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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

#261

Post by localhost »

yellowapple wrote: post #195
localhost wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The real problem, as the author tangentially points out, is our over-reliance on cars to move us around. And the author fails to explain why (in the context of climate change) that's actually a problem. Suburban areas have a disproportionate carbon footprint specifically because of ICE-powered cars being required to go anywhere; if those ICE cars become electric cars, and that electricity comes from solar/wind/nucl…

Another aspect of suburban living that I don't like at all is how it isolates people from each other. I've made the mistake of living in a subdivision with lot sizes > 0.5 acres. Because of the low density, my kids can't have spontaneous interactions with friends that I enjoyed while younger, i.e., walk / cycle to their houses to hang out. Everything becomes scheduled and everything requires a car to shuttle the kids around to their activities.

I've become convinced that density really is the answer to building a more humane way of living.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#262

Post by alexis_read »

agumonkey wrote: post #26
charlesism wrote: post #10

Alot about our system of roads and cars strikes me as crazy. Most of the vehicles on the road have only one person in them, yet weigh as much as an elephant. Nobody drives under the speed limit, which is typically fast enough to result in hundreds of thousands of fatalities every year anyways. Every neighborhood designed primarily for these idiotically heavy vehicles, that occasionally drive over pets and children wh…

The worst part about it IMO is traffic light and stops. In a city, if you can drive around 20mph (25 maybe) uninterrupted, you get in most places very fast, very pleasantly and with fuel savings since you never slow down. Instead of a smooth flow, you get drivers that do: - high accelerations - nervous braking - idle engine running between 30 - 60 seconds (120 max?) Pure waste. Maybe I'm asking for a problem too comp…

Not too complex really. The #1 thing is to encourage flexible working so we can work locally more often - shared office spaces (if required) can be a great resource eg. You get to know people who can provide a great painting service etc.

After that, encouraging building energy efficiency so aircon is not needed so often would be beneficial - well designed buildings that promote airflow without heat exchange for instance. Extra insulation and so on.

Promoting more localised towns and cities, with shared waste/water facilities is good - that datacenter heat can drive aircon or hot water for the town.

Lastly, electric cars as you've said, have many problems - care to see how 2 different companies' cars handle parking in a busy car park? ;)

The best transport option might be smartrail (similar to https://openprtspecs.blogspot.com/?m=1 but steel wheel/LIM and faster).

Smartrail and PRT are designed as a point to point separated-grade network carrying on av. 1 person or a pallette of goods. With a hanging rail you don't need heavy batteries, parking for the vehicles, you can run a pod straight into the factory to pickup goods, and large/rich places can pay to have track straight to their door.

You can prefab the rail and as land usage is just poles in the ground it can be rolled out over fields etc quickly. Track is one-way to eliminate junctions. Pods are on-demand ie. No waiting.

Accessibility improves, you can use the top of the rail to generate (solar) power, run highspeed internet cables in the rail to improve comms across a country, and save on distribution center logistics as you're going point to point.

The last mile may possibly be an issue, but forklift drones and bicycles can take most of the load I feel.

Drivers for this are that it would go fast (200mph+ as light pods so little wear), can go overnight (sleeper pods), you could buy track to your door, personal transport (like a cinema room if you want). The main real issue with cars is that there's a large lobby behind what is a legacy transport solution...

By way of example, UltraPRT has been running flawlessly at Heathrow airport for 10 years, was built on time, on budget, and performs exactly as predicted/modelled.

For more info checkout http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/ in particular Swedetrack

The last thing to mention, and the elephant in the room, is overpopulation. Looking at the stats it seems that birthrates for developed countries is in decline, so the obvious solution is to give everyone a good quality of life.

