There’s this concept under socialism called “development” where you make small steps towards your desired outcome. Naturally, capitalists hate this which is why they spend so much money pushing for all-or-nothing “solutions” and encouraging people to quit when it doesn’t work. Whatever it takes to make sure that people don’t fundamentally challenge their illegitimate rule as they burn the planet for profit.
There’s a lot wrong with this video as most videos on EVs from 2016. The data is sources for electricity production is actually over a decade old now (Sep 2013) and it rationalizes that the electric cars will break down before the grid ever moves towards greener sources. This is a very silly notion considering solar is straining the grid with too much power at times, times where EVs could charge. They can also charge over night encouraging nuclear power to be more financially feasible as nuclear relies on a base load as they don’t like to turn off.
They’re not a silver bullet and in some cases like the Hummer EV they are worse than an old car but if you have to drive a lot it is completely less carbon intensive than an ICE for most EVs.
Every car on the road being converted to electric with magic wouldn’t fix climate change. If you didn’t also get trucks and SUVs it may not even move the needle Personal car use is not a major cause of climate change. It just doesn’t matter compared to industrial and commercial emissions.
Of course it won’t fix climate change in one go, but doing so would remove a major fossil fuel dependency for your average Joe and make them much more likely to vote against fossil fuels.
Put another way, how many people driving gas cars would vote in favor of heavy taxes on fossil fuel use?
Now, how many would vote that way if they personally didn’t have any dependencies on fossil fuels?
Also, highway vehicles account for 1.5 billion tons of GHGs being emitted each year, that’s 11% of the global yearly GHG emissions, so yeah, it definetely would “move the needle”. In the US specifically it’s as much as 20% of our nations emissions.
And yeah I already know the next argument “bUt YoUr JuSt UsInG fOsSiL fUeLs To ChArGe It” - except you’re not necessarily, in my area (part of CA), you can choose to have 100% of your electricity provided by renewable sources for a small monthly premium ($18/month). Additionally in CA, all new homes are being built with solar power, which further increases your ability to charge without fossil fuels.
And in the areas that isn’t true, it’s at least getting groundwork laid down to make it true. An electric car can be powered by renewable energy, a fossil fuel car must be powered by fossil fuels.
There are a lot of steps to solving climate change beyond “buy an electric car”, and you’re right that industrial and commercial pollution accounts for the majority, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be pushing on all fronts.
We’ve already waited way too long to act, we can’t afford as a species to say “well, I’m not going to change my car until the industrial polluters get their shit together”, we have to push in Every possible direction, all at the same time to make progress, and electric cars overtaking fossil fuel cars is a big part of that.
There’s a lot of work to be done globally until electric cars are 100% green, both in terms of power infrastructure and the processes to create them, but there’s no way forward with gas cars, so we need to start moving over as a society now, phasing out the production of gas cars with electric
This is the exact kind of fucking bullshit that i hate.
Of course it won’t fix climate change in one go
Be honest: It won’t fix it at all. It won’t significantly impact climate change. It won’t insignificantly impact climate change.
so yeah, it definetely would “move the needle”
First of all: emissions are not the target. Climate change is the target. Even if all human related greenhouse gas emissions ceased tomorrow we would still be facing catastrophic climate change and then an effectively indefinite period (on a human scale) before things settled down again. We cannot not-pollute our way out of this mess.
Let me reiterate: We can no longer change the outcome by reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and consumer car usage is a small slice of overall carbon dioxide emissions. Of course, we could make it worse. So how much do consumer cars contribute to making it worse?
I don’t know if your figure of billions of tons is worldwide or not, the worldwide number i found here is about 3 billion metric tons. (It dropped for 2020! Yay we did it!) In contrast, Wikipedia (who I believe are taking their numbers from the IPCC) lists about 35 billion tons (about 32 billion metric tons) of co2 from fossil fuel burning, with total greenhouse gas emissions of about 50 billion tons (about 45 billion metric).
Then there’s also reduction in the Earth’s ability to extract co2 due to land use (chopping down forests). This is difficult to model because it’s not a direct emission but it is undeniably a result of human activity that unbalances the Earth’s climate. That Wikipedia article earlier says that total emissions from 1870 to 2017 were about 1.5 trillion tons from fossil fuels and 660 billion tons from land use change which works out to be about 31% of the total. Note that this is total and cumulative so again: Ceasing all emissions would not change this number. No longer cutting down forests (etc) would not change this number a single gram.
