The electric car as a talisman of false hope • Hacker News Board

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#121

Post by zzzcpan » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:09 PM UTC

pif wrote: post #6

> To have any chance of slowing down climate breakdown rather than accelerating it further, we need to change our entire way of life... I agree with him. And that's why I keep saying that global warming is here to stay. We had better to learn to cope with it rather than hoping it can be reversed!

I think global warming is not just here to stay, it's going to get as worse as it can get.

If the west moves off of fossils the rest of the world will get them cheaper and still burn them all, it's too important to get cheap energy for all the countries that are not as rich as the west and still need a lot of growth. For that not to happen the west would have to somehow share and distribute all the wealth it accumulated with the rest of the world or somehow force the rest of the world into the middle ages, neither of which is realistically possible. Not sure what else can be done, but it seems the earth will inevitably return to the pre historic climate where all those fossils were still in the atmosphere.

The problem of global warming is the problem of distribution of wealth in capitalism itself.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#122

Post by patientplatypus » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:15 PM UTC

One of the things I like to do when half in the bag in a bar and blagging to a new friend is to say,

"Look - pick a direction - any direction - and tell me what you see."

And what they see is plastic and metal and bar bottles with paint on them and more plastic and all the detritus of human society.

And every piece of it, as far as the eye can see!, will be garbage in 6 months to 20 years and sit on the ground and leech poisons into the Earth and nothing will grow from it.

Every.

Single.

Piece.

We, as human beans, have broken the cycle of life and death where something grows, flowers, dies, rots and something else grows and flowers. This idea that we can make a new shiny thing that will become more garbage to fix all our problems so we can keep eating more isn't going to change that.

The solution is that we simply have to do with less. And people will kill each other before they admit that.

It's already starting to happen now.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#123

Post by srfilipek » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:16 PM UTC

ensiferum wrote: post #85

693471 wrote: post #47

I bought my EV for three reasons: 1. Traditional car maintenance is expensive and sucks 2. I'm betting due to natural disasters in the environment and in the Oval Office we will see fuel prices continue to rise 3. While I don't think it will save the planet by itself, it can certainly save lives. Emissions are dangerous to breathe in and we are willfully ignoring it.

And the energy comes without emissions? :)

Depends on where you live. In West Virginia? No, it's almost all coal based.

In Vermont? Yes, their grid is 100% renewable.

Source: https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#124

Post by theworld572 » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:27 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #88

Denzel wrote: post #13

His argument distills to: solve it all-at-once, or don’t solve it at all. This is an uninteresting and uninspiring line of thinking that ignores the nature of socially dynamic systems which don’t exist in a world of instantaneous cause-and-effect. His conclusion states that electric cars make a difference, but they don’t make a real difference: “I do think they can slightly reduce unsustainability” but “by switching…

They don't make a real difference, and the author is correct about it. If you drive towards a wall and you're accelerating and all you're doing is slowing the rate of acceleration you're still going to run into the wall at terminal velocity. The author correctly points out that the total increase in car usage, mostly conventional engines is going to offset the small dent that electric cars make, and that cars themsel…

So whats the alternative? Do nothing at all?

If you have $100k left to pay on your mortgage, and somebody offers you $5k towards the mortgage are you going to tell them they're offering you a "false hope because you'd still have $95k left to pay"?

EDIT: This is also known as the "nirvana fallacy": because the solution is not perfect - that means it is worthless.

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

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#125

Post by PeterStuer » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:27 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #76

PeterStuer wrote: post #7

"Electric cars give us a sense that we can have change without having to change at all. They are a talisman of false hope." On a tangent issue: it going to get even worse. The automotive industry predicts total annual miles driven to go up by 300% when autonomous driving comes through.

How? The roads are at capacity in many places. We're not going to build 300% more road area to put cars on.

Potential road capacity is far higher than is currently achieved by human drivers. Rational coordination and less accidents are more than feasible. Platooning is estimated to have the potential to increase per lane capacity by 500%.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#126

Post by oftenwrong » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:29 PM UTC

navigatesol wrote: post #95

pas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people already don't buy shit. At all. I mean after about a decade I finally gave in and bought a used TV (instead of using a PC monitor). I already don't fly to useless tech conferences, and work remotely (so no mindless daily commute). And eventually when the e-charger network will become widespread enough around here, I guess, I'll buy a used EV instead of the current car, because cities can't ban these s…

> And the way to make the GHG-friendly stuff cheap is to tax the shit out of the GHG-positive things. Making everything more expensive is a political dead-end, and would exacerbate income inequality.

Not if it is revenue-neutral.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#127

Post by kaibee » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:30 PM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #75

endymi0n wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment hits the nail on the head. Plus, what the OP conveniently ignores, is that electric cars aren‘t a talisman, but a bridgehead. If electric cars succeed on a large scale, it means we solved making electricity storage fast, dense and cheap enough to put them on the road. Putting that technology into the electric grid and combining it with renewables will enable dirt cheap, limitless energy, which will contr…

Agreed. Consider using the term "low-carbon energy" in place of "renewable energy". We want to promote the right stuff. Biofuel is considered renewable but is high carbon. Nuclear fusion would be low carbon but not considered renewable. The difference matters hugely for future energy policy.

While I agree that technically, fusion is not renewable, I feel like it might as well be? Working fusion reactors make it economical to siphon hydrogen fuel from Jupiter and such. Did you mean fission?

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#128

Post by zzzcpan » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:30 PM UTC

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #82

Why is the embodied carbon in the manufacture of the car the same in all the energy mix scenarios? Surely quite a lot of electricity is used in manufacturing electric vehicles. Also, solutions that rely on substantially reconfiguring living patterns - moving from driving-required suburbs to walkable communities also have large embodied carbon costs. It's all well and good to say that suburbs are energy inefficient bu…

> solutions that rely on substantially reconfiguring living patterns

Surely switching to bikes or electric bikes is not that substantial and immediately eliminates a lot of car related problems.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#129

Post by oftenwrong » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:33 PM UTC

lawlessone wrote: post #27

Electric vehicles would make a huge difference to me and many others that suffer from asthma. Moving the emissions away from the vehicles , away from city centres and roads to the factories and power stations where they can be controlled would save thousands of lives. Our children will look at us how we look at people during the industrial revolution. And a gradual change is better than no change at all.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/tripping/wp/2018/03/27/c...

>Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and other institutions who studied Stockholm’s congestion-pricing scheme found that the policy cut air pollution in the city center and reduced childhood asthma cases by nearly 50 percent.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#130

Post by amluto » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:39 PM UTC

kaibee wrote: post #127

acidburnNSA wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Consider using the term "low-carbon energy" in place of "renewable energy". We want to promote the right stuff. Biofuel is considered renewable but is high carbon. Nuclear fusion would be low carbon but not considered renewable. The difference matters hugely for future energy policy.

While I agree that technically, fusion is not renewable, I feel like it might as well be? Working fusion reactors make it economical to siphon hydrogen fuel from Jupiter and such. Did you mean fission?

I prefer “sustainable”, as in “this technology can be used as some scale for X years without causing major problems”.

High-burnup nuclear power, under reasonable assumptions, is sustainable for hundreds of thousands of years. Fusion is presumably sustainable as long as the Earth exists, as are solar and wind. Coal is not sustainable at all.