The electric car as a talisman of false hope • Hacker News Board

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#81

Post by sokoloff » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 12:25 PM UTC

ahje wrote: post #57

seren wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. We could probably revert back to a 1920-1930 level of car without being in a "primitive" state. That means less individual car ownership, and more bicycles, public transportation and more local factories/shops.…

> We could probably revert back to a 1920-1930 level of car without being in a "primitive" state. Reducing urban car ownership rates is a good thing, if nothing else it'll result in cleaner city air. It becomes more complicated when it comes to the modern forestry and agricultural industries, not to mention mining and a lot of other raw material extraction, which are all completely dependant on fossil fuel for poweri…

> Reducing urban car ownership rates is a good thing, if nothing else it'll result in cleaner city air.

Maybe not if ownership is just replaced with higher Uber/Lyft usage.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#82

Post by Mvandenbergh » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 12:25 PM UTC

Why is the embodied carbon in the manufacture of the car the same in all the energy mix scenarios? Surely quite a lot of electricity is used in manufacturing electric vehicles.

Also, solutions that rely on substantially reconfiguring living patterns - moving from driving-required suburbs to walkable communities also have large embodied carbon costs. It's all well and good to say that suburbs are energy inefficient but the US has a lot of them already built.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#83

Post by r00fus » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 12:25 PM UTC

growlist wrote: post #62

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.

Cite needed. Also types of pollution matter. Do brakes & tires contribute to climate change or to the PM2.5?

Yes we need to move towards more sustainable transport (mass transit) and reduce the overall load but EVs don’t hamper this movement.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#84

Post by upofadown » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 12:28 PM UTC

You can see this false hope expressed all the time in media articles that assume that we will just electrify all the cars with no other changes to how we do transportation. That hope is why we are told how important it is to get chargers absolutely everywhere, that charging needs to be fast and how important it is that electric cars have the same range as petroleum cars.

The thing is, cities don't want any sort of cars these days. So in most cases the type of energy used to propel a car is beside the point and a lot of this discussion doesn't matter any more.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#85

Post by ensiferum » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 12:28 PM UTC

693471 wrote: post #47

I bought my EV for three reasons: 1. Traditional car maintenance is expensive and sucks 2. I'm betting due to natural disasters in the environment and in the Oval Office we will see fuel prices continue to rise 3. While I don't think it will save the planet by itself, it can certainly save lives. Emissions are dangerous to breathe in and we are willfully ignoring it.

And the energy comes without emissions? :)

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#86

Post by acidburnNSA » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 12:28 PM UTC

adamlett wrote: post #58

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 way I read TFA, the argument is this: If you think electric cars is the solution or a meaningful part of the solution, you're wrong. It does not say electric cars are bad, and it certainly does not argue that we should not solve [the climate crisis] if we can't solve it all-at-once. There are unfortunately still many, many people, who—even if they accept that human caused climate change is real—do not appreciate…

It does say EVs are solving the wrong problem, which (OP says) is that our consumerist lifestyle is unsustainable.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#87

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 12:28 PM UTC

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…

That's a pretty uncharitable reading of TFA. My take-away is this: if we use the electric car as a way to persuade ourselves that our 'way of life' is safe if only we all switched to electric vehicles then we are ignoring the elephant in the room: it is our way of life that is the problem, not how we transport ourselves.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#88

Post by Barrin92 » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 12:33 PM UTC

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 themselves are only a small fraction of the transportation industry to begin with.

And not to mention that there's global shipping, construction, meat consumption all of which is by itself faster increasing than any environemntal solution in the respective domains which all only marginally change the equation to begin with.

Our ecosystem doesn't care whether we tried really hard and if we were really good citizens or whether we did nothing, all that matters at the end is if our efforts were significant enough to not degrade our environment. And we're off by a magnitude or two and that's not going to change until we make radical changes to how we manage our societies.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#89

Post by acidburnNSA » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 12:33 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #65

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 c…

Low carbon energy! The article listed pure renewable energy but if it was biofuel, emissions would be high. We must stop talking about renewability and focus on sustainable, low-carbon energy. They are not the same.

Further example: nuclear fusion is low carbon and sustainable but not considered renewable. If we charged EVs with nuclear fusion power stations, we'd all be happy.

Re: The electric car as a talisman of false hope

#90

Post by ovi256 » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 12:33 PM UTC

adamlett wrote: post #60

rebuilder wrote: post #3

Are there examples of societies radically changing their lifestyles in order to prevent a disaster?

We managed to stop using freon, thereby rescuing outselves from ozone depletion. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/5/100505-scienc...

That did not require a change in lifestyle. Substitutes were found for all freon applications.