Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jeff Bezos climate change plan unveiled – buy 100k electric vans.

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 97 posts

Re: Jeff Bezos climate change plan unveiled – buy 100k electric vans.

#81

Post by Kye »

codingdave wrote: post #36

While I applaud any move towards decreasing negative impacts our our environment, I also encourage people to take advantage of Amazon's option to pick a delivery day and get all your stuff at once. Even without that option, Amazon has some work to do on their route planning - I should never need 3 different deliveries from 3 different drivers on the same day, and that has occurred at my house.

Those three trucks would be inefficient if they only delivered to you, but they could have saved trips by arranging it that way.

I forget where I read it, but there was an explainer that showed how all those deliveries with one huge box for one tiny item saved gas and packaging on the scale of the entire delivery network.

Logistics is weird.

Re: Jeff Bezos climate change plan unveiled – buy 100k electric vans.

#82

Post by mumblemumble »

noonespecial wrote: post #31
mumblemumble wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unstated major premise: Buying electric vans is a step in the right direction in the first place. I'm thinking here of the lessons we've been learning recently about recycling: It would appear that we now need to come to terms with the possibility that recycling has done far more harm than good, by making it easier to justify excessive packaging waste while at the same time mostly only giving consumers the impression…

It's possible. But even if that part is true, the large investment might spur faster growth in electrification which might then be good enough to outweigh that initial downside. Unintended consequences are hard. I'm just getting a little fatigued with the fearful "don't do anything, it might make it worse" coupled with the "stop all the everything" approach to environmentalism that seems to becoming ever more dominan…

I wasn't really going for "don't do anything, it might make it worse" so much as calling attention to what I suspect is an act of greenwashing.

As far as convincing people to do without goes, IMO the root cause of the problem is consumerism, and anything that fails to contend directly with that is bikeshedding.

Re: Jeff Bezos climate change plan unveiled – buy 100k electric vans.

#83

Post by martythemaniak »

Jill_the_Pill wrote: post #41
martythemaniak wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change is not about consuming less. It is about not taking carbon from the ground and putting it in the atmosphere.

Large quantities of carbon are taken from the ground and added to the atmosphere in the manufacture, transportation, sale, use, and disposal of consumer products.

Hence, climate change is about doing these things without carbon (or only with carbon that's already in the atmosphere), rather than not doing those things at all.

Re: Jeff Bezos climate change plan unveiled – buy 100k electric vans.

#84

Post by thinkcontext »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #71
m0zg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a typical strawman. An average US consumer could easily forego half of what they buy (aside from groceries) and they'd still be fine. One would argue that this needs to happen for us to really make progress on reducing emissions. People blame "corporations" and "the rich", but it's like blaming a Mexican cartel for making drugs. They wouldn't make them if there weren't any buyers, and unlike with drugs, pointing…

I'm not talking about any kind of "victim shaming" here. Just pointing out the fundamental fact that thoroughly breaking economy is game over. Think for a moment why we want to fight climate change? It's not because of some deep love to the pile of space rock we happen to inhabit. I was addressing the problem with ideas that people should "just stop doing things", or that we should be drastically reducing consumption…

I think you are overlooking that the US has optimized policy for this excess consumption in areas like capital formation, agriculture, labor, healthcare, etc. If there was different policy the economy would reallocate capital to other purposes.

Re: Jeff Bezos climate change plan unveiled – buy 100k electric vans.

#85

Post by baumy »

mumblemumble wrote: post #79
derekp7 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would increasing the delivery time reduce the amount of gas it takes to get an item to my doorstep? Considering that the items ship from a warehouse about 15 miles from my house. I suppose that if an occasional item ships from across the country, then it would be less impactful to go by truck for 5 days, so if that is the case then any item that falls under that category could have a selection item on the checkou…

You're picking a rather particular example. Most people don't live within 15 miles of an Amazon distribution center. To pick my particular example for contrast, I'm also relatively close to an Amazon facility, but it's still over an hour away by car. And I imagine that, for most people who drive to get around, the nearest big box store is close to their route home from work. There's also an unstated major premise tha…

> Most people don't live within 15 miles of an Amazon distribution center

May not have a huge impact on your overall point, but bump that number up to maybe 20 miles and I actually would bet that the majority of Americans at least do live that close to an Amazon distribution center

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_locations#Fulfi...

