The electric car as a talisman of false hope | Hacker News Reader

The electric car as a talisman of false hope

jussipasanen.com

138 pointsumadon330 comments

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 from a regular car to electric I might think that I am making a real difference”.

I’m sorry that the author doesn’t consider a real reduction in emissions a real difference.

Look, it’s simple, climate change will require a concerted effort to change in multiple markets across multiple arenas. And the solutions are not mutually exclusive. People that buy electric cars to help the environment or become vegetarian, are probably more likely to make additional changes in their life, and persuade others to make changes as well, to reduce emissions.

Most people arrive at the decision to purchase an electric vehicle exactly because they are questioning their way of life. Electric vehicles are not a talisman of false hope, they’re a singular step in the right direction.

The argument isn't that doing _something_ is bad, it's that the amount of effort people put into obtaining their shiny non-paleolithic-compost-fueled-but-rather-battery-powered 2 tonne sledgehammers would be better spent changing policies that operate on organizational rather than individual units. How about we just stop buying as much shit from halfway across the world? Global trade requires us to spend stupid amounts of fuel in engines that have never been optimized for emissions. This of course involves making changes to global trade, this is a lot harder, but surely all those people who are capable of shelling out at least 30000$ (but in reality, barely anyone gets the cheapest model because this is a luxury item) could be doing things that make a bigger difference.

You didn’t rebut any of my points.

First, can you not buy an electric car and advocate and enact organizational or systematic change? They’re not mutually exclusive.

Second, how do dynamic systems composed of many independent, self-directed agents change? Instantaneously or over some period of time? How long is that period of time? Probably much longer a period of time than it takes to purchase an electric vehicle (< 1 minute) and reduce your emissions immediately.

  They’re not mutually exclusive.

Well, you can only spend a given dollar once.

So if for example the government spends $$$$ to put an EV charging point in every street light, that's $$$$ they didn't spend making busses more appealing.

Except the government does even need to do that. The government could actually make money by leasing spaces/taking a cut of revenue to put chargers and letting private industry install them and manage them.

>Except the government does even need to do that.

And perhaps it won't, if enough of the people that make it up read articles like this to ignore the very powerful automotive lobby

The reality of many governments however is that they are handing out money to the few people who frequently buy new cars for making those cars fractionally less unsustainable, while those who don't drive get pushed aside by even heavier and wider cars (using current "3" by BMW and Tesla as a comparison sample)

There are problems there though, because adding parking spaces makes driving more desirable for both EVs and non-EVs, and parking spaces tend to compete with bike lines in US cities. And as long as US cities remain car centric, having parking be expensive enough to be a deterrent to driving (or a major revenue source) is going to be a 3rd rail for local politicians.

That assumes that the lack of appeal of buses has anything to do with money. Until buses can:

* Deliver me from point A to point G without stopping at B, C, D, E, and F along the way

* Provide room for more than a handful of cargo/luggage and park / wait around while I load/unload it

* Actually stick to a goddamn timetable (looking at you, Muni)

Then no amount of money will make buses more appealing to me than a car.

Trains have these same problems, minus the inconsistent timetables, and have the added benefit of typically going at least a little bit faster.

This is a textbook example of false dilemma fallacy. Replacing ICE cars with electric cars doesn't preclude other environmental measures, and in fact, people who worry about their car's emissions tend to be people who worry about other environmental issues as well.

..it surely precludes the environmental measure of not having a car.

And what exactly is that impact? The author never specified; just asserted "cars are bad because reasons" and left it at that.

But continuing to have car-centric cities, and investing more into car-centric infrastructure, as many cities and states continue to do, is a real dilemma. Government funds are limited, especially in the current era, and space in cities is limited, too. We should be converting interstates to high-speed rail, and cheap/free city parking into bike lanes, but if our plan to tackle climate change is all about electric cars, none of that stuff is going to happen.

In a sense, this conversation mirrors the myopia the article talks about, because people who disagree with it are defending their individual consumption choices, while ignoring the broader social and policy connections that surround them.

Eco-friendly behavior does not abide to laws of matter conservation. I see no reason to suspect people who reduce carbon footprint using X would stop being vegetarians for example.

In fact, everything I know suggests the opposite - environmental engagement is always a positive feedback loop.

A lot of people already don't buy shit. At all.

I mean after about a decade I finally gave in and bought a used TV (instead of using a PC monitor). I already don't fly to useless tech conferences, and work remotely (so no mindless daily commute).

And eventually when the e-charger network will become widespread enough around here, I guess, I'll buy a used EV instead of the current car, because cities can't ban these smoke machines fast enough.

And when the choice is presented I already buy local stuff.

But.. this is a luxury for me/us, because of the enormous income inequality bonus of IT/tech.

Those who already live on the edge won't pick the local things, they will pick the cheapest one. And the way to make the GHG-friendly stuff cheap is to tax the shit out of the GHG-positive things.

And that unfortunately seems like a pretty hard challenge, thanks to our wonderful society favoring chauvinists rhetoric, trade wars, nationalist triades, and other bullshit.

So, yes, in terms of the big picture EVs don't matter much, but without even presenting an alternative, it'll be quite impossible to persuade the other half of society.

>And the way to make the GHG-friendly stuff cheap is to tax the shit out of the GHG-positive things.

Making everything more expensive is a political dead-end, and would exacerbate income inequality.

Not if it is revenue-neutral.

Who said everything?

Taxing stuff that comes from large scale industrial destruction of the environment is completely different than everything.

Plus all the carbon tax schemes start with direct rebates to the tax payers in equal parts, so those who consume more get less back than those who don't.

Which is why you'd want to combine the tax with a subsidy for "clean" products (financed by those very same taxes, perhaps).

Sounds like the typical apocalyptic activist thinking where actually helping the problem /at all/ is a bad thing because it distracts from their grandiose vision and makes their crazed plan that even they can only see happening in severe conditions - often because it involves mass murder.

I have seen far too many examples of self declared communists saying things like a $20/hr minimum wage is bad thing because it distracts from overthrowing "the oppressor".

I paid net $22K for a new 2015 Nissan LEAF (after $10K in combined government incentives). You could have gotten the base model (with resistance heat only) for under $20K, but that’s a fairly poor choice for New England year ‘round usage.

Even at 22k, that is a lot for most people. Online it says the LEAF can go 150 miles for around $4.80. Your payment would be around $375ish a month with at least $100 for insurance (probably more).

Why would most people do that when they can get a used car cheaper or keep driving what they have. It is just expensive (i am not saying i would not like a Nissian LEAF, that would be sweet).

I guess i see people buying EV's and ask why the rest of the world is not (i know you are not asking this, but a lot of comments i read are) when we cannot afford them.

Totally agree. All our other cars have been bought used. My wife’s CR-V has been excellent and was $7500 (or maybe it was $8500) when 5-ish years old. We don’t carry collision insurance on it at this point.

I wouldn’t have bought the LEAF new either if it weren’t for the $10K in government cheese that came with it. (I can buy a $32K car; I just choose not to as it seems a waste.)

> Global trade requires us to spend stupid amounts of fuel in engines that have never been optimized for emissions.

Whoa there! These engines are indeed not optimized for emissions like NOx and particulates, but they are impressively efficient. I believe that a good deal less CO2 is emitted shipping a container across the ocean than would be spent driving it across the country.

Anyhow, the economic solution here is clear: a carbon tax that applies to imports. The serious proposals do this.

People that buy electric cars to help the environment or become vegetarian, are probably more likely to make additional changes in their life, and persuade others to make changes as well, to reduce emissions.

I'm not sure about that, some of my neighbours seem to think that giving up plastic bags is enough to offset their annual holiday in Bali.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing

Sure, I’d be interested in seeing actual data. Which is why I qualified my statement with “probably” because of course I have anecdotes that counter your anecdotes. :) I just don’t have the time to look into any primary sources.

Those milieus who care most about the environment consistently turn out to have the highest environmental footprint. The point isn't that these people are hypocrites. Maybe they are (who, besides a cynic, isn't to some degree?), maybe they are not. The point is that it doesn't matter at all. People by and large will not alter their behavior in any major way for a common good as long as the individual marginal advantage is dwarfed by the individual marginal cost. Fishers will happily eradicate all fish in their fishing grounds and thus destroy their own livelihood, and will fiercely protest any meaningful regulation aimed at conserving. Consumers will happily fly around the world or commute in a SUV until the planet is doomed.^1

It's just the way it is, lamenting the sinful human nature doesn't change a thing. We need meaningful regulation.

--------

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Which is why a carbon price is so essential. Even if all the information was readily available to consumers, its too complex to be able to interpret.

You cannot shop yourself out of a societal problem. The tragedy of the commons guarantees that.

The problem is time. Or lack of it. We cannot afford for the markets to work things out for us. Sure, you can shift culture and behavior but that takes time that we do not have. It’s time for drastic policy change and swift global action.

Don't know why you're being downvoted. We currently have only 1 nuclear plant under construction. Any new construction wouldn't be complete and operational until at least 2033. IPCC clearly stated we need to make significant progress if not reverse emissions by 2030. The idea that nuclear is somehow going to save the day is insane. Sure, if we had plants that were nearly complete (in the US) and we prioritized operational approval and somehow got the population on board.. but that simply can't happen.

This comment hits the nail on the head. Plus, what the OP conveniently ignores, is that electric cars aren‘t a talisman, but a bridgehead. If electric cars succeed on a large scale, it means we solved making electricity storage fast, dense and cheap enough to put them on the road.

Putting that technology into the electric grid and combining it with renewables will enable dirt cheap, limitless energy, which will contribute in a major way towards solving all the other problems OP enumerated.

Agreed.

Consider using the term "low-carbon energy" in place of "renewable energy". We want to promote the right stuff. Biofuel is considered renewable but is high carbon. Nuclear fusion would be low carbon but not considered renewable. The difference matters hugely for future energy policy.

Biofuel is carbon-neutral because the carbon comes from the atmosphere. It's fine to burn it because its emissions have already been bought and paid for in its creaion. The problem with carbon is digging it up, in an open cycle.

Renewable is a more strict term than carbon-neutral, it's true, but all "renewables" are by definition closed-loop and hence carbon-neutral.

This is a common but incorrect assumption. Biofuels are very far from carbon neutral. Renewable is in no way restricted to the desirable.

As an extreme case in point, wood in particular is a horrifying energy source due to health detriment from particulates.

Have a look at some data:

https://partofthething.com/thoughts/wp-content/uploads/ipcc-...

Source: Schlomer S., et.al., 2014: Annex III: Technology-specific cost and performance parameters. In: Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

Setting aside other issues with it like particulate emission, how can it be anything other than carbon neutral? Where could the surplus carbon possibly come from?

When biofuels are valuable, people clear forests to make biofuel. The carbon payback period can be up to 1000 years. It's called indirect land use change [1,2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILUC

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofuel#Greenhouse_gas_emissio...

Okay, but the problem we're trying to solve is the carbon being in the atmosphere, so even biofuel is objectively far worse than, say, solar.

Making the biofuel takes exactly as much carbon out of the atmosphere as it releases when burned, so no it is not far worse from a global warming perspective.

While I agree that technically, fusion is not renewable, I feel like it might as well be? Working fusion reactors make it economical to siphon hydrogen fuel from Jupiter and such. Did you mean fission?

I prefer “sustainable”, as in “this technology can be used as some scale for X years without causing major problems”.

High-burnup nuclear power, under reasonable assumptions, is sustainable for hundreds of thousands of years. Fusion is presumably sustainable as long as the Earth exists, as are solar and wind. Coal is not sustainable at all.

Right on. Breeder fission reactors can power civilization for at least tens of millions of years, probably billions, thanks to seawater uranium extraction and renewal through plate tectonics.

