Cats reduce pollutants that contribute to smog that directly harm human health. But they do nothing to reduce the net carbon released into the atmosphere. In fact, by converting carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide they are hastening climate change (CO2 is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO).
EVs also help with the brake disc “dust” since a lot of the braking is “regenerative breaking” done by the electric motor and does not use the brake pads at all. They require less maintenance, and have fewer parts in them, so fewer manufacturing materials. With very few exceptions, they are also smaller vehicles with more safety features which should result in fewer pedestrian casualties.
Obviously having no vehicles at all would be even better at solving these issues, but that’s not practical for our current reality. Maybe in 100 years.
I will say that “autopilot” features should absolutely be outlawed and cause nothing but trouble to everyone.
Which market is it that is producing smaller EVs? They’re all just regular cars turned EV, which means they’re heavier and you can’t feature-rich your way out of physics as per pedestrian safety
China has some great small, low and medium range electric cars. They’re not allowed to be sold in the U.S. due to protectionism, but they exist, and they’re cheap as hell compared to most EVs.
Emissions Analytics has found that adding 1,000 pounds to a midsize vehicle increased tire wear by about 20 percent, and also that Tesla’s Model Y generated 26 percent more tire pollution than a similar Kia hybrid. EVs’ more aggressive torque, which translates into faster acceleration, is another factor that creates more tire particulate mile for mile compared to similar internal combustion engine cars.
100 years is ambitious only if you want to remove all of the cars. There are plenty of milestones that can be attained fairly quickly :
Smaller cars. Less energy, materials, etc. Safer for other road users (you don’t get hit on your vital organs, better vision for the driver and everyone else since pedestrians can easily see over the car).
Less car use is available now, if we just empower the alternatives (make bike usage safe, make public transport good enough)
No more cars in cities. Bikes + trains mostly do the job, you can rent a car if you leave the city, or park it at the outskirts.
Even smaller cities used to be liveable without a car. This could be brought back, but that’s probably a tough hill to climb.
I will say that “autopilot” features should absolutely be outlawed and cause nothing but trouble to everyone
Autopilot is a pretty broad category. I like the autopilot on my car, which is nothing like elon musks self driving bullshit. It only turns on on supported highways and uses lidar instead of machine vision. All it does is maintain a following distance and follow the curve of the road. On Long drives it stops your foot and arms being fatigued and frees up a lot more mental space to look out for road hazards, it has a camera in the wheel that makes sure you have your eyes pointed at the road. I don’t see any risks for this sort of simple autopilot but it does have a lot of upside.
I’d definitely rather ride the train if it didn’t cost 200 dollars and come once a day, but until it gets better(and I’ve been writing a lot of letters to my officials) my self driving ev is the best alternative.
They conveniently left off the 3 month oil changes, grease fittings, transmission fluid, gear oil, brake fluid, power steering fluid, etc. Cars have a lot of fluids and after market additives that people use to try and pass the inspection tests. Also the corruption where people pay off the inspectors to make sure the vehicle passes
I’m sure that there’s a decent chunk of corruption with inspections, but there are also states like Arkansas where we don’t ever have to get our vehicles inspected… It’s absurd how shitty some of the cars and trucks are that I see regularly.
I am tired of the rush rush rush everyone is feeling and pushing onto others. Leave with sufficient time and then go the speed limit. You get there when you get there. If there are delays you should have a backup route planned if you have an important meeting or deadline. Give plenty of room in case the car in front of you needs to stop. I sometimes get pushed through a red light because someone is tailgating me. One time there was a truck pulling a trailer behind me. I had plenty of time to stop but they didn’t. I ended up going into the intersection to avoid getting rear ended and had to drive into opposing traffic on the other side before moving back onto the right side of the road. I’ve gone through it so many times in my head and the only solution was to not stop and run the red light. This should never happen. People do not treat stale green lights as something that can potentially change and they don’t prepare for it.
I live in a city with about 2 million people. It has major sprawl and lots of guys with big trucks to compensate for little personality. The city has a brown haze floating over it that is a result of tailpipe emissions.
EVs may not be the solution to climate change, but they are helping my local area with air pollution. Well… they would if they were more popular. Every time a local buys an EV, ten more prosthetic penises are sold.
I just wanna say I appreciate people here making intelligent, good faith arguments on both sides without resorting to black or white thinking or getting too aggressive/ abusive.
