His argument distills to: solve it all-at-once, or don’t solve it at all.
This is an uninteresting and uninspiring line of thinking that ignores the nature of socially dynamic systems which don’t exist in a world of instantaneous cause-and-effect.
His conclusion states that electric cars make a difference, but they don’t make a real difference: “I do think they can slightly reduce unsustainability” but “by switching from a regular car to electric I might think that I am making a real difference”.
I’m sorry that the author doesn’t consider a real reduction in emissions a real difference.
Look, it’s simple, climate change will require a concerted effort to change in multiple markets across multiple arenas. And the solutions are not mutually exclusive. People that buy electric cars to help the environment or become vegetarian, are probably more likely to make additional changes in their life, and persuade others to make changes as well, to reduce emissions.
Most people arrive at the decision to purchase an electric vehicle exactly because they are questioning their way of life. Electric vehicles are not a talisman of false hope, they’re a singular step in the right direction.
This comment hits the nail on the head. Plus, what the OP conveniently ignores, is that electric cars aren‘t a talisman, but a bridgehead. If electric cars succeed on a large scale, it means we solved making electricity storage fast, dense and cheap enough to put them on the road.
Putting that technology into the electric grid and combining it with renewables will enable dirt cheap, limitless energy, which will contribute in a major way towards solving all the other problems OP enumerated.
The really irritating thing about the 'solve it all at once' argument is that electric cars, in a very real way, are the keystone that lets the entire arch support itself. Renewable energy sources are already the cheapest ways of generating electricity at certain times, the trouble is that those aren't always when the electricity is needed. Energy storage makes investment in renewables much more profitable. The problem is, energy storage is itself expensive, much too expensive to invest in for most situations.
By attaching wheels and motors, electric cars make people pay more for batteries than they ever would otherwise be willing to spend on energy storage.
They don't make a real difference, and the author is correct about it. If you drive towards a wall and you're accelerating and all you're doing is slowing the rate of acceleration you're still going to run into the wall at terminal velocity.
The author correctly points out that the total increase in car usage, mostly conventional engines is going to offset the small dent that electric cars make, and that cars themselves are only a small fraction of the transportation industry to begin with.
And not to mention that there's global shipping, construction, meat consumption all of which is by itself faster increasing than any environemntal solution in the respective domains which all only marginally change the equation to begin with.
Our ecosystem doesn't care whether we tried really hard and if we were really good citizens or whether we did nothing, all that matters at the end is if our efforts were significant enough to not degrade our environment. And we're off by a magnitude or two and that's not going to change until we make radical changes to how we manage our societies.
The argument isn't that doing _something_ is bad, it's that the amount of effort people put into obtaining their shiny non-paleolithic-compost-fueled-but-rather-battery-powered 2 tonne sledgehammers would be better spent changing policies that operate on organizational rather than individual units.
How about we just stop buying as much shit from halfway across the world? Global trade requires us to spend stupid amounts of fuel in engines that have never been optimized for emissions. This of course involves making changes to global trade, this is a lot harder, but surely all those people who are capable of shelling out at least 30000$ (but in reality, barely anyone gets the cheapest model because this is a luxury item) could be doing things that make a bigger difference.
He also perpetuates what I call abstinence based environmentalism. It won't work for the same reason abstinence based sex ed won't work. You are not going to guilt trip people into being poor.
It's failing hardest in the developing world because do you really expect people in Africa, South America, and Asia to listen to rich Westerners guilt trip them into not doing what those same rich Westerners are doing? "To save the planet we need you to stay poor." The response is a predictable "fuck you."
There are only two possible futures:
1. We develop ways of running our civilization in a more sustainable way. This is a huge multifaceted roll up your sleeves engineering problem. Electric cars are a huge piece because they break a big part of our hard dependence on carbon based energy and free us to substitute other things. Anything that gets hot, blows, flows, or shines can make electricity, while ICE cars only run on petroleum. No, it is not enough, but the way you do things like this is piece by piece.
2. We adapt to climate change and other major environmental problems as they unfold.
Some world where people stop wanting transport and air conditioning and such is as realistic as the one where teens dont have sex.
Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that this is an engineering problem not a moral problem. Environmentalists have treated it as a moral problem for 50 years and this has accomplished nothing at all. It reminds me a lot of the drug war.
Edit #2: I also see a similarity in the human reaction. When you shame teens about sex they still have sex but they hide it. Shame people about industry and they outsource it all to China, in other words hide it.
