Very much so, people try to sell it like it's a magical solution to all the world problems. Even if it was as amazing as people tout it to be right now (it isn't) it wouldn't make our lives better. Maybe faster, a bit cheaper (for some) but not better in the most fundamental sense. We can do better right now but choose to ignore our most important issues to chase the new shiny thing.
AI R&D definitively has its place but certainly not like this, this feels like just another hype bubble.
I feel like this is one of the biggest missed opportunities. Why do we insist on our energy system to be infinitely flexible and full power available 24/7? Is a habit of doing the laundry at night worth more than additional millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere?
I understand convenience, laziness and inertia (resisting change) but I also think changing the times when we click "power on" is a simpler solution than mining millions of tons of more lithium, no?
Like computing, having high uptime has a value all its own compared to an unreliable system. Countries which do have regular brownouts you find people buying their own (inefficient, polluting) generators to get round it.
Smart demand-response may yet become a thing, but it's not yet a commodity product. You need a system to send out "turn off" notifications, and a system for measuring that in realtime, and a system for paying people. Some grids _do_ have this, but only for very large consumers.
Many grids do have this for normal residences, but it only covers your air conditioner not everything (and maybe water heater). By running your AC on half duty cycle all day your house still stays cool enough and they are able to reduce substantial peak demand. For most people HVAC and water heating are the two biggest demands, and also ones where simple management can result in a substantial changes in demand without affecting your comfort.
Making thermostats that are aware of dynamic energy pricing or, better yet, are in part controlled by the energy company (I want my house to be 21-24 C, I don't care when the cooling happens) would give us massive flexibility.
All power hungry devices should at least have that capability (maybe other than the kettle, lol). This is literally a cost of $20 hardware in many cases.
In most houses the HVAC and water heater are the only devices that the user can accept not being in full control. Everything else is like the kettle: when you turn it on you want it on now.
You would have to retrofit every residence to handle daily brownouts (circuits for lights, furnaces and medical equipment stay on, everything else off).
You would have to completely rebuild most of the manufacturing industry, as many plants have startup times measured in hours or days.
It's often >90 degrees Fahrenheit at night in for months on end where I live, and houses are built cheaply and in a style completely unfitting a hot climate (that is, thin walls, dark roofs, fully aboveground, thoughtless window placement, etc. Standard American Dumbass style). It's unhealthy to sleep in these conditions without AC, even fatal for some.
So yes, we could survive without power at night. We just have to rebuild every building.
As a long-term ideal I don't disagree with you. We should be building for resilience. But that's not a solution to climate change.
> Why do we insist on our energy system to be infinitely flexible and full power available 24/7?
I like to heat my home during winter. We have a (modern, highly efficient) heat pump, so we need most electricity during January, just when the least amount of solar insolation is available [1] and when it sometimes stays cloudy and below 0°C continuously for days. But I guess we'll just have to be more flexible and turn off heating, light, and electricity in general for a week, no big deal.
[1] I wonder if there's a causal relation between cold weather and low solar insolation?
You don't actually need your heat pump 24x7 even on those cold days, if you can run for 15 minutes one, 15 off that would make a big difference to the grid (your neighbor running the same schedule but opposite times) without making your house too cold. Managing the above is tricky though.
> You don't actually need your heat pump 24x7 even on those cold days, if you can run for 15 minutes one, 15 off that would make a big difference to the grid
That's already the case – the actual heat pump only runs intermittently, on demand. This happens quasi-randomly, so you automatically get some load balancing across a city.
The problem is that this is intra-day load balancing, which doesn't help one bit if there are several days of low supply (windless winter days).
What your thermostat does is not synchronized with your neighbors, so the peak load is not managed.
It also isn't synced to supply, instead most people have it set to different temperatures based on when they are home. It would be better to cool or heat the house based on supply. You want the house between 21 and 24c, you don't care when the system is on.
Of course it was sarcasm. I meant to highlight the major problem for using renewables for heating: you'll need most of the power when the least amount of daily solar insolation is available – in winter. This means you either need a lot of storage capacity, or a lot of transfer capacity from far away places, to cover several days of dunkelflaute [1]. This problem is solvable, but it's hard and expensive to solve in practice.
I couldn’t tell because many people make arguments (or imply) that it doesn’t matter with an apparently straight face all the time! Including large scale gov’t programs.
Including other comments on this exact thread where people did exactly that.
Water heating, AC, fridges and freezers, maybe even EV charging (in some cases) could be done at any time during the 24 hour period, if setup with proper hysteresis.
That's why so many people are cautious about "EVs to save us all", to put it mildly.
We are so focused on climate change and greenhouse gases that we do not see a lot of other issues and may exacerbate some of them in the process of decarbonisation.
This sentiment is just contrarianism, I think. I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life and the difference that clean air standards make is obvious. The black dust isn't just tire and brake dust. It's also soot and it used to be much much worse.
Nothing is a silver bullet but I'll be much happier when we're done with ICE noise and exhaust.
I really don't think it is. We're thrusting ourselves into just new problems. Yes, we move away from old problems that gas-powered cars have, but we move into new problems. For one, EVs perpetuate the idea of the car, which is perhaps the most dangerous part. Then, there's all sorts of new things like building out the infrastructure required for EVs and mining the new materials. For example, have you looked into the areas where lithium mining occurs? It is not a clean process and brings its own new problems, especially for the local people. You have foreign owned and operated companies move in and suck out manufactured value from the land, all the while polluting the local ecosystem. It's oil all over again.
It isn't contrarianism to point out that a solution is not the solution everyone thinks it is. Yes, we should probably switch to EVs, but we should be switching away from cars as a whole. But we're not. Cars are selling more than ever. It's not contrarianism to simply look at facts rather than hype.
Cars are selling, despite their high economic price, because they're incredibly useful.
Make competing modes of transit at least one of more useful at no more cost or no less utility but at a lower cost and people will switch incredibly quickly. That's a tall order, because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience.
I'd only add "...because they're incredibly useful, AND government policy has consistently favoured such a mode of transport over all other alternatives". The amount spent by governments on maintaining road infrastructure dwarfs all other transport spending, the amount of land dedicated to parking and driving space is mindboggling, and of course the amount spent on ensuring the global oil industry has been able to reliably and safely deliver fuel to vehicles is beyond comprehension* (and almost certainly one of the reasons the transition to EVs will be slower than technology might otherwise allow - vested interests with billions to lose will do anything to keep their share of the spoils).
Not to mention the fact that we've yet to actually start truly paying for the long term environmental and health costs of allowing our cities to be so dominated by a single mode of transport.
*) it's estimated up to 20% of the US's defence budget is spent protecting oil supplies for a start, which effectively acts as a subsidy of around 70c a gallon.
You aren't wrong that government support of automotive transport is immense. But that government support comes from decades of popular electoral support for those policies from all across of the political spectrum. Why? Because cars give people more convenient and independent transportation then just about any other mode. And people push their politicians and representatives to support that kind of transportation.
If you want to undo the car centric culture and economy, you cannot just ignore the broad base of popular support it enjoys.
> Why? Because cars give people more convenient and independent transportation then just about any other mode.
This is kind of a chicken and egg problem.
The value of a car is proportional to the extent of the road network. There is no value (for most cars) in isolation.
The original push for government investment in car-friendly infrastructure and highways was from industrialists, technocrats, and military minds. It was top-down planning, not bottom-up. After those major infrastructure investments (and divestments from commuter rail), the car was an obvious choice. Everything after that was self-reinforcing: more cars -> more roads -> more cars -> more roads. Of course if you already own a car then it is a sunk cost and you will prefer the government spend more on car infrastructure to benefit you, further perpetuating the investment cycle.
