California votes to ban new gas car sales by 2035
cnn.com
cnn.com
So, EV cars take a long time before CO2 savings are seen, and they may not be seen at all. Accounting for the current mix of clean Vs dirty energy in our electricity supply, nations would need to invest many $trillions in building a clean energy network, before EV cars become a net negative CO2 force. But that would also require intense mining and manufacturing, which, if not revolutionised, first, will necessarily cause a dramatic surge in CO2 production. There is no way around this problem, except to clean up manufacturing and supply chain, first.
Selling people EVs is trying to solve the problem from the wrong end. But it perpetuates the myth that CO2 levels, and/or climate change are a simple function of consumer choice.
[0] "The emissions from Materials production and refining of the ICE are roughly 40 per cent less than for the BEV" https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/project/contentpl...
Of course, a lot of the problem isn't even from family passenger vehicles. It's all the trucking taking place because of the ports. If mitigation measures don't include switching all of those onto non-combustion engines as well, it won't be nearly as effective.
In particular: The EV/ICE comparison in both documents relies heavily on the energy mix that goes into grid electricity, ad this is somewhat a free parameter. California will have a lot of wind and solar, and this will tend to tip the balance toward EVs. Your summary has emphasized a more fossil-intense scenario in the Volvo report.
I also feel like your argument of “don’t do this, do this other thing first” is not sane regarding climate change. We need to be pursuing all effective strategies, and setting EV roadmap expectations is one area where California can show leadership. This has been necessary before, e.g. with mileage and emissions.
Nothing else he mentioned seems relevant to the central issue. That manufacturing to support this ICE ban will result in a surge of CO2, that you believe will be offset in the future, when we have improved the energy mix of our grid.
For clarity, most of the world is not as progressive as California; globally, clean energy is about 5% of the grid. Nuclear is another 5%, and they plan on reducing this. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
Switching to new EV cars will dump vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. And it is hard to see how that does not accelerate climate change? Front loading a 60% CO2 fee and hoping to offset it over, what, 20 years? The batteries won't last that long. Plus, you need to manufacture the solar panels and wind turbines, and that also is CO2 intensive and missing from your calculations.
The link you just supplied repeats this error on your part. Here is a California-relevant link:
https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2022-02/new-data-indicates-ca...
Note especially that the state is working hard to simultaneously move the grid mix to renewables.
Second, I think your notion of a “switch” is getting it wrong. This is a transition over the next 13 years, of new car sales. It’s not front loading, it’s a gradual replacement. The UCS link shows a 1-2 year break even point on CO2, not 20 years.
I really think your analysis here is on the wrong track, and that California is doing some solid work, both with promoting renewables, and on signposting a transition to electric power, in the absence of good Federal leadership.
See also, the recent moves to curtail natural gas hookups (fought by the gas industry) and to monitor and limit excessive methane emissions.
My link, and every sensible discussion of this over the last decade has answered your rhetorical question.
The EV pays itself back in CO2 after a year. Every year after that it offsets enough CO2 to build another EV, which then can do the same.
We had this whole conversation about solar panels and wind turbines too. They also have short and shrinking CO2 paybacks. Weve passed the point where we were in carbon "debt" for these techs and are in the payback phase.
"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark …" Marcellus, Shakespeare’s Hamlet
The best car is a train or a bus. Some situations definitely require cars, especially when folks are disabled or when temperatures of 100+ degrees make it difficult to wait for a bus. But this is just a different type of theatre. Public transit is the only real way to decrease CO2 emissions.
Not sure if that counts as just buying different versions of the same stuff.
Nothing on its own fixes this. No one is suggesting to only do one thing (apart from maybe the people who are monomaniacal about nuclear or carbon taxes. Both good solutions but they seem mostly to be wielded as weapons to stop all the other stuff happening).
The only movement this warrant has made very effective is making citizens have FUD about what car to buy and what not to buy, making some people settle with their old car for longer time than they expected waiting for better prices and better infrastructures for EVs, and making others to buy a new petrol engine cars to replace their Diesel one to be able to enter in city centres in the next years.
I don't know how this is going to end, but there are a lot of sacrifices people can't do, and others that people doesn't want to do, and I don't know any country that is doing a decent strategy in this matter. I would say we would use public transportation with combination of some kind of car sharing in most urban areas, and private owned EVs in more remote and rural areas, where having a private parking spot is common and you can install a charger without problems.
2035 seems awfully close looking at the quality of current models available..
GM SuperCruise and Ford BlueCruise are generally regarded to be better at actually driving than Tesla's cameras-only approach. They are geofenced to only work on properly mapped highways instead of just letting any idiot YOLO it and claim they're "testing" so they don't get as much attention but they also haven't killed multiple people in the process.
Tesla has a Level 2 ADAS system just like everyone else, they just market it as more than it actually is.
Mercedes is about to launch a Level 3 system where they actually take liability when the computer is in control. They will be the first to do so.
> 2035 seems awfully close looking at the quality of current models available..