A lot of drivers have gotten way worse and more aggressive since the pandemic in my area. A lot of it, is people moving out of the city into the suburbs and bringing their toxic driving with them
I’m lucky enough to live somewhere with 24/7 public transit and generally walkable spaces. Some of my coworkers have moved out of the city to cheaper places and I’m just like yeah sure you pay less for rent or your mortgage, but now you’re in a car-first wasteland.
To keep in line with the meme, you must acknowledge that bikes also have pollution from tire wear and replacement, require road salt many places, causes accidents which lead to wounds or death of humans and animals and causes pollution from brake wear and manifacturing.
As the post clearly implies, if you can’t fix every issue with something simultaneously, then you should’t attempt to fix anything at all. /s
I don’t even think you have to fix every issue. Human existence by nature requires us to use and change our environment and our job is to minimize that so we can continue living on this planet.
Both of those examples solve our issues to a point where they’re non-existent. Yes, they’re still produced but they’re well within our manageable amounts and would reverse much of the damage we did if we did them on mass.
I’m not even necessarily against electric cars. I just don’t want one personally, I don’t think they’re great or even the solution, but they’re certainly better than combustion. They just still aren’t great, especially when we already have the actual solutions.
This is pure oil company propaganda. I hate cars with a passion and want a car free society. We will get there but it will take time. But We need to get rid of gas NOW.
Anyone who spews this kind of filth is literally the enemy.
Even if we ignore microplastics, steel wheels on rail are significantly more efficient than tires. Rail is just better unless you are going to places not traveled much.
An example of a very light high-speed passenger train is the N700 Series Shinkansen, which weighs 715 tonnes and carries 1323 passengers, resulting in a per-passenger weight of about half a tonne. This lighter weight per passenger, combined with the lower rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rail means that an N700 Shinkansen is much more energy efficient than a typical automobile.
Are you saying that EVs produce the same CO2 as ICEs? Even if an EV is charged 100% off natural gas it will create less CO2 than an ICE. A gallon of gasoline is 33.7kWh of energy. This means a basic Model 3 has a battery with less than two gallons of gasoline worth of energy. They don’t idle, they don’t rev, they don’t make noise… all of these are significantly better for cities.
Then there’s the other shit about how ICE cars don’t just create CO2, they release a lot of other chemicals into the air that we shouldn’t be breathing and unlike a power plant, they do it almost always where people are.
The funny thing is, electric cars help with the tire/brake dust and mined materials issue. Regenerative braking reduces the wear on brakes, and electric motors provide smoother power delivery, which reduces tire wear. As for the mined materials, electric cars generally take more material to make, but they are also easier to recycle, and the batteries themselves are able to be recycled in to even better batteries that they were when brand new.
My brother in Christ, you literally have no idea how much stuff is made out of petrochemicals, do you? Try asphalt, industrial solvents, cosmetics, any real lubricant, fertilizers, pesticides, textiles, circuitry, detergents, insulation, PVC, paint, adhesives, roofing material, synthetic rubbers, as well as a ton of pharmaceutical products and food additives. And that’s not even an exhaustive list. Gasoline is a big part of the petrochemical industry, but it’s not the totality of it.
I do know how much we use petrochemicals. Gasoline is not a direct synonym for petrochemicals, it’s definition is fuel for combustion engines. None of the products you mentioned are made out of gasoline.
I really do not think so. Oil propaganda would support cars rather than be against it. I’m quite sure this is directed at the people who think EVs are a full solution.
Mate, the whole comic shits on cars as a whole, each and every part that electrics and gas both share. The only thing making electric better being tailpipe emissions and nothing else.
The messaging here is clear, eliminate the car as a concept for transport and stop accepting lukewarm solutions as anything but unacceptable.
No, I said it’s LIKE racism, meaning that it has similarities.
Literally NOBODY thinks that EVs are a “full solution” to environmental damage or climate change or whatever the whataboutism is about this week.
It’s only beneficial to put this argument forward for two groups: Car manufacturers and oil producters.
Then why is my neighbour down the street spewing this shit on Facebook daily? He is not a car manufacturer or oil producter.
No, it’s because he has been lead to believe that the smug EV people are going to take his vehicle away. He has bought the lie and now he’s spreading the arguments that will fragment car owners so that nothing will ever change.