If the initial circumstances had been different (maybe progress in electrification proceeded a little faster and oil refining a little slower) then public transit and urban planning might have developed differently and the car would not be as important as it is now (practically a necessity in most of the US).
Sure, there's an element of that. But the idea that government policy has been primarily driven by what would produce the "best" outcome as far as transport options go that the population actually want is a little naive. And of course what we all want is convenience and comfort for ourselves while not having to deal with the downsides (or impossibility) of providing it for everyone.
I'm happy to accept the reality that currently we have no form of alternative transport technology that offers the same comfort & convenience of the car - but I also believe we'd've been better off in the long run if public spending hadn't been so grotesquely skewed in favour of that particular option - other technologies would have had a better chance to come to the fore (e.g. why have e-bikes/e-scooters taken so long to become popular - there's no particular reason I know of they couldn't have been a big part of our transport network 20 or 30 years ago), we could have laid out our cities so we didn't need to travel such huge distances on a regular basis (vs, e.g. occasional long-distance travel between dense hubs where most facilities and services could be accessed via walking/cycling etc.), goods transportation could've been revolutionised by dedicated automated networks etc. etc. For me the most convincing argument that exists against the size (and reach) of government power that we've become accustomed to is that so many opportunities for a better balance of transportation options have been lost to a virtually single-minded focus by the powers-that-be over the last 70 or 80 years on private cars above all else.
But we also built our society to make the car more convenient. Can’t remember the ratio but the amount of parking space available per car is absolutely insane. That means a relatively cheap access to put your giant car almost anywhere you go. Most cities are built around that idea and that makes other form of transportations almost impractical.
So yes the car is convenient but we also built many things to make it more convenient. In places where subways/rapid transit are made more convenient, there’s of course less parking and less road space and naturally % of car ownership goes down
It’s a choice. It’s not naturally always based on the merit of the car.
Does "800 parking spots per car" pass the sniff test?
There's order of magnitude 1 car per US resident. Does it seem like there are 800 parking spots per US resident? A quarter of a trillion total parking spots?
I doubt my car parks in 800 unique places (including different street parking spots as unique) in a given year.
On the smaller end, call each space 16'x8'. That puts a little more than 2% of the entire land mass of the US as parking spaces (assuming I didn't get any of the exponents wrong).
That's originally the result of a deliberate domestic propaganda campaign, cf. "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM
If we did it once for cars we could do it again agin 'em.
> Because cars give people more convenient and independent transportation then just about any other mode.
In the US, this is true.
In most European cities, you can just walk instead, or take the metro or a tram.
It's really convenient to just walk to where you want to go, and when the grocery store is a 10 minute walk away, you don't need to fill a car with groceries. Just go more often.
Need to go further? Clean and safe public transportation is often more convenient than having to drive yourself.
I really like being able to read a book on my way to work rather than paying attention to the road and making sure i don't kill myself or someone else.
I’ve been looking at places for retirement where I can live car-free or at least very car-lite. There are very few places in the US where this will be possible in my lifetime. Absolutely, let’s more towards an EV future because that’s the best we’ll do in most people’s lifetimes but we can’t expect that change to fix what we’ve spent 100 years building. It needs to be seen as step one of many yet so many Americans are fighting against taking even that step.
Yes it's called NYC. Cars everywhere but you don't need one. Every neighborhood has everything you need. Subway taxis and Ubers and delivery for everything else.
Cars are only useful because America foolishly built and rebuilt around cars, instead of humans. There were even places that functioned perfectly fine with transit and walking, destroyed and replaced with infrastructure for cars.
If it can be demonstrated to most voters to be a mistake, presenting the full plan to undo and replace it with something better would be a good next step.
When was the plan for what we have now ever presented to voters?
Clearly it's not something that can be "undone" all in one go - but every day governments make decisions about what infrastructure to build/repair/extend, how much parking should be available and how much to charge for it, and how much to continue ensuring the current car-based economy is well supported/subsidized. If those decisions gradually moved towards "let's not assume cars are the be all and end all", we could still slowly unboil the frog as it were.
It never was. But as a voter, it's what outside my window right now and what I understand.
If you want to make wholesale changes quickly, you probably need the support of voters.
Nobody put 240V center-tapped, 60 Hz AC residential electricity to the voters either, but if you wanted to change it, you're probably going to need a strategy and a communications campaign to explain why and how.
US public transit is ruled by homeless and criminals. Constant stabbing, sexual assault, robbery, and stalking.
I will not take my kids on any transit where they might be assaulted by a naked homeless man. America will never have safe public transit because it lacks the will to handle the mentally ill and addicts.
If the city you live in has been entirely designed around private motor vehicles and lacks any decent transit network (LA being the obvious example), no amount of investment into helping the mentally ill and drug addicts is going to make transit an attractive option for more than a tiny percentage of the population.
Thankfully in Australia's biggest cities our public transport systems are generally clean and safe to use - but a) they're not always super reliable, despite some improvements in recent years b) they're often poorly interconnected, meaning I could potentially do 80% of the journey sitting in comfort on a train, but spend 3 times longer than it would take to drive trying to deal with getting to/from train stations and c) there are still huge areas of said cities that are fairly poorly served by trains, and buses will always be a second rate way of getting around. Oh and d) you can't carry v. large items or animals on most public transport (*). All solvable problems, some easier than others, but there's a distinct lack of real political will to do so.
(*) e.g. it'd be a 15 min train ride to take my dog to the beach from where I live, but she's not a service animal so wouldn't even be allowed on, despite taking up less space than a human.
(Ooh, I actually just looked it up - you are actually allowed to take dogs on trains here, though they're supposed to be muzzled. Never seen anyone do so though, and I'm quite sure they wouldn't be allowed on buses).
> because the modern automobile is a wonder of transport speed, comfort, and convenience.
It's also heavily subsidised and its cost does not include a signficant chunk of externalities.
Also, this has been discussed to death, but a large chunk of car usage can be replaced by other modes of transportation. However, that transition requires upfront infrastructural investment.
Sadly, arguments like yours ensure that investment won't happen. So, externalities will keep piling up, until the situation will get dire enough that 1. it can't be ignored anymore and 2. it's too late to meaningfully undo the damage.
For example if you google "why did Japan enter WW2" the summary answer is:
> "Faced with severe shortages of oil .. Japan decided to attack the United States and British forces in Asia and seize the resources of Southeast Asia."
and while we're on the subject, we didn't go to war with Iraq (either time) for oil. Iraq wanted to sell us oil, and Iraqi oil on the international market would have driven oil prices lower for us. The reasons lie elsewhere.
It's OK to be against the Iraq war or all war, but it's not OK (or at least accurate) to say it was so we could get their oil, pretty much the exact opposite.
energy is what replaces human labor and also makes things possible that human labor can't even provide. Our energy desires in the future will grow even higher. It's not a defect in human nature, it's a defect in the laws of thermodynamics.
Taking the bus is inconvenient, especially in Los Angeles. We do not have a great public transit system. However, it is far cheaper than car insurance. One bus ride is $1.75 these days, which is quite a bit--but it also includes transfers up to at least an hour after you get on. I usually get a ride to work, and I take the bus home daily, except on the rare occasion I manage to get a ride home with someone at work.
