Interesting for a country that is also building more coal power plants than the rest of the world combined and also at the fastest pace in 7 years: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
However, I'm skeptical renewable energy transition will actually be a transition, rather than just piling more on top of what we already use. For the same reasons adding more lanes to a freeway doesn't alleviate traffic congestion, adding renewable energy to the mix assumes a static demand for energy: but the reality is we'll take all we can get, and if more is available, we'll find ways to use it. Induced demand.
What I said was that it will temporarily decrease congestion, but that the effect will disappear over time.
It's certainly not a rule that "adding lanes never helps traffic", that's insane.
Now it would be much better if your city built great transit so people didn't have to drive their car.
Adding lanes to random places where cars stop due to congestion achieves nothing, and adding lanes to non-congested places that feed the bottlenecks increases congestion.
You can find real examples of those tree kinds.
As long as Electricity is metered and billed, it will not have the same problem.
And you do pay to use Freeway lanes, through vehicle registration fees and gas taxes.
They're completely irrelevant for this discussion.
it was mainly a side point though that it's not free, every legal driver has prepaid via vehicle registration AND pays on usage basis via a gas tax.
my main refute was toll roads get just as congested.
For demand to match supply, it's not enough to charge any non zero price.
If cell phones cost nothing, they will always be sold out. If they cost $1, they will also always be sold out. This does not disprove microeconomic theory!
With some experimentation you can find the "equilibrium price", where supply meets demand, and you can always find a phone to buy.
For road pricing, it's true that the driver pays a bit extra for gas in rush hour traffic. But if it's just going from 1% to 2% of the equilibrium price, there will still be gridlock.
Toll roads are a better cause for you, but even if thery try to set equilibrium prices, that is pretty hard, since conditions vary every 10 minutes. If prices are set politically, it's bad for reelection to set the prices high enough.
If you do succeed in setting equilibrium road prices - and to be fair, I'm not aware of anywhere that has been done, which weakens my point - we would see freeways that today crawl at 15 mph go at full speed 65 mph traffic 24/7, which - and this is the huge payoff - means vastly more cars could travel on them, and they'd be much more useful than today.
~160 years ago, Jevons noted that the market for coal had the inverse effect. Adding cheaper and more efficient production capabilities just increased consumption.
If you only have a single driver in a normally five seated car, that's additional inefficiency on top.
Meanwhile, a human walking barely take up any space compared to a car.
Strange to compare two completely different modes of transportation isolating one variable.
You also have the problem of stocking. You still need roads for trucks to supply stores.
Then there's the need of roads to connect cities and towns.
I can walk end to end in my town, but I still need to be able to drive to a specific spot incase of an emergency or logistical errand like moving or vacationing.
Even simple things like buying kitty litter would be a hassle without a car.
I'd go with a horse then if no car, which I occasionally see actually. Then a bike with a wagon or something. Slowly regressing in mobility, freedom, and tech.
The urban planning no cars thing really makes no sense once you realize your bubble is supported by the vast road network the US has.
Not to mention that metering and billing someone's driving would be a gargantuan incursion on a human being's freedom of movement -- something so incredibly inherent in who we are.
Let me guess: you think EVs will save the planet -- all the while ignoring most of the electricity that powers them is not cleanly generated.
My goodness...
Freedom of movement does not requires using cars for everything.
Let me guess: you think EVs will save the planet -- all the while ignoring most of the electricity that powers them is not cleanly generated.
My goodness...
They are probably cleaner anyway even when the source is from a coal power plant.
However, they're only really one solution in our arsenal. We would be better off in using more public transit.
China builds more coal than the rest of the world combined exactly because the rest of the world combined is building almost none of it, because coal is not competitive anymore unless you have some crazy levels of unmet demand that will absorb all the renewables you can build.
Oil is next on the line. And while it looks like it will take a while for natural gas to follow, is oils stops being competitive and cars get electrified, the cross subside it does to natural gas stops, and gas starts to get really expensive.
Top comment: But what about coal?
The key tho is moving to clean renewable energy as the primary source of energy production growth makes the increased demand a shrug worthy event. The issue isn’t consumption of energy is morally wrong for some reason, it’s that production of energy is destructive. Making marginal increases in energy production not destructive is the goal.
Efficiency is its own goal, and is definitely necessary if marginal increases in energy production are destructive.
Finally I think attributing it to per capita or GDP is the wrong way to attribute energy consumption and side effects to causes. Much energy use of China is in service of production consumed elsewhere. Final point of end good consumption is where the energy production and its adverse externalities should be attributed (which makes the US look even worse frankly).
Since the population has grown over that same period, per capita energy consumption has been falling from its peak in 2000: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1042928/primary-energy-u...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/business/us-production-oil-re...