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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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

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?)

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