*I pay $0 in car insurance, gas, maintenance*. I pay $1.75 for the bus on most days, while others might have to pay $3.5/day; A day pass is $5 if you need to make a third trip during the day, or go backwards for shopping (taking the same line in the opposite direction doesn't count for a transfer)
If you spend a hundred years optimizing your infrastructure for one mode of transport while disregarding all others, it's not surprising that it's the most convenient, or indeed the only possible, mode of transport for a majority of people.
This is the wrong question: the right question is whether public transit is more subsidized per passenger-mile (or freight mile) than our road networks.
(Even more abstractly, it doesn’t matter whether or not public transit is highly subsidized, so long as the positive externalities of that subsidization are deemed worth it. You don’t get to the size and density (and corresponding economic output) of cities like NYC by allocating personal parking space for every resident.)
One application of (EV) cars is the robotaxi. Once this solution reaches critical mass, car ownership as we see it today will drop off.
If I can send my car out to be a robotaxi while I'm at work and/or :^) asleep, then how much do I care that MY specific vehicle return to bring ME home, when I could just use any other robotaxi available? So then I don't own a car at all and ownership elsewhere falls and the number of total cars drops to the number needed to handle only the maximum number of simultaneous rides.
Robotaxis don't have anything to do with and certainly aren't dependent upon EVs. I highly doubt robotaxis ever make it. And at that point, why not invest in other infrastructure. It's pointless to have big vehicles carrying one or two people.
Once cars start being designed for robotaxi use, it makes economic sense to be much smaller: most rides are one-passenger. (Though who knows what crazy outcomes you end up with under the regulators.)
EVs are usually designed for consumers convenience insofar as being able to travel a substantial distance between charges to accommodate a minority of actual use when user may need to travel further than the average commute inside the city. A company that operates a fleet of taxis can purchase a very large number of short jaunt single/dual passenger EV and a much smaller number of large vehicles and task the former with the majority of rides either charging frequently when unused or hot swapping batteries when theirs get low. Therefore weight and ergo tire dust might be decreased even more so than one might imagine from size alone due to the reduced battery needs.
One might also suppose that in exclusively urban environments it might make sense to provide harder tires designed to produce less dust and less aggressive driving than human drivers to the same end.
Most car trips today are single person and yet cars are enormous and getting bigger all the time. It's not the regulators, it's the consumers that want the crazy outcomes.
If we look at the economics of Uber and Uber Eats, we see that they have shifted to ride sharing and also delivery sharing. In that, it makes more sense to bundle up multiple people and deliveries into one. Doesn't that sound a whole lot like buses?
Uber has drivers. There's probably some reason to customize car design for taxis, I'm not sure, but that's a modest difference relative to no driver and the greater expected scale of supplanting most human driving in time.
Whether Uber has drivers or had automated drivers doesn't really matter. I think they show that there isn't much business in point-to-point "automated" car rides.
> It isn't contrarianism to point out that a solution is not the solution everyone thinks it is.
Literally nobody thinks that EV's will reduce microplastics. What are you even talking about?
EV's have the potential to dramatically reduce our reliance on gasoline. Current EV technology is far from perfect, but do you think people will just stop having personal transportation? Do you think it's better to keep using gasoline cars forever? So you agree that some kind of non-gasoline personal vehicle is likely to be dominant for some time as a method of personal transportation, unless you are just ignoring reality completely or think that people will magically change how they live in even more fundamental ways without incentives to do so, which is magical thinking. So EVs are inevitable, since there is no other credible alternative to gasoline personal vehicles that is even proposed, and EVs are starting to displace gas vehicles in significant numbers.
So keep shouting as much as you like about how we need to 'stop normalizing the idea of a car' but just realize that less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% of the world will even bother to listen to it, and in the meantime we are likely to end up building several billion electric cars before another alternative comes around. If you want to change the world, develop the technology that makes it make sense to act the way you want people to act, because nothing else will persuade anybody.
> Literally nobody thinks that EV's will reduce microplastics. What are you even talking about?
Not that, for starters.
Is there data that proves inconclusively that electric vehicles AND the new infrastructure and mining and every other systematic thing that comes along with them and doesn't currently exist is actually (not just hopes and dreams) less impactful on the environment? Because as far as I can tell, your comment relies on that, and I haven't seen that data. I could care less about holding on to gas-guzzling cars. I would just like to understand things better before jumping headlong into a "solution" that may or may not be any better. And there are massive incentives for companies to jump into EVs, so there is a lot of conflict of interest with EVs. Can corporations and investors be trusted when they stand to make a fortune?
Again, my point is to reach an understanding. I do not currently understand why EVs are some bastion of hope when it comes to cars. The best data that I have seen does not account for disposal of batteries nor the mining, long term maintenance and upkeep and continual use of EVs, infrastructure, etc. when it comes to EVs. And if they are better, then where is the crossover point when all this is considered? Is it 10 years? 50 years?
And yes, I do think re-enforcing the car is not a good idea. You can think it's unrealistic, and sure, in the short term it probably is. But we shouldn't just throw our hands up and reach for a new "solution" that just brings new problems.
It is a fact that EVs are better for the environment and will be even more better once certain infrastructure is built out. There's no reason to shit on an improvement just because it's not a cure. The data is a quick search away if you're actually interested.
Well, I have looked, so if you don't mind pointing to data that addresses what I mentioned then that would be appreciated.
It is hard to find, but what I have found is that EVs cross over, in terms of emissions, around 6-24 months into ownership over ICE vehicles. This accounts for manufacturing to use. As far as I could tell, it does not take into account the new mining required, the new manufacturing centers, the new infrastructure, battery disposal, end of life scenarios, etc. Basically, what I've already said.
These are systems. Yes, in isolation EVs are better than ICEs. As you start to broaden the viewpoint, I think things get a loss less definitive such that the wins become a lot less impactful.
Being honest, I think the main reason that EVs have so much hype is that because people plan on making a lot of money from the lithium and other mines and selling the EVs.
Did you know the lithium in batteries is 95% recyclable? So even if lithium mining is dirty, the amount needed for 2 cars might actually be used in 8 or more cars over time. Hopefully we find something even better for batteries.
I'm not really sure what you mean. What information from what sources? What is dubious? I didn't quote anything and simply stated my understanding. I am not aware of the 6-24 month cross over point being so-called "FUD". I don't think I have read this report directly before, but I just found Volvo's 50 page report (https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/market-assets/int...). On page 6, it effectively confirms what I just stated. With wind power recharging batteries, EVs cross over ICE at 49,000km. With EU-28 mix at 77,000km. With standard global electricity mixed power sources at 110,000km. Given I've had my car since 2015 and barely have 50,000 miles on it, that means that I would need to drive an EV for at least ten years before it crosses over an ICE car for CO2 emissions, according to Volvo's data. Now, I realize that my driving mileage is probably well under average, but it is my personal usage. (Of course, the data has +/- components depending on various specifics, but the idea is there.)
So that effectively confirms (and is actually worse than) what I stated above. Everything else I am merely asking about because I haven't seen the data that says one way or the other. You and the other commenter claim there's the magic data out there if I "just search for it", while everything I've stated is just oil propaganda. It's just dumb that if you even ask for data regarding EVs, you get labeled an oil person, when such a claim, for myself, could not be further from the truth.
The Volvo report seems pretty good, so I guess I'll read it while missing out on your and the other commenters' magic data unless you decide to materialize it. Although, it goes without saying that Volvo stands to make money from this, so there is a conflict of interest for sure, at least for this particular report. But it seems relatively accurate to my read so far.