>His argument distills to: solve it all-at-once, or don’t solve it at all.
I disagree. I think the argument that's being made is rather that switching to electric cars isn't enough, but people focus on it so heavily that people feel as though switching to an electric car is saving the planet. The problem here is that it's not enough and due to how hyped up electric cars are there won't be enough will left to tackle many other problems that affect climate change.
I don't know if I came across properly, so I'll explain it in a different way: humans have a limited amount of attention and will. Switching to electric cars is a useful move to combat climate change, but due to how hyped up electric cars are, it will satisfy many people's urge to do something for the climate. This occupies most of the limited amount of attention and will, thus there isn't enough left over to tackle all the other, bigger, problems.
The way I read TFA, the argument is this: If you think electric cars is the solution or a meaningful part of the solution, you're wrong. It does not say electric cars are bad, and it certainly does not argue that we should not solve [the climate crisis] if we can't solve it all-at-once.
There are unfortunately still many, many people, who—even if they accept that human caused climate change is real—do not appreciate how urgent the crisis is.
I read the article's message as follows: electric cars are still cars and cars
are always going to be bad for the planet, so stop driving any cars, including
electric cars.
So he's not trying to argue for a total solution or no solution. He's arguing
that the proposed solution is actually part of the problem, and that it is not
a solution because it is part of the problem, not because it is a partial
solution.
You, and others in this thread, are saying that electric cars are a small step
towards a solution to climate change, even though it is not a complete
solution. However, any solution to climate change, partial or complete, needs
a reduction to our greenhouse gas emissions and electric cars do not achieve
such a reduction (to CO₂ specifically).
That's because having only a few people buy electric cars does not reduce CO₂
emissions given that everyone else keeps buying more and more normal, dirty cars; and having
everyone buy electric cars does not reduce CO₂ because then we have enough
electric cars that we are still emitting more than we can afford to.
People that buy electric cars to help the environment or become vegetarian, are probably more likely to make additional changes in their life, and persuade others to make changes as well, to reduce emissions.
I'm not sure about that, some of my neighbours seem to think that giving up plastic bags is enough to offset their annual holiday in Bali.
If you dump BEVs on a grid that's transitioning towards renewables, you'll delay that transition. It doesn't make sense to account for the emissions as being the average of the grid, because you're delaying shutting down your dirtiest power to deal with the marginal load.
BEVs are clearly the future, and offer opportunities for distributed storage and demand dispatch that will help us keep the grid stable even with high renewable mixes. They're going to be great in the future, and for that we need to build up a market for them. That's where the real difference will come from.
That's a pretty uncharitable reading of TFA. My take-away is this: if we use the electric car as a way to persuade ourselves that our 'way of life' is safe if only we all switched to electric vehicles then we are ignoring the elephant in the room: it is our way of life that is the problem, not how we transport ourselves.
> Most people arrive at the decision to purchase an electric vehicle exactly because they are questioning their way of life. Electric vehicles are not a talisman of false hope, they’re a singular step in the right direction.
Oversimplistic view, you have a stake in Tesla or you don't know better. Otherwise you would also discuss the TCO, the total power need to produce e-vehicles, where Lithium is harvested and under what circumstances, that increased electricity demand fuels the discussion about nuclear power plants. And many more points to consider which certainly don't give a 100% conclusive picture in favor of e-mobility.
The problem is time. Or lack of it. We cannot afford for the markets to work things out for us. Sure, you can shift culture and behavior but that takes time that we do not have. It’s time for drastic policy change and swift global action.
"But overall, they are too little too late. An electric car is still a car, and permeates our car-dependency the same as any other car." .... Well yeah..., till Startrek's teleportation is invented.
Alot about our system of roads and cars strikes me as crazy. Most of the vehicles on the road have only one person in them, yet weigh as much as an elephant. Nobody drives under the speed limit, which is typically fast enough to result in hundreds of thousands of fatalities every year anyways. Every neighborhood designed primarily for these idiotically heavy vehicles, that occasionally drive over pets and children who made the mistake of wandering off a footpath. Then there’s the pollution, of course. I can’t imagine many people would accept the way we do things today, if we started from zero and someone proposed it, instead of the situation slow-boiling us over a period of a half century.
The worst part about it IMO is traffic light and stops. In a city, if you can drive around 20mph (25 maybe) uninterrupted, you get in most places very fast, very pleasantly and with fuel savings since you never slow down.