The entire purpose is to split car users and preserve the status quo.
This is the fuck cars community. We should hate all cars equally. When I see other posters here repeating the lies from the car and oil industries, I have to point it out.
EVs are the only solution to getting ourselves out of this mess. We can’t ban all cars in the next few years like we can with all gasoline cars. Building proper public transport takes time, especially when it’s been sabotaged to such a point. We need to transit to a carless society through ev or it’s literally over.
Propaganda is a slimy business and their current strat is bash EVs and bring up nihilism. Regardless of your intentions, you are being their mouthpiece by posting this.
The only solution EVs provide is a pathway for automotive companies to continue to exist. They solve nothing and their existence continues to enable suburban sprawl, lack of public transportation, and the alienation of a car-centric society. You are trash for supporting EVs and you aren’t interested in a better world, one without cars.
EVs have about half the lifecycle emissions as a gas car, given today’s electric grid. Which is better, but not all that much better.
However: 80% of the US lives in metropolitan and micropolitan areas. 20% of the US is rural. You can build better public transit in cities and small towns, and stop doubling down on building shitty-ass suburban stroads and sprawl. But Farmer Joe is never going to bike 20 miles to the nearest Dollar General. It’s just not practical, and neither is putting a bus stop in front of every farm.
A car-lite world where Farmer Joe drives an EV to a farmer’s market that 95% of people walked, biked or took a bus to seems way better than either the status quo or a car-free world.
What did “farmer joe” do before cars I wonder? Plus it’s 100% fine if “farmer joe” still uses fossil fuels for his tractor and to drive into town. That isn’t a problem that is solved by EVs. that isn’t a problem that needs to be solved, and that absolutely isn’t the reason you are bringing up EVs at all.
Ironic talking about me living in a bubble when you are literally in a bubble every time you drive. Hope you are ready when the “social and political realities” make a car-centric society untenable.
I think we live in very different parts of the world. Where I’m from, it is quite self-evident that we have to transition to EVs, and most people in fact already do. However a lot of people seem to forget that EVs only solve part of the problem and that we have to think further, so from my perspective this comic can basically only be used for good.
But I do get that this could be used by reactionaries to push back against clean energy in places where such sentiments are common. However, I don’t think that’s a particularly big problem on the Fediverse.
That’s all true, maybe I’m overthinking it. I like his other work, the punch line just seemed prominently anti ev on this one and I think I’m developing a hair trigger for it. Most are a bit more reticent in my community and I’ve seen all kinds of arguments against EVs, some being they are just as bad for the environment so why bother.
I do agree it might lead to complacency, especially since most countries seem quite unwilling to tackle any kind of issues related to vehicles.
I wouldn’t doubt people driving EVs may even have less sustainable lifestyles in general because of their absolved guilt from driving the EV. Not that the average driver matters much when considering cargo and air traffic.
Regenerative braking is basically turning the motors into a generator to recharge the battery. If you brake regeneratively, you’re not using your brake pads at all.
Many EVs can have their settings adjusted to where 90+% of braking can be just regenerative.
Although lightweight EVs emit an estimated 11-13% less PM2.5 than ICEV equivalents, heavier weight EVs emit an estimated 3-8% more PM2.5 than ICEVs. In the absence of targeted policies to reduce non-exhaust emissions, consumer preferences for greater autonomy and larger vehicle size could therefore drive an increase in PM2.5 emissions in future years with the uptake of heavier EVs.
I always have felt like blaming cars, of all things, misses the bigger picture. 1 crude oil shipping vessel produces more pollution than the entirety of cars in America will for a year. Cars are one of the things that actually empowers individuals to live their individualized lives. Hell, some people live in their cars/rv/campers and it allows people to escape the rigors of daily life.
I agree we should take aim at making them more environmentally friendly, and take a harder focus on replacing plastic components with metal and/or other recyclable alternatives. If we could sequester carbon into them somehow that would be even better; but things like carbon fiber require nasty epoxies that are difficult to break down again once they need to be recycled.
The position of most people in this community is usually “Cars should cease to be the primary means of transportation for North Americans as soon as possible”. There are cases where cars and trucks are the only logical option, like rural communities, but in cities we should be aggressively against cars as a primary means of transportation. Nothing solves the the problems cars cause like replacing them with a train or bus or cycling
Even living in a European city with good bike and public transit options, I run into cases where a car is the only logical option.
