I feel like this point is missing the big picture: people create the demand, and companies supply what the market demands. Like or hate “the free market”, this is essentially what it is. If there were magically 1/10th the number of humans on the planet, we would expect those companies to have 90% less emissions. It’s not that some of these companies aren’t bad actors, and have actions that are at times immoral, it’s that they are amoral actors in a market economy that is only responsive to consumer demand.
The example I like to give is that companies’ race to the bottom on quality. They’re responding to human behavior, where if an item on Amazon is $6, and another very similar item is 10 cents cheaper, the cheaper item will sell 100x more. This is a brutal, cutthroat example of human behavior and market forces. It leads to shitty products because consumers are more responsive to price and find it hard to distinguish quality, so the market supplies superficially-passable junk at the lowest possible price and (with robust competition) the lowest possible profit margin.
I feel like YOU are missing the point. Even tho you say exactly why this matters the most.
Yes market respond to demand. Compa oes DGAF whether they pollute, only that people buy. That’s why the ONLY solution is that all these companies are regulated to pollute less. If everyone has to, then they are still equal and people won’t buy a cheaper alternative that happens to be more polluting.
Hell, I’d go as far as to say that it only matters if the top 5-10 countries do it. If China, USA, and India don’t do this, the entire world is fucked and there is nothing to be done by anyone else.
Gates-funded eco porky. People watch them for their science videos then get sucked into neoliberal propaganda. Like it’s one thing to be biased (everyone is) but it’s a complete other to be parroting think tank talking points verbatim.
You know how you have to buy tires every few years because they “go bald”? As in, they’ve lost that material that was once tread? That material isn’t just disappearing, it flies off the tires in the form of tiny particles that are in the air and water. It’s actually really toxic too, way more than other plastics. Fun fact EV tires are even more toxic.
Source: I work in a toxicology lab studying microplastics.
Honestly didn’t take too long to find a lot of people taking this take in the least generous way possible.
And who can forget the “I commute 50 miles each way I can’t use any alternatives” folks as well who seem to think that the better future means absolutely no cars.
It means better alternatives to everyone having to own a car and take a car everywhere.
Tbh that should be expected. It’s always easier to convince someone to use an option that already exists and is observably better than their current situation than it is to convince them to support a theoretical change that will take place in the future if we inconvenience them now. That’s just how “humans” work.
Too many people think upgrading their car to electric is ‘doing their part’ but when they are replacing a vehicle less than 5 years old with an electric car they also intend to replace within 5 years, they haven’t helped anything.
Also people don’t want to feel like the action they took is actually unhelpful.
They like greenwashing and want to feel good about their choices. Applying critical analysis to a complex problem like climate change is hard compared to buying a Tesla.
I sort of agree with you, but at the same time the wealthy are always the earliest adopters for expensive new technology. Them buying overpriced luxury cars helps subsidize the development of the tech for the rest of us. And when they switch to a new car in 5 years it adds more stock to the used car market for people that can't afford the cutting edge but still want to own an EV.
It’s an interesting one, a lot of people really do seem to be arguing cars shouldn’t exist which is absolutely insane, likewise there are people who have the equally hairbrained idea that cars are the only option for any journey.
There is no doubt at all that fleet managed self-driving electric cars are at some point going to be a vital part of all transport networks, the efficiency and utility is far higher than any other potential option. Lithium batteries can be recycled endlessly and the construction process can be powered from renewables so long term we’re going to get to a point where the ecological impact is negligible.
Of course we should be using other options where appropriate but we don’t have a magic wand so we need the utility of small personal transport, if we’re going to start switching off oil production systems then we’re going to need those vehicles to run on electric - the more we shift to electric the better the support and industrial infrastructure gets and the more refined the technology becomes.