Well, technically, nothing's really renewable. Limited but massive nuclear fusion in the sun is indirectly powering solar PV and wind and hydro for 4-10 billion more years. Limited nuclear alpha decay of Uranium inside Earth powers geothermal. The limited Earth-Moon gravitational system powers tidal.

So I think it's fair to actually consider nuclear fusion and nuclear fission in breeder reactors both to be renewable. B. Cohen said the same about breeder fission reactors in the 1980s [1].

Uranium in seawater can be extracted at 10x world energy scale for billions of years. It replenishes continuously through crustal erosion and plate tectonics. Sounds pretty renewable.

But according to policies we're writing today, the term renewable does not include fusion or fission in breeders. I consider this problematic. Thus I think we all should prefer either "sustainable energy" or "low-carbon energy".

[1] http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...

Also, the article doesn't explore whether electric cars could be manufactured in a more friendly way.

If you dump BEVs on a grid that's transitioning towards renewables, you'll delay that transition. It doesn't make sense to account for the emissions as being the average of the grid, because you're delaying shutting down your dirtiest power to deal with the marginal load.

BEVs are clearly the future, and offer opportunities for distributed storage and demand dispatch that will help us keep the grid stable even with high renewable mixes. They're going to be great in the future, and for that we need to build up a market for them. That's where the real difference will come from.

Doesn't that contradict itself? Increased storage capacity delaying the transition to renewables?

When storage at scale is the hard part and electric car batteries can power a house for a few days? Not to mention that the transportation sector is a part of the grid fundamentally. Even if it interferes with one metric it is still better overall which makes the complaint seem like it misses the point.

In the short term, it means you're just keeping fossil fuel power plants online for longer (if you're in the process of transitioning). You stop burning oil in your car though, and it's still a win, though in terms of ROI not an amazing one.

In the long term, once you're generating so much renewable energy that it's causing instability in the grid and you can't pump more in, BEVs are a probably an essential component of handling that.

Certain grids at certain times have already reached this point (the SA battery being a great example of where BEVs could have helped), but most are many years away from it, depending on how the price of solar trends.

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 how urgent the crisis is.

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

>There are unfortunately still many, many people, who—even if they accept that human caused climate change is real—do not appreciate how urgent the crisis is.

I am one of these people. How urgent is it? Between the denials and exaggerations, I really can't tell.

I'm also one of those people. I mean, the only meaningful change we could make in a couple years would involve mass depopulation of the planet- anything else is on the order of decades.

"But overall, they are too little too late. An electric car is still a car, and permeates our car-dependency the same as any other car." .... Well yeah..., till Startrek's teleportation is invented.

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.

A "way of life" isn't something you flip a switch on, it's a conglomeration of factors which might or might not be made to change. I think that's the parent poster's point.

I actually strove to be charitable in my interpretation. Sure, his heart may be in the right place, but his framing is not. And I feel like he's doing more to invite analysis paralysis than actually help people make decisions.

  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

Who is doing that?

I'm genuinely asking for sources because I don't know of anyone that is pushing electric cars as the solution. Not Tesla, nor people who buy Teslas, nor people who buy electric cars.

I want sources because all I can do is speak about the individuals I've come across. In my life, some of the people that have bought electric vehicles also:

- Advocate in local government for bike lane buildout in their cities.

- Adopt vegetarian or vegan diets.

- Ask their employers to buy carbon offsets for any work-related flights.

- Push schools, hospitals, governments, apartment complexes, etc. to transition what they can to solar or wind energy. (My brother's HS didn't have solar panels, now they have solar+batteries providing some X% of their energy needs.)

The list goes on.

Yes, I agree with the author, electric vehicles aren't the full solution. No, I don't agree that they're a talisman of false hope. That's pretty strong, inflammatory wording. And no, I don't agree with the author's decision to set his article in a negative framing. To me, that does more to invite analysis paralysis than a positive framing would.

If he (or anyone) knows a better route, then please offer CTA for a program where individuals can pay $X for a guaranteed Y benefit towards addressing climate change. Electric vehicles offer exactly that CTA. Why didn't the author?

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.

So whats the alternative? Do nothing at all?

If you have $100k left to pay on your mortgage, and somebody offers you $5k towards the mortgage are you going to tell them they're offering you a "false hope because you'd still have $95k left to pay"?

EDIT: This is also known as the "nirvana fallacy": because the solution is not perfect - that means it is worthless.

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

No, the alternative is to figure out how to change the very fundamental levers of the system in a way that enables change on a scale that matters. The individual consumption lens is going to accomplish nothing.

If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect.

Or if we eliminate meat consumption altogether rather than promising people magic lab meat every five years, that would have an effect. Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot.

But buying a tesla or a linen bag at the supermarket or paying 50 cents for a biodegradable cup at starbucks isn't saving the planet, it's the modern version of paying the catholic church for absolution.

And in the long and infamous history of bad references to fallacies, this isn't one either. If you need to go from 100 to 10 and you're spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have.

So, while you sit there waiting for the perfect solution (which is completely unrealistic) people actively working on real solutions.

> spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have.

Of course those numbers are just made up but they are also very far from reality. Solutions to climate change have actually been ranked in terms of total cost and total amount of CO2 reductions and electric cars come in at the 26th most cost-effective solution to climate change:

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/transport/electric-vehicl...

I really don't know why climate change seems to inspire so many people's inner contrarian where they just want to deride any attempt at preventing it because they haven't solved the whole thing in one go. There is no perfect solution, we are not going to fundamentally transform the world to a car-less society, or eliminate meat consumption.

Its like if you buy an electric car, somebody tells you "BUT you still fly!".

If you stop flying, somebody tells you "BUT you still eat meat!".

If you stop eating meat somebody tells you "BUT you still heat your home with gas!"

If you switch to electric heating based of clean energy sources somebody tells you "BUT you still buy avacados imported from across the world!"

It never ends.

Do you know what the #1, most significant thing any of us can do to reduce climate change? Have one fewer child.

Nothing else even comes close. It’s a simple fact. It’s easy to do. But nobody wants to do that.

It’s far less painful to pretend that we can keep the Titanic from sinking by making sure we sip our boat drinks from metal straws.

The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consumption problem, but predictably, a group of technology people want desperately to believe that if we just make the stuff we’re consuming better — with technology! — we’re helping.

To this end, it’s worth pointing out that the only item on that list that relates to family size is midway down, where it talks about family planning for the third world...something other people can do, so that you don’t have to change your life.

Someone should go through the comments and collect together all the "perfect" solutions.

If we let the "ban cars" and the "ban children" folk fight it out then that frees up time for the "pragmatically improve things along many different dimensions, many of which would be beneficial even if we totally ignored climate change" folk to get on with things.

You can deny it all you like, but it’s true [1] and you’re just illustrating the point: nobody wants to do the things that actually matter, because those things are painful (not incidentally, #2 is “sell your car”).

It’s far easier to mock the people who tell you the truth than it is to make substantial changes.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...

Or those things will just scare people into doing nothing because it's so overwhelming and hopeless to be so uncompromisingly perfectionist about it.

Whereas making a car or a plane trip or a burger or a child x% more expensive will move us in the right direction and even that will be resisted to a crazy degree.

What is so “scary” here? It’s literally the easiest thing you can possibly do. It’s the default option.

“You know how you were gonna have a second kid? Here’s a thought: consider using the time and money you’d spend on that to do something else. Like retire early.”

If we can’t convince people not to do an expensive, time-consuming, painful thing in order to help stop global warming, we really do have problems.

You know what would be EVEN more effective at fighting climate change than not having children? Committing suicide.

But people don't want to listen to the harsh truths. They would rather consume their way out of the problem with electric cars, education for third world countries, reforestation, solar power and other false hopes.

> You know what would be EVEN more effective at fighting climate change than not having children? Committing suicide.

I'm sorry but I think this crosses the line. I don't want to impose my morality on you but in my opinion me saying "most people should not have children" is not the same as basically telling people to kill themselves.

I understand that I am in the minority when I say this I think not conceiving children is not the same as telling people to kill themselves. I think people do not have a fundamental right to reproduction at the same level as they have the right to be left alive (which I think comes higher).

I'd much rather see most people not have children rather than they kill themselves.

Exactly. This harsh reaction to what should be an obvious statement of fact underscores the ridiculousness of the conversation, and the point of the original post.

It’s not surprising at all (as I said, people don’t want to actually change their lives), but it does become a self-satire.

I'm not equating killing yourself with not having children. Of course they are not the same. I'm simply reflecting irq11's logic back at him: if the only measure by which you judge a solution is how much CO2 emissions are reduced then killing yourself is the best solution.

irq11 does not consider the costs of implementing a world-wide child reduction policy. A combination of solutions including education, birth control, electric cars, reducing flying, solar energy etc. is FAR more realistic than the "no kids, no cars" approach. He complains about harsh reactions but he is the one who started this off from a very antagonistic perspective that everybody is just a mindless consumer while he is the arbiter of harsh truths that people are too weak-minded to admit to.

Well that's technically what will happen when the forcing function of Earth's climate reaches a limit. I suppose it will be Earth killing us rather than us killing ourselves at that point though. We'll see if we get there with our current methods or not, hope electric cars work!

In that case you can thank the educated women of the world who are forgoing having children in all the countries where the fertility rate is already below replacement.

They've probably done more to combat global warming than most "ban cars/meat/flying" fanatics.

> To this end, it’s worth pointing out that the only item on that list that relates to family size is midway down, where it talks about family planning for the third world

"Educating Girls" and "Family Planning" are ranked 6th and 7th on the list (out of 80). So I don't know why you are saying that its midway down the list?

>Do you know what the #1, most significant thing any of us can do to reduce climate change? Have one fewer child. Nothing else even comes close. But nobody wants to do that.

What the heck are you talking about? Every industrialized nation now has negative population growth if you ignore immigration. People are having fewer children, and frequently, none.

It's not just the industrialized nations. It takes about two generations for a country to drop from a high birth rate to a birth rate of less than two (replacement, more or less). All but a handful of impoverished, war-torn countries in Africa and the Middle East are deep into this cycle or through it already.

So? I’m not talking about “industrialized nations”. I’m talking about you, personally.

If you elect to have one fewer child, you can drive a car everywhere and fly first class for vacation and eat a big steak every week of your life, and you’ll still be greener than your neighbor with the solar panels and the Tesla. Doesn’t matter what birth rates are in the industrialized world.

Another way of saying it is that you believe by not having kids, you can ethically consume the energy that your offspring (and their offspring) would have consumed.

No, not at all. I don’t believe that; the point is that the magnitude of the impact is so dramatically greater that all of this other stuff is rounding error.

Drive a Tesla and put solar panels on your house and eat vegan and shop local at the co-op. Knock yourself out. But the single guy next door with no kids who drives a muscle car and eats big red steaks every day is still doing more for global warming than you are. It’s not even a question.

Wrong.

The primary cause of population growth now isn't the birth rate, but rather life expectancy. People are living 20+ years longer than before.

If you take your argument to its logical conclusion, the #1 most significant thing you can do to reduce climate change is suicide. And the most significant thing a nation can do is genocide.

> Nothing else even comes close.

According to this logic the real number one thing you could do is to kill yourself, but it fails for exactly the same reason.

You're just measuring the impact and not the cost. Doing one thing with a large impact and an even larger cost is worse than doing three things whose total impact is more and total cost is less than that of the one thing. Especially since in this context they stack -- if you buy an electric car and switch to electric heat and install solar panels on your roof, but so too do your spouse and three kids, that's going to have more impact than having two kids while you're all driving ICE cars and getting heat from fuel oil and electricity from coal, since the impact of each measure is multiplied by each of the five people in your family.

