Why EVs Aren't a Climate Change Panacea

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-ev-transition-explained-2659316104

by mfiguiere • 3 years ago

79 169 3 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

Better headline: "EVs are decarbonizing transport, but we have more work to do. Here's what we should do next."

From the article:

This is not to imply in any way that electric vehicles are worthless. Analysis by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) argues that EVs are the quickest means to decarbonize motorized transport.

The headline feels like someone crafted it for maximum clickbait. The perpetual doomsday framing of everything, including the climate wins, only makes people tune out of the conversation.

acdha11• 3 years ago

I think this concern has to be balanced against the billions of dollars promoting the status quo. A lot of people want to believe that all we need to do is buy electric cars, and there are multiple industries pushing that since it’s good for business while politicians like not having to tell people that lifestyle changes are necessary.

CraigJPerry• 3 years ago

> A lot of people want to believe that all we need to do is buy electric cars

The people i hear most vehemently arguing for ev adoption are quick to share a laundry list of all the other things we should be doing.

I haven’t run across the EV-and-we’re-done brigade. I’m not dismissing that they exist but I haven’t met them.

ajross3• 3 years ago

A lot of people want to believe that all we need to do is buy electric cars, and there are multiple industries pushing that

Um... who? I think it's rather the opposite: I see a "lot of people" in "multiple industries" making strawman arguments like this. Essentially, it's a deflection from "EVs are better than cars" (a clear truth that can't reasonably be argued with) to "EV proponents don't have all the answers either" (a winnable argument that feels like it's related even though it isn't).

Buy the EV. Also move closer to the urban core, WFH, and otherwise reduce your dependence on the suburban road networks. But buy the EV if you need a car.

dheera3• 3 years ago

What I really don't understand is why don't Shell, Exxon, Chevron and their ilk get into the EV game and start setting up DC fast chargers at all of their gas stations? They profit, and EV range anxiety becomes a thing of the past by having chargers literally everywhere.

aqme28• 3 years ago

I don’t fully agree. It argues that beyond the EV conversion, we also have to switch to cycling and public transit for transport.

sfpotter• 3 years ago

Maybe instead of criticizing the way in which the article was written you could comment on some if its actual contents. I feel like people on HN get incredibly hung up on minor things like the title of an article and can't move past that. Climate change is a big deal and HN is full of smart people. It would be nice if we could use it as a venue for discussion about interesting topics instead of whinging about things that annoy us.

belval• 3 years ago

I guess you haven't been here long. It's a staple of HN to be pedantic and obsess on details, that being said it's also how sometimes you end up with very interesting threads on tangential topics.

wffurr• 3 years ago

The presentation of the topic is as relevant as the facts at hand.

labrador• 3 years ago

The headline feels like someone crafted it for maximum clickbait

It's written as a bait to people who have bought into the oil industry propaganda that EV's aren't a solution. "Where do you think the electricity comes from? Coal, gas and oil fueled power plants, that's where." If I had a dollar for every time I've heard this I could afford a Tesla.

dheera3• 3 years ago

Yeah I've heard this way too much too. Why are humans so bad at second-order thinking and understanding that it's possible and, barring politics, straightforward to change where electricity comes from but it's not really possible to change where gasoline comes from?

throwaway894345• 3 years ago

Yeah, it’s a weird argument to make in public. It’s an admission that you don’t understand the difference between a binary/dichotomy and degrees.

mshake211• 3 years ago

Massively increased WFH (triggered by the pandemic) has done more to improve carbon emissions from transportation than any electric vehicle movement will ever do. yet you don't see a hard line top-down push for more WFH, only resistance, why?

hackerlight• 3 years ago

EVs are a significantly worse solution than mass transport. Not because the electricity comes from the grid but because of the wastefulness involved in the construction, from the cars themselves and roads, also the additional electricity that's required per capita from cars than from mass transit. That said, they're better than ICE cars.

andrepd3• 3 years ago

Individual automobiles have 100 problems. EVs solve 1 of them (tailpipe emissions), leaving the other 99. Yes, I guess it's better than nothing, but...

