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Comment by mint2 | Hacker News Reader

“ Comparing larger vehicles, the original Hummer H1 emits 889 grams of CO2 per mile and the new Hummer EV causes 341 grams, demonstrating that behemoth EVs can still be worse for the environment than smaller, conventional vehicles”

So 1/3 the emissions of a normal hummer… I don’t think the normal hummer owner is going to ever switch to a sedan so that seems like a major improvement

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Arguably that’s why you need legislation to more strongly dissuade buying a ridiculous car like that via taxes or whatever. If you leave it to individual choice there will always be plenty of people who don’t care about the costs they’re imposing on others.

This seems like a useless place to optimize. Like, what is the total pollution output of all Hummers or similar vehicles? A rounding error, I'm guessing. The only way to make dents is with systemic changes like for entire trucking industry, for example.

Lots of other benefits come from removing urban tanks from the roads. https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/suvs-other-large-vehicles-o...

Sounds like a good reason to create protected “no turn on red” crosswalks.

The state’s monopoly on violence should be used judiciously and sparingly to secure our individual rights, not as a catch-all tool for coercing (or outright forcing) people into making the choices you want them to.

Yes, first and foremost the right to bodily integrity, since rights are no good if you are dead. The two biggest killers of people in the US who are otherwise many many years from dying are guns and cars, and in both cases a large number of those dead had neither a gun nor a car in the moment. If the state is going to use its monopoly on anything, it should obviously be those two.

The state’s job isn’t to enforce prior restraint on others who have done nothing to violate your rights.

The state's job is whatever we tell them it is. This is a democracy, not a want ad.

If that’s the kind of tyrannical state and use of a monopoly on violence you aspire to, sure.

Then the state should stop building roads. Until that happens, they're free to regulate what vehicles can drive on those roads.

They can also enforce existing laws better. Don't forget that most states have had truck laws for a very long time. We know there is a direct linkage between vehicle weight and road maintenance costs. We've had laws that required vehicles to be weighed. We've had laws that taxed vehicles that exceeded certain weights on given roads. We've had laws banning vehicles of certain weights from certain roads. We could turn those laws "back on", get back to enforcing them better, adjust their fines and penalties to match a decade or three of inflation.

(For instance, Hummers are allegedly already technically illegal by weight on California residential streets. When was the last time that was enforced? When was the last time an owner paid fines on that?)

How about securing my right not to get killed by a dangerously large vehicle?

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobiles...

This old article mentions a lot of advantages of electric velomobiles vs cars like doing average commutes in roughly the same time, dramatic increase in road capacity, tiny power consumption if everyone was to switch etc etc

But write-ups hardly ever mention how hard it is to damage a pedestrian with it. Crashes involving just velomobiles usually leave little more than a scratch.

I think it's OK for the government to ban vehicles from their roads.

Does the state really own the road though?

Who else would pay for the maintenance for said roads?

I live in a state with many “no right turn on red” intersections, and I can tell you for sure that people very often ignore those signs and do it anyway.

Strongly agree that you ought to be able to drive most anything you like on roads that you build and maintain on your own property.

The roads we mutually pay for belong to us collectively, too.

Yep! That's why our government sets rules for their use.

> The state’s monopoly on violence should be used judiciously and sparingly to secure our individual rights, not as a catch-all tool for coercing (or outright forcing) people into making the choices you want them to.

May I steal this, please? I know a few people who don't get my political philosophy, and I want to help them understand.

The state's monopoly, qua Max Weber, is on the legitimate use of violence. That is, the right and legitimacy of that right, is restricted to the state.

Absent this, one of three conditions exist;

1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.

2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).

3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.

The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy

Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California P. p. 54.

https://archive.org/details/economysociety00webe/page/54/mod...

There's an excellent explanation of the common misunderstanding in this episode of the Talking Politics podcast: https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership

The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard, and was further popularised by Nozick.

> May I steal this, please?

Of course. Glad it was cogent enough to be useful.

Succinct is probably the best word. You've essentially described the Non-Aggression Principle as it applies to government.

And here we are discussing individual pedestrians' rights to safety on the roads, no?

This is very well stated and honestly completely sums up most of the political divide between left and right.

If by individuals you mean white men, that is.

Don't newer vehicles with pedestrian detection address the issue?

Not really:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5hdIR5vHMo

Piecemeal regulations that treat luxury and small business vehicles separately and ignore the rich's pastimes to crack down on the working man's daily bread are why nothing other than an evenhanded carbon tax could ever be applied in a democratic country.

A very funny quirk of human psychology is people drinking water shipped from Fiji in an Uber Black car on their way to a first class flight thinking “those hicks in hummers are really destroying the environment”

We as humans only really internalize the things we see.

