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I think it's very good to ask this question: which is the most environmentally friendly battery? However, I also hope that we ask the question, how can we make

I think it's very good to ask this question: which is the most environmentally friendly battery? However, I also hope that we ask the question, how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less and use less energy? Because what would be even more friendly than a lithium-sulphur battery is no battery at all. Let's not forget that with all this optimizing within our existing lifestyles, we should also try and make our lifestyles different so that we don't need any cars at all...(I know, not possible on a massive scale immediately, but over time...)

oblio 3y ago
> However, I also hope that we ask the question, how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less and use less energy? Because what would be even more friendly than a lithium-sulphur battery is no battery at all. Depending on where you live, forces such as fear, uncertainty, misanthropy have lead to the exact opposite. We live in insane times where in parts of settlements at peace you can't even WALK to where you need.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Yes, that is true. Suburbia and cars make it cheaper for people to live in the short-term, but it then leads to even more dependence on mass industry that they are slaving away to keep afloat, while their hard-earned money is taken away in part by taxes to provide subsidies to hide the true unsustainability of it all.
  - bilsbie 3y ago
    Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature. Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      As much as the implementation usually leaves much to be desired, soviet-style microdistricts with a few apartment blocks, a park and playground, and a handful of local shops is a pretty decent option. Put a few of these around a primary school and a shopping mall and you have a really decent suburban area where everything you might need is in a 10 min walking distance, and kids can be left alone in that microcosm until they leave for high school. Western individualism doesn't really play with that collectivist setup though, everyone needs their own private building, their own private micro park, etc.
      - JKCalhoun 3y ago
        See Japan also, the mamachari....
      - bashmelek 3y ago
        I don’t want to point any fingers at western culture on the whole, and the idea of individualism. At this point it feels more like fragmentation. Community pools were really popular in the States some decades ago, and then when segregation ended you start seeing a lot of pools in backyards, and white flight to the suburbs. Even in today’s less racist society we just plain hate our neighbors. Their decorations, messy lawn, or loud baby. It is almost as if we forgot how to live with others.
      - Turing_Machine 3y ago
        > soviet-style microdistricts with a few apartment blocks, a park and playground, and a handful of local shops is a pretty decent option. Why stop there? Build communal cafeterias and dormitories that you can hot-bunk 3 shifts per day. Quality of life is totally a thing, mang. Weirdly, for a "decent option" these only seem to exist as the norm in areas where people are forced into them by totalitarian governments. In the United States the few setups like this that have existed were called "The Projects". To put it mildly, they were not widely considered to be desirable places to live.
        Turing_Machine 3y ago
  - dgfitz 3y ago
    This is such an ignorant take. Not everyone is going to live in a city. Not everyone wants to live in a city. Cars aren’t going away, ever. This narrative needs to go away. Don’t worry though, your virtue has been signaled.
  - AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
    [dead]
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    Suburbia is not cheap at all, not even in the short run. The reality is that it is very expensive and heavily, heavily subsidized. US style Suberbia is a result of the US government massive policies in encouraging suburbia style housing and highway building during the New Deal and then in the Post-WW2 boom, plus of course the Red-Lining and destruction of city centers. These places never ever pay for themselves. You can look at the data gathered by 'Strong Towns' and 'Urban3'. In fact the poorer parts of the city/state and of course the town center are subsidizing the richer suberbia. Its a fucking travisty of epic proportion. Suberbia is expensive to set up initially, needs massive infrastructure backing to be viable and is horrible energy inefficient.
