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I remember seeing loads and loads of analyses like this back in the 2000s on a site called The Oil Drum about why electric cars would never work at scale. (Spoi

by api 1y ago

I remember seeing loads and loads of analyses like this back in the 2000s on a site called The Oil Drum about why electric cars would never work at scale. (Spoiler: My family has two EVs.) They always assume that the technology will never get better, that industrial economies of scale don't exist and therefore that prices don't decrease with scale, that currently developed reserves of resources like lithium equal total reserves, etc. I do think it will be a while before electrification of long haul aviation is practical. Aviation -- all of it -- accounts for only 7% of global oil consumption as of 2024. We could cut oil consumption by more than 80% without touching aviation. Most oil is burned in cars and trucks and those can be electrified today, so we should focus our energy on that and on replacing fossil fuels in electricity generation and take the win there. Related tangent: The popularity of toxic dogmatic pessimism on the political left is really problematic. It stops people from offering positive, expansive visions of the future. It's one reason the fascists are winning by default. They don't buy this shit, so they tell stories about the future that aren't "and then we all die in a great Malthusian catastrophe, the end." The fascist vision of the future sucks, but it's better than that, so it wins hearts and minds. Ask yourself: what if our civilization doesn't collapse? Then what? The assumption that it will collapse prevents people from thinking about the future. Malthusianism is a thought stopping cliche.

pfdietz 1y ago
The Oil Drum was converted to a static archive site in 2013, in part because they were finding it hard to attract quality content. Gee, maybe that was because it was clear Peak Oil (in the we're running out sense) wasn't happening? This comment was made to the shuttering announcement: "8 years means The Oil Drum came online in 2005, basically matching the start the current plateau in crude oil production." Global oil production has increased since then. The price of West Texas crude has gone from $100 (which would be $136 in today's dollars) to $64 now. The left wing pessimism stems from a moralistic view. The underlying idea is that we deserve to suffer, so suffering is predicted.
- api 1y ago
  I didn't mean to imply that the right didn't have its own doomer narratives. The current hotness seems to be demographic predictions of doom, "great replacement" theories, etc. I'm very skeptical of those too. What I was getting at though was -- I think the left allows its doomer narratives to be intellectually paralyzing. If everything is going to crash and collapse and burn, there's no need to actually try to solve problems or offer a compelling narrative about the future. The right doesn't do this. They feed their own doomer narratives into a "rage against the dying of the light" narrative. This results in all kinds of ugly racism and persecution and authoritarianism, sure, but it doesn't lead to paralysis. So, as I said, they win by default. In the battle for hearts and minds, they win if they're the only ones that show up. Edit: Another way of saying it would be to say that for the left its doomer narratives are demotivating, while the right treats its doomer narratives as motivating.
numpad0 1y ago
> They always assume that the technology will never get better, that industrial economies of scale don't exist The technology hadn't improved not much more than a quarter's worth so far in my lifetime as far as EV is concerned. Wh/kg figures hasn't changed, even fusion seems closer than solid state batteries, mileage figures for EVs is same 4mi/kWh, battery recycling still hasn't been figured out. They can't even recover Lithium out of Lithium ion batteries. wtf. Meanwhile, computers had gotten like, up to petaflops per nation to per building to per node. Wireless Internet went from kilobits to gigabits. Everyone wears UNIX or Linux watches. IMO, optimistic heuristics floating around EV is too shallow. The model just doesn't have enough parameters that it's expecting growth where it should not and vice versa. It just needs way more grounding to be meaningful.
- api 1y ago
  Computers have psyched us out. There is no other technology in human history that has ever seen a capability growth curve like Moore's Law. Even aviation, which went from biplanes to moon landings in 50 years, doesn't compare. Still, there has been huge improvement in batteries. The main improvement has not been in energy density but in cost. Find some graphs of battery cost per kWh of storage. Storage cost has dropped by almost 10X in the last 15-20 years. Reliability and rapid recharge capability have also increased a lot. Still, for medium to long haul aviation we probably would need at least a 3-4X improvement in energy density per unit volume and mass, and I don't see that happening soon. It's likely that long range aviation is stuck with liquid fuels for the foreseeable future. But as I said it's only 7% of oil consumption. We should just let aviation keep going as-is and cut fossil fuel use in terrestrial transport and power generation. Part of why we're not recycling batteries much is that lithium isn't expensive enough to make the investment in it profitable. The major cost in batteries is the manufacturing process, not the lithium itself. If lithium prices go up there'd be an incentive to figure out recycling.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    Cost doesn't matter when something is just too darn heavy to be viable aviation fuel. Can't fly rockets on sails just because it's efficient.
kumarski 1y ago
<2.5% of US vehicles are electric. I bought $AMR, $FCG, $UAN, and $POWL. I bought $TSLA and sold almost at the top as well, but for different reasons than fundamentals. (Greenback boomerang CCP dollars etc...) Chemistry doesn't lie and it imputes all of human behavior.