My unwillingness to spend an hour giving you sources to counter your nonsense "points" is only evidence of my disdain at your half worked out half baked thesis of "electric cars aren't as perfect as some people think". You aren't making any concrete claims and you aren't giving any concrete arguments, you are just vaguely saying electric cars are worse than some hypothetical person thinks they are, but you don't say what that person actually believes or what constitutes 'good'. Its just sloppy thinking with all the hallmarks of someone who has been consuming propoganda, your opinion about what the policy conclusion should be is extreme and is so much more strongly held than any other part of your thinking. You also present, with no support whatsoever, that everyone elses views are shaped by unnamed mining interests who want to sell raw materials for batteries (but you are completely unconcerned about the likely source of your own opinions, big oil interests who will lose 100% of their gasoline profits).
I don't know what point you are making with your CO2 numbers. Say the actual thing you think you are demonstrating. Are you saying electric cars won't reduce CO2 emissions? That the average person over estumates how much CO2 emissions will be reduced? Say that then? I have no idea what you are trying to say.
My advice is to sit and actually decide before you research it what constitutes "good" and "improvement" for this topic. Then go see if you can decide whether those things are delivered, potentially. Then write down a list of specific "problems" and try to verify, feom credible sources, if they are really significant problems. Otherwise no matter what is presented you will just keep saying "yea but" and bringing up new unrelated "facts". This is the sort of emotional argument used by talk radio charletans.
That means not just saying "infrastructure" as though that is an actual argument. Keep in mind any argument that could equally well be used against current technologies as well is not a valid argument against electric cars.
For example, in 1915 I could claim that adoption of gasoline cars is impossible because of a lack of infrastructure. You would have to build a gas station on every corner in the city! This is not a valid argument because they did easily build all those gas stations, as well as a vast network of pipelines to deliver fuel to them, millions of workers to sell the gas, hundreds of refineries, etc. So when you make vague claims about infrastructure, you need to state what infrastructure and why its not reasonable for it to be built, and in fact you have to show its not even possible for it to be built. The market for cars is vast, the amount of resources available is enormous.
> I don't know what point you are making with your CO2 numbers. Say the actual thing you think you are demonstrating. Are you saying electric cars won't reduce CO2 emissions? That the average person over estumates how much CO2 emissions will be reduced? Say that then? I have no idea what you are trying to say.
I don't know why you are claiming my data is FUD when I meed to explain this basic fact about EVs. It's also explained in the report I linked.
The point, which is very well known at this point, is that manufacturing EVs actually causes much higher emissions than ICE cars. In other words, at time of purchase, buying an EV is worse for the environment than buying an ICE car.
Since EVs are cleaner to drive but not manufacturer, it takes time for EVs to emit less emissions overall. That's what I have mentioned and the chart in page 6 mentions. It takes tens of thousands of miles of use for EVs to have less cumulative emissions than ICE cars.
So this is just one component that shows EVs are not strictly better. My overall point is that such estimations do not take into account the rest of the EV ecosystem which can only worsen the numbers for the EV case.
Given people usually buy new cars fairly frequently, it's very possible that EVs are a wash in terms of environmental impact and that it might take several decades, if ever, for them to actually be better. This is important to understand, to question, and to investigate.
> The point, which is very well known at this point, is that manufacturing EVs actually causes much higher emissions than ICE cars. In other words, at time of purchase, buying an EV is worse for the environment than buying an ICE car.
At the point of purchase, buying a reusable water bottle is worse for the environment than buying a disposable water bottle. This is not a complete argument.
> Since EVs are cleaner to drive but not manufacturer, it takes time for EVs to emit less emissions overall. That's what I have mentioned and the chart in page 6 mentions. It takes tens of thousands of miles of use for EVs to have less cumulative emissions than ICE cars.
Vehicles last about 12 years on the road (on average in the USA). Average miles per year is over 12,000. It seems like your argument implies that EVs very very easily save emissions over their life, and probably massively since they will pay for their own emissions 4 or 5 times over their life. This assumes that EVs don't have a longer life on the road than gas vehicles, but it is reasonable to think they could last longer.
> So this is just one component that shows EVs are not strictly better.
No, it absolutely does not show that. It shows that you can arbitrarily pick a moment in time where an individual EV is behind in terms of emissions, but that over the average life they are STRICTLY BETTER. If on average they are strictly better, then net they are strictly better (this is how averages work).
> Given people usually buy new cars fairly frequently, it's very possible that EVs are a wash in terms of environmental impact
This is a very stupid thing for you to say. You don't get to just make up nonsense and draw conclusions from it. This isn't something you get to just say 'people like buying cars, therefore they won't drive them enough to save emissions'. You have to look at data and extrapolate from the data, and the data says you are just being ridiculous. The data is very clear, and you aren't even remotely close to being correct. It's extremely easy to check this. You don't care though, because you want to try to get to the conclusion that EVs are bad, rather than try to figure it out.
Your problem with EVs is that they don’t eliminate the idea of cars? Let me guess, your problem with the Impossible Burger is that it doesn’t eliminate the idea of eating meat?
Entangling ideology with progress is a recipe for getting nothing at all. We see this consistently in climate activism and drug activism. If you try to use a crisis (say, global warming) as a wedge to force your ideology (say, austerity) on the public, you get zero progress on said crisis.
That's a disingenuous response. The idea of cars and car culture have significant negative externalities (the tire pollution in TFA/GP, shitty urban planning, classism/marginalization of people who can't own cars, and so on). Those externalities might be worth it, or they might not.
But that's not "entangling ideology with progress", that's just ... pointing out the drawbacks of a progressive initiative (EVs).
Put another way, the idea of a burger decoupled from the beef industry has few negative externalities. The idea of a car decoupled from fossil fuels does.
The car noise problem is partially solved (or improved) by EVs, actually. The tires used on EVs tend to be efficient (low rolling resistance), which translates to less noisy tires. Additionally, their body shape tends to aim towards very aerodynamic so they have less turbulence noise. If they didn't do this, their efficiency would be much worse so it essentially becomes a necessity.
It's pretty evident when you drive next to a large vehicle with knobby tires meant for off-roading (Jeeps seem to commonly have these). The tire noise is easily MUCH louder, even ignoring any engine noise.
The other thing, broadly, is road construction can lead to a huge difference in noise from highways. I'm sure you've experienced huge differences depending on the road surface.
I think it is marginally reduced, definitely not solved. It also depends on the tires a consumer puts on their EV once it leaves the factory, and anything about 50kmph is still very noisy.
I think that is good in one aspect though, road noise is the only warning you get that an EV is approaching, which in a PED/Cylcing friendly city is important.
EVs already need to make noise at 19mph or under in the US.
Personally, I'd prefer strongly if road noise were eliminated entirely. It'd lead to a better society broadly by reducing noise pollution. Ped/cyclist safety is better handled by other policies than "just make more noise" IMO.
I was in Shenzhen recently, walking around the shopping districts, and I was constantly feeling a sense of unusualness. Eventually I figured out that it was because that despite all these cars and scooters on the road, I felt like I was waking in a forest, as most of the sounds I hear are from people, and the cars and scooters are pretty much silent, since so many of them are electric.
You can hear the difference with your own ears. Even if a freeway sounds the same, it's obviously different when an EV rolls through the alley or shared driveway vs an ICE car.
Not to mention the jerks intentionally making noise with loud engine mods but I guess there's no getting rid of them.
I don't think they can unless the car is not moving. The point is: the dominating sound pollution from a car is from sources that are not removed in EVs.
Unless you're on the far corner, you're only living by one side of the road. Hearing ICE engines rev up to accelerate from a light is a non-trivial amount of noise.
