Why EVs Aren't a Climate Change Panacea | Hacker News Reader

Why EVs Aren't a Climate Change Panacea

spectrum.ieee.org

79 pointsmfiguiere169 comments

Better headline: "EVs are decarbonizing transport, but we have more work to do. Here's what we should do next."

From the article:

> This is not to imply in any way that electric vehicles are worthless. Analysis by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) argues that EVs are the quickest means to decarbonize motorized transport.

The headline feels like someone crafted it for maximum clickbait. The perpetual doomsday framing of everything, including the climate wins, only makes people tune out of the conversation.

I think this concern has to be balanced against the billions of dollars promoting the status quo. A lot of people want to believe that all we need to do is buy electric cars, and there are multiple industries pushing that since it’s good for business while politicians like not having to tell people that lifestyle changes are necessary.

>> A lot of people want to believe that all we need to do is buy electric cars

The people i hear most vehemently arguing for ev adoption are quick to share a laundry list of all the other things we should be doing.

I haven’t run across the EV-and-we’re-done brigade. I’m not dismissing that they exist but I haven’t met them.

Literally every time I see anything about "green transportation" from federal, state, or local government and non-profits the talk starts with and ends with electric vehicles.

The feds talk some talk about alternative transit, and some cities are leaning heavily into alternate transit...but at my county and local level there's basically zero interest in public transit, walking, or biking infrastructure.

Advocating for walkable cities and being anti-automobile is all the rage nowadays, but that doesn’t translate well to real world action. As much as we want to, and should, redesign cities, that is a monumental undertaking that will necessarily require several decades worth of effort and billions of dollars.

Switching to electric vehicles, meanwhile, does not require eminent domain and does not ask citizens to change their mobility standards. It is also something local governments don’t have to pay for.

> ...does not ask citizens to change their mobility standards.

My how far we have come from "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

That challenge was to find ways to contribute in your own sphere.

Converting one car to an EV (and accepting the resulting compromises) is more realistically in that spirit than something like “knock down your house and build a mid-rise on your lot” would be.

Collective action and sacrifice will be necessary to change density. Still that doesn't prevent us from adapting to more sustainable transportation modes, both collectively and personally.

I was addressing the fear that governments have of disrupting current mobility 'standards'.

> A lot of people want to believe that all we need to do is buy electric cars, and there are multiple industries pushing that

Um... who? I think it's rather the opposite: I see a "lot of people" in "multiple industries" making strawman arguments like this. Essentially, it's a deflection from "EVs are better than cars" (a clear truth that can't reasonably be argued with) to "EV proponents don't have all the answers either" (a winnable argument that feels like it's related even though it isn't).

Buy the EV. Also move closer to the urban core, WFH, and otherwise reduce your dependence on the suburban road networks. But buy the EV if you need a car.

Even leaving aside your dubious claim about what can and cannot be argued with, your conclusion about what choices people should make is pie in the sky for a significant part of even the developed world.

Economic and logistic reasons mean that carbon fuel cars are still the best transport option for most (?) people outside of urban centres and well-paid jobs.

This seems like a dodge? You said lots of people were saying something, I asked for a cite.

I'm not the poster you are referring to.

Upvoted, as I see you were downsmashed because you spoke of realities, not "where we want to be".

What you say is true. I find "everyone EV now!" proponents, often just use handwavy platitudes when given "I can't" info. For example, for many, many people ... range is a vital, and sadly an electric EV preventive thing.

When told this, EV absolutists often blather on about why a person is wrong, and do so while ignoring that person's reality.

The same is valid for cost. If you are poor, and can barely afford a truck for work, telling someone to spend 2x or 3x for a EV variant is exceptionally unfeeling, unrealistic, and elitist.

What we need to do, is be open to solutions to help people switch. One is H2, which has multiple cars with extensive range on the road, yet EV absolutists will start going on about green or not h2.

While at the same time ignoring that all excess power in the US, currently comes from fossil fuel!

Until the last fossil fuel shuts down, that is excess kept running by EV needs.

But you see, the goal is not where the battery charge, or h2 comes from, it is where it can come from!

We can 100% make green h2, just as we can eventually fully purge fossil fuels from our electric grid.

And it takes decades to move cars and transport from fossil to alternative options. We are doing it in parallel. So that one day, when we are free of fossil use, all our cars will already be fossil free! Including poor people driving 20 year old cars!

It’s not 2-3 times more for an EV: the average American truck buyer dropped $46k last year. You can buy a Leaf or Bolt for half that much and you’ll save many thousands of dollars in maintenance and fuel over the life of the vehicle. Yeah, perhaps 10-20% of truck buyers do something those vehicles can’t but most of the sales are fashion accessories for men who like to cosplay as ranchers. Given how much of the population lives in non-rural areas and doesn’t haul cattle for a living, switching to EVs buys a lot of time to find solutions for the hardest use cases.

Similarly, the reason hydrogen isn’t talked about more comes down to two reasons: it’s not competitive and it costs a lot more. Right now a huge number of people can buy an EV and charge it at home - if your commute is the American average or less, you don’t even need a 240V plug for that. If you want to buy a hydrogen powered car, you’re paying twice as much just to get started and you can refuel at a total of 60 places in the entire U.S. and Canada, most of them in California.

That might be worth thinking about but for the other problem: most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels. This is why there’s so much astroturf presenting it as a good future choice: the hydrocarbon industry can profit now while claiming that green sources will happen real soon now.

Yes, you can envision that we’d have solar powered H2 plants or something but that still hits a lot of incompletely solved logistical problems—it’s hard to contain and ship—and immediately runs into the question of why you wouldn’t instead have that solar power charging the much greater number of EVs which are much easier to support.

Here we are again. People "don't need" that truck, so buy a small ev, it is cheaper!

Meanwhile, I specifically referenced prople buying trucks for work.

And if they do not, a small gas powered is far cheaper that a small ev. Remember, I referenced poor, which means save NOW!, or where do you think all that well known credit card debt comes from.

Planning for future maintenance costs takes a back seat, when poor.

And so here we show an elitist, hand wavy response. Telling the person referenced as "need a truck for work", no, you don't!

Not helpful, but elitist, exclusionist.

Yes, I’m aware. It’s still true that most people do not need a truck for work, even if you look exclusively at the subset of people who buy a truck for work. One of the interesting things about getting out of affluent areas is that you see far fewer trucks – go somewhere poor and it’s a lot more small cars because they cost less to buy, maintain, and use half as much fuel.

Again, it’s not that _nobody_ uses one but that it’s a much smaller fraction of the total market. We can reduce emissions considerably without inconveniencing anyone and over time all of the used EVs on the market will improve the low-cost options.

The automobile industry is huge. They desperately want the way we deal with climate change to be buying EVs at the same price as ICEs rather than investing in transit, density, biking, or electric low-speed vehicles (one electric SUV needs a battery large enough to power tens of those or hundreds of e-bikes).