by api 1y ago

pfdietz 1y ago

The Oil Drum was converted to a static archive site in 2013, in part because they were finding it hard to attract quality content. Gee, maybe that was because it was clear Peak Oil (in the we're running out sense) wasn't happening? This comment was made to the shuttering announcement: "8 years means The Oil Drum came online in 2005, basically matching the start the current plateau in crude oil production." Global oil production has increased since then. The price of West Texas crude has gone from $100 (which would be $136 in today's dollars) to $64 now. The left wing pessimism stems from a moralistic view. The underlying idea is that we deserve to suffer, so suffering is predicted.

api 1y ago
I didn't mean to imply that the right didn't have its own doomer narratives. The current hotness seems to be demographic predictions of doom, "great replacement" theories, etc. I'm very skeptical of those too. What I was getting at though was -- I think the left allows its doomer narratives to be intellectually paralyzing. If everything is going to crash and collapse and burn, there's no need to actually try to solve problems or offer a compelling narrative about the future. The right doesn't do this. They feed their own doomer narratives into a "rage against the dying of the light" narrative. This results in all kinds of ugly racism and persecution and authoritarianism, sure, but it doesn't lead to paralysis. So, as I said, they win by default. In the battle for hearts and minds, they win if they're the only ones that show up. Edit: Another way of saying it would be to say that for the left its doomer narratives are demotivating, while the right treats its doomer narratives as motivating.

numpad0 1y ago

> They always assume that the technology will never get better, that industrial economies of scale don't exist The technology hadn't improved not much more than a quarter's worth so far in my lifetime as far as EV is concerned. Wh/kg figures hasn't changed, even fusion seems closer than solid state batteries, mileage figures for EVs is same 4mi/kWh, battery recycling still hasn't been figured out. They can't even recover Lithium out of Lithium ion batteries. wtf. Meanwhile, computers had gotten like, up to petaflops per nation to per building to per node. Wireless Internet went from kilobits to gigabits. Everyone wears UNIX or Linux watches. IMO, optimistic heuristics floating around EV is too shallow. The model just doesn't have enough parameters that it's expecting growth where it should not and vice versa. It just needs way more grounding to be meaningful.

api 1y ago
Computers have psyched us out. There is no other technology in human history that has ever seen a capability growth curve like Moore's Law. Even aviation, which went from biplanes to moon landings in 50 years, doesn't compare. Still, there has been huge improvement in batteries. The main improvement has not been in energy density but in cost. Find some graphs of battery cost per kWh of storage. Storage cost has dropped by almost 10X in the last 15-20 years. Reliability and rapid recharge capability have also increased a lot. Still, for medium to long haul aviation we probably would need at least a 3-4X improvement in energy density per unit volume and mass, and I don't see that happening soon. It's likely that long range aviation is stuck with liquid fuels for the foreseeable future. But as I said it's only 7% of oil consumption. We should just let aviation keep going as-is and cut fossil fuel use in terrestrial transport and power generation. Part of why we're not recycling batteries much is that lithium isn't expensive enough to make the investment in it profitable. The major cost in batteries is the manufacturing process, not the lithium itself. If lithium prices go up there'd be an incentive to figure out recycling.
- numpad0 1y ago
  Cost doesn't matter when something is just too darn heavy to be viable aviation fuel. Can't fly rockets on sails just because it's efficient.

kumarski 1y ago

<2.5% of US vehicles are electric. I bought $AMR, $FCG, $UAN, and $POWL. I bought $TSLA and sold almost at the top as well, but for different reasons than fundamentals. (Greenback boomerang CCP dollars etc...) Chemistry doesn't lie and it imputes all of human behavior.