Meanwhile old boring things like trains, trams (frequent, comfortable, extensive), proper bike lanes, do more for climate change and general quality of life than replacing a petrol SUV with an electric SUV.

PheonixPharts2• 3 years ago

including the climate wins

EVs aren't a climate win. It's just more consumption which ultimately means more energy which means more oil.

Aside from that the issue has nothing to do with where the oil is consumed, but how much. The only way to stop climate change is to prevent oil from being extracted. We're currently in the process of escalating a war to extract more so I'm not optimistic about this.

If EVs had an impact on US oil consumption you would expect that consumption to drop right?

But 2022 was nearly a record year for US oil consumption [0]:

20.40 million bpd in 2022 and 20.75 million bpd in 2023. That compares with a record 20.80 million bpd in 2005

EVs are just a way to keep you consuming while feeling okay about. It's not a climate win in the slightest.

0. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-crude-output-petroleum...

codeulike2• 3 years ago

If EVs had an impact on US oil consumption you would expect that consumption to drop right?

Not yet, no. Barely expect it to make a dent yet.

Straw man.

It's not a climate win in the slightest.

Why not? Why not in the slightest?

You're saying its not even a teeny weeny little sliver of a climate win?

We have to get away from fossil fueled transportation. Having transportation that can/can potentially be renewably powered has to be a step forward. What you're saying just seems like 'let the perfect be the enemy of the good'

Please explain.

pcthrowaway• 3 years ago

EVs don't use as much oil in their lifetime (including production) as a combustion engine would in theirs (those have to be produced also, right?)

tppiotrowski• 3 years ago

Anytime I see the word "assume" in an article it feels like a mechanism for subtly turning journalism into an op-ed.

amanaplanacanal• 3 years ago

This article is explicitly an op-ed. Not sure what you were expecting here.

MaysonL• 3 years ago

Micromobility EVs may make a much bigger contribution to climate change amelioration.

andrepd3• 3 years ago

Exactly. A 3.5-ton electric SUV is marginally better than a petrol SUV. You what's better than both? An e-bike.

zip12342• 3 years ago

Truly, micromobility like E-bikes are cheap, require much less space, healthier and are more social. Governments do not know how to build for micromobility yet it seems.

Tiktaalik3• 3 years ago

all it would require is building some protected bike lanes (which are very cheap to build), but that would gasp be taking space away from exclusive car use, and so is political anathema to many. This needs to change.

mulcahey• 3 years ago

Perfect is the enemy of good! More at 11

pyrrhotech• 3 years ago

EVs seem to not be a very well thought-out long term solution in general, unless radically different batteries with very high energy density can soon be developed. Earth has 88 million tons of lithium, of which only 1/4 is economically feasible to mine. Each Tesla battery uses about 50 kg of Li, which means only about 18 Tesla batteries can be produced per ton, or about 396 million total Tesla batteries. Current global automobile production is about 80 million per year. If society were to totally switch to EVs, we would run out within a decade or so even assuming most of these cars used far less lithium (and thus had much shorter range, limiting practicality). This back of the napkin analysis also ignores all the other competing uses of Li...

triyambakam• 3 years ago

And the mining itself is very polluting

ravenstine• 3 years ago

Maybe governments are helping to prop up EVs as a means of covertly hoarding lithium. Even if EVs don't work out, having an abundance of lithium could be of tremendous value. /conspiracy

zopa• 3 years ago

This is in a timeline where governments are capable of long-term secret plans that move markets, but haven’t thought of strategic reserves?

jhp1232• 3 years ago

Earth has many trillions of tons of lithium.

mjrpes• 3 years ago

Musk in 2022 said lithium makes up 5kg in a car battery: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4502519-tesla-inc-tsla-ceo-...

ajross3• 3 years ago

Earth has 88 million tons of lithium, of which only 1/4 is economically feasible to mine.

This is outrageously spun. That number is (I assume, you don't cite a source) a count of total known reserves. That's not the way research extraction works; as industries develop (and this one is in its infancy) they discover new sources. This is the logic that led people to warn about "peak oil" in the 90's. They were hilariously wrong (because guess what? we "discovered" fracking as prices rose!).

