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.
Are you proposing that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs is not an essential part of a long-term, low-carbon future?
Same answer as people who built cities in the middle of fucking deserts and complain about potential lack of water: you don't
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.
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:
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.
> 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)"
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.
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
Personally, I’d prioritize suboptimal solutions which prevent a rise in ocean temperatures.
2. A pun.
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 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).
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, ... .
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.
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.
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'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 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
>"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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
+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.
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."
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
If we can't manage these fundamentals, I don't know how much of an improvement we would see by building out new infrastructure.