Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

People pushing carbon offsets seem to have a lack of understanding of how global element cycles work. To be brief, the only way to 'offset' fossil fuel CO2 emissions is to bury an equivalent amount of carbon, extracted from the atmosphere, in a geologically stable formation or a permanently anoxic aquatic basin. End of story. Planting trees does not 'offset' fossil emissions unless you plan to take the tree and bury it in an anoxic environment in which it can never decay. Solar panels and wind turbines offset nothing at all.

The only real fix for fossil-fueled global warming is to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix. A practical plan for doing that would result in perhaps a 3% reduction in fossil fuel PRODUCTION per year (no, don't try counting emissions, count production). In 30 years, this would mean zero fossil fuel production globally.

View on HN

A single tree is likely to release its carbon at the end of its life. A forest however can permanently endure and keep retain carbon in aggregate, at least compared to the alternative barren ground. To your point though, I would be surprised if this effect is big enough relative to removing fossil fuels from the energy mix.

I believe you can safely assume "it is not enough". We are recirculating literally millions of years worth of trees into the air. No amount of living carbon will be able to offset it, even if the entire earth were covered in trees (citation needed).

Citations seem to indicate this is actually enough! This surprised me also: https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/global-carbon. Indicates 400GT are in from forests, vs 800GT in the atmosphere. Some various sources seem to indicate that around 50% of forests have been destroyed by humans already (by area, not necessarily by carbon?). So if we could instantly recover all forests, and nothing else changed, that alone would reduce the atmosphere CO2 to preindustrial levels (it has almost doubled). I think the misleading part about "millions of years worth of trees" is that a very small percentage of tree biomass probably becomes useful fossil fuel, and the majority is recycled many times.

Wow, that really is surprising to me. This is the best non-personal news I've heard in probably a decade, so thanks for sharing!

A forest however can permanently endure...

Here in California we had two million acre burn last year, including, I believe, some "carbon sequestering" forests.

A lot of forest in the US actually have an excessive amount of growth due to suppression policies.

You can't expect to "plant" a forest in some random location and expect it to simply endure. Ecosystems have a more or less natural level of vegetation and getting more to grow is asking for it to burn away later (accelerating global warming, later). And that's not talking about the greater propensity for fire due to global warming itself.

That's why I said "can". Obviously there is a lot of diversity of forests in the world. Cutting down half of them to make room for human stuff might have reduced the average amount of carbon stuck in wood on average?

There is no fundamental problem with a forest burning. It might release all it's carbon into the atmosphere while burning, but when it regrows it will re-absorb all that carbon.

Bit of an accounting nightmare. You have to make sure it is allowed to regrow. You can't count that regrowth as new carbon sequestration, it's sequestrating it's original carbon again. And it's also going to take decades before it fully regrows.

My point above is that because of fire suppression, California's forests have grown denser than the long-term, sustainable average. California's forests were much less dense in the 1880s because fires were quite common - it is a "fire shaped landscape", the ecology evolved with fire.

If someone is attempting to make things even more dense, they simply will stoke fuel for more fire.

Yeah. The accounting can become even more of an absolute nightmare if you actually have to start planning that far ahead and taking into account the long-term sustainable average of converting land to forest, instead of the short-term best case.

> People pushing carbon offsets seem to have a lack of understanding of how global element cycles work.

They're the same as people pushing for mass adoption of EVs, they're not looking for a long term solution to the environmental problem, they're looking for a short term solution to extend their market for one more generation.

Sorry, what? The long-term benefits of EVs is that they can be powered by clean, renewable and nuclear energy (though even without that they are more energy-efficient than ICE cars)

Are you proposing that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs is not an essential part of a long-term, low-carbon future?

The essential part of a long-term, low carbon future is to drastically reduce car use. After that wether it's an EV or an ethanol fueled ICE is really secondary.

This isn't very well thought out, where do you live?

We spread too much thanks to unsustainable technologies/ideologies and now that we're facing the consequences our excuse is "how will we continue living unsustainably"

Same answer as people who built cities in the middle of fucking deserts and complain about potential lack of water: you don't

This is even worse thought out, and really demonstrates a real lack of understanding of how the world works. Oh how humans work. You're one of us, and equally complicit as any human live today. So, maybe, rather than being this unearned smugness, you come up with an answer. Any idiot can identify the challenges, and shit on something.

Las Vegas exists, as do many other desert cities. So, this point makes no sense. Humans, harness the physics of the world around us, to shape our futures.

The problem isn't cars, it's capitalism.

From many people's viewpoints, it is not very well thought out to subsidize the use of 3-ton single occupancy vehicles that require massive amounts of energy to manufacture and massive amounts of energy to move. At the very least there should be far higher licensing taxes, congestion charges, road wear taxes, enormous gas taxes, etc.

I think people don't realize just how bad car dependence is for their own communities. notjustbikes has many good videos on the topic, such as:

Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0

The Ugly, Dangerous, and Inefficient Stroads found all over the US & Canada:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM

We understand. What are we supposed to do, sell our houses and move to a condo downtown? Whose going to buy them, and where the fuck are we going to get the resources to house that many people without a massive energy/resource exploitation. So "no cars" is childish and naive.

Awareness isn't the issue, but awareness of an issue we have no control over does nothing of value to anyone other than add anxiety.

Who's building nuclear power plants now ? Renewable sources of electricity are stacked on top of non renewable ones so far

> Are you proposing that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs is not an essential part of a long-term, low-carbon future?