On top of that, you're not considering the economic and political implications. If there are fewer children then there will be fewer working people per retiree. That means a resource crunch, which is exactly the sort of thing that will prevent people from being able to afford sustainable alternatives that may cost a little bit more, and then you've doomed us all.

Only if you equate “having fewer children” to “killing yourself”, which is transparently incorrect, not to mention tasteless.

However, the responses to this simple fact continue to be enlightening: people would rather commit all sorts of tortured fallacies of reasoning than change their lifestyles in any meaningful way.

> Only if you equate “having fewer children” to “killing yourself”, which is transparently incorrect, not to mention tasteless.

It's the same result. You're just choosing it for yourself instead of your parents having chosen for you, which only seems fair -- I know I'd rather be the one to choose for myself. But the point is that the choice, in either case, is not worth the cost when there are better alternatives.

If we were at the point that population reduction was the only possible solution then we would be soliciting volunteers, but it's not.

> However, the responses to this simple fact continue to be enlightening: people would rather commit all sorts of tortured fallacies of reasoning than change their lifestyles in any meaningful way.

Why would anybody want to do that when it isn't necessary? You can't just buy an electric car and call it done, but it's one among a collection of things you can do that sum together to an actual solution that doesn't require people to abandon their standard of living.

Killing a living, breathing person is nowhere near choosing to not make a new one, morally, practically, legally or in any other sense.

Edit: choosing not to have children (and I don't think that's a reasonable way to expect people to try and address climate change) is not population reduction. It's population control, if you like. You are making sure that the population doesn't keep increasing. Killing people on the other hand is population reduction. They're really not the same thing at all.

> Killing a living, breathing person is nowhere near choosing to not make a new one, morally, practically, legally or in any other sense.

I don't think anybody wants to have the abortion debate right now, so let's not.

> choosing not to have children (and I don't think that's a reasonable way to expect people to try and address climate change) is not population reduction. It's population control, if you like.

The fertility rate is already below the population replacement rate in developed countries, so having fewer children than the current baseline is a (further) population reduction.

> Have one fewer child. (is the best way to reduce climate change) But nobody wants to do that.

I mean, a small-but-growing number of young adults are already doing exactly that.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/some-millennials-climat...

https://qz.com/1590642/these-millennials-are-going-on-birth-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-americans-worry-...

> The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consumption problem,

I don't think that's true. People are trying to find better ways to solve the minimum amount of consumption they need to continue to exist. That's not the same thing as what you've described, that's not "consuming our way out".

People aren't buying EVs because they want to vacation all the time and/or take fun extra road trips 24/7. It's mainly about "I have to be able to get to Work/School/Home in a quick and safe manner, because capitalism demands it for my survival. How can I emit as little CO2 into the air as possible, while still meeting the requirements a capitalist nation demands of me. Which of these solutions can I afford?"

> it talks about family planning for the third world...something other people can do, so that you don’t have to change your life.

Because many "first world" nation birthrates are already abstaining pretty significantly. In the US specifically, birthrates have fallen to all-time record lows - https://money.cnn.com/2013/09/06/news/economy/birth-rate-low...

> So, while you sit there waiting for the perfect solution (which is completely unrealistic) people actively working on real solutions.

The author acknowledges electric cars are a modest improvement.

And who is working on the better solution?

Better question is who can work on the better solution?

The article claims it is a problem of consumption, but yet also it's a systemic problem. You can't fix systemic problems from consumption choices, and blaming individual consumers for systemic problems misses the point entirely of: a) who is to blame, and b) who could fix it.

> So, while you sit there waiting for the perfect solution (which is completely unrealistic) people actively working on real solutions.

This isn't true. No one is arguing we should sit around and wait for a perfect solution, and that's a really dishonest framing of this article.

The argument is that electric cars are over-weighted as a solution, and it's one I see all the time. Not only that, but it directly conflicts with other goals. In the US, cities and states are still investing in expanding highway and car-based infrastructure at a time when we desperately need to be moving away from car-centric cities. Infrastructure is expensive and time-consuming to build, so putting resources into car-centric infrastructure means that a) we will be stuck with car-centric cities for a long time, and b) there will be less money for non-car infrastructure. If instead, we stopped building new car infrastructure and poured our efforts into non-car infrastructure, we'd be much better off.

First, A lot of people buy Teslas because of looks and performance, or a linen bag because of ocean pollution. It may not reflect a desire to address climate change.

Second, we can do both moonshots and paper straws. Why not encourage people finally pulling their head out of the sand?

Because, as indicated, it 'buys absolution' for the individual. That means they don't have to do anything else to feel they are contributing. Which shoots the moonshot in the foot.

You're assuming that they're indeed not doing anything else. I strongly doubt that's an accurate assumption.

And I'm completely sure its exactly what's happening. In 99% of the people.

Based on what?

Same thing yellowapple based their baseless assumption on.

So you're basing it on nothing?

Which was exactly my point. Neither of us have any way to know beyond anecdotal evidence. Your claim is exactly as baseless as mine.

That's a lazy, cynical argument. The core of conservatism is "People are awful". What if people aren't awful?

No they just have to be emotionally insecure, and busy. It isn't 'awful' to ignore 99% of the issue-of-the-day demands on our caring. Its practical.

Surely we need all of the above, we need to encourage public transport and EVs. Vegetarianism and lab meat. Carbon capture and carbon reduction.

People are different, your idea of the best tradeoff and how to spend your carbon budget is likely to be different to mine, neither budget is more right or wrong so why not allow both.

>If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit

While these are the “right” solutions, they occur over decades. Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Even bus lines. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work.

You can buy a Tesla or a Leaf or an e-Golf and have significant personal emission reductions today.

>Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work.

That's a uniquely American problem. Maybe America should fix itself so it doesn't take so long to build infrastructure.

Well unfortunately, fixing America will take far more time and effort than even outright abolishing ICEs and transitioning every automobile-driving American to electric vehicles (let alone let the market do its thing, given that the advantages of ICE relative to electric are rapidly evaporating).

So, you know, why not push for the latter in the meantime while we work toward the former?

I'm not even talking about abolishing ICEs or anything like that. I'm just talking about fixing whatever political problems cause America to take literally decades to build a single bridge or other infrastructure, when other industrialized nations get it done in a small fraction of the time and cost.

That's not a 'uniquely American problem' at all. e.g. Berlin's Brandenburg airport, UK's HS2, third Heathrow runway, etc. Infrasturcture projects lag in almost all developed countries for various political reasons.

You're cherry-picking counter-examples. No developed country, overall, has the infrastructural problems that America has. America just canceled its high-speed rail in California, yet Japan is already working on a maglev train scheduled for completion in 2027, and China already has one between Beijing and Shanghai. Japan's Shinkansen has been operating since the 1960s, has had zero accidents in all that time, and has an average delay of less than a minute. Germany and France also have very impressive high-speed train systems. Meanwhile, all the US has is the Acela, which is a joke.

You only mentioned airports in your examples. America can't even build rail lines that go to airports!

I did mention UK's HS2, so not all airports.

Speaking of cherry picking, I think that referring to high-speed passenger train alone is an example thereof, especially as it ignores the large and successful American fright train infrastructure. California made the mistake of being too ambitious, a more modest plan from the start would have worked.

Freight trains are useless for passengers, and worse, Amtrak actually leases tracks from the freight companies and their trains are lower priority than the freight trains, which is why Amtrak schedules are so bad. Only a really screwed-up country would have a system like that.

As for California, it's just CA, it's the whole country. Where's the high-speed rail in the northeast, where they have the highest density of people who would use such a system? It doesn't exist (and again, no, the Acela doesn't count). What about between Seattle and Portland? Why isn't the federal government involved, since this should be an interstate issue? This whole country is just a fucking disaster when it comes to public infrastructure.

Yes, you are in agreement with the author — do both.

Anyone who has been to Tokyo knows that you can survive without a car.

I think that misses the overall point: OP is saying the personal emission reductions themselves don't matter AND providing this as absolution kills off the available attention spans that should go towards real solutions.

It is akin to saying 'I recycle my meagre household waste, I am doing my best!' while that's addressing probably 1% of the actual problem (most recycling ends up in garbage and corporations are bigger polluters than individual consumers).

If I am to put words into OPs mouth, we should be pushing for real changes at a society level. This would mean a bigger and more intrusive governance which will come in the form of things like no meat, 2 children per family, all electric cars, no 2 day shipping and so on. I am sure there one in there that will hurt everyone, which is where people should be willing to put their energy into.

FWIW at a macro level, I do see the point. I can put money on the fact that people won't elect or push for societal changes that actually affects them though. These are the reasons why giant systems pretty much never completely overhaul themselves: They might course correct a little, but unless aliens invade or a giant conflict happens - we are kinda set. (Do you see my cynical side yet :)

OK, you changed my mind. I still think buying an electric car is better than doing nothing, but I also see the emphasis on individual consumer decisions as a serious distraction.

Sure, electric cars and other consumer decisions could maybe make a 10% contribution in solving the problem, but these individualist approaches are getting the bulk of the attention.

I feel there should be a name for this phenomenon: When the solution that has a ~10% effect gets ~99% of the attention, whereas solutions that solve ~90% of the problem get ~1% of the attention.

It's like a Pareto law of inversion of contribution versus attention.

It should go without saying that this effect is everywhere in technology, especially software development. You're going to encounter it today at work.

If I understand the incremental benifit presented in the article correctly, upgrading to an ev before the useful life of your fuel vehicle is over could increase emissions, as would be buying a a ev as a secondary vehicle just used for commuting

> If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect.

This isn't necessarily true. Depending on how you put "20 drivers onto a bus" in a dense rapid urbanization, you are often generating more CO2 than the drivers were previously. Building an entire nations worth of new train lines generates a lot of extra CO2. "Rapidly urbanizing" everyone generates a ton of extra CO2 (and will instantly price out nearly all of the residents you want to 'urbanize', something EVs never do)

In the US, most EV drivers with a renewable energy source are already emitting less CO2 per trip than the equivalent bus ride would emit (even after factoring in per-rider numbers for the bus). Depending on your area, the "largely car free" option is semi-regularly worse for the environment once an EV is factored in.

> Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot.

We already are? https://carbonengineering.com/ and https://www.climeworks.com/

That doesn't discount the work people are doing on EVs. Its still usually better to prevent emissions than to attempt to recapture them later.

And companies like Tesla not only don't accomplish anything to reduce car dependency, they (or at least their principals) are actively working to maintain or possibly even extend car dependency (cf. the Boring Company with its mission to direct even more transportation funding to individual transportation).

>> Or if we eliminate meat consumption altogether rather than promising people magic lab meat every five years, that would have an effect.

With this I don't agree. People need meat for a healthy diet. Completely eliminating meat is just as fantastical as magical lab meat and indeed requires some magical unicorn technological solution (like giving everyone B12 supplements or whatnot).

Reducing meat consumption, of course is another matter. However, we are going to have to live with at least some greenhous gas emissions and the ones from the animals we farm for their meat are the ones we will be forced to keep until last.

Because, ultimately, we need to eat meat, but we don't need to drive cars, fly in planes, have each our personal communications device, etc etc.

That’s not what the original author of the article is claiming from how I read it.

He’s claiming that sure, take the 5k, but don’t let that fool you into believing you’re done. You still have to plan on finding the other 95k.

Sure but who is denying that you don't need to pay the other 95k? The article is arguing against a straw man. Nobody is saying that electric cars will be the end-all solution to climate change. Literally no one.

I'm seeing a few comments in this thread that come very close to saying just that.

He’s claiming that sure, take the 5k, but don’t let that fool you into believing you’re done. You still have to plan on finding the other 95k.

Specifically, from reading through the rest of the site, the author seems to be arguing that we need to give up technology and go back to farming with our neighbors. Oh and no entertainment either, just working on sustaining your existence.

