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Comment by hdjjhhvvhga | Hacker News Reader

That's why it's even more impressive it took off in Germany which is normally very protective of its car industry.

We still have massive subsidies for providing leased new cars, mostly selected from German car manufacturers, to employees (about 3 bn per year [1]).

Few people in the upper middle class and above will use public transport instead of their car, if it's provided by their employer.

The results from the 9€ Ticket also indicate that people aren't using their car that less often. They are just using the ticket to do additional journeys [2].

But I suppose that having this ticket available for longer than 3 months will motivate some households to get rid of/ not purchase a second car. Also, it will probably convince younger adults in metropolitan areas (like me) to not buy a car - or to delay it until it's needed for family reasons.

[1]: https://www.exberliner.com/politics/red-flag-why-we-should-b... [2]: https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/9-euro-...

One limitation of the previous price experiment is that it was only a few summer months. Nobody sells their car for 3 months, especially when they include a summer holiday. Let's see what happens when you can count on this existing for years to come.

The germans are generally quite conscious of right and wrong (see e.g. Linux and OSM usage: it's still minorities but it's much more present than in similar countries like NL), maybe very competitive pricing does help in mass transport adoption.

In my opinion it should be somewhere between dirt cheap and free if your income is in the bottom 10% of incomes (and could cost twice as much for the top 50%, which includes me, because it has to be financed somehow anyway), but as an intermediate step, this is not going in the wrong direction.

> In my opinion it should be somewhere between dirt cheap and free if your income is in the bottom 10% of incomes (and could cost twice as much for the top 50%

True, for many people 49€/ month is still too expensive - e.g. low wage, low pension or living on welfare.

In its current form, it's mostly a relief for the middle class living in areas with good public transportation.

I'm definitely happy to pay just 49€ for all over Germany instead of 80€ just for Berlin. I'd be ready to pay more and think it would be fair if the amount was tied to the taxable income, like union memberships are.

>True, for many people 49€/ month is still too expensive

But those people have to have means of transport at least to go to work. Even if they have a shitbox they pay more than that in gas and taxes. It's precisely for those people that this would be more beneficial.

As a bonus, it would reduce the ENORMOUS externalities that come from car usage: pollution, congestion, space for parking, roads, etc.

That sounds logical. Somehow I fear the problem might be in convincing people of these facts.

Case in point: nuclear energy popularity in Germany

You don’t need to mention that you are in the top 50% to make your augment stronger. You should probably even actively avoid saying it so that people don’t think you’re relying on selfless reasons, (hey everyone I’m the nice one in the room) to further your point, because others may not feel that way about themselves.l, at least not to random strangers in the bottom 10%.

Anyway, making more money is just a measure of one’s ability more or less (not a causation but a strong correlation). Therefore to the extent that one works harder or provides more value to others and is rewarded for it by increased earning power, they should not be punished for it by an arbitrary tax on their transportation needs.

I think it might make sense to create countries or places where people in the bottom 10% live with minimal conveniences, a place like Thailand when everything is cheap.

In additional to above requiring everyone to pay the same amount creates equality and most likely moves technological innovation ahead that much faster because everyone feels like they are getting value for their money and more likely to spend even more on improvements.

What exactly do you mean like by

“ I think it might make sense to create countries or places where people in the bottom 10% live with minimal conveniences, a place like Thailand when everything is cheap.”

Like a “full service convenience place” for the part of society that doesn’t want to work and outsource that to a cheap third world country and make their population work at low cost for the unemployed of the first world?

Or collectively create a place where “the bottom 10 percent are left at their own abilities” ?

I think you'll have to read a couple of Ayn Rand novels to truly understand what they mean. But I think the gist of it can be reduced to: "I'm very smart and upset that I have to pay taxes. Also, I don't like it when I see homeless people, after all it's their own fault they provide no value and are therefore poor. Can't we just send them to Thailand where I went on holiday recently and the can of Pabst Blue Ribbon that cost a reasonable $19 here in San Francisco only cost $15 at this "bar" some guy took me to to meet his sister. That's very cheap."

Sun Rand would be a bit extreme, but you’re not too far off track.

My take is that in many, if not most, cases people choose based on convenience and practicality unless one option is simply unaffordable.

In Europe in general affordability of public transport is not the problem so I don't expect that decreasing prices will have a big effect on use.

