Can we go electric before it's too late? | Hacker News Reader

Can we go electric before it's too late?

citylab.com

19 pointsjseliger46 comments

"Transportation makes up the largest share of emissions."1)

Transportation is still only 28%, slightly more than a quarter. Electricity & "industry" account for 50%.

Further, I remember a discussion with the president of Mercedes who was pushed for cleaner cars. He mentioned that one ocean-going freight vessel pollutes more than 450k cars combined (here is an article in that same trend (2).

I love the notion of quiet, electric cars, but the "industry" that pollutes these cars, and the "electricity" that is needed to charge these cars still accounts for 50% of the pollution. So, until ocean freighters are cleaned up, the net effect on pollution will likely be zero.

1) https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... 2) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-...

> Electricity & "industry" account for 50%.

Sure, you have to solve the problem in multiple places.

But electric vehicles can actually help with some of this. For example, they help significantly with the storage problem for solar, because you can charge your car while the sun is shining and keep that entire load outside of what needs to be generated from fossil fuels.

> He mentioned that one ocean-going freight vessel pollutes more than 450k cars combined (here is an article in that same trend (2).

That is with reference to particulate emissions rather than CO2, and the reason for it is that ships have basically no emissions controls because nobody cares about air pollution in the middle of the ocean. So they burn horrible sulfur-laden garbage fuel with the obvious consequences.

The solutions for that are known -- stop letting them use that fuel, apply emissions controls -- but nobody has bothered to pass that law, because it would cost money. And it's still not a reduction in CO2.

So by way of the trade war with China, potus may ironically be the greatest hero in the war on climate change.

You laugh, but actually yes!

Trade, while it's a pretty efficient market today, is not efficient as far as raw materials -> manufacturing -> products go and how they are moved.

The most common thing today is to move raw materials to a location where the manufacturing and labor is the cheapest..., the finished product may go right back to where the raw material came from. Seems silly right?

The tariffs will alter where raw materials and finished products are sent, if sent anywhere at all.

Ideally, raw materials, manufacturing, and final delivery of finished goods would all be next to each other.

Of course scarce, or regional, raw materials are different because there may only be a few places in the world to obtain them. But that's not the norm. Governments can economically incentivize all three steps to be at least in the same country so we aren't shipping things across the ocean for basically cheap labor/production cost.

Yeah. Instead of burning gasoline for our cars, we will burn oil/gas for electricity for our cars.

Even if that were the case, it's still an efficiency improvement.

Large turbine power plants + electric motors with regenerative braking is still about twice as efficient well-to-wheel as gas powered cars.

https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-whee...

Sure, electric cars are an improvement, but they aren't the end-all-be-all of climate change. The bulk of the problem is out of the hands of individual choice.

Yes, there's definitely more to be done. Electric cars go hand in hand with moving to renewable electricity sources as well. It's easier to change what's on the other end of the grid than it is to stick solar panels, wind turbines, and nuclear reactors on cars.

I see the "well your electric car is just burning coal/oil/gas anyway" argument repeated pretty often despite being an oversimplification and usually wrong.

An internal combustion vehicle burns gasoline or diesel for it's entire life. An EV gets cleaner every year as coal and gas are replaced by renewables. Even today, burning coal and natural gas, an EV is cleaner and more efficient fueled off of those generators than a petrol vehicle.

We'll need enormous amounts of storage to move to intermittent renewables; lucky for us, a million EVs are sold every six months, and that timeframe continues to narrow.

Sure, electric cars are an improvement, but they aren't the end-all-be-all of climate change. The bulk of the problem is out of the hands of individual choice.

Find ways to contribute towards actions that scale. Climate change is hundreds of problems actioned simultaneously.

http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

What most of us forget is that we can manufacture gasoline and diesel fuel in carbon neutral ways. (From algae or other plant-based materials.) It's just currently much more expensive than pumping oil from the ground.

So, we don't need massive adoption of electric cars to solve the problem. We can also figure out how to manufacture conventional fuels in environmentally friendly ways.

There is much progress being made in decreasing the cost of EVs and cleaning up our grid by installing more solar and wind. There has been not nearly as much progress in the production of cheap cellulosic ethanol or fuel based on algae.

There are a lot of Exxon commercials talking about algae-based fuels, but in reality we are still just making our ethanol from corn (which most agree is not a good idea). Given the momentum behind EVs and their other benefits (lower maintenance costs, less noise, no emissions, etc.), I would rather my tax dollars go towards accelerating the push for electrification than push for a transition to biofuels.

Creating synthetic fuel requires a lot of resources. Growing it has a massive environmental impact and the necessary farm area would be very large. Solar cells would require a fraction of the area and can be put onto roofs or into areas not suitable for farming. Synthetic fuels also don't fix the efficiency problems of combustion engines. So electric cars would require only a fraction of the effort to be powered compared to combustion engine cars with synthetic fuels. On top of this, synthetic fuels do not solve the exhaust problems.

The main advantage of present day internal combustion engine vehicles over electric vehicles is lower cost. Once you require carbon-neutral fuel for ICE vehicles they're actually more expensive over a typical lifetime.

There is definitely a place for carbon-neutral fuels in applications where energy density is paramount, particularly aviation and long distance shipping. There is also a niche case for fueling heavy-duty ground vehicles like large trucks. I don't think that carbon-neutral fuels are going to be cheaper than electrification for passenger vehicles and light duty trucks, though.

> It's just currently much more expensive than pumping oil from the ground.

The issue is it's also more expensive than using electric cars.

Isn’t the issue to do with consumption of gasoline rather than production? Burning carbon based fuels releases large amounts of carbon, no matter how you’ve produced it

When you produce fuels by biological means, the carbon in those fuels is captured from the atmosphere.

