US will relax pollution-limiting rules for vehicle emissions | Hacker News Reader

US will relax pollution-limiting rules for vehicle emissions

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29 pointsgmays89 comments

You know what else would help reduce carbon emissions? Banning private jets and mega-yachts.

Funny how you never see that in the mainstream discourse.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the emissions from 10s of millions of personal vehicles is much more significant than a few thousand yachts. Don't get me wrong, I'm for adding restrictions on those things, but I see this private jet argument pop up as a way to avoid doing anything.

its not a way of not doing anything, its a way of showing the absurdity of telling little old ladies they can't get a new gas stove - or the struggling landscaper that he has to buy more expensive battery operated mowers, but Bill gates can fly around the planet on one of his many private jets - either it is a climate 'emergency' or it isn't.

When the elites get real about making a personal sacrifice (not greenwashing one) - then maybe, just maybe the everyday Joe will get the message.

...and buying carbo credits doesn't count - that is no different than beating the heck out of your wife, and donating money afterwards to a battered women's shelter to absolve your sins.

If the people who travel by private jet to davos keep telling the people who don't what to do and why, their arguments would have more credibility if they actually made similar sacrifices.

Its hard to take Bill Gates seriously about climate change when he flies around unencumbered on his own private plane.

Those are not significant sources of emissions. All air travel, including commercial and private and goods transportation, is 1.9% of global emissions. All sea travel, including commercial and private and goods transportation, is 1.7%.

Road travel is 11.9%.[1] Of that, more than half is personal transportation vehicles (i.e. not freight)[2].

This is why personal vehicles are the #1 target for transportation-related improvements.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Emissions-by-sec...

[2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/transport-sec...

What percent will private jets be once everyone is driving EVs?

I don't have numbers, but I would guess still pretty tiny. There just aren't a lot of private jets out there, compared to other forms of transport. If your goal is to reduce emissions quickly, it makes sense to target the largest sources first, and I don't think private jets will be near the top of the emissions list for a long time.

But we're already targeting the 3 biggest sources: the EV transition has started, the renewable energy transition has started, and the heat pump heating transition has started. Agriculture is the only remaining biggie. After the big 4 the next biggest are all in the 1-3% range -- stuff like cement, steel, fertilizer and jets.

IOW, jets are near the top of the list now, tied for second after agriculture.

I'm skeptical private jets are in the 1-3% range, even after the EV and grid conversions are complete, but I would love to see some sources if you have any! It's not something I've looked into.

The math doesn't matter - tell the poor and middle class they can no longer buy a gas lawnmower or gas stove, but the rich can own 5 mansions, multiple private jets and 400' yachts (all of which damage the environment way more than the average poor or middle class person does), then people will push back - and rightly so.

Its hard to sell a 'climate emergency' when the people pushing it the hardest (i.e. Gates) are the worst polluters. If there really is a climate emergency, then everything should be on the table - you know, shared sacrifice and all - otherwise it just stinks of the rich faking a climate emergency so they can get richer.

See the '$50 trillion dollar opportunity' that has the Davo's elite salivating on how to make themselves even richer:

https://www.dw.com/en/davos-green-transition-is-50-trillion-...

and btw, these Davo's elites pushing for this '$50 trillion opportunity', by scaring the public about the 'climate emergency', by and large all flew to Davos in their private jets.

Sure, I'm 100% in favor of a wealth tax/cap, but I think that's going to be a lot less effective at lowering emissions than targeting the biggest sources of emissions.

but to me, its not about the actual emissions (which you are correct about in absolute terms) - its about selling the message to the average Joe who is being asked to make a sacrifice that the people who are pushing the message, are not being asked to do.

Side story: during Covid, teachers at a local school wanted mandates for all the students (the people least at risk of actually getting very sick), but they pushed very hard not to have to get it themselves - i.e. they wanted all the benefits of having a vaccinated population around them, but they were unwilling to take the risk on themselves (they lost this battle btw)

Not to conflate the issues, but its the same principle - don't make me(the public) do something that you (the ones in charge) are not willing to do yourself.

> its about selling the message to the average Joe who is being asked to make a sacrifice

I think selling fixing the climate as a sacrifice is a non-starter. If you're framing it that way, you've already lost. We should align incentives such that fixing the climate is also an improvement for people. That means subsidizing green solutions (EVs should be cheaper than gas cars), replacing polluting power plants with renewables improves the surrounding community (less immediate air pollution, noise) and users of the power (renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuel plants). No one needs to make sacrifices to fix this.