    - jjav 3y ago
      > Suburbia is not cheap at all, not even in the short run. Cheap for who, though? As an individual I can't change society but I can choose where to live. So if rent in the city is 4K for 1 bedroom and in the suburb it's 2K for 3 bedrooms, suburb is cheaper.
      - panick21_ 3y ago
        We are talking about the system not the cost for the individual. The whole point is that hidden subsidies (and explicit rules) distort the system.
- cyberlurker 3y ago
  I enjoy my car but I think the same way we have the ADA for public buildings, there should be some level of walkable areas nearly everywhere. I’m currently frustrated in my new location that there are random sidewalks that aren’t connected to each other and I have to walk on the street with traffic for a few hundred meters at a time.
- i80and 3y ago
  I live in the most densely populated state in the US. The car mandate is INSANE. I'll drive somewhere, then figure "the next place I need to go is a five minute walk. I'll walk!" Then the sidewalk disappears and I'm trudging across lawn next to 60mph traffic. Another time I wanted to walk to a shop right on the other side of the road. It would have taken 45 minutes. The cultural hostility towards pedestrians is wild.
  - swayvil 3y ago
    It's dominance by business that's to blame. Business says "put money in the hole. Deliver money to hole with fast wheeled box." Everything else is disposable, sacrificial.
  - marliechiller 3y ago
    Thanks for this anecdote. It really made me realise I take a lot of infrastructure for pedestrians for granted here in the UK
    - kwhitefoot 3y ago
      Not just the UK. The US really is an outlier. Pedestrian infrastructure is better almost everywhere else. Certainly in every country I have visited from Canada to China and a dozen others in between.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        In my experience, Canada is similar. We couldn't afford a car when I was younger so we had to subsist on Translink and Skytrain, and those systems were roughly on par with Muni and VTA. Outside of the Vancouver core, pedestrian infrastructure was weak to nonexistent in suburbs like Richmond, Surrey, South Vancouver, etc or towns/cities like Nanaimo or Abbotsford. Calgary and Edmonton were worse.
  - ponector 3y ago
    Why not to use a bicycle? I've spent a summer in Fairbanks, AK and it was totally fine to navigate anywhere around the city and suburbs by bike. Almost no bike lanes there, of course.
thsksbd 3y ago
"However, I also hope that we ask the question, how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less and use less energy?" By radically lowering speed limits [1] and slowly rebuilding our infrastructure to reflect that. It will take a long time, it took 100 years to build infrastructure that assumed a person could cross 15 miles of suburbia in as many minutes. [1] I do mean radical; cars shouldnt be able to go faster than 30 mph. For folks with a need for speed (myself incld.), perhaps will exempt motorbikes
- yetihehe 3y ago
  > I do mean radical; cars shouldnt be able to go faster than 30 mph You might just ban them at that point. Why waste ANY resources on a car? We could return to horse drawn carriages, they are biological and therefore more environmentally friendly [1] [1] https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-Horse-Manure-Crisis-of-1894/ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great...
  - krallja 3y ago
    Horse poo covering streets is not particularly friendly to the environment.
    - throw0101b 3y ago
      > Horse poo covering streets is not particularly friendly to the environment. Most people did not own horses, especially not in cities. They were generally limited to farmers, businesses (to draw carts/carriages), and the rich (Gilded Age). For most of history most humans walked to their destination on a day-to-day basis. This changed slightly with the invention of rail roads and later bicycles. The automobile didn't go mainstream until roughly the 1920s: * https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/ Look at any pre-WW2 development and you'll see neighbourhoods built for human scale: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb Design things 'properly' and neither cars, nor horse-drawn carriages, are needed by people for most of their daily tasks. This is evidence by the fact that humans lived like that for centuries just fine.
bilsbie 3y ago