The "1/4 economically feasible" bit likewise assumes, again, current prices and production method. You don't think it's possible to reach a price equilibrium and technology balance that makes that worthwhile to extract? Why? It's happened for every other resource we use.

And the big mistake here is that you're assuming that we throw the batteries in the trash when a vehicle reaches end of life. In point of fact battery elements are among the most effectively recycled materials in the modern economy. A junk NMC battery is, in essence, a very highly concentrated cobalt/lithium ore just waiting for smelting. We don't "run out" like you posit. At steady state, we need enough to cover growth and loss only.

Basically: you're wrong. There's lots and lots of Li out there long term. In the nearer term, though, yeah: we can't mine remotely enough of the stuff and batteries will remain expensive as the industry grows.

yawaramin3• 3 years ago

as industries develop (and this one is in its infancy) they discover new sources.

And what do you imagine they will do with those new sources? Leave them pristine while they elegantly and cleanly suck out only the required lithium? No, they will destroy those ecologies with massive mining operations which will generate tons of waste, toxic chemicals, and CO2.

In our quest to reduce carbon emissions it seems we are willing to do everything we can to destroy our habitable environment.

jakewins2• 3 years ago

Your number is off by eight orders of magnitude.

Lithium is one of the most common elements on the planet. Earths crust contains ~0.002-0.006% Li by weight, or 1,220,000,000 million tonnes if you use the low estimate.

You seem to have confused the concept of "known reserves" - the 88M number is deposits that we've paid to map out and know exactly where they are.

As current deposits empty out, companies will invest in mapping out others.

diebeforei485• 3 years ago

Each Tesla battery uses about 50 kg of Li

Do you have a source for this figure?

pasttense012• 3 years ago

If lithium gets too expensive you use alternative materials for car batteries. A lot of research is pursuing this.

giardia3• 3 years ago

The Economist wrote a few months back that an EV in Japan actually produces more carbon per mile than an ICE because almost all of their energy comes from coal plants. I'm not sure if America has a radically different coal plant design which produces less carbon somehow, but ~60% of electricity in America comes from coal. [edit: 60% is fossil fuel generated, ~20% is coal]

Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs, and America is not well situated for public transport since we built out instead of up.

I don't want anyone to get the impression that EVs are bad, but people act like they're saving the world by buying a Tesla. It's not that simple. This is a very, very difficult problem and every solution has trade-offs.

ezfe2• 3 years ago

I don't believe that it's true a fully coal powered EV produces more carbon per mile due to how inefficient combustion engines are

giardia3• 3 years ago

I'll be honest, I haven't bothered to double check it, but it may be that coal is just that dirty.

com2kid• 3 years ago

The Economist wrote a few months back that an EV in Japan actually produces more carbon per mile than an ICE because almost all of their energy comes from coal plants. I'm not sure if America has a radically different coal plant design which produces less carbon somehow, but ~60% of electricity in America comes from coal.

It is easier to upgrade a (comparative) small number of power plants than it is to make everyone's ICE engine more efficient.

Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs.

The amount of work needed to upgrade our grid to handle the increased usage of air conditioning due to global warming is greater than the work needed to support EVs.

kiba• 3 years ago

Also, America is not well situated for public transport since we built out instead of up. That's a very difficult issue.

It's currently economically unsustainable. We will need to densify and abandon non-viable area, get rid of minimum parking, and reduce lanes of roads.

zip12342• 3 years ago

Every state/local already continually asks for federal handouts to maintain their overbuilt 8 lane roads. The fact that people still want to add lanes to roads is mind boggling.

philipkglass• 3 years ago

Coal provided 23% of US electricity generation in 2021, 20% in 2022, and is forecast to fall to 19% in 2023. The US now burns less than half of the coal it did in 2007.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184333/coal-energy-consu...

giardia3• 3 years ago

Oops, mixed up coal and total fossil fuel for energy generation which is a big difference.