Hm yes, a sustainable future won't be made of 3 tonnes personal steel cages transporting 1 person. There are 1.5B personal vehicles on earth right now, replacing every single one of them with the EV equivalent will just displace the problem (EVs generate half their lifetime pollution before even being driven on the street, then you have to take care about recycling, mining the raw materials, &c.)

This is just another chapter of the "don't worry we'll magically figure it out sometime in the future (_cough cough_ after I got my dividends and retire)"

I'm still missing a vision for a positive future which lacks EVs.

Every vision of a low-carbon future requires many things to change. You're saying we should let the current slow movement on electricty generation be an excuse for not moving on EVs (despite the fact that they're an improvement regardless). You could similarly argue that the slow movement on EVs should be an excuse from not improving electricity generation (despite the fact that there are improvements regardless).

Whataboutism about one vision is worthless until you have a better vision, where we can compare the practical and political tradeoffs between them.

Simple: no more personal cars

But yeah that would require work, let's just cry about losing convenience and continue perpetuating the same cycle again, since we have no options but to commit to our clearly unsustainable model

That would not solve the problems like transporting goods from ports and warehouses to stores or transporting equipment that a plumber or drummer needs to do their job. We'll still need electric trucks and vans.

Presumably the parent has something more drastic in mind, like leveling every city and replanning it around bikes and extending public transit to every rural community. Basically treat every place like a dense urban area or force people to move into dense urban areas. At least those are the common, facile alternatives presented by the anti-car side of these debates. It's just urban chauvinism.

Faced with an overwhelming problem, is is tempting to seek simple solutions which would boil the ocean.

Personally, I’d prioritize suboptimal solutions which prevent a rise in ocean temperatures.

Maybe I'm not very clever, but it's hard to guess what you're driving at here.

1. An argument (that others are also making) that we need to be willing to accept partial solutions.

2. A pun.

Yes, I understand that. I'm not sure which is the "partial solution" in this scenario, EVs?

I've never heard an anti-car person call for public transit in the sticks. It doesn't seem viable to me[0], and I'm pretty anti-car as is. Most people live in cities or suburbs now and I don't see that changing anytime soon - so it doesn't really make sense to disrupt the lives of people living in rural areas.

While "make everything dense again" is kind of the end-goal, the way we get there isn't so much by "forcing" people to move into dense urban areas. At least, not unless you consider markets to be a form of coercion, in which case everything is "forced" all of the time and I have no argument for you. What happens is that we stop overplanning zoning codes, let commercial and residential zones mix, and allow the market to do it's job rather than just lining the pockets of whoever bought into the neighborhood 30 years ago.

As to your point about urban chauvinism, I do want to point out that while New Urbanism (the thing you're talking about) is really prevalent in urban spaces, so are NIMBYs. It's not so much "everyone should live like us"; it's an argument between people who want city centers to actually be cities and people who still think mixed-use land is the path to crack-era Manhattan. Dense urban spaces are already so desirable now that pretty much every formerly-cheap neighborhood has been gentrified to the hilt. If more people want to live in a dense urban area, then why shouldn't the housing market be allowed to cater to that desire and expand the urban core outwards or upwards?

[0] Though I may be wrong about this. Part of the reason why Amtrak still exists in it's current form is because it's a de-facto subsidy from Acela[1] riders to rural towns with no airport links.

[1] Me: Mom, can I have a Shinkansen?

Mom: No, we have a Shinkansen at home.

Shinkansen at home: acela.jpg

> I've never heard an anti-car person call for public transit in the sticks.

I don't think anti-car people call for rural public transit as much as they ignore rural, suburban, and exurban areas altogether. They call for "banning cars" (or drastically reducing them) without articulating how this would actually work outside of dense cities.

> While "make everything dense again" is kind of the end-goal, the way we get there isn't so much by "forcing" people to move into dense urban areas. At least, not unless you consider markets to be a form of coercion, in which case everything is "forced" all of the time and I have no argument for you. What happens is that we stop overplanning zoning codes, let commercial and residential zones mix, and allow the market to do it's job rather than just lining the pockets of whoever bought into the neighborhood 30 years ago.

I'm kind of fine with this (I like walkable neighborhoods!). I would like more mixing of residential and commercial (more, smaller shops), but I think it's a foregone conclusion that this would result in the kind of dramatically increased density that makes European-style public transit ubiquitous (a lot of people like space, and there's a lot of it in the US). I certainly don't think that's going to happen on a time scale that allows us to skip EVs while meeting climate targets like the OP suggests.

> As to your point about urban chauvinism, I do want to point out that while New Urbanism (the thing you're talking about) is really prevalent in urban spaces, so are NIMBYs. It's not so much "everyone should live like us"; it's an argument between people who want city centers to actually be cities and people who still think mixed-use land is the path to crack-era Manhattan.

I'm not sure what New Urbanism is, but I would be fine with urban people quibbling about how urban spaces should look (I live in a major US city); however, this debate isn't scoped exclusively to cities.

> Dense urban spaces are already so desirable now that pretty much every formerly-cheap neighborhood has been gentrified to the hilt. If more people want to live in a dense urban area, then why shouldn't the housing market be allowed to cater to that desire and expand the urban core outwards or upwards?

I don't think this is true except perhaps in NYC or the Bay Area. But in general I don't think anyone has a problem with the concept of expanding urban density (although there's surely some NIMBYism from people who don't want their suburb to be the target of urban expansion).