Curious what you mean by this, there are currently a decent selection of EVs from a variety of manufacturers that all match the level of quality you'd expect from the brand. The main limitations for wider availability and use are the still developing public charging infrastructure and the same cost/supply chain issues affecting basically all cars, ICE or EV.
The cars aren't the problem at this point, it's figuring out how to allow those of us who rent in dense areas to charge at home. Solve that and you're left with just the long distance road trippers and trailer towers actually needing to burn fuel.
This has stopped me from buying an EV. I park on the street. homes here have no dedicated garages to install EV charger.
How are they planning to solve this in a little over a decade.
Nobody currently fills their gas powered cars in street parking.
1) Convenience is marketable. You couldn't do it in a gas car, you could in some natural gas programs. Plugging in at night and waking up to a full charge is luxurious.
2) While available, charger networks will be catching up until electric cars make up a significant portion of vehicles are electric. We see this with diesel where availability is less than gas. Long charging times don't help
3) it helps expand; if 50% of EV trips use existing electrical (eg charging when the ac isn't running), it reduces lines at more commercial setups.
4) Fast charging can degrade battery life in some cases?
In some places, it lets you directly use your own PV production.
In others it's just the extra convenience.
I don't agree with 'just' , 'extra' in that sentence. Noone buys an electric car ( atleast in usa) without a plan to have an in home/garage charger. I wonder if there are any stats available around this, but I if i would have to guess it has to be over 90%. 'just' isn't a justified use of that word in this context. Its complete necessity to have in inhome charger atm.
closest thing i found.
> 70-80% of charging occurs at home or at a workplace parking lot.
> Charging occurs predominantly either at home or at work and typically overnight
https://www.fuelsinstitute.org/Research/Reports/EV-Consumer-...
ridiculous suggestion that people without garages need to drive to state park to charge when people with their own homes charge at home.
> But its totally doable.
So according to govt, I should be traveling to state park or such over the weekends while people with homes enjoy weekend with their family at home?
Charge at the supermarket, or the mall or the library or at the gas station, at your friends or at work or wherever works best for you.
It's entirely possible to own an EV and not have access to home charging. It's really nice if you can, because your car is going to be parked there for hours and you can usually get cheap power at night but it's not necessary, and there is no compulsory visites to state parks required.
Chicago doesn't have libraries that have EV chargers, my friends live in the city too, there are no garages here. My work doesn't provide parking (no one does downtown chicago), let alone parking with EV charging.
>It's entirely possible to own an EV and not have access to home charging
my Point is that this will unfairly punish ppl without a home/garage. Its an unreasonable burden proven by the fact that people don't buy EVs without home chargers. Only thing that clearly works best is home charging.
hypothetically imagine govt banning home chargers. How do you think that would be received ?
Okay, so the problem is, urban Chicago hasnt yet installed suitable EV charging. Presumably they have parking for their cars and gas stations, they've just not bothered to add charging to them.
They should do that. It's not particularly hard.
Chicago even publish simple PDF guides for owners and tenants of apartments to talk them through it:
https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/progs/env/drive_electric_chi...
and they seem to have planned for it:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/chicago-requires-new-reside...
So, it's all good. They even note how EV charging can lead to lower energy prices for those that don't own an EV. A win-win-win.
Yea that would be great. Not sure if city of chicago is ready for that kind of investment over hundreds of thousands of street parking spaces.
> Worked pretty well here.
here?
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1991-01-06-910102...
Tesla doesn't lead in range: https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/
Tesla struggles with FSP (full self-parking): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA
Tesla doesn't take liability for its semi-autonomous driving, whereas Mercedes does: https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a39966189/2022-mercedes...
There are many areas Tesla doesn't lead.
Today you can go out and buy a used ICE car for a fraction of a new price and then operate it with almost all further operating and maintaince costs being incremental and small unless you get into an accident or have a (quite rare) major drive-train failure, which effectively total the used car since they cost more to fix than getting another similar used car.
By comparison the EV will need its batteries replaced every N years at a substantial all-at-once price, which is currently at a scale of 2x what a perfectly usable ICE used car costs.
The EV's TCO still is better or competitive with the ICE car because the extra cost of battery replacement is offset by reduced fuel costs and maintenance costs. But this is a reduction of many pay-as-you-go incremental costs and a replacement with a big upfront cost, and so it imposes a significant cashflow burden.
To put concrete figures, my spouse bought a used Nissan Leaf a number of years ago for a price a bit higher than a comparable classed used ICE car would cost. At the time, we priced out the replacement battery in order to account for the future expense we could expect and IIRC were quoted $8k by Nissan. A number of years pass and the battery degrades, eventually getting down to a range of only ~45 miles which was becoming unusable for us. We contact Nissan about a replacement and are informed that the price was then $12k, and that's still with the original 24kwh battery type, not newer technology. 12k would buy you _two_ perfectly usable used ICE cars from a used car dealer, maybe three in private party transactions. We were able to find a mechanic that was able to install a 40KWh battery from a more recent generation all in for about the $8k we were anticipating, so we were ultimately happy with the outcome.
