Hacker News Reader

Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Of course that the West would label everything as a "carbon bomb" right now, i.e. everything that doesn't fit its socio-political biases. Labelling nuclear power-plants the same would be met with derision, even though in our day and age the price of energy and the price of "stuff" is pretty well correlated, and seeing as nuclear power-plants are pretty damn expensive then it means that's lots and lots of energy that has been "incorporated" into them. But because there's no black smoke getting out of those nuclear power-plants then it means it's all "in our heads" or something. The same goes for most of the subsidised "green" energy.

View on HN

If I understand correctly, what you're describing is often called 'embodied carbon' or 'embedded emissions' [0].

Many people spend their lives estimating embedded emissions and, more importantly, the time it will take for any emission-reducing technology (e.g. electric cars) to amortise away the CO2e emissions required to produce it.

For instance, it's been estimated that a Tesla Model 3 "needs to be driven for 13,500 miles (21,725 km) before it does less harm to the environment than a Toyota Corolla" [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_emissions [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifeti...

> it's been estimated that a Tesla Model 3 "needs to be driven for 13,500 miles (21,725 km) before it does less harm to the environment than a Toyota Corolla"

Huh, that’s a factor of 5-10 less miles than I was expecting. Good to know.

This also depends a lot on the electricity source mix that you're powering your car with today and in the next 10 years.

As a matter of fact, electric cars would be more efficient than ICE cars even with a very high-carbon electricity mix, because thermal power plants are much more efficient than ICE engines (due to size + available cooling source), and the power transmission/battery/electric engines are optimized enough that they don't gobble all the efficiency gains.

Electric cars are better CO2-wise, no question. But it will not reduce emissions enough. People who can afford not having a car should do so, and public authorities should develop public transportation. Of course, people who can't do so will be better off with an electric car, but environmentalists are worried that a push to full-electric will undermine needed efforts to reshape society towards a less energy-hungry world.

...is the argument you're making here that somehow a nuclear plant or solar farm is somehow equally polluting as a coal-fired power plant? Everything costs time, materials, and money to produce, but only coal plants continue to actively pollute after construction...

And regarding the type of pollution created, more radioactive material has been released into the atmosphere from the world's fleet of coal plants than the world's fleet of nuclear plants. That includes the two with significant containment breaching meltdowns.

It turns out, when you burn a bunch of rocks, You release as gas all the stuff in those rocks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com