> We'll still need electric trucks and vans.

But that would still reduce the problem by a factor of what? 100? With all the other side effects of needing smaller roads, reducing congestion, ... .

GP specified that mass adoption of EVs was not the solution, not that there were no applications for EVs in a carbon-zero future. Just like the carbon offsets in the OP article, simply replacing personal vehicles with EVs does little to nothing to reduce either the global energy expenditure or carbon emissions, it simply moves the energy budget around. Especially true when a plurality of electric power generation still comes from burning coal and natural gas. Removing personal vehicles does reduce both energy expenditure and emissions (to the extent it is feasible, which covers probably >50% of personal vehicles; remember, while most of the US is not urban, most people live in urban areas)

EVs, like carbon offsets, are a necessary part of a carbon-zero future, but they don't actually get us any closer on their own.

And it would require massive amounts of time (building the new infrastructure to support this vision would take generations), which we don't have...

You’re complaining about the environmental impact of reworking a few billion vehicles but blink at razing and rebuilding cities?

How is that going to work out politically? You think a majority of voters are gong to support banning all personal automobiles? In the US, banning personal firearms is non-starter, and car ownership is even more deeply embedded.

> Who's building nuclear power plants now ? Renewable sources of electricity are stacked on top of non renewable ones so far

You're arguing against a straw man of your own making. No one is positioning EVs as the solution for generating clean energy. They are a solution for electrifying transportation which is a prerequisite for moving transportation from fossil fuel generation to clean energy. Moreover, the current average blend of energy sources in the US grid is already much cleaner than burning gasoline, and on top of that virtually all charging stations are powered by 100% renewable energy.

> EVs generate half their lifetime pollution before even being driven on the street,

This is an argument in favor of EVs. Solar panels also produce all of their emissions prior to being plugged into the grid. This is precisely the mechanism by which they reduce carbon output relative to fossil fuel energy sources which have a large upfront carbon cost and then an even larger ongoing cost. It's the same deal with EVs.

> 3 tonnes personal steel cages transporting 1 person

Well, we have to have some way of getting around, and most of the US is not dense urban area. Space is plentiful in the US, and anyway "steel cages carrying one person" isn't optimizing for space, not carbon emissions. Any sort of utopian restructuring of US transportation is going to involve way more carbon up front for decades to solve a relatively small part (transporting humans) of a problem that we need to have solved in decades.

> This is just another chapter of the "don't worry we'll magically figure it out sometime in the future (_cough cough_ after I got my dividends and retire)"

This kind of vapid, incorrect cynicism isn't helpful and probably violates the site rules. We already largely know how to drastically reduce our emissions--clean energy and electrification. EVs are part of the electrification story. There's not much to "magically figure out" except how to make renewable energy viable for base load generation economically, but since any anti-car transportation solution is completely ignoring economy (not necessarily to be confused with "the economy") anyway, we can elide the "economically" requirement for base load generation in which case we already know how to get from here to there. In whichever case, EVs involve much less "magic" to solve than any anti-car alternative.

> We already largely know how to drastically reduce our emissions--clean energy and electrification

I think the parent is arguing against this premise.

You argue from a value system, in which cars for personal transportation, are an axiomatic condition. Not only that, cars, no matter their size, going as fast as geometry allows it, are an inherent fixture.

Solutions like EVs are a solution to carbon emissions, but only within this value system.

I can think of plenty of other solutions, all of them old-skool tech. Driving more frugal cars with high mpg (which will be lighter, smaller), would be a low-tech solution that anyone can implement today. However, since this is not in your value system, it does not occur to you. Since your value system is the dominant one, American car manufacturers no longer even want to put this solution up for sale. Not requiring people to commute, is another low-tech way we can curb carbon emission. Taxing cars by weight is a low-tech bureaucratic solution. A true forest of automated speed cameras to push top speeds down, and thus fuel consumption down, yet another one. Zoning which allows amenities in walking and biking distance is another, and infrastructure making walking and biking be safe, not having to worry about getting run over by 3-ton EVs, would be yet another low tech solution.

None of the above curb quality of life. But rather, they exist in a world that cannot be imagined.

> EVs involve much less "magic" to solve than any anti-car alternative.

This quote is a perfect encapsulation of your solipsism. You cannot even imagine these other solutions, and if you do, they appear magic. While this "magic"is the reality on the ground in so much other parts of the world. Even within the US, they exist.

EVs will not be a solution to curb carbon emissions. It is because EVs fundamentally do not address the root causes of why we have these emissions in the first place. The wasteful use of energy on personal transportation, caused by overly heavy, overly fast vehicles, having to drive over overly long distances, for even the most basic daily needs.

> You argue from a value system, in which cars for personal transportation, are an axiomatic condition. Not only that, cars, no matter their size, going as fast as geometry allows it, are an inherent fixture. ... However, since this is not in your value system, it does not occur to you. ... You cannot even imagine these other solutions

You're making so many baseless and incorrect assumptions about my value system and thought process that it's very hard to assume you're arguing in good faith. You're welcome to try again without making assumptions about my beliefs or capacity for imagination.

I think the original poster is arguing the point that having personal vehicles is the wrong solution, and that the life style of the typical american cannot imagine that as a solution.

I think it is impossible to put the personal vehicle genie back into the lamp. Any future climate solution cannot involve decreasing the quality of life for the typical american (or western person, i'm using american as a catch-all term).

