Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study

No my argument was serious. You've sliced your data gratuitously. You're also making rude jokes, and I think there are HN rules about that somewhere. But, I'll forgive you.

Right where you found your data (you shouldn't use Wikipedia for science), is a map of coal plants in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stati...

You looked up the share of energy for the US as if every vehicle owner spends equal time driving in every city. That's dishonest. A vehicle owner typically drives in one city nearly all the time. If that city is coal powered as we can see, many are, that owner should not operate an EV. But policy relying on blanket data like yours would incentivize their doing so. That's bad for everyone, except the policymaker and his buddies selling EV related products.

The primary point, however, is that EVs move the pollutants up the supply chain. The car itself is non-emission, but the power plant and battery cycle are not! And the alternative power sources aren't really clean either. Nuclear, for example, requires mining, enrichment, etc. (all carbon heavy) and then we still need to deal with disposal which doesn't even exist! We're sweeping that under the rug when we call that clean energy. We don't have a solution for waste so we just exclude it from our impact calculations? Ridiculous.

Now add a toxic battery on top of all of that, and all of the mining and waste disposal associated with it. You've moved your pollutants to China, added shipping lanes, and dumped more oil and now lithium into the ocean. This may be worse overall and it's for sure worse for owners of cars in coal powered locations.

But you do get to say that the EV in a vacuum is zero emissions (at the location of inertial output only). Nice work!

Your argument zoomed out to blanket statement the US where it suits you, and then zoomed in to the car itself to exclude where your pollutants are. It's truly very dishonest. That argument is damaging to the public interest and to the environment, and insults the sciences.

My point is not that if there are no more ICE cars, there will be no market for oil. It's that the portion of the market for oil that has, heretofore, serviced ICE cars is starting to disappear, and it won't be coming back, nor will it be repurposed to service anything else, to any significant degree.

The broader point is that, because of the environmental consequences, people all over the world are diligently working on ways to eliminate the other markets for oil. And they will also not be coming back.

Oil is on its way out, period. Not this year, not this decade, possibly not this century...but it's going. And the world will be much, much better off for it.

(It's just possible that there will be some tiny fraction of the current uses for oil that we can't find any meaningful replacement for, but it's not going to be much.)

For the purposes of tire wear, applying regen braking in a car is the same as applying brake pads. Generating 5kW of electricity of 10 seconds vs generating 5kW of heat for 10 seconds, same same.

Let's say you're on the highway driving in an EV. You have cruise control on. You go down a hill. The EV's cruise control applies regen braking down the hill, using the tires to slow you to your desired speed.

Let's say you do the same in an ICE vehicle. You will coast down the hill, gathering speed. Cruise control in an ICE vehicle generally will not brake for you. So more of your energy from the hill gets removed as air resistance. When you slow due to air resistance it does not wear the tires.

The same logic applies each time you push the gas pedal slightly harder than you needed to and then back off.