Instead of a smooth flow, you get drivers that do:
- high accelerations
- nervous braking
- idle engine running between 30 - 60 seconds (120 max?)
Pure waste.
Maybe I'm asking for a problem too complex to solve, but a smooth oriented traffic organization would help. Well, that is until fossil fuels are removed from the market.
Mr. Money Mustache is a financial blogger, he emphasizes minimal living and reducing environmental footprint. He calls cars 2 ton wheelchairs and advocates MUCH more bicycle use. I have to say I agree, we need to cure our ridiculous car habits, especially 1) buying ridiculously huge vehicles with terrible MPG; 2) taking short trips everywhere in the car, when walking or biking would do.
Seems to me a lot of people are so attached to carculture that they can't even read the article properly.
The author sees all sorts of good things about electric cars. I drive them myself. I love cars. But...
The points the article makes about cars being part of a larger flawed system of urban and rural development are spot on.
'Self-driving' cars will only make this worse.
Even just the excessive prevalence of hard-top surfaces in roads and parking lots leads to environmental catastrophe when flooding begins.
Urban sprawl leads to farmland and natural area destruction.
The car is the ultimate symbol of entitled consumerist individualism, and it is becoming more and more unsustainable.
The net effect of every household being in car(s) with a population as big as we have is really bad, even if all emissions were to be eliminated.
If all the private investment money being dumped into self-driving technology at the moment were public money being put into urban mass transit, just think of what could be accomplished...
I've been thinking about this for awhile and I think the problem is roads. People will go wherever the roads are good. They will build houses everywhere and subdivide everything a million times. However, if there is no way to access a certain area or it is very difficult, they will not go there and build.
urban mass transit is never used by the wealthy. the last thing people with ill gotten gains want to do is to be around others who can identify them and see with their own eyes how much they’ve stolen. and they don’t want to be around their own kind as there’s no honor amongst thieves.
Electric vehicles would make a huge difference to me and many others that suffer from asthma.
Moving the emissions away from the vehicles , away from city centres and roads to the factories and power stations where they can be controlled would save thousands of lives.
Our children will look at us how we look at people during the industrial revolution. And a gradual change is better than no change at all.
>Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and other institutions who studied Stockholm’s congestion-pricing scheme found that the policy cut air pollution in the city center and reduced childhood asthma cases by nearly 50 percent.
Very true many countries in Europe has shifted to diesels due to lower co2 but they make the air dirty. Dirty air is bad for asthmatics.
Hybrid gasoline/biogas can be as co2 efficient as diesel if not more with a lot cleaner tail pipe air. Almost zero local emission with 10kw batteries and upwards.
> To have any chance of slowing down climate breakdown rather than accelerating it further, we need to change our entire way of life...
I agree with him. And that's why I keep saying that global warming is here to stay. We had better to learn to cope with it rather than hoping it can be reversed!
Honestly, I hope electric cars become commonplace just because of the reduction in noise pollution let alone PM and CO2 emissions.
Furthermore, I'm not really sure what the author thinks we should do? How can we maintain modern civilisation without factories etc.? Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable.
Out of all the other industries dominated by massive corporations - and we know how they go about doing business - the first priority to save the planet is for John Doe to buy a new product! Also, let's create a culture where we feel justified to shame people who don't do it.
Of course nothing is black and white. I love electric cars and will probably get one. I think they're really cool and would love to do my bit in keeping things green.
BUT at the same, you got to see a bit of irony in the whole thing don't you?
1. Traditional car maintenance is expensive and sucks
2. I'm betting due to natural disasters in the environment and in the Oval Office we will see fuel prices continue to rise
3. While I don't think it will save the planet by itself, it can certainly save lives. Emissions are dangerous to breathe in and we are willfully ignoring it.
Two me, reading the graph in the article brings up two priorities:
1: transition to renewable energy
2: figure out how to lower the carbon emissions during
1&2 sound a lot easier than completely transitioning off motorized personal transportation.
#2 can be done with appropriate government incentives, like a $100/ton carbon tax + equivalent tariff. Producers will use alternate energy sources and otherwise eliminate carbon wherever it costs them less than $100/ton to do so, and the $100 can pay for sequestration when it costs them more.
Of course #2 will significantly increase the price of a car. This will also help to convince people to use alternatives. But cars will still be significantly cheaper than they are in Denmark or Norway, yet those two countries are still fairly car oriented.