> As required by the PSEA, (1) this rule proposes to establish FMVSS No.141, Minimum Sound Requirements for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles, which would require [quiet vehicles] to produce sounds meeting the requirements of this standard. This proposed standard applies to EVs and to those HVs that are capable of propulsion in any forward or reverse gear without the vehicle's ICE operating. The PSEA requires NHTSA to establish performance requirements for an alert sound that is recognizable as motor vehicle in operation that allows blind and other pedestrians to reasonably detect a nearby EV or HV operating below the crossover speed. The crossover speed is the speed at which tire noise, wind noise, and other factors eliminate the need for a separate alert sound.
>[...]
> This standard will ensure that blind, visually-impaired, and other pedestrians are able to detect and recognize nearby hybrid and electric vehicles by requiring that hybrid and electric vehicles emit sound that pedestrians will be able to hear in a range of ambient environments and contain acoustic signal content that pedestrians will recognize as being emitted from a vehicle. The proposed standard establishes minimum sound requirements for hybrid and electric vehicles when operating under 30 kilometers per hour (km/h) (18 mph), when the vehicle's starting system is activated but the vehicle is stationary, and when the vehicle is operating in reverse.
I would think having a vehicle be entirely electric must allow more options in terms of car body shape and even tyre shape/material that could possible reduce noise (and particulate) pollution even further. And certainly if we could reduce the vehicle weight (I gather the current generation of EVs typically weigh 25%+ more than their ICE equivalents - and cars have generally been getting heavier over the last couple of decades anyway, which is a trend that we desperately need to reverse, and won't happen without legislation).
Having said that, as a cyclist the idea of not being able to hear cars around me is somewhat disconcerting.
I have no trouble hearing EVs approaching, they sound identical to modern ICE, which is to say 90% road noise.
Some ICE cars are noisier by choice of course but modern commuter cars are very quiet at the exhaust typically, the road noise is the dominant noise.
I have cars driving past me at about 50kph right now, I am barely hearing the engine for about 3 seconds or less as it passes, and the road noise continues to be audible for about 20-30 seconds. Pretty much all I am hearing is road noise. Same was true when I lived near a highway. Just a whooshing blob of road noise.
Driving both a gasoline car and an EV, I can surely tell you that pedestrians get out of the way when I approach with the former much more often than with the latter. So they are no identical. Of course where I live there's no law-mandated minimum noise level for EVs.
We might end up in the weeds here, but I imagine you are meaning when moving relatively slowly? I hope pedestrians aren't in need of moving out of the way of your driving over 25kmph!
Indeed at slow speeds EVs are quieter. That probably does make a difference for inner city traffic, which is also where you really want less tailpipe emissions, EVs help there too.
Due to their vastly greater mass and torque, EVs produce far more tire pollution than ICE vehicles do. In addition to that, tire dust is a far larger part of the overall pollution from operating a car than even the emissions from an ICE car. "Research done by UK-based independent testing company Emissions Analytics showed that used tyres produce 36 milligrams of particles each kilometre, which is nearly 2,000 times higher than the 0.02 mg/km average from exhausts."
Well, there are no emissions from an EV, so obviously the tire pollution will be larger than the nonexistent tailpipe emissions. I’m surprised this has to be stated.
The problem is that you get what you give incentives for.
Right now, there's a big push to move to EVs. However, in the long run you might end up with more cars total. As the old cars aren't going away for a while. So you're kinda pushing a even heavier car dependence on society. All for a small net gain of reducing a few ICE vehicles.
If the same subsidies were also applied to (electric) bikes, public transit etc it would instead actually shift behavior.
EVs aren't saving society. They're saving the car industry.
For bike subsidies to work a ton of money would need to be put into installation of bike lanes too, though. Where I live a bike would be great, but bike lanes are rare and riding on the road along with gargantuan SUVs and trucks is not an attractive proposition.
It's only expensive because one insists on having all the roads remain for cars and need to build bicycle infra in addition, often by purchasing land next to the road, rebuilding intersections etc.
Can do it cheaper like how they did in Paris: just give some of the roads and lanes to cyclists. Almost free, might need a bollard in the beginning, but the road is there already.
Switching everything about the country's infrastructure from gas to EVs is a huge undertaking. If we're going to do such a massive change, just to end up with something that still carries all the same problems except one, that's a missed opportunity.
If there was a will to spend that quantity of effort in making public transit practical for the long haul and heavily promoting cycling and e-bikes for the short haul we'd be much better off.
> That's why so many people are cautious about "EVs to save us all"
Certainly no, that's not why people are "cautious". They are hesitant about EVs because they fear running out of "gas" mid-trip.
Most people don't give a shit about anything except their plans and needs (and not necessarily unreasonbly so). You can just look around at what kinds of cars most people purchase to reason what their priorities are (or are not).
Reducing greenhouse gasses are not on most people's priority list.
Range anxiety was solved years ago. I don't know of anyone with an EV (which is most car owners here in Norway) that actually feel this is a problem. You can charge at basically every gas station in the country, and new cars have 400km ++ range.
Saying range anxiety was solved years ago is the same as saying hunger was solved hundreds of years ago. Just because you can afford it, doesn't mean everyone else can afford it.
Well if affordability is your concern, what about all those that can't afford cars? Purchasing, insurances, payments, gas, repairs, other upkeep etc. is tremendously invasive in lots of people's economy.
So for affordability's sake, figure out how to avoid cars entirely is the best bet.
Millions of new cars are sold yearly in the US. It's a huge market. It's also a huge country, with some long distances between some cities.
Assuming charging is available at most gas stations on US highways, it's still not attractive to most people to have to wait 30 minutes (or whatever) for a fast charge to allow them to continue their journey.
Norway might be a good use case, but currently the US is not a good use case (except in town). So US buyers will still need one gasoline car for road trips.
Personally I'd prefer passenger train infrastructure over millions of electric cars. Equal or more cars is, as the article notes, still a bad thing.
Well no, it wasn't. My partner just bought a new EV recently and range anxiety is huge. I've been researching places to charge and there's nothing convenient nearby. There's an old business campus but it's a sketchy area to go sit for an hour or more. There's one near a starbucks close by but they are ridiculously expensive (95c/kwh). The best one is at a whole foods, but requires driving 15 minutes away from their destination, go sit there for an hour and then drive to campus. Not so great.
Decarbonization will have negative externalities. Yes, even environmental ones. I'd argue that those externalities are necessary and delay to mitigate them is going to be worse than fixing them later.
It sure isn't going to help with all the other things we are doing in parallel.
Soil exhaustion, poisoning, and erosion; groundwater depletion and poisoning; deforestation; wild ecosystem destruction and food web destabilization; coastal sea surface and seabed destruction; river and lake poisoning; acid rain; carting invasive species around the world willy-nilly; anoxic ocean zones; hunting fish species to extinction; the ruinous effects of mineral and sand mining... all in parallel with the effects of extra carbon in the atmosphere.
The point is that reducing car usage / dependency would solve both. Just switching to EVs doesn't really solve that much, except it saves the car industry.
Exactly. Moving to EVs was a huge mistake. We would have had to practically abandon personal vehicles at some point. This was that chance. Blown. These things will keep us in this same pattern for at least another 50 years leaving this problem for a new generation.
If anyone was serious about any of this, wfh for anyone that can is such an obvious solution with by far the lowest cost. Its a solved problem, we just don’t like the solution enough.
Fixing that is much harder than switching to EVs and would have a massive environmental impact. Buildings have 2x more global warming footprint than transportation.
