Hacker News Reader

Comment by uejfiweun | Hacker News Reader

This anti car shit is so dumb IMO. Cows produce wayyyyy more atmospheric pollution than cars. Supertankers emit 260x the world's car pollution every year. Countries are burning tons of coal and putting thick smog into the atmosphere. So what do we do? Make life harder for basically every western citizen by making gas prices skyrocket and banning gas cars, and do nothing about those other problems. It seems to me like nothing more than idiotic virtue signaling (like so many other policies nowadays, unfortunately).

View on HN

The solution is clear. Buy a private jet.

"EU Proposes To Exempt Private Jets From Fuel Tax": https://bitluxtravel.com/eu-proposes-to-exempt-private-jets-...

Lol, I haven't seen that before. Sometimes these people truly defy all reason. Not sure what to do other than shake my head in disgust.

vote wisely?

Have you noticed how EU parliament works - it doesn't matter whom you send there, they all vote the same. With a few exceptions like Petr Mach or J Korvin-Mikke ofc, but it is more fringe exceptions.

Is there an alternative to moving goods other than super tankers (or planes?)

There's plenty of alternatives to moving people than the car, such as walking, cycling and a variety of forms of public transit, all of which are more efficient and less CO2 intensive than the car.

The reason for the legislative focus on cars is because amongst all the various things we need to do to lower CO2 emissions, it is one of the most relatively easiest shifts to make.

The additional upside as well is that at a local city level, cars are an enormous percentage of CO2 emissions, and on top of the whole limiting climate change thing, shifting to electric is going to have real every day positive impacts in air quality.

Local manufacturing and consuming less crap.

Trains.

Also, tankers and cargo ships have inefficient engines what if International Maritime Organization enforced emission limits like for cars?

Are you suggesting that trains are more efficient than tankers? Per ton-km, ships are close to an order of magnitude lower CO2 emissions.

> This anti car shit is so dumb IMO.

This is anti-petrol, not anti-car. They haven't banned the sale of cars.

ICE cars are replaceable with Electric cars fairly easily.

The EU is aiming to meet its Paris agreement on coal reduction by 2050 (and many other countries before that, UK eliminating use of coal by 2024, Germany by 2030) https://climateanalytics.org/briefings/eu-coal-phase-out/#:~....

Many people are also reducing their use of cows. Just going after the biggest polluter one by one will take far too long.

the anti-car case can be made without any reference at all to global warming. designing cities around expecting everyone to own and drive a car is stupid and makes us all poorer and unhealthier. that includes electric vehicles btw.

Not everybody lives in a city. Proven by the exodus from the cities during covid…

suburbs too

We could still pay for public transport on the country side too.

I live in the countryside and I’m going to be completely honest: I take a car any time a day. Public transport doesn’t go where I usually go to.

By paying for public transport i mean paying for transport, maybe a some app ordered transporters which can fit a family and stuff.

So that transport would do be basically a family car with a lot of junk kilometers?

It costs 20€ just to get a Taxi go come out here, and the total cost of taking a taxi to the closest bus stop is about 40€. Sure, if the weather is nice, I can ride a bike to the same bus stop and get some exersize at the same time, but that'll get a bit problematic during winter.

I don't expect society to spend hundreds of millions on making public transport available to the 30% of the Finnish population who live outside urban areas. It will, however, take more than a decade before EV's are viable alternatives to everyone living in the countryside; the power grid needs extensive renovations, power production needs to get away from fossil fuels and the EV's themselves need to be both capable and cheap enough for people to afford them. I can buy 20 year-old car in working order for about 600€ today if I want to. Even cheaper if I don't care about electric windows.

I know people who would barely be able to afford such a purchase if their current car broke down. None of them will be able to afford a used EV anytime soon, and I suspect, not in '25 either.

That being said, EV's is a good thing. We need synthetic petrol and diesel until they're able to fill all needs currently filled by ICE cars, though. We're going to need it for farming and forestry equipment and the like anyway, so we might aswell get that ball rolling.

> It costs 20€ just to get a Taxi go come out here, and the total cost of taking a taxi to the closest bus stop is about 40€.

What is unrealistic to me is your expectation to live in a remote area but still get easy access to other areas. Why don't you try to live closer to your job, or work closer to your home?

I don't understand why I should also pay (breathing your pollution is paying for me) for your desire to live away from a city. If it's your choice, you should pay the full cost of it.

I work remotely and have been doing so since I moved here. I'm not expecting anyone to pay for me either, I make more than enough to cover the expenses for my family.

However, as I said, there's plenty of others who aren't as fortunate. Most of those I know, are born out here, work in agriculture, and don't see why they should keep producing cheap food for city-dwellers, when all they do is try to limit their ability to keep the production going. And I assure you; urban areas in Europe will not want to be depending on food imports this fall.