Hard disagree. More energy is the way to grow our society and lift everyone up. If it’s renewable or nuclear I see no good reason we’d want to reduce.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  More energy means more distractions away from the natural world. It means less disposable prodcuts. Renewable energy isn't really renewable. Wind energy still requires oil and mining, and dams disrupt river ecosystems. Nuclear produces toxic waste that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years. Our society has gotten into an incredible mess with more energy usage (e.g. climate change).
- cyberlurker 3y ago
  I think eventually we run into a heat pollution problem. More efficient use of energy can grow a society as well.
- rplnt 3y ago
  Cars need more than energy. E.g. tires that we breathe in.
- worldsayshi 3y ago
  Hard partial disagree. More energy used for the right purposes lifts us up. Wasting energy on things that makes us more miserable, like traffic jams and avoidable commute, does not lift us up. Energy use is not in itself creating any value. It's a cost for value creation. More energy available can allow us to make more value, sure.
  - nwiswell 3y ago
    > Hard partial disagree. If only there was a word besides "hard" for this situation
    - chihuahua 3y ago
      "Uncompromising slight disagree" ?
everdrive 3y ago
I think I agree with you on a fundamental level, but there must be solutions to this problem where the answer is "everyone should live in a city" (or a relatively urban environment) I would go to any lengths not to live in a city again.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  I don't think everyone should live in a city. I HATE cities with an absolute passion. But it would be nice to have more local, self-reliant solutions in smaller towns and rural areas that require less driving, too. I'm thinking more along the lines of small, local economies rather than packing everyone in a city.
  - vladms 3y ago
    I have the impression that too many people think about actual examples (like: I hate New York - or insert your hated city name here) rather than the idea of a city. I have lived in a couple of large European cities and each was very different from each other, so I can't draw a "generic conclusion". Cities can become what people imagine they would like - which sometimes is wrong/sometimes is right (in the sense: sometimes they imagine they would like X but when they have it they are more unhappy, other times they are more happy). But we should talk more about what we like and wish rather than where we want to be or not (city/country-side).
    - schnitzelstoat 3y ago
      I live in a large European city with the highest population density in Europe. It's okay but noise is a real problem as is air pollution and crime. I think in the future China with its electric vehicles and strict law enforcement will probably end up with better cities.
infecto 3y ago
I am excited how we the human race and use increasing amounts of energy to drive new innovation. The more energy we consume the more innovation will happen. I am ok with those that want to live on a self-sustaining homestead but its not for me.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  The problem is that your desire for more technological innovation direclty drives the destruction of land and the environment that other people could potentially use to live more sustainably.
  - infecto 3y ago
    There is more than enough land for people who want to live "sustainably".
    - vouaobrasil 3y ago
      It is not just a matter of land, but of poisoning the land and also allowing other species to live on it. Clearly, based on the massively increased extinction rates due to us, we have not been very nice to other species. And we have no right to continue destructive mining and agricultural practices to feed your continued desire for growth.
      - infecto 3y ago
        Perhaps its clear to you but I think the vast majority of the globe would generally disagree. A balance is required and I don't think believe the way forward is for your calls but rather improved technology that maintains that balance.
- worldsayshi 3y ago
  There's a truth to this but this reductionist naive approach to progress is also extremely dangerous. We have to be able to keep two thoughts in our head. More is good but we must exist in a balance with nature or we will destroy ourselves. To grow beyond current limitations we must first acknowledge them on a fundamental level.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less Carbon tax and VR? I wish cities were more walkable and that people didn't buy so much junk.
surcap526 3y ago
Enegry sources that Mitochondrion uses are most environmentally friendly.

