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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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