161–170 of 171 posts
This goes completely against another recent report that said even electric cars running on coal would still reduce CO2 emissions after about 3.5 years of average use, simply because the internal combustion engine is so woefully inefficient. (With green energy it was 2.5 years.) I'm afraid I can't find a link to that article right now.
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Without commenting on the figures of this article, generally EV CO2e footprint is manufacturing-heavy -> total lifecycle per-km footprint is still substantial without any emissions from charging energy.
> total lifecycle per-km footprint is still substantial without any emissions from charging energy. The "total lifecycle CO₂-per-Km footprint" is a pointless and deliberately misleading figure when its basis of calculation is (almost completely) independent of the distance driven, but it suggests that driving the vehicle is subject to a high amount of emissions per Km. The opposite is true: EV lifecycle CO₂/Km become…
I'd say a better title for this article/graph would be "How would electric cars affect CO2 output in European countries?" or something along that line. There's far more to a specific car being a good idea considering the differences between EVs and ICEVs (but of course the needs vary inside countries as well). However, an electric car is much less attractive in a land of long distances where you often need to keep th…
E.g. Norway, the country where EVs are the most popular in the world?
(And why is Norway so rich to begin with, you don't need to wonder.)
It's all in the subsidies.
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I have very hard time believing anything harmful can get from Chernobyl to Bavaria and still be dangerous by now. I think it's just overreacting. There are millions of people living between Chernobyl and Bavaria, including cities such as Kyiv (3 mln people, less than 100km from Chernobyl), and there seems to be no sign of mass morbidity and mortality from any of radiation related causes. Makes it kinda hard to believ…
No believing involved, this is just science and using geiger counters. Here is the relevant link: https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-w... The thing is that there are long living isotopes in the upper soil of the forests. As they are long living, they have not decayed yet enough and are not going to in the next decades. Something does not need to kill 80% of the population to be a significant h…
200 grams of mushrooms with 3,000 becquerel cesium-137 per kilogram corresponds to a load of 0.008 millisievert . This corresponds to the radiation load on a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria.
And:
If wild game or wild growing fungi are consumed in conventional quantities, the additional radiation load is comparatively low, but it is avoidable.
In other words, there is no danger to one's health - no more that one is exposed to by living regular life and being subject to various low-level radiation sources present in the environment. The regulations have very low acceptable level, just to be safe, but there is very little actual danger from the levels present right now.
From Wikipedia[1]:
For comparison, natural radiation levels inside the US capitol building are such that a human body would receive an additional dose rate of 0.85 mSv/a.
So, working in a granite building for about 4 days is as dangerous as eating a meal of "contaminated" mushrooms. Thousand of people do the former every day. Or about the same as one dental xray. I think my conclusion that it is done out of overabundance of caution still seems to be correct.
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No believing involved, this is just science and using geiger counters. Here is the relevant link: https://www.bfs.de/DE/themen/ion/umwelt/lebensmittel/pilze-w... The thing is that there are long living isotopes in the upper soil of the forests. As they are long living, they have not decayed yet enough and are not going to in the next decades. Something does not need to kill 80% of the population to be a significant h…
The article says: 200 grams of mushrooms with 3,000 becquerel cesium-137 per kilogram corresponds to a load of 0.008 millisievert . This corresponds to the radiation load on a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. And: If wild game or wild growing fungi are consumed in conventional quantities, the additional radiation load is comparatively low, but it is avoidable. In other words, there is no danger to one's health…
Anyway, I have not claimed, that occasional eating of mushrooms is going to kill you. Still, the doses are high enough to warrant an official warning not too often to eat these mushrooms (you have a dental X-ray not every day either), and enough animals are contaminated high enough to be destroyed.
Overall, the life in Bavaria is not impacted by the radiation. But I find it startling, that over a thousand kilometers away from Chernobyl, the Bavarian landscape is contaminated and will be for decades. It shows me, that we do not want to risk a reoccurrence of such events.
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it requires two meters Why?! Two-rate meters have been around for decades, long before they went digital.
Ok, it may require changing to a two rate meter then :) Never actually used an economy 7 tariff myself so I don't know the details but the point is most houses in the UK aren't equipped to have one. However a home-owner choosing to install a charging point for an electric vehicle will probably switch to a suitable metering setup for economy 7 whilst they're at it.
All homes in Britain will have smart meters installed by 2020:
https://www.smartenergygb.org/en/smart-future/about-the-roll...
These support Economy 7, as well as whatever other variable tariffs that energy companies dream up in the future.
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NOx isn't the only pollutant involved in localized deaths from pollution, so it's very misleading to claim a car "pollutes 4x as much as a truck" based on NOx alone. Also, what does this have to do with the VW scandal? Your own article explains why the cars generate more NOx per mile. They are held to lower standards than the trucks and busses after those were "reigned in" in 2011. It's not some kind of defeat device…
> Also, what does this have to do with the VW scandal? The entire point of the VW scandal is that their cars pollute way more than they tested. Their diesels especially - the same diesels that have been popular in Europe for decades are the ones polluting the most. And their apparent low emissions was a passive way of fighting electric cars.
And this is still all NOx emissions, not total emissions.
And this whole tangent really has nothing to do with the original point. If anything is emphasizes the benefits of moving pollution generation for cars to centralized points out of the hands of the manufacturers
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In Amsterdam, the city creates an electric car parking spot (with charger) near your house if you get an electric car. This is effectively a private parking spot if you're the only electric car owner in the street, and that's incredibly valuable in a city where parking spots are hard to find.
This will not scale as more and more people make use of this though. I agree it's a very strong incentive though.
And by then there will be a market for commercial charging stations, if they are necessary.