Agriculture uses a ton of fossil fuels, and they have the same interest: electric trucks aren’t a threat the way eating less beef or not shipping food halfway around the planet is.

Repeat for hospitality & travel, etc.

My point isn’t that EVs are terrible or that we shouldn’t buy them but that we have to guard against complacency. Remember how city governments jumped at Uber & Tesla’s marketing because it gave them the chance to say self-driving cars would solve travel & therefore they didn’t need to invest in transit or bike infrastructure, wasting a decade? The same dynamic will unfold here if we treat EVs as the primary thing we need to change rather than a necessary but far from sufficient step.

What I really don't understand is why don't Shell, Exxon, Chevron and their ilk get into the EV game and start setting up DC fast chargers at all of their gas stations? They profit, and EV range anxiety becomes a thing of the past by having chargers literally everywhere.

Low profit. Accelerates decline of the cash cow.

But the gas station cash cow is often the overpriced kiosk and not the gasoline.

Gas stations are usually franchised and the gas companies make good profit from that arrangement. The problem with supporting electric, is that most EV users don’t visit gas stations at all - they charge at home overnight.

I'm guessing for the same reason innovation rarely happens within companies that are printing money by maintaining the status quo. The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen is a good book on this, and the iPhone is another good example that had to come from outside the telecom industry.

Plus, there's an impedance mismatch between EV charging times and the retail store model, in that retail stores want customers in and out ASAP.

> What I really don't understand is why don't Shell, Exxon, Chevron and their ilk get into the EV game and start setting up DC fast chargers at all of their gas stations?

At least in Canada, there has definitely been a push in this direction. Both Petro-Can[1] and Irving[2] have set up fast charging networks at their stations. Many of the Tesla Superchargers in Canada[3] are also located at various gas stations and truck stops (that specifically benefit from more restaurant customers when they use the charger).

[1] https://www.petro-canada.ca/en/personal/fuel/canadas-electri...

[2] https://www.irvingoil.com/en-US/on-the-road/electric-vehicle...

[3] https://www.tesla.com/findus

They're in it and have been for years

Example: https://shellrecharge.com/en-us/solutions

It’ll happen but it requires reversing half a century spent pouring money into marketing the idea that climate change isn’t real, won’t be much, etc. They’ll need to reconsider the space usage but one nice thing about EVs is that non-toxic fuel means you can safely spread out through the entire parking lot.

Where I live those big petroleum companies own very few gas stations. Personally I almost always fill up at convenience store chains or truck stop chains--and almost none of those I use are owned by a petroleum producing company.

I don’t fully agree. It argues that beyond the EV conversion, we also have to switch to cycling and public transit for transport.

Maybe instead of criticizing the way in which the article was written you could comment on some if its actual contents. I feel like people on HN get incredibly hung up on minor things like the title of an article and can't move past that. Climate change is a big deal and HN is full of smart people. It would be nice if we could use it as a venue for discussion about interesting topics instead of whinging about things that annoy us.

I guess you haven't been here long. It's a staple of HN to be pedantic and obsess on details, that being said it's also how sometimes you end up with very interesting threads on tangential topics.

The presentation of the topic is as relevant as the facts at hand.

> The headline feels like someone crafted it for maximum clickbait

It's written as a bait to people who have bought into the oil industry propaganda that EV's aren't a solution. "Where do you think the electricity comes from? Coal, gas and oil fueled power plants, that's where." If I had a dollar for every time I've heard this I could afford a Tesla.

Yeah I've heard this way too much too. Why are humans so bad at second-order thinking and understanding that it's possible and, barring politics, straightforward to change where electricity comes from but it's not really possible to change where gasoline comes from?

130 million adults in the US have low literacy skills, meaning that more than half (54%) of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, according to a piece published in 2022 by APM Research Lab.

https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy

My note: critical thinking is not as prevalent as one might think, and there are also folks at various levels of gov and corp acting maliciously about the topic (fossil fuel consumption, climate change) due to entrenched interests. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

That the article did not make a bigger reference to immigrants makes me suspect. What are the percentages for native English speakers vs ESL? The states with the largest rates of Level 1 are all in the southwest where I expect there to be larger numbers of native-Spanish speakers.

I don't like "most people are dumb" arguments. Most people have average intelligence (i.e. a normal distribution). It is generally most accurate to assume that "the masses" are just as smart as us - even if it hurts.

> I don’t like “most people are dumb” arguments. Most people have average intelligence

“low literacy skills” or lacking "critical thinking" is a description of learning/education, not intelligence.

> It is generally most accurate to assume that “the masses” are just as smart as us

IF “us” refers to people of average intelligence only, this is accurate, though irrelevant here for the same reason as the preceding.

If you do believe in intelligence it's pretty clear the average professional software engineer is probably up there with other professionals which are half to a full standard deviation above the rest.

The map in your link suggests that low literacy rates are the result of states with large minority populations and immigrants. For example Iowa and Idaho have much higher literacy rates than say New York or California. Mississippi and Alabama have comparably low literacy rates to New York and California, but I’d hazard a guess that this is a product of their Democrat-voting minority population. Because it’s not like education funding or anything like that otherwise distinguishes North Dakota from Alabama. So I’m not sure what point you’re trying to get across here.

English proficiency != literacy

Most immigrants are fully literate in another language and if they can speak broken English are more intellectually accomplished than a huge fraction of Americans who speak only 1 instead of 1.5 or 2 or even more languages.

I'm not convinced that correlation is due to immigrants, unless they mistakenly equated English proficiency to literacy. Anecdotally though, I feel there are a whole lot more homeless people in New York than in Idaho, and maybe that's the reason for the correlation.

The survey linked above relies on English language material to gauge literacy:

> Some of these high county-level percentages stem from high populations of immigrants, whose first language is not English. The PIAAC only assesses English literacy…

Also you can just see this in the chart. The highest literacy rates are in states with the highest native born white American populations, but are otherwise very different in terms of politics (Minnesota and North Dakota). Meanwhile the lowest literacy states are those with large minority or immigrant populations, but again are otherwise very different politically (California and Mississippi).

The politicians in Germany somehow believe in synthetic fuel...

Hydrogen is difficult enough, adding carbon makes it absurd.

Was there any significant evolutionary pressure to reward better second-order thinking? Better thinking? Yes. Better long-term, second-order, or very nuanced thinking? Probably not.

Raising a kid for over a decade before they’re biologically mature is actually pretty long term. Granted, they were probably able to contribute to a hunt before puberty so maybe my points not so sharp. But humans are clearly tasked with survival for decades.

Modern society being able to invent scenarios basic human logic fails is probably more a reflection of poor design or lack of accountability somewhere. Ie the periodic learning that things that seemed good were poisonous (lead paint, asbestos) is more about lack of perfect knowledge and thus unforeseeable consequences. Or outright malignant intent.

Ok so definitely the capacity for one human to decide a slight increase in some metric is a fine reason to lie/cheat/steal/kill another human is definitely a bug. There are species which don’t kill one another.