Edit: Someone downvoted me, but in another article one of the things the author states we must do is quit any job where you are paid and start working locally to help your community directly. Which means just about anyone reading Hacker News needs to leave their job right this moment.

> So whats the alternative? Do nothing at all?

Change marketing in a way that muscle cars are uncool much the way smoking is uncool these days.

This would pave the way for SEVs which are the best solution to start the change but are comparativelly weak in power.

> 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.

To complete your metaphor and make it more accurate: we don't know exactly how far away the wall is. Reducing acceleration (emissions) is good unambiguously. If we reduce them fast enough, maybe our seatbelt and airbags will make the crash survivable.

> Our ecosystem doesn't care whether we tried really hard and if we were really good citizens or whether we did nothing

Yes, it absolutely does "care". It's not a black and white issue. Each fractional degree more of temperature increase causes dramatically more serious change to the environment. Every possible reduction is valuable.

The real problem, as the author tangentially points out, is our over-reliance on cars to move us around. That’s due to the intentional choices that we have all made. If you look at the structure of suburban areas of cities in the US, you’ll immediately see that they are entirely designed the assumption of the existence of a personal car for YOU. You simply cannot get around without one.

A choice that I’m grappling with personally (as someone who lives in the suburbs in the US and owns two Teslas) is that I should really move somewhere more sustainable, i.e., more density so that I can get rid of my cars. That’s more difficult given family needs etc. If I didn’t have to factor others’ needs, I would have done this already.

This is the point that I think the author is trying to make. Changes at the margin aren’t addressing the real problem - they’re treating the symptom, not the disease.

>A choice that I’m grappling with personally (as someone who lives in the suburbs in the US and owns two Teslas) is that I should really move somewhere more sustainable, i.e., more density so that I can get rid of my cars. That’s more difficult given family needs etc. If I didn’t have to factor others’ needs, I would have done this already.

This is exactly what I'm planning to do. However, for most Americans, it isn't a realistic choice, because it means you have to emigrate from America. There's almost no place in this country where you can live without a car.

I haven’t ruled out emigrating from America either. I follow modacitylife[1] on Twitter, and love the cycling centric culture in that small city just outside of The Hague.

I like the design of that city more than, say Manhattan, which is another candidate.

[1] https://twitter.com/modacitylife

> There's almost no place in this country where you can live without a car.

There's almost no place in this country -that is affordable- where you can live without a car.

That's the real problem. Sure - there's NY or SF, which for the most part have the infrastructure to support most people's non-car needs. But only the very few can afford to live in either place. I know I couldn't afford it, unless I somehow could land a FAANG job (not likely at my age and education level). I can't even afford to live in the downtown area of the city I currently live "in" (Phoenix) - prices there have skyrocketed, mainly due to certain infrastructure transportation improvements and other things making downtown "the cool place" to live at (and conversely pushing out the artists and such who can't afford to live there any longer). Expensive loft apartments, existing urban housing in the historic parts (pricing gone thru the roof on those). It's crazy. So - out in the "suburbs" I stay (which isn't really the real suburbs any longer, since I'm in an older area that used to be "the edge" but no longer).

> The real problem, as the author tangentially points out, is our over-reliance on cars to move us around.

And the author fails to explain why (in the context of climate change) that's actually a problem. Suburban areas have a disproportionate carbon footprint specifically because of ICE-powered cars being required to go anywhere; if those ICE cars become electric cars, and that electricity comes from solar/wind/nuclear/hydro/geothermal/etc., then... where, exactly, is the carbon footprint?

Hell, at that point the suburban areas could actually be net carbon sinks, given there's more room for big carbon-devouring trees in between single-family/duplex/quadruplex homes than there typically is between skyscrapers packed as tightly as possible (as is the norm in even small cities, let alone large ones).

> And the author fails to explain why (in the context of climate change) that's actually a problem ... if those ICE cars become electric cars, and that electricity comes from solar/wind/nuclear/hydro/geothermal/etc., then... where, exactly, is the carbon footprint?

The author very specifically points that out:

> ...our cars primarily exist to connect things, things that require immense extraction and fossil fuel energy to build, run and maintain: roads buildings factories shopping centres suburbs cities airports and so on. It is not just the car itself that is unsustainable; it is our entire way of life and the system that underpins it.

Okay, and those things don't go away - nor do we stop building them - if we use buses or trains or planes or boats or teleportation pads instead. What about cars, specifically, contributes to this where other modes of transportation do not?

I can almost understand this for roads (but buses still need those, too!). Literally everything else is entirely orthogonal to cars or the lack thereof; abolishing cars entirely v. switching to electric-only would have zero impact there.

Another aspect of suburban living that I don't like at all is how it isolates people from each other. I've made the mistake of living in a subdivision with lot sizes > 0.5 acres. Because of the low density, my kids can't have spontaneous interactions with friends that I enjoyed while younger, i.e., walk / cycle to their houses to hang out. Everything becomes scheduled and everything requires a car to shuttle the kids around to their activities.

I've become convinced that density really is the answer to building a more humane way of living.

> I've become convinced that density really is the answer to building a more humane way of living.

Counterpoint?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

Having grown up in a rural area, the openness and freedom/room to play outdoors was - IMO - well worth the inconvenience of things being more spread out (not that this was ever that big of a problem; the main pain point was more the lack of sidewalks and bike lanes, but that's relatively easy to fix).

This was in an area where (IIRC) the mandated minimum lot size was 1 acre, and the vast majority of properties were 5+ (I lived on 8).

> Hell, at that point the suburban areas could actually be net carbon sinks, given there's more room for big carbon-devouring trees in between single-family/duplex/quadruplex homes than there typically is between skyscrapers packed as tightly as possible (as is the norm in even small cities, let alone large ones).

This is absurd. If people move away from the suburbs, the trees will still be there, and more if we get into reforestation. Building a suburb generally involves cutting down trees. Humans living in a smaller area of the planet leaves more room for trees.

> Building a suburb generally involves cutting down trees.

Only for cities/suburbs that exist in forested areas. This would exclude most desert and prairie ecosystems (for example).

> Humans living in a smaller area of the planet leaves more room for trees.

Sure, mathematically-speaking, and planet-wide. On a more local scale, though, this is not necessarily the case.

There's also the consideration for relative density of CO₂ sources v. sinks. I don't have any actual data here, so feel free to ignore this, but my hypothesis is that urban areas would have significantly higher CO₂ densities than suburban areas (which would in turn have significantly higher densities than rural areas, and in turn wilderness areas), and this high-density CO₂ would not readily/easily/immediately disperse / would be more difficult for surrounding carbon-sink areas (like wilderness and - I'd argue - potentially suburban areas) to even receive, let alone absorb. You thus end up with big lingering blobs of CO₂, continuously fueled by human occupation, and unable to disperse. Spreading out humans would better spread that CO₂ sequestration load, thus allowing better efficiencies.

There is an alternative. Lobby your city to relax zoning. Let someone replace one of the homes in your subdivision with a coffee shop/convenience store/pizza parlor. Things like that.

Your current built environment isn't perfect for perfectly sustainable living, but allowing it to grow organically in that direction is far more sustainable than abandoning it and building new cities.

I agree. Although I wasn't advocating building a new city; rather just moving to a city that already has the infrastructure in place.

I struggle with this as moving is most definitely giving up on my current "community" and lobbying would most definitely push me out of my comfort zone. But perhaps that's a good thing :)

"If you drive towards a wall and you're accelerating and all you're doing is slowing the rate of acceleration"

I don't like your metaphor. Individually this may be enough to slow down for that tight hair pin. As a society each additional electric car is someone putting the brakes on some massive train, others may still be mashing the accelerator, but eventually the balance will tip.

Yes. Plus we're talking an entire society all changing everything they do all at once. Think about how that's going to be achieved when even a single individual can't change their life all at once.

Think about how long has it taken to get people to stop smoking. True, even now new young people continue to start up smoking. But overall, it is a massive improvement over the situation as it was 50 years ago. One person at a time, but coordinated from the top. This I think is how climate change will be solved. Very slowly, and it will never be completely eradicated.

> 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,

That (almost-certainly-incorrectly) assumes that conventional engines will continue to grow in use forever despite electric vehicles continuing to decrease in price and increase in performance/versatility/diversity. At some point we'll see an inflection point, especially as charging stations continue to proliferate.

That is: just because electric cars ain't dominant marketshare-wise now doesn't mean they'll never be.

I can't imagine the ICE ever going completely away, simply because there are certain uses of it, especially in 1st world developed countries, where electric probably won't ever be able to substitute for it.

It basically comes down to energy density. Right now, fossil fuels are the most energy dense for their weight. They are portable enough, along with the engine, to make for machines which are very powerful, yet still small enough for practical purposes.

For instance, you'll likely not ever see - barring some extremely major advance in battery technology - something like a Bobcat Skid-steer loader using an all-electric drive system. The problem isn't the motors - it's the battery; you can't make one small enough with the same energy density as the diesel or gasoline those machines currently use.

That's merely one example, I can think of more, but I won't. The only way around any of this would be to change (fairly radically) how certain tasks are accomplished; For instance, if instead of such a machine with a single operator, you instead had a ton of smaller robotic machines digging or whatnot, all in some kind of conga line or bucket-brigade type system - and let it work overnight or be slower in some other manner - the same amount of work could potentially be done and stay all-electric. But - somebody will be losing a job in such a scenario...

> For instance, you'll likely not ever see - barring some extremely major advance in battery technology - something like a Bobcat Skid-steer loader using an all-electric drive system.

These do exist, though, albeit in smaller form factors: http://www.sherpaminiloaders.com/eng/models/sherpa-100-eco/

Industrial applications like this tend to be more amenable to electric-only vehicles (even if those vehicles ultimately get their power from ICE generators on the job site) thanks to there being far less of a need to drive long distances on a single charge (and thus never having to be very far from a charger). Electric forklifts are pretty common, on that note.

----

But yes, I fully expect ICE vehicles will continue to exist for various specialized applications (and also because there are a lot of them driving around right now). They just don't need to be anywhere near the majority of vehicles in operation.

Cars are around half of oil consumption. They are a huge part of the transportation industry in terms of CO2 emitted. They are also the most rapidly growing part.

"real reduction in emissions" ...real problem is : Is your electricity 'clean' ?

In France for sure : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

in China I don't think so : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China ...however local pollution is zero so that's huge benefit for large cities of course.

The really irritating thing about the 'solve it all at once' argument is that electric cars, in a very real way, are the keystone that lets the entire arch support itself. Renewable energy sources are already the cheapest ways of generating electricity at certain times, the trouble is that those aren't always when the electricity is needed. Energy storage makes investment in renewables much more profitable. The problem is, energy storage is itself expensive, much too expensive to invest in for most situations.

By attaching wheels and motors, electric cars make people pay more for batteries than they ever would otherwise be willing to spend on energy storage.

The author talks about a lot more than the cost of energy to power the car. For one, there is the cost in energy of building and maintaining the roads.

The author is kinda talking about civilization. And no, expecting humans to give up much on that front won't save the planet.

We have to improve on a lot of fronts and the attention argument is one of the better ones... finding better ways to achieve the same is worthy pursuit. Sailing across the ocean to save on emissions worthy action for some young female climate activist, but certainly not something many of us would be willing to do.

The interesting thing about electric cars is that many of them sorry scheduled charging (my charging station also supports remote configuration of when I can charge). If my electric provider was willing (and able) to control when I could charge my car, they could use the the batteries to level out peaks in production to a degree.

Off peak charging already exists today, however there aren't enough electric cars to make utilities heavily incentivise of peak charging solutions (it would only make sense for me to do so if my car was fully electric and not a hybrid due to initial installation costs)

Much easier would be for the utility to transmit the current price of power and have the car or charger charge the car when the price is below a certain threshold.