In other words, instead of worrying about what some rich jag-offs are doing, focus on how we can turn fixing climate change into a win for everybody. (And make those rich jag-offs pay for it ;) )

> No one needs to make sacrifices to fix this.

If no one needs to make sacrifices, then this should happen by default basically and we'd have to actively work to prevent it from happening.

No, I don't think that's the case. Governments can influence what the market does using incentives and funding, without anyone making sacrifices. Fund climate-friendly research, fund deployment of renewable energy, subsidize EV cars and charger deployment. This work creates a ton of jobs, advances our tech and research capabilities, and puts us in a good position to help transition other economies around the world. None of that is a sacrifice: cars get cheaper, energy gets cheaper, jobs are created, tech improves, and we don't have to pay trillions of dollars in environmental damage every year.

“Fund, fund, subsidize, and subsidize” contain embedded sacrifices for someone*. (If they didn’t, we’d fund and subsidize even more than we currently do, by an enormous margin.)

* In this case, the sacrifices come from competitors/substitutes to the things being funded or subsidized, consumers who are ineligible for a particular subsidy program (but for which the demand is increased for the product by those eligible), and of course, often from net taxpayers.

Also from inflation.

Expanding OPEC to cover all producers, and setting global oil production at an environmentally safe limit would make efforts to control demand unnecessary.

Pay $100 now, or pay $100,000 in a few years. This decision pushes us towards the latter. Bad move.

The Biden campaign is presumably rationally acting in a way they think will help get him reelected.

If the alternative is a second Trump presidency then the choices are really a bad environmental choice or a Republican presidency which typically dont tend to enact policies that improve the environment.

Greenhouse gas emissions dropped under Trump: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-...

And no... criticisms about the economic situation during covid should not count. Trump is criticized for covid, and people argue he is responsible. Then he should be praised for the good and criticized for the bad equally.

Only because of covid and the major shock to commuting and production that it caused.

Greenhouse gas emissions rose each other year of his presidency.

> Greenhouse gas emissions rose each other year of his presidency.

Except they didn’t. The graph shows a rise and then a drop before COVID in a long term falling trend[1] that admittedly has little to do with Trump but wasn’t stopped by him either.

1. https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

oh, you are right and I'm wrong here.

They only went up one year in his presidency. Appreciate the correction. I must have read something wrong.

> "In 2020, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions will be substantially lower than they were in 2019, but that's not because of progress that the Trump administration has made in reducing emissions," said Trevor Houser, an energy and climate analyst with the Rhodium Group, a nonpartisan research organization. "That's because we had the largest economic recession in a generation. So that's not exactly cause for celebration."

itt people are talking about specific policy actions by Biden. Is there a causal effect we can attribute to Trump?

The economy is complicated. Emissions were in decline before COVID as well (as they have been for a while). Most emissions reductions are due to activity in the private markets.

So his exacerbation of covid is a good thing because it caused greenhouse emissions to drop? Is that a serious argument?

In the sense that regulation of the markets increases prices for emissions and this lowers economic output, I fail to see how the lockdowns are a whole lot different from an economic perspective. The effect of lowering economic output is the same. What I did think the lockdowns showed was how much the current economy would need to be shutdown to achieve certain emissions targets.

And how does that answer my question?

Your question presumes a black and white worldview which I do not share. Things can be good for some reasons and bad for others.

What exactly does my question presume that you think it means a "black and white" worldview? I'm well aware things can be good for some reasons and bad for others, nevertheless you made the argument you did. I'm asking if you are serious about it, because it's completely specious, and to your point, they aren't even necessarily related to each other, so I'm wondering if you are actually serious in putting it forward.

The covid response had some good side effects, such as increased savings rates, decreased pollution, etc. You asked me if I was 'being serious', implying that believing the covid response had good side effects is somehow 'unserious'. I am totally serious, despite being against the covid response in general. Because I'm not an absolutist.

> "In 2020, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions will be substantially lower than they were in 2019, but that's not because of progress that the Trump administration has made in reducing emissions”…

From the article. Trump loves to take responsibility for anything well in motion before he was involved, see also market/economy. He loudly undermined Covid response.

> Trump loves to take responsibility for anything well in motion before he was involved

That is a cliché about politicians in general since long before Trump existed.

So because there is intellectual dishonesty on one side, it's valid to be intellectually dishonest on the other side?

You recognize the likely counter argument, and counter it by saying it "should not count", which I think is lacking as a counter argument.