Are there any large mammal species (say, bigger than a rabbit) that don’t?

In an environment of limited resources, I can easily reason my way to a harsher filter being optimal for a species long-term, including more fit members killing less fit members of another sub-group.

They’re all damnable together.

Yeah, it’s a weird argument to make in public. It’s an admission that you don’t understand the difference between a binary/dichotomy and degrees.

Massively increased WFH (triggered by the pandemic) has done more to improve carbon emissions from transportation than any electric vehicle movement will ever do. yet you don't see a hard line top-down push for more WFH, only resistance, why?

Another one is the fashion industry[1], amongst others. But that would be inconvenient for a lot of folks and so everyone forgets about it.

[1] https://carbonliteracy.com/fast-fashions-carbon-footprint/

Because many people don't really care about carbon, climate, and just latch on to that for their biases and agendas

There’s a real reason for this. Notice that traffic is back to normal? The demand for space on the road was WAY higher than the people actually using it - pre-pandemic far more people were using public transport.

Even with a sizable increase in WFH, the people who were previously dissuaded from driving alone by traffic have filled much of that road space with cars (in the case of Seattle, nearly all of it).

thx for pointing this out. i wasn’t aware of this before, but it be totally makes sense. so we need also need to keep reducing (rather than increase) road space in combination with reducing reason to travel/commute at all.

I think traffic in Boston/Cambridge is way better than I recall it being pre-pandemic. There’s still some at rush hours, but it feels like a lot less to me.

Indeed. I get the feeling it's due to a combination of sunk cost fallacy (we've spent a lot of money on a fancy central London office space god damn it) and upper management wanting to maintain control over their little kingdom.

Most jobs are on-site.

The software industry, and things similar to it, like finance, certainly are suitable to work-from-home answers.

But construction, service trades (plumbing, electrical, roofing...), transportation, factory work, retail, restaurant work, farming, janitorial, and more, require people to show up for work at specific places.

How do you mandate that the work most people do, that can't be done from home, should be done from home. Yes the lock-down reduced carbon emissions. But those bounced right back, except for those few "tech" jobs that stayed remote.

Maybe require tech workers to stay home? Maybe the tech-worker shuttles could be electric? I don't think government is particularly good at nuanced rule-making. Let's solve the problem some other way.

Any office job is suitable to work from home.

The point is that people are saying loudly that this is literally a matter of life and death, but we're not being told to continue stay home if our job can be done from home, we're being told to go back to the office (in a EV!). It's doublethink.

> It’s doublethink.

Yes. If humans were any good at thinking, we’d be trying a little harder to stop pooping where we eat. We’d have been decarbonizing everything a whole lot sooner.

But we’re not all that good at thinking, so here we are and this is how it’s going.

If we could wave a magic wand and suddenly make it so that the currently-externalized costs to everything that we do (e.g. the costs of correcting all the downstream impacts of things like driving a mile down the road, manufacturing a plastic bottle, ordering meat, disposing of waste items, etc.) became rolled into the up-front costs of these activities paid by companies and consumers, we'd have correct incentives informing every aspect of society and cities/commutes would look much different (out of necessity).

That's like saying making drugs illegal produces the correct incentives to stop the drug trade. Companies and consumers will break the law to bypass any artificial market inefficiency, and it will produce a thriving black market. Why would I pay $50 for a pack of hamburgers when I can get it for $10 from a black market butcher?

Having waved my magic wand, the black market butcher can't afford to sell his meat that cheaply without losing money on the sale—and besides, why undercut the going retail rate by so much more than he needs to?

> we're being told to go back to the office (in a EV!)

Who is saying this? There are some businesses types saying to go back to the office. There are some environmentalists saying drive an EV. They are different people. There are hundreds of different view points from people with an opinon of what you should do.

The generic "they" that are supposedly controlling your life is just lazy victim thinking

Yeah ok. Find a CEO who publicly says "return to the office in a gas-guzzling SUV" and I'll buy you an ice cream.

Which CEO is mandating return to the office in an EV? They're just saying "return to the office."

It seems you're also taking the "(in a EV!)" pedantically as a literal mandate. Nobody is saying "you must return to the office in an electric vehicle now" and I should be surprised that I have to spell that out. The messages are "return to the office" and "drive a climate-conscious vehicle" and people do the vast majority of their driving to and from work.

> people are saying loudly that this is literally a matter of life and death

Some people are saying that, but if you rationally think about the actual claims, it's clearly not like that.

The goal of net zero by 2050 was clearly set by some rounding. If we achieve net zero by 2060, it does not mean that in 2050 we are at 100% and boom, in 2060 we are at 0%. It means we are somewhere at 10-15% in 2050. It won't change that much the trajectory of the climate change.

We will clearly get to net zero. My bet is that in the US we will get there by 2040. It's going to take longer in China and India. But working from home will not make the difference between apocalypse and paradise.

>But working from home will not make the difference between apocalypse and paradise.

Ah, the old "it doesn't matter if we do X, so long as we do Y" where "X" keeps shifting to whatever the arguer wants it to be in that moment. In this case "X" is the 860,000 US office workers driving fossil fuel cars back and forth to work every day for their entire working life, which I was told was a bad thing, but now it actually doesn't really matter.

> which I was told was a bad thing, but now it actually doesn't really matter.

The average car in the US emits 350 g CO2 per mile [1]. The average American commute is 40 miles [2]. That's 14 kg of CO2 per commuter, or 14 million kilograms per 1 million commuters. So, about 14000 tons of CO2 per day, or about 5 million tons per year. 5 MT.

Every year the US emits about 5 GT of CO2 equivalent [3]. If a million people stop commuting right now, the US will reduce its emissions by 0.1%.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1223-janu...

[2] https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-commute-time-statistic...

[3] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas...

How about the reduction in emissions for all of the office spaces for every office in the US?

Office buildings tend to be much more efficient than homes. People who are not in the office work from home, where they use heating, air conditioning, lights, you name it. They don't just disappear from the face of the Earth.

What? Tons of people leave their HVAC on when they're at work, so that it's comfortable when they return. Now they're at home using it instead.

So the climate argument for working from home is "let me work from home, otherwise I'll live my home HVAC on when I'm at work, and that's bad for climate"?

Look, some people want to work from home, and it's good for a lot of reasons, but climate has nothing to do with that.

It does: transportation is about twice as large a source of emissions as all non-industrial commercial and residential activity. There's just no way not to be wasting a lot of energy when you're moving multiple tons of metal to move one person.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Since car commuting also correlates with other negatives, that seems like a good thing to try to reduce since there are very few downsides — someone giving up their commute is _happy_ about it, unlike a business being asked to stop using an industrial furnace or a farm being told they shouldn't truck in feed. Every bit we save in one area gives us more time to work on the others.

I'm not threatening anything, these are actual human behaviors that your cost analysis has to take into account when you say things like WFH has no meaningful impact on emissions. Running HVAC on every office in the US + daily commutes has a big impact, one that would completely vanish if office workers WFH.

