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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Global hydrocarbon consumption is down on a per capita basis. And that's despite the fact that renewable energy and electric vehicles had a negligible share. It's only the last year or two that renewable energy's share has become non-negligible. The EV transition is lagging the renewable energy transition, but it's happening too. EV's now have a non-negligible share of new vehicle sales, but since it takes ~20 years to turn over the global vehicle fleet, they still have a negligible share of the entire fleet. But that's changing, very slowly.

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> And that's despite the fact that renewable energy and electric vehicles had a negligible share.

I could not disagree with this more. While China is a "developing" country, they are arguably making herculean efforts to move away from oil for transportation. They will drag the developed world along, as they will have built up all of this EV and electric scooter/bike/moped manufacturing capacity with only so much domestic consumption for it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37307619 (China Reaches Peak Gasoline in Milestone for Electric Vehicles)

From the Bloomberg piece:

> Earlier this month, Chinese oil giant Sinopec made a surprise announcement that mostly flew under the radar. It’s now expecting gasoline demand in China to peak this year, two years earlier than its previous outlooks. The main culprit? The surging number of electric vehicles on the road.

> China has been the largest driver of global growth for refined oil products like gasoline and diesel over the last two decades. But EV adoption rates in China are now soaring, with August figures likely to show plug-in vehicles hitting 38% of new passenger-vehicle sales. That’s up from just 6% in 2020 and is starting to materially dent fuel demand.

> Fuel demand in two and three-wheeled vehicles is already in structural decline, with BNEF estimating that 70% of total kilometers traveled by these vehicles already switched over to electric. Fuel demand for cars will be the next to turn, since well over 5% of the passenger-vehicle fleet is now either battery-electric or plug-in hybrid. The internal combustion vehicle fleet is also becoming more efficient due to rising fuel-economy targets.

I said "had", past tense. Most numbers still end in 2021, and EV's were a negligible fraction of the 1.5 billion vehicles on the road in 2021. Still are, but it's changing fast. 6 million EV's per year is a huge fraction of one year's vehicle sales but a tiny fraction of the entire 1.5 billion fleet.

Fair, retracted. Words are hard. Leaving the comment for the datapoints.

Per capita metrics are useless when it comes to climate stats. The ice caps don't care about how much hydrocarbons are burned per person, they are only affected by the net amount of hydrocarbons burned on a global scale.

True, but it disproves the narrative that oil consumption must inevitably go up.

And if per capita consumption can go down in the 2010's when we had negligible amounts of wind, solar, EV's and heat pumps, what'll it do in the 2020's when we have non-negligible amounts of wind, solar, EV's and heat pumps?

There were a lot of heat pumps in the 2010s (and before). There’s been a lot of attention and press about heat pumps recently, including some push for heat pumps as sole-source space conditioning, but they’re nowhere as new-tech as mass-market EVs or even the adoption of solar/wind/battery farms.

> EV's now have a non-negligible share of new vehicle sales,

In only a few third world countries.

Incorrect. Ireland: "In the opening four months of the year, electric cars took a 17% share of new car sales, up from 13% the previous year "

In Norway, about 90% of new sales are EVs. They aren't a third world country.

https://insideevs.com/news/675163/norway-plugin-car-sales-ju...

The USA was at 14% last year and could hit 18% this year.

https://insideevs.com/news/675163/norway-plugin-car-sales-ju...

that was a typo, I meant first world countries.

Still not negligible.

but not enough to make a impactful dent in carbon emissions, especially if the electricity used charge them is produced by fossil.

When I ran the numbers off of the actual CO2 emissions of the actual California grid, an EV created something like half the CO2 for a trip in the equivalent gas car.

The calculation wasn't straightforward though. And varies widely by locale.

EV mileage is reported in eMPG. Which means, "The miles you get when you charge the battery with the same energy as is in a mile of gasoline." The problem is that to deliver that much to the battery, you have losses at the charger, losses in the grid, and losses during power generation. None of which are counted in that figure. If your electric car is running off of a coal power plant, that 120 eMPG Tesla can easily perform about like a 30 MPG Camry. But as soon as you have a significant fraction of your grid being generated by renewables, now the electric car is running on a fraction of the CO2 emissions of the gas car.

In the end using a car is using a car. It takes an awful lot of energy to build, and then to move, more so often to transport only one or 2 persons, in a very short trip. It needs huge infrastructure that are energetically and financially costly to build and maintain.

All these needs to be cut down and EV won't help us. People need to be able to reach safely schools, workplaces, shops, restaurants by foot or by bike regardless of their age and fitness level.

What we help us is better infrastructure for non motorized vehicles, better public transport (even if they are not financially profitable), walkable spaces, security (with a density of human presence making sure we are safe, not useless cameras), transforming suburbs, commercial and social areas so there is no physical separation anymore between people and where they need/want to go and spend time, effectively bringing back the village/small town paradigm.

EV goes way way way way down the list and we should focus first on EV for public transport and transportation of good rather than personnal toys and vanity possession.

Large energy plants are still more efficient than individual ICEs.

So China is first world?

Though I do admit, electric is less compelling where the electric grid is unreliable.

Well this whole first/second/third world nomenclature is not really pertinent in most cases but yes, I rank the parts of China that do buy cars as developped even though other parts of the same country is in a completely different state.

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

Are you talking about China? I think they're considered a second-world country, as they were somewhat aligned with the USSR.

The EV crutch is getting really old. With current tech it is not a solution. Not even remotely.

It's great. I love the idea too. I would rather we stop driving around machines that belch out dangerous toxins but a mass migration to EVs will be disastrous. The manufacturers are going hybrid...which is a sensible transition. It should get people used to the freedom of producing/collecting their own energy. Hopefully they get addicted to that.

Disastrous? It's already happened. 38% of new cars in the largest car market in the world are EV's.

In Norway (I know it's a small market) it's over 80%. Over 20% of cars on the road are pure electric EVs.

https://elbil.no/om-elbil/elbilstatistikk/elbilbestand/

Parent is talking about China. Note that the number is not pure battery electric vehicles, it includes hybrids.

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/08/02/38-plugin-vehicle-marke...

How are hybrids a sensible solution?

Condition people to view generating your own energy as "freedom." This will shift mindset about solar panels as "freedom." People will flock to hybrids, drastically cut C02 emmissions without spending more or needing decent charging infra. I'm sure others can go one and one with more advantages.

A lot of us are thoroughly enjoying our disasters.

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