Low carbon energy! The article listed pure renewable energy but if it was biofuel, emissions would be high. We must stop talking about renewability and focus on sustainable, low-carbon energy. They are not the same.
Further example: nuclear fusion is low carbon and sustainable but not considered renewable. If we charged EVs with nuclear fusion power stations, we'd all be happy.
The charts on the page directly contradict the headline.
In the renewable energy case emissions are miniscule, and in fact only come about because the chart assumes large emissions during manufacture - a lot of the processes involved in producing an EV could be done with renewable energy, and would be if we instituted a carbon tax or otherwise forced the issue.
So its not a talisman, but it is certainly a real step in the right direction. I don't hear anybody saying that electric cars means we can just forget about the other causes of climate change?
A very contrarian article that just argues against a straw man. I suspect people who write articles like this are usually the ones who revel in being smarter than everybody else.
1. Incentivise retrofitting of electric transmissions to cars with internal combustion engines
2. Disincentivise the introduction of new models, visual updates etc. to existing cars via taxation
3. Incentivise durability and repairability - force car makers to produce cars that are modular and easily repaired, enforced limits on pricing of spare parts, force open-sourcing of designs etc.
Of course all of above would likely smash the car makers' current business model to pieces - and when you get down to it this is the real problem with the kind of genuine, general change we need to see in order to save the Earth.
Sustainable approaches simply will not deliver the kind of reduction in consumption required. Everyone is going to have to accept a much poorer lifestyle. The main blocker to me is the rich: how are they going to justify their continued opulence when the companies they own (are forced to) produce so little for the average person?
Looking at other articles the guy seems to be full in apocalyptic thinking - a few in he has an article on "Collapse" and lifeboat thinking. Those are words are downright toxic meme symptoms referring to paranoid and evil ideologirs respectively. They are like referring to science based medicine as "alleopathic" is a sure sign that they are off the deep ene in alternative medicine.
To explain "collapse" briefly there is even a /r/Collapse convinced of coming doomsdays from various sources from any fear de jure from ebola, economic meltdowns, or global warming.
"Lifeboat ethics" refers to a rehash of Malthusians and Eugenicists arguing helping people who are worse off is actively immoral and rapidly justifies travesties. There is a reason I skip straight to evil when describing them - when in power their actions can have no other end.
One of the things I like to do when half in the bag in a bar and blagging to a new friend is to say,
"Look - pick a direction - any direction - and tell me what you see."
And what they see is plastic and metal and bar bottles with paint on them and more plastic and all the detritus of human society.
And every piece of it, as far as the eye can see!, will be garbage in 6 months to 20 years and sit on the ground and leech poisons into the Earth and nothing will grow from it.
Every.
Single.
Piece.
We, as human beans, have broken the cycle of life and death where something grows, flowers, dies, rots and something else grows and flowers. This idea that we can make a new shiny thing that will become more garbage to fix all our problems so we can keep eating more isn't going to change that.
The solution is that we simply have to do with less. And people will kill each other before they admit that.
From my European perspective, this reads like a typical leftist pov. First of all, of course everyone has to change their way of living. This has been the corner Stone of left ideology since forever.
And then of course the attack on EV, because it is not about the climate, but about individuality. Individual travel simply does not fit into a world view where everyone has to change their way of living into the rational way. And offering a different solution is heresy.
Why is the embodied carbon in the manufacture of the car the same in all the energy mix scenarios? Surely quite a lot of electricity is used in manufacturing electric vehicles.
Also, solutions that rely on substantially reconfiguring living patterns - moving from driving-required suburbs to walkable communities also have large embodied carbon costs. It's all well and good to say that suburbs are energy inefficient but the US has a lot of them already built.
We can imagine that the energy mix in EU will lean towards more renewable energy, increasing the benefit of electric cars over conventional cars.
If indeed not decreasing yet, the number of cars sold seems to flatten and I can see that Europeans cities are transforming to make life more complicated for cars owners (ie LEZ tax in London) and easier for pedestrians and bikes.
Several reasons to be optimistic.
reminds me of slavoj zizek's point of how corporations use problems caused by consumption and come up with a solution that increases consumption, like the "2% of profits goes towards planting trees" type of scenario
The numbers are somewhat contested. See potholer54's well-sourced video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwMPFDqyfrA He cites ghg savings of about 20-30% for a common mix of electricity production sources.