> has a big impact

Big relative to what?

Let's run the numbers.

For a 2000 sqf home the AC consumes about 3-4 kW of electricity [1]. The vast majority of electricity in the US is produced with natural gas, where 1 kWh of electricity results in about 0.5 kg of CO2 [2]. Let's say 1 million people run the AC for 10 hours per day during the hot season, which is roughly 100 business days per year. That's 40 kWh per day, or 20 kg per person, or 20000 tons per one million people. Multiplying with 100 we get 2 MT of CO2.

Heating is probably similar. Obviously heating does not happen at the same time as AC, and people in the Southern states use more AC, and those in the Northern ones use more heating. Anyway, let's say heating adds another 3 MT of CO2, so overall the commute and the AC and the heating come to 10 MT of CO2 or 0.2% of the emissions.

[1] https://itlandes.com/how-many-watts-does-an-air-conditioner-...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11

The savings would be on office heating and cooling, not home heating and cooling. You're calculating the wrong thing.

Also, I thought of another thing you should factor in: restaurants. They're incredibly wasteful with food. With no office workers, many restaurants (especially around offices) have drastically fewer customers. You'll need to include the carbon savings from some percentage of the food that goes to waste.

> You're calculating the wrong thing.

Yes, I was just being conservative. The savings on the office side would be much lower, because as I said, offices are more efficient than homes. Plus, most offices would not close if people work from home.

As for restaurants, you are going into second and third order impacts. Why not calculate the savings from all the dry-cleaning that doesn't happen because people can work in their sweat pants at home?

>As for restaurants, you are going into second and third order impacts.

Yes, that's what systemic change is, and you appear to be presuming (with your mocking jab about sweat pants, give me a break) that it's irrelevant to study second and third order effects of large social changes. That's not a very credible perspective to have.

Governments worldwide are generally forcing public servants to commute and pollute, while also taxing their commutes in the form of carbon pricing.

We can’t solve the problem by ignoring the government and government regulations. The government not only is failing to protect the planet from the employers destroying it, they are such an employer. The public is MORE environmentalist than the government will tolerate. It is the stultifying nature of the government you allude to that’s causing the issue, the government is actively resisting the environmentalism of its own staff by threatening their jobs.

Work from home will let us get more gas vehicles off the road than EVs ever will. Government and legal reform can disempower those forcing others to pollute.

Shouldn’t WFH be reflected in US oil consumption?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/282716/oil-consumption-i...

Yes but it has increased carbon emissions from heating and cooling because people are more dispersed in their own homes. I read an article that linked a study saying it was worse than if people commuted but I doubt one paper is worth much.

I always assumed that WFH is better for emissions but that assumption isn't necessarily true.

EVs are a significantly worse solution than mass transport. Not because the electricity comes from the grid but because of the wastefulness involved in the construction, from the cars themselves and roads, also the additional electricity that's required per capita from cars than from mass transit. That said, they're better than ICE cars.

Individual automobiles have 100 problems. EVs solve 1 of them (tailpipe emissions), leaving the other 99. Yes, I guess it's better than nothing, but...

Meanwhile old boring things like trains, trams (frequent, comfortable, extensive), proper bike lanes, do more for climate change and general quality of life than replacing a petrol SUV with an electric SUV.

> including the climate wins

EVs aren't a climate win. It's just more consumption which ultimately means more energy which means more oil.

Aside from that the issue has nothing to do with where the oil is consumed, but how much. The only way to stop climate change is to prevent oil from being extracted. We're currently in the process of escalating a war to extract more so I'm not optimistic about this.

If EVs had an impact on US oil consumption you would expect that consumption to drop right?

But 2022 was nearly a record year for US oil consumption [0]:

> 20.40 million bpd in 2022 and 20.75 million bpd in 2023. That compares with a record 20.80 million bpd in 2005

EVs are just a way to keep you consuming while feeling okay about. It's not a climate win in the slightest.

0. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-crude-output-petroleum...

If EVs had an impact on US oil consumption you would expect that consumption to drop right?

Not yet, no. Barely expect it to make a dent yet.

Straw man.

It's not a climate win in the slightest.

Why not? Why not in the slightest?

You're saying its not even a teeny weeny little sliver of a climate win?

We have to get away from fossil fueled transportation. Having transportation that can/can potentially be renewably powered has to be a step forward. What you're saying just seems like 'let the perfect be the enemy of the good'

Please explain.

> Straw man.

Sorry but anything other than reduction in global fossil fuel consumption is that strawman. That is the only thing that matters. If everything we do is "green" and we still burn more oil than the year before that's all that matters.

In absolute terms more oil may be consumed, yet the cause could be growth elsewhere. Said another way EVs may have made that same growth less oil intense than the alternative.

Yeah, but there’s pretty much no way to measure that with massive interconnected global supply chains.

You can say less oil is being used in this specific fixed depth trace of an EV production line but at the end of the day it doesn’t mean anything if the net effect is billions of cars worth of ICE scrap and new-car consumption along with the impact of retrofitting every gas station, parking lot, and garage with chargers just for an unrelated industry (like freight shipping) to see dollar signs and take advantage of the inevitable price drop and burn all the oil anyway.

The only measure that can means anything is worldwide consumption. This is not an argument for or against EVs but I think the parent is right at where the goal posts need to be set. Around 45% of US oil consumption is gasoline for vehicles so I do believe that it could make a real dent but I won’t be popping any champagne until the numbers go down and stay down.

EVs could have reduced global oil consumption by 2 units while other factors, perhaps entirely unrelated to transportation, increased global oil consumption by 7 units for a net of +5.

EVs still did something beneficial in that story.

But its like we're trying to cross a river and you're standing on the bank saying "we've got to cross that river, thats the only thing that matters" and the guy next to you goes and gets some wood and starts making a boat and you're looking at him saying "making that boat makes no difference, we're still no further across that river. Getting across the river is the only thing that matters"

EVs don't use as much oil in their lifetime (including production) as a combustion engine would in theirs (those have to be produced also, right?)

People are hoping for a quick sustainability fix but that is not on offer. Our current footprint on the global environment took at least a century of population growth and technological expansion to manifest. Car based cities are just one of the designs we are stuck with.

EV's will play some role to keep that pattern workable, but it may well be that other ways of organising life and the economy will prove better adapted and more efficient in the midterm (~20 yrs)

Keep in mind that co2 is just one of the many constraints we are increasingly bumping against. The age of innocence is gone. On the other hand there is nothing sacred about how we organized things since 1900 or so...

> International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) argues that EVs are the quickest means to decarbonize motorized transport. However, EVs are not by themselves in any way going to achieve the goal of net zero by 2050.

Yep. Technically correct, but an example of shooting for the wrong goal, and failing entirely.

The goal is not making our motorized transport system low carbon. The goal is limiting the damage of climate change and keeping a lid on temperature rises. If we constrain our solution set to maintaining the same sort of motorized transport system we will fail.