oblio 3y ago

> However, I also hope that we ask the question, how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less and use less energy? Because what would be even more friendly than a lithium-sulphur battery is no battery at all. Depending on where you live, forces such as fear, uncertainty, misanthropy have lead to the exact opposite. We live in insane times where in parts of settlements at peace you can't even WALK to where you need.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
Yes, that is true. Suburbia and cars make it cheaper for people to live in the short-term, but it then leads to even more dependence on mass industry that they are slaving away to keep afloat, while their hard-earned money is taken away in part by taxes to provide subsidies to hide the true unsustainability of it all.
- bilsbie 3y ago
  Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature. Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    As much as the implementation usually leaves much to be desired, soviet-style microdistricts with a few apartment blocks, a park and playground, and a handful of local shops is a pretty decent option. Put a few of these around a primary school and a shopping mall and you have a really decent suburban area where everything you might need is in a 10 min walking distance, and kids can be left alone in that microcosm until they leave for high school. Western individualism doesn't really play with that collectivist setup though, everyone needs their own private building, their own private micro park, etc.
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      See Japan also, the mamachari....
    - bashmelek 3y ago
      I don’t want to point any fingers at western culture on the whole, and the idea of individualism. At this point it feels more like fragmentation. Community pools were really popular in the States some decades ago, and then when segregation ended you start seeing a lot of pools in backyards, and white flight to the suburbs. Even in today’s less racist society we just plain hate our neighbors. Their decorations, messy lawn, or loud baby. It is almost as if we forgot how to live with others.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      > soviet-style microdistricts with a few apartment blocks, a park and playground, and a handful of local shops is a pretty decent option. Why stop there? Build communal cafeterias and dormitories that you can hot-bunk 3 shifts per day. Quality of life is totally a thing, mang. Weirdly, for a "decent option" these only seem to exist as the norm in areas where people are forced into them by totalitarian governments. In the United States the few setups like this that have existed were called "The Projects". To put it mildly, they were not widely considered to be desirable places to live.
      - Turing_Machine 3y ago
- dgfitz 3y ago
  This is such an ignorant take. Not everyone is going to live in a city. Not everyone wants to live in a city. Cars aren’t going away, ever. This narrative needs to go away. Don’t worry though, your virtue has been signaled.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  [dead]
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Suburbia is not cheap at all, not even in the short run. The reality is that it is very expensive and heavily, heavily subsidized. US style Suberbia is a result of the US government massive policies in encouraging suburbia style housing and highway building during the New Deal and then in the Post-WW2 boom, plus of course the Red-Lining and destruction of city centers. These places never ever pay for themselves. You can look at the data gathered by 'Strong Towns' and 'Urban3'. In fact the poorer parts of the city/state and of course the town center are subsidizing the richer suberbia. Its a fucking travisty of epic proportion. Suberbia is expensive to set up initially, needs massive infrastructure backing to be viable and is horrible energy inefficient.
  - jjav 3y ago
    > Suburbia is not cheap at all, not even in the short run. Cheap for who, though? As an individual I can't change society but I can choose where to live. So if rent in the city is 4K for 1 bedroom and in the suburb it's 2K for 3 bedrooms, suburb is cheaper.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      We are talking about the system not the cost for the individual. The whole point is that hidden subsidies (and explicit rules) distort the system.
cyberlurker 3y ago
I enjoy my car but I think the same way we have the ADA for public buildings, there should be some level of walkable areas nearly everywhere. I’m currently frustrated in my new location that there are random sidewalks that aren’t connected to each other and I have to walk on the street with traffic for a few hundred meters at a time.
i80and 3y ago
I live in the most densely populated state in the US. The car mandate is INSANE. I'll drive somewhere, then figure "the next place I need to go is a five minute walk. I'll walk!" Then the sidewalk disappears and I'm trudging across lawn next to 60mph traffic. Another time I wanted to walk to a shop right on the other side of the road. It would have taken 45 minutes. The cultural hostility towards pedestrians is wild.
- swayvil 3y ago
  It's dominance by business that's to blame. Business says "put money in the hole. Deliver money to hole with fast wheeled box." Everything else is disposable, sacrificial.
- marliechiller 3y ago
  Thanks for this anecdote. It really made me realise I take a lot of infrastructure for pedestrians for granted here in the UK
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    Not just the UK. The US really is an outlier. Pedestrian infrastructure is better almost everywhere else. Certainly in every country I have visited from Canada to China and a dozen others in between.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      In my experience, Canada is similar. We couldn't afford a car when I was younger so we had to subsist on Translink and Skytrain, and those systems were roughly on par with Muni and VTA. Outside of the Vancouver core, pedestrian infrastructure was weak to nonexistent in suburbs like Richmond, Surrey, South Vancouver, etc or towns/cities like Nanaimo or Abbotsford. Calgary and Edmonton were worse.
- ponector 3y ago
  Why not to use a bicycle? I've spent a summer in Fairbanks, AK and it was totally fine to navigate anywhere around the city and suburbs by bike. Almost no bike lanes there, of course.

thsksbd 3y ago

"However, I also hope that we ask the question, how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less and use less energy?" By radically lowering speed limits [1] and slowly rebuilding our infrastructure to reflect that. It will take a long time, it took 100 years to build infrastructure that assumed a person could cross 15 miles of suburbia in as many minutes. [1] I do mean radical; cars shouldnt be able to go faster than 30 mph. For folks with a need for speed (myself incld.), perhaps will exempt motorbikes

yetihehe 3y ago
> I do mean radical; cars shouldnt be able to go faster than 30 mph You might just ban them at that point. Why waste ANY resources on a car? We could return to horse drawn carriages, they are biological and therefore more environmentally friendly [1] [1] https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-Horse-Manure-Crisis-of-1894/ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great...
- krallja 3y ago
  Horse poo covering streets is not particularly friendly to the environment.
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    > Horse poo covering streets is not particularly friendly to the environment. Most people did not own horses, especially not in cities. They were generally limited to farmers, businesses (to draw carts/carriages), and the rich (Gilded Age). For most of history most humans walked to their destination on a day-to-day basis. This changed slightly with the invention of rail roads and later bicycles. The automobile didn't go mainstream until roughly the 1920s: * https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/ Look at any pre-WW2 development and you'll see neighbourhoods built for human scale: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb Design things 'properly' and neither cars, nor horse-drawn carriages, are needed by people for most of their daily tasks. This is evidence by the fact that humans lived like that for centuries just fine.

