Hacker News Reader

Comment by badcarbine | Hacker News Reader

No shit. Now we just need to figure out how to make them. Until that happens no vehicles should be produced. There needs to be more regulation on the biggest CO2 producers. This isn’t about the planet it’s about our lives. We’re breathing this stuff too.

View on HN

If you're serious about climate change and global warming, then you need to have priorities. And the first priority is coal-fired power plants. They produce 30% of the global CO2 emissions.

Automobiles only make up 14%, and that's including the big diesel trucks that move freight around.

You've got to attack the big stuff first.

Transport makes up a quarter of emissions and electricity 40%. Smaller, but not very much smaller. The three biggest emitters are electricity, transport and heating in that order, and that is the order that we're attacking them in.

40% of new electricity generation capacity worldwide in 2022 was renewable.[1]

YTD, 15% of new vehicle sales have been EV's.[2]

Heat pump market share in 2022 was 15%.[3]

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/270281/electricity-gener... 2: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/09/10/world-ev-sales-15-of-wo... 3: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/heat-pum...

Mess with peoples transportation options and they notice in a big way.

Whereas nobody cares where their electricity to the grid comes from, provided it does.

EVs are an excellent option for exactly this reason: what we need is to mess with transportation minimally, ideally with benefits (i.e. quieter, cheaper fuel, maybe self-drive) but ultimately get the usage of energy for transportation disconnected from any specific fuel source.

Climate change and global warming aren't the only problems with gasoline cars.

Just listen to how the news and the average person discuss gas prices. Operating gasoline vehicles requires continuous access to affordably extracted oil. The US is so car-dependent that high gas prices in isolation can impact the economy.

EVs open options and almost certainly stabilize energy pricing more than refined gasoline. They also use less energy overall.

The idea of cars themselves as we know them may be an issue too - tyres are one of the largest sources of microplastics in the environment, and the infrastructure around them (roads, parking etc.) is a big contributor to disruption of local ecosystems. And the costs to the environment of batteries over their total usable lifecycle, and then to disposal or recycling, is still an ongoing project. They take a lot of energy to produce right now, and have a relatively short lifetime.

Sure, don't let "Perfect" be the enemy of "Better", but it's not the end solution.

If you're serious about global warming we could change the building code for residential/commercial. With just a swipe of a pen you could reduce the need for more power plants, cut pollution and CO2 and make a massive impact on not only the environment but the money saved on less energy used. It wouldn't require anything but better building practices and perhaps more insulation, better windows, geothermal HVAC, etc. Totally doable and low hanging fruit. Perhaps not as exciting as superbatteries though.

I know it was meant as a throw-away part to the comment, but geothermal HVAC is extremely expensive.

I live in Calgary and I looked into it. $50k, which is more than 10% of the value of my house; if people are complaining about house prices right now, they will be more-so when this gets priced in.

Let me put it another way; Radon is a major problem in Canada, and any reduction is a plus. Getting radon reduction is a pittance; about $2k; however, instead of just biting the bullet and making it a mandatory part of buying and selling houses in the Praries, they leave it "to the home owner".

In short, while I agree with you, these sorts of building codes will never happen.

>I know it was meant as a throw-away part to the comment, but geothermal HVAC is extremely expensive. I live in Calgary and I looked into it. $50k

I understand your point but what's interesting is many folks won't even blink when you tell them their kitchen is going to be 50k or their interlock driveway and landscaping is going to be 100k. But you tell them their Geothermal is 50k or Spray foam insulation for the entire house is 30k and they look at you like you threaten their lives.

That's what the EU is doing for about 15-20 years already, with ever more stringent rules for new buildings. It's not all low hanging fruits though, as the buildings get more to zero energy demand, the construction has to be more precise and more expensive with all the insulation and proofing, triple glazing etc. Of course in the long run it will pay for itself.

That’s already being done, but it only reduces heating/cooling which is 15% of emissions. Also, houses last longer than cars, so the impact of better building codes will take many decades to materialize.

Got to do it now!!, then.

