As I know people in the transport business I'm just gonna shut up and wait for them to switch for economic reasons. Until then it's just words.
Diesel truck pm2.5 emissions are harmful. Carbon emissions are harmful. Adapt or die. PepsiCo and Frito-Lay are already running Tesla Semis in production. The learning curve is bending up. To get better at this, we’ll have to first suck at it, in the aggregate.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/04/28/california-bans-the-sale...
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/barcu/regact/2022...
https://electrek.co/2023/04/12/tesla-delivers-fleet-tesla-se...
Makes sense when your cargo is air.
> PepsiCo and Frito-Lay
Which I would assume that the PepsiCo product is about as heavy and dense as you could expect in normal freight scenarios, being liquids.
No one cares if the dakotas don’t ban them if no one will build them for just their market.
Think in systems. Find lynch pins and apply maximum force. It’s either a climate emergency or it’s not, and if it is, treat it like an emergency.
If the poor cannot afford the transition, fix this with policy. We have the aggregate system wealth. Allocate accordingly.
Edit (throttled, replying here): Growing your own food for self sufficiency is an unreasonable ask and challenging at best for your average citizen. Check out how many acres and the work involved for a family of four’s annually nutritional needs. It simply doesn’t scale (no pun intended), although it can work for those with ample land and no time commitments.
Individual action isn't the solution to a systemic problem, because there's more incentive to cause the problem than to fix it. Individual action requires time, money and effort on behalf of the individual, whereas the ones causing the problem have financial incentive to continue causing it, in greater amounts.
Plenty of single family dwellings with grass yards.
And time commitments/work involved? I guess they aren't serious about climate change. This just reinforces my original point. Screeching about climate change but unwilling to do any of the work or make any _real_ sacrifices.
It only takes a few hours a week to operate a backyard garden that produces more than even a large family can consume.
You're taking an extreme, untenable, position as an alternative to an incremental solution that generally fits everyone's needs at a slightly higher cost.
Electrification is inevitable.
What's the point in running a diesel semi when it can't be used to make deliveries to key states in the country? That will force a "relay" model in the freight industry which kills point-to-point delivery, where diesels deliver to a border state and an EV semis runs the last leg. Once that happens, then it becomes economical to run more EV semis between diesel relays, or add rail depots to the relays for ultra-low cost transport over long distances, then EVs for the last leg.
The diesel truck industry is going to die slowly, then all at once.
New producers of diesel vehicles would show up to cater to those markets. Econ 101.
>Think in systems. Find lynch pins and apply maximum force. It’s either a climate emergency or it’s not, and if it is, treat it like an emergency.
Very emotionally charged rhetoric there. That kind of action would result in bifurcation of the market. Balkanization. Separate economies. That sort of thing.
So I think what will happen is that a few existing car manufacturers decide they're OK with being a larger share of a smaller market. Or else a new/adjacent player buys out legacy IP and operations while the original manufacturer focuses on EVs. Or there's a bunch of remanufacturing going on to keep hydrocarbon vehicles running.
Either way, there'll be quite... boutique prices.
> they don’t want their citizens to be poorer
If this was true, we would have walkable and bike able cities...
I feel like there is a lot of misinformation when it comes to bans. No one is coming to your house to take away your existing cars and trucks as far as I know. We are talking about disincentivizing new sales after a certain date.
Primary evidence is their profitability.
Every couple of years, some politician gets some press for initiating an investigation into price gouging. If a hearing actually happens, no one ever makes the mistake of saying anything concrete.
Nothing ever changes.
And now we have analysis which shows that 50% (?) of recent consumer price inflation is just Big Oil charging more.
And nothing will change.
Silver lining is that price gouging will hasten switch to EVs, so yay for small victories.
(FWIW, my uncle works in a refinery making diesel. He couldn't explain pricing. So what hope do noobs like me have of lifting the veil?)
My guess is that things won't change as much as diesel fuel becomes more niche in terms of distribution, but the pressure will be against future price rises, especially if that hastens the move to EVs. The Saudis have to sell their oil before there is no demand for it.
I meant to read up on govt's allegations of price gouging (profiteering), to maybe understand what's going on, but got distracted.
So many outrages, so little time.
Cheers.
Perhaps these limitations aren't as rigid as people swear they are, or maybe shipping modalities change in order to play to the strengths of EVs. For example, there's nothing stopping shipping from becoming a relay-based, rather than point-to-point. Or maybe it becomes financially feasible to have drivers swap trucks. Yeah, that kills the "owner operator" long-haul trucker, but that model is pretty untenable anyway.
Even industry experts can call an idea patently absurd, then have it become dominant over the next 20-30 years. Cable television is a good example of this, it's crazy to attach physical cables to every house in the USA in order to deliver TV, which can be sent over-the-air at a fraction of the cost. But we did just that. The benefits out-weighed the (tremendous) costs.
Or maybe their plans is to get the first mover advantage and see what pans out ? Or get the whole market à la Uber by spending a lot of VC money and then figure out how to recoup ? See farming tech.