I would disagree. Public transportation isn't cheap either if you're not a student or have a company sponsor, in some cases even more expensive than having a car.

I didn't claim it was 'cheap'. I wrote that people can afford it in the same way people can afford a car and that other concerns are often more important.

It surely is a problem and not everyone lives in the city center or in a nearby street with a public transport stop.

Then there is the whole issue with timetables once one gets a few km away from city center, with only one connection per hour between 7 AM and 8 PM, for anything else there are taxis.

Not every location in Europe is Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan,...

it is a problem, especially if you need a car anyways.

I'm still surprised by that, but personally a bit disappointed it ended up at 50 bucks, I think it was increased multiple times during the planning and discussions about extending the 9€ ticket. At least it's not 70, which I think was also on the table at some point. Still, a huge win for people who can use it daily for commute, which is unfortunately not me. I had the 9€ one and occasionally took the train into the green for hiking or other events, but didn't even come close to 50€ in fares.

The car Minister has been trying to slow down the introduction of the ticket and increase the price while trying to look like he’s working towards the ticket. This 49€ ticket is basically a permanent continuation of last summer’s 9€ ticket, which existed for 3 months.

It's not that impressive if you consider that the current government in Germany is driving a massive de-industrialization campaign. Destroying the own car industry fits well in the agenda.

In reality Germany just last year reached the highest number of cars ever: 48.54 million cars. Now with roughly 84 million people.

They're not destroying it but forcing them to acknowledge the truth about climate.

Isn't that about the fuel and not the vehicle?

If we manufactured diesel out of wood or algae, the same cars would suddenly become very green - in case of algae cultivation for fuel, you can reach carbon negativity (the process net-decreased carbon in atmosphere).

This is likely more green than building battery electric vehicles with large capacity. Batteries are great but cars don't need more than 100km of charge. Longer trips should be on bio-diesel or bio-gas.

The process cannot be carbon negative unless you sequester the algae somehow. All the carbon the algae captures while growing will be released when they decompose.

Hmm could be that the way is co2->algea->hydrocarbon->H2 and carbon as a byproduct.

Still I dont think its Carbon negativ because they rather make hydrocarbons out of it and the production uses energy plus. Only wanted to state the possibility of Carbon negativ as real.

It works out carbon negative because pieces of algae fall down to the ocean floor and remain there, as a side effect of algae cultivation. It's a significant number.

You are right about biodiesel. Most energydense crops that we grow are used for meat production and generates a shitlod of greenhouse gases on the way. Less meat consumption would mean more crops could be used for biodiesel

and bio diesel production is worse for the climate than fossil diesel, because of the amount of agricultural work that needs to be done

Plus in the context of climate change we'll probably need every square-foot of farm field to actually produce food and not fulfill the wet dreams of every Porsche 911 driver which can be very efficiently dealt with by e-mobility.

Its not about „wet dreams of a porsche driver“

Its about the transition phase between now and a full electric vehicle fleet.

Combustion engine will exist in the next 20-40 years.

I am not an expert or sth. If you have links or could expand a bit more on why fossil fuel would be preferable, that would be nice. Thanks

Hmm ok. Do you have sources for that? Their is a certain amount of energy that is needed to process the crop to diesel and also for production. But is it that bad? Even if those energys are provided by biodiesel and renewables?

When is China going to "acknowledge the truth about climate"? When it finished building the hundreds of planned coal power plants? This BS is all a pure geopolitics show with obvious traitors in power of western governments.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China

The truth about the climate is that whatever Germany does, it does not really make a difference, but also that what they have done (rolling out renewables) did not even work (high CO2 footprint, dependency on gas, coal and electricity imports).

You're parroting populist statements of political parties who actively destroyed the chance Germany had to transform their energy system and industry towards green energy. And now the same people are claiming that they were right from the beginning.

The "truth" is that the Energiewende was a wise decision from early 2000s for Germany making a case that it'd be possible to transform an industry nation to renewables and possibly export technology to other countries since we all frantically should figure out ways to reduce our carbon emissions.

Germany would be at ~80% electricity from renewables by now if the Merkel government in 2013 wouldn't have stopped it: Renewables were heavily subsidized by the German electricity customers and was so successful around 2012 that electricity prices skyrocketed; instead of finding other ways to further boost the building of more renewables while lowering electricity prices for the customers, they just stopped it. And when Merkel also irrationally decided quit nuclear energy after Fukushima even earlier (2022) and Russia quit delivering cheap gas, we're now in this pity situation in which we have to burn coal like its 1920.