Of course, Jussi Pasanen is still completely right. The only solution is to stop driving cars.
Big cities can definitely phase cars put, and should electrify their public transportations for the people who can't bike.
Some form of "small number of passengers, not short but not long range" trips are going to have to be done ouside of cities, unless you displace people.
If "displacing people to cities" is your advocated policy, or "preventing people from traveling at all", that's a legitimate point to argue, but be prepared for fierce resistance from well meaning people (who're not going to massively vote for you...)
[+] [-] Denzel|6 years ago|reply
This is an uninteresting and uninspiring line of thinking that ignores the nature of socially dynamic systems which don’t exist in a world of instantaneous cause-and-effect.
His conclusion states that electric cars make a difference, but they don’t make a real difference: “I do think they can slightly reduce unsustainability” but “by switching from a regular car to electric I might think that I am making a real difference”.
I’m sorry that the author doesn’t consider a real reduction in emissions a real difference.
Look, it’s simple, climate change will require a concerted effort to change in multiple markets across multiple arenas. And the solutions are not mutually exclusive. People that buy electric cars to help the environment or become vegetarian, are probably more likely to make additional changes in their life, and persuade others to make changes as well, to reduce emissions.
Most people arrive at the decision to purchase an electric vehicle exactly because they are questioning their way of life. Electric vehicles are not a talisman of false hope, they’re a singular step in the right direction.
[+] [-] endymi0n|6 years ago|reply
Putting that technology into the electric grid and combining it with renewables will enable dirt cheap, limitless energy, which will contribute in a major way towards solving all the other problems OP enumerated.
[+] [-] SuoDuanDao|6 years ago|reply
By attaching wheels and motors, electric cars make people pay more for batteries than they ever would otherwise be willing to spend on energy storage.
[+] [-] Barrin92|6 years ago|reply
The author correctly points out that the total increase in car usage, mostly conventional engines is going to offset the small dent that electric cars make, and that cars themselves are only a small fraction of the transportation industry to begin with.
And not to mention that there's global shipping, construction, meat consumption all of which is by itself faster increasing than any environemntal solution in the respective domains which all only marginally change the equation to begin with.
Our ecosystem doesn't care whether we tried really hard and if we were really good citizens or whether we did nothing, all that matters at the end is if our efforts were significant enough to not degrade our environment. And we're off by a magnitude or two and that's not going to change until we make radical changes to how we manage our societies.
[+] [-] eptcyka|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|6 years ago|reply
It's failing hardest in the developing world because do you really expect people in Africa, South America, and Asia to listen to rich Westerners guilt trip them into not doing what those same rich Westerners are doing? "To save the planet we need you to stay poor." The response is a predictable "fuck you."
There are only two possible futures:
1. We develop ways of running our civilization in a more sustainable way. This is a huge multifaceted roll up your sleeves engineering problem. Electric cars are a huge piece because they break a big part of our hard dependence on carbon based energy and free us to substitute other things. Anything that gets hot, blows, flows, or shines can make electricity, while ICE cars only run on petroleum. No, it is not enough, but the way you do things like this is piece by piece.
2. We adapt to climate change and other major environmental problems as they unfold.
Some world where people stop wanting transport and air conditioning and such is as realistic as the one where teens dont have sex.
Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that this is an engineering problem not a moral problem. Environmentalists have treated it as a moral problem for 50 years and this has accomplished nothing at all. It reminds me a lot of the drug war.
Edit #2: I also see a similarity in the human reaction. When you shame teens about sex they still have sex but they hide it. Shame people about industry and they outsource it all to China, in other words hide it.
[+] [-] Mirioron|6 years ago|reply
I disagree. I think the argument that's being made is rather that switching to electric cars isn't enough, but people focus on it so heavily that people feel as though switching to an electric car is saving the planet. The problem here is that it's not enough and due to how hyped up electric cars are there won't be enough will left to tackle many other problems that affect climate change.
I don't know if I came across properly, so I'll explain it in a different way: humans have a limited amount of attention and will. Switching to electric cars is a useful move to combat climate change, but due to how hyped up electric cars are, it will satisfy many people's urge to do something for the climate. This occupies most of the limited amount of attention and will, thus there isn't enough left over to tackle all the other, bigger, problems.
[+] [-] adamlett|6 years ago|reply
There are unfortunately still many, many people, who—even if they accept that human caused climate change is real—do not appreciate how urgent the crisis is.