SigmundA• 3 years ago

Coal is under 20% now in the US and dropping: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896

Even if you still run off coal you are decoupling energy source from the vehicle allowing the vehicle to run off any source that currently makes the most sense. You can't run a gas car off coal but you can run an electric.

Power plants are more efficient than small combustion engines as well as having more sophisticated emission controls with no concerns for weight or size with a full time staff to maintain them.

The grid needs to increase 30% to support all cars, it only took 40 years for it to increase 5X from 1960 to 2000, about 4% per year, so less than 10 years to support all cars, easily doable.

thinkcontext2• 3 years ago

On US average grid EVs get 93mpg equivalent. On the dirtiest (most carbon intense) grid in the US that figure is 42, the cleanest 256. Of course for EVs those numbers will get better each year.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/plug-in-or-gas-up-why...

Zigurd• 3 years ago

The article headline sets up a straw man. EVs do two important things: take a diffuse source of CO2 and other pollutants, and confine the problem to large-scale power plants. They also cut smog in cities where people are most exposed to pollution.

Other commenters here have noted that small EVs like scooters are an important part of electrifying transport. A lot of cities would smell a lot better with electric scooters replacing gas scooters.

sillywalk2• 3 years ago

I feel like I'm missing something fundamental about the whole EV thing.

1. Produce/transport a bunch of electric vehicles, producing massive emissions 2. ??? 3. Somehow billions of tonnes of carbon get removed from the atmosphere

I fail to see how EVs do anything to actually do something about the problem i.e. REMOVE CO2 from the atmosphere.

howtousethetime• 3 years ago

The idea, as I understand it, is that: A. Before the 2038 date the article suggests we must move to EV by, many/most cars will need to be replaced. So, the suggestion isn't necessarily to throw away good cars, as much as to replace them with an EV when they are replaced. B. Currently the electricity used to charge your EV may not be emission free, but someday it might be. Whereas gasoline will never be emission free. And if everyone has EV's already, then the benefit of cleaning the grid becomes greater and easier to justify to a decisionmaker. So while EVs wont solve the problem, it maybe could be said that the problem cannot be solved without first switching to EVs.

kristopolous3• 3 years ago

It's a giant decrease in aggregate emissions.

Some people say we should go all in on mass transit. Alright cool. Suburbia doesn't work then. We're going to have to massively build our way out of this any way you slice it.

EVs are an incremental improvement and that's how all goals are reached.

Some people argue "What if you have a coal plant from the 1830s and that's powering the EV and we compare it with some sleek next gen hybrid" and we're all supposed to pretend that's not just some classic bullshit artist play. The stupidity gives me a headache. Why are we entertaining such transparent lies as if they're being given in good faith?

sillywalk2• 3 years ago

The point I'm trying to make (or get) is that EVs (or solar panels/wind turbines) don't actually do anything to actually fix the root problem - too much CO2 in the atmosphere. All of the emissions required to produce them in fact make the problem worse.

Even if the world ICE vehicle fleet was magically converted to EVs powered by carbon-free fusion power tomorrow, I fail to see how this will actually lower the CO2 from 414ppm.

gulikoza• 3 years ago

They don't.

What they do is centralize CO2 production which can be then mitigated on a larger scale (switching power production to nuclear/solar/wind, CO2 capture from industrial processes...).

They also clean-up living spaces and allow pollution (that which is necessary) to be outside of the cities. This alone would probably save millions of lives...

SECProto2• 3 years ago

1. Produce/transport a bunch of electric vehicles, producing massive emissions 2. ??? 3. Somehow billions of tonnes of carbon get removed from the atmosphere

I'll revise that to be more accurate:

1. Produce/transport a bunch of electric vehicles, producing moderately more emissions than the production of equivalent gasoline vehicles would have

2. These electric vehicles release dramatically less carbon emissions per kilometer, even if the power source is itself fossil fueled

3. Billions of tonnes of carbon that would have been emitted with the status quo are not.

I fail to see how EVs do anything to actually do something about the problem i.e. REMOVE CO2 from the atmosphere.

EVs aren't going to remove carbon from the atmosphere (and I've never heard anyone say that they will?). They simply reduce the ongoing increase of emissions from the transportation sector. They are one small piece of the climate change puzzle.