Then there are other factors that are making climate change worse but they’re not that important in comparison. I’m going to ignore them because i am not a scientist and i’m not writing a scientific paper here.
I am going to be harsh, however. If you take that 3 billion number and you divide it into the 32 billion number you get about 10%, as you say.
That’s not correct if you want to make a difference for climate change.
If you take that 3 billion number and you divide it into the 1.5 trillion tons number you get about 0.2%.
So to answer the question above: how much worse do consumer cars make climate change? Well, they worsen the situation with carbon dioxide by about 0.2% per year, coming from about 10% of our overall emissions, and carbon dioxide is only one of the factors contributing to climate change. So overall? Not much.
And yeah I already know the next argument “bUt YoUr JuSt UsInG fOsSiL fUeLs To ChArGe It”…
That is not my argument.
…except you’re not necessarily, in my area (part of CA), you can choose to have 100% of your electricity provided by renewable sources for a small monthly premium ($18/month).
Oh my god, of course you couldn’t help it. The smug liberal (derogatory) virtue signalling had to come out. Jesus fucking Christ.
You understand, right, that if you pay $18 and go from a 50/50 split of fossil fuel and renewable energy (about where CA is) and your neighbor does not what ends up happening is you go 0% fossil fuel and your neighbor goes to 100% fossil fuel and nothing changes, right?
Like, you’re paying $18 not to change anything, you’re paying $18 so you can go on the internet and complain about how everyone else isn’t fixing climate change like you are.
The corporate response to climate change has been to try to convince everyone to take shorter showers, switch to an electric car, and install solar panels. That is, for individual people to do things (that don’t matter) and for corporations to continue doing things (that do matter, negatively). You unironically listed two of the three elements of a fucking climate change denial meme.
Also current renewable energy isn’t actually that great. I guess this is the right time for my pitch for nuclear power.
If you want to actually have an impact (in the “stop making things worse” direction not the “fix climate change” direction) then let me suggest nuclear power. Nuclear power is great. It’s a proven technology. Even nuclear power at its worst is still better than coal, even if you ignore the greenhouse gas emissions difference. I’d argue nuclear power is better than modern renewables too but this post is long enough so i won’t.
Right now, coal fired power plants account for 20% of fossil fuel emissions and are the single largest source of emissions. and… well… let me direct quote:
Notably, just 5% of the world’s power plants account for almost three-quarters of carbon emissions from electricity generation, based on an inventory of more than 29,000 fossil-fuel power plants across 221 countries.
Putting it a different way, almost 15% of all fossil fuel emissions come from 5% of the world’s power plants.
So it’s great that California is doing better than average, but if you want to make a difference in emissions you don’t try to change every single car on the planet over to electric, which is a tremendous task to undertake. You kill that 5% of power plants and replace them with nuclear. (Or okay if it really makes you feel better i’d be on board with renewables too but nuclear is still the better and more practical solution.)
There are a lot of steps to solving climate change beyond “buy an electric car”, and you’re right that industrial and commercial pollution accounts for the majority, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be pushing on all fronts.
If you want to make a difference right now, probably the best thing you can possibly do is advocate against coal power plants. It’s both easier to do than replacing all cars and it would have a bigger impact.
In 2035, 12 years from now, Europe plans to mandate all new cars to be electric. Europe is not responsible for the majority of passenger vehicle emissions. Most countries do not have plans that are anywhere near as ambitious. The US is only aiming at 50%, and that 50% of vehicles that get switched over won’t be the ones emitting the most greenhouse gases. (Hybrids being switched to full electrics have little impact when Ford F150s are the most popular vehicle in America.)
Meanwhile, that 5% of power plants is still out there. Industrial and agricultural emissions are still out there. Land use changes are still out there. The vast majority of everything that brought us to this point is still out there, untouched. And when will you get your 100% electric cars worldwide? In 2045? 2060? How deep underwater will Miami and New York City be by the time that happens? How many people will die in the meantime? How much further will the ecosystems of the world be destabilized?
This isn’t about “pushing on all fronts”. This is about moralizing at individual people about their personal decisions, which did not cause this problem and cannot fix it. Paying $18 to California power companies isn’t about improving the world it’s about making you, personally, feel better. Like you’ve “done your part”. Meanwhile, the planet is burning. In the coming years, it will burn more and more.