Well could be done on all scales. A small Kia with a roofrack / towbar maybe for extra cargo / small trailer is probably big enough for most human A->B needs, even small scale moving house.

Large trucks and SUVs tend to be so expensive to buy and operate that you can pay for a lot of deliveries and truck rentals per year—maybe a boat slip at the local marina, too—while still saving money.

Farther out in the sticks, sure, those things may be so inconvenient or unavailable that it's not an option, but it is for the average Suburban Assault Vehicle owner.

Yes, some people really need big vehicles (and/or we need them to keep farming) and so you need exemptions. In the UK there is Red diesel for example that is for farm use / private use that is much cheaper than diesel for the road.

What is the justification for this subsidy?

Likely untaxed for road wear that isn't happening when they aren't driven on roads.

Right—it's not a subsidy, at least in the US, because much or all of the gas tax goes to road maintenance, so if you're not driving on public roads, you don't have to pay it.

Doesn't make sense to make e.g. farm tractors that rarely see a public road, pay for public road maintenance when fuel's purchased for them. Or trucks and other vehicles (some farms are really big and may include road-worthy vehicles that hardly drive on a public road more often that the tractors do).

If you're going to only drive on private land, you also don't need tags/plates for your car, at least around here. No registration. Just personal property tax and you're good to go.

The high cost does this automatically, a Hummer EV is over $100k.

Can we just properly price carbon emissions and be done with it?

What are the carbon emissions of manufacturing a yellow pencil? The amount of carbon released by the trees that were cut down? What about the chemicals needed to add the shine? Or the rubber manufactured for the eraser? What about the employees that have less time to feed themselves so they buy crappy junk food with packaging creating more waste? What about the costs to recycle it? What about the ecosystem that was replaced to make way for the new factory? What about the cost of the tools that were created to make these pencils? Do you calculate that in by how much wear is added every time they're used? And what about the tools needed to make THOSE tools? What about the graphite powder used for the lead or the energy it cost to heat petroleum coke above the temperature of graphitization or the ships needed to ship those to the right factory? What about that petcoke? Do you discount some of its cost because its mostly a side-product of the process of refining oil? What about when a company innovates to sell higher quality pencils made of higher quality petcoke that requires more emissions to make and isn't just a byproduct? What is the social cost of advertising and manipulating tastes in demand?

Where exactly do you stop?

[Yes this is my subverted version of "I, pencil"]

> The simplest approach, administratively, is to levy the carbon tax “upstream,” where the fewest entities would be subject to it (for instance, suppliers of coal, natural gas processing facilities, and oil refineries).

Include other highly polluting industries with that, and while you may not get 100% coverage, it would definitely cover the majority of carbon intensive products and services and lead to a drastic reduction in emissions.

CCL estimates that the annual administrative cost of a carbon tax in the US would be about $4 to $5 billion per year, which is about 6.8 percent of revenues in year one ($15/ton of CO2e year one, rising by $10/ton each year), but as revenues grow along with the fee, it drops to only about 1.7 percent by year 10.

This seems the simplest solution, tax the folks digging or pumping the carbon from the ground. Imported goods get a lot more complex though.

>Imported goods get a lot more complex though.

True, it definitely is trickier, but it can be managed to some degree.

> The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act has a provision built in to protect trade competitiveness: a ‘Carbon Border Fee Adjustment’ imposed on covered fuels and ‘emissions-intensive trade-exposed’ (EITE) goods that cross our border in either direction. These goods include products like steel, aluminum, cement, glass, certain chemicals, and some agricultural products. Goods that fall under this EITE classification and are imported from a country that does not have a carbon price equivalent to ours will have to pay a surcharge to make up the difference. Conversely, domestic EITE products exported to any country will get a refund for the carbon fee paid.

> If you leave it to individual choice there will always be plenty of people who don’t care about the costs they’re imposing on others.

I think the current state of affairs is actually worse than that -- big trucks are popular not just because some people like big trucks, but also because there are regulations that prevent small trucks from being a viable market segment in the U.S.: that class of vehicle has much more stringent fuel economy standards (perversely forcing people into larger vehicles with looser regulations), and light trucks imported from other countries are subject to a 25% tariff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

The only light truck I know of that you can get currently is the long version of the Jeep Wrangler. I'm not sure if they actually meet the fuel economy standards, or if they can somehow claim to not technically be a light truck. Maybe there are some others, but as far as I can tell almost all trucks sold in the U.S. are huge and have comically tall grills.

If I wasn't already in the middle of an EV conversion project, I'd be tempted to get something like an old Datsun 620 and load it up with batteries. I wish there was a product on the market like that.

Relevant example from Finland:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/44642/imported-1000-hp-henness...