I would like to hope that software engineers on this site reading this would recognize such a problem.

It is like when, fundamentally, the design of a program from the get go was wrong from the first foot forward and as a result it's simply too slow. No amount of fiddling around the edges, hacks and minor fixes will result in an adequate improvement. Only a new design is a real fix.

Thankfully in many ways it's actually easier to fix cities than to fix a major software project. For one thing we at least know the solutions, and they're easily achievable given political will and with not a great deal of money. (not easily around on a software project!)

Most of the issues come more from political restriction than anything else, and so much can be done by simply letting people do things that they're currently banned from doing (ie. let people build more housing). Couple that with some relatively affordable bike lanes and rapid bus lanes, and one can achieve remarkable improvements with relatively little capital expenditure and effort.

> Even a few US cities it might be livable without a car.

Musing that better things are maybe possible in "a few" US cities is dramatically low ambition and out of touch.

Consider that 45% of Vancouver's West End commutes to work by walking. That's a neighbourhood of 45,000 in a major NA city. There's absolutely nothing going on remarkably here that accounts for this excepting the simple fact that it's a bunch of 1960s era residential apartments in a pleasant tree lined area within a 20 minute walking distance of Vancouver's Downtown. That's it. I'm pretty sure this concept is quite replicable in cities across America.

They've also made it very unpleasant to own a car in the West End - parking is extremely limited or requires a special pass. There are very few thru- streets so all car journeys are convoluted, etc.

And support for alternatives is plentiful - bus service is excellent, bike lanes and routes are abundant, there are numerous and frequent bike share stations, etc.

It's definitely a great place to live.

The head of IEA they are referring to, Birol, wrote an op-ed on why the explosion of EVs is fundamental for the climate transition just a few months ago: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/23/perspectives/iea-electric...

Why would IEEE use a quote from 2017 from some Norwegian blog to make it seem IEAs position is the opposite of what it actually is?

EVs seem to not be a very well thought-out long term solution in general, unless radically different batteries with very high energy density can soon be developed. Earth has 88 million tons of lithium, of which only 1/4 is economically feasible to mine. Each Tesla battery uses about 50 kg of Li, which means only about 18 Tesla batteries can be produced per ton, or about 396 million total Tesla batteries. Current global automobile production is about 80 million per year. If society were to totally switch to EVs, we would run out within a decade or so even assuming most of these cars used far less lithium (and thus had much shorter range, limiting practicality). This back of the napkin analysis also ignores all the other competing uses of Li...

And the mining itself is very polluting

Maybe governments are helping to prop up EVs as a means of covertly hoarding lithium. Even if EVs don't work out, having an abundance of lithium could be of tremendous value. /conspiracy

This is in a timeline where governments are capable of long-term secret plans that move markets, but haven’t thought of strategic reserves?

Earth has many trillions of tons of lithium.

Musk in 2022 said lithium makes up 5kg in a car battery: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4502519-tesla-inc-tsla-ceo-...

> Earth has 88 million tons of lithium, of which only 1/4 is economically feasible to mine.

This is outrageously spun. That number is (I assume, you don't cite a source) a count of total known reserves. That's not the way research extraction works; as industries develop (and this one is in its infancy) they discover new sources. This is the logic that led people to warn about "peak oil" in the 90's. They were hilariously wrong (because guess what? we "discovered" fracking as prices rose!).

The "1/4 economically feasible" bit likewise assumes, again, current prices and production method. You don't think it's possible to reach a price equilibrium and technology balance that makes that worthwhile to extract? Why? It's happened for every other resource we use.

And the big mistake here is that you're assuming that we throw the batteries in the trash when a vehicle reaches end of life. In point of fact battery elements are among the most effectively recycled materials in the modern economy. A junk NMC battery is, in essence, a very highly concentrated cobalt/lithium ore just waiting for smelting. We don't "run out" like you posit. At steady state, we need enough to cover growth and loss only.

Basically: you're wrong. There's lots and lots of Li out there long term. In the nearer term, though, yeah: we can't mine remotely enough of the stuff and batteries will remain expensive as the industry grows.

> as industries develop (and this one is in its infancy) they discover new sources.

And what do you imagine they will do with those new sources? Leave them pristine while they elegantly and cleanly suck out only the required lithium? No, they will destroy those ecologies with massive mining operations which will generate tons of waste, toxic chemicals, and CO2.

In our quest to reduce carbon emissions it seems we are willing to do everything we can to destroy our habitable environment.

How are you quantifying those mining externalities compared to other mining activity or compared to the reduced externalities from ICE vehicles?

These new mining activities will need to be orders of magnitude more than anything we've ever seen before: https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/22/the-tough-calculus-of-emis...

> To illustrate the ultimate scale of demand that EV mandates alone will place on mining, consider that a world with 500 million electric cars — which would still constitute under half of all vehicles — would require mining a quantity of energy minerals sufficient to build batteries for about 3 trillion smartphones. That’s equal to over 2,000 years of mining and production for the latter. For the record, that many EVs would eliminate only about 15% of world oil use.

> Set aside the environmental, economic and geopolitical implications of such a staggering expansion of global mining. The World Bank cautions about “a new suite of challenges for the sustainable development of minerals and resources.” Such an increase in mining has direct relevance for predictions about the future carbon intensity for minerals because acquiring raw materials already accounts for nearly one half of the life-cycle carbon dioxide emissions for EVs.

People are still living in the fantasy that EVs will solve the problem of ICEs, they haven't thought through what it would actually take to do that. Basically, they are imagining a completely blue-sky happy path where every single piece magically falls into place: abundant high-yield mineral deposits continue to be found and quickly extracted, battery technology improves exponentially, car makers are able to smoothly incorporate all of these new technology improvements and supply chain disruptions to switch to EVs, and cheaply decommission and recycle legacy ICE vehicles. So many things have to come together absolutely perfectly that it beggars belief.

Ironically the very oil and gas industries that funded this FUD via the Manhattan Institute are themselves a perfect example of how extractive industry can scale up far beyond the kind of naive extrapolations that gave us the "peak oil" idea.

I suppose that the Climate and Community Project and University of California, Davis are also being funded by the Manhattan Institute to spread FUD?

> The US’s transition to electric vehicles could require three times as much lithium as is currently produced for the entire global market, causing needless water shortages, Indigenous land grabs, and ecosystem destruction inside and outside its borders, new research finds.

That's the first paragraph of https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-electric-... (that's 2023-01-24, btw). The entire article is worth reading to get a high-level overview of the actual real-world impact the lithium mining will have over the next couple of decades if we keep rushing headlong into a path where we believe electric cars will just magically solve everything.

I know in this cynical age no one wants to believe anything, but really–have we not seen enough ecologies destroyed by mining to understand that this is real?

Your number is off by eight orders of magnitude.