Thus biological fuels are carbon neutral. No new carbon is added.

(For the same reason, if you heat your home with wood, the only new carbon comes from the energy used to cut the wood down and transport it to your home. The carbon released from your chimney is neutral because the tree captured that carbon from the atmosphere while it was growing.)

That's a little simplistic. The state of the carbon is incredibly important - keeping it locked in a tree, ice or the ground instead of floating around in the atmosphere is kind of the entire goal.

Heating with wood unlocks all that essentially inert carbon into wide spread particulate, so it's no more carbon neutral than burning coal you collect by hand. You're also depleting the carbon absorption side by harvesting the tree

PS: Please don't heat with wood, it's very very polluting. There's more to pollution than just CO2.

Extracting and burning fossil fuels release carbon that is already stored in the Earth, while biofuels capture carbon from the atmosphere when the feedstock is grown then release it when the resulting fuel is burned. That is why biofuels are considered to be carbon-neutral.

I imagine we'll need pretty substantial upgrades to our electrical grid if we want electrical charging to be ubiquitous.

A typical home peaks at 15-30 kW, whereas a single DC fast charger can use as much as 62 kW or 500 kW.

Even a L2 charger uses something like 6.6-19.2 kW; if you tried to retrofit a Wal-Mart parking lot to have L2 chargers at every parking spot you'd probably need to build a new electrical power plant next door.

I doubt we'll see every space getting a charger, in fact as EVs/PHEVs become more common I would expect to see the free charging parking spaces go away (they're supposed to be an incentive to get people to switch, but if everyone already has...).

I see the free charging spaces at my local Target packed full of cars. I was wondering who would have time to spend there all the time until I realized some of them are Uber drivers. They get electric cars so they can charge for free waiting for their next customers. I'm guessing Target was hoping they would be actual customers who you drop by to shop while charging. I'm sure some time in the future they will be changed to have a fee once EVs become more common place.

Exactly. I've owned a Tesla for 3 years. Never once have I used those retail parking lot chargers. They seem silly to me.

I charge in my garage, which doesn't need to be very fast at all, about 10Kw. And use the Supercharger network only on road trips.

"Catastrophic climate change" is no longer my primary concern here. I don't think we're going to avoid that. My big concern now is Peak Oil. If major producers like Saudi Arabia and Iran peak and start petering out, then demand will quickly outstrip supply, before widespread electric vehicles are viable in the market.

What happens to the world if the price of gasoline spikes 50-100% in a mere year or two?

> What happens to the world if the price of gasoline spikes 50-100% in a mere year or two?

An uptick in EV sales, I'd guess. Gasoline was about 55% more expensive less than a decade ago, recall. We survived. I don't think it would get all that interesting until gasoline gets around $10 or more per gallon in today's prices.

It's around $7 per gallon in the UK already.

The net result is on average we drive smaller cars with more efficient engines.

There are serious limits to the scalability of that solution. We can't all just sell the cars we have and buy something 25% better every year. And frankly, we've squeezed most of the efficiency we're going to get out of internal combustion already.

> And frankly, we've squeezed most of the efficiency we're going to get out of internal combustion already.

If we stick to large engines we need to push honking great SUV's around maybe, modern 3 door's (like the Citigo) are pushing 60+ mpg average in the is something like 25.

To my point, your solution is not better cars, but rather smaller cars. That's incrementalism, and it won't go far. Feel-good snark about the American love of big cars won't solve the problem at all.

We're already there for anyone who wants it. A Prius gets essentially the same gas mileage as the Citigo while also being more appropriately sized for American tasets.

I'm highly skeptical that peak oil will happen from lack of supply. I'm betting it will happen from lack of demand. Petroleum extracting technology gets better, and is always increasing viable reserves of existing oil fields.

That's what I'm hoping will happen - that EVs will lead to a big drop in demand before Peak Oil leads to a drop in supply.

But hope is not a strategy.

There are still very large oil fields up north, but they are a bit too expensive to extract right now. If gas prices go up enough then they can start getting oil from there.

peak oil is not worth worrying about. I've studied this for investment projects and the whole idea is just a perpetual, simplistic, political meme that has existed since the oil industry started a century and a half ago. Oil might get more expensive than it is now, but that will lead rapidly to renewed investment in exploration and extraction. There are centuries-worth of reasonably-extractable oil - supply will literally never be a problem because we will have to leave that oil, and the coal, unburned for atmospheric chemistry reasons. peak oil consumption is a policy choice, peak oil supply is a myth.

It won't, because at that price point it's cost-effective to manufacture gasoline using algae or other biological techniques.

the only reason why we pump oil out of the ground is because it's the cheapest way to manufacture gasoline and diesel fuel.

We are forced to drive and consume less, avoiding climate change extinction? Sounds like a thing to hope for rather than a concern.

>"Catastrophic climate change" is no longer my primary concern here. I don't think we're going to avoid that.

I don't know about you, but I will live to see a destroyed climate. We should do everything in our power to soften its blow when it comes.

yeah - I mean no matter how bad is is, it can always be worse! There's a sort of nihilistic worldview implied by these statements from usually-smart, usually-young folks that I don't think they actually believe. it's just an intellectual tantrum, i think.

Why do you believe that we are that near peak oil?

Because I can read.

Even though 100 companies are responsible for the bulk of climate change, lets keep painting it as the moral failure or greed of the general masses.

This reads far too much like a Facebook virtue signaling meme, rather than a supported fact.

Not saying it's wrong, just saying the standards are (usually) higher on HN.

Those 100 companies don't include oil companies I hope? Because including them would be completely nonsensical, and would totally ruin any point you are trying to make.

While I share your sentiment, I don't see any real actual address of the underlying cause of climate change before irrecoverable harm to the planet.

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