The problem is that the best time to charge a car is immediately after it has been used, so it is ready to go the next time. Who wants a half dead car sitting around?

Some cars have a lot of capacity, so in some cases that is like saying who wants a car with only half a tank of gas?

Unfortunately, until there's more infrastructure supporting electric cars, it's much easier to refill your car with gas if it runs low while you're out than recharge it.

The dominant share of vehicle miles are commuting to work. If you work 9-5 and there is a charging port at work, you plug into it when you get there and you're charging during daylight hours. Meanwhile the average commute is 16 miles each way against cars that now have a ~300 mile range, which is plenty of slack for the odd evening use while still not needing to charge outside of work on anything but rare occasions.

I wish I had a charging station at work. My commute is short enough I don't need it fortunately

In the 300 mile range you start to get near the point where the average (mean and median, maybe not mode) commuter can charge once a week on an average work week at a fast charger at the local grocery store for merely an hour or two and still not worry about range. Work charging and home charging are nice to have slow and steady options that make EVs easier than gas, but it's about to the point where if you treat it like "gas" with a once a week fill-up that is increasingly an option if you relax your worries about "range" to the point that gas users are currently relaxed about in keeping their tanks full.

(Range anxiety for ICE will eventually make a huge comeback. Electricity is everywhere, imagine driving a car where you couldn't just plug in anywhere the electric grid is and had to go to "stations" of a scarce mostly single-purpose resource for power. Haha.)

How long does an electric car take to charge, though? That's the convenience factor of ICE vehicles that will be hard to beat, probably. I can fill up my ICE vehicle in a minute or two.

I included that information. A top level CCS or SuperCharger can often fill an electric car to 80% battery in about 30 minutes and to 100% generally somewhere between an hour and two (models will vary, as do the variety of chargers). People easily spend that much time on a grocery trip or a snack/meal (at least) once a week per my hypothetical scenario above. It's "good enough" already for a lot of people today, and again I was primarily arguing today's median/mean case.

That's why I like having a hybrid. My daily commute is entirely electric

That feels like a different implementation of the same idea.

Me? I charge my car when I come home from work. Provided it's charged by morning I don't car when in that time it's charging

"Smart Grid" utilities can even "borrow" electricity from a sitting car's battery when demand/price is high and "repay it with interest" when demand/price is low. Some CCS chargers and car models already support this idea, but it may be a while to see it in practice.

You generally don't need a full charged car at all times of the day: if you and your car both know you'll be at work for the next 8 hours and most likely you only need the 20 miles to get home, and a couple after work errands (plus some range floor for emergencies), there's plenty of leeway in how and when it charges.

Utilities will need to formulate financial incentives to get this done. It should make sense, yet few utilities actually are doing it.

Correct. The capabilities have been added to the CCS car charging standard and some vehicle models support it, but so far as I'm aware no utility has actually yet figured out a plan to use it (much less how much it might potentially rebate/subsidize charging in cases where it would be used).

It's the usual sort of bootstrapping hurdle that a lot of the "user interface" of it probably can't be well developed until there's a general demand for it, and there won't be a general demand for it from the Utility side until there's maybe a larger installed base of vehicles with the capability.

But, the interesting part is still pointing out that plenty of people are already thinking about it, and it is a somewhat exciting part of the equation of how more electric vehicles potentially better balance the electric grid more so than "destabilize" it or hugely increase peak demand. (Because not only are they capable of smartly arranging their charge times to off-peak demand times, but also are giant roving batteries that can themselves act as temporary storage buffers for the grid.)

I think you and other commenters are responding to the "solve it all at once argument" without it being put forward by the article.

The article does not claim that electric cards do not reduce emissions sufficiently to solve the problem of climate change all at once. It claims that electric cars increase emissions and that increasing emissions exacerbates the problem of climate change.

It's not saying that electric cars are only a partial solution. It's saying that they are part of the problem.

I read the article and felt it was kinda thin and conclusory.

I take a bit of issue at his swipe 'if you can afford them'. Since the price is falling fast enough that electric cars should be actually cheaper than gasoline ones within a few years. Which means we might end up with more electric cars than we would gasoline ones. So yeah some of the negative externalies are fixed, CO2 emissions and air pollution. But others are not, traffic fatalities and injuries, traffic congestion, industrial pollution, resource depletion. And low prices may mean more of the latter not less.

> Most people arrive at the decision to purchase an electric vehicle exactly because they are questioning their way of life. Electric vehicles are not a talisman of false hope, they’re a singular step in the right direction.

Oversimplistic view, you have a stake in Tesla or you don't know better. Otherwise you would also discuss the TCO, the total power need to produce e-vehicles, where Lithium is harvested and under what circumstances, that increased electricity demand fuels the discussion about nuclear power plants. And many more points to consider which certainly don't give a 100% conclusive picture in favor of e-mobility.

>His argument distills to: solve it all-at-once, or don’t solve it at all.

I disagree. I think the argument that's being made is rather that switching to electric cars isn't enough, but people focus on it so heavily that people feel as though switching to an electric car is saving the planet. The problem here is that it's not enough and due to how hyped up electric cars are there won't be enough will left to tackle many other problems that affect climate change.

I don't know if I came across properly, so I'll explain it in a different way: humans have a limited amount of attention and will. Switching to electric cars is a useful move to combat climate change, but due to how hyped up electric cars are, it will satisfy many people's urge to do something for the climate. This occupies most of the limited amount of attention and will, thus there isn't enough left over to tackle all the other, bigger, problems.

> switching to electric cars isn't enough

It's not enough it's worse : basically by buying an electric car you're outsourcing your pollution to China and Africa.

Aren't a lot of electric cars (e.g. Tesla, Nissan Leaf) made in the US from batteries made in the US?

Where do rare earth materials contained in the batteries come from ? To the best of my knowledge it comes from Africa and China.

So the problem is the "hype" around electric cars, not the electric car itself.

Nobody said "buy an electric car, and you are done, the planet would be saved". And if some people do believe that, then it is an education issue, not an electric car issue.

A bit tired of people shooting for perfection and berating those who actually try to make a difference, even so slightly.

Maybe a more effective solution would be to ban any fossil fuel powered large ships and planes ("the 15 largest ships in the world emit as much nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxide as the world’s 760 million cars." http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-mo... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...). And yet we all know this is not going to happen anytime soon... and still we would keep getting blog posts saying that electric cars are a problem (of hype or whatever) for the environment.

>Nobody said "buy an electric car, and you are done, the planet would be saved". And if some people do believe that, then it is an education issue, not an electric car issue.

It's irrelevant what people said. What matters is what people believe.

>A bit tired of people shooting for perfection and berating those who actually try to make a difference, even so slightly.

The problem here is that you only have a limited amount of attention from people to spend on trying to improve climate change. If you misspend it, even when your proposed solution helps, you won't deal with the problem.

Imagine you're in a desert with a jug of water. You know the direction you have to go in to get to a city and be saved. You can choose to walk or crawl. If you pick the option to crawl then you're moving in the right direction, but you'll die of thirst before you get there, because you have a limited amount of water. People's attention and will are like that jug of water. You need to make the best of it. Electric cars are great, but people need to understand that that isn't all that needs to be done.

I guess we agree that electric car is not the problem, education is. So, let's the 0.2% of them buy electric cars.

And let's find a way to get rid of all large (fossil fuel powered) ships/planes and coal/gas power plants polluting way more than all cars combined.

All that hair splitting about electric cars is just noise.

Nonono, I think you still misunderstand a bit. Electric cars are good. It is a step in the right direction. The problem is the perception that many people have that gasoline cars are the main problem and switching to electric is what's needed. The argument by the author is against the rhetoric of electric cars, not against electric cars themselves.

All of what you said is what needs to be done (and more), so we should use rhetoric that acknowledges that cars are only a part of the problem.

The bigger problems is industry.

People have plenty of attention for the things they care about. What they don't have is the ability to change much at all about the bigger problems

But all of that is built on the false premise that this is solely and directly a individual level consumption-based problem (which the article ends with, and is wrong about). Most carbon problems are industrial or only indirectly affected by an individual's consumption patterns. In terms of individual consumption habits that make a noticeable difference on the scale of climate change:

- Energy saving appliances (LED lights) [Mostly a checkmark; done]

- Vegetarianism / local, sustainable, slow food [Growing trend]

- Electric vehicle [Current fight]

That's mostly it from an average individual's day to day carbon footprint. After that you might argue over things like flight patterns and cruise ship carbon, but those are less day-to-day and more infrequent and start to get into "nice to have" easily interchangeable work/vacation/models.

The article is correct that there are greater systemic issues to solve. Sure, it would be great to bring back more public transportation, (re-)build better more walkable cities, better deal with the environmental externalities of our many industries, etc. But we aren't going to push the scales on those without collective effort, real political policy decisions, and probably regulation and taxes. We aren't going to correct these things on "many people's urge to do something" at an individual level, and focusing on it heavily isn't what's exhausting or will exhaust individuals from bigger problems, focusing on it only being an individual effort crisis is distracting us from dealing with bigger problems.

This isn't a problem solvable from consumption alone and it is well past time we stopped pretending it is. It's a political problem we keep pretending the markets will solve because the markets own the politicians and that's what they want the politicians to tell the people.

> His argument distills to: solve it all-at-once, or don’t solve it at all.

I read the article and didn't get that impression at all.

I got: electric cars are an improvement, but don't fundamentally solve the problem.

I mean, "the problem" in the author's eyes is capitalism, technology and entertainment. His solution is that we need to get back to subsistence farming as our main way of life.

He also perpetuates what I call abstinence based environmentalism. It won't work for the same reason abstinence based sex ed won't work. You are not going to guilt trip people into being poor.

It's failing hardest in the developing world because do you really expect people in Africa, South America, and Asia to listen to rich Westerners guilt trip them into not doing what those same rich Westerners are doing? "To save the planet we need you to stay poor." The response is a predictable "fuck you."

There are only two possible futures:

1. We develop ways of running our civilization in a more sustainable way. This is a huge multifaceted roll up your sleeves engineering problem. Electric cars are a huge piece because they break a big part of our hard dependence on carbon based energy and free us to substitute other things. Anything that gets hot, blows, flows, or shines can make electricity, while ICE cars only run on petroleum. No, it is not enough, but the way you do things like this is piece by piece.

2. We adapt to climate change and other major environmental problems as they unfold.

Some world where people stop wanting transport and air conditioning and such is as realistic as the one where teens dont have sex.

Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that this is an engineering problem not a moral problem. Environmentalists have treated it as a moral problem for 50 years and this has accomplished nothing at all. It reminds me a lot of the drug war.

Edit #2: I also see a similarity in the human reaction. When you shame teens about sex they still have sex but they hide it. Shame people about industry and they outsource it all to China, in other words hide it.

"abstinence based environmentalism", that right there is a perfect term, thank you!

I read the article's message as follows: electric cars are still cars and cars are always going to be bad for the planet, so stop driving any cars, including electric cars.

So he's not trying to argue for a total solution or no solution. He's arguing that the proposed solution is actually part of the problem, and that it is not a solution because it is part of the problem, not because it is a partial solution.

You, and others in this thread, are saying that electric cars are a small step towards a solution to climate change, even though it is not a complete solution. However, any solution to climate change, partial or complete, needs a reduction to our greenhouse gas emissions and electric cars do not achieve such a reduction (to CO₂ specifically).

That's because having only a few people buy electric cars does not reduce CO₂ emissions given that everyone else keeps buying more and more normal, dirty cars; and having everyone buy electric cars does not reduce CO₂ because then we have enough electric cars that we are still emitting more than we can afford to.

Nobody wants to hear that the only solution is to keep human population levels to something sustainably low. It's more fun to pretend that shiny new tech will save us.

