151–160 of 168 posts
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Practically speaking, poor people can't just get an electric car .
You can get a used Nissan Leaf or Chevy Spark for around $4000. "Poor people can't afford electric cars" was from when the only electric cars were newer cars. That was a decade ago, it's not true anymore.
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You can get a used Nissan Leaf or Chevy Spark for around $4000. "Poor people can't afford electric cars" was from when the only electric cars were newer cars. That was a decade ago, it's not true anymore.
> You can get a used Nissan Leaf or Chevy Spark for around $4000. With how much life left on its battery before it needs a $10k+ replacement?
> In fact, many EV batteries may outlast the vehicles they are installed in, then enjoy a second life in a stationary storage application before finally being recycled, according to EVANNEX. “At the end of the vehicle’s life — 15 or 20 years down the road — you take the battery out of the car and it’s still healthy with perhaps 60 or 70% of usable charge,” Thomas said.
Meanwhile the battery replacement cost isn't $10k+. Nissan dealers charge $5500 for a new battery. Refurbished batteries are available for as little as $1000, with the obvious trade off that you'll have to replace it again sooner, but $1000 for another 3-5 years (with the option to do it again) could be a better choice for an older car than $5500 for another 10-15 years, depending on how much value you place on the inconvenience of disassembling your car to put it in again.
There’s nothing specific to data centers here, just electricity use. The electricity use generates a shit load of GDP and soft power for the U.S., way more than $5.4B over 5 years. So what do these degrowth people want exactly? Cant have resource extraction. Can’t have manufacturing, pollution. Can’t have tech, pollution. Just twiddling thumbs and money will come? Or keep all the benefits while offloading all the dow…
> So what do these degrowth people want exactly? Cant have resource extraction. Can’t have manufacturing, pollution. Can’t have tech, pollution. Just twiddling thumbs and money will come? Or keep all the benefits while offloading all the downsides to Mexico? And a few years later they will complain about dependence on foreign countries. It feels like you're arguing against a strawman. I can only speak for myself, but…
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You can get a used Nissan Leaf or Chevy Spark for around $4000. "Poor people can't afford electric cars" was from when the only electric cars were newer cars. That was a decade ago, it's not true anymore.
I looked in to this every year for the past five years, and the sub AU$10,000 - AU$15,000 Leafs are generally not worth the effort.
There is also an obvious market response if something like that was actually introduced. If burning carbon cost more, people would buy more fuel efficient cars. Then those cars enter the used market a few years later.
This is one of the reasons the only sensible carbon tax proposal is the one where all of the tax revenue is distributed back to the population. In the first year, there will be more demand for efficient cars than existing supply, so they'll cost more. People who drive a lot will buy them anyway, but can use the refund to offset the cost. People who don't drive as much would eat the cost of the carbon tax on a less efficient vehicle, which isn't so bad because they don't drive as much, and then gets offset by the refund until more efficient cars filter into the used market. When that happens the tax revenue goes down because people have more efficient cars, so the refund gets smaller, but by then people don't need it as much because they have the more efficient cars.
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I looked in to this every year for the past five years, and the sub AU$10,000 - AU$15,000 Leafs are generally not worth the effort.
It's not the world's greatest car but if there was a carbon tax then it's cheap and fully electric. There is also an obvious market response if something like that was actually introduced. If burning carbon cost more, people would buy more fuel efficient cars. Then those cars enter the used market a few years later. This is one of the reasons the only sensible carbon tax proposal is the one where all of the tax reven…
If all we have is opinions, let’s go mine. Fortunately, we have data.
Take Australia for example.
1. We had a carbon tax, sort of, briefly, but no one wanted it, and still doesn’t.
2. Fuel for vehicles here, petrol and diesel, has become wildly expensive, but cars have become huge to gigantic. Approximately no one drives a small car, approximately everyone owns at least two 4x4 and or SUVs, and those that don’t tend to drive a turbo charged Skyline or Subaru or similar.
Everyone drives relatively new cars compared to, say, 30 years ago when half the population drove a rusty floor pan around, you were luck to have anything resembling an actual car hanging off it.
No one here gives a shit about climate change, except maybe our Australia Broadcasting Corporation, but approximately no one consumes any of their media, and even if ya do 97% of the time their performing their mandate of proportional representation by publishing media aimed at the LGTBQI+ fictious community 100% of the time.
To the point where electric vehicle sales here in Australia have fallen off a cliff, and one hundred down ten to one the current buffoons get voted out and replaced by a potato promoting nuclear.
Good.
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It's not the world's greatest car but if there was a carbon tax then it's cheap and fully electric. There is also an obvious market response if something like that was actually introduced. If burning carbon cost more, people would buy more fuel efficient cars. Then those cars enter the used market a few years later. This is one of the reasons the only sensible carbon tax proposal is the one where all of the tax reven…
I don’t believe any of this at all . Is anyone aware of any place where this has worked? If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data. If all we have is opinions, let’s go mine. Fortunately, we have data. Take Australia for example. 1. We had a carbon tax, sort of, briefly, but no one wanted it, and still doesn’t. 2. Fuel for vehicles here, petrol and diesel, has become wildly expensive, but cars have become huge to gig…
Australia briefly had something their politicians called a carbon tax, but it was really cap and trade, which is an entirely different system and is rubbish. In particular, you have to give ordinary people back the money the carbon tax collects or they'll rightfully hate it, which cap and trade does not.
