141–150 of 188 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If by "electrification" you mean "switch to public transportation," I agree with you. If by electrification you mean "burn dinosaurs four miles away," then I don't agree with you.
Public transportation that runs on the power grid also burns dinosaurs if it's powered by fossil fuels. Edit: why the downmod? Energy is energy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
China is putting ~10k electric buses a month on the road: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/04/china-is-adding-a-lon...
And they are still using coal to produce electricity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And they are still using coal to produce electricity.
This World Resources Institute graph^1 shows intense growth in solar electricity generation in China so they are at least moving away from fossil fuel electricity generation at a rapid pace and fossil fuel electricity generation is plateauing^0 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#/m... [1] https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/distributed-solar-pv-china-...
This is the same tactic they use on trade. They're hyper protectionist about access to their economy, and then claim they're free traders.
"China's leading role in financing a wave of new coal plants across Asia is drawing fresh scrutiny as the world’s top climate scientists weigh calling for much deeper cuts in emissions. China, India, Japan and the Philippines rank among the biggest investors in the 1,380 coal plants under construction or development worldwide, according to a study by the German pressure group Urgewald released Thursday."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/china-s-f...
"The research, carried out by green campaigners CoalSwarm, suggests that 259 gigawatts of new capacity are under development in China. The authors say this is the same capacity to produce electricity as the entire US coal fleet. The report says that at present China has 993 gigawatts of coal power capacity, but the approved new plants would increase this by 25%."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45640706
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/climate/china-energy-comp...
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/6/17427030...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/06/china-is-massively-betting-o...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using alcohole fuel would have been a very reasonable solution, specially if you care about air quality amd not carbon. China is using 100% methanol and other lesser methanol fuel that are produced from coal. But in other places you could use gas. This would also be faster then full electrification. The US missed out massivly. The gas boom could have lead to very cheap and relativly clean fuel. It would also be great…
Source for this? My understanding is that there is solid full-life-cycle analysis showing CO2 reduction from ethanol (35% lower on average), but a total mixed bag when it comes to hydrocarbons and various other air pollutants - some better, some worse: https://www.afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/flexible_fuel_emissions...
With these fuel it very much depends on a lot of factors.
However a overall police towards use of fuel alcohol would overall be very benefical.
Both in terms of emission and in terms of price competition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in the Netherlands and I can confirm that. In just a couple of decades they transformed all their car friendly cities and made cars second rate citizens Cycling infrastructure is amazing. It is almost always faster to travel by bike than by car. They did it so long ago and the world still hasn’t caught up. I’m very sad about that. Also somehow the amount of cars per capita is still very high in NL.
> Also somehow the amount of cars per capita is still very high in NL. That's OK. We can keep up the consumerist "Everybody needs a car" mentality as long as the amount of driving per capita stays low.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm glad Chen attempted to give an intelligible quantity, but I'm not really sure what to make of the metric. "Years of education" don't seem like an intuitive metric for cognitive impairment. Checking the abstract gets us: > Cutting annual mean concentration of particulate matter smaller than 10 μm (PM10) in China to the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard (50 μg/m3) would move people from the median to the 6…
I'd say that a "year of education" is a lot more quantifiable to your average person than "2 points of IQ". IQ isn't used for anything meaningful in terms of ability or qualifications, especially since it's age-adjusted and historically has been biased against minorities/foreigners. A year of development however, is a graspable (if shocking) measure of lost opportunity/capability.
In case anyone else wanted to quantify "huge": > “Polluted air can cause everyone to reduce their level of education by one year, which is huge,” Yale School of Public Health's Professor Xi Chen, one of the report's authors, said in an interview published in The Guardian.[0] [0] https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/air-pol...
I'm glad Chen attempted to give an intelligible quantity, but I'm not really sure what to make of the metric. "Years of education" don't seem like an intuitive metric for cognitive impairment. Checking the abstract gets us: > Cutting annual mean concentration of particulate matter smaller than 10 μm (PM10) in China to the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard (50 μg/m3) would move people from the median to the 6…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
human powered transport like walking or cycling works great in dense cities, it's more space efficient so it scales better too.
cycling isn't space efficient and doesn't really scales that good. It is a luxury ttransportation mode for low/mid density US cities not capable/not willing to build true mass transit modes. Look at the packed subway in say Moscow ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCZKXHsZo68 ) and compare to the best possible bicycle situation - mid-80s China http://www.theurbancountry.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/83... - around 1…
A lot more people can pass any point in a biketrack per hour than they can per subwaytrack, and they can often take a more direct path to their destination using bikes than they can by subway. That also means that a bike system is better suited to a city where both the departure and the destination are diverse among all "packets".
That's not even starting to talk about how biketracks scale much better economically since they are much cheaper to build.