The carbon in the atmosphere can't even begin to decrease if we are continually increasing the amount we add to it.

imtringued4• 3 years ago

They are more energy efficient than ICE cars. An ICE car produces a lot of waste heat in the process of trying to move its wheels. That heat serves no purpose other than warming the cab. This reduces CO2 emissions. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere isn't cost effective without heavy government subsidies. You need somewhere between 300€ to 600€ per ton to capture CO2 with mature tech and 100€ per ton assuming some sort of breakthrough. How are you going to pay for this? Are you going to introduce 300€ CO2 taxes?

That would kill many industries and they would move abroad so the first thing that needs to be done is to reduce emissions because that costs less than 300€ per ton.

A VW golf driven for 150k km produces 30 tons of CO2 which would cost 9000€ to capture just to break even. If you want to get rid of 3 tons of CO2 for every car then let's round it up to 10k€.

There are plenty of EVs in the 30k€ price range that you can buy today and there are other benefits that make EVs appealing like lower energy costs, less maintenance and so on. So you have this product on the market that doesn't need much government support anymore and is well accepted in the market and then you got this mega project that can only be started by the government with massive taxation that makes everything more expensive.

jakewins2• 3 years ago

The head of IEA they are referring to, Birol, wrote an op-ed on why the explosion of EVs is fundamental for the climate transition just a few months ago: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/23/perspectives/iea-electric...

Why would IEEE use a quote from 2017 from some Norwegian blog to make it seem IEAs position is the opposite of what it actually is?

cat_plus_plus• 3 years ago

We are talking 2050 right? Why would most people keep a separate self-driving EV in the garage? Just hail one through an app and it will drive you on your trip, 1 mile or 500 miles. Some people just enjoy shaming others for living pleasant lives when technology is already available to preserve each activity while keeping carbon emissions down and is not standing still - in fact the rate of technological advancement of humanity is accelerating over time. Lab grown meat can be cheaper, tastier and healthier than one from a whole animal. See your less important travel destinations in high quality VR. Or if you still want organic meat or a non-VRable beach vacation, enjoy, we have carbon capture and biofuel tech to get you covered. Progress is about giving choices, not taking away choices.

mrshadowgoose• 3 years ago

Some people just enjoy shaming others for living pleasant lives

I've observed that most people have some instinctual need to hate on some other sub-group of society, and blame them for the world's problems. For a lot of people that subgroup seems to be "car users".

We could collectively be focusing on decarbonizing all energy production, and building excess energy production capacity to offset any remaining carbon production, and even start winding back the damage we've done so far. And then it wouldn't matter one bit what mode of transportation you used, or what you used energy towards.

But it's easier to divide ourselves and hate on each other.

KennyBlanken2• 3 years ago

EVs absolutely help, but they don't address any of the myriad of problems inherent in low occupancy vehicle transportation. One person in a car requires more resources (energy, parking space, space on the road while in use, the cost of the vehicle and its maintenance, damage to roads, injuries/deaths from crashes, etc)

If we spent even some money spent on self-driving vehicles on public transit infrastructure, we'd get immediate gains and it would in particular help those who are on the bottom rungs of the ladder economically - making it easier for them to contribute toward society, and causing fewer problems to boot (such as the enormous costs of trying to maintain a cheaper/older car, causing a crash because their vehicle is poorly maintained, or they fell asleep while driving from working 2-3 jobs, etc.)

andrepd3• 3 years ago

Absolutely nailed. EVs solve one problem about ICE cars. Not the other 99.

imtringued4• 3 years ago

Governments don't tax land so they have no incentive to invest in good public transport. Most transportation projects massively increase property values which is then captured by landlords instead of governments and then everyone complains that public transport doesn't work and can't fund itself and people wonder why politicians invest in boondoggles to immortalise themselves instead of acting more like a business that prioritizes useful investments because it increases future tax revenue.