> I’m sorry that the author doesn’t consider a real reduction in emissions a real difference.

Building a new (electric) car also produces emissions. It may be that we produce less emissions overall by continuing to use existing cars.

Alot about our system of roads and cars strikes me as crazy. Most of the vehicles on the road have only one person in them, yet weigh as much as an elephant. Nobody drives under the speed limit, which is typically fast enough to result in hundreds of thousands of fatalities every year anyways. Every neighborhood designed primarily for these idiotically heavy vehicles, that occasionally drive over pets and children who made the mistake of wandering off a footpath. Then there’s the pollution, of course. I can’t imagine many people would accept the way we do things today, if we started from zero and someone proposed it, instead of the situation slow-boiling us over a period of a half century.

The worst part about it IMO is traffic light and stops. In a city, if you can drive around 20mph (25 maybe) uninterrupted, you get in most places very fast, very pleasantly and with fuel savings since you never slow down.

Instead of a smooth flow, you get drivers that do:

    - high accelerations
    - nervous braking
    - idle engine running between 30 - 60 seconds (120 max?)

Pure waste.

Maybe I'm asking for a problem too complex to solve, but a smooth oriented traffic organization would help. Well, that is until fossil fuels are removed from the market.

Difficult for big vehicles, but changing the landscape and focusing more on personal mobility vehicles and a lot can be done (like the elevated roundabouts for bikes on Netherlands)

this is insane..

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elevated+roundabouts+for+bikes+on+...

I've read tons of articles about bikes in netherlands and how they design roundabouts. But never this.

It's a bit too much in terms of landscaping impact but it must be sooo lovely to bike..

Has anyone ever seen calculations of whether leveling out the roads would save significantly in energy? We are slowly getting regenerative technology into cars so we can at least recapture some energy on the way down, but avoiding the use of energy for going up would seem like an even better win. The bonus is the level roads would also benefit older vehicles not equipped to recapture energy.

Most modern roads are far more level than ones made in the past. Though that is because we can easily expend huge amounts of energy in heavy equipment to move said rock and dirt. In general more level roads have a much higher safety factor. Hills and curves tend to increase the accident rate because they require the driver to slow down and re-accelerate more often.

That's annoying and wasteful but hardly the worst part. Murdering children (the rallying cry of Dutch cycle infrastructure was Stop de Kindermoord) and the massive CO2 emissions destroying our climate are the worst part.

> high accelerations

Acceleration does not waste energy (other than speed related things like wind resistance). This is a myth that is perpetuated without merit, but probably because it's typically associated with overall aggressive driving, which implies bad braking habits.

Max efficiency is typically near peak torque for internal combustion engines [0]. For EV's, electric motors are actually most efficient at higher RPMs [1].

Fuel efficiency can be measured by breaking habits alone.

Edit: sources:

[0] https://i.stack.imgur.com/RE4SM.png

[1] https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-fcf541de83bd871b9ba92d...

true, but I'd bet a 100$ that people accelerating too fast do speed too long and brake too much..

I gun the shit out of my Tesla at a green light, but look far ahead and slowly ease to a stop using regen braking only. Regen braking and one pedal driving is a nice incentive to not waste energy with brakes, and as EV's become more popular, I bet driving habits will become more efficient generally across the board.

Just curious, do you have stats on your watts per mile efficiency you can share? How it compares to the EPA estimates?

244 Wh/mi over 17,000 miles in a Model 3 LR. That's really close to the rated 310 miles for the 75 kw battery. The vast majority of my miles are driving 72 mph on the freeway.

you know I was talking about ICE. Electric motors are a lot simpler so wild change in momentum is probably free and as you say you have regen braking..

Try roundabouts. In certain cities, they work really great.

I'm all for them

Not too complex really. The #1 thing is to encourage flexible working so we can work locally more often - shared office spaces (if required) can be a great resource eg. You get to know people who can provide a great painting service etc.

After that, encouraging building energy efficiency so aircon is not needed so often would be beneficial - well designed buildings that promote airflow without heat exchange for instance. Extra insulation and so on.

Promoting more localised towns and cities, with shared waste/water facilities is good - that datacenter heat can drive aircon or hot water for the town.

Lastly, electric cars as you've said, have many problems - care to see how 2 different companies' cars handle parking in a busy car park? ;)

The best transport option might be smartrail (similar to https://openprtspecs.blogspot.com/?m=1 but steel wheel/LIM and faster).

Smartrail and PRT are designed as a point to point separated-grade network carrying on av. 1 person or a pallette of goods. With a hanging rail you don't need heavy batteries, parking for the vehicles, you can run a pod straight into the factory to pickup goods, and large/rich places can pay to have track straight to their door.

You can prefab the rail and as land usage is just poles in the ground it can be rolled out over fields etc quickly. Track is one-way to eliminate junctions. Pods are on-demand ie. No waiting.

Accessibility improves, you can use the top of the rail to generate (solar) power, run highspeed internet cables in the rail to improve comms across a country, and save on distribution center logistics as you're going point to point.

The last mile may possibly be an issue, but forklift drones and bicycles can take most of the load I feel.

Drivers for this are that it would go fast (200mph+ as light pods so little wear), can go overnight (sleeper pods), you could buy track to your door, personal transport (like a cinema room if you want). The main real issue with cars is that there's a large lobby behind what is a legacy transport solution...

By way of example, UltraPRT has been running flawlessly at Heathrow airport for 10 years, was built on time, on budget, and performs exactly as predicted/modelled.

For more info checkout http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/ in particular Swedetrack

The last thing to mention, and the elephant in the room, is overpopulation. Looking at the stats it seems that birthrates for developed countries is in decline, so the obvious solution is to give everyone a good quality of life.

The issue here is actually at the heart of economics - how do we run an economy with an ageing demographic? Japan is the leader here and they are placing a bet on robotics. What happens though when robots consume 80% of jobs? That may be the issue we need to solve, and as you can effectively tie energy to economic prosperity on a macro scale, a solution presents itself - create more (environmentally friendly) energy sources to raise global wealth.

The worst part about it is accepting the 40,000 deaths a year just because people are selfish and feel they need a car to get anywhere.

Mr. Money Mustache is a financial blogger, he emphasizes minimal living and reducing environmental footprint. He calls cars 2 ton wheelchairs and advocates MUCH more bicycle use. I have to say I agree, we need to cure our ridiculous car habits, especially 1) buying ridiculously huge vehicles with terrible MPG; 2) taking short trips everywhere in the car, when walking or biking would do.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/04/22/curing-your-clown...

Bicycles are great, but there is no reason all cars need to weigh two tons or have room for 5-7 passengers.

Actually, there is: if you get in a collision with a large vehicle in a really tiny one, you're going to die. So you need a larger vehicle that can make a crash survivable. Basically, it's an arms race.

Clearly fewer folks are buying into that. The day of the 1970's 25-foot land cruiser are waning. The Ford Focus is now king.

The Ford Focus is still a 3000-pound car these days. Even "economy" cars these days are rather heavy, and you'd be surprised how little those 70s cars weighed. Old Mustangs are positively lightweight. While the land boats are mostly gone, cars in general have gotten larger and especially heavier, even with lightweight technologies and materials used to offset the increase.

The way I read it, the OP was talking about people needing to drive micro-cars (e.g., ones that can only hold 2 people, like the micro-cars that are only sold in Japan). Those cars would fare very poorly in a crash against just about any typical car (let alone SUV) on an American road.

Just like a bicycle. Which are also booming. And which are also dangerous to ride on the road with any car.

The argument I was addressing was, if its really an arms race, then no way we would go from the 4800lb Ford Thunderbird to the 2600lb Ford Focus in a generation.

Folks have by and large opted out of the arms race. For better and for worse.

The only problem with your argument here is the fact that Ford doesn't sell cars, including the Focus, in the USA any more. So I'm not sure what locale you're talking about, but it doesn't reflect reality in America right now.

The 4800lb Thunderbird buyers aren't buying cars; they're buying SUVs and crossovers these days.

Ford still sells the Focus; I chose it for exactly that reason. Its the only sedan they kept.

Ah now I see they're renaming it the 'Active'. My mistake.

But bicycles offer zero protection in contrast to lightweight cars which at least provide some.

> The Ford Focus is now king.

The Ford F150 wishes to disagree.

I have one of each!

Ford isn't making the Focus, Fiesta or the Taurus for North America anymore. The only passenger vehicles people are buying are pickups, SUVs and crossovers.

That's not quite true. What is true is that the only Fords people in North America were buying were pickups, SUVs, and crossovers, so Ford stopped bothering with cars in North America.

However, there's still people buying cars, but usually they're foreign makes. The American carmakers have spent decades trying to prove to people that they suck at making cars and only put their effort into trucks/SUVs, and American car buyers are finally getting the message.

Right but I am replying to the guy who is advocating bicycles.

Seems to me a lot of people are so attached to carculture that they can't even read the article properly.

The author sees all sorts of good things about electric cars. I drive them myself. I love cars. But...

The points the article makes about cars being part of a larger flawed system of urban and rural development are spot on.

'Self-driving' cars will only make this worse.

Even just the excessive prevalence of hard-top surfaces in roads and parking lots leads to environmental catastrophe when flooding begins.

Urban sprawl leads to farmland and natural area destruction.

The car is the ultimate symbol of entitled consumerist individualism, and it is becoming more and more unsustainable.

The net effect of every household being in car(s) with a population as big as we have is really bad, even if all emissions were to be eliminated.

If all the private investment money being dumped into self-driving technology at the moment were public money being put into urban mass transit, just think of what could be accomplished...

urban mass transit is never used by the wealthy. the last thing people with ill gotten gains want to do is to be around others who can identify them and see with their own eyes how much they’ve stolen. and they don’t want to be around their own kind as there’s no honor amongst thieves.

Senators use the DC Metro and Stock Market traders in NYC use their subway.

Big Subway systems in big cities are pretty famous for seeing executives in suits and celebrities sit in the same bus as beggars.

> ill gotten gains

That's... quite an assumption you're making there. Sure, some execs are assholes. But most true wealth is driven through cooperation.

I think he's making the morally dubious jump to say that corporate profits are immoral.

nothing wrong with corporate profits. the problem lies when a corporation is being used as a money laundering and tax evasion scheme. and a boogie man that wealthy people hide behind.

and your are mistaking the working class with people with wealth.

"urban transit is never used by the wealthy" ...

In North America

What you are saying here is not true of Europe.

This is a cultural problem, and says a lot about American culture. Racism, excessive individualism, and status seeking.

I remember being shocked when I first visited suburban Atlanta for work. Atlanta is a lot like the greater Toronto area (where I live[d]) -- big giant sprawl. But unlike the Toronto area, people in the suburbs were actively campaigning _against_ the extension of rail into their area, because they didn't want the undesirables from downtown coming into their prosperous sprawl.

Or, if you have money, you can opt out of uncomfortable inconvenient dirty solutions to your transportation problems. What's money for after all.

> What's money for after all.

> At the heart of capitalism is a vast and scarcely examined assumption: you are entitled to as great a share of the world’s resources as your money can buy. You can purchase as much land, as much atmospheric space, as many minerals, as much meat and fish as you can afford, regardless of who might be deprived. If you can pay for them, you can own entire mountain ranges and fertile plains. You can burn as much fuel as you like. Every pound or dollar secures a certain right over the world’s natural wealth.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/15/capita...

Vast wealth can get out of hand, sure.

But for the most part, we as individuals earn money to better our lives. Get a better education, live in a better part of town, raise kids safer with better food etc. Its not a game, its life. Its also a mistake to say "money shouldn't determine important things like who gets to go to a good school", because money is exactly designed for that. Its not supposed to be just a game where money only buys toys and entertainment

They use it when it's faster

It doesn't get faster when cars are the priority. Neighbourhoods are built without consideration for transit, and roads sprawl out indefinitely into the countryside.

