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Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

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Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#101

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

jimmywanger wrote: post #80
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China switched to a remarkably different writing system. The simplified characters are not actually "remarkably different". In many cases, simplification just codified a large number of short forms of the traditional characters that were already being used by the people. Have you ever seen how Chinese actually write many common characters with a paper and pen? > For instance, China's government simply mandated that…

> The simplified characters are not actually "remarkably different". You're incorrect. As a simple example look at the difference in the character horse between the two character systems. You might be able to sort of figure it out if you knew ahead of time what it meant. Just plopping a whole pile of text in front of you with no translation in the language you're familiar with is fairly incomprehensible. >Have you ev…

> As a simple example look at the difference in the character horse between the two character systems.

If you are a foreign learner just looking at typeset ways of representing this character, then the difference may seem great between traditional and simplified. But in fact, the rapid way of writing 'horse' before the script reform, is where the simplified form was eventually taken from.

> The strokes are still suggested if not perfectly expressed.

No, rapid writing often drastically limits the number of strokes. I’m sorry, but I must question your experience with Chinese, because all this is covered in any reasonable introduction to the script reform.

Even Wikipedia's article [1] is pretty clear on this: "Character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, more complicated forms ... Some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms."

This is why Taiwanese and Hong Kong readers, though they may find mainland China’s system culturally alien, do not generally consider it a barrier to understanding.

> Although there since it's not enforced, you end up with a plurality of languages, like India.

You are very mixed up here. One moment you are talking about orthography, the next about multilingualism. They are distinct things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#102

Post by fulafel »

abakker wrote: post #67
danans wrote: post #21

It's a strange shift in affairs that China appears to have the greatest incentives (urban pollution, petroleum imports) today to advance clean transportation and energy while the US has stalled or moved backward, at least the Federal level. Western European countries, for whom fossil fuels don't seem to be an identity politics issue like in the US, are also making more progress in electrifying their transportation an…

I don't know if it really proves anything and it might be OT from your point, but, the confounding variable is that in the US - especially outside of the major urban areas - everything is just very far away in terms of miles. Lacking a car, you can expect life to be very difficult. there are still plenty of places in the US where the range of a tesla might be a borderline problem week-to-week. (though probably not as…

The nordics have canada level pop density and are still doing better.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#103

Post by hartator »

danans wrote: post #21

It's a strange shift in affairs that China appears to have the greatest incentives (urban pollution, petroleum imports) today to advance clean transportation and energy while the US has stalled or moved backward, at least the Federal level. Western European countries, for whom fossil fuels don't seem to be an identity politics issue like in the US, are also making more progress in electrifying their transportation an…

And, still, bigger part of GDP in Europe and China is about burning oil.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#104

Post by seanmcdirmid »

greglindahl wrote: post #88
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the norm? I guess the floor could be raised with a higher roof to compensate. I’ve noticed that new energy buses are taller (NG and electric) to make room for fuel/battery, but I’m not exactly sure where that is going.

Car batteries in the floors of cars don't seem to have made them any taller.

Buses have different constraints, so I'm assuming they have more battery for more range between recharges.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#105

Post by fsloth »

abakker wrote: post #67
danans wrote: post #21

It's a strange shift in affairs that China appears to have the greatest incentives (urban pollution, petroleum imports) today to advance clean transportation and energy while the US has stalled or moved backward, at least the Federal level. Western European countries, for whom fossil fuels don't seem to be an identity politics issue like in the US, are also making more progress in electrifying their transportation an…

I don't know if it really proves anything and it might be OT from your point, but, the confounding variable is that in the US - especially outside of the major urban areas - everything is just very far away in terms of miles. Lacking a car, you can expect life to be very difficult. there are still plenty of places in the US where the range of a tesla might be a borderline problem week-to-week. (though probably not as…

I think it is well known the car and petrol companies were heavy lobbyists in developing the transit architecture in the US (including zoning and so on) after the second world war. To exaggerate a bit, the entire country was designed to facilitate automobile sales.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_car_on_societ...

In the continental europe most of the urban centers predate the automobile hundreds if not thousands of years, thus the existing infrastructure does not use the private automobile as one of the key design constraints.