So don't claim it "did not even work" because they didn't really try.

The truth is that it's not possible to to push renewable electricity generation up to arbitrary levels by just continuing to build more and more of them, especially with the mix that Germany ended up going with, because not only are they intermittent but every solar panel produces electrity at basically the same time and stops producing at basically the same time and the same with wind. This means that eventually, extra renewable generation mostly just cannabalizes the existing renewable generation by producing at the same time as them and forcing it to shut down in order not to overwhelm the grid rather than replacing non-renewable generation. This causes a rapid explosion in cost, and those costs ultimately have to be paid for by the public somehow whether that's via high energy bills or increased taxes. Germany's renewable energy mix was particularly bad in this regard because they had a lot of solar which is cheap on paper but isn't useful that far north in the winter when energy demand is at its highest.

No from my understanding that's the old thinking with power plants like nuclear and coal that cannot be easily switched on and off.

Peaks in renewable generation would go into electrolysis to produce hydrogen which can "save" the surplus energy the same way we're heaping up natural gas to be used in times when the sun is not shining and when in addition there's no wind. Plus there are industrial processes that cannot (yet) be based on electric energy and need to run based on hydrogen or derivatives.

In addition we can save surplus renewable energy locally, regionally and in neighbor countries (e.g. Norway with its pumped hydroelectric energy storage).

This has been backed by several studies but was critically dependent on scaling up renewables massively. With the latter we failed, for political reasons.

So energy storage and hydrogen producing is worth for both nuclear/coal and renewable

This is the pathological blaming of foreign influence on the failure of an ideology to deliver on its promises. It would have worked, if only. First of all, you do not know that. Secondly, it did in fact not work. Your solution did not take into account whatever factor made it fail, so it failed.

Ha, in Germany the people who use the word "ideology" are almost always chief ideologists themselves.

I'm not even blaming "foreign influence". We have good data that car manufacturers, energy and chemical companies didn't want to risk their profitable fossil-based business models and thus lobbied the according governments.

> It would have worked, if only. First of all, you do not know that.

Well, as I said, it worked that well that electricity prices skyrocketed and Germany set a world record in renewable electricity production in ~2012. We had >200k employees in a (IIRC) world leading solar industry. Nowadays you can only buy Chinese solar products while the German solar industry is dead.

> Secondly, it did in fact not work. Your solution did not take into account whatever factor made it fail, so it failed.

That kind of argument opens up a can of worms where everything is legit. Just because people don't "like" some project would legitimize harming the country they've sworn to protect. Why oh why is my first association the lies about Brexit.

> I'm not even blaming "foreign influence".

It's an analogy. Foreign in this case means "foreign to your ideology", if you will.

> We have good data that car manufacturers, energy and chemical companies didn't want to risk their profitable fossil-based business models and thus lobbied the according governments.

Again, "foreign influence". We're talking about electricity. Car manufacturers and chemical companies don't care whether their electricity comes out of a coal plant or a windmill. They care about price. Production capacity of renewables may be impressive on paper and therefore cheap in theory, but it's not available on demand. That requires (hitherto non-existent) buffering solutions that completely change the economics. So, you did not provide a comprehensive solution that takes these factors into account, therefore you failed. Rather than learn from your mistake and tackle the harder parts of the problem, you blame others. This is how I know I'm dealing with an ideology.

> Nowadays you can only buy Chinese solar products while the German solar industry is dead.

I don't see how that's relevant. If you can't produce solar panels more efficiently than the Chinese, then you should just buy them from the Chinese if you need them.

Unfortunately, they made a really dumb mistake: getting rid of nuclear power in favor of shitty coal. Doesn't exactly make them look eco-friendly.

They did not get rid of nuclear in favor of shitty coal. That’s fake news.

They planned to be at about 80% of primary energy to be based on renewables which got boycotted by Merkel government AND they expected to bridge the residual needs with cheap Russian gas which got rendered impossible in the current situation. Now the only option is shitty coal.

BTW: Nuclear energy is damn expensive (for the tax payer), the nuclear waste problem is still not solved and in France (>70% nuclear) we just started to see the huge problems with fission when climate change results in a drought.

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