Combine it with a similarly restrictive air travel regulation and I'm on board. Takes a lot of miles in a Hummer to equal a trip to Europe and back.

Ugh, just skipped a conference in Australia for that reason - decided I'm only doing long-haul flights for things I *really* care about.

"Honor is the gift a man gives himself."

I'm fairly low emissions but mostly by accident. I work from home and have until recently been too poor to travel like that. I just always found it annoying when people who are jetting around the globe complain about other people's cars. You on the other hand have a leg to stand on in that regard.

I put in a ton of flight miles and saw the world. No regrets, but I recognize I need to spend my carbon more judiciously now.

That said, I do truly believe travel makes you a better person, so if you can afford it now you should get out there and see it before it all burns down. Use my “credit”. :-)

That’s why we need legislators who actually legislate.

The US has huge variety of terrain, climate and road quality. Hummer has it's use cases.

I always see replies like this in conversations about vehicles in the US and it baffles me a little. Yes, of course there are appropriate situations in which someone might own a Hummer. But are we really trying to claim that even 10% of Hummers out there today are used in those situations? They’re very obvious status symbols.

> They’re very obvious status symbols.

Vast majority of people with a truck or off-road vehicle have one for work - they’re working vehicles.

We're talking about Hummers here, right?

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/why-hummers-arent-good-for-off-...

If their owners wanted to actually go off road, they'd have bought something else. They really have no purpose other than to mark you as a person with more money than sense.

https://goshare.co/pickup-truck-facts/

They really don't. Ford did a similar study and found around the same number. Only 15% of pickup truck owners use them for work.

This definitely does not mean what you think it means. Owning a large car for work doesn’t mean it’s utilized as such. I know people who own trucks and large SUVs for work - but it’s “just in case” not because they need additional space on a daily or even weekly basis.

I live in a truck-loving part of the country. This cannot possibly be true.

Ok let's diligence this:

There are about 60m trucks on the road in the US [0]

There are 6m construction/mining workers, 6m installation workers, and 4m building maintenance workers. [1]

Using that definition, at most, 25% of trucks are used for work.

If you want to be extremely generous, there are also 13m transportation drivers (being very generous because that 60m does not include big rigs) and 8m factory workers (again, unlikely to use trucks for work).

Using that frankly incorrect definition, you still get only 62% of trucks being used for work.

So no, under NO circumstances are the "vast majority" of trucks in the US used for work.

[0]https://www.bts.gov/content/number-us-aircraft-vehicles-vess...

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

> There are 6m construction/mining workers, 6m installation workers, and 4m building maintenance workers.

What’s this random collection of jobs and why do you think they’re the only people who use a truck for work?

Have you ever met for example a farmer? Crazy concept for people in tech, I know.

But how many of those contruction/mining workers need to drive a truck?

My brother works in road construction - he drives a 15,000 lb maintenance truck owned by his company. But he doesn't drive it home, it stays on the job site (which varies between 15 and 150 miles from home). He owns a truck, but like many suburban trucks, it's in pristine condition and he mostly only uses it to pull a trailer, he drives a Honda Civic to get to the job site.

So you must not be familiar with NAICS codes. They are a mutually exclusive completely exhaustive categorization of jobs, as defined by the US government.

Here's the other ones:

11-0000 Management Occupations

13-0000 Business and Financial Operations Occupations

15-0000 Computer and Mathematical Occupations

17-0000 Architecture and Engineering Occupations

19-0000 Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations

21-0000 Community and Social Service Occupations

23-0000 Legal Occupations

25-0000 Educational Instruction and Library Occupations

27-0000 Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations

29-0000 Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations

31-0000 Healthcare Support Occupations

33-0000 Protective Service Occupations

35-0000 Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations

37-0000 Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance Occupations

39-0000 Personal Care and Service Occupations

41-0000 Sales and Related Occupations

43-0000 Office and Administrative Support Occupations

45-0000 Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations

47-0000 Construction and Extraction Occupations

49-0000 Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations

51-0000 Production Occupations

53-0000 Transportation and Material Moving Occupations

Sure, maybe the 500k farming, fishing, and Forestry workers should be added to the list, but I'm curious as to what else you think should be.

EDIT: HN is banning me so this doesn't turn into a flamewar, but I'll leave you with this:

I am trying not to personally attack you, but I think you're kind of dipping into ad hominen attacks because you regret making statement that is not supported by data.

If you want to know why I think they shouldn't be included (and why I think you're really over your skis here), it's because the reality of farm work in the US is as follows:

1) The majority of the <1m US farm workers do the following job [0] [1]:

Manually plant, cultivate, and harvest vegetables, fruits, nuts, horticultural specialties, and field crops. Use hand tools, such as shovels, trowels, hoes, tampers, pruning hooks, shears, and knives.