Coming from a place where I'd bike nine months of the year as my primary mode of transportation, I tried it in the bay area and got hit by a car after a few months. So I got a car, even though I'd much rather bike.
Most trips most people take with a car right now (EV or ICE) are close enough to bike. They are unpopular. There are a lot of disadvantages to explain why.
All the time. Perfectly fine to bike all year. That sentiment is so funny. Before heavy snow days the police and newspapers put out warnings not to drive. But those days it's perfectly fine to bike. Then a few hours later coworkers that drove ti work show up angry about the chaos. If anything, it's the cars that can't handle snow!
A bike ala a Tern cargo bike solves most of a family with kids needs where I live. (disclaimer, I'm not living in a car based society like the US). Then for hauling big stuff or something one just rents one of the share cars in the street for an hour or two.
To be clear, I ebike to work 9 miles each way year-round, including in rain and snow (not a lot of rain where I live, but plenty of snow in winter). I don't have kids though.
But I do live in the US where the city is fairly car-centric, and it is ludicrous to suggest as the person I first replied to did that a cargo e-bike is a full replacement for a short-range electric car like a Leaf. There are large commercial sections of my city that cannot be safely accessed by bike, as the only ways to get there include highway off-ramps that have a 12-inch shoulder, with concrete barriers to the right and cars going 50mph just a few feet to the left.
Few people would regularly bike on such a route with their children. Especially in inclement weather.
I can take care of 70% of my day to day life with my ebike. But for the remaining 30%, a car really is necessary. And that 20% is too frequent to rent, especially lacking the inexpensive carshare services of other countries.
> If a low range EV is enough 100% just buy a bike.
Pretending that a short-range electric vehicle is not useful because ebikes exist is just sticking one's head in the sand and pretending that people unlike oneself and locations unlike where one lives do not exist.
Very rarely actually and I don't have kids. I live in a small city and bicycles are the better mode vehicle for daily transportation. There are many reasons for someone to have a car: travel, heat waves, kids, etc. But the number 1 reason is because it is a symbol of status.
People will buy a car because otherwise they would be a low status male and they want to f#. Note that cars are expensive, I live in a poor country with absurd interest rates, so many are making debts that they will need a decade to get rid of, if ever, just so they can constitute a family.
Here at least car culture is squeezing the middle class into indebtedness and poverty and overcrowding the streets with cars and idiots, not a causal relation but a dangerous combination. Cars are great tools but f# car culture.
I don't know where you live but everything is too far apart in American suburbs. How you would fix that without tearing it all down? And it's totally impractical for transporting a family around.
Road tripping. Visiting far away family. Day at the lake or beach. Going camping. How do you convince people to give all of that up and just be content with whatever is 15min away.
Residents of American suburbs should have to pay for their full costs (infrastructure and maintenance, environmental, healthcare, services, ...), and if many people can't afford it, we should do a universal cash subsidy to every resident at the federal level to make up the difference so the transition is not so damaging, then let people decide if they really want to spend that whole amount on paying the actual costs of their lifestyle or if they would prefer to move to a more efficient living arrangement and keep the cash to do something more productive with it.
The USA subsidizes the suburbs to an absurd degree, pushing most of the costs into the future and making city dwellers pay more than their share for the rest.
Living in a relatively large house in the suburbs should in principle cost several times more than living in a flat in the city, because it requires vastly more infrastructure and the amortized cost of services is much higher. But our broken economic system has flipped this around and made suburbs extremely artificially cheap, while making most of the building practices that make denser walkable neighborhoods possible illegal under building codes and local ordinances.
I don't think it's broken. I think it's working as intended, but what it's optimizing for (people raising families) is perhaps not what you'd like for it to optimize for. Whether it's the right or wrong thing to optimize for is another conversation, but you may be surprised about what the collective political will of the US expresses. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a voting majority support for the idea that "American suburbs should have to pay for themselves."
American style suburbs are worse for raising a family than living in a city. Long commutes practically remove one or more parents from the equation 5 days a week. Long bus rides compromise sleep and exercise etc.
All for a back yard that’s rarely used and worse in just about every way than a nice park.
What they are is a cheap imitation of the wealthy enclaves near cities that only work because so few people can afford to live in them. You can imitate such buildings cheaply, what you can’t do is build or maintain the support structures which made such places so appealing.
From the perspective of the child, it's much worse. You are basically arrested until you are 16-18. No independence whatsoever. Want to meet a friend? Ask your parents to drive. They're busy? Too bad.
My children love it. There are so many friends within walking & biking distance of my house. The roads are slow, traffic sparse, with wide open spaces to play and ride bikes, etc. None of the kids seemed bored, there's so much to do. And little of the unpleasant stuff that makes living in the city more exciting.
Parents and society can be unreasonably restrictive in any environment. People call social services on parents for letting kids walk around alone in suburbs. The freedom you can get as a young teen without a car is however vastly higher in cities due to public transportation.
Social norms also vary widely, first graders in Tokyo take public transportation to school alone. This isn’t inherently unsafe or unreasonable.
Why can't they just walk or bike to their friends? 2-3 km walking distance is perfectly fine, bike extends that range significantly (10 km at least). This was the case for me.
Sorry if the question is naive, I don't live in USA.
Because your friends can easily be 10-30 miles away and only accessible via shared roadways with 55mph road traffic. There are no cross country bike routes here.
Building around roads results in everything being pushed farther away and that includes other people’s homes too.
That is my experience in the East coast US. Here, the suburbs are very spread out, with amenities 15-20 minutes away by car. There are older suburbs where that is not true, but that's more of an exception. Housing in those older suburbs costs more than the newer more spread out developments and there are fewer of them than the newer more spread out ones.
Typically, those old suburbs were originally built around train stations or street car lines, which influenced their design. The newer ones were designed around access by car and zoning prevents any non residential land uses nearby.
it's incredibly ironic but I've lucked into a very bikeable community in a rust-belt state, we have extensive rails-to-trails here and in this situation the rails followed the main state (2-lane) highway, or vice versa. so I actually can bike to some things specifically thanks to rails to trails.
Don’t confuse socioeconomics for inherent advantages. Adjusted for income people live longer in cities, they are thus objectively safer.
Wealthy parts of cities have vastly better schools and less crime than the average suburbs, but the American middle class abandoned cities. Air pollution again can go either way, suburbs often have surprisingly terrible air quality made worse by long commutes.
Per mile, small urban roads were millions of usd a mile (see department of transports annual report and it varies by region). Maintenance is even worse. It’s the 5th highest expense for most cities (US census survey of local and state governments 2020).
Of course the suburbs don’t make sense, you have a half mile of road out to a neighborhood and another half mile of street in the neighborhood itself. The percentage of property taxes going to the road is probably just a few percent points. With only a few hundred houses, it would take decades to raise the 1-3 million to replace the road.
Already have this problem with our subdivision lol. Private road, and replacing the road is going to be $20k a house even over 20 years or something even with a bond lol, and that’s a normal, reasonable-density subdivision. People don’t realize how much rural and suburban roads are getting subsidized.
Initial infrastructure is often paid for with up-front cash transfers from the federal/state government and long-term loans, then the long-term maintenance is supposed to be funded by local taxes but in many cases is set up to be more expensive than the long-term available tax base, so infrastructure just starts falling apart and then either taxes go up or maintenance is put off and people left holding the bag are screwed, or external cash bailouts make up the difference.
In either case, the suburbanites (especially near the beginning of the construction cycle) and initial construction companies are getting a huge subsidy from everyone else (and from future generations) to promote an inherently unsustainable and destructive living arrangement.
