> As for trucks, no, electrifying them is harder for all sorts of reasons. A big one is range and how big a battery would need to sit for them.
This only really matters for long-haul trucking, which predominantly exists for political reasons because it would otherwise be much more sensible to use rail for that. A large proportion of usage for big trucks, and the part that can't easily be replaced with rail, is short haul trucking, e.g. getting bulk goods from the port to the local warehouse an hour away. This doesn't require a huge amount of range and the truck can be charged while it's being loaded and unloaded.
But even long-haul trucking isn't unsolvable. The Tesla Semi has a 500 mile range, which is more than 8 hours of driving at 60MPH, and at some point the driver will want to stop for a meal which allows the truck to be topped off.
> diesel trucks are really hard to electrify. Evidence: people have been trying to do this for a while and there’s no electric semis on the road.
There are Telsa Semis on the road, though not a lot of them yet. But this is a production issue, not a feasibility issue. They just have to make more of them.
> That argument feels flat - work commuting makes up the vast majority of miles that people use their cars for.
I tried to look this up and the numbers are all over the place (probably depends heavily on region) but it doesn't seem to be true. Typical numbers are in the range of a third or less.
But also, what it is about the other numbers that would make this confusing? "Cars and vans" are a little under 15% of total CO2 emissions. That's how much you could get by electrifying them and charging with renewable generation, which is not at all insignificant. But if you reduce the <15% by a third temporarily and then say the reduction was only <5%, well, yeah. But what do you want to do? It isn't the case that one source is emitting 95% of CO2 and we're trying to focus on the other 5%. It's 15% here, 15% there, >50% nowhere in particular.
> As for aviation, its global warming effect is actually larger because of complicated effects. Unclear what biofuels will do.
What they would do is replace petroleum-based jet fuel in existing planes.
> If you spend the money to build nuclear for winter, it makes a lot more sense to run it in the summer too.
Of course it does.
> If anything, solar and wind make more sense as technologies to power recapture with nuclear satisfying our day to day energy demands.
Nuclear is base load. Electricity demand is higher during the day because that's when most people are awake, but also when solar generates. Building enough nuclear to satisfy peak daily demand would be unnecessarily expensive, and result in overcapacity most of the day. Moreover, there is a lot of demand which is adaptable to intermittent generation -- that ~15% of CO2 that comes from "cars and vans" and becomes charging batteries, that can be ~100% solar and wind. Energy storage to shave down the demand peak in the early evening can be charged from renewable generation.
> I’ll note that solar advocates conveniently overlook how much our grid demands will scale up with electrification of transportation - it will rapidly out grow our renewable efforts since we’re not regularly building nuclear power plants meaning fossil fuels will take up the slack.
Pretty much all of the One True Solution folks are missing the plot.
Existing US power generation is ~60% fossil fuels, ~18% nuclear, ~14% solar and wind, ~6% hydro and a trivial amount of "other". It's hard to increase the amount of hydro because most of the good sites are already used, so if we want to get rid of that 60% fossil fuels, what's left is nuclear, solar, and wind.
But it's not 60%. It's more like 260% because we're also talking about dumping the fossil fuel energy use for transportation and heating onto the power grid, which are themselves each almost as much energy use as the entire existing power grid.
You don't ask whether we should address this by building more solar and wind or more nuclear, you build as much of both as you possibly can and still might end up short. We need something like 6 times more nuclear and 12 times more solar and wind than we have right now.