Time to refuel / practical vehicle range 1a. The cost involved in having charging installed on your property
Weather. Snow. Effect of cold on batteries. I know everyone hates those evil SUV’s, bit when there’s 14" of snow on the ground your tesla/volt/insert your favorite EV ain’t gonna cut it
To the “just put in mass transit” crowd, do you feel that eminent domain is justified to take property from someone to fulfill this need?
Honestly not trying to troll, these are real questions that should be answered
And for the record, my vehicle is a compact sedan, getting on average 34-37mpg, so I’m not in that dick-size contest over who’s truck has the bigger lift kit
Oh no. How did people do it before in the past before SUVs?! Also, public transit.
Yes. A steong public transportation infrastructure. As we are going to experience worst and worst weather that challenges the survival of the human race, we will need to make sacrifices.
The discussion was about EV’s, you missed the point. But ill bite.
1/1a. My relatively short daily commute of 20 minutes turns into 1:10. My time is more valuable than money, so no. 2. “Before the SUV” people didn’t have to commute much further than down the street for work, so no. 3. Cool. You first.
You had answers to your questions? I knew your comment was bait.
Yes, I am first. I am more than happy to have new affordable housing built near me and public transportation expanded! If done well it will always be a benefit. Imagine walkable neighborhoods with buses on time?? Yes please!
If we have an expanded public trans option, there will be less people on the road which means your commute will be shorter. Not longer. People in like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other congested places would feel it!
So please, less individual vehicles and more public transportation
Not to argue semantics, but moving people from cars to public transit keeps the same people on the roads, but fewer vehicles. While i get your line of reasoning, accuracy counts.
If you’re willing to give up what you own to move to denser populated areas that meet your needs, great! I’m all for it. That’s YOUR choice.
On the flip side, who decides who is allowed to operate a personal vehicle? To me, that seems like the opposite of a choice.
But once again, the conversation was about EVs. You want dense vertical growth urbanism, be my guest, but I’m really not interested.
Gonna further add, if there is 14" of snow on the ground and the roads aren’t clear, then with 99% of the SUVs, Trucks, and cars sold today, you aren’t, and you shouldn’t, be going anywhere.
That’s a design issue of the vehicle anyway, and not inherently related to the ICE vs EV drivetrain.
Weather. Snow. Effect of cold on batteries. I know everyone hates those evil SUV’s, bit when there’s 14" of snow on the ground your tesla/volt/insert your favorite EV ain’t gonna cut it
How so? I live in Boston, where it gets cold and snowy. During the winter, the efficiency on my Bolt goes from 4.0mi/kWh (134.8 mpg equivalent) to 2.7mi/kWh to (90.99 mpg equivalent), and I park outside in the cold. Otherwise, it works just like any car I’ve had. Why exactly do I need an SUV?
I never said you need one. I make do without one, however there are plenty of times during our winters here the larger wheels/greater ground clearance would be extremely useful. Just because it doesn’t work for you or me doesn’t mean there are people it does work for.
Recently my parents got a car for emergency situations (like dropping my sister to school when busses are cancelled and she can’t bike because of rain). And when I did the research for a car with them, I realised just how good cars with sub 1L engines are (3-4l per 100km in the city). Sure, they are not gonna be fast, but they are still faster than the speed limit of 120km/h on our highways here. I am personally hoping to buy a rx8 or a na miata soon for enthusiast reasons. Modern transport should be 100% public.
if public transport is a valid alternative (cheaper, less crowded, more comfortable) i will use it. but currenly it is not. so i will drive my 1st gen yaris 1.0. besides 70€ of gas a month, there ate no other operation costs.
fair points, a 1 litre car like this which is considered very safe basically costs nothing to ensure. i mainly forgot because it’s technically part of a company fleet of a family member, and they just pay the minescule bill.
it is a toyota. there are no broken parts.
i am not planning to sell it, it was already worth less than 1500€
oil doesn’t really cost much either, especially because i change it myself.
tires last really long and if you buy slightly used ones from someone who sold their car you can save a lot of money.