EV is the compromise already.

I generally agree, but cars are fully integrated into even the most non-western countries regardless of wealth or poverty. I admittedly can't imagine solutions that also help us meet our (time constrained) climate objectives or which don't cost trillions of dollars, but I think it's pretty rhetorically crumby to criticize someone's "ability to imagine an alternative" without proffering one's own proposal.

Piggybacking to plug notjustbikes on youtube who does a nice job of outlining why the US's obsession with cars and single-family-zoned housing areas has dug us into the value system you're describing. That is not to say that working to fix these vast infrastructure problems is a simple or remotely carbon neutral feat (Amsterdam has taken 50 years to get there). We got here because of choices about how transportation/freedom in the US should look (many lobbied by the car industry). I'm not saying cars shouldn't exist. I don't think that's realistic with an area as vast as the US. But places like Amsterdam and Tokyo can clue us in that it doesn't need to be like this in reasonably dense areas.

What if we could eliminate the need for cars in many areas by creating infrastructure that's vastly more efficient, cheaper, safer, and healthier to use? We already have a lot of this technology (bikes/trains/buses/trams + relevant infrastructure). Building this would be expensive and create a lot of pollution. Does that mean we shouldn't try?

notjustbikes is such a great channel. I think he paints a great picture of all forms of transportation existing side-by-side. It's not an either/or, but an and/and. Super inspiring channel.

> What if we could eliminate the need for cars in many areas by creating infrastructure that's vastly more efficient, cheaper, safer, and healthier to use?

Yes, that would be so great. Many neighborhoods in the US could accomodate it too. Roads are wide, there's absolutely space for different kinds of road use, side by side. And a lot of neighborhoods predate car travel, everything before the 30s or so, we know, as a historical fact, that they can totally be liveable without a car, if only it was safe for other road users to do so.

> Does that mean we shouldn't try?

Absolutely. The investment in safe road infrastructure, providing transportation options, has so many benefits.

Changing the value system of the American public is a ridiculous pie in the sky solution that is not going to happen in any reasonable timeframe.

Those things change in small steps one generation at a time. Our best bet right now is to find carbon solutions that are compatible with the current set of values.

I get that point for sure. It's and/and. And electric vehicles (which won't be a solution to climate change) will at least reduce noise and pollution. They're just more civilized, and I think invite more civilized driving overall.

>"pie in the sky"

I think that's where we disagree. I don't think it is at all. Much of the US city infrastructure is build before the 30s. These neighborhoods could accommodate biking, walking, (and yes, together with cars)... much more easily. They don't, it's because every single road is completely dedicated to multi-lane car traffic. It's basically unsafe for others.

Slowing traffic down (top speeds mainly), would really only take bollards and paint. That is just a mental change; basically accept we need to share the road safely. It's unreal to me that such a small, almost insignificant shift, triggers such intense resistance.

The claim we were originally disputing was something like "abolish cars", but it seems you're walking that back considerably to "slower speed limits". The right answer IMO is "slower speed limits on streets AND more, higher throughput highways" so cars can get where they're going quickly and without using streets for bulk of their transit (thus increasing safety for pedestrians).

But this is an unpopular idea among anti-car people because it's insufficiently punitive toward drivers. Specifically, they often advocate for fewer, lower throughput highways even though that only pushes traffic out into the side streets, endangering pedestrians. (This isn't a straw man, I've had that debate with people in my own city about removing a major thoroughfare, essentially to spite drivers).

> more, higher throughput highways

Please not. But maybe underground, then yes, sure why not.

> removing a major thoroughfare, essentially to spite drivers)

I don't really know the particular situation. I hope it was not out of spite! That'd be sad. (I do understand fwiw - how it can come across like that). I do think a city should never accommodate high speed traffic, only maybe on an interstate or a truly segregated roadway. A lot of these high-speed corridors are through residential areas, it's just plain dangerous, noisy, polluting. There's a reason nobody wants to live next to a high speed road, and if they do, it requires a lot of empty buffer space (huge front yards, basically) to make it tolerable.

> lower throughput highways

Again, not knowing the particular situation, since this can be very context dependent, and maybe we have radically different examples in mind, so ymmv, fwiw, etc... Just as an example: in my town, a recent a high throughput highway was reduced from 4 to 2 lanes. That did not reduce throughput. It did decrease top speeds, no more mad max style passing and jostling, and fewer accidents. Basically, cars now toddle along in single file, at a civilized clip, but no longer that accordion of rushing and breaking from light to light anymore. It also is so much safer for people crossing the road, or biking. It took decades to make this happen. When trying to get these, most drivers at these public planning meeting could just not imagine that removing lanes has any kind of net good. After two years now of this conversion, which is positive is so many ways (it does not even inconvenience drivers, only curbs their worst impulses), every other similar proposal still face this same kind of opposition. This mindset is completely ingrained to such a degree that it almost seems monomaniacal.

>I can think of plenty of other solutions, all of them old-skool tech. Driving more frugal cars with high mpg (which will be lighter, smaller), would be a low-tech solution that anyone can implement today.

But I already do that and considering current gas prices in Germany an EV is cheaper to operate. It's the next small step that short sighted humans are willing to take. I would rather take it than not.

Demanding that we stop driving cars would require a land value tax to encourage densification of downtown. Considering how many people are against letting people live in the place they want to live that's not an option. A car is effectively a tool to undermine the rent seeking done by land owners. If you can just drive away from the oppressor his power diminishes by how far you can get away from him. That's the true source of sprawl.

