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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand gas and diesel vehicles are effectively subsidized by getting to release CO2 for free.

Free? Maybe in the US, but over here, 40-60% of the cost of fuel is taxes (Dutch source: https://www.unitedconsumers.com/tanken/informatie/opbouw-bra...).

Bonus taxes ("accijns", also raised on alcohol and tobacco) makes up 12.2 billion of the country's income (https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/prinsjesdag/inkomst... at least a billion is spent on CO2 and nitrogen reduction, and reducing the dependency on natural gas in favor of electricity (that can be produced in a renewable fashion).

Why the downvotes?

The taxes on fuel need to do a lot of heavy lifting, pricing in the cost of road building and maintenance, the effect of road congestion and air pollution in cities, and the effect of increased global warming. I’m sceptical they cover those factors.

Although, it probably would be better to move more of the tax burden to car use in cities, and away from fuel. Driving a car in the countryside is much less damaging than in a city centre.

We also get taxed for owning the car itself (Road Tax). Which is meant for road maintenance in the Netherlands.

We pay a lot of taxes.

There are a number of studies that show that there are still many externalized costs for cars. A lot of course also applies to EVs (e.g. accidents, noise).

That's not true.

EU has very strict policies about emissions.

The most immediate and obvious cost is not being able to drive those cars that do not respect the limits.

Also: in many EU countries fuel is heavily taxed

In Italy 75% of the price to the pump is taxes.

Definitely not free.

Norway isn't a part of the EU.

Does it matter if 700 million people are under the same rules if a country of 5 is not?

ICE cars are not releasing CO2 for free, that's the point.

in Norway gas is heavily taxed as well

Too simple a take on the relations between EU and Norway, here is a more comprehensive view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway%E2%80%93European_Union_...

In short, as much part of EU you can be without being part of it. Norway keeps the freedom on key areas like fishing rights and agriculture while essentially being part of everything else without voting rights. And in some partnerships also having voting rights due to their structure.

>Too simple a take on the relations between EU and Norway

It's just the truth. Norway is not a member of the EU. But I agree that it is good to have a strong understanding of what exactly the relationship is between Norway and the European Union.

Some of you may be noticed that the EU tends to make decisions that are acceptable to the countries that pay.

The truth is that except for some quite narrow fields, the EU decides a lot of things and Norway has to accept those things.

They're like Switzerland, which hemmeded and hawed about immigration from the EU, held a referendum deciding to block it, and then when the EU put an economic gun to their head, backed down and all EU citizens now have freedom of movement to Switzerland.

We've spent almost three decades negotiating and harmonising with the EU and still have plenty to work out afresh every year, so if the UK thinks it will tie up its divorce with a bowed ribbon in three months, the only word I have for that negotiating position is: brave.

Freedom of movement (and a lot of other things) is guaranteed in the Bilateral I agreements [0] between the EU and Switzerland which are protected by a so-called guillotine clause [1]. The latter meaning that violation of any part of the agreement would void all of it.

The result of the referendum would definitely violate part of the agreement and the EU just reminded Switzerland of the consequences.

If anything it could be blamed on the initiators and supporters (SVP) of the referendum to not properly inform the populace of the consequences of a successful referendum.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_U...

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

Norway isn't part of the EU but is part of the EEA. It is through that membership that it's bound by the same as other EU countries economic agreements that through simplification people tend to associate with the EU.

Carbon emissions and units of currency are not fungible.

So unless some of that tax is intended to be a carbon tax and works to incentive cleaner alternatives, then this is a pretty weak argument.

Also, the producers aren't paying he cost, end users are[1] and without much in the way of alternatives.

1. always do, but you get where I'm coming from

> So unless some of that tax is intended to be a carbon tax and works to incentive cleaner alternatives, then this is a pretty weak argument.

Of course the incentive is towards cleaner alternatives, in my country is public transport (trains, trams and subway are electric here).