If they’re made instead of making fossil fuel vehicles, they do (addressing the cartoon, not the barely related added title) . Cars will still be made as many become no longer repairable. Which kind to build? Yes, better to make more electric buses and trains, but cars wont simply vanish in any scenario.
The main issue in the push for electric cars, is that we’re pretending that we can fix things with no lifestyle changes.
And for the richer people, that’s probably true. But there’s a big chunk of people for whom the electric car revolution means no more personal transport.
I accept that, but we need to invest in public transport exponentially more than we are doing. It needs subsidising up the wazoo so people outside the inner-city bubble can still get around. By just pretending that electric cars will reach affordable levels for the poorest, we’re inviting trouble further down the line when they can’t use their petrol cars any more.
I do agree that there should be done a lot more to make this go faster. One of the most obvious things is immediately outlaw the production of gasoline suvs. They‘re inefficient and rather pricey so you wont hit anyone who‘s life depends on it. Then outlaw the production of any gasoline sportscars.
Obviously the expansion of public transport is still important but selling new v8 suvs demoralizes anyone trying to do the right thing.
Well, the carbon footprint calculator I used may not be accurate, but for the same mileage on my car vs an electric car is about 1/2 the carbon… and I assume the electric car’s footprint decreases even more over time…
Certainly, electric cars aren’t solving all the problems, but reducing my carbon footprint by 1/2 over a 10 year period sounds like a pretty good start.
Its always more costly and less efficient to produce new things in smaller quantity than large numbers. So electric car manufacturers at this point in time costs more to produce from an environment perspective. As the number of electric cars go up, my understanding is that this will compare to fossil fuel car production.
Imo you cannot compare these two as its impossible to be as efficient as a large scale manufacturer until you become one yourself.
Fossil fuel cars do use cobalt though, significantly less though. But they also need fossil fuels which are hard to come by (in an environmentally friendly way.
At the moment they do with the Lithium batteries but better and cheaper batteries are already on the market that have solved that rare minerals problem. Sodium ion batteries have most of the capacity by weight of Lithium type batteries, but they do not require any of the rare minerals, in fact they can be made with minerals that are cheap and abundant in the USA. They are also non-flammable, much safer than lithium.
Yeah economies of scale are absolutely a thing, but what the average person is coming around to is the idea that the personal vehicle is environmentally unfeasible. Tyre wear alone has a significant environmental impact and electric vehicles are only going to make that problem work. That’s just one factor of countless factors. Transportation is a necessity, personal transportation isn’t (not entirely true, some places have such terrible transportation infrastructure that a personal vehicle is a necessity). Electric car manufacturers are never going to tell you not to buy their car regardless of the fact that their products significantly contribute to climate change.
The problem is more like that cars that use fossil fuels have a very much lower efficiency rate than electric cars. So theoretical if you use the same amount of FF for the energy production and use that for electric cars it would be more efficient. But that shouldnt be the solution.
Electric cars are indeed much worse for the climate at production time than combustion cars likely will be throughout their entire lifetime.
But this matters little, as the electric car is not made to be the perfect alternative, it is instead made to be the “weird in between solution” that we need to bring as many devices as possible to use a common power source and get people acquainted with the concept, before moving to the actual solution.
The next steps will be better battery technology because, let’s face it, lithium gel batteries suck, and proper power sources.
In the end, I guess it’s kind of a “chicken and egg” situation.
Imagine if instead of rewarding Reagan for having the Iranians keep the hostages so he could rip the solar cells off the White House, we;d rewarded Carter for recognizing the trap oil was.
So you want to keep drilling for oil forever? Oil wells, pipe lines, refineries, more pipes, trucks carrying liquid fuel… when you could just get rid of all that and have renewable powered cars?
There’s a brief window where if you look at it from a very careful angle ICE is briefly better in some ways than electric, long term electric is the only option.
Great, I agree too, but go ahead and start lobbying the US government to build more.
