Hacker News Reader

Anti-environmental conspiracy theories (the evil electric car lobby are ruining the business of the nice oil providers for no good reason) aren't really any more useful than environmental conspiracy theories and biases ("chemicals" are bad, "natural" means good etc).

EVs are better for the environment, both local and global, than ICE cars. That's true on average and even truer for Norway with its cleaner grid.

Biodiesals etc. should really be saved for the things that can't be easily electrified, like flying craft. But, at this very moment I believe various places including the US mandate that the diesel is mixed with these fuels to a certain percentage, so there's no big conspiracy here against this type of fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biofuel_policies...

If someone buys a brand new EV then a) presumably they would have bought a brand new ICE instead, b) they do not set their older car on fire and push it over a cliff, but rather sell it to someone, who in turn sells their car to somoene else. In the end, particularly with punitive tax incentives in place, the oldest, least-safe, least-efficient, most polluting cars in the system are scrapped.

> things that can't be easily electrified, like flying craft

Funfact about airplanes: they can pretty easily be converted to run on liquid hydrogen. There was a big Airbus-led research project on this some years back. IIRC they found overall efficiency (when accounting for larger fuel volume etc. etc.) was ~4% lower than normal aircraft.

Not to mention that Tupolev actually built and flew a full-scale proof of concept liquid H2 airliner in the late 80's, the TU-155; sadly yet another cool project that died with the Soviet Union.

What about the fuel tanks that would be required for a hypothetical hydrogen aircraft? Unlike kerosene, hydrogen is very light, but the high-pressure tank to contain the hydrogen is quite heavy. Plus, given hydrogen's very low volumetric density, I imagine you'd have to sacrifice a lot of the cargo volume of the aircraft to fit the H2 fuel tank.

Liquid hydrogen is the key. It's frickin' cold, as in liquid nitrogen is positively tropical in comparison, but the density is high enough that you just need slightly larger wing volume for tanks. Vacuum based insulation, which is what they use, is pretty light.

As I said, Airbus did a large R&D project on this and they concluded it's technically and economically feasible for passenger jets. I'm taking their word for it, seeing as they build airplanes for a living.

That is cool, though currently there's no low carbon source of Hydrogen. Possibly over time excess wind an solar power can be used to generate liquid fuels.

There's steam methane reforming from natural gas; it converts methane to CO2 and H2, and you separate those. This is already a large scale commercial process (e.g. used for hardening fat in food or upgrading petroleum to fuel), giving tens of millions of tonnes per year, and recent plants even include CO2 capture and storage, making it a low carbon source.

One could - from a narrow perspective[1] - argue that diesel engines on plant oil would be carbon-neutral but not that they are emission free. In fact: (older) diesel engines are being banned from cities (e.g. Antwerp, Belgium) not because of CO2-emissions but due to emissions of particulates (and NOx). CO2 is a global problem, but particulates and NOx are local problems (and hence more likely to trigger local political action).

[1] it is often argued that biomass/biofuel is not entirely carbon-neutral due to several reasons: the inherent lifecycle means some CO2 is in the atmosphere at any point; production is often based on CO2-emitting processes ... Secondly some other issues pop up as well: (indirect) land use change, competition with food ...

> even though a diesel engine run on veg oil is emissions free

Nonsense.

Well thanks for the well-reasoned and neatly laid out rebuffal, it's what I come to HN for. Perhaps "free from harmful emissions" would be better, I'm not in that field of expertise so I can't say, but if you take issue with plant based fuel over fossil fuels then I would like to hear that rational: preferably in a one word answer sans context. /bitchy

The better response would be (theoretically) "carbon neutral": as long as that diesel is run strictly on biomass-based fuels, the carbon cycle would be completed (it would would be "net zero" in pollution).

That doesn't mean it would be "pollution free", of course; no vehicle can be. For a diesel, you have various gases and particulates, but with proper capture and scrubbing, much of these can be disposed of in more environmentally friendly ways. Plus, most if not all of this tech is already developed and used on current diesel vehicles.

I actually agree that it's all about money. An average citizen cares for environment in abstract, but not enough to pay premium for it. What we have in Norway with EVs is government incentives for adoption at work.

With biodiesel I remember there used to be some debate how much it can harm the food crops supply if the prices are competitive. So at least that is a concern. And specifically in Norway diesel is penalized for a while now, ironically after being promoted by the government for years before that.

The whole EV thing is a mess.

There was some old regulations on the books that allowed EVs to drive toll free and use buss lanes during rush hour.

Hardly anyone cared when it was introduced, because the major EV available were Think compacts.

But when Tesla introduced their sports car, suddenly everyone monied individual in the cities took interest. Because it was still a EV according to regulations, so now they could drive something that looked and performed just like the gas guzzler the neighbor had, get around tolls and rush hour traffic, and pretend to care about the environment.

> ...even though a diesel engine run on veg oil is emissions free.

This just isn't true. Local emissions of bio-diesel are comparable to petro-diesel.

When you factor in that C02 is absorbed during manufacture, biodiesel is estimated to have 45%-65% lower net emissions than petro-diesel, but that ignores the fact that you just repurposed viable farmland (or in some cases rainforest) and changed its C02 profile, potentially reducing or erasing any net benefit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_biodie...

Another challenge is what to do with all the waste glycerol (100kg per ton of biodiesel), since prices crashed a few years back

>Another challenge is what to do with all the waste glycerol (100kg per ton of biodiesel), since prices crashed a few years back

Vape it obviously.

I used to be one of the weirdos collecting waste oil to burn in my VW. That was pretty cool but obviously not everyone can do that.

Money is how we align priorities although our individual wants and needs vary dramatically.

I don't think there are any major initiatives around that are compelling people to junk cars in favor of EVs. We do have subsidies that are "priming the pump" to ramp up production volumes and build enough economies of scale to make EVs a thing. That's a good thing IMO as many driving use cases are well met by EVs.

IMO, plant based fuels are problematic due to the affects they'll have on the agriculture market. I would prefer to see subsidy to make natural gas replace diesel fleets. Alot of needless human suffering is attributable to diesel particulate emissions.

> However, buying a new car and junking the old one has to be less energy efficient than owning an old car and trying to use it less while utilizing public transport.

I don't know about Norway specifically, but in Western Europe in general (Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland etc.) old cars are sold to less well-off EU countries, where they're still in operation for (typically) many more years. So, the Western consumer changing cars every 5 years isn't actually affecting the environment, and is actually helping out folks in poorer economies.

That's something I would really have to see hard facts on before I could believe it.

It should be enough to compare the number of yearly cars bought vs salvaged in say Germany (the difference should be the export, presumably to poorer economies). Unfortunately, I don't speak German (or French, Dutch etc.), but here are the Polish buy-side stats:

This article says that the number of USED cars imported to Poland in 2015 was around 1 million:

http://www.samar.pl/__/3/3.a/91648/3.sc/11/Ponad-milion-aut-...

While this article says the number of NEW cars sold in Poland in 2015 was around 400k:

http://motofocus.pl/informacje/wiadomosci-rynkowe/14747/sprz...

Which means that roughly 70% cars in Poland are used ones coming from (mostly) Western Europe.

You could also come at it from another angle. Consider that a 5-10 year old car can still easily be worth 20-50% of its initial value. Who in their right mind would scrap it, when you can sell on the second-hand market? You don't see these cars on streets of Zurich or Paris, but come to most Polish cities and you'll be surrounded by them (a lot of them still have various stickers in German on them, as people don't bother to peel them off).