> Also, the producers aren't paying he cost

fiscal incentive for EV go straight to car producers pockets, I don't see the difference

taxing owners is a way to drive them to buy a different product, cheaper for the buyer and more profitable for the seller

it works both ways

Germany plans to introduce a CO2 price and it won't end with cheaper fuel even though it is already quite expensive. The existing taxes aren't high enough to cover the CO2 price.

> The most immediate and obvious cost is not being able to drive those cars that do not respect the limits

Wishful thinking. You can still drive the most extreme of polluting vehicles as long as they're old enough, or as long as their manufacturer cheated at emission tests (many recalls are still pending for years).

> as long as they're old enough

old enough as in 30 years old at least

there are very few of them

and usually they can't be trusted to commute everyday

> as their manufacturer cheated at emission tests

that's universally true.

there was an article yesterday about Tesla Y built with cheap material and rooftop flying away while driving

I guess it can be considered dangerous too

I wish it weren’t the case, but the mining of rare earth materials is quite hazardous as well as the electricity production that powers EVs. We are mostly moving the environmental damage to other places.

However if we can get to renewable energy (nuclear power, as solar panel manufacturing has a lot of damage as well currently) then we can truly be carbon neutral.

The best thing to say about EVs is that air quality in dense areas is better, at the cost of electricity being produced by dirty methods in (hopefully) more sparse areas.

Am I right in believing an EV has a lower carbon output per unit distance than an ICE vehicle even if charged by thermal coal power?

Possibly, the relatively new Polestar marque has published it's transparency report about lifetime emissions, and references 'Global' and 'European' power mixes along with 100% wind in it's sums about after how many miles it will have produced less CO2 overall (inc. production emissions) vs. a ICE equivalent. Polestar's figures for the 2 are (vs the XC40 on the same underlying platform):

Global power mix: 112,000 km (69,594 miles) European power mix: 78,000 km (48,467 miles) Wind power: 50,000 km (31,068 miles)

The electrical emissions data comes from GaBi, but I can't see reference to the specific mixes they mention in the GaBi professional database, so I don't know what the exact breakdown of the mixes are.

Thanks for the numbers.

I didn't realise the numbers were so high!

Many EVs will be carbon-better only once their second hand vehicles!

Sorry, forgot to post the link, which contains a reasonably detailed white paper alongside the headlines on the webpage: https://www.polestar.com/uk/electric-sustainability/transpar...

I expect you're right about the equilibrium extending beyond the first owner in many instances. Volvos are renowned for their longevity (100,000mi is not uncommon) so will be interesting to see how Polestars fair with battery degradation. It would be interesting if Polestar go the way of Apple and try to recapture cars at end-of-life to recycle them and reduce subsequent generation car production emissions.

Doesn’t most of Norway’s power come from hydro?

I don’t know, but Norway has profited immensely from oil and gas through their sovereign wealth fund, which is also used as a model for how other countries should establish social safety nets.

If Norway was truly sorry, they should liquidate all of their oil profits and use it to invest in research to make a carbon neutral future. As it stands they ruined the environment and now will profit off the backs of the rest of the world through the legacy of their fossil fuel extraction.

I doubt Norway is "sorry". Also, they're barely on the 13h place... what does US do, at the policy level?

https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-production-by-country/

[edit] For all those who scale with population: it doesn't really matter for production. Population matters for consumption, and emissions (if they were producing 5% of US CO2, it would really look bad for Norway; but they don't - per capita the emit half than what US does per capita[1]). I guess it could matter in "benefit per capita"... if that were a thing (outside Norway maybe). I.e. how much did you benefit from US oil production, vs. how much Exxon benefited? I mean, yeah US citizens benefited from cheap gas - but that's because of middle-east production, so in reality the production elsewhere in the world should count on the US as "pollution".

[1]https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/norway?country=~NOR#p...

I think you should somehow scale that by country size. For example, there are about 5½ million Norwegians. I think that, in production per capita, only smaller countries such as Kuwait and Qatar score higher.

Having said that, because of the law of large numbers, in any ranking scaled by size, the outliers typically are the smaller entities.

