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Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

timharford.com

231–240 of 291 posts

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#231
post #51

> Here’s a thought: environmentalists should fight climate change by buying coal mines. Matt Levine wrote about this recently (unfortunately I could not find the reference but it was in the last month). One of the big bank tried to launch a fund for this but it was met with a hostile reception.

20 December newsletter: > When you go to an ESG fund manager and say “hey wanna buy up all the coal mines” she is going to say “what no absolutely not.” And then you say “no hear me out, you are a better owner of coal mines than the alternative, this is better for the climate in the long run,” and you explain how, and she says “hmm yes your logic is impeccable,” and you say “so you’re in?” and she says “no absolutely…

Thanks for finding this.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most" We have a name for them - Bus Drivers! Why is all the discussion is focused on personal cars, they sit idle 90% of the time. First vehicles to go electric should be bussed, light delivery vans, taxis and all other service vehicles that are in motion over 10 hours a day, 365 days a week. Today 95% of all electric busses are in China…

I could not agree with you more, except for the small problem of range. I'm not sure batteries will support vehicles being in motion 10 consecutive hours. And in some categories (busses, delivery bikes) it will be as lot more than 10 hours a day. Maybe a 3 on, 1 off schedule would work (leaving it some time to charge) and that will have some capital implications (more actual vehicles in the fleet) But I concur with t…

City buses seem like a great use case for battery swapping!

Depends a lot on the exact bus system, but thinking loosely about San Francisco: maybe retrofitting ~10 terminals with swap+recharge capabilities means most routes only need 1-2 hours of juice between swaps?

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#233
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For vehicles which are in nearly continuous use, the capital costs are essentially irrelevant next to fuel and maintenance, both of which are far cheaper for EVs. It might take a few years to pay for replacements.

Right, electrics can be optimized to a usage. Some buses could have capacitor banks recharged at every stop. That sort of tactic would be nonsense for a daily driver.

There is that in my city. A new bus line able to recharge bus capacitors at some stops. It looked like pretty hard to implement but it’s working interestingly well.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#234

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…

This also has an econ person fallacy in it. PHEV is only ever more environmently friendly when it gets plugged in as much as possible (in reality every night to cover next days drives). And people rarely do as PHEV is marketed to sell SUV’s by the BMW’s of the world and also reduce their fleet emission fines on paper by not making their customers inconvenience themselves.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#235
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. So, while on paper a PHEV solution might look better, in the real world it would result in those people just goin…

BMW's and Porsche's PHEVs are pretty good, why other companies cannot follow the same formula (add batteries and electric motor to a regular car without crippling the existing drivetrain) is a mystery. It appears most want you to buy their BEV so they intentionally make PHEVs unappealing.

Traditional automaker tend to get a bit paternalistic and perhaps communist in American terms - the new Camry your team is going to build and sell is going to carry life and moments of its drivers, and their families, and their neighbors waving hands for next decades, each year adding up in tens of millions as the cars are built and shipped - it’s definitely not going to do 0-60 in under 2 seconds because they can’t get around that for better or worse. Maybe even 5 seconds is too much. Is 7.5s too slow? Debatable. Think about kids! Our future!

Tesla is at the other side of spectrum when it comes to it, so they just put what they make because they can. They managed to set the benchmark for BEV so others follow them for BEV products.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most" We have a name for them - Bus Drivers! Why is all the discussion is focused on personal cars, they sit idle 90% of the time. First vehicles to go electric should be bussed, light delivery vans, taxis and all other service vehicles that are in motion over 10 hours a day, 365 days a week. Today 95% of all electric busses are in China…

How heavy is an EV bus? Battery-electric cars are already pretty hefty for their class. Would a bus be even more so, to the point of being dangerously massive?

EV bus are not science fiction. There are a lot of them working everyday in a lot cities. So no, there is no such thing as dangerous weight.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#237
British Columbia has conservation groups doing precisely this: acquiring forestry rights with the intention of never harvesting[0].

Word has it that the Provincial Government will be supporting this effort.

0: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/conservation...

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#238
post #179

> Each new person who joins a queue goes to the front, standing immediately behind the person being served. This is, of course, an outrage against reason, intuition and natural justice. It is also highly efficient. If you’re next in line to be served, but someone shows up and shoehorns herself into position in front of you, you walk away. The line is only going to get longer, and you’re always going to be at the back…

Yeah, seems dumb "economist" thinking. The idea that "if someone gives up and walks away, everyone behind them benefits" is a absurd on two fronts.The stall owner clearly doesn't benefit from a lost sale. Mulled wine, mince pies and hot chocolate are not fungible. Maybe you are allergic to chocolate. Maybe mince pies make you gag. Also, optimising for queue length only makes any sense in the described scenario if all…

Of course the position "only add something to your todo list if you are going to do it immediately" is ridiculous at face value.

But if you are a bit more generous with its intentions, then there is something that really chimes with me about it.

I work in engineering support to oil and gas operations (but I'm sure this is applicable to many industries), and we have quarterly workplans and pretty fixed budgets. Of course our budget-holder typically asks us to do more work than we are able to deliver, so I will often have to say "this job does not make the priority list for next quarter, but we can do it the quarter after next?".

However, I've found a pretty good rule of thumb is that if a job was not high priority enough to win a place on the next quarter's to-do list then by the time the following quarter comes around, it will probably get bumped off the priority list by something else higher priority. In other words, our limited budget means there is always some 'cut-off point' where work that looks important is still not quite high enough priority (compared to our other work) to ever get done.

It is easy to 'form a long queue' by saying yes to work and letting it sit on our to-do list forever, but just slightly too low down to ever get done. But in our industry at least, there's a small overhead involved in just keeping that work around and passing the ownership of the task from person to person.

A more realistic rephrasing could be "if you're adding something to your todo list and it's not high enough priority to bump anything else, consider how much inefficiency it will cause long-term by it just sitting in your queue for months"

Maybe a little silly for your personal todo lists, but I think the idea has some applicability at a larger scale.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#239
post #179

> Each new person who joins a queue goes to the front, standing immediately behind the person being served. This is, of course, an outrage against reason, intuition and natural justice. It is also highly efficient. If you’re next in line to be served, but someone shows up and shoehorns herself into position in front of you, you walk away. The line is only going to get longer, and you’re always going to be at the back…

It's also a bizarre example, because there's already a very simple solution from fast food.

Sometimes you can serve customers about as quickly as it takes for them to order and pay (e.g. hotdogs) and then there's typically no queue, or if you can't keep up and the queue is intolerably long like in this example, then they take your order and give you a number which gets called out when you're done.

This is exactly how a popular food truck would work at a fair, and you don't wait in a queue for ages, you mill around a bit and you come back when your food's ready.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#240
post #179

> Each new person who joins a queue goes to the front, standing immediately behind the person being served. This is, of course, an outrage against reason, intuition and natural justice. It is also highly efficient. If you’re next in line to be served, but someone shows up and shoehorns herself into position in front of you, you walk away. The line is only going to get longer, and you’re always going to be at the back…

It's also a bizarre example, because there's already a very simple solution from fast food. Sometimes you can serve customers about as quickly as it takes for them to order and pay (e.g. hotdogs) and then there's typically no queue, or if you can't keep up and the queue is intolerably long like in this example, then they take your order and give you a number which gets called out when you're done. This is exactly how…

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