Uber makes a gross profit of over $12 billion on a revenue of nearly $32 billion. They lose money on paper because they keep reinvesting profits and further investments back into the business. They've almost doubled revenue YoY.
So even the most ludicrous SV startup you can think of pulled this off.
I am not following. I didn't mean to make fun of you, I honestly thanked you for correcting my warped vision of Uber's VC situation. Sorry if it sounded ironic or aggressive.
It's also not true to say that Uber's loss is due solely to R&D, since R&D only represents $1 billion in expenses, per Uber's 2022 annual report and their Q1 financials. Uber would still be unprofitable even if it did no R&D, since it has very large G&A, marketing costs, and CORS (cost of revenue).
Aren't a lot of countries basically forcing companies to do this early before the support infrastructure is in place?
I'm still curious how people living in the mountain of condo buildings in most major cities are going to charge their consumer cars, without having to line up for hours at gas-station style charging stations, considering most condo parking garages I've seen only have 3-4 charging spots.
Solving it for trucks delivering to various locations across non-urban areas seems a bit easier, given it's less of a real estate problem, but still a huge investment.
I'm guessing loading docks at warehouses will need to set up individual plugs while it loads/unloads and pre-planned trucks stops all along the highways? Any time they eat/rest will be designed around charging.
Maybe it's different where you live, but Superchargers are all over here. Most of the grocery stores around me have them, and they have lots of spots available even at peak hours (some have EA and Superchargers next to each other). Chargefinder.com shows tons of public charging options around.
Even the lowest range Model 3 has more "range" than my petrol car, and I still only fill up at the grocery store gas station most weeks.
The infrastructure is already there and it's growing quickly. But unless you have an EV, you probably don't even notice it's happening.
Easy: condos will place more chargers.
Currently the paradigm is to place a few high-power chargers and have people occupy the charger as little as possible. Once electric cars hit a certain threshold everyone will want a charger, so it'll become more viable to just equip every single parking space with a low-power charger, and have everyone slow charge overnight.
All of them?
I guess there will be either be rapid improvements to charging time where the real estate burden for charging won’t be too bad or the private landlords will have to pay for it (or get subsidized to). There’s a ton of buildings in each city which aren’t exactly in a rush to do investments in old properties.
The battery life issue is mostly offset by lower operating costs: electricity is a lot cheaper than diesel / 100km and electric motors are pretty much maintenance free
Anyway, I saw an electric ford van on a delivery run yesterday.
1. The consequences of global warming
You could ask people how much they’d pay to keep chocolate or coffee, bananas, pineapples, or mangoes. Most of Florida’s coastline, about half of California. There are things that specialists disagree about, but all have no doubt that all those crops will not be cultivated (outside) if we stay the course. Florida and California are now seeing insurance companies bailing out, so we are moving from scientific certainty to economic reality.
Naturally, there’s more: most people think that Cajou nuts, açai berries, passion fruits, agave, prickly pears, should be on this list (because of temperature) but if we start looking at that, then people think pollinator collapse or opportunist infection are going to be there first… So I tried to make a conservative list.
Typically the answer to the question “What would you pay to keep those (chocolate, coffee, etc.)?” is that whatever cost to save those things is worth it. You can try to find numbers, but the US famously started wars to end democracies in several countries to grow just bananas (that gave us “Banana Republic”), so we are closer to amounts where it’s less money measured in many billions and more state-sponsored violence.
All that long rant to say: whatever is the cost of not destroying those, that is the “true” cost.
2. The cost of CO2 extraction and storage
With current rock-bottom electricity prices in Iceland, ClimateWorks research facility can extract CO2 for a bit more than $3,000 per ton (depending on accounting for research costs; that number is just OpEx IIRC).
To convert that to the cost of transporting goods, you can apply a ratio of 50 grams of CO2 per tonne-kilometer [1]. A 40-ton truck will have to pay $600 to compensate for every 100 km.
That sounds like a lot, even without considering the cost of storage.
ClimateWorks hope to lower the price by an order of magnitude [0], which specialists think is unlikely. In truth, much cheaper electricity makes electric trucks that much more appealing. You will never save any money by burning fuel and then spending energy trying to re-capture that CO2 at low concentrations. It’s engineering nonsense. A better idea would be to have trucks carry a balloon with their emissions and that’s obviously a clownish idea. All that, again, before we even have a scalable solution for storage. A cousin works on that project for Statoil. Sure it might work (with the right salt cave) but it’s nowhere ready to scale to handle emissions from trucks all over the world.
So we will never be even close to making ICE trucks a sound idea if we consider the environmental impact.
[0] https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/carbon-capture-and-storag...
[1] https://www.transportenvironment.org/wp-content/uploads/2021...
The problem may be that "both aren't perfectly great" and maybe the best solution, despite Capitalism, is to use less as one of the only ways to well: save ourselves from destroying the Planet.
"Coal is used to power electric vehicles," is an argument that is more noise than signal.
Yes, pollution is bad. Diesel trucks are a highly visible form. However, there are too many unknowns for these sweeping statements about 'true' costs to be taken seriously. It is another example of the economic calculation problem.
Try as they might, researchers can't sit in a bureau and come up with figures to plan an economy with.