Which is why I rent them a few times and year which basically comes down to sharing a handful of cars between a few hundred neighbours. Every single person having one or multiple cars is insanity, especially when you consider traffic conditions.
Part of the issue here is that if you own a car, it’s often cheaper to take the car than public transport, because most of the car expenses are paid independent of the immediate usage.
Car value deprecation, taxes, maintainance, all of that cost you money no matter whether you drive into town today or use some other means of transport.
I think it would be much better to put all taxes onto the fuel price. If you pay €5 for a litre of fuel, instead of the ~€1.5/l that we are currently paying, it would make more sense to take public transport some times.
I think this is the huge balancing point at which cars rely on. You saw a lot more small cars and less of these huge monster trucks roaming around North America back when gas had hit $5/gallon. Now gas is $3 but accounting for inflation, it’s probably at one of the cheapest points it’s ever been.
Even though I argue many times for cars in these posts, I long for a day when gas is $10/gallon so that these 3-5 ton behemoths aren’t on the road carrying a single person. I’m fine with this causing an artificial limitation on people to pick and choose when they use their personal transportation. Granted, we’ve also seen that this results in the economy slowing down overall as people choose to go fewer places and thus spend less money overall.
i feel like you probably didn’t realize what community you are posting in. this is the anti-car community. not the better car community, the anti-car community.
No I realized damn well what community I was posting in. That’s the great thing about intellectual discourse, is the ability to argue a cause based on its merits in order to refine an opinion or idea to its ultimate ends. Without dissenting opinions being allowed, all you do is isolate yourself into an echo chamber where your opinions are never challenged and get ever-more extreme to the point of comedic proportions. You need your ideas challenged so that you can make an educated and refined argument. Additionally, my arguments allow me to be open to correction and I can update my own opinions based on arguments made against my statements as well. I know the internet has taught many people that argument = bad, but true discourse invites other opinions that may not necessarily agree. I, in my propensity to wish for the best in humanity, am of the hopes that I can achieve that here on a platform where I assume that people are slightly more intelligent because they had the foresight to leave the previous platform which has been overrun with anti-intellectualism.
But this argument basically implies that we should gut the majority of people’s benefit because of a minority’s inconvenience. Certainly we should accommodate the minority who can’t, especially if it means living a fulfilling life, but not at the expense of everyone else.
Making life easier for those who can’t or doesn’t want to drive detracts nothing from those who can. In fact it is beneficial for those who want to drive to have denser cities, and better public transport. It means safer streets, less traffic and lower insurance premiums. Yours is a false dichotomy.
You lack reading comprehension. I did not give you a false dichotomy, because a false dichotomy requires that I present to you two options, with the stipulation that you can only choose one or the other. Nowhere in my previous post did I do any such thing.
I merely reiterated what I understood your stance to be, and offered an alternative; which would be not unduly hampering other people’s experience because of a minority.
You’re so focused on being “right”, that you’ve lost sight of the actual discussion in an effort to portray my argument as some sort of argumentative fallacy. Which ironically enough, is in itself, another fallacy – called the fallacy fallacy.
You’re not arguing with the original poster. Someone definitely lacks reading comprehension skills and is irrationally fixated on proving themselves right at all times, but it ain’t me. You created a straw men and presented it at “either this or that”, false dichotomy. Again, supporting those who don’t want or can’t drive doesn’t infringe upon the rights of car owners and those who do want to drive. This is not an oppressor-oprressed dynamic. That’s classic victimization. We can help and accommodate to the needs of minorities without having to disregard the needs of the majority. At least learn your moral arguments right.
I find the language you use interesting. Those who take their living room with them to save a few minutes “benefit”, whereas those who have to breathe in the fumes and be victims of traffic violence are “inconvenienced”.
The thing is that the 1 container ship transports a hell of lot more actual cargo from one place to the other than personal cars, which are mostly used for commuting lazy buttchecks back to where they came from in the morning.
I always have felt like blaming cars, of all things, misses the bigger picture.
On the contrary, doing anything other than blaming cars misses the bigger picture that car-dependent development is what drives, directly or indirectly, almost all the pollution except for industry and agriculture:
The emissions of the cars themselves, of course.
