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Comment by jupp0r | Hacker News Reader

Luckily, coal is becoming less and less profitable compared to renewables. Not saying the decision is good, but pure economics will hopefully solve this problem in the long run.

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Coal isn't even all of the problem. "Rolling Coal" is a personal political statement of thousands.

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

Greenland once had a booming ecotourism industry, driving people across the ice sheet in diesel powered trucks. That is, until the diesel soot particulates destroyed the routes across the ice sheet.

I doubt idiots in modified trucks are a major component of our problem here.

You'd be wrong. One of those trucks can emit hundreds of times more particulate matter than a compliant vehicle.

Even when they aren't shooting visible smoke they are outputting a massively excess amount of pollution.

I'm sure that's true. There just aren't enough of them to matter that much.

>The owners and operators of more than half a million diesel pickup trucks have been illegally disabling their vehicles’ emissions control technology over the past decade, allowing excess emissions equivalent to 9 million extra trucks on the road, a new federal report has concluded.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/climate/diesel-trucks-air...

The emissions technology significantly increases the TCO of the vehicle so it's not exactly surprising that people disable it.

It just moves the TCO to the lungs of everyone else.

Why is it impossible to say <thing happens> without everyone around here reading it as <thing happens and I approve>?

My comment intentionally no value judgement yet everyone assumed one.

How much does it increase the TCO?

From a European perspective pretty much any diesel car here that has done over 200,000km will have had the DPF removed. In most countries it's illegal, but it's also not tested as part of the emissions tests (particulate matter in general is not tested, other than 'is there black or white smoke? nope, you pass').

Above this mileage it will become clogged and need to be replaced. If it isn't it will increase fuel consumption, reduce power, and damage the engine if left long enough. They are not off-the-shelf parts you can buy (not that they couldn't be, but nobody buys them), so you need to get a 'reconditioned' one which isn't going to last anywhere near as long. For €2500 or more for parts and labour it doesn't make financial sense, especially when your car is probably valued at a similar amount.

I live in a city center next to a relatively busy road and whenever I replace the filters in my apartment ventilation system every 3-6 months they are always thick black. We don't really have any heavy industry in this city, so I assume most of that is from vehicles.

Looks like this is a problem to be solved with the application of law and order. If a few extrajudicial executions happen along the way, it's just the price we pay for an orderly society.

After all, all lives matter.

Isn't it a little hypocritical to call for law and order and condone vigilantism in the same sentence?

Obviously I'm being sarcastic. The extrajudicial executions are administered by the police, in case that wasn't clear.

I live in a small town, population around 9,000. There are several dozen trucks rolling coal here.

How many small towns are there in the USA, each one of these trucks belching soot equvalent to over a hundred vehicles?

Even if there are only twenty five thousand small towns, that's a quarter million additional soot stacks on the road.

Apparently, there are 310 cities and nearly 19,500 total number of incorporated cities, towns, villages and boroughs across the U.S. Twenty five thousand small towns is a reasonable estimate.

https://www.reference.com/geography/many-cities-united-state...

That's a bit misleading as it's going by the actual city population and not the metro area. For instance, SF proper is only about 850k, but the metro is 5M... 9M if you count Oakland, etc.

OKay, how many trucks are rolling coal in SF and Oalkand?

Then it'll be easy to round them all up and prosecute them based on new laws.

That's actually easy to regulate at the state level, if states were on board. Simply failing inspection would take them off the road.

Usually they have a hidden switch to toggle the mode. I guess the best method would be dash cam evidence

Why not have officers pull them over and fine them?

We have fines for littering and broken tail lights. Egregious pollution could be included.

A questiom that I had is whether the tax cuts from Trump helped the renewable sector, or it's just a coincidence that Tesla's price went up so much at the same time for example? What would have happened with the democrats? I guess we'll see in the next 4 years though..

Things which drive TSLA's price are myriad. Assigning it to a single policy of the current administration is unlikely to be right. A good indication that there is something else at play would be if TSLA shot up much more than other stocks in the renewable market.

The Electric Vehicle Tax Credit and the ITC (solar tax credit) were passed by Democrats. Tesla benefited greatly from both. Tesla also received a massive loan from Obama's DOE during the great recession, without which it may not have survived. Meanwhile Trump has been doing everything in his power to prop up the dying coal industry, reduce vehicle efficiency requirements, and expand oil and gas drilling. All of these efforts indirectly harm Tesla by benefiting Tesla's competitors.

It's very interesting how Tesla could come out so well from all those policies. Of course the factory in China was crucial...it was a lucky timing that Tesla got the license from China just in time to be productive during and in spite of the pandemic.

Tax cuts came years before Tesla’s stock started soaring, so probably an unrelated happening. It’s pretty much only this year where Tesla’s stock started to rise so dramatically.

The major component of the Trump Tax Cut was lowering the tax on corporate profits.

Telsa barely makes any profit, making that change mostly useless for them.

I believe capital gains taxes were also lowered, which may have been helpful for their stock price. But that in itself is helpful to Elon Musk and other stockholders, not the company itself.

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