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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

#61

Post by ecpottinger »

PeterStuer wrote: post #28
mcot2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miles driven should go up but with far fewer vehicles, since with autonomy cars can operate almost 24/7. But point taken, we will need those autonomous cars to be BEV and use renewable power.

I have not seen automotive industry projections that predict fewer vehicles.

Of-course not - what do you expect them to say to their shareholders?

But in all the other NON-automotive industry sources the idea of a car that drives itself and acts as a taxi suggests 4-10 times less cars needed.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#62

Post by growlist »

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.

Exhaust emissions are only part of the air pollution problem - brake discs and tyres contribute around 50%, as I recall.

Depressing! But we need lighter vehicles all round, and less travelling in general.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#63

Post by growlist »

stuaxo wrote: post #14
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!

We're going to have to reverse it at some point. If we keep accelerating it there won't be any learning to live with it.

It's self limiting, with an attenuation in global population once a threshold is reached. I suspect we'll never reach a point where humanity disappears entirely - they'll just hang out in higher altitudes and latitudes.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#64

Post by pankajdoharey »

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…

"But overall, they are too little too late. An electric car is still a car, and permeates our car-dependency the same as any other car." .... Well yeah..., till Startrek's teleportation is invented.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#65

Post by bryanlarsen »

Two me, reading the graph in the article brings up two priorities:

1: transition to renewable energy

2: figure out how to lower the carbon emissions during

1&2 sound a lot easier than completely transitioning off motorized personal transportation.

#2 can be done with appropriate government incentives, like a $100/ton carbon tax + equivalent tariff. Producers will use alternate energy sources and otherwise eliminate carbon wherever it costs them less than $100/ton to do so, and the $100 can pay for sequestration when it costs them more.

Of course #2 will significantly increase the price of a car. This will also help to convince people to use alternatives. But cars will still be significantly cheaper than they are in Denmark or Norway, yet those two countries are still fairly car oriented.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#66

Post by growlist »

We could for example:

1. Incentivise retrofitting of electric transmissions to cars with internal combustion engines

2. Disincentivise the introduction of new models, visual updates etc. to existing cars via taxation

3. Incentivise durability and repairability - force car makers to produce cars that are modular and easily repaired, enforced limits on pricing of spare parts, force open-sourcing of designs etc.

Of course all of above would likely smash the car makers' current business model to pieces - and when you get down to it this is the real problem with the kind of genuine, general change we need to see in order to save the Earth.

Sustainable approaches simply will not deliver the kind of reduction in consumption required. Everyone is going to have to accept a much poorer lifestyle. The main blocker to me is the rich: how are they going to justify their continued opulence when the companies they own (are forced to) produce so little for the average person?

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#68

Post by m4rtink »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #50
alexgmcm wrote: post #2

Honestly, I hope electric cars become commonplace just because of the reduction in noise pollution let alone PM and CO2 emissions. Furthermore, I'm not really sure what the author thinks we should do? How can we maintain modern civilisation without factories etc.? Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable.

> Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable. You'll see plenty of complaining online about DC's transit system, but to me it is an example of what can be done. Vienna metro station is ~13 miles as the crow flies outside the city center. It gets trains every 8 minutes and 12 minutes during rush hour. Compare to Boston where train stations at the same distance out have service every half h…

And if you add one or two levels of magnitude of improvement, you will get the insanely good train system in Japan.

Seeing 14 car 300 km/h capable shinkansens arrive on the same track in ~4 minute intervals in Hiroshima station (and elsewhere) is something to behold.

And the commuter system is sometimes ever crazier, with many lines running parallel in the city center, large stations having dozens of lines, together providing huge capacity. No wonder around 8 million people commute to central Tokyo, 1.3 million of them through a single station (Shinjuku).

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#69

Post by Nasrudith »

eptcyka wrote: post #21
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…

The argument isn't that doing _something_ is bad, it's that the amount of effort people put into obtaining their shiny non-paleolithic-compost-fueled-but-rather-battery-powered 2 tonne sledgehammers would be better spent changing policies that operate on organizational rather than individual units. How about we just stop buying as much shit from halfway across the world? Global trade requires us to spend stupid amoun…

Sounds like the typical apocalyptic activist thinking where actually helping the problem /at all/ is a bad thing because it distracts from their grandiose vision and makes their crazed plan that even they can only see happening in severe conditions - often because it involves mass murder.

I have seen far too many examples of self declared communists saying things like a $20/hr minimum wage is bad thing because it distracts from overthrowing "the oppressor".

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#70

Post by pixl97 »

nikconwell wrote: post #35
agumonkey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Has anyone ever seen calculations of whether leveling out the roads would save significantly in energy? We are slowly getting regenerative technology into cars so we can at least recapture some energy on the way down, but avoiding the use of energy for going up would seem like an even better win. The bonus is the level roads would also benefit older vehicles not equipped to recapture energy.

Most modern roads are far more level than ones made in the past. Though that is because we can easily expend huge amounts of energy in heavy equipment to move said rock and dirt. In general more level roads have a much higher safety factor. Hills and curves tend to increase the accident rate because they require the driver to slow down and re-accelerate more often.
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