The emissions associated with producing all the extra concrete you need to build places to store the cars, as well as wider roads to fit all the traffic. (EDIT: and longer roads, for that matter, because inserting all the space for car storage forces your destinations to be further apart!)
The emissions associated with restrictive low-density zoning codes forcing 90% of the population to live in single-family homes exposed to the environment on all six sides, instead of giving them the freedom to choose to live in denser housing where shared walls increase thermal efficiency.
When you talk about “pollution” (compared to a shipping vessel) you are only talking about greenhouse gas emissions. This is the exact fallacy that the comic is addressing.
Localised particulate matter pollution will have a much more severe and direct impact on human health. Whether widespread individual car ownership is worth the cancer and microplastic pollution in our bodies is certainly still open for debate. However, this “environmentally friendly car” that you are imagining is a pipe dream.
Humans living fulfilling, individualised lives has been happening for more than just the last century.
Cargo ships also emit a shit ton of particulate, NOx, and SO2 since they aren’t required to have the same emissions controls as on road vehicles. It’s a serious problem for both climate change and immediate health impacts.
But those cargo ships exist whether we’re also driving a bunch of cars or not. It’s just totally orthogonal.
If anything, switching to heavy EVs will increase the amount of pollution caused by cargo ships. Bringing up cargo ships makes no sense as a defense of EVs
Plus, short of putting nuclear reactors on every ship, they can only really function on oil based fuels. Nothing compares in terms of energy density. If you somehow managed to put god knows how many battery packs on a ship without it sinking, it would probably take months to charge and suck tens of megawatts from the grid whilst doing it.
The greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), expressed in CO2e — of total shipping (international, domestic and fishing) have increased from 977 million tonnes in 2012 to 1,076 million tonnes in 2018 (9.6% increase).
Whereas in a pdf from the EPA at the bottom of this page says passenger cars and light-duty trucks produced 1,046 million metric tons of CO2 in 2021.
So to recap, all maritime shipping in the world produced only slightly more CO2 than the passenger cars and light trucks only in the United States.
Damn, thanks for the rebuttal – Do you have any other sources that are closer to 2022? Covid REALLY did a fucking number on everything from shipping to travel, both reducing travel and increasing shipping - so I’m concerned that those numbers may be a little different in a post-covid world. Still, very enlightening facts!
I do not. The previous study of its kind from the IMO was from 2014 and looked at the years 2007-2012, so it seems to take a few years for them to be able to put all the information together.
Cars are one of the things that actually empowers individuals to live their individualized lives.
So if I’m forced to live in my car or forced to use it because I would otherwise most likely be run over if I was riding a bike or the distance is too far for walking and I can’t catch public transit to my destination, am I empowered? Having a choice of how I want to get to places is empowering, not “oh I’ll guess I’ll go in my car”. I can see the argument for living in a car, but I also know that people sometimes make that choice because it is literally cheaper to buy and re-do a car so they can live in it rather than renting in some areas.
Cars are, and honestly should be treated as, a luxury good. It’s fun to drive around some routes form time-to-time, but I’d much rather bike or ride public transit to places rather than drive.
If a significant amount of people live in their cars, it means that the housing market and the wages are seriously out of whack, and the government has not been doing their job for the last decades.
This is one of the main cores behind the anti car and fifteen minutes city concepts. I’m currently facing the choice. Should I buy a car? Because, though I currently move and live without, using a car for commute would be a net personal gain. Biking is not an option, there is no infrastructure nor protections for moving on a bicycle in my city. I have to commute 50km each way, my job is not possible to be done from home, moving closer to work is financially prohibitive. Any new job would be near the same exact geographic area. A car would reclaim almost 3 hours of my day and multiply my options for leisure 10 fold for relatively cheaper. I hate to have to face that dilemma.
I want public transport more than anything, but where I live there’s little to none, I can’t do anything about that other than voting for parties that apparently have little chance to win. What I can do is buy an electric car, sue me.
I bet there are statistics on just how much space is wasted on cars (roads, parking space) but I don’t have them handy. It will probaly pretty maddening when only considering “urban” areas but I wonder if it’s more or less of 1% of the world’s total landmass …
I’m tired of people looking at me crazy because I keep suggesting we need better public transportation rather than fucking electric cars. We are 100% going to replace every car in America with an E.V before we ever expand access to public transportation. And we will do this because the car manufacturers stock prices will go up if we do.
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