Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry • Hacker News Board

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#111

Post by profalseidol » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 5:52 AM UTC

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…

Perhaps the Oil companies control the US gov't. Or perhaps they're actually the same.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#112

Post by hohenheim » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 5:59 AM UTC

garadox wrote: post #30

Isn't that the point? What a strange title for an article.

I thought the same. The title portraits the change as a negative thing and in the text there is no mention of the benefits that this brings :/

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#113

Post by Taniwha » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 6:03 AM UTC

craftyguy wrote: post #72

ChuckMcM wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is picking nits :-) Not only is China rapidly building nuclear power plants, containing the emissions of one plant burning coal is easier than containing the emissions of the 10,000 buses that plant provides power to operate. There is also a benefit to China converting from oil (something imported[1]) to coal (something available locally[2]). [1] https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Chinas-Becomes-Worlds-... [2…

> That is picking nits No, actually it's not. The source of electricity matters, and just because something doesn't directly emit pollutants does not mean its power is derived without emitting pollutants.

I flew across China last month ... Lots of open cast coal mines, each with a power station next to it .... But they're planning ahead, those power stations are surrounded by thousands of windmills, more than I could count leveraging the power distribution network

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#114

Post by davedx » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 6:06 AM UTC

lenepp wrote: post #62

One interesting feature of articles like this that I don't really get is that they often leave out a huge huge quality of life benefit that electric vehicles bring: reduced urban machine noise.

Yep! I’m sitting on one of the new electric buses at Schiphol Airport right now. They are so quiet and smooth.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#115

Post by jchanimal » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 6:10 AM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #96

seandoe wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think abakker's point is that the US is much less densely populated compared to China and the EU. The US has much of its population distributed far distances from urban areas, which makes electric vehicles a less desirable option.

Sweden's population density is less than the US but they have better transit. The US's urbanization rate is 82% which is higher than Canada, Norway, Spain, France, Greece, Taiwan, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Ireland, and 150 other countries. The US doesn't have much of its population distributed outside of urban areas compared to most countries. The US actually has few people outside of urban area…

Except that rural votes are magnified by the Senate distortion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... is one step towards sanity.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#116

Post by dagss » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 6:22 AM UTC

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.

Not zero but... consider that just the oil refinery alone uses about the same energy to make gasoline to drive one mile, as an EV uses directly to drive one mile.

EVs are hugely more energy efficient overall, which helps even if what energy requirement is left comes from burning coal.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#117

Post by arrrg » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 6:24 AM UTC

craftyguy wrote: post #72

ChuckMcM wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is picking nits :-) Not only is China rapidly building nuclear power plants, containing the emissions of one plant burning coal is easier than containing the emissions of the 10,000 buses that plant provides power to operate. There is also a benefit to China converting from oil (something imported[1]) to coal (something available locally[2]). [1] https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Chinas-Becomes-Worlds-... [2…

> That is picking nits No, actually it's not. The source of electricity matters, and just because something doesn't directly emit pollutants does not mean its power is derived without emitting pollutants.

It’s a toxic argument, because in practice it’s used to absolve diesel or gas cars entirely. It‘s also a way of missing the forest for the trees. Gas cars can never be clean, electric cars are in fact cleaner from the get go and have the potential to be (nearly) entirely clean. Building a world where that is possible requires a large investment in infrastructure and that will only happen if there is a large scale switchover to electric cars.

You are certainly not wrong when you say that also electric cars pollute, but you should be aware of how and when and why this kind of argument is usually deployed.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#118

Post by chaoky » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 6:28 AM UTC

make3 wrote: post #109

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

Machine translation is AI-hard. If this happens in 30 years we might as well have reached the singularity as computers will understand natural language and all of its meaning completely.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#119

Post by ItsMe000001 » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 6:28 AM UTC

reissbaker wrote: post #85

freddie_mercury wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP was talking about China. China is bigger than the continental US. I think the persistent myth about the US's size being some unique problem doesn't explain much. What's more, if you think of the EU as a comparison for the US, with the individual counties as analogues for US states, it seems to explain even less. Belgium and Massachusetts are the same size but over has much better transit options than the other…

Sheer landmass is less critical for transit than population density. The US has a population density of 33 people per square kilometer; China is nearly five times more dense at 144 people per square kilometer. [1] This sparse population distribution is one of the causes of many of the difficult-to-solve infrastructure problems in the US, such as poor broadband rollout, poor transit, etc. For what it's worth the Unite…

> The US has a population density of 33 people per square kilometer;

Yes, and they are evenly spread out across the country, right?

What you conveniently leave out, and which turns all these kinds of arguments based on a "total area / total population" numbers into absurd exercises in futility in showing anything useful, is that you have some few mega regions:

http://osnetdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/2050_Map_Me...

Even a country like Germany has extremely uneven population, never mind countries like China or Russia. There is nothing special in the situation the US finds itself in at all - especially not since the enormous population shifts of the 20th century from rural areas to cities.

When I lived in the US (for a decade), the area I lived in was the SF Bay Area, several places. This is far more densely populated than area in Germany where I grew up (former East Germany). And yet, I could not do anything or get anywhere without a car. It has next to nothing to do with population density - in the US you are forced to drive for distances where you would walk, use a bike or public transit in areas with less pop. density in other countries.

Even during my brief first visit to the US end of the last millennium, which was a three month tour of the continental US (NY to Alaska, to Arizona, CA to FL) the "must... use... car!!!" bug got to me too. Towards the end I caught myself getting into the car and driving <200 feet to drop some waste into a wastebasket (from the car window of course) on a shopping mall parking lot... it seemed the natural thing to do, I had to deliberately catch myself and consciously think about what the hell I was doing to recognize the absurdity. After only two months in the country.

Re: Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

#120

Post by jimmywanger » Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 6:29 AM UTC

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #101

jimmywanger wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sugg…

> 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.

No, it's not the same. When you make the abbreviated strokes you try to simulate things. It's not turning four apostrophes into a straight line. I also like the little dig about my knowledge about Chinese writing.

> 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.

It is in terms of familiarity. Just like reading Shakespeare. Or the KJV if you're used to reading modern English. Try filling out a DMV form written in Chaucerian English.

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

No, not at all. Maybe I should explain myself more. Orthography if rigorously enforced by ALL parties leads to acceptance. If you start accepting old scripts and language, you start causing multilingualism.