Land value taxes make way more sense than income taxes because they are location based. If a politician makes a mistake and you move away they will get your income tax regardless. So they have no reason to invest in any given location.

dragonwriter2• 3 years ago

Governments don’t tax land

They…actually do.

lnsru• 3 years ago

I see on some days, that electricity generation in Germany is 45% coal and 20% gas. With all transmission and storage losses the EVs are almost coal powered then. I know, it’s very rough estimation. But with coal powered cars not much positive can be done against climate change.

timbit422• 3 years ago

An EV running on coal-generated electricity is still cleaner than an ICEV.

AstixAndBelix• 3 years ago

Decrease need for private transportation.

Heavily push for EVs.

Allow combustion engines when actually necessary instead of banning everything like a bunch of blind ideologues.

Clean up the air from carbon to compensate.

api• 3 years ago

Nothing is a “panacea.”

osigurdson2• 3 years ago

I think any solution that involves things getting worse for people is a non-starter. EVs will soon reach the point where it makes no sense to purchase an ICE vehicle. That is the model to shoot for - make the bad stuff obsolete. When the bad stuff is obsolete already (WFO is a good example), lets do our best to take advantage of it.

college_physics• 3 years ago

People are hoping for a quick sustainability fix but that is not on offer. Our current footprint on the global environment took at least a century of population growth and technological expansion to manifest. Car based cities are just one of the designs we are stuck with.

EV's will play some role to keep that pattern workable, but it may well be that other ways of organising life and the economy will prove better adapted and more efficient in the midterm (~20 yrs)

Keep in mind that co2 is just one of the many constraints we are increasingly bumping against. The age of innocence is gone. On the other hand there is nothing sacred about how we organized things since 1900 or so...

nkingsy• 3 years ago

Don’t know where to put this, but utility rates in northern California have gotten to the point where it’s cheaper to drive my prius than my EV from a fuel standpoint, and that’s using the special off peak EV rate.

If you have net metering and solar, great, but at this point if you’re not a homeowner with grandfathered nem 2.0, Evs make no sense in northern ca.

agilob• 3 years ago

Pretty much the same in most of Europe. Electric trams are stopped where I lived, council resigned from buying electric buses, some nearby cities even turn on only one side of street lights, charging EV is more expensive than diesel for the same range.

jeffrogers• 3 years ago

Even factoring in probable range increases and advances in charging tech, it will still be necessary to incrementally, if not fully, charge EVs in public. One thing that doesn’t seem to occur to our elected officials… there is nowhere near enough real estate to charge that many vehicles around town.

timbit422• 3 years ago

Use existing parking spaces.

acdha11• 3 years ago

How hard would it be to put plugs onto street lights? Most cities have wiring and the switch to LED bulbs means those circuits have a lot more spare capacity than they used to.

longitudinal932• 3 years ago

New Westminster ( part of metro Vancouver) has been doing exactly that:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KaBLOGakGfg

tzs• 3 years ago

The average amount driven per day by Americans is 39 miles, meaning that a heck of a lot of people will be able to do just fine with only charging at home.

fwungy5• 3 years ago

1) Climate modeling is hard. There have been substantial shifts in the climate over time, including five ice ages.

2) Climate change predictions have been repeatedly wrong. In the 80's they said the Maldives would be submerged by 2000, for example. Maldives are still there.

3) if the models are good then things like the costs of coastal real estate should show it. Coastal real estate is still premium so either the models are wrong or the banks are ignoring the models and lend huge amounts on property thar will soon be reclaimed by the sea.

4) There are people and countries with trillions on pil reserve wealth who will be reduced to poverty in a fossil free world. Are they going to cooperate with their own impoverishment based on weak, poorly performing climate models produced by antagonistic western states?

5) There is a huge installed base of fossil fuels in the developing world. The energy density and portability of fossils is great for places with limited infrastructure. How do you convert them?

6) Nuclear is the only realistic approach to mass scale decarbonization. Why is this ignored. If you believe the climate models then we should accept the stochastic risks of nuclear over the absolute risk of climate in the near future. Is not the risk of an occasional Chernobyl better than planet wide destruction and degradation.

7) The past few years have demonstrated the danger of alarmists reacting to scary looking model data that they don't fully understand.