Again, as I mentioned, synthetic fuels are the way to go until electrification is done. While food occasionally does grow on trees, harvesting is almost completely dependent on fossil fuels. The power grid is being upgraded, albeit slowly (and believe me: we're paying a lot for the work). The forestry industrycan't run without diesel.

Electrifying everything will take time. If we want it done faster we need synthetic fuels. Preferably yesterday.

I honestly think solutions like electric or synthetic fuels are a delusion. The only way to get out of this situation is to accept the fact that we developed in a totally unsustainable way in the past decades, thanks to private transportation. We will have to step back and give up some of our most recently acquired habits, I'm entirely sure of that. The question is, will we wait until it's too late to do it?

Narh. We'll keep going until we don't. There's no silver bullet to solve all our problems. We have a few half-baked suggestions, but none is good enough. Getting everyone to agree on developing one into a state that will be good enough won't happen, so we'll have to make do with a dozen different solutions that is nowhere near enough on their own. With luck, we can control the damage sufficiently to prevent catastrophic failure and a repeat of the Bronze age collapse.

Giving up on recent developments sounds good in principle, but the fact is that energy usage in the middle classes is slowly going down. If we want an equal distribution of energy usage, then we'd need to go back to pre-WW2 levels in order to be sustainable. And that somehow assumes we retain our current ability to produce clean technology while reducing usage to a level that most people simply won't accept. The middle class wasted a _lot_ of energy in the 60's and early 70's.

I remain optimistic in hoping that multiple smaller solutions will be enough to prevent the proverbial shit from hitting the fan. Synth fuels is one such solution. As is EV's, insulating homes, or being better at keeping old infrastructure running for longer in order to avoid wasting resources on replacing said old infrastructure. Not because they solve the root cause of the problem, but because it's better than to keep going with fossil fuels, or to force changes without being at all prepared for the consequences. I'm not saying you're wrong. But I remain hopeful that you are.

Certainly a car club of some sort in the village replacing the 100 or so cars normally here with say 80 rental cars could be beneficial, not sure it would save much environmentally though, especially given that most vehicles passing are either vans or tractors

And public transport, if it'd be any good, would be next-to-empty on many runs.

Lots of wear & tear and energy consumption. A bus is much more expensive to maintain and uses much more energy than a car.

Stopping coal, oil and natural gas in the energy and heat sector is hard problems because a lot of influential and power companies and powerful people depend on those things to be cheap in order to continue increase revenues. Car manufacturers however doesn't really care that much if they produce an electric car or an IC car, since the profits in selling cars is fairly similar either way. As long they know ahead of time when to switch manufacturing so they can slowly switch production, and all manufacturers are effected identically, it doesn't matter much.

Replacing fossil fuel infrastructure is also very costly to government budgets since existing investment are sunk costs.

> Stopping coal, oil and natural gas in the energy and heat sector is hard problems because a lot of influential and power companies and powerful people depend on those things to be cheap in order to continue increase revenues.

How about we forget about those "influential and powerful" people for just a second and worry about the little guy who relies on having cheap energy available to get to work? The ones who, when the price of energy goes up, have to decide between buying vegetables for their kids that week instead of cheap junk food vs filling up the tank to get a paycheck?

Or the ones that live in a not so great house who need to fill up the oil tank to get through winter without freezing to death. Or the ones who live at the edge of death valley and need air conditioning to have a semblance of comfort in the summer? Or the ones who live in apartments with no ability to charge an electric vehicle.

Can we (not you specifically but collectively) please, for once, start worrying about them too instead of pretending the reason this problem is so complex is because of the big bad greedy corporations?

>worry about the little guy who relies on having cheap energy available to get to work?

Surely the issue is relying on cheap energy then, not the fact that its no longer available. I've just checked US prices and they're about $1.30 a litre. compared to Europe that is cheap. but then we have more fuel efficient cars. If you want to talk about knock on inflationary pressures then I'd probably agree with you, but my fuel costs roughly twice what yours costs, and its still not causing a major dent in my finances, and most of my driving isn't for work.

>decide between buying vegetables for their kids that week instead of cheap junk food

Why do people claim that junk food is cheaper than veg? A low carbon diet probably coincides quite nicely with a low cost diet, I know my major food costs are meat (and alcohol), veg is basically a rounding error.

I am sorry, but your comment is very uninformed.

* Cows produce methane, cars produce CO2. Talking about "pollution" just muddies the waters. According to https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector lifestock produces 6% of greenhouse gases, road transport 12%. Also looking at Germany (I don't have data for all of Europe), drinking milk production fell by 7% in one year (replaced by plant based milk) https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/05/PE22_N034_51.html . Beef production fell by 2.4% (https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/02/PE22_050_413.html ) So changes are happening in agriculture as well.