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|6 years ago|reply
So he's not trying to argue for a total solution or no solution. He's arguing that the proposed solution is actually part of the problem, and that it is not a solution because it is part of the problem, not because it is a partial solution.
You, and others in this thread, are saying that electric cars are a small step towards a solution to climate change, even though it is not a complete solution. However, any solution to climate change, partial or complete, needs a reduction to our greenhouse gas emissions and electric cars do not achieve such a reduction (to CO₂ specifically).
That's because having only a few people buy electric cars does not reduce CO₂ emissions given that everyone else keeps buying more and more normal, dirty cars; and having everyone buy electric cars does not reduce CO₂ because then we have enough electric cars that we are still emitting more than we can afford to.
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|6 years ago|reply
I'm not sure about that, some of my neighbours seem to think that giving up plastic bags is enough to offset their annual holiday in Bali.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing
[+] [-] reitzensteinm|6 years ago|reply
BEVs are clearly the future, and offer opportunities for distributed storage and demand dispatch that will help us keep the grid stable even with high renewable mixes. They're going to be great in the future, and for that we need to build up a market for them. That's where the real difference will come from.
[+] [-] thomasz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregknicholson|6 years ago|reply
Building a new (electric) car also produces emissions. It may be that we produce less emissions overall by continuing to use existing cars.
[+] [-] raaaaraaaa2|6 years ago|reply
In France for sure : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
in China I don't think so : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China ...however local pollution is zero so that's huge benefit for large cities of course.
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|6 years ago|reply
I read the article and didn't get that impression at all.
I got: electric cars are an improvement, but don't fundamentally solve the problem.
[+] [-] jhoechtl|6 years ago|reply
Oversimplistic view, you have a stake in Tesla or you don't know better. Otherwise you would also discuss the TCO, the total power need to produce e-vehicles, where Lithium is harvested and under what circumstances, that increased electricity demand fuels the discussion about nuclear power plants. And many more points to consider which certainly don't give a 100% conclusive picture in favor of e-mobility.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mrhappyunhappy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pankajdoharey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlesism|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|6 years ago|reply
Instead of a smooth flow, you get drivers that do:
Pure waste.Maybe I'm asking for a problem too complex to solve, but a smooth oriented traffic organization would help. Well, that is until fossil fuels are removed from the market.
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|6 years ago|reply
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/04/22/curing-your-clown...
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|6 years ago|reply
The author sees all sorts of good things about electric cars. I drive them myself. I love cars. But...
The points the article makes about cars being part of a larger flawed system of urban and rural development are spot on.
'Self-driving' cars will only make this worse.
Even just the excessive prevalence of hard-top surfaces in roads and parking lots leads to environmental catastrophe when flooding begins.
Urban sprawl leads to farmland and natural area destruction.
The car is the ultimate symbol of entitled consumerist individualism, and it is becoming more and more unsustainable.
The net effect of every household being in car(s) with a population as big as we have is really bad, even if all emissions were to be eliminated.
If all the private investment money being dumped into self-driving technology at the moment were public money being put into urban mass transit, just think of what could be accomplished...
[+] [-] zip1234|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whenanother|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawlessone|6 years ago|reply
Moving the emissions away from the vehicles , away from city centres and roads to the factories and power stations where they can be controlled would save thousands of lives.
Our children will look at us how we look at people during the industrial revolution. And a gradual change is better than no change at all.
[+] [-] growlist|6 years ago|reply
Depressing! But we need lighter vehicles all round, and less travelling in general.
[+] [-] oftenwrong|6 years ago|reply
>Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and other institutions who studied Stockholm’s congestion-pricing scheme found that the policy cut air pollution in the city center and reduced childhood asthma cases by nearly 50 percent.
[+] [-] acd|6 years ago|reply
Hybrid gasoline/biogas can be as co2 efficient as diesel if not more with a lot cleaner tail pipe air. Almost zero local emission with 10kw batteries and upwards.
[+] [-] pif|6 years ago|reply
I agree with him. And that's why I keep saying that global warming is here to stay. We had better to learn to cope with it rather than hoping it can be reversed!
[+] [-] alexgmcm|6 years ago|reply
Furthermore, I'm not really sure what the author thinks we should do? How can we maintain modern civilisation without factories etc.? Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable.