Sure it's not _the_ solution to the world's green house gas problem but as someone living in a province with about 97% of energy being hydro/geothermal/wind/solar, making the next car an EV should make a pretty big dent in one's personal CO2 footprint. You have to take your local energy mix into consideration.

EVs still have a ton of embodied carbon in their production. Creating those batteries is not easy, we still haven't figured out how to remove carbon emission from the steel production process, and at the end of the day we can't beat climate change with out reducing our overall resource consumption substantially.

I looked up the numbers and did the math a few years ago, and best case scenario - an EV fueled entirely by non-emitting sources - is that an EV cuts emissions by 85% in a full lifecycle analysis.

And that's actually a pretty rare case. Most people getting EVs right now are charging them on grids that are still mostly powered by fossil fuels. Which complicates matters even further. Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged on the grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions over a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE.

For most people, car use doesn't have to be necessary. With intelligent design of our cities and a shift in culture, most people could get around primarily by foot, on bike, or by mass transit and forgo car ownership. So drastically reducing car ownership needs to be the bigger part of the equation. Those who absolutely still need to own a car can go EV. But we can't hit our carbon targets by simply replacing all the ICE vehicles with EVs.

Right but a problem that exists in 100 places is far easier to solve than a problem that exists in 283,000,000 places (in the case of ICE vehicles in the US).

+1 to cities needing to be less car friendly regardless of how they're manufactured, but the reality is that large parts of the world (especially the US), there's just huge, huge, huge amounts of investment in a (yes, broken) model of urban planning that requires cars. Undoing that will be really hard and I don't think we can afford to wait – we should take every solution we can find, even if it's partial.

Yeah, I agree we can't afford to wait for the urban planning model to change (and that changing it is going to require massive investments) so in the mean time we need to be encouraging people who can to go EV. But we need to do that alongside education about the urban planning model and the need to eventually get off cars entirely.

We can't go around saying "Everyone go EV to solve climate change!" because it's not a solution, it's an iterative step to a mid-point towards a carbon neutral society.

What we need to be saying is "Walk, bike, or ride the bus if you can. If you can't, look at your community and figure out why you can't, then work to change your community so you can. And in the mean time, drive an EV if you can afford it, or a fuel efficent used ICE if you can't."

> Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged on the grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions over a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE.

Given how efficient even something like a coal power plant is compared to vehicle engine (with a transmission, and stopping and going at traffic lights every so often), this is incredibly unlikely bordering on impossible in realistic conditions.

Where are you getting those numbers?

From the US Department of Energy. You can get emissions numbers per Kw for each location. You can get miles per KW for most EVs. From that you can calculate emissions per mile for an EV. Which is a number you can get for most standard gas engines. Then you can compare.

But actually, I probably should have said "highly efficient ICE or hybrid" rather than reasonably efficient. It's been a while since I ran those numbers and the piece of info my brain stored was "Don't get an EV until I can charge it from solar". Either way, my overall point stands - EVs don't actually lead to the major emissions cuts advertised in most real world scenarios.

I just did the math on my EV history (~3.5mi/kWh) and compared to the EPA emissions for my region, Texas. That came out to ~0.122kg/mi of CO2 emissions. If I'm reading this other EIA chart, there's 8.1kg of CO2 per gallon of finished motor gasoline. So for a 30mpg car, that's .27kg/mi of CO2 emissions. So I would need to get on average at least 66mpg to match the CO2 emissions from my EV in Texas.

How many crossovers do you see on the market get >66mpg?

Also, this is entirely ignoring the transmission factors, this is purely a gallon of gas on its own being burned compared to the production at the plant. In reality you'd need to add a significant amount more emissions to the gas as there's tons of trucks having to drive that fuel to local fuel stations all over the place, meanwhile transmission of the electrical energy is pretty darn efficient in comparison.

https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2...

https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php?m...

> long-term benefits of EVs

If a benefit of EVs is currently theoretical and would only come after the useful life of the car, is it really a benefit?

I say this as a happy EV-owner, but one who doubts that my EV will still be on the road by the time when my electricity is >75% sourced from renewable or nuclear energy.

If nothing else, at least the demand from your EV is contributing to the mammoth project of EV charging infrastructure, which will help with future EV uptake.

The current projections are that the switchover to primary renewables is going to happen in the lifetime of EVs manufactured today. For a slow to adapt industry such as our energy grids the drastic capital cost reductions (much less TCO advantages such as decreased fuel costs, decreased maintenance costs) of renewables (especially wind and solar, but some of those advances have had knock-on effects in mainstay hydro's TCO too) has made them take notice and they are adjusting much more rapidly than people assume. Entire countries have had 24 hour periods or more entirely running on renewables, and sure that's good weather, but that's still not something some people would have guessed ten years ago. Most of that isn't top-down government mandates, most of that is "ordinary" capitalism and the fact that power companies are realizing it's "easy money" to go for cheaper renewables as large portions of their energy mix. (To be fair, power companies have always worked that way. Even what most people think of as "coal states" have always been nearly as much hydro as coal since basically the beginning of electricity.)

Just about no one is building new nuclear into the mix right now, but that's a different can of worms, and at least for the moment with so many easy wins in sight to be had in solar/wind/improving existing hydro it may not even be necessary to add much or any nuclear.