And then, because the system they proposed was the miserable one, the opposition leader credibly threatened to repeal it (and then did), so hardly anyone bothered to try to save costs under a program they reasonably expected to quickly go away.
Actual carbon taxes have been implemented in parts of Europe and they do what they're expected to do.
> Fuel for vehicles here, petrol and diesel, has become wildly expensive, but cars have become huge to gigantic.
People used to say "buy a smaller car" as the way to save fuel, since that used to be about the only way to do it. Then carmakers learned you could design an SUV with the use of a wind tunnel instead of shaping it like a brick and then use a smaller displacement engine with a turbo, or a hybrid system, and then you get SUVs with better fuel economy than subcompacts got in the 90s.
Even the huge stonking V8s still get modern aerodynamics and get significantly better mileage than the old ones did.
> To the point where electric vehicle sales here in Australia have fallen off a cliff
Electric vehicles were never popular in Australia. Range is their Achilles heel and Australia is spread out. But then you do a plug-in hybrid that can operate as electric 90% of the time while completely solving the range issue.
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I don’t believe any of this at all . Is anyone aware of any place where this has worked? If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data. If all we have is opinions, let’s go mine. Fortunately, we have data. Take Australia for example. 1. We had a carbon tax, sort of, briefly, but no one wanted it, and still doesn’t. 2. Fuel for vehicles here, petrol and diesel, has become wildly expensive, but cars have become huge to gig…
> We had a carbon tax, sort of, briefly, but no one wanted it, and still doesn’t. Australia briefly had something their politicians called a carbon tax, but it was really cap and trade, which is an entirely different system and is rubbish. In particular, you have to give ordinary people back the money the carbon tax collects or they'll rightfully hate it, which cap and trade does not. And then, because the system the…
Opinions / data, let's go with the data.
It's really not. Australia is mostly uninhabited, with most people living in very few high density places.
The average commute distance in Australia is 16 kilometres; 90% of Australians live on the East Coast; 73% of Australian's commute less than 20 kilometres.[1]
Even Western Australian has people living outside of Perth, which, by the way, is the most remote centre of commerce in the world, has an average commute distance of 20.4 kilometres.[1]
The average Australian vehicle travels about 12,100 kilometres annually, that's all vehicles including freight vehicles.[2] The average household in Australia owns 1.8 cars[3], so very many Australian's would be well served by owning at least one purely electric vehicle, but don't.
Plug-in hybrids are mostly not a thing here.[4]
1. https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject...
2. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/tourism-and-trans...
3. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/tourism-and-trans...
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> So what do these degrowth people want exactly? Cant have resource extraction. Can’t have manufacturing, pollution. Can’t have tech, pollution. Just twiddling thumbs and money will come? Or keep all the benefits while offloading all the downsides to Mexico? And a few years later they will complain about dependence on foreign countries. It feels like you're arguing against a strawman. I can only speak for myself, but…
Article is about health impact and explicitly not about carbon emissions. It also strongly implies “we don’t want you to pay, we simply don’t want you here”. You can’t accuse me of arguing against a strawman when I’m addressing the article while you’re bringing in something else only loosely in the same category.
Yes. But air pollution is a negative externality that is not priced in for polluters/consumers, in exactly the same way as CO2.
You could argue that the case with air pollution is even more straightforward than with CO2, because those damages and costs are fully shouldered by the local population (unlike the consequences of climate change, which is probably gonna be felt more acutely in countries like Bangladesh, and thus less of a problem from a US citizens PoV-- note that this is not an argument I endorse).
> It also strongly implies “we don’t want you to pay, we simply don’t want you here”.
This feels like conjecture to me. The message of the article to me was "Tech giants operate data centers for hundreds of billions, but they are not paying for the consequences of their emissions which are mainly felt locally (costing billions)". That is not "we don't want you here" to me, but instead a "you should be responsible for the consequences of your actions".
I'm not exactly sure what your actual positions is. Are you arguing that industries/consumers should be exempt from paying the actual price for things (including external costs), because this (indirectly) subsidises local industry? And where do you draw the line? Because surely "the local gold extraction industry may freely pollute rivers with mercury" is across that line?
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You cant make a car not pollute. Even EV pollutes the local neighborhood. Ever notice how tires and the stains on the curbs and the black soot you wipe off the window sills are all the same color? How tires get bald? You are probably breathing tire right now. It is probably getting on your plate of food and you are eating tire.
I feel like this is just making the point. Originally cars ran on leaded gasoline, which was very bad. But we didn't ban cars, we got unleaded gasoline. Then they were emitting too much in terms of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, so we got low-sulfur fuels and catalytic converters. Then it was brake dust from friction brakes, but now hybrids have regenerative braking. Then it was CO2, so we got electric cars that can be…
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No, air isn't clean by default. All air has particulates in it at various levels. There are natural particulates like forest fire smoke, blowing dust, and volcano emissions. And there are man-made particulates, dating back to the invention of fire but getting much worse with coal. All are harmful to some extent. If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 pp…
> If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out. The average ppm cancel out but the outcomes don't, because you have more sick people: Let's say 12 ppm is the maximum safe ratio for some pollution [edit: assuming it is a pollutant that has local impact, not like CO2 which has g…
It's actually slightly sub-linear, meaning that an increase for one group and an equal decrease for another group produces slightly less total mortality. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9109601/#gh2329-bib... for some numerically fitted curves (search for GEMM).