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Comment by naskwo | Hacker News Reader

"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-...

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> 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.

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

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.

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