The issue here is actually at the heart of economics - how do we run an economy with an ageing demographic? Japan is the leader here and they are placing a bet on robotics. What happens though when robots consume 80% of jobs? That may be the issue we need to solve, and as you can effectively tie energy to economic prosperity on a macro scale, a solution presents itself - create more (environmentally friendly) energy sources to raise global wealth.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#263

Post by jmnicolas »

Mirioron wrote: post #224
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…

> switching to electric cars isn't enough

It's not enough it's worse : basically by buying an electric car you're outsourcing your pollution to China and Africa.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#264

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jmnicolas wrote: post #263
Mirioron wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> switching to electric cars isn't enough It's not enough it's worse : basically by buying an electric car you're outsourcing your pollution to China and Africa.

Aren't a lot of electric cars (e.g. Tesla, Nissan Leaf) made in the US from batteries made in the US?

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#265

Post by edmundsauto »

irq11 wrote: post #249
magduf wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. But nobody wants to do that. What the heck are you talking about? Every industrialized nation now has negative population growth if you ignore immigration. People are having fewer children, and frequently, none.

So? I’m not talking about “industrialized nations”. I’m talking about you, personally. If you elect to have one fewer child, you can drive a car everywhere and fly first class for vacation and eat a big steak every week of your life, and you’ll still be greener than your neighbor with the solar panels and the Tesla. Doesn’t matter what birth rates are in the industrialized world.

Another way of saying it is that you believe by not having kids, you can ethically consume the energy that your offspring (and their offspring) would have consumed.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#266

Post by api »

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…

Cars are around half of oil consumption. They are a huge part of the transportation industry in terms of CO2 emitted. They are also the most rapidly growing part.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#267

Post by AnthonyMouse »

saghm wrote: post #257
jdofaz wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some cars have a lot of capacity, so in some cases that is like saying who wants a car with only half a tank of gas?

Unfortunately, until there's more infrastructure supporting electric cars, it's much easier to refill your car with gas if it runs low while you're out than recharge it.

The dominant share of vehicle miles are commuting to work. If you work 9-5 and there is a charging port at work, you plug into it when you get there and you're charging during daylight hours. Meanwhile the average commute is 16 miles each way against cars that now have a ~300 mile range, which is plenty of slack for the odd evening use while still not needing to charge outside of work on anything but rare occasions.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#268

Post by SubuSS »

karthikb wrote: post #163
Barrin92 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 While these are the “right” solutions, they occur over decades. Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Even bus lines. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work.…

I think that misses the overall point: OP is saying the personal emission reductions themselves don't matter AND providing this as absolution kills off the available attention spans that should go towards real solutions.

It is akin to saying 'I recycle my meagre household waste, I am doing my best!' while that's addressing probably 1% of the actual problem (most recycling ends up in garbage and corporations are bigger polluters than individual consumers).

If I am to put words into OPs mouth, we should be pushing for real changes at a society level. This would mean a bigger and more intrusive governance which will come in the form of things like no meat, 2 children per family, all electric cars, no 2 day shipping and so on. I am sure there one in there that will hurt everyone, which is where people should be willing to put their energy into.

FWIW at a macro level, I do see the point. I can put money on the fact that people won't elect or push for societal changes that actually affects them though. These are the reasons why giant systems pretty much never completely overhaul themselves: They might course correct a little, but unless aliens invade or a giant conflict happens - we are kinda set. (Do you see my cynical side yet :)

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#270

Post by llsf »

Mirioron wrote: post #224
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…

So the problem is the "hype" around electric cars, not the electric car itself.

Nobody said "buy an electric car, and you are done, the planet would be saved". And if some people do believe that, then it is an education issue, not an electric car issue.

A bit tired of people shooting for perfection and berating those who actually try to make a difference, even so slightly.

Maybe a more effective solution would be to ban any fossil fuel powered large ships and planes ("the 15 largest ships in the world emit as much nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxide as the world’s 760 million cars." http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-mo... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...). And yet we all know this is not going to happen anytime soon... and still we would keep getting blog posts saying that electric cars are a problem (of hype or whatever) for the environment.

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