Lithium is one of the most common elements on the planet. Earths crust contains ~0.002-0.006% Li by weight, or 1,220,000,000 million tonnes if you use the low estimate.

You seem to have confused the concept of "known reserves" - the 88M number is deposits that we've paid to map out and know exactly where they are.

As current deposits empty out, companies will invest in mapping out others.

> Each Tesla battery uses about 50 kg of Li

Do you have a source for this figure?

If lithium gets too expensive you use alternative materials for car batteries. A lot of research is pursuing this.

Micromobility EVs may make a much bigger contribution to climate change amelioration.

Exactly. A 3.5-ton electric SUV is marginally better than a petrol SUV. You what's better than both? An e-bike.

Truly, micromobility like E-bikes are cheap, require much less space, healthier and are more social. Governments do not know how to build for micromobility yet it seems.

all it would require is building some protected bike lanes (which are very cheap to build), but that would gasp be taking space away from exclusive car use, and so is political anathema to many. This needs to change.

1) Climate modeling is hard. There have been substantial shifts in the climate over time, including five ice ages.

2) Climate change predictions have been repeatedly wrong. In the 80's they said the Maldives would be submerged by 2000, for example. Maldives are still there.

3) if the models are good then things like the costs of coastal real estate should show it. Coastal real estate is still premium so either the models are wrong or the banks are ignoring the models and lend huge amounts on property thar will soon be reclaimed by the sea.

4) There are people and countries with trillions on pil reserve wealth who will be reduced to poverty in a fossil free world. Are they going to cooperate with their own impoverishment based on weak, poorly performing climate models produced by antagonistic western states?

5) There is a huge installed base of fossil fuels in the developing world. The energy density and portability of fossils is great for places with limited infrastructure. How do you convert them?

6) Nuclear is the only realistic approach to mass scale decarbonization. Why is this ignored. If you believe the climate models then we should accept the stochastic risks of nuclear over the absolute risk of climate in the near future. Is not the risk of an occasional Chernobyl better than planet wide destruction and degradation.

7) The past few years have demonstrated the danger of alarmists reacting to scary looking model data that they don't fully understand.

8) Addressing climate change directly at the source is intractable for the reasons I've listed. Mitigation approaches are going to pay much better dividends than multi moon shot green technology agendas.

2) By "they said the Maldives would be submerged by 2000", this seems to be one report which was the basis for for a full study of the problem by the UN. Do you agree there have been notable, significant, temperature rises over the last 100 years, which appear to be a significantly faster change than in previous ice ages?

Show me the detailed climate data for the past 20 million years.

Oh, you can't. Why? Because there is no data. It's all modeled.

To be clear I'm not denying anthropogenic climate change, I'm questioning the strategies employed .

A hundred years of data amongst millions is insignificant. We don't know what proportion is anthropogenic and which is the larger climate trend that is beyond our control. Regardless, the logical optimization is nuclear and mitigation, not a suicidal unilateral rush into zero GHG. Under that approach if the multiple technogical breakthroughs never come we are in worse shape than if we had not done anything.

Actually there's substantial geological evidence for CO2-driven climate change. Several chapters of James Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren provide a good introduction to it.

I agree with you on nuclear, and if you read Hansen's book you'll see that he does as well.

Yes. Hansen is quite convincing on his nuclear stance, which is sadly ignored.

Net zero energy exclusively from renewable resources is a dangerous and delusional pathway.

As for the climate backcasting, it's all theory. There's no way to even get a confidence interval on the estimates because there is no way to witness the actual events that they extrapolate from.

Several independent lines of geologic evidence all point to a similar climate sensitivity (see Hansen). Some fairly basic physics does the same, and physicists back to 1896 predicted our current reality pretty well. The recent book The Physics of Climate Change by Lawrence Krauss covers that in detail.

It's not surprising that modelers using the same data and modeling theories come up with similar results.

My point is that we have no actual way to confirm how correct these models are because we can't check them.

The part you’re missing is that it’s not “the same data” but multiple data sources showing the same trend. Ice cores, stalagmites, lake sediment, tree rings, sea shells and corals, microfossils, etc. are all measuring different things - when those show consistent results it’s increasingly unlikely that this is coincidental.

Wikipedia has a good overview of the major categories which is well worth reading:

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

Those cover many separate fields so it’s also unlikely that this is because they all happen to be making the same mistakes. Revealing such a flaw would be a career-making move for an academic.

If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.

Richard Feynman

Feynman wrote a lot about the problems of science and scientific group think. Scientists are people. They have egos, careers, and families to feed like everyone else. They actually tend to resist outside results from their field consensus because they have papers and grants and reputations built on prior findings, as well as a healthy resistance to the newest hot theory that breaks everything because it is simply incorrect and they don't want top go through the trouble of really examining it.

Without the ability to check the techniques of paleoclimatology we have a have a science with extremely wide confidence bands on its estimates.

I think Hansen is absolutely right about Thorium nuclear as the carbon free energy pathway of choice. It certainly doesn't hurt anything to make that happen then is worse than catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. However, the choices made under alarmist predictions from theoretical models must be avoided.

I would strongly suggest learning what is common in the field - whoever is originating the talking points you’re repeating is doing you a real disservice.

One of the first questions to learn about is why you incorrectly believe there’s no way to validate techniques, and especially whether it might be the case that there are so many different lines of evidence is because scientists looked for independent sources of data so they could do exactly that.

> Show me the detailed climate data for the past 20 million years.

> Oh, you can't. Why? Because there is no data. It's all modeled.

This isn't true:

> Paleoclimatology data are derived from natural sources such as tree rings, ice cores, corals, stalagmites, and ocean and lake sediments. These proxy climate data extend the weather and climate information archive by hundreds to millions of years. The data include geophysical or biological measurement time series and some reconstructed climate variables such as temperature and precipitation. Scientists use paleoclimatology data and information to understand natural climate variability and future climate change.

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/paleoclimatology

This also isn't the only question to ask: we know that the earth has been warmer in the past but there's also the question of timeframe — a gradual change over a long period of time gives ecosystems time to adjust gracefully whereas a sudden change will cause significant disruption and mass die-offs. The historical data shows that the change we're seeing is on the latter side, and while natural factors can affect the temperature scientists have measured a lot of them over decades and consistently found that the primary factor is anthropogenic. Here's a good chart showing that while other things like volcanic activity or solar variation can have big effects they don't consistently push the trend in one direction:

https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/3/#fig-3-3

> Climate change predictions have been repeatedly wrong

This is fossil fuel industry propaganda - whoever told you this is untrustworthy and literally banking on you not fact-checking their claims. The consensus predictions since the late 1970s have been increasingly accurate, especially since the 1980s.

For example, the first IPCC report from 1990 had estimates which we now have data to judge them against:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...

Similarly, Dr. James Hansen (director of NASA's Goddard Institute) testified before Congress based on his 1988 study predicting global warming and his numbers were very close to what we saw over the subsequent 3 decades:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... If you believe that “ice age” talk was real, remember that the source of that was a couple of speculative papers which were never widely accepted and were refuted by the late 1970s.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...

