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The electric car as a talisman of false hope

jussipasanen.com

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Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#221

Post by nguoi »

zip1234 wrote: post #164
michaelt wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not mutually exclusive. Well, you can only spend a given dollar once. So if for example the government spends $$$$ to put an EV charging point in every street light, that's $$$$ they didn't spend making busses more appealing.

Except the government does even need to do that. The government could actually make money by leasing spaces/taking a cut of revenue to put chargers and letting private industry install them and manage them.

>Except the government does even need to do that.

And perhaps it won't, if enough of the people that make it up read articles like this to ignore the very powerful automotive lobby

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#222

Post by AnthonyMouse »

irq11 wrote: post #152
theworld572 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, while you sit there waiting for the perfect solution (which is completely unrealistic) people actively working on real solutions. > spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have. Of course those numbers are just made up but they are also very far from reality. Solutions to climate change have actually been ranked in terms of total cost and total a…

Do you know what the #1, most significant thing any of us can do to reduce climate change? Have one fewer child. Nothing else even comes close. It’s a simple fact. It’s easy to do. But nobody wants to do that. It’s far less painful to pretend that we can keep the Titanic from sinking by making sure we sip our boat drinks from metal straws. The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consump…

> Nothing else even comes close.

According to this logic the real number one thing you could do is to kill yourself, but it fails for exactly the same reason.

You're just measuring the impact and not the cost. Doing one thing with a large impact and an even larger cost is worse than doing three things whose total impact is more and total cost is less than that of the one thing. Especially since in this context they stack -- if you buy an electric car and switch to electric heat and install solar panels on your roof, but so too do your spouse and three kids, that's going to have more impact than having two kids while you're all driving ICE cars and getting heat from fuel oil and electricity from coal, since the impact of each measure is multiplied by each of the five people in your family.

On top of that, you're not considering the economic and political implications. If there are fewer children then there will be fewer working people per retiree. That means a resource crunch, which is exactly the sort of thing that will prevent people from being able to afford sustainable alternatives that may cost a little bit more, and then you've doomed us all.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#223

Post by maxsilver »

Barrin92 wrote: post #132
theworld572 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, the alternative is to figure out how to change the very fundamental levers of the system in a way that enables change on a scale that matters. The individual consumption lens is going to accomplish nothing. If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk a…

> If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect.

This isn't necessarily true. Depending on how you put "20 drivers onto a bus" in a dense rapid urbanization, you are often generating more CO2 than the drivers were previously. Building an entire nations worth of new train lines generates a lot of extra CO2. "Rapidly urbanizing" everyone generates a ton of extra CO2 (and will instantly price out nearly all of the residents you want to 'urbanize', something EVs never do)

In the US, most EV drivers with a renewable energy source are already emitting less CO2 per trip than the equivalent bus ride would emit (even after factoring in per-rider numbers for the bus). Depending on your area, the "largely car free" option is semi-regularly worse for the environment once an EV is factored in.

> Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot.

We already are? https://carbonengineering.com/ and https://www.climeworks.com/

That doesn't discount the work people are doing on EVs. Its still usually better to prevent emissions than to attempt to recapture them later.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#224

Post by Mirioron »

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…

>His argument distills to: solve it all-at-once, or don’t solve it at all.

I disagree. I think the argument that's being made is rather that switching to electric cars isn't enough, but people focus on it so heavily that people feel as though switching to an electric car is saving the planet. The problem here is that it's not enough and due to how hyped up electric cars are there won't be enough will left to tackle many other problems that affect climate change.

I don't know if I came across properly, so I'll explain it in a different way: humans have a limited amount of attention and will. Switching to electric cars is a useful move to combat climate change, but due to how hyped up electric cars are, it will satisfy many people's urge to do something for the climate. This occupies most of the limited amount of attention and will, thus there isn't enough left over to tackle all the other, bigger, problems.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#225

Post by OrangeMango »

localhost wrote: post #155
Barrin92 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The real problem, as the author tangentially points out, is our over-reliance on cars to move us around. That’s due to the intentional choices that we have all made. If you look at the structure of suburban areas of cities in the US, you’ll immediately see that they are entirely designed the assumption of the existence of a personal car for YOU. You simply cannot get around without one. A choice that I’m grappling wi…

> A choice that I’m grappling with personally (as someone who lives in the suburbs in the US and owns two Teslas) is that I should really move somewhere more sustainable, i.e., more density so that I can get rid of my cars.

There is an alternative. Lobby your city to relax zoning. Let someone replace one of the homes in your subdivision with a coffee shop/convenience store/pizza parlor. Things like that.

Your current built environment isn't perfect for perfectly sustainable living, but allowing it to grow organically in that direction is far more sustainable than abandoning it and building new cities.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#226

Post by jmpman »

I have an electric car because it lets me get in the carpool lane. I understand that investing the delta between an electric car and an ICE into some sort of carbon capture technology would likely be better for the environment, but then I wouldn’t be home for dinner 15min earlier.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#227

Post by theworld572 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #204
yellowapple wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that they're indeed not doing anything else. I strongly doubt that's an accurate assumption.

And I'm completely sure its exactly what's happening. In 99% of the people.

Based on what?

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#228

Post by almost_usual »

theworld572 wrote: post #178
irq11 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can deny it all you like, but it’s true [1] and you’re just illustrating the point: nobody wants to do the things that actually matter , because those things are painful (not incidentally, #2 is “sell your car”). It’s far easier to mock the people who tell you the truth than it is to make substantial changes. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...

You know what would be EVEN more effective at fighting climate change than not having children? Committing suicide. But people don't want to listen to the harsh truths. They would rather consume their way out of the problem with electric cars, education for third world countries, reforestation, solar power and other false hopes.

Well that's technically what will happen when the forcing function of Earth's climate reaches a limit. I suppose it will be Earth killing us rather than us killing ourselves at that point though. We'll see if we get there with our current methods or not, hope electric cars work!

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#229

Post by JKCalhoun »

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…

> His argument distills to: solve it all-at-once, or don’t solve it at all.

I read the article and didn't get that impression at all.

I got: electric cars are an improvement, but don't fundamentally solve the problem.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#230

Post by blendo »

About 300,000 cars cross the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge every day.

I think the author's point is that if they were all electric, there would _still_ be 300,000 cars crossing the bridge each day, and the problems of road maintenance costs, pedestrian safety, and soul-deadening commute times remain. Fewer GHG emissions, to be sure.

A good next step would be to focus on reducing the total energy of the system. Minimizing 1/2 m v^2 is your friend here -- reduce weight and reduce speed.

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