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I haven't read it and I'm curios what is the gist of the electrification approach. Is it that it's more efficient?

Wouldn't heating and cooling be more efficient if done through architectural approaches?

For example, for cooling Persians use "cooling towers" called Windcatcher[0]. I know that there's a lot that can be done through design both for cooling and heating.

Also, organising the public spaces and infrastructure must be much more productive than aiming for changing the energy conversion systems(i.e. switching away from combustion propellers to electric ones). I' m very sceptical of the idea that electric cars will solve our problems. Just recently Elon Musk demonstrated that electrification of cars and taking the traffic underground simply creates underground traffic congestion[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher [1] https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1479153917749600257

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Obviously passive is better, but the point is that you need active heating or cooling or cooking or moving, electric is better. For example, a heat pump space heater or hot water heater is 3 - 5 times more efficient than gas heating.

Electric cars, of course, do share the same issues cars have (extremely space inefficient meaning the throughput of people through over a distance is lower than most other transit options). But the roundtrip efficiency is about three to four times better than a regular ICE (most of the energy goes into producing heat, not locomotion). So they're generally better than ICE cars. You are right that the Boring company seems to have basically solved no problems, and the Vegas system could have hundreds of times more throughput just using light rail (either underground or overground). But the rolling stock of the light rail would be electric - so that better solution would be electrification too!

What about the energy already spent producing and getting your current car to you, the energy spent doing away with said car, the energy spent to produce said eletric car and get it to you? A car represents a lot of potential energy at rest. A lot of power was used to take those atoms of metal or carbon from all over the living earth and reconfigure them into the shape of a car at your present location.

I haven’t seen very many analyses pencil all this out. I’d assume the greenest thing would be to drive your current car for the rest of your life.

Plenty of this research is being done. I know of one a Dutch academic Auke Hoekstra who does a lot of this kind of thing as his main area research.

The average age of vehicles around where I am is 10.6 years, so it is unfair to pretend as if people don’t scrap most vehicles already after 15 or so years. I think a lot of the transition will not be forcing people to replace their cars but just phasing out new ICEs from being sold. The ones that were being driven by those who buy electrics will get sold into the used market and replace older, even less fuel efficient cars that are naturally scrapped.

My understanding around EV production is that it currently takes something like 3 years to cross the total lifecycle energy curve of a conventional car, and then every subsequent year is better for the electric car. Things are improving too as energy grids get greener and battery production gets more efficient.

As I said, cars still have many problems and are a quite large amount of embedded energy and anything we can do to reduce the number of cars around and shift journeys to other modes (walking, cycling, busses, trams, trains) is better again.

It's not really that electricity is more efficient (is IS more efficient in most cases, but a key point of the book is that we can't "efficiency" our way out of the climate crisis). It's that as long as the generation of electricity is clean, the use of it is also clean. We already have clean ways of generating electricity that are cost-competitive with fossil fuels, and by scaling up production it will actually end up massively cheaper than fossil fuels. But there is a high upfront cost to switching, so financing the switch is one of the biggest challenges.

The book is quite thorough in laying out all the challenges (eg, handling variable production from renewables, how to get buy-in from existing fossil fuel stakeholders, etc) and presents realistic solutions for each. I recommend you pick up a copy and read it!

I don't understand why so many make a big deal of the Las Vegas loop congestion. I don't have the impression that it's supposed to demonstrate anything other than that Boring Co could actually dig a tunnel. Presumably they could fix the problem by building a vehicle actually designed for the purpose of a "loop" transportation system, but that's obviously still some ways out. So it's basically a demo, a playground and a marketing gimmick for Boring Co/Tesla.

But surely you would agree that for a company claiming to be revolutionising transport, building a demonstration system that is much worse in most ways than conventional systems is not a very good marketing strategy...?

> I don't understand why so many make a big deal of the Las Vegas loop congestion

Because it demonstrates the exact thing that sceptics said it would happen?

Think a perpetuum mobile company having a demonstration of their machine and it stops. Would you be able to use the excuse that the demo was about showing that they can build machines and not the machine that they promised?

Demonstration that they can dig tunnels? Why would that need a demonstration and even if they wanted to demonstrate it why would they demonstrate it with cars inside and then say that the cars part doesn't count.

Digging tunnels is a very old thing. We know it can be done and we know it works well when you run electric vehicles inside it(All underground systems already run on electric cars), it's just that it doesn't solve congest any differently than the one on the ground. Two cars can't occupy the same volume and it holds both over ground and underground.

Sometimes the difference between Elizabeth Holmes and Mus*k are negligible. She should just failed to kick can down the road for long enough I guess. She should have imitated Mus*k instead of Jobs, then people would have been saying thing like "The tests not producing correct results doesn't mean anything, it's just a demonstration that they can build machines".

Why are you putting an asterisk in Musk?

To prevent fanboys finding it on search flocking. You can't criticise Mus*k on the internet, people will find you abd be very aggressive and annoying.

lol ok

Sure there are many ways to design housing to be more energy efficient, but what about all of the existing housing?

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