Re: Jeff Bezos climate change plan unveiled – buy 100k electric vans.

#86

Post by WhompingWindows »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #50
giacaglia wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon clearly wants Rivian to succeed: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/15/rivian-announces-700-million... :-)

And that is fine, in my opinion. I don't think it's self dealing. If you think climate change is an urgent issue, you fund solutions. When you fund solutions, you choose the best option. When you're ready to act on it, you choose the best option.

Well, it's not as if there are 100k electric vans ready for purchase, Rivian needs their investment and their orders to scale up to 100k. Amazon's creating its own demand and supply here.

Re: Jeff Bezos climate change plan unveiled – buy 100k electric vans.

#87

Post by throwaway5752 »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #86
throwaway5752 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is fine, in my opinion. I don't think it's self dealing. If you think climate change is an urgent issue, you fund solutions. When you fund solutions, you choose the best option. When you're ready to act on it, you choose the best option.

Well, it's not as if there are 100k electric vans ready for purchase, Rivian needs their investment and their orders to scale up to 100k. Amazon's creating its own demand and supply here.

Yup. Just comes with the territory of the scale they are operating at. Looking at Renault Kangaroo ZE and Nissan e NV200 sales its possible 100k electrics vans is more than have ever been produced, cumulatively, period.

Re: Jeff Bezos climate change plan unveiled – buy 100k electric vans.

#88

Post by lph »

Arubis wrote: post #6

I'm glad to see that there's deliberate movement in this direction. However, it's a little dismaying that the headline is implying that we can address climate change by Consuming More Stuff; that's how we got into this mess in the first place.

It's unfortunate that this post links a bad CNBC summary, rather than the actual Amazon press release. There's a lot more to Amazon's announcement than just buying electric trucks:

https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

Re: Jeff Bezos climate change plan unveiled – buy 100k electric vans.

#89

Post by Gibbon1 »

floatrock wrote: post #47
mrpopo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example airplanes emit tons of CO2, but if the same 300 people in a plane drove the same distance it could be much worse. Technically true, however airplanes provoke a rebound effect. By making travel so efficient and fast, it makes people travel more. If airplanes didn't exist all people would simply travel less, not drive more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I've thought as far as congestion is concerned cheap electric and self driving cars could make things worse. Especially if is as expected the price of EV's drops below the price of gasoline powered cars. Probably not that make effect in the US but in countries like India and China on the other hand.

Re: Jeff Bezos climate change plan unveiled – buy 100k electric vans.

#90

Post by AgloeDreams »

driverdan wrote: post #73

> Bezos said the first electric delivery vans will be on the road by 2021 I strongly doubt this will happen. Their truck still isn't in production and they haven't even built a concept van yet. The chances of them producing vans in two years is very low.

I thought this about a year ago when they came out of stealth, however; Rivian has all the magic in their sleeves. 1: They actually did the work, the prototype trucks are rather far in development for their announcement. Seemingly they are almost R&D-complete. This is different from most other EV startups like FF or Lucid as they pretty much just showed off mockups.

2, and this is what really matters:

They got major investments from established ICE manufacturers (Huge investment from Ford) with agreements to cooperate on building the factory and making products together. This is the real barrier to entry on EV startups and they executed on it by spending years figuring out the powertrain issue and then going off and getting help by those with the institutional knowledge on manufacturing them. This is why I think they will win.

3: It's a van, a skateboard with a metal box on top, likely borrowing heavily from already developed designs. Note that the van appears largely production ready lacking all the normal concept drawing details and lacking any form of wild 'FUTURE!!' details. Boring Ford van mirrors, standard marker lights, correct size tires and rims. This is a production-ready design, not a concept-car, that likely makes use of the Ford production machine for all the little bits. Think of it like building an app with Angular or React, they know what they want to do and what they want to use other sources for.

Post reply on HN