Don’t know where to put this, but utility rates in northern California have gotten to the point where it’s cheaper to drive my prius than my EV from a fuel standpoint, and that’s using the special off peak EV rate.

If you have net metering and solar, great, but at this point if you’re not a homeowner with grandfathered nem 2.0, Evs make no sense in northern ca.

Pretty much the same in most of Europe. Electric trams are stopped where I lived, council resigned from buying electric buses, some nearby cities even turn on only one side of street lights, charging EV is more expensive than diesel for the same range.

I think any solution that involves things getting worse for people is a non-starter. EVs will soon reach the point where it makes no sense to purchase an ICE vehicle. That is the model to shoot for - make the bad stuff obsolete. When the bad stuff is obsolete already (WFO is a good example), lets do our best to take advantage of it.

EVs absolutely help, but they don't address any of the myriad of problems inherent in low occupancy vehicle transportation. One person in a car requires more resources (energy, parking space, space on the road while in use, the cost of the vehicle and its maintenance, damage to roads, injuries/deaths from crashes, etc)

If we spent even some money spent on self-driving vehicles on public transit infrastructure, we'd get immediate gains and it would in particular help those who are on the bottom rungs of the ladder economically - making it easier for them to contribute toward society, and causing fewer problems to boot (such as the enormous costs of trying to maintain a cheaper/older car, causing a crash because their vehicle is poorly maintained, or they fell asleep while driving from working 2-3 jobs, etc.)

Absolutely nailed. EVs solve one problem about ICE cars. Not the other 99.

Governments don't tax land so they have no incentive to invest in good public transport. Most transportation projects massively increase property values which is then captured by landlords instead of governments and then everyone complains that public transport doesn't work and can't fund itself and people wonder why politicians invest in boondoggles to immortalise themselves instead of acting more like a business that prioritizes useful investments because it increases future tax revenue.

Land value taxes make way more sense than income taxes because they are location based. If a politician makes a mistake and you move away they will get your income tax regardless. So they have no reason to invest in any given location.

> Governments don’t tax land

They…actually do.

Decrease need for private transportation.

Heavily push for EVs.

Allow combustion engines when actually necessary instead of banning everything like a bunch of blind ideologues.

Clean up the air from carbon to compensate.

> Perfect is the enemy of good! More at 11

Even factoring in probable range increases and advances in charging tech, it will still be necessary to incrementally, if not fully, charge EVs in public. One thing that doesn’t seem to occur to our elected officials… there is nowhere near enough real estate to charge that many vehicles around town.

Use existing parking spaces.

How hard would it be to put plugs onto street lights? Most cities have wiring and the switch to LED bulbs means those circuits have a lot more spare capacity than they used to.

New Westminster ( part of metro Vancouver) has been doing exactly that:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KaBLOGakGfg

The average amount driven per day by Americans is 39 miles, meaning that a heck of a lot of people will be able to do just fine with only charging at home.

We are talking 2050 right? Why would most people keep a separate self-driving EV in the garage? Just hail one through an app and it will drive you on your trip, 1 mile or 500 miles. Some people just enjoy shaming others for living pleasant lives when technology is already available to preserve each activity while keeping carbon emissions down and is not standing still - in fact the rate of technological advancement of humanity is accelerating over time. Lab grown meat can be cheaper, tastier and healthier than one from a whole animal. See your less important travel destinations in high quality VR. Or if you still want organic meat or a non-VRable beach vacation, enjoy, we have carbon capture and biofuel tech to get you covered. Progress is about giving choices, not taking away choices.

> Some people just enjoy shaming others for living pleasant lives

I've observed that most people have some instinctual need to hate on some other sub-group of society, and blame them for the world's problems. For a lot of people that subgroup seems to be "car users".

We could collectively be focusing on decarbonizing all energy production, and building excess energy production capacity to offset any remaining carbon production, and even start winding back the damage we've done so far. And then it wouldn't matter one bit what mode of transportation you used, or what you used energy towards.

But it's easier to divide ourselves and hate on each other.

The Economist wrote a few months back that an EV in Japan actually produces more carbon per mile than an ICE because almost all of their energy comes from coal plants. I'm not sure if America has a radically different coal plant design which produces less carbon somehow, but ~60% of electricity in America comes from coal. [edit: 60% is fossil fuel generated, ~20% is coal]

Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs, and America is not well situated for public transport since we built out instead of up.

I don't want anyone to get the impression that EVs are bad, but people act like they're saving the world by buying a Tesla. It's not that simple. This is a very, very difficult problem and every solution has trade-offs.

I don't believe that it's true a fully coal powered EV produces more carbon per mile due to how inefficient combustion engines are

I'll be honest, I haven't bothered to double check it, but it may be that coal is just that dirty.

I would certainly believe that the smog/pollutants from coal outweigh the benefits, but acording to this [1] Reuters article reviewing this question:

> Even in the worst case scenario where an EV is charged only from a coal-fired grid, it would generate an extra 4.1 million grams of carbon a year while a comparable gasoline car would produce over 4.6 million grams, the Reuters analysis showed.

> The Economist wrote a few months back that an EV in Japan actually produces more carbon per mile than an ICE because almost all of their energy comes from coal plants. I'm not sure if America has a radically different coal plant design which produces less carbon somehow, but ~60% of electricity in America comes from coal.

It is easier to upgrade a (comparative) small number of power plants than it is to make everyone's ICE engine more efficient.

> Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs.

The amount of work needed to upgrade our grid to handle the increased usage of air conditioning due to global warming is greater than the work needed to support EVs.

Also, America is not well situated for public transport since we built out instead of up. That's a very difficult issue.

It's currently economically unsustainable. We will need to densify and abandon non-viable area, get rid of minimum parking, and reduce lanes of roads.

Every state/local already continually asks for federal handouts to maintain their overbuilt 8 lane roads. The fact that people still want to add lanes to roads is mind boggling.

Coal provided 23% of US electricity generation in 2021, 20% in 2022, and is forecast to fall to 19% in 2023. The US now burns less than half of the coal it did in 2007.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184333/coal-energy-consu...

Oops, mixed up coal and total fossil fuel for energy generation which is a big difference.

Coal is under 20% now in the US and dropping: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896

Even if you still run off coal you are decoupling energy source from the vehicle allowing the vehicle to run off any source that currently makes the most sense. You can't run a gas car off coal but you can run an electric.

Power plants are more efficient than small combustion engines as well as having more sophisticated emission controls with no concerns for weight or size with a full time staff to maintain them.

The grid needs to increase 30% to support all cars, it only took 40 years for it to increase 5X from 1960 to 2000, about 4% per year, so less than 10 years to support all cars, easily doable.

On US average grid EVs get 93mpg equivalent. On the dirtiest (most carbon intense) grid in the US that figure is 42, the cleanest 256. Of course for EVs those numbers will get better each year.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/plug-in-or-gas-up-why...

