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Comment by coryrc | Hacker News Reader

You can put a battery from a crashed 2021 Leaf in a 2015 Leaf.

There's little the non-Tesla automakers are doing to stop you. They aren't helping you, but they aren't stopping you. The biggest problem is there's basically no market for it right now. I used to build stuff for this market (more-or-less). Only a tiny fraction of vehicles need anything. It's far cheaper to sell your vehicle to someone who doesn't mind 70 miles range and buy a new one with all the scale advantages of mass manufacturing than paying for the shop labor ($100-300/hr) and amortized cost of a battery few people want.

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This makes me more pessimistic that "the markets" will ever fix something related to anything where the negative effects are seen a decade down the road. We will switch to an electric fleet to "save the environment" and in 20 years we will throw our collective hands up in the air and see that "yup, that didn't work".

Economic activity nearly always has negative externalities. Our economic model is based on ever growing economic activity, and coupled with population growth this produces ever mounting externalities. We treat these externalities separately, as individual problems to solve, first clean air, then clean water, then fixing the ozone hole, now fighting global warming. Every time that we “solve” these problems we cause new externalities to pop up. Even if we “solve” climate change, something else will pop up. Perhaps the impact of chemicals on biological reproduction? That is building up steam and would be even bigger to tackle than climate change.

The classic environmentalist solution is to live a smaller life, with fewer things. That is a hard sell and runs counter to innate human instinct to gather resources. On the other hand, economic policy can’t seem to move past fighting symptoms, and does its very best to pretend the growth model isn’t the root cause of all environmental problems. Does anyone have a handle on a real and pragmatic solution I wonder?

Thank you for being tuned into my pessimism and helping me paint an even bleaker picture! =D No but seriously that was a very thought-provoking reply and I'm personally very aligned with the classic environmentalist solution but equally desoriented on how that could be "sold" on a global scale as a way of living. My political leanings is showing here so it comes as no surprise that my analysis is that the issue is with that sneaky quoted word. "Selling" an idea implies rational actors that could "buy in" to the "small life lifestyle" and reject the options readily available on the market, which would be a (potential) life abundant with short term kicks and a dopamine filled days with an endless supply of various things that are fun and "help" us in our daily life (but in the end will destroy earth). Which indeed is a hard sell, primarily because we aren't rational economical agents that can weight "guaranteed happiness the next decade" vs "my children potentially living in a desert fighting for scrap in 50 years".

History shows that individuals and groups equipped with the mindset of accumulating wealth and power will not yield their "progress".

This means society may tend to fall back to authoritarian systems like feudalism, when put under increasing external pressure.

The struggles and lack of coordination caused by this failure to act as a collective with modern technology present will lead to a fast and indiscriminate decline of the worlds population, I think.

What about an authority that could price negative externalities into the goods as they were discovered? I think there are extremely high challenges around enforcing this globally, and resisting the pressure from industries that are impacted, but it would seem to be the least disruptive in terms of modifying the fundamentals of our existing capitalist system.

> to "save the environment"

This is an odd straw man to bring out, when the goal is very explicitly to reduce carbon output. Also nothing so far implies that the legislation is impossible to fix once the electric fleet exists.

What do you think is going to happen in 20 years?

Approaching ten years of life, most of these cars have lost <10% battery life (and loss is fairly linear in lithium) so in 20 more years we'll have cars with 70% of their original battery life. They'll still be perfectly usable for many people. So long as fossil-fueled vehicles are in use, let's get more EVs on the road instead of upgrading the ones we have.

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