Diesel truck emissions have been reduced by 90% since 2000. Unfortunately some people have a burning desire to roll coal and they cut off the DPF and reprogram the computer with a "tune" to dump more fuel during the combustion cycle. All of this of course kills fuel economy and power but they feel the power band shift and think it helped...and they get to blow black smoke on people. So if you see someone rolling coal, know that they modified their truck on purpose to do that.

Yeah they are idiots, but fortunately in the big picture there are not enough of them to really move the needle.

I’m not sure about that. I once watched an idiot roll coal across an entire state on the freeway (the rest of us drivers were not amused).

They clearly were producing >> 1000x more particulates than the rest of the vehicles I saw that day, combined.

I’d guess that one car was pumping out 1,000,000x more crap per mile than a non-modified car.

May their gas cost skyrocket and their engine wear out speedily.

> Diesel truck emissions have been reduced by 90% since 2000.

The CO2 emissions haven't. That's not even remotely close.

And batteries impact both of those markets.

For EVs, it's obvious.

For power generation, battery technology lets us shift from coal and gas powered plants to more solar, wind, geothermal, etc... and then store that energy for when it is useful at a time when the supply from the primary energy source may not be producing but the demand is still there.

Batteries can help make fundamental changes in both of those key pieces of the economy.

> no vehicles should be produced

Listen, I’m as radical as any of them, especially when it comes to the climate, but you can’t propose no new vehicles be produced and be taken seriously. We need outputs -governed regulation around CO2 And we need it now. Stopping vehicle production is a band aid over the symptom, not the cause. Most harmful CO2 comes from general electricity production anyway.

I think new ICE engines should include a $200/ton atmospheric carbon capture fee based on their expected lifetime fuel consumption. (That works out to a $2/gallon tax. I’m fine with charging it at the pump, especially if established at the same time as a universal basic income scheme).

This would only work if every source of atmospheric carbon was equally taxed - otherwise you get incentives to have indirect carbon usage, be it in costs of manufacture, or energy generation through other means.

Otherwise you get BS like scrapping vehicles that took significant amounts of atmospheric carbon to produce, just because they have a slightly better gas mileage. It should only be encouraged if the total over the lifetime of the vehicle is better, but manufacturing costs are often excluded.

Plus this naturally excludes those who can't afford the upfront cost of a new vehicle - even if everything was taxed "correctly" by this logic and so was lower cost in the long run.

That would only hurt poor people. $2/gallon extra would cause overnight riots.

If you wanted to introduce a carbon tax then you could return the money to the population as a carbon dividend. The poor would be better off (because they don't consume much anyway) and everybody else would have an incentive to reduce their emissions.

That’s why I suggested UBI for the pump tax alternative.

(Most poor people don’t buy new cars.)

that's the only way to incentivize people to optimize their routes, habits, switch to hybrid/electrics, otherwise consequences can be much tougher in 30-50 years with no way to fix it.

Poor people cannot afford an EV now, and they cannot afford a $2/gallon tax. Taking away options without supplying any new ones will cause a large number of people to be unable to commute to work and huge economic upheaval.

I don't see how you come to such conclusion, I think $2/gallon tax will be some fraction of total ownership cost for the car (fuel, car cost, insurance, maintenance), those who can't afford that fraction can't afford car too.

There are many people out there who can barely afford a car. On average gasoline accounts for ~16% of people's transportation budgets and ~2.5% of their take-home pay (obviously, these numbers are using average everything). A $2/gallon tax is an increase of a little more than 50% (not in California, but using the US average price). So that's more than 1.25% of their tax home pay and 8% of their transportation cost. That's a lot. And again, those are averages. For people at the bottom it's worse.

It's not a lot if you are making six-figures. But for a lot of people it quite literally puts driving to work as too expensive.

> So that's more than 1.25% of their tax home pay

its totally not a lot given we are talking about future of planet and humanity and that penalties on children of exactly the same people will be much higher if we won't stop pollute the planet.

If the only way to save the "future of humanity" is by sacrificing the poor, I don't want to save humanity.

tax is applied on everyone in proportion they release CO2. "Poor" can move to public transit or optimize their routes. What do you propose?

If anyone can wants to stop new vehicles from being produced, I hope they at least are honest enough to be a subsistence farmer who refused to use computers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com