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Comment by haltist | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday I did some amateur science and measured how many cars pass through a relatively busy intersection during rush hour. I knew it was pretty bad and did some basic math to confirm that things are indeed very bad.

Expect things to continue to get worse. Fish stocks are already on the brink of collapse and I'm almost certain it will happen in my lifetime.

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What percentage of the cars were electric? hybrids? diesel? hydrogen? natural gas?

I am curious to hear your insights. I watch the traffic like this too and try to tally up as many as I can as I try to count 1000 cars. How do you record what you find?

I just sampled the cars during a 1 minute window by recording with my phone camera and then counted cars in slow motion. I guess if I had access to the cameras at the intersection I could feed the data through an ML model and get a more accurate count but it wouldn't change the order of magnitude and it was already around 10k cars per hour (or thereabouts). The place I live is somewhat affluent so there are plenty of Teslas and electric cars but it's not enough to make a difference. Conservatively maybe 1 out of 50 is electric, not enough to make a difference in terms of pollution and CO2 output.

It makes little difference. Even if electric cars were 4 more energy efficient than ICE cars (and considering their construction cost, they probably aren’t), that’s still nowhere near enough. They’re still cars.

We could drop transportation energy use by at least 20 times if most of it was trains or trams.

But if they are charged on green power, and in many countries now they are especially over night, then they are vastly better than ICE vehicles. The goal with electrical vehicles isn't right now they are obviously greener (they are) but the true potential only comes when the supply is green power too which is happening at an accelerating rate.

Plenty of those EV's will have been charged at home on Solar, people tend to do both.

That’s quite rare. And you could just as well use ethanol and biodiesel for the same zero emissions result.

The advantage of (small) electric cars is moving emissions away from people, not in total carbon emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle.

Transportation is <30% of energy use in Europe. If that percentage is already too much (spoiler: it isn't) - you'd be screwed no matter what.

The reality is, you're moving in the right direction about as fast as you can.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

We didn't get into this mess over night, and we're not getting out of it overnight either.

What's very bad, that people have the freedom to use personal transportation? Would you rather see us on a bus or something?

> What's very bad, that people have the freedom to use personal transportation?

"Sometimes the things you do impact other people" is something we learn in very early childhood.

> Would you rather see us on a bus or something?

Yes?

“Just give up individual transportation and hop on the cattle truck!” isn’t exactly what I imagine when I think of what a decent future looks like.

It’s very “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll like it” energy.

Visit somewhere with an effective public transportation system like the Netherlands or Switzerland to expand your imagination a little bit.

"You'll own nothing, and you won't like it" is a whole bunch of folks' future if we continue to pretend our decisions don't have externalities.

I have a feeling you like to talk about the tragedy of the commons when it's something you don't have a personal stake in.

Elect a government that can provide better buses than cattle trucks. Like in developed countries.

It's very "You'll think about the consequences of your actions if everyone else also does the same actions, and you'll like it" Kantian energy, you mean.

Or maybe, "You'll stop engaging in activities that objectively harm those around you, and you'll like it".

Just some alternate phrases for you to explore placing between quotes.

"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."

Construction + buildings generate about 2x more CO2 per year than cars.

If we want to maintain our exponential increase of CO2 emissions in the face of EV adoption, we need to get people to tear out and replace existing construction.

One way to do that is to rapidly build up low-cost, low-efficiency housing near bus and train lines.

What's very bad is that we have an ongoing tragedy of the commons in the form of global climate change caused by human activity. What's even worse is that we know this, yet are not changing our society to alleviate the effects of our unsustainable carbon usage.

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