As long as the investment priority is in cars, transit will suck.

There's probably some truth to this, although it's not as absolute as you say.

The obvious solution is higher taxes for the wealthy. Wealthy people have higher climate impacts across the board, from increased meat consumption to larger houses, to first class flights and private jets.

I've been thinking about this for awhile and I think the problem is roads. People will go wherever the roads are good. They will build houses everywhere and subdivide everything a million times. However, if there is no way to access a certain area or it is very difficult, they will not go there and build.

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.

Very true many countries in Europe has shifted to diesels due to lower co2 but they make the air dirty. Dirty air is bad for asthmatics.

Hybrid gasoline/biogas can be as co2 efficient as diesel if not more with a lot cleaner tail pipe air. Almost zero local emission with 10kw batteries and upwards.

The shift to diesel was also caused by a lower price of gas and a lower consumption for medium and long distances.

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.

>brake discs

Regenerative braking does not have this problem. Although the tyre problem remain.

Though the extra weight of the regenerative system has to be taken into account.

Tesla's brake pads for the Model 3 are scheduled for replacement after 250,000 miles of use (according to tesla rep. I spoke to).

No, I did not mistype that.

Just checked mine on my honda with 200,000 miles. Fronts were a bit low, so I replaced them, rears were still about at half wear. Tesla is no magic beast in this reguard. The secret is a manual transmission.

If I drove my manual better, I could probably achieve that, but spirited driving made me replace everything twice over in 100k miles, with a third needed soon. :(

You pay twice everytime you brake. Once for the gas and then for the brakes too.

Tires are a far more significant pollution source than brakes.

But still a far less significant pollution source than diesel (especially) and gas exhaust.

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.

Agreed, it's a complex topic. Just pointing out that EVs alone won't solve air pollution from transport.

https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat09/1...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/tripping/wp/2018/03/27/c...

>Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and other institutions who studied Stockholm’s congestion-pricing scheme found that the policy cut air pollution in the city center and reduced childhood asthma cases by nearly 50 percent.

> To have any chance of slowing down climate breakdown rather than accelerating it further, we need to change our entire way of life...

I agree with him. And that's why I keep saying that global warming is here to stay. We had better to learn to cope with it rather than hoping it can be reversed!

We're going to have to reverse it at some point. If we keep accelerating it there won't be any learning to live with it.

It's self limiting, with an attenuation in global population once a threshold is reached. I suspect we'll never reach a point where humanity disappears entirely - they'll just hang out in higher altitudes and latitudes.

The more we let it go the harder it'll be to reverse / the more lifestyle changes we'll have to go through.

If we do nothing, then we get to learn to cope with an 8 degree rise in temperature. If we do something, maybe we can limit it to three degrees instead of our two degree target. Acknowledging we're going to miss our two degree target doesn't change the measures we have to take to mitigate climate change.

I think global warming is not just here to stay, it's going to get as worse as it can get.

If the west moves off of fossils the rest of the world will get them cheaper and still burn them all, it's too important to get cheap energy for all the countries that are not as rich as the west and still need a lot of growth. For that not to happen the west would have to somehow share and distribute all the wealth it accumulated with the rest of the world or somehow force the rest of the world into the middle ages, neither of which is realistically possible. Not sure what else can be done, but it seems the earth will inevitably return to the pre historic climate where all those fossils were still in the atmosphere.

The problem of global warming is the problem of distribution of wealth in capitalism itself.

Honestly, I hope electric cars become commonplace just because of the reduction in noise pollution let alone PM and CO2 emissions.

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.

I think you'll be disappointed, tyre and air noise doesn't change much at speed with electric cars.

Maybe close to highways, but it's not my experience with electric cars. In cities they tend to travel slowly and thus minimal turbulence and tire noise.

Time spent producing noise in a given location decreases with speed. The worst thing in terms of noise is not a car passing by every 10 seconds. It's a bus idling for 2 minutes in front of you.

We now have hybrid buses that shut off at idle. Simple and effective noise reduction.

We also have fully electric buses.

https://www.volvobuses.com/en-en/our-offering/buses/e-mobili...

Many electric cars have a much lower drag. This means lower noise.

> 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.

(But that was already 25 millions of car sold in the decade for about 100 millions inhabitant in the US, so it does not mean no car at all)

The most limiting factor is that since the 1930s all our infrastructure or civilization organization is based on having cheap oil and cars, so even if technically feasible, the path to get there is not so easy...

> 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 powering machinery, bulk transports, backup power and so on. Replacing all that equipment will take many decades no matter how it's done, and we need to start looking at stuff like ethanol/bio-fuels/E-diesel and such right away.

That would solve a large part of the problem the author describes as well -- it would be a nice interim solution while we renew the existing infrastructure.

> 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.

You are in for a cold shower. Above 35 km/h (~22 mph) tire noise becomes the dominant factor. Besides, a large part of a modern vehicle's engine noise is designed. Some cars even go as far as play engine noises through added speakers.

Source? Does this hold true for diesel trucks and buses and garbage trucks which are very common in cities?

> Does this hold true for diesel trucks and buses and garbage trucks which are very common in cities?

I know from the hybrid buses in Boston that they are a massive reduction in noise for the passengers. When you're at a stop, it is great to not have that engine idling. Electric will only be better in that regard.

The garbage trucks though seem to make a shit load of brake noise though. And noise from trash dumping on top of trash and being compacted.

Won't electric trucks use regenerative braking?

Below is a non-technical article on the subject.

Large heavy utility diesel trucks like garbage trucks have huge engines, extreme start-stop patterns, lots of shifting. Those are loud by themselves. Also, they are low production volume and are only noise insulated in as far as regulation requires them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/americas-bes...

The best noise reduction measure in cities is to limit cars to 30 km/h. Which, by the way, also actually reduces the time it takes to get to places by car (because you need fewer traffic lights), apart from obviously making the city much safer for bikes and pedestrians.

This might be the case in the US since most cars are 'gas' (petrol) powered. However, in much of Europe diesel powered cars are extremely common. Also, at least in London, the average speed for a car is <20mph.

Some of the ideas that are popular with HN readers include:

1. Denser cities, like the centre of Paris or London rather than Los Angeles.

2. Walking, busses, metro systems, and cycle infrastructure for journeys within the city; high speed rail between cities.

3. Carbon taxes that cover the cost of recapturing the carbon. So ships and factories and things can keep operating, they've just got to plant some trees or whatever.

4. Nuclear power, alongside wind; solar; and a worldwide power grid to average out differences in production.

5. Remote working.

Ideas less popular with the HN community, but that you'll hear elsewhere include:

6. An end to endless growth.

7. Vegetarianism for everyone.

8. Total bans on certain polluting activities, where taxes would unfairly impact the poor and not the rich.

I'm sure you're aware of the political problems with all of these.

1. How do we make existing cities denser?

2. Good where possible. Where cars are better suited, the cars should be electric.

4. Those will be EVs even better.

6. What does this entail?

> Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable.

You'll see plenty of complaining online about DC's transit system, but to me it is an example of what can be done.

Vienna metro station is ~13 miles as the crow flies outside the city center. It gets trains every 8 minutes and 12 minutes during rush hour. Compare to Boston where train stations at the same distance out have service every half hour during rush hour and once an hour outside of rush hour. Add to it that if you continue along I-66 much past Vienna, you enter HOT-3 lanes, where you either have 3 passengers in a car or pay a toll.

Guess what the result is? People in the DC area take the metro at Vienna because there is frequency of service and are disincentivized from driving. People in Boston drive in. It isn't a primitive state or a postmodern crowded dystopia. The people commuting from Vienna mostly live a suburban life with yards. The infrastructure is just there to encourage taking the train.

Here in Toronto the GO Train used to be one hour apart. If you missed your train you had to wait an hour for the next one. Of-course people drove in to work.

Today the train is every twenty minutes, and every run is half to completely full.

Why? Because on average people have to wait 20 minutes if they just missed the train, and if they just randomly arrive they often do not have to wait more than 10 minutes for a train.

Result, people use the train more often and for more than just work since the train is available so often.

And if you add one or two levels of magnitude of improvement, you will get the insanely good train system in Japan.

Seeing 14 car 300 km/h capable shinkansens arrive on the same track in ~4 minute intervals in Hiroshima station (and elsewhere) is something to behold.

And the commuter system is sometimes ever crazier, with many lines running parallel in the city center, large stations having dozens of lines, together providing huge capacity. No wonder around 8 million people commute to central Tokyo, 1.3 million of them through a single station (Shinjuku).

Btw: In reference to noise pollution, expect to go batshit crazy once the low speed EV's start making all sorts of crazy sounds. Thank the automotive lobby that at the time keen on embracing a service model, got inspiration from the early mobile phones and wanted a 'ringtones for cars' business added.

https://newatlas.com/eu-ev-acoustic-noise-avas/60022/

The author has a point.

Out of all the other industries dominated by massive corporations - and we know how they go about doing business - the first priority to save the planet is for John Doe to buy a new product! Also, let's create a culture where we feel justified to shame people who don't do it.

Of course nothing is black and white. I love electric cars and will probably get one. I think they're really cool and would love to do my bit in keeping things green.

BUT at the same, you got to see a bit of irony in the whole thing don't you?

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

Not answering directly, but the advantage of us humans is that our culture is pretty malleable. Something that was trendy a few decades ago might become horrifying by today's standard.

For example, I would say that colonization was still regarded by some as mostly positively until the 1950s or 1960s, and today would totally look out of place (even if countries keep annexing their neighbors).

So it is possible the change will come quickly, not necessarily only because of regulations, but also because of the social norms. See recent articles about "flying shame".

There are examples of change, but most of the times after disaster stuck.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/fire-...

That's human nature: if it ain't broken, don't try to fix it. And ignore those marginal, annoying naysayers, what do they know? But first let's install AC, nobody can work in these heatwaves :)

Chinese one-child policy is the closest I can come to an example off the top of my head. A much milder change than the one required against global warming, and it required an authoritarian government, though...

Although if we somehow could apply a global one child policy, it would halve the population every generation, it would help tremendously with carbon emission (but not so much for our growth or financial system)

The spread of contraception is making this a reality for a significant part of the world. Government campaigns to provide more contraceptives and get people to use them would be huge boons in the fight against long term AGW.

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.

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? :)

Depends on where you live. In West Virginia? No, it's almost all coal based.

In Vermont? Yes, their grid is 100% renewable.

Source: https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

The electricity required to refine a gallon of gas is 6kW, so add that into the equation on what I'm not responsible for emitting.

ICE vehicles are doing double duty on emissions but nobody's paying attention.

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 carbon wherever it costs them less than $100/ton to do so, and the $100 can pay for sequestration when it costs them more.

Of course #2 will significantly increase the price of a car. This will also help to convince people to use alternatives. But cars will still be significantly cheaper than they are in Denmark or Norway, yet those two countries are still fairly car oriented.

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.

Oops, "2: figure out how to lower the carbon emissions during vehicle production"

The charts on the page directly contradict the headline.

In the renewable energy case emissions are miniscule, and in fact only come about because the chart assumes large emissions during manufacture - a lot of the processes involved in producing an EV could be done with renewable energy, and would be if we instituted a carbon tax or otherwise forced the issue.

Electric vehicles are ranking number 26 in terms of total cost and total atmospheric reduction of CO2:

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

So its not a talisman, but it is certainly a real step in the right direction. I don't hear anybody saying that electric cars means we can just forget about the other causes of climate change?

A very contrarian article that just argues against a straw man. I suspect people who write articles like this are usually the ones who revel in being smarter than everybody else.