Not so in the US, where huge areas were populated and zoned specifically with the support of the automobile as one of the key constraints.

Once the infrastructure has been built using one design constraint, it's really expensive and difficult to unravel it.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#106

Post by specialist »

rdtsc wrote: post #90
quadrangle wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about real rural areas, it's sprawl largely. It's been the dominant and TOP-DOWN planned development pattern for a whole generation, and it's totally tragic. Not only from energy perspective but nearly all other variables. There's almost nothing arguably redeemable about sprawl. https://www.strongtowns.org/ is about the best org discussing these issues and isn't coming from a left- or right-wing perspective…

> and TOP-DOWN planned development pattern for a whole generation, I'd almost think it is bottom-up not top-down. Top down would imply some central planning, allowance for more space, livable communities, more trees, more parks and trails, mixed zoning etc. I grew up in a Soviet Union and towns and cities were designed top-down. Nice wide streets, electric trolley buses in the city that ran regularly. For all the ill…

Post WWII, our (USA) policy has been to loot urban areas to subsidize sprawl.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#107

Post by rdtsc »

mantas wrote: post #98
rdtsc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and TOP-DOWN planned development pattern for a whole generation, I'd almost think it is bottom-up not top-down. Top down would imply some central planning, allowance for more space, livable communities, more trees, more parks and trails, mixed zoning etc. I grew up in a Soviet Union and towns and cities were designed top-down. Nice wide streets, electric trolley buses in the city that ran regularly. For all the ill…

Not all central planning mean same end result. US gov did embrace suburban sprawl. Bottom-up planning example would be post-USSR where people converted community gardens into suburbs on their own. Without any central planning or viable infrastructure.

> US gov did embrace suburban sprawl.

Yeah but they didn't directly design cities the way a top-down developer would do. They are some planned communities in US. I live next to one, and it is a different feel to it definitely. But it is not a common thing at all.

At the federal level there are tax incentives and credits and subsidies and those affect everything but it is still very much a local "maximize my profit" kind of deal. Uncle Sam doesn't care if there are enough play grounds or parks for given area and population density.

I think that you are trying to say that the incentives (say cheap mortgages) and subsidies for oil and car manufacturers resulted in suburban sprawl? But that's more of a nasty side-effect than a direct policy or law. In other words we got the bad part of top-down influence without the good part of it.

> Bottom-up planning example would be post-USSR where people converted community gardens into suburbs on their own.

I jokingly say that overnight they become more capitalist and laissez faire than most countries in the West.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#108

Post by pnathan »

It is clear that China, in particular, has embraced a future-oriented way of thinking in managing its society. While I quite fundamentally disagree with some of what the leadership does in terms of human rights & democracy, it is certain that they are taking bold and progressive steps in technological areas.

I should learn Chinese - I expect it to be the key language in 30 years.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#109

Post by make3 »

pnathan wrote: post #108

It is clear that China, in particular, has embraced a future-oriented way of thinking in managing its society. While I quite fundamentally disagree with some of what the leadership does in terms of human rights & democracy, it is certain that they are taking bold and progressive steps in technological areas. I should learn Chinese - I expect it to be the key language in 30 years.

as machine translation is a field of machine learning research with the largest budgets and even though it's not perfect it's already pretty good, in 30 years it will likely be solved and it may not really matter which language you know

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#110

Post by icc97 »

ams6110 wrote: post #18
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #14

The scale of this is astounding and wonderful: "China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country’s entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters—the equivalent of London’s entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance."

While electric buses are almost certainly an emissions win compared to the no doubt primitive and dirty Chinese diesel buses, I doubt it is it fair to call them zero-emission? China burns a lot of coal for electrical power.

Every time we talk about EVs someone tries to make this point.

Yes you can call them zero emission because they themselves produce zero emissions. This means in the city which is where the most people and the biggest problem with smog is, there are zero emissions.

One further reason that the HN crowd should understand is that it decouples energy generation from it's usage. So once you have clean energy generation you can turn off the coal and no one driving EVs will notice.

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