But when I think back to prior points in my life when I wasn't wealthy, these kinds of cashflow hits would have been devastating. Probably the biggest day to day difference between being poor or not is having access to the cash flow required to take on large infrequent expenses.
So I worry that this transition to EV will force many more less wealthy people into predatory financing. Access to transportation is key to economic mobility, since without it people are limited to whatever jobs are accessible from where they live and are limited in where they live accessible to where they work. Today people of limited means can own a car outright, and it's less clear to me that this is true in a EV world given today's battery economics.
I've seen a lot of discussion and debate over the total cost of EV's putting them out of reach of the less wealthy, and from my own analysis I agree that shouldn't be a major issue now. But I haven't seen any discussion about the cashflow impacts, which I think are very important too.
There seems to be a lot of hope that battery economics will continue to improve dramatically and I share it. But it's already improved dramatically and after some amount those improvements should diminish. I find it hard to accept that we should be setting public policy based on conjectural improvements that are far from guaranteed even in the sense of "if we adopt it the prices will drop".
We find charging at home to be one of the great benefits of having an EV (no need to go to a gas station) and without the ability to do so, the EV would be much less usable because of the extra charging logistics. Since we can charge at home we only take a charging logistics cost when taking unusually long trips. Having more EV charging availability improves but doesn't solve charging logistics simply because charging takes a lot more time than filling up with gas.
But for people who live in an apartment charging at home is usually not an option (and even if it becomes one it may well only be available at inflated prices), even people that live in a single family residence in suburbia may be unable to charge at home. If you are one of the many people who use street parking, again-- charging at home is right out.
All these sorts of things are less of an issue so long as ICE cars are still available: EVs get used by people who they fit best for, and ICE get used by people for whom the different EV dynamics don't work best.
From an environmental perspective, it only matters that total amount of distributed pollution sources are substantially reduced-- we don't need to eliminate them completely. (At some point pollution from tires dominates in any case, or from the mfgr/disposal of the car).
The quantity of metal required to make just one generation of renewable tech units to replace fossil fuels, is much larger than first thought. Current mining production of these metals is not even close to meeting demand. Current reported mineral reserves are also not enough in size. Most concerning is copper as one of the flagged shortfalls. Exploration for more at required volumes will be difficult, with this seminar addressing these issues.
You can count on replacing them in 8-10 years. It is currently a false economy based upon a false narrative to buy an electric car.
At $6.00/gal you can buy about 1333 gallons of fuel which translates into about 3 years of fuel purchases. It might make economic sense if the government stops increasing the price of EV by subsidizing them.
At $3.00/gal it doesn't make sense because of the added cost of an EV. It is price prohibitive for the majority of voting Americans.
EV total cost can be somewhat lower or substantially higher depending on your beliefs about battery lifetimes and your usage levels.
There are many factors that go in to battery lifetime so its easy to debate endlessly-- one of the reasons we really wanted to increase the battery size was so that we could usually charge it to only 80% which should substantially improve the battery life.
This is in contrast to an ICE where, especially in California or other moderate humidity low rainfall environments, an unused ICE will basically last forever. Some property I bought had a old 1940s military truck on it that at some point had been changed to 12v, and had not been driven since ~1990. We got it running fine with two afternoons of tinkering and a visit to the auto parts store, after replacing some cables and rubber parts that had degraded. And even with regular commuter use its totally realistic to get decades of use out of an ICE with nothing but intermittent couple hundred dollar maintenance expenses here and there, O2 sensors, pumps, etc.
Even in the midwest where humidity, salt and freezing temps are significant issues the 1940s tech can still work after much disuse if care is taken to get it running properly. Check out youtube there are plenty of "Will it run" videos highlighting this design feature.
Now put a current technology battery in a similar situation and by comparison it is depressing. What we stand to lose is important to retain.
I would love to see EV work well at replacing ICE. It is not today's reality for me or many others in my demographic (outside of the suburban coastal metro areas).
Perhaps when Aluminum, Sulfur, Salt batteries are available that will change. We'll see how that new tech develops.
If you are basing that 8-10 on the warranty offered by manufacturers, then I assume that you expect a gasoline engine to need to be replaced at 36,000 miles.
I know it's very limited what Cali can actually do and they already do a lot and there are good arguments to do nothing. But I just hate these dumb long dated "commitments". They're how we got INTO this mess...
The first line of the article is:
> California air regulators voted Thursday to approve stringent rules that would ban the sale of new gasoline cars by 2035 and set interim targets to phase the cars out.
edit to add even more detail:
> The board's new rules would also set interim quotas for zero-emission vehicles, focusing on new models. Starting with 2026 models, 35% of new cars, SUVs and small pickups sold in California would be required to be zero-emission vehicles. That quota would increase each year and is expected to reach 51% of all new car sales in 2028, 68% in 2030 and 100% in 2035. The quotas also would allow 20% of zero-emission cars sold to be plug-in hybrids.
And, you know, it’s not like California can bring a bunch of power plants (in other states) online fast enough to ban all ICE vehicles tomorrow.
edit: spelling