At the end of the day, administrations are held responsible for their economic results, whether fully responsible or not. Trump isn't 'responsible' for COVID in the sense that he did not release the virus. His response can be criticized until the cows come home, but I'm just applying the same standard used for the economy to climate.

Recognizing fallacious reasoning and reapplying it in a different direction may be clever but is certainly more dubious than believing a fallacy out of poor reasoning skills.

> And no... criticisms about the economic situation during covid should not count.

What should count? Had Trump did something to bring emissions down? No, he did everything he could to bring them up, just no luck for him, Covid had broke his plans on speeding up global warming and destruction of humanity.

That seems very reasonable. The infrastructure to actually use EVs in the USA doesn't exist except for the coasts and around very large cities. Most of the area of the USA simply doesn't have it at all. Additionally, if everyone did have EV cars the current electrical grid infrastructure would not be able to support the increased load.

These aren't problems with EVs, really, but they are show stoppers. The EV car infrastructure for a large, dispersed country like the USA is much harder than the cars themselves.

The timeline is the biggest problem. Grid stuff moves extremely slowly due to the extremely critical aspect of the grid, slowish beauracracy of many organizations involved, high costs for generation and power lines, and permitting challenges. If you want to make everything electric and demand is going to triple in about a decade or so, then we simply have no way to respond to that in short order with the current reality of the system. The industry has seen more change in the past 10 years than the previous 50. There are a lot of moving parts. It's an exciting time to be working in power.

Where people live, the infrastructure exists. The US grid can handle existing load if almost 80% of current light vehicles moved to electric today (per DOE and NREL). This regulation is a cop out because the US is lazy.

https://supercharge.info/map (all automakers have adopted the NACS Tesla standard)

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/research/blog-can-the-g...

https://www.6sqft.com/50-of-americans-live-in-the-countrys-1...

> Where people live, the infrastructure exists.

Have you tried using non-Tesla charging stations? It's a disaster! Those charging terminals are hastily thrown together pieces of junk, frankly. The hardware, software, billing, everything.

Most people should be doing most of their charging at home. As someone pointed out downthread, level 1 (120V/15A) charging should be sufficient to cover most people's daily driving needs as long as they can keep the vehicle plugged in while they're not driving it. Obviously this is much easier for some (people who own a home with a garage) than others (people who do not have a garage or other fixed parking spot) but that's a problem we can fix gradually as electric cars gain market share.

Yep I agree EV charging “grid upgrades” will cost some amount but it is small potatoes in the big picture, like a couple pennies per day per person

>Have you tried using non-Tesla charging stations? It's a disaster! Those charging terminals are hastily thrown together pieces of junk, frankly. The hardware, software, billing, everything.

I've used public CCS charging for several years and I think your assessment is more than a bit harsh. Is the Tesla network more refined, reliable, and widespread? Yes. Is the CCS option "a disaster"? Absolutely not. I would call it a mixed bag. Level-2 charging has just worked 99.999% of the time. DC fast charging there are stations that can be out of service more often than I would like, but if you use the plugshare app you will almost certainly be able to reliably find chargers that are both working and available.

It is extremely annoying to potentially have to use more than one app, but I would hope that will slowly change over time. The best thing the government could do is mandate some sort of centralized billing option for all of the various providers. For and GM are trying to do it through their apps but the problem is they only cover a subset of networks.

> Level-2 charging has just worked 99.999% of the time.

If Level 2 charging worked all but 1 in 100K trials, neither you (in several years) nor I (in 10 years) should have expected to be a favorite to have experienced even a single Level 2 charger outage. Instead, I've experienced multiple such failures every year.

I'm a pretty big supporter of the potential of EVs, and been very happy with mine (even having bought the cheapest and worst one: a Nissan Leaf). But, I'm also a fan of using correct estimations and data when confronting the problems with EV-related infrastructure and I estimate public Level 2 charging to be closer to 99.5% than 99.999% (1 in 200 failures vs 1 in 100K failures). That might even be a slightly generous estimate.

I've literally never come across an L2 charger not working anywhere in my state. I have seen one offline in the last 4 years. Looking at plugshare I see one site that had an outage for 2 days across all L2 chargers in the last 90 days.

Presumably you've got a database that you just forgot to link that you can reference for your information since you're a fan of correct estimations and data, and not just using your personal anecdotal experience. Because otherwise you're just being pedantic.

Sure, here's a data summary of overall grid availability, which in most places will serve as the upper limit on L2 charging availability. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50316

That gives a typical grid availability of only 99.95%, making it pretty unlikely that the L2 network will have 1/50th the downtime of the grid itself.