I’m all for your suggestions, but the fact of the matter is we need solutions yesterday and to build what you’re talking about will take 10 years of lobbying alone. California HSR is going to be another 10 years and they’re already building it.
well then please don’t shoot down the next best alternative. We would love HSR, hell even faster trains through areas like the Midwest, but no one is building them and no one wants to lobby for them. Until then we’re stuck in this car-centric hell, and EVs are the best alternative. (Again, we all know they’re not the best, they’re the best alternative)
It shows in how clueless you are about the US. Very little mass transit is actually viable. People can't afford to spend 4 hours getting to and four hours getting back from their 10 dollar an hour job. Worry about what is going on where you actually know something about.
The US was built on mass transit. Pre WWII the US was covered in electrified interurban lines, it wasn’t until the 50s when the car started to become really popular that these were dismantled and your cities demolished to make way for more highways. Many people could easily benefit from new transit options if they were installed, while for others changes to land use (such as ending single family zoning) would also be need to be made.
The dismantling of public transit in the US started in the 20’s, not the 50’s. GM, other auto and truck manufacturers, and the oil industry began buying up street car and train companies through proxies and then shutting them down. They also used government influence to make them unprofitable.
A former head of GM was made transportation secretary in 1948 and used the department of defense budget to build the highway system, further damaging any chance public transit had of taking hold here.
By the late 50’s we had all but destroyed any hope of having a mixed transit system.
The US wasn’t built by public transit though, it was built by car and truck. Public transit in the post industrial era has always been a pipe dream on the periphery for Americans.
Manifest destiny’s “go west, young man” has morphed into “go into debt, purchase cars and houses, young man.” And like “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” it has always been a lie.
With the legalized bribery system known as lobbying in this country we never had a chance at being anything but a facade of democracy propped up by corporate avarice.
The US wasn’t built by public transit though, it was built by car and truck.
Many US towns and cities started as railroad towns, and they grew due to rail connections. They had local streetcars around which new suburbs were built. Downtowns were originally walkable and mixed use. Only later were they destroyed to make way for urban freeways and parking, and the post war housing boom’s racist policies brought about single family zoning and car dependant suburbs.
I listened podcast/interview (one of the latest Making Sense podcasts by Sam Harris) with a person who studies climate change and the ways to address it. And she disagrees with your statement. She said that just couple of years of typical electric car use is required to offset the production, and the rest is all green.
In much of Southern US, they've got three kinds of vehicles. Massive new shiny trucks, really old gas guzzling reality size trucks, and speed bumps for the first. You can't see out of a compact car as you are always in a valley of truck.
What are they supposed to do? Not drive a truck? They have an office they have to commute to! Think of all the people who would totally make fun of them (read: not care at all).
accurate representation of Southern mentality. The Women want a Truck because they feel unsafe in a little car with massive monsters blasting past at 80MPH and Men want them because they've got very small peepee.
Not true. Large-scale power plants are WAY more efficient at turning fossil fuels into work than internal combustion engines. Even if all electric car power was generated by coal (it’s not, almost half of electricity generation now is nuclear + renewables), electric cars would still have net emissions that are half of gas cars.
It’s a process that is absolutely underway and making great progress, even the USA now generatea more from solar than from coal, many countries like Scotland are already producing over 90% of their electrical use from renewables with only 2% from fossil fuels.
It’s worth noting too that these numbers are only grid based usage and a lot of solar is direct use, often being stored in an electric car rather than sold to the grid - with rooftop solar at home and at work it would be possible to use a car without requiring any of the oil extraction, transport and refining faculties. I don’t know how many people it would take using solar cars before a single oil well goes untapped but I do know if we get to a point where no one is using gas stations then that’ll be an awfull lot of horrible polluting infrastructure we don’t need, just carrying the fuel through wires instead of in tanker lorries is a huge saving alone.
That’s not a huge problem. Chernobyl and Five Kilometer Island were old reactor designs, and Fukushima mostly sustained an earthquake+tsunami (it would fully succeed under better corporation oversight)
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