It is not clear to me that this requires a truck (especially not one for each worker).

2) The average wage of farmworkers is $15/hour [1] and the average cost of a used F-150 in the US is $40k ($30k pre-pandemic) [2], so it's not immediately clear to me that this group of people own a large number of pick-ups.

Ultimately though, for someone to work at a large tech company, make their identity publicly available and to be so aggressive on a forum like this seems like a weird risk to take. If you want to delete all of this stuff and just move on, I'm ok with that.

[0]https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes452092.htm [1]https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor/#wag... [2] https://pickuptrucktalk.com/2021/07/used-pickup-truck-prices...

The fact that you don't even think of 'farmers' when you think of truck user makes it clear you've got a warped suburban idea of what people use trucks for.

Given the vast majority of the population reside in urban/suburban areas perhaps you have a warped rural idea of what people use trucks for.

Farmers are a rounding error in the claim "the vast majority of trucks are used for work".

[EDIT] I think, assuming you're posting all this in good faith, it may be a result of expanding a local perspective to the entire country. Some parts of the country definitely do have way fewer non-work trucks driving around, as a proportion of total cars. One might conclude that this is the norm over enough of the country that "the vast majority" of trucks are work trucks. It very much is not.

Vast minority*

A Suzuki Jimny would probably be more effective for 99% of Hummer owners that actually use it off-road, and in turn that is probably a very small minority of the total.

There's probably some amount of a valid point there, but making it about a Hummer, specifically, undermines it, since they suck at most of the things one might think they'd be good at.

Incidentally, I saw tons of Hummers on the road around here in the '00s. Now... I thought they'd stopped making them. All those "I want a huge car because... I want a huge car" buyers must be getting expensive trucks or other kinds of big SUVs these days.

The reason Hummers suck for those off-road and work uses is because so few people actually use them for that

Yesterday's "off-road" battle on Carwow featured a Jimny and a (petrol) Hummer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Srb8LYt82z0 . Spoiler: the Jimny won.

I’ve been in places with rougher terrain than virtually anything in the US.

You’ll see people in areas like that driving a beat up truck barely large enough to fit 2 people or a tiny scooter that’s hauling a half ton of cargo.

Nobody is getting their hummer dirty or risking a scratch. And anybody going to a job site is going to prefer an actual truck over an oversized vehicle for bored suburban couples.

Yes the vehicle that’s too heavy to cross a not insignificant percentage of bridges within the U.S. has its use cases.

It makes sense to rent them near such places as speciality items, but you don't need for the grocery run.

So do apostrophes, and that's not one of them. ;)

No one needs a hummer.

Here's an alternative: don't allow the normal hummer owner to get a new one because they're terrible for everyone else.

That's one of the reasons what governments were made for.

Unfortunately half of our government is against any common sense regulations or rules. Mass shootings are becoming a daily occurrence that happens in no other first world country but instead the gop has spent the last decades trying to weaken what little gun regulations there are. Enough of The public seems totally okay with that, and would absolutely go batshit if they perceived someone as wanting to ban trucks.

Tell me in that climate how the government does it’s job? People keep electing government officials who are expressly against what you’re suggesting.

I think the premise of the article is a bit silly - not everything is "average-able". The US is huge, and many places (like SV) do have 100% renewable energy so the electric is carbon free. This is like saying that if Portugal had a 100% clean grid that cars in Poland powered by coal plants meant that Portuguese EV's were not truly "environmental".

Something rarely discussed is that the generation technology matters in your specific locale.

If you're powering it with coal, this is horrible. If hydro/solar/nuclear power, well it's still a big load on the grid, but carbon wise it's a small fraction of the footprint.

Of course you need to factor in where the power is actually coming from on your grid. And definitely factor in the time of day (are you charging overnight and actually using a higher carbon source, etc).

When you do the math on this Hummer on the cleanest sources, it's still far cleaner than even a small ICE engine. Even though I still hate it :)

If you are powering with hydro/solar/nuclear then you are consuming electricity that could otherwise be used to reduce the load on a natural gas power plant somewhere else

I don't think the normal hummer owner gives a shit about the environment or wasting food.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmBGSKRGs6A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmk6z3qqfIw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaQ-s_P5mwM

I think you're missing the fact that a huge chunk of a vehicle's lifetime emissions are just in the manufacturing alone. And EVs are much more energy intensive to manufacture. Mostly this is due to the batteries. Which also have to be replaced every decade

Because of this alone, there are many EVs that are still worse for the environment than many gas-powered vehicles

38%[0] of an EVs emissions are in the manufacturing alone. Ultimately, the best thing you can do for the environment is still to STOP BUYING NEW CARS

[0] https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Insights-i... (page 90)

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