> lifetime of EVs manufactured today

My EV is 7.5 years old and so probably halfway to its median practical service life. It's already down to around 70 miles of "can count on it" range and in 7.5 more years, I expect it to be down to just under 60.

I don't think very many 2015 Nissan LEAFs will be in service at the epoch rollover, unless someone comes out with a <$2500 in today's money battery replacement pack. No one's putting a $5-7K battery into a 15 year-old outdated tech BEV in 2030.

For some clarification, I did mean more in terms of EVs manufactured starting around today (next 10-15 years) more than those manufactured as of today.

I read it that way naturally. Mine is “halfway used up” and my local grid is still majority fossil fuel was my point.

The problem with pushing EVs as the ultimate solution to car emissions is that they are still grossly inefficient compared to other modes of transportation (rail, bus, etc.). EV's do nothing to solve other problems that car culture has created, such as urban sprawl and the associated traffic.

We should be pushing to replace ICE vehicles with EV's, but we should also be pushing to make mass transit more viable, and make our communities more pedestrian/bicycle friendly.

> We should be pushing to replace ICE vehicles with EV's, but we should also be pushing to make mass transit more viable, and make our communities more pedestrian/bicycle friendly

Sure. That doesn’t make EVs a “short term solution”. This is in the same category of fallacy that lead hippie-era greens to oppose nuclear power. It’s not nukes or windmills, it’s nukes or coal.

No. It really is nukes or wind turbines.

Nobody is building coal plants. They are being shuttered just as fast as renewables can be brought online. Starting nukes steals funding from that for construction projects which will deliver no power for a decade. We burn coal in the meantime. The coal steals even more dollars, the whole time, and the nuke displaces much less coal when it does come online, if ever. Often, it wouldn't.

Money is fungible. Dollars spent on a nuke, and on coal the whole time it is being built, is dollars not spent on wind turbines that displace coal immediately as each comes online, and displace more than the nuke could.

This is a very stark difference, and no amount of logic-chopping can change it.

> Nobody is building coal plants

Poland is retrofiting coal plants [1] to send anti-nuke Germany power. And every anti-nuke nation is spinning up new gas turbines.

Voters’ sensitivity to power cuts and price spikes is more vicious than their preference for green energy. This sets the rules of the game plainly: anti-nuke states, invariably, burn more fossil fuels.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-05/poland-sh...

States that shut down nukes burn more fossil fuel after.

States that build new nukes instead of solar and wind also spend on fossil fuel for all the years until their nukes are done. When the nukes are finally done (if ever), they displace a lot less fossil fuel than the solar and wind would have, for the money.

Or in general with smaller cheaper, lighter vehicles. We should aim to build society where we don't need private vehicles for intercity transport. And then intracity we have electric bicycles or very small vehicles outside specific use cases.

It would be far better to generate synthetic gasoline from atmospheric carbon, if such a thing were possible. Then you don't need to replace all the cars or all the fuel (energy) delivery infrastructure.

I think synthetic fuels works better in large transport vehicles, like planes and cargo ships. These require hi-density fuels, and electrification of these do not work.

for personal vehicles, i think EV works well, as electricity generation is far more efficient than synthetic fuel generation, and battery at this weight scale and distance works great.

So you'd have a middle use-case - trucks and lorries - which i'm unsure if electrification works for. Presumably, it would, but only if charging stations are dotted around a lot more places, including remote areas.

I don't see the connection to EVs. Certainly one can power EVs using coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, which just shifts the demand away from oil and towards coal and gas. However, people can also power their EVs off wind, solar or uranium power, whose production involves no fossil fuels. In contrast, ICE vehicles are locked into gasoline or diesel.

Obviously, transition to EV is a key necessity for getting transportation off fossil fuels. Now, international jet travel and global shipping are not going to work with electric power due to lower energy density in batteries, but here we can simply do artificial photosynthesis, based on DAC and hydrogen from water, and generate carbon-neutral fuel with no need to sacrifice agricultural land.

I agree with most of this, but we keep finding clever ways to knock down sectors that had seemed impossible to electrify. For instance, FleetZero claims to have a practical approach for global shipping [1]. It's not yet proven, but I haven't seen a serious counter-argument.

Even for jet travel, we may be able to whittle away at the problem with electric planes (or trains!) for short routes, and hydrogen for medium routes. Long routes may have to rely on artificial carbon-based fuels, as you say.

[1] https://climateer.substack.com/p/better-than-fossil

Perhaps GP had an issue with the battery technology itself. Obvious comments about rare or toxic mining aside, population center infrastructure isn't really designed to support everyone having battery based EVs.

It's true that personal EVs are not that great in dense urban centers due to the congestion problem. Light electric rail, electric buses and bicycles are the better option.

I'm going to sidestep the rail & bicycle hole here and focus on busses since those are the closest alternative in America specifically. I wish bikes were more feasible nationwide though.

There are plenty of population centers that aren't densely urban. Cities in the 200k to 400k range seem like they're just starting to be big enough to support a regional bus system on their own, or with the support of a nearby larger city.

The problem is how infrequently they would run though. Those cities tend to sprawl just a bit as they haven't made the full transition to multi-tenant dwellings so lots of folks would have to walk multiple blocks sometimes to get to a stop.

Individually operated vehicles, namely cars, are still the name of the game for the vast majority of America. But then you run into the electrification issues I mentioned. A lot of these neighborhoods have very old electrical systems, and while we've made a ton of room by not running 60W light bulbs everywhere, I'm not sure we could handle charging 50k electric cars per night in many medium sized cities.