Capitalism wants to pretend that everyone acting individually can solve problems but capitalism created this problem and it cannot and will not solve it.
So what do you suggest that can actually be done, besides removed about it on Lemmy?
I somehow fucking knew this was coming, Everyone has the same response regardless of what you say.
I suggested targeting the most heavily polluting power plants for conversion to clean energy. This suggestion is:
Practical from a cost standpoint
Could be accomplished with current technology
Easier to implement politically than "make all cars electric"
Would have a bigger impact on the environment than “make all cars electric”.
You: “Well if you don’t have any ideas…”
I know my comment was long but you aren’t really arguing with me, you’re arguing with the shadows that live inside your head. This was true of your previous post, too. See:
And yeah I already know the next argument “bUt YoUr JuSt UsInG fOsSiL fUeLs To ChArGe It”…
(Which is still not and never has been my argument.)
For the record it’s my belief that we could currently not only halt but fully reverse climate change (though it would take maybe 100 years) at our current technological level. I believe it’s possible. However, i do not know of any way to do it that does not require major change to the political and economic systems of the West (the ones that brought us to this point, in other words: Capitalism). Back in the '70s it would have been way easier to address this but now we’re on hard mode.
You talk a lot about moralizing without actually making a difference, but that’s exactly what you’re doing in your comment.
I’m critiquing a moralizing argument, it’s somewhat inevitable that my critique will also adopt the form of a moral argument. Unless you want me to argue that all morals, all ideas of “good” and “bad”, are phantasms that are propagated by the powerful as a form of social control or something. Which i also could do, but it seems a little abstract given the current conversation.
Even granting you that point there’s still a difference:
My arguments are concerned about outcomes, about material conditions in people’s lives, they include the concept of collective and corporate action.
Your arguments are superficial, concerned about appearances, do not acknowledge the context or history of how we came to where we are, and are primarily concerned with individual actions that wealthy Westerners can take without regard to the practicality of implementation across the rest of the world.
I’m going to throw out one more thing:
Even if cars were the biggest source of carbon dioxide, going to all electric cars is not the best solution. Building electric cars still has a significant environmental impact, including greenhouse gas emissions. Better still would be mass transit. Trains and buses are more environmentally friendly still and would allow us to make other changes to society that would further reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, that option is not favored by our capitalist overlords…
Electric cars are certainly preferable to gas cars, but the whole car industry I’m general that are needed for both gas and electric cars are bad. Roads, parking lots, highways, the lights needed to keep them lit, the process of mining enough materials to make electric cars. The issue in my opinion is that cars in general are awful for the environment and just quality of life, they’re better but I hope we can shoot for higher.
The US actually hasn’t declared war since WW2 and the US military industrial complex is fucking hungry to never slow down. Like the US spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on the military and that’s not including all the sales to other countries and such.
It’s kind of how the DoD defense plan works. Bases all over every continent so that the US can fight Russia and China from someone else’s yard. It also incidentally protects those other countries.
If only employers cared. It has been nice, now my employer is rolling out a arbitrary but mandatory 4 days return to office policy. In like 8 years of employment I never needed to be there that much. Whatever, 100% remote job market looks decent for me, hopefully find a better place soon.
I love how Game Of Thrones ended like 3 years ago and the internet is still processing our collective trauma from how objectively terrible season 8 was.
I hear a bunch of N thing needs to happen, but the question is will that N solution help. The question to ask is, has someone run a study on N solution, and if so what’s the next best solution. Gather data like where are the things of interest happening e.g. region of city. Make shore that N solution does not try to fix a symptom and disregard a source problem. Is N thing is symptom there can be many sources which have different solutions.
Like climate change, this mostly is not an intellectual question. Good answers in theory don’t matter if you have a reactionary political establishment that refuses to implement it.
Like for climate change bad solutions exist and if people are pushing back you should listen, a solution maby it’s not good anoth maby we are spending time getting bad solutions to work when we should work on find new solutions.
Like for climate change, waiting and doing nothing when we already have a wealth of research on the subject will do much more damage than even the worse solutions that the data still supports [rather than moronic, unsupported solutions like giant ice machines].
Like for climate change, the pushback is mainly based on people being paid to push back and the astroturfing funded by the same people in a litany of campaigns that have gone on for decades. People disagreeing do not, by the very fact of being “people disagreeing”, have a valid point, and usually they do not in the context of these subjects.