* Supertanker emit a lot of soot, not so much CO2. Again: Talking about pollution in generic terms does not help. Also supertankers won't be needed anymore, if no oil is consumed. So electric cars will help with this as well. Replacing all fossil fuels would remove need for 40% of all tonnage shipped worldwide.

* Sweden and Norway already have basically completely renewable electric grids. Germany is exiting coal by 2038 (this will hopefully be accelerated to 2030). Every year some of the existing coal plants are being shut down: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Elektrizitaet...

* No new gas heatings will to allowed to be installed in most EU countries by 2025. Heat pumps are already the default in Scandinavia and will be in other countries soon.

* Hydrogen production is being ramped up: https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/germany-s-fir... or https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight... to replace gas usage where electricity does not work.

So a lot is happening in all sectors. And you can see results: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t... This is not just virtue signalling.

Sweden and Norway are lucky to have long chain of mountains to run hydro. Scandinavian hydro won't power everybody's electric cars...

UK, Ireland, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Cyprus are lucky enough to have vast areas of ofshore wind and tidal capacity. Morocco, Libya, Algeria have vast areas of desert ripe for Solar which can be exported via HVDC under the Med. France seems competent enough to be able to build and run nuclear power at an affordable level, they could expand that ability to the rest of Europe

Wind and solar will go stale once in a while. Tidal may be stable enough I guess.

Nuclear is the only, well, nuclear solution

Unlikely that wind drops in the north sea, bay of biscay and med at the same time.

Nuclear also goes stale once in a while, when plants are taken offline for maintenance.

Solar is predictable, it generates in the day (when demand is highest), not at night. With connected vehicles you have massive battery banks of power that can be bought back from people, and as you've used the excess energy when you have been producing more than the demand from those resources to create green hydrogen, you reverse the process.

Average yearly wind won't drop. But it may slower for a day or week. Unless you want to stop some parts of society for that time, you'll have issues.

Same for solar. It's not predicatable on day-by-day bases.

With using cars as battery banks, even if you skip the problem of having cars connected all the time, you'll need to redo grid in a big way. Both to fill simultaneously cars if cheap solar energy hits the grid and keep the grid going on a stale cloudy day.

Well we do that all the time at the moment, if it drops, prices increase, and your car sells power back (because you've got 300 miles in the battery but only need 30 tomorrow), green hydrogen halt production, bitcoin miners stop usage, grid level storage comes online

On the flip side when there's surplus that's used to make the hydrogen, to recharge the resovoirs, etc.

Many people feed back to the grid with their home solar etc, no difference to electric charging.

Not many cloudy days in the Moroccon deserts

The problem is you can't plan for „this is rare“. Given how grid is getting more and more away from guaranteed sources, a once-in-few-years perfect storm may become a big event where shutting down hydrogen plants may be not enough to save the grid.

The other issue is, how much grid upgrades do you need to allow to keep it up from electric cars? Maybe even on green front it'd be better to have stable power generation with simplified grid. All those beefy substations don't come out of thin air.

> Morocco, Libya, Algeria have vast areas of desert ripe for Solar which can be exported via HVDC under the Med.

The EU currently learns every day that depending on unreliable countries is a bad idea for your energy needs. But I think we will still find solutions without involving unreliable partners by extending the cooperation within the EU.

The average car in Europe drives 30km a day and is parked more than 23h. So a charged battery will have a moving 10 day window to be charged again. This is a great use case for renewable energy. 10 days of Dunkelflaute does not happen a lot. Smart charging for cars will stabilize the grid.

>making gas prices skyrocket and banning gas cars.

you know that the latter will solve the former. and fuel prices are more about a certain invasion so not so much about the environment. So which do you want to complain about?

> Make life harder for basically every western citizen by making gas prices skyrocket

That's mostly done by a certain Mr. Putin.

Putin's actions certainly don't help, but our policy response here is pretty stupid. Instead of ratcheting up our own oil production to counterbalance the loss of supply from Russia, it seems we have intensified anti-oil regulations [1] in service of the goal of some mystical "energy transition" that is yet to materialize [2]. Of course, my sources here are just what I see online, would love to hear from someone who has firsthand perspective on the US energy industry.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/chevrons-ceo-says-... [2] https://nypost.com/2022/05/23/biden-praises-gas-prices-as-pa...

This is not anti-car, it is about fighting climate change. And whataboutism doesn't help. We have to basically eliminate all sources of greenhouse-gas emissions to fight climate change. So yes, we need to make cars not emit CO2. And to deal with any other emissions, like the ones you have named.

And of course, no one is asking people to get rid of car, just not to buy any ICE car after 2035. Today, there are already lots of electrical cars to choose from and the offerings will definitely increase going forward, especially as now car manufacturers have a clear deadline for combustion engines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com