I have to laugh - yes, on paper, the US is ready in many areas.

In reality - it's not even close. The charging experience is a disaster. The grid? I'm not confident, to put it mildly. Politically? Nobody wants to drive what feels like a Prius - light-duty vehicles are unpopular, and the last thing EVs need is anything that feels like politicization.

I agree its an uphill battle against the lizard brain. Onward. Can't fix the human, can only engineer around it.

I actually even reject that premise, because that comes with an implicit "I know better than you, because I read the science."

Science is only a small factor in everyday decision making for most people. Art is not scientific. "Feel" is not scientific. The feel of "safety" is not scientific. Etc.

I'm unsure if the climate cares how one feels about science. Like gravity, the hard stop is ambivalent to a position on the topic.

When 37% of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency expense, there are other things that need to be fixed first. Make Americans feel like they can afford more expensive vehicles - and they will buy expensive vehicles.

> light-duty vehicles are unpopular

I think by "light duty vehicle" the OP meant ordinary passenger vehicles. Under US law, essentially every vehicle with four or more wheels, under 10,000 lbs gross weight and no more than 10 passenger seating positions counts as one: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.3 That includes everything from smaller vehicles like the Mazda Miata or Mini Cooper all the way to large vehicles like the Cadillac Escalade or a Ford F-250.

Correct. I was referring to how almost everyone seems to want an SUV or a Truck. We can discuss the merits of that, or why that is, another time - however, forcing people to go back to small cars would breed resentment and turn EVs into a national political issue overnight.

Edit: And by "force," I mean "price out of the market" relative to gas-powered vehicle prices.

Almost every company making EVs these days has truck or SUV models planned if they do not already have them for sale. Even the most recent round of US subsidies for electric vehicles favors trucks and SUVs over cars by having a signficiantly higher price cap for those types of vehicle to qualify for the subsidy vs cars. For better or worse, the EV transition (in the US) is not going to force people to buy smaller cars.

> Nobody wants to drive what feels like a Prius

I'm quite happy with my Prius. I think it's a skill issue. Roof racks and a tow hitch on a normal sized car handle the vast majority of cases where people imagine they need a truck or SUV. But I remember a young couple showing up to buy a mattress from my roommate, and being flummoxed when the mattress wouldn't fit inside their Subaru Forester with built-in roof rails. I had to show them how to tie it on the roof. They never did return my rope... If you can only imagine putting things inside the vehicle or in the bed of a pickup truck, then having a truck or a big SUV must seem essential. What makes it even weirder is that the Prius has more interior space than a lot of SUVs.

According to this, who advocates for EVs, it doesn't exist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNBLhGsjHQI

There is neither the power, nor the electric lines, to carry all of the electricity needed. Making all of that needs to happen and happen fast but AFAIK it's not happening.

In the video she says it will cost $1.5-2k per EV to upgrade the grid which is just not that much money

That's a common response I get from people who only have lived experience in the US west. You may not be aware but east of the Mississippi all the land is lived in, all of it. It's not empty like in the west outside of cities. Living in Wisconsin in one of the vast areas you assume people don't live in I've never even seen an EV station. I live in a duplex and would not be able to charge an EV car (no outside outlets, no way to run an extension cord across the shared parking lot, only one NEMA 50 outlet used by my oven). Forced EV policies unintentionally discriminate against the poor. And yes, 50% of people might be in large cities, but 50% are not.

Looking at that supercharge.info map I see the EV stations are 50 miles apart and only on major interstates. There are significant fractions of the population (ie, probably 1/3) more than 75 miles from any charging station. And the vast majority of destinations are just as far from them. There's literally only 30 for the entire state of Wisconsin and half are clustered in the two moderately large cities in the south. Why link the map when you knew it didn't confirm your assertion?

edit: I was wrong about the grid not being high capacity enough and I am happy to be corrected and learn I am wrong about that.

Yes, we'd need about 20% more electricity generation if all cars were EV's.

Even if 100% of all new cars sold today were EV's, it'd still take 20 years before essentially all cars were EV's. Add the 10 years to get to that point. So we have 30 years to add 20% more electricity generation capacity.

We're currently adding 50GW of capacity per year to our 1.3TW current capacity. IOW, about 4% per year. At that rate it'll take about 5 years to add enough capacity to handle a 100% EV fleet.

How much do you think it would cost to add an outdoor 120v 15a outlet? Any rational landlord would add one if it increases/keeps renters

What parts of the US don’t have a grid that can tolerate about two dozen kWh per car per day extra load?