It's a kind of Ponzi scheme, and like any other Ponzi scheme, at some point the music stops and then the whole system is in an extremely precarious place.
It is already a huge change if people who drive to thir offices didn't. People going camping or driving across the country aren't the problem. The Dutch do that as well, what they don't need to do is having to drive to go fetch milk or get to work. I have my dentist, grocery shop, restaurants, coffee shops, gym, bike shop, bank, park, hardware storeband bus stops within 15 minutes from my home, and all of those are in a residential neighborhood of an American city that to my Latin American sensibilities is too residential and spread around. The level of density needed to support "15 minute cities" is much lower than people think, but it means allowing there to be a bakery in the corner of your block within a residential neighborhood, and wrestling some space in the commons from inefficient forms of transportation in favour of more efficient ones.
You don’t have to tear it all down. Just tear some of it down. For example, you could tear down a single house and replace it with a shop, and suddenly a whole neighbourhood would have a shop within walking distance.
I wonder where people live that this isn't already true. My suburban neighborhood has several small & medium sized markets. I have a suspicion that many HN participants idea of suburbia is the endless tract housing variety. That's just one version, and comparatively rare in my region. Our suburban neighborhoods are mixed.
Suburbia probably doesn't have enough density that the number of people who choose to walk to the shop over driving twenty minutes to the huge shop could keep the small shop alive.
You start by not making the problem worse. Stop building stroads[0]. Liberalize the zoning code and allow mixed-use development. Get rid of parking minimums.
The upside of how sparse American suburbs are is that we can repurpose all the junk/wasted land with normal market incentives. Roads can be thinned and the land handed back to the owners of that land, along with the setbacks that are used to force people to maintain water-intensive lawns[1]. Upzoned buildings can be redeveloped to higher density or turned into small commercial stores as market forces dictate. Anyone who wants to hold out can still do so.
None of this requires absolutely banning cars[2]. People will stop driving as cars become less necessary for daily suburban life. Road trips can still happen. So instead of families with three or four cars, maybe they only have one or two. As car infrastructure is used less, it can be repurposed for transit networks that don't suck - i.e. BRT, light rail, or tram systems with dedicated rights of way.
"15 minute city" doesn't mean "you should only ever travel 15 minutes on foot and anything further will be stopped by the pollution police". It means "building a city so that everything you need is closer and more convenient".
[0] Surface street / highway combos, i.e. roads with 3 lanes on each side, highway speed traffic, no pedestrian infrastructure, and business access. They try to do everything and fail at everything.
[1] Incidentally this was sold as a way to stop communism, somehow
[2] OK, but can we still at least ban the giant Escalade mega-SUVs that let you run down like ten kids without even seeing them
Cars are great for all that, and an electric cargo bike like an urban arrow is great for all the things nearby, IF you have safe infrastructure. Plenty of people have cars in my Dutch city but it's still safe to do local things by biking and walking
Yeah, EVs are the minimum possible change that at first glance looks like it might work, of course without disturbing the global capitalist system or our cultural values.
Wow, people are going to be pissed off in thirty years. "Why didn't that fix it all? We have to do more?"
EVs could "save us all" if we got over the meme of "range anxiety" and realized that a majority of Americans (who drive more than anyone else) drive less than 40 miles a day, and sized batteries appropriately, especially in dense urban environments. https://electrek.co/2023/03/22/wink-motors-test-drive-electr...
There's no reason that an EV needs to weigh as much as a Sherman tank.
Purpose-built EVs typically weigh 5-10% more than a comparable ICEV. That's not enough to make much of a difference. Go back to the usual target of anti-car hate -- pickups. Those are pretty heavy.
And EVs make almost zero brake dust. On many EVs the pads will last the life of the vehicle, unless they malfunction due to non-usage.
Eh, not really. Teslas tend to, because Tesla's slowest car is pretty fast. A typical EV driven by a normal driver gets pretty average life out of a set of tires.
Yours wasn't a really substantive answer. The next person provided more details and didn't add 'lol' at the end of his short statement. Just some feedback if you want people to accept your points more often!
Yes, they do. Even our lowly Fiat 500e's consumed tires much faster than any of our ICE cars.
It's not just raw power, which a Fiat 500e doesn't have much.
It's the fact that with an electric motor you have 100% torque at 0rpm starting from a standstill, which is when there is most opportunity to briefly spin the tire. Tire wear is much reduced when driving in a straight line at a constant speed.
Agreed. Even solar + wind - when the buzz started it was all rainbows and butterflies because we found a silver bullet to energy!
There is no such thing as free lunch. If you start absorbing massive amounts of solar, you will have some effect on the environment that we have absolutely no clue about. Same with interfering with wind patterns and ocean currents, which would happen with energy generation at true humanity-scale.
> What do you think happens to solar energy which doesn't land on a solar panel currently
It magically disappears from this universe of course. The photons know if it is actually being of use to sentient humans and decides to wreak havoc (in some as yet unknown fashion) only in that instance.
Not sure what to make of your comment. Are you suggesting we don't use any technology? All our actions have consequences on the planet. However your comment seems to suggest that by adopting wind and solar we are buying into an issue we would not have otherwise.
Absolutely not, I can't believe you would take my healthy skepticism as a dismissal of technology. As I said, critical thinking is gone.
I suggest nothing other than what I said - discussions around new technologies, particularly those in response to perceived crises, rarely receive the scrutiny they deserve and rarely show both sides of the coin. This makes me immediately suspicious for the same reasons history has already shown time and time again.
It is not. Proper waste disposal is an unsolved issue that extends beyond so many human generations.
Also I suspect that social licence and NIMBYism will make it impossible to build them in time to save us from global warming.
I get the joke but let me just mention that wood campfire is one of the worst solutions (if done at scale). This may sound idealistic (like the other comments mentioned) but I think we just have to reduce our energy footprint and then many solutions will be green again.
One great example (some will say absurd and impractical) is just using energy whenever it is available, with minimum storage. That means cooking, heating water etc. during the day (or when the wind is high) and only using lighting and low-energy devices at night. Factories could work on a similar principle (producing more in the summer) but then we would have to rearrange a lot more stuff to suit the seasonal renewable energy production capabilities.
This may sound absurd but it only shows how much we are locked in our way of thinking about how reality is supposed to work, not what it is. There's no reason to have high quality on-demand electrical energy available 24/7/365 other than convenience. Convenience that fossil fuels brought us.
What sort of onboarding path do you see to get a majority of the energy consumers (both the populace and industry) willing to accept this? How could the public will to make that change be created?
This feels like about as useful a solution as saying "the US could balance their budget by simply disbanding their military". Would it work if implemented? Sure. Would the resulting world be arguably better than before? Quite possibly. Is there a path to that outcome from the present day with a nonzero chance of success? Well...
We really have to think this all through before jumping 100% on any particular bandwagon. Researching, testing, seeing how it goes and adjusting is a must.
Absolutely agreed. Beyond the need in the name of science, you're more likely to bring every onboard with an idea if you transparently study and share the pros and cons.
Tangentially I want to mention that rinsing dishes before running the dishwasher is a known anti-pattern. The first washing cycle is exactly that - a rinsing cycle. I know this is off-topic but saving water is always a good idea.
In my experience visual tools like RoseRT can quickly turn into an obstacle. I think it's super important to not only know what the non-code solutions may be good at but also keep the solution limited or at least be prepared to go back to code if the problem domain is complex enough.