8) Addressing climate change directly at the source is intractable for the reasons I've listed. Mitigation approaches are going to pay much better dividends than multi moon shot green technology agendas.

CJefferson• 3 years ago

2) By "they said the Maldives would be submerged by 2000", this seems to be one report which was the basis for for a full study of the problem by the UN. Do you agree there have been notable, significant, temperature rises over the last 100 years, which appear to be a significantly faster change than in previous ice ages?

fwungy5• 3 years ago

Show me the detailed climate data for the past 20 million years.

Oh, you can't. Why? Because there is no data. It's all modeled.

To be clear I'm not denying anthropogenic climate change, I'm questioning the strategies employed .

A hundred years of data amongst millions is insignificant. We don't know what proportion is anthropogenic and which is the larger climate trend that is beyond our control. Regardless, the logical optimization is nuclear and mitigation, not a suicidal unilateral rush into zero GHG. Under that approach if the multiple technogical breakthroughs never come we are in worse shape than if we had not done anything.

acdha11• 3 years ago

Climate change predictions have been repeatedly wrong

This is fossil fuel industry propaganda - whoever told you this is untrustworthy and literally banking on you not fact-checking their claims. The consensus predictions since the late 1970s have been increasingly accurate, especially since the 1980s.

For example, the first IPCC report from 1990 had estimates which we now have data to judge them against:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...

Similarly, Dr. James Hansen (director of NASA's Goddard Institute) testified before Congress based on his 1988 study predicting global warming and his numbers were very close to what we saw over the subsequent 3 decades:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... If you believe that “ice age” talk was real, remember that the source of that was a couple of speculative papers which were never widely accepted and were refuted by the late 1970s.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...

Tiktaalik3• 3 years ago

International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) argues that EVs are the quickest means to decarbonize motorized transport. However, EVs are not by themselves in any way going to achieve the goal of net zero by 2050.

Yep. Technically correct, but an example of shooting for the wrong goal, and failing entirely.

The goal is not making our motorized transport system low carbon. The goal is limiting the damage of climate change and keeping a lid on temperature rises. If we constrain our solution set to maintaining the same sort of motorized transport system we will fail.

I would like to hope that software engineers on this site reading this would recognize such a problem.

It is like when, fundamentally, the design of a program from the get go was wrong from the first foot forward and as a result it's simply too slow. No amount of fiddling around the edges, hacks and minor fixes will result in an adequate improvement. Only a new design is a real fix.

Thankfully in many ways it's actually easier to fix cities than to fix a major software project. For one thing we at least know the solutions, and they're easily achievable given political will and with not a great deal of money. (not easily around on a software project!)

Most of the issues come more from political restriction than anything else, and so much can be done by simply letting people do things that they're currently banned from doing (ie. let people build more housing). Couple that with some relatively affordable bike lanes and rapid bus lanes, and one can achieve remarkable improvements with relatively little capital expenditure and effort.

Even a few US cities it might be livable without a car.

Musing that better things are maybe possible in "a few" US cities is dramatically low ambition and out of touch.

Consider that 45% of Vancouver's West End commutes to work by walking. That's a neighbourhood of 45,000 in a major NA city. There's absolutely nothing going on remarkably here that accounts for this excepting the simple fact that it's a bunch of 1960s era residential apartments in a pleasant tree lined area within a 20 minute walking distance of Vancouver's Downtown. That's it. I'm pretty sure this concept is quite replicable in cities across America.

longitudinal932• 3 years ago

They've also made it very unpleasant to own a car in the West End - parking is extremely limited or requires a special pass. There are very few thru- streets so all car journeys are convoluted, etc.

And support for alternatives is plentiful - bus service is excellent, bike lanes and routes are abundant, there are numerous and frequent bike share stations, etc.

It's definitely a great place to live.

xnx• 3 years ago

EVs have the most effect on atmospheric carbon when they are saving money over an ICE vehicle. If the all-in cost (vehicle, fuel, parts, repair, etc.) per mile traveled isn't less, it's very unlikely there is lower carbon emitted.

Why EVs Aren't a Climate Change Panacea

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