bilsbie 3y ago

Hard disagree. More energy is the way to grow our society and lift everyone up. If it’s renewable or nuclear I see no good reason we’d want to reduce.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
More energy means more distractions away from the natural world. It means less disposable prodcuts. Renewable energy isn't really renewable. Wind energy still requires oil and mining, and dams disrupt river ecosystems. Nuclear produces toxic waste that lasts for hundreds of thousands of years. Our society has gotten into an incredible mess with more energy usage (e.g. climate change).
cyberlurker 3y ago
I think eventually we run into a heat pollution problem. More efficient use of energy can grow a society as well.
rplnt 3y ago
Cars need more than energy. E.g. tires that we breathe in.
worldsayshi 3y ago
Hard partial disagree. More energy used for the right purposes lifts us up. Wasting energy on things that makes us more miserable, like traffic jams and avoidable commute, does not lift us up. Energy use is not in itself creating any value. It's a cost for value creation. More energy available can allow us to make more value, sure.
- nwiswell 3y ago
  > Hard partial disagree. If only there was a word besides "hard" for this situation
  - chihuahua 3y ago
    "Uncompromising slight disagree" ?

everdrive 3y ago

I think I agree with you on a fundamental level, but there must be solutions to this problem where the answer is "everyone should live in a city" (or a relatively urban environment) I would go to any lengths not to live in a city again.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
I don't think everyone should live in a city. I HATE cities with an absolute passion. But it would be nice to have more local, self-reliant solutions in smaller towns and rural areas that require less driving, too. I'm thinking more along the lines of small, local economies rather than packing everyone in a city.
- vladms 3y ago
  I have the impression that too many people think about actual examples (like: I hate New York - or insert your hated city name here) rather than the idea of a city. I have lived in a couple of large European cities and each was very different from each other, so I can't draw a "generic conclusion". Cities can become what people imagine they would like - which sometimes is wrong/sometimes is right (in the sense: sometimes they imagine they would like X but when they have it they are more unhappy, other times they are more happy). But we should talk more about what we like and wish rather than where we want to be or not (city/country-side).
  - schnitzelstoat 3y ago
    I live in a large European city with the highest population density in Europe. It's okay but noise is a real problem as is air pollution and crime. I think in the future China with its electric vehicles and strict law enforcement will probably end up with better cities.

infecto 3y ago

I am excited how we the human race and use increasing amounts of energy to drive new innovation. The more energy we consume the more innovation will happen. I am ok with those that want to live on a self-sustaining homestead but its not for me.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
The problem is that your desire for more technological innovation direclty drives the destruction of land and the environment that other people could potentially use to live more sustainably.
- infecto 3y ago
  There is more than enough land for people who want to live "sustainably".
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    It is not just a matter of land, but of poisoning the land and also allowing other species to live on it. Clearly, based on the massively increased extinction rates due to us, we have not been very nice to other species. And we have no right to continue destructive mining and agricultural practices to feed your continued desire for growth.
    - infecto 3y ago
      Perhaps its clear to you but I think the vast majority of the globe would generally disagree. A balance is required and I don't think believe the way forward is for your calls but rather improved technology that maintains that balance.
worldsayshi 3y ago
There's a truth to this but this reductionist naive approach to progress is also extremely dangerous. We have to be able to keep two thoughts in our head. More is good but we must exist in a balance with nature or we will destroy ourselves. To grow beyond current limitations we must first acknowledge them on a fundamental level.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

> how can we make our society better such that we have to drive less Carbon tax and VR? I wish cities were more walkable and that people didn't buy so much junk.

surcap526 3y ago

Enegry sources that Mitochondrion uses are most environmentally friendly.