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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Getting off of oil solves the problem, not bandaids like temporarily stoking production of a resource we don’t want to be using.

In an ideal scenario, we’d institute a carbon tax and subsidize EVs and clean electrical generation if US politics weren’t broken, but here we are.

The average voter doesn’t understand global oil market economics, geopolitics, refinery capacity, fossil investment divestitures, etc, they just want to drive where they want to go. Don’t want to be beholden to a constrained energy resource? Switch to proven alternatives. It’s not rocket science. Make it cheap to buy EVs and make it more financially painful to by combustion vehicles, even if you’re cutting checks to EV makers out of the Fifth Fleet’s budget.

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"Too poor to afford $4/gallon? Just buy a brand new Tesla!"

For those who can afford it, absolutely. I spoke with someone yesterday who sold their F350 pickup and partner’s gas vehicle for a Model 3 and a Y because they could no longer justify their gasoline expenses with their driving cycles. The free hand of the market at work. As I mentioned, carbon taxes and EV point of sale rebates for those less well off.

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/tesla-model-3-costs-considerabl...

https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/tesla-model-3...

If you don’t want to tax carbon and offset EV prices with the proceeds, yes, people of lesser means will experience economic pain in the near term due to apathetic energy policy since the 70s oil embargo. The price of oil will only go up with capital divestments (including refineries at maximum capacity perpetually) and the price of EVs will continue to decline over time. Nothing will spur increased investment in fossil fuels long term in the current political climate. There is no short term fix. You must lean hard into electrification.

Im all for getting off oil, but getting off it onto rare earth minerals is not green.

EVs have a life span of less then 10yrs, they often blow up catastropically, they rely one rare earth minerals to be built and run, they are very hard and expensive to fix, and they are charged via fossil fuels the majority of the time; they are not saving the planet of anything. They are marketing! Green is worth big money.

> EVs have a lifespan of less then (sic) 10yrs

This is demonstrably false, as the Model S alone was first released in 2012 and still has a KBB value estimate of over $20,000 for a 100k mi very good condition example.

Now do one with 200k miles and needs a new battery.

10,000 miles/year is not realistic in many (most?) parts of the country.

It's 13,476 for everyone. This link breaks it down by age and sex:

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm

>This is demonstrably false, as the Model S alone was first released in 2012 and still has a KBB value estimate of over $20,000 for a 100k mi very good condition example.

I agree EVs can easily last as long as any other car so long as you're willing to do a battery once but KBB value doesn't mean squat other than as a measure of original purchase price vs how hard the owners drove them into the ground. Considering who buys Teslas and how they get treated they had better hold their value or something is seriously wrong.

> In an ideal scenario, we’d institute a carbon tax and subsidize EVs and clean electrical generation if US politics weren’t broken

US politics isn’t “broken” most voters just don’t care enough about climate change to actually do anything more than support mitigation efforts in the abstract as long as it doesn’t cost them anything.

My parents, for example, are core democrat voters: older minorities who vote straight ticket democrat not only in presidential elections, but random local ones. My parents didn’t even vote for Larry Hogan, who won our Biden-leaning county by 38 points.

And they don’t care at all about climate change! They have a car and aren’t going to buy an EV. Their biggest concern right now is inflation and gas prices. (My dad blames Biden for not strong arming Ukraine into quickly capitulating so the Russian gas can keep flowing.) If you polled them they would say that we should do something about climate change, because they know republicans are climate change deniers and don’t want to come across as being Republican, but it’s a purely symbolic belief that doesn’t affect their voting patterns at all.

Indeed, your entire comment is accurate, in broad strokes, across the electorate. Luckily, adoption is ramping quickly enough that we're already passed an inflection point in the US (per Bloomberg): https://archive.ph/wPQ9B

I still argue politics is broken if people don't care about climate change; that apathy flows to their representatives. C'est la vie, we'll clean it up on the backend with tech and clean energy's version of Moore's Law.

"People don't care enough about my pet issue" does not make politics broken for any value of pet issue no matter how legitimate said value is.

"Politics is broken" is right up there with the. "people are bad at X" family infantile assertions always boil down to the old Principal Skinner "everyone else is wrong and I'm right" argument. Said argument is inherently wrong for issues of social norms or consensus where the "average man" is always tautologically correct.

Makes perfect sense as carbon emissions is the kind of "commons" problem that needs to be solved by carbon tax, not individual action.

Repositioning it as an individual problem is a very old PR technique.

https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...

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