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> The final car will drop off the bottom of the chain Maybe not. The $500 used car lot will take them, and some will get shipped off to third world countries.

• epistasis 2y ago
  But now you're dealing with probabilities, weighed against the certainty of the original EV purchaser emitting less. Try this: if everyone in the US suddenly purchased EVs, and ditched their ICE cars, flooding the market with old ICE vehicles, would emissions decrease in the world or increase? I think it's pretty clear that the vast majority of the old ICE vehicles would be junked, and there'd be marginally more vehicle-miles-travelled, so the huge wins of everyone using EVs would counteract any increase in vehicle miles from suddenly having cheaper ICE available around the world. So I would argue that the single person doing that action would have the general same trend as if everyone did it.
  • relaxing 2y ago
    > But now you're dealing with probabilities, weighed against the certainty of the original EV purchaser emitting less. Welcome to public policy. > Try this: No, I’ll stay in the real world. Your thought experiment isn’t possible, and extrapolating from it isn’t useful.
• robertlagrant 2y ago
  > Maybe not. The $500 used car lot will take them, and some will get shipped off to third world countries. If you're saying electric cars are pointless, and we should keep making ICE cars, because for a period of transition from ICE to EV some older ICE cars will go overseas, then I'm not sure there's much else to say. I disagree that that's good logic, I suppose.