We could for example:

1. Incentivise retrofitting of electric transmissions to cars with internal combustion engines

2. Disincentivise the introduction of new models, visual updates etc. to existing cars via taxation

3. Incentivise durability and repairability - force car makers to produce cars that are modular and easily repaired, enforced limits on pricing of spare parts, force open-sourcing of designs etc.

Of course all of above would likely smash the car makers' current business model to pieces - and when you get down to it this is the real problem with the kind of genuine, general change we need to see in order to save the Earth.

Sustainable approaches simply will not deliver the kind of reduction in consumption required. Everyone is going to have to accept a much poorer lifestyle. The main blocker to me is the rich: how are they going to justify their continued opulence when the companies they own (are forced to) produce so little for the average person?

> Incentivise retrofitting of electric transmissions to cars with internal combustion engines

What would that do to help? Modern transmissions are fairly efficient (basically anything with a lockup torque converter is now very good and any manual or computer controlled manual transmission is excellent in terms of efficiency). I can’t see what an electronic transmission on an ICE engine would do that would possibly pay back.

Removal of the ICE in favour of electric I meant, in case I wasn't clear. Massive amounts of power etc. are required to produce the chassis, bodywork etc. - it makes sense to get a lifetime's use out of them rather than throw away the whole thing just because the ICE has gone out of fashion.

Ok. The transmission is a very specific (and overly specific for your intended meaning) assembly, so it was indeed not clear.

I apologise :)

Looking at other articles the guy seems to be full in apocalyptic thinking - a few in he has an article on "Collapse" and lifeboat thinking. Those are words are downright toxic meme symptoms referring to paranoid and evil ideologirs respectively. They are like referring to science based medicine as "alleopathic" is a sure sign that they are off the deep ene in alternative medicine.

To explain "collapse" briefly there is even a /r/Collapse convinced of coming doomsdays from various sources from any fear de jure from ebola, economic meltdowns, or global warming.

"Lifeboat ethics" refers to a rehash of Malthusians and Eugenicists arguing helping people who are worse off is actively immoral and rapidly justifies travesties. There is a reason I skip straight to evil when describing them - when in power their actions can have no other end.

One of the things I like to do when half in the bag in a bar and blagging to a new friend is to say,

"Look - pick a direction - any direction - and tell me what you see."

And what they see is plastic and metal and bar bottles with paint on them and more plastic and all the detritus of human society.

And every piece of it, as far as the eye can see!, will be garbage in 6 months to 20 years and sit on the ground and leech poisons into the Earth and nothing will grow from it.

Every.

Single.

Piece.

We, as human beans, have broken the cycle of life and death where something grows, flowers, dies, rots and something else grows and flowers. This idea that we can make a new shiny thing that will become more garbage to fix all our problems so we can keep eating more isn't going to change that.

The solution is that we simply have to do with less. And people will kill each other before they admit that.

It's already starting to happen now.

From my European perspective, this reads like a typical leftist pov. First of all, of course everyone has to change their way of living. This has been the corner Stone of left ideology since forever.

And then of course the attack on EV, because it is not about the climate, but about individuality. Individual travel simply does not fit into a world view where everyone has to change their way of living into the rational way. And offering a different solution is heresy.

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.

> solutions that rely on substantially reconfiguring living patterns

Surely switching to bikes or electric bikes is not that substantial and immediately eliminates a lot of car related problems.

Sure but there are many houses that are surrounded by just more houses for many, many kilometres with the nearest concentration of offices and other places of work, stores, and transport hubs (if there even are any) very substantial distances away. It's challenging to increase cycling when that is the case.

We can imagine that the energy mix in EU will lean towards more renewable energy, increasing the benefit of electric cars over conventional cars. If indeed not decreasing yet, the number of cars sold seems to flatten and I can see that Europeans cities are transforming to make life more complicated for cars owners (ie LEZ tax in London) and easier for pedestrians and bikes. Several reasons to be optimistic.

reminds me of slavoj zizek's point of how corporations use problems caused by consumption and come up with a solution that increases consumption, like the "2% of profits goes towards planting trees" type of scenario

The numbers are somewhat contested. See potholer54's well-sourced video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwMPFDqyfrA He cites ghg savings of about 20-30% for a common mix of electricity production sources.

Of course, Jussi Pasanen is still completely right. The only solution is to stop driving cars.

Fine. Which rural neighborhood do we nuke first ?

Big cities can definitely phase cars put, and should electrify their public transportations for the people who can't bike.

Some form of "small number of passengers, not short but not long range" trips are going to have to be done ouside of cities, unless you displace people.

If "displacing people to cities" is your advocated policy, or "preventing people from traveling at all", that's a legitimate point to argue, but be prepared for fierce resistance from well meaning people (who're not going to massively vote for you...)

Electric batteries gives the most effect in shared transport such as buses and taxis. If I remember correctly it’s 50x more efficient with batteries in such public vehicles. This is due to higher utilization they buses drive all day vs private cars mostly are parked.

This we should electrify public transport first for maximum carbon reduction.

+1 Electric Public Transport

-1 Battery based Public Transport

Smart Grids touted as 'the future' in the energy distribution sector are counting on all those parked batteries for their network balance.

“Still, in most cases an electric car is slightly less bad for the living planet than a comparable car with an internal combustion engine – if you can afford to buy one.”

Bad article all around. There is bias in that statement alone referencing the price of EV’s after an admission that they are actually better for the environment already. This article also references almost every negative trope about BEV’s.

What many of these articles fail to explore is any future advancements in technology that can solve some of the issues listed. Nothing in BEV technology is static, almost everything is improving from motor efficiency all the way to removing things like cobalt from batteries. It’s also possible that we will see a lot more localized solar and wind power for charging stations over time.

Lastly, autonomy is coming which will be a game changer when paired with BEV technology.

I have an electric car because it lets me get in the carpool lane. I understand that investing the delta between an electric car and an ICE into some sort of carbon capture technology would likely be better for the environment, but then I wouldn’t be home for dinner 15min earlier.

It's much more impactful for the tech community to push for remote work everywhere except where it's physically necessary than to convince everyone to buy a battery car. Where i live it's impossible to use one anyway due to non-robust electicity network. Despite being an island that is sunny year round, its not possible to incorporate more renewables into the system, so the main source of electricity remains oil. I bet the main buyers of battery cars live in big cities anyway.

https://image.slidesharecdn.com/emissionsfromdrivingtowork-1...

This is an extremely counter-productive line of thinking. Slowing climate change to manageable levels requires massive costs and sacrifice, but not insane levels. In terms of cost, single figure trillions.

IOW, similar to the Apollo project or the Iraq war. A heck of a lot cheaper than WWII.

"Electric cars give us a sense that we can have change without having to change at all. They are a talisman of false hope."

On a tangent issue: it going to get even worse. The automotive industry predicts total annual miles driven to go up by 300% when autonomous driving comes through.

As an asthmatic I'm looking forward to a drastic reduction in the pollution in our cities.

We still need to move to car free cities at the same time though.

I agree with you that the very idea that it is somehow acceptable to have an 'exhaust' on a car that just belches out toxins is just as crazy as dumping your nightpot out the top floor window into the middle of the street. There was also a time in which that was deemed 'normal'.

That said, a very large part of small particle dust produced by cars comes from wear, especially brakes, tires, road surface and crushed stuff by the weight of the car driving over. If there is a significant uptick in traffic, electric will be better than the equivalent traffic if it were all diesel, but the aggregate amount of micro dust might still go up compared to today's volume.

Again, technology is not static. There are lots of folks working on the brake dust and tire wear issue. You should be happy to know that regenerative breaking on BEVs results in a lot less brake dust, although currently more tire wear due to more initial torque.

Miles driven should go up but with far fewer vehicles, since with autonomy cars can operate almost 24/7. But point taken, we will need those autonomous cars to be BEV and use renewable power.

I have not seen automotive industry projections that predict fewer vehicles.

Of-course not - what do you expect them to say to their shareholders?

But in all the other NON-automotive industry sources the idea of a car that drives itself and acts as a taxi suggests 4-10 times less cars needed.

Why is that? Taxis have always existed, and rationally are cheaper than owning a car for some. Yet most people own private cars, and when yours in the future comes with a free private driver, the possibilities for having a decent office or entertainment center in there when freed from the driving task will only make them more attractive to own.

Taxis mostly seem to displace other forms of public transport.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/uber-lyft-rid...

How? The roads are at capacity in many places. We're not going to build 300% more road area to put cars on.

Potential road capacity is far higher than is currently achieved by human drivers. Rational coordination and less accidents are more than feasible. Platooning is estimated to have the potential to increase per lane capacity by 500%.

Some perspective on EVs: Project Drawdown lists CO2 reduction by adoption of better cars as #49 in it's ranked list of of climate change solutions. #1 and #2 are refrigerant management and onshore wind turbines respectively.

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.

About 300,000 cars cross the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge every day.

I think the author's point is that if they were all electric, there would _still_ be 300,000 cars crossing the bridge each day, and the problems of road maintenance costs, pedestrian safety, and soul-deadening commute times remain. Fewer GHG emissions, to be sure.

A good next step would be to focus on reducing the total energy of the system. Minimizing 1/2 m v^2 is your friend here -- reduce weight and reduce speed.

Have anyone seriously studied the impact of switching to all-electric cars on a global scale ?

I read that there are over a billion passenger cars right now, let's say we manage to shift them all to electric by 2050 (not saying this is realistic), sure it'll move the air pollution out of the city, but what about long term pollution, manufacturing, recycling, &c. ? Would it really solve the problem or simply move it out of our sight for a few decades ?

More inconvenient truth in TFA. Note that the market price of electricity hit $9.00/kwh in Texas last week. IICC, that would be maybe a couple of Benjamins to charge an electric car, suggesting that there will have to be bigger changes than electric cars if we really want to keep things the way they are.

Once we get self driving, there could be far fewer cars per person. If you amortize that part of the bar chart of emissions which comes from producing the vehicle and divide it by, say, 20, and continue to develop new solar and wind farms, the BEV looks really amazing compared to current non-self driving ICE cars.

I tell people who are waiting for self-driving cars to take the bus.

So we transition to EV's and we change power to non-fossil fuels. It's not hard it just costs money and requires some sacrifice. I'm on 100% renewable now. If I wasn't already, I'd happily pay twice what I pay now to ensure I was at least on non-fossil if not on renewable.

I made this same point on an article about "where will apartment dwellers and city dwellers with street parking charge their EVs". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20678842

It was a question that was completely missing the forest for the trees. Just like this article is claiming all the EV boosterism is doing.

An EV car is still a car. It's still three tons of steel that goes way too fast and gets used in all manner of inappropriate ways. As an EV owner, you are still part of the problem. Not to mention that you just bought a fantastically expensive vehicle to signal how much you "care" about the environment, but not enough to give up any creature comforts. And how many anti-malaria bednets could you have bought instead if you got a used fuel efficient ICE or, gasp, no car at all?

Much higher impact would be accelerating retrofitting our cities and towns for other modes of transportation: bikes and scooters, massively expanded public transit, and walking.

Too little too late? That's the best the writer could say? Pessimism is not what we yearn for.

What an absolute garbage piece.

Solving environmental impact is extremely political and is fought every step of the way by those with vested interests.

This adds nothing to help improve things, it actually does the opposite.

Yes, we know if we went back to pre-industrial revolution we'd stop impacting the planet. Good luck with that.

Everyone can drive an electric car with the Green Nuclear Deal.

Ok, so the author suggests nothing.. He fails to describe the solution(if any). May be the solution is population control.

Pretty much. He doesn't seem to grasp the reality that solving the problem is political and like gun laws in the US there are those that will oppose every change no matter how small every step of the way for money regardless of the human or planetary cost.

"Tesla sales are up seven-fold from Q3 2015 to Q3 2018"

Wow. I consider that a good sign. Electric cars are progress.

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