The OP must be talking about eastern Alaska ;)

> rules that would have forced US automakers to turn EVs into their main business by 2032

8 years is plenty of time.

On a big project, 8 years is no time at all.

It's going to feel much more dire if any of the major European or Korean brands approach their 2030 targets.

That’s not a useful observation regarding the grid - yes, if EVs magically appeared in everyone’s driveways tomorrow then there might be a problem, but over a decade or so it’s basically no issue. All this is factored into planning. Even just a little demand management helps a lot too (like incentivising people charging at certain times by making it cheaper).

Electricity consumption in the US has historically been higher than it is now - why do you assume that a) the conversion to electric vehicles will be overnight b) the grid can't be enhanced to cope?

Surely increased pressure would deliver the desired effect, not decreased pressure!

Are you saying places in the US lack electricity? Aside from long range travel, you only need an extra 120v 15A outlet for most EV use cases.

Not quite. You need an extra 120 V 15 A outlet near someplace where you can leave your car overnight.

That would be no problem at my house. My garage has plenty of 120 V 15 A outlets (although when I get an EV I'll have a 240 V 30 A outlet put in).

Every apartment I've lived in did have an extra 120 V 15 A outlet, but none of them had one anywhere near my parking spot.

So either is an area with sparse population where there are few public chargers and lots of people with garages, or it’s a dense area with apartments where it’s relatively easy to improve the infrastructure?

Yeah exactly, I agree it will cost something to upgrade but the costs are just not that high

The interesting thing about high density parking spots; is that they are, also the most cost effective to add high density charging to;

Whether outside or in a parking garage,

- they tend to be located near the trunk line

- where an additional transformer and meter can be added with least impact to aesthetics

- either buried electrical or concrete mounted conduit have the lowest construction costs (compared to finishing behind walls)

Yeah I mean maybe it would cost 50-100k to provide L2 charging for an entire apartment? Not zero but not really a big deal in the big picture

The amount it would cost to add minimal outlets near apartment parking is just not that high

So let them make the infrastructure instead of pushing the dates. What were they doing until now?

After land taxes catch on, we should get voters to understand that gas should simply cost more

Somebody have the “why this is the right choice” take ? Want to share?

I'm not sure it's the "right" choice, but organized labor, is, and should, be an important constituency for the Democrats. Unfortunately the unions do better when Americans are buying massive trucks and SUVs.

He wants to beat Trump.

"Right" is a value judgement, meaning its all about whos asking. From an economics standpoint, regulation causes higher prices, less competition/innovation, and are unethical. From the prespective of the people who pushed this policy, its "oh ** ** **, gm is dead in the water and everyone else isnt far behind, my portfolio is in the toilet, we need to loosen these restrictions!".

Not a ton of information in this article, which appears to just summarize this NYT article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/17/climate/biden-epa-auto-em...

https://archive.is/OJvBr

It seems like the following things are true:

* They are changing the milestones, but not the final goal. That is, according to this new plan, 2032 is still the target date for 2/3rds of new sales being EV, but the requirements will be relaxed until 2030, at which point they'll suddenly jump back up where they were in the old plan. I guess that's the "then a miracle occurs" step in the overall strategy. Sounds like it'll definitely work, can't see any way for that to fail.

* This push comes from both automakers and labor unions, for different reasons. Finally, they can all agree on something, which is that you can use the threat of a second Trump presidency as leverage to make your job a little easier for a while.

In Indiana our electricity comes primarily from coal, so EVs here run on coal. I'm not sure that is better for the environment than heavily-filtered exhaust from gasoline combustion. I'm just trying to understand why so much focus is on personal vehicles when emission comes mostly from other sources: https://www.c2es.org/content/international-emissions/#:~:tex.... I assume because it's easier to tell people they can't drive a certain kind of car than it is to tell an energy company they can't burn a certain kind of fuel.

EVs are better in all US states:

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/09/electric-vehicles...

> I'm not sure that is better for the environment than heavily-filtered exhaust from gasoline combustion.

It is: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/10/26/analysis/dirty-e... You can find many more sources with a search for yourself. The numbers only get better as we continue to increase the percentage of renewables on the grid. Gasoline cars will never get better.

> I'm just trying to understand why so much focus is on personal vehicles when emission comes mostly from other sources. I assume because it's easier to tell people they can't drive a certain kind of car than it is to tell an energy company they can't burn a certain kind of fuel.

There's plenty of work going into making the grid renewable. Passenger cars are basically #2 on the list, no reason not to start tackling it now, too.

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