I know nothing much on this topic, but worth considering Norway's population is 5 million, versus 330 million in the US.

All of a sudden it doesn't seem that impressive if Norway is only producing 15% the amount of the US

Norway's sovereign fund doesn't invest in companies which only carry out exploration & production, and invests in fossil fuel companies only if they also fund renewable research (although that may be token efforts for some). In all that's about 6% of the fund. It also invests a lot in renewable focused companies. Not perfect, but steps in the right direction and Norway is very aware of the contradiction in it's energy usage and fossil fuel production.

About 96%-99% of Norway's power come from hydro.

True, 96% of their power is produced from hydro, but two things have to be considered

- Norway has a population of 5 million

- because of the incentive to use electricity, the annual electricity consumption was about 26-27 MWh per inhabitant during 2004-2009 when the European union (EU15) average in 2008 was 7.4 MWh. Norway’s consumption of electricity was over three times higher per person compared to the EU 15 average in 2008

For comparison, Italy makes 41% of its power from hydro, but have to serve a population of 60 million

Moving the environmental damage from "everywhere in the atmosphere", to mining sites and power plants is a good thing. Power plants can be replaced with carbon free energy sources, but synthetic fuels have such terrible efficiency that they only make sense for niche applications.

I mean if you don’t care about African mines and Chinese rivers that factories dump their effluent into, sure. But there is absolutely an environmental cost, just less to the wealthy nations that pay to move the damage elsewhere.

If you're talking about cobalt you should know that it's also used to refine oil. Battery makers are moving away from it and Tesla have already invented batteries that use no cobalt at all (see battery day)

I think his point was that the damage moves from "everywhere" to certain places like factories and mines. Than you can add better filters/cleanup to the factories and mines.

It's a simpler problem to tackle if you have a few thousands polluting agents than billions of polluting agents everywhere.

Mining problems have the huge benefit that they're relatively localized and get a lot less severe when you choose to stop mining there. Fixing environmental problems from mining also doesn't require global coordination.

Global warming on the other hand threatens the whole biome and stopping the release of CO2 doesn't stop global warming once tipping points are reached. You also need global agreement to meaningfully do something about it.

(You also have to keep in mind that fuel for ICEs doesn't magically appear. Extracting oil and transporting it isn't particularly good for the local environment either.)

Off topic: Nuclear power isn't renewable energy. If we keep it up and cannot find methods to extract it more efficiently, the current rate of consumption would consume conventional uranium reserves by 2080. Some say we can add 100 years for potentially undiscovered ones, but it is certainly limited. Especially if we increase usage further, currently NP just serves around 12% of energy worldwide.

I know that NP is hip right now, but it really has its own problems at scale.

At scale we'd probably switch to breeder reactors once fresh Uranium becomes too expensive. Normal reactors only extract a few percent of the energy in the fuel.

Not only CO2 but a lot of toxic fumes as well.

not true, each gallon of gas has about 75¢ of state/federal taxes. this revenue is lost on evs

Completely burning one gallon produces about 10kg of CO2. Sequestrating it would cost around 5$ at today's prices (500$/ton).

Electric vehicles cause much more CO2 emissions during production as compared to cars with internal combustion engines due to complicated manufacturing process of the battery.

If you’re comparing CO2 emissions, you have to consider the full lifecycle.

That's interesting, and self-defeating I might add!

Do you have any data to share supporting the claim?

https://www.allego.eu/blog/2019/october/circular-thinking--c...

Really fascinating if true

It is also something a lot of people keep saying, but I have never seen proper documentation for it. So at this point I just think it is people repeating rumors.

But it would be interesting to read a proper documentation of it.

Most of the reputable reports I've seen put the payback time at 12 to 18 months.

I can't help but feel the CO2 released by any manufacturing process is either:

a) Due to the factory power source which will probably (hopefully) be renewable soon

b) Due to some processing step where carbon capture should be a lot easier to perform than the direct air capture necessary to capture car emissions.

So the method of emissions needs to be considered as well.

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