The article headline sets up a straw man. EVs do two important things: take a diffuse source of CO2 and other pollutants, and confine the problem to large-scale power plants. They also cut smog in cities where people are most exposed to pollution.

Other commenters here have noted that small EVs like scooters are an important part of electrifying transport. A lot of cities would smell a lot better with electric scooters replacing gas scooters.

I feel like I'm missing something fundamental about the whole EV thing.

1. Produce/transport a bunch of electric vehicles, producing massive emissions 2. ??? 3. Somehow billions of tonnes of carbon get removed from the atmosphere

I fail to see how EVs do anything to actually do something about the problem i.e. REMOVE CO2 from the atmosphere.

The idea, as I understand it, is that: A. Before the 2038 date the article suggests we must move to EV by, many/most cars will need to be replaced. So, the suggestion isn't necessarily to throw away good cars, as much as to replace them with an EV when they are replaced. B. Currently the electricity used to charge your EV may not be emission free, but someday it might be. Whereas gasoline will never be emission free. And if everyone has EV's already, then the benefit of cleaning the grid becomes greater and easier to justify to a decisionmaker. So while EVs wont solve the problem, it maybe could be said that the problem cannot be solved without first switching to EVs.

It's a giant decrease in aggregate emissions.

Some people say we should go all in on mass transit. Alright cool. Suburbia doesn't work then. We're going to have to massively build our way out of this any way you slice it.

EVs are an incremental improvement and that's how all goals are reached.

Some people argue "What if you have a coal plant from the 1830s and that's powering the EV and we compare it with some sleek next gen hybrid" and we're all supposed to pretend that's not just some classic bullshit artist play. The stupidity gives me a headache. Why are we entertaining such transparent lies as if they're being given in good faith?

The point I'm trying to make (or get) is that EVs (or solar panels/wind turbines) don't actually do anything to actually fix the root problem - too much CO2 in the atmosphere. All of the emissions required to produce them in fact make the problem worse.

Even if the world ICE vehicle fleet was magically converted to EVs powered by carbon-free fusion power tomorrow, I fail to see how this will actually lower the CO2 from 414ppm.

We are always limited to the best solutions we have on hand.

Since there's more than one person in the world, we can work on even better solutions while transitioning to the best ones we have, simultaneously.

What's presented by saying EVs aren't the final solution is the classic perfect being the enemy of the good dilemma weaponized to encourage waiting, stalling, and inaction. The actual material world impact of this type of policy is just delay delay delay as we sow in seeds of uncertainty to putz around without actually doing something.

This has literally been the oil playbook for decades. It's the same thing.

It manifests in many ways. For instance there is a leftist tech skeptic movement against electric vehicles that in practice is just reactionary conservatism. They use the classic Ralph Nader play to falsely claim that EVs catch fire more than ICE vehicles, focus on the egregious labor issues at EV plants and other classic tropes while simultaneously proffering some imaginary solution of getting rid of single family homes, suburbia and radically transform how people live overnight into a marvelous network of high speed rail by I assume, an actual magic wand.

This is the same tactic tobacco companies used: "4 out of 5 doctors (who smoke) prefer brand X". Just like this statement ignores that most doctors don't smoke, the sensationalization of Tesla ignores all of the problems of the rest of the industry or that there's many fine offerings of electric vehicles from other vendors. It's a wildly misinformed caricature.

In practice it produces the same stalling outcome - delaying the transition even more.

On the WSJ conservative end there's articles where someone rents say a $180,000 Lucid Air, drives like a maniac, goes to the most expensive charging options and then compares the vehicle with a used Toyota Prius to demonstrate how much more expensive electric vehicles supposedly are.

Learn to recognize the bullshit. It's important and the consequences are big this time.

Limiting ever more CO2 from going into the atmosphere is an important related thing to do alongside of the other (much much harder!) problem of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

That’s a technically correct but IMO too narrow view of the problem.

Reframe the problem as “how much atmospheric CO2 will be present in 2050?” and 2023 EVs do have promise to reduce that.

They don't.

What they do is centralize CO2 production which can be then mitigated on a larger scale (switching power production to nuclear/solar/wind, CO2 capture from industrial processes...).

They also clean-up living spaces and allow pollution (that which is necessary) to be outside of the cities. This alone would probably save millions of lives...

> 1. Produce/transport a bunch of electric vehicles, producing massive emissions 2. ??? 3. Somehow billions of tonnes of carbon get removed from the atmosphere

I'll revise that to be more accurate:

1. Produce/transport a bunch of electric vehicles, producing moderately more emissions than the production of equivalent gasoline vehicles would have

2. These electric vehicles release dramatically less carbon emissions per kilometer, even if the power source is itself fossil fueled

3. Billions of tonnes of carbon that would have been emitted with the status quo are not.

> I fail to see how EVs do anything to actually do something about the problem i.e. REMOVE CO2 from the atmosphere.

EVs aren't going to remove carbon from the atmosphere (and I've never heard anyone say that they will?). They simply reduce the ongoing increase of emissions from the transportation sector. They are one small piece of the climate change puzzle.

The carbon in the atmosphere can't even begin to decrease if we are continually increasing the amount we add to it.

They are more energy efficient than ICE cars. An ICE car produces a lot of waste heat in the process of trying to move its wheels. That heat serves no purpose other than warming the cab. This reduces CO2 emissions. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere isn't cost effective without heavy government subsidies. You need somewhere between 300€ to 600€ per ton to capture CO2 with mature tech and 100€ per ton assuming some sort of breakthrough. How are you going to pay for this? Are you going to introduce 300€ CO2 taxes?

That would kill many industries and they would move abroad so the first thing that needs to be done is to reduce emissions because that costs less than 300€ per ton.

A VW golf driven for 150k km produces 30 tons of CO2 which would cost 9000€ to capture just to break even. If you want to get rid of 3 tons of CO2 for every car then let's round it up to 10k€.

There are plenty of EVs in the 30k€ price range that you can buy today and there are other benefits that make EVs appealing like lower energy costs, less maintenance and so on. So you have this product on the market that doesn't need much government support anymore and is well accepted in the market and then you got this mega project that can only be started by the government with massive taxation that makes everything more expensive.

I see on some days, that electricity generation in Germany is 45% coal and 20% gas. With all transmission and storage losses the EVs are almost coal powered then. I know, it’s very rough estimation. But with coal powered cars not much positive can be done against climate change.

An EV running on coal-generated electricity is still cleaner than an ICEV.

EVs have the most effect on atmospheric carbon when they are saving money over an ICE vehicle. If the all-in cost (vehicle, fuel, parts, repair, etc.) per mile traveled isn't less, it's very unlikely there is lower carbon emitted.

Nothing is a “panacea.”

Anytime I see the word "assume" in an article it feels like a mechanism for subtly turning journalism into an op-ed.

This article is explicitly an op-ed. Not sure what you were expecting here.

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