I'm always rubbed the wrong way by folks showing up with a "well, actually" over this point about dishwashers because this advice only holds in general if you're using a recent model, which not everyone can afford -- in fact, probably most people can't, so it becomes a question of accessibility. True, it would reduce your costs over the long run to use something more efficient -- but one of the insidious realities of being poor is that you can't afford to think long-term. If it's between paying my rent this month, and maybe saving an extra $15/month over the long term, sorry, but I'm going to make sure there's a roof over my head.
So if you're like me and have always lived in rentals with older model dishwashers for much of your life, and find yourself going crazy reading advice like this all over the internet despite making sure the filter trap is clean and taking full advantage of dishwasher pre-rinse cycles and even adjusting the temperature on your water heater and experimenting with different detergents, don't feel too bad -- dishwashers become less efficient over time for the most part, and hand-rinsing beforehand becomes a necessity. So go ahead and hand-rinse beforehand if you need to. It's not an anti-pattern unless you have a newer model.
Even with a fairly recent model I’ve occasionally had food debris from un-pre-rinsed dishes redeposited (and firmly so, with a heated dry cycle) on other dishes.
I've been washing dishes by hand my whole life and just recently got a dishwasher. When washing by hand pre-rinsing and soaking is essential so I kept doing that even after getting the machine, only recently discovering that I am wasting water this way.
Soaking is definitely necessary for many sorts of baked-on food remnants. But rinsing is mostly unnecessary unless you're expecting to leave the dishes in the machine long enough before running it that food particles dry out and get stuck - in that case just run a quick rinse cycle, it'll almost certainly use less water than doing it by hand
> Tangentially I want to mention that rinsing dishes before running the dishwasher is a known anti-pattern. The first washing cycle is exactly that - a rinsing cycle.
I haven't been fortunate enough to use a dishwasher that can reliably remove all particles from a dish. And I hate getting a "clean" dish out which still has some small bits of food stuck - now especially well stuck having gone through the heat drying cycle.
Some dishes need a human rinse/scrub before going into the dishwasher. The dishwasher is really more of a bacteria reducer.
Not according to the condescending maintenance guy who was replacing my broken dishwasher at the apartment I lived at years ago. You should have been there for THAT lecture.
We are easily manipulated into thinking how stupid people must be but in reality it is often a bad process, tiredness, mismanagement or cost cutting that are responsible for it.
I encourage you to read about the "Hot McDonald's coffee" case which has unfortunately been a meme for a long time:
> Since Liebeck, McDonald's has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee. McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C),[40] relying on more sternly worded warnings on cups made of rigid foam to avoid future liability, though it continues to face lawsuits over hot coffee.[40][41] The Specialty Coffee Association of America supports improved packaging methods rather than lowering the temperature at which coffee is served. The association has successfully aided the defense of subsequent coffee burn cases.[41] Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C).[citation needed]
This case seems to have myths inside myths. The first order myth is that the lawsuit was bogus. But there's a second order myth, that the temperature of the coffee was unusually hot and they've since changed this. What is true is that the coffee was hot enough to cause severe third degree burns, requiring skin grafts, and that McDonald's coffee cups at that time were prone to spontaneous collapse. But the coffee was not unusually hot; coffee hot enough to cause those kind of burns is the norm. In fact even coffee substantially cooler than that can cause third degree burns, particularly with children and the elderly. Look up scald charts, 140 F / 60 C can cause third degree burns with only 5 seconds of exposure.
Your definition of "bad article" is a single word difference: "And McDonald’s began changing how it [serves] up its coffee."
It's not false that McDonald's was negligent, and it's not false that the lawsuit forced a change. As far as I can tell nothing else is false. You can correct a statement in one bullet point of an article without calling it a "bad article."
It's false that McDonald's coffee was unusually hot, and it's false that McDonald's has reduced the temperature they serve their coffee at since then. They haven't, and their coffee continues to burn people. They now win most of the lawsuits about this.
It's a bad article because the guy who wrote it didn't do any research. He just paraphrased a youtuber's video. Said youtuber also didn't do any research and just repeats stuff he's heard other people claim about the case, probably on reddit, perpetuating this easily debunked misinformation.
If you weren't around at the time, it's hard to describe just how absolutely pervasive the ridicule of this woman was. It was a daily thing for quite a long time. Looking back at it makes me sick.
The funny thing is she was just asking for McD's to pay her medical bills and they refused. I believe most of the ridicule was funded by them too. Enjoy your fries.
I wonder if anyone here is using RPi as a main PC? Seems to be capable of most office work with a bit of multimedia on the side. My laptop is dying and I would love to get something stationary that is low-power by default yet good enough so that the internet wouldn't lag.
Mounted at the back of an LCD screen could make a nice wireless setup with the other peripherals.
I was using a Pi 400 for my programming PC, basically testing out if I can sell my gaming PC after I got my steam deck. It was perfectly capable for that task, and I’d say I would be happy to use it as my primary desktop PC.
Just sold my Pi 400 after the announcement of the Pi 5, deciding the Pi 5 will be my primary desktop PC. (Also ordered a Pi 4 because I have some other plans for it, but don’t want it built into a keyboard).
Falling back onto my Pi 3 I never really used before — it’s surprisingly capable. Not as a general desktop but gets my programming done fine. Its bottleneck seems to be I/O and limited RAM.
I got one and I don’t touch it. I do also have an orange pi 5 and khandas edge 2 pro. Both are miles ahead of the rpi4 and based on specs they are miles ahead of the rpi5.
Interesting. Can you give more details on your work? I've been on the edge lately over picking a desktop, an intel NUC or something like a Pi. Price to performance and power draw is something I'm considering.
Same here. A great advantage of such devices is they can later be easily repurposed to control home automation, audio system or make a simple DIY project with them. It is much harder with other types of hardware, like a laptop for example.
> I wonder if anyone here is using RPi as a main PC? Seems to be capable of most office work with a bit of multimedia on the side. My laptop is dying and I would love to get something stationary that is low-power by default yet good enough so that the internet wouldn't lag.
Unfortunately, it is too slow to even smoothly power a desktop environment.
It will probably display video at those resolutions and refresh rates just fine, so it could be used for improvised commercial displays like a TV at a conference looping some information, for example.
Don't forget "refuse". A ton of stuff is not worth the materials from which they were made in the first place.
A nice thing to keep in mind is that complex products are essentially non-recyclable. A lot of the elements that went into making the 2010s state of the art electronics are now lost in landfills, never to be recovered or reused again.
I think the intention was pointing out that reduce implies you consume only the things you need, while refuse means you'll deliberately refuse wasteful things even if you need them.
For example, smarthome lighting. The lightbulbs could be dumb, and all the smarts could live in the lightswitches, that would reduce waste. Conversely, the traditional smarthome lighting approach is very wasteful, every lightbulb is a small computer, and who knows what percent of the discarded lightbulbs gets recycled.
Don't think iPods are anything special, they are just small computers: they have CPU, ram, storage and a battery. I'd imagine they mostly went into e-cycling just like the billions of cellphones that are scrapped. They are similar sizes to cell phones.
I just wonder how do "mishaps" like this square with techno-optimists looking at graphs going up and convincing us "everything is on track for an amazing future!" [1].
I don't know if this is just my cynicism but I just can't believe we are going to fix the climate. Every now and then something like this sees the light of day and it seems like we are just doing some clever feel-good bookkeeping rather than fixing the core of the issue.
AI R&D definitively has its place but certainly not like this, this feels like just another hype bubble.
A good read explaining some of it: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/