> I'm not sure we could handle charging 50k electric cars per night in many medium sized cities.

You can scale up electrical infrastructure relatively easily (especially compared to installing a subway or cable car system), and it will be a lot more popular politically to upgrade this infrastructure than to force people to use buses.

But mass adoption of EVs, percentage wise, is absolutely required. I don't see how the alternative of keeping ICE vehicles is sustainable.

Neither thermic nor electric vehicles are sustainable with our current usage.

Let's pretend you don't know about cars and someone comes to pitch you this idea: "We'll make a 3 tonnes metal box, with a 1 tonne battery, that will on average only transport about 80kg of human being from A to B, we'll need about 1B of them". Who on earth would believe this is the optimal solution to a green future ?

You do realize that people aren't trying to make heavy vehicles, but that weight is imposed by physical and economic constraints. EV manufacturers try very hard to minimize weight. But anyway, it makes no sense to criticize EVs in a vacuum--tell us all about your miracle solution! Are we going to treat every urban community like a dense metropolis? Or are we going to close down urban communities and force everyone into fewer concrete jungles? And how much do you reckon your solution will cost?

Some of the size forcing is for "safety," that is, we have larger vehicles because they need to survive crash tests at high speeds. But if you have a city that decides they want to set all speed limits at 20 mph and design streets so that it's physically very difficult to exceed that speed, you can get away with much smaller vehicles (no vehicles over a certain weight allowed within city limits, for example).

Not every place needs to be a "dense metropolis," but designing everyone's lives and modes of transportation around the needs to people who live 20 or more miles from the nearest city doesn't make a ton of sense. Too often this discussion is presented as either/or when it can be both/and.

> Some of the size forcing is for "safety," that is, we have larger vehicles because they need to survive crash tests at high speeds. But if you have a city that decides they want to set all speed limits at 20 mph and design streets so that it's physically very difficult to exceed that speed, you can get away with much smaller vehicles (no vehicles over a certain weight allowed within city limits, for example).

But people need their vehicles to drive on highways as well as side streets (where 20mph is more reasonable). There's a reason EVs began with smaller, low-capacity batteries that were suitable for the kind of driving you're describing, but grew larger because people want to be able to travel between cities effectively.

> Not every place needs to be a "dense metropolis," but designing everyone's lives and modes of transportation around the needs to people who live 20 or more miles from the nearest city doesn't make a ton of sense. Too often this discussion is presented as either/or when it can be both/and.

I agree that we shouldn't try to treat urban areas like rural areas or vice versa. That said, I don't think we're optimizing for rural areas (I've lived in both kinds of environments). Specifically, I think cities can do more to optimize for their own conditions both without imposing on people in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas and without necessitating the creation of "side-street-only" cars. Specifically, I think this looks like "better planning"--invest in more, faster, and higher-throughput highways so people can get around quickly without relying on side-streets. Side-streets should be slow and pedestrian-friendly, highways should be fast and car-friendly. Get cars off side-streets and onto highways. Note that this is eminently compatible with more investment in public transit and cycling infrastructure (fewer cars on the streets = more room for bus and bike lanes). I reject the premise--we aren't "designing everyone's lives around the needs of people who live 20+ miles from the nearest city". People who live in cities can (and do!) buy fewer, smaller cars than people who live in rural areas. I think you're right that cities can do more to optimize for their own needs, but I think this looks more like "planning" than building cars that are only safe/useful on side streets. With respect to planning, I think cities can do a lot more to make fast, high-throughput highways so people aren't using city streets for commuting and thus city streets can be slower and more pedestrian friendly. This is also compatible with investing more in public transit and cycling.

Ban people from manual driving on public roads and even highways could work with lighter vehicles with less passive safety. Of course that might be more of an long-term outlook, as in "late this century", but it seems like an option.

Moving intercity traffic to mass transit be it trains or busses seem entirely reasonable. Ofc, this means that those services should be better or as good as private options.

There's a ton cities can do to make public transit a lot more comfortable without billions for building out new public transit infrastructure (which isn't to say that the latter is a bad idea!). Like, put some police on trains and buses so people are less likely to stab, urinate, smoke, blast music, etc. Clean buses and train cars regularly. Keep a high standard for antisocial behavior (if someone is being disruptive, kick them off). Run more trains and buses on existing infrastructure (don't make people wait half an hour for a train, keep people from being packed so tightly into train cars and buses). Keep reliability high.

If we can't manage these fundamentals, I don't know how much of an improvement we would see by building out new infrastructure.

I'm not sure where you got that we need 1B of such vehicles. We won't. But of all the vehicles that will remain, I'm willing to bet that almost all will be EVs. Even if there will be a fraction of vehicles on the roads compared to today, they still won't be using ICEs. Hence, mass adoption of EVs is inevitable either way.

I've been wondering if hybrids aren't actually better than full EVs, since I assume that 95% of trips are short enough to be covered by a hybrid's electric capacity while also minimizing the battery waste by not having gigantic batteries.

It would make sense to have a range extender as an option. But real-world statistics about PHEV usage patterns have been discouraging. (https://www.electrive.com/2020/09/28/phev-real-world-consump...)

I don't think anyone is pushing mass adoption of EVs as the whole solution to the climate problem, but it largely solves for the "consumer transit" share of the climate problem. Of course, if you're hinting at doing away with cars, then yeah, people are fixating on EVs because getting rid of cars is completely infeasible, politically, economically, and environmentally (it would be a decades-long project that would involve tremendous emissions to address a small part of a problem that we have only a few decades to solve in total).