Why ten? How many does “lithium batteries are made with a substantial amount lithium” count for?
Beyond that, I’m not just some bullshit technocrat, I don’t believe that “innovating your way out of the apocalypse” is almost ever possible. Yeah, we should move away from car-centric infrastructure, which could be conflated for arguing for “green tech” because, compared to cars, trains, bikes, scooters, etc. are green tech, but overwhelmingly my suggestions are policy-side because stopping the destruction of the earth is not a sci-fi pipe dream, it is a materially feasible goal and has been for as long as capitalists have been destroying it.
You can take a look at regulations in other countries. They work. Everywhere. There’s no need to ask questions, everything was already answered all over the world.
Obviously there’s a solution! Give underpaid and abused teachers guns and ask them to shoot a teenager with zero followup on mental health for the teacher!
/S
Genuinely makes me sick how many people have said this to me, that teachers just need to be armed
When I had two fellow teachers tell me (not at the same time, like a week apart) that they agreed and wanted their rights respected so they could carry at work, well, I figured it was about time for me to bow out of the profession.
This was referencing the fact that it was a carbon copy of somebody else’s comment that replied to me hours before you. Have you tried using your eyes before pressing the reply button?
Do you know how Lemmy works? I can’t see comments from users on instances that are defederated from my home instance. My reply to your first comment in this thread is the only one I see. If there are other replies, they were made by users I’m defederated from.
You have, maybe 2k users here, defederate a new insurance a day, and users are constantly finding lack of content; but yeah it’s the normal user who is quite in the corner 🤣
Are we talking a world war, or just a war somewhere in the world?
Because one of those things we won’t have a choice over. I can not want a war while still preparing for one.
I don’t believe the US would be left alone in a world War, simple from all the shit we stuck our noses in in the 50s-90s, to say nothing of the last 23 years.
These capitalist and billionaire cocksuckers sure love socialism when they socialise their losses and fucking take our tax payer money to bail themselves out. if you’re working class and don’t support socialism, you should look into it more. Propaganda from these blood sucking billionaire ghouls have made most of us blind to the better life socialism can offer us.
Yes i agree. Just pointing out the fact there’s no free market. When they lose, they still win by taking our hard earned money and using it to further their interests. I’d be happier if it were used for our welfare instead.
Literally not a single thing in our world isn’t chemicals. Lemontek - chemicals interacting. Alcohol for some party - Chemicals. Every part of any meal - chemicals. All of it.
In general I think people are referring to things that are either A) heavily proccesed and/or B) something that isn’t naturally occurring. When they speak about “chemicals”
Your body is made to eat natually occuring plants and animals. Any deviation from that is risking long term issues. Effects that are very often (at least here in the states) ignored unless they just straight up kill you. And even then it’ll probably take a couple decades before anyone actually does something about it. So, yes while many people misuse the word “chemical,” their fear is not misplaced. You should be skeptical of things that are synthesized until they are proven to interact with the human body appropriately
Granted, there are things in this world that aren’t chemicals. Muons, stuff at the LHC, plasma… But everything that a normal person interacts with is a chemical.
That one’s just for you. People always go off about it being a natural chemical reaction etc and it’s timely with all the conversation about growing acception of psychadelics for mental health
I think we need to understand what definition people are using for “chemicals”. They usually are referring to highly processed ingredients, with highly processed preservatives, highly processed artificial flavors (called “natural flavors”, but taken for example from the anal glans of a beaver… yes this is real and common). By the broadest definition, absolutely everything is a chemical. Generally, people should avoid any definition for a word that makes the word nonsensical. And also generally, you will find big lobbyist groups using that general definition to shell-game about the specific chemicals they are trying to protect.
When a food-concerned person mentions chemicals, they are referring to things like antibiotics or hormones, preservatives or processed sweeteners with known side-effects. Some of them are talking about isolates, like soy protein isolate to which there are valid health concerns.
And yes, sometimes people referring to chemicals don’t know what chemicals they’re complaining about. And yes, sometimes people complaining about chemicals are complaining that their meatless burger’s consistency comes from methyl cellulose, (probably) completely harmless but absolutely artificial.
The same way some vegans are made ill by the thought of meat, some folks are made ill by flavor- or consistency-related facts in their food. I mean, I think vegans would be concerned to know the beaver anal secretions above was in some plant milks under the term “natural flavors”.
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