> it would be a decades-long project

Too bad nobody makes decade long projects for their country/continent/planet anymore. Instead we're stuck in ~5 years cycles of throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks

You misunderstand the problem. It's not an issue that the project is decades long, it's that it is going to take, say 50 years of capital- and carbon-intensive development to solve a small part of a larger problem that we only have, say, 50 years to solve. And it offers virtually nothing over EVs except to gratify some anti-car ideologues.

NOTE: if it's not evident, those 50 year figures are made up. The point is that we have limited time and resources to solve the whole climate problem and we should be efficient (rather than ideological) in our approach.

But in reality, when prices at the pump rise >20%, even so called progressive governments resort to excise tax cuts and drill baby drill. Because if they didn't they'll be out of office very quickly.

Isn't the carbon that make up trees a form of sequestration? I thought that was the "global warming counter measure" component of planting trees. But, perhaps this part of the equation can never be significant?

The problem is at some point the tree dies, decays, and releases the carbon it was holding.

Contrast to an oil deposit which, left undisturbed, might never release its carbon.

Thinking of it at the individual tree level is wrong.

An acre of forest sequesters somewhere in the region of 30,000 lbs of carbon dioxide. Individual trees die and are reborn, but the forest as a whole, if it does not shrink, retains that carbon.

I’m not an expert on the market, but I don’t think there are many carbon offsets sold as “we will plant and maintain an acre of forest in perpetuity.”

And frankly it’s not something any organization can promise. Governments change and clear forest that was previously protected. Brazil provides a current and unfortunate example of this.

Also I wonder what ratio of those schemes are trees planted that would have anyway been planted for industrial forestry... We grow trees for reasons. And if there is extra cash in it there is few who don't take it.

"An acre of forest sequesters somewhere in the region of 30,000 lbs of carbon dioxide. Individual trees die and are reborn, but the forest as a whole, if it does not shrink, retains that carbon."

But it's even more complicated than that ...

We are reforesting ~20 acres of woodland just outside of San Francisco and we are not, as you say, thinking about individual trees - we are thinking of the woods as a whole ...

... which means clearing out a tremendous amount of sapling / deadwood / litter material that would quickly combust in a wildfire and destroy the entire forest.

So while we are on track for planting >200 redwood and douglas fir trees, we have also had to cut down >100 marginal trees to reduce fuel load. We're thinking on the scale of the entire forest and the entire forest needs to survive a burn ... including our relatively new trees that aren't as fire resistant as the old growth redwoods that were originally logged out of here.

Generally speaking:

The complexity of carbon mathematics is fraught and complex and I don't think it's reasonable to expect end users like consumers to navigate it.

It doesn’t release all its carbon. Much of the biomass does not end up back into the atmosphere but ends up in the ground. Those oil deposits were once forests.

One of the issues is that planting a tree is a slow form of sequestration. An individual tree may sequester a lot of carbon over its lifetime (measured in decades) as it grows, but it doesn't (and can't) immediately offset things as a seed or a sapling. Some carbon offset schemes attempt to amortize for this with accounting tricks, but for the most part when people are buying things like carbon offsets they are offsetting a pound of CO2 (or equivalent) emitted today with the hope that maybe a tree planted today will maybe sequester that pound over say the next ten years. (If it survives, if it is in a forest that is well maintained and hopefully not in a region prone to wildfires, if that forest is protected as an entity and not clear cut, and so forth.)

An interesting compromise would be that carbon "offsets" are available for purchase, but must be used to fund installation of renewable generation and energy storage infrastructure.

So that carbon offsets are accelerating the transition away from carbon.

> the only way to 'offset' fossil fuel CO2 emissions is to bury an equivalent amount of carbon, extracted from the atmosphere, in a geologically stable formation or a permanently anoxic aquatic basin

Why would avoiding the same amount of emissions in a place where it's cheaper to avoid not help?

Let's say for each kg of kerosene you burn in your plane, you hand out a solar lamp to someone using kerosene lamps, accelerating solar lamp adoption in a way that causes 1 kg less kerosene to be burned by that person.

The total emissions without the flight + compensation is 1 kg of kerosene burned in a lamp (over the period we're looking at). The total emissions with the flight + compensation is 1 kg of kerosene burned in a plane (and 0 in the lamp).

That seems very much offsetting.

This is a time based problem. Even if we make a forest, and cut it down 30 years from now, we have won ourselves 30 years of sequestration. In those 30 years we can develop substitution tech.

Maybe we can grow crustaceans in massive numbers in the ocean? There have during earths history been huge deposits of carbon from such animals

Changing an ecosystem is always a risky thing to do though, because there are long food chains, different species living in symbiosis, and just so very many variables.

We will have to get good at it then— we are already doing, just not trying to do it well. Engineering can function even in complex environments.

If growing in the ocean is to be done, it's probably better to try increase the amount of food algae/plankton at the bottom of the chain.

Last i heard, there was some experiment in this area, where a "sterile" part of the ocean was studied, and found that iron is the limiting micro-nutrient. By spreading iron (or rust i guess?) in these dead areas of the ocean, it would trigger growth, which would create a lot more ocean life where none existed before.

But the long term consequences of doing this is unknown. And that's not to mention how to actually get the requisite amount of iron to those places.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com