[+] [-] kaolti|6 years ago|reply
Out of all the other industries dominated by massive corporations - and we know how they go about doing business - the first priority to save the planet is for John Doe to buy a new product! Also, let's create a culture where we feel justified to shame people who don't do it.
Of course nothing is black and white. I love electric cars and will probably get one. I think they're really cool and would love to do my bit in keeping things green.
BUT at the same, you got to see a bit of irony in the whole thing don't you?
[+] [-] rebuilder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 693471|6 years ago|reply
1. Traditional car maintenance is expensive and sucks
2. I'm betting due to natural disasters in the environment and in the Oval Office we will see fuel prices continue to rise
3. While I don't think it will save the planet by itself, it can certainly save lives. Emissions are dangerous to breathe in and we are willfully ignoring it.
[+] [-] ensiferum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|6 years ago|reply
1: transition to renewable energy
2: figure out how to lower the carbon emissions during
1&2 sound a lot easier than completely transitioning off motorized personal transportation.
#2 can be done with appropriate government incentives, like a $100/ton carbon tax + equivalent tariff. Producers will use alternate energy sources and otherwise eliminate carbon wherever it costs them less than $100/ton to do so, and the $100 can pay for sequestration when it costs them more.
Of course #2 will significantly increase the price of a car. This will also help to convince people to use alternatives. But cars will still be significantly cheaper than they are in Denmark or Norway, yet those two countries are still fairly car oriented.
[+] [-] acidburnNSA|6 years ago|reply
Further example: nuclear fusion is low carbon and sustainable but not considered renewable. If we charged EVs with nuclear fusion power stations, we'd all be happy.
[+] [-] esotericn|6 years ago|reply
In the renewable energy case emissions are miniscule, and in fact only come about because the chart assumes large emissions during manufacture - a lot of the processes involved in producing an EV could be done with renewable energy, and would be if we instituted a carbon tax or otherwise forced the issue.
[+] [-] theworld572|6 years ago|reply
https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank
So its not a talisman, but it is certainly a real step in the right direction. I don't hear anybody saying that electric cars means we can just forget about the other causes of climate change?
A very contrarian article that just argues against a straw man. I suspect people who write articles like this are usually the ones who revel in being smarter than everybody else.
[+] [-] growlist|6 years ago|reply
1. Incentivise retrofitting of electric transmissions to cars with internal combustion engines
2. Disincentivise the introduction of new models, visual updates etc. to existing cars via taxation
3. Incentivise durability and repairability - force car makers to produce cars that are modular and easily repaired, enforced limits on pricing of spare parts, force open-sourcing of designs etc.
Of course all of above would likely smash the car makers' current business model to pieces - and when you get down to it this is the real problem with the kind of genuine, general change we need to see in order to save the Earth.
Sustainable approaches simply will not deliver the kind of reduction in consumption required. Everyone is going to have to accept a much poorer lifestyle. The main blocker to me is the rich: how are they going to justify their continued opulence when the companies they own (are forced to) produce so little for the average person?
[+] [-] Nasrudith|6 years ago|reply
To explain "collapse" briefly there is even a /r/Collapse convinced of coming doomsdays from various sources from any fear de jure from ebola, economic meltdowns, or global warming.
"Lifeboat ethics" refers to a rehash of Malthusians and Eugenicists arguing helping people who are worse off is actively immoral and rapidly justifies travesties. There is a reason I skip straight to evil when describing them - when in power their actions can have no other end.
[+] [-] patientplatypus|6 years ago|reply
"Look - pick a direction - any direction - and tell me what you see."
And what they see is plastic and metal and bar bottles with paint on them and more plastic and all the detritus of human society.
And every piece of it, as far as the eye can see!, will be garbage in 6 months to 20 years and sit on the ground and leech poisons into the Earth and nothing will grow from it.
Every.
Single.
Piece.
We, as human beans, have broken the cycle of life and death where something grows, flowers, dies, rots and something else grows and flowers. This idea that we can make a new shiny thing that will become more garbage to fix all our problems so we can keep eating more isn't going to change that.
The solution is that we simply have to do with less. And people will kill each other before they admit that.
It's already starting to happen now.
[+] [-] choeger|6 years ago|reply
And then of course the attack on EV, because it is not about the climate, but about individuality. Individual travel simply does not fit into a world view where everyone has to change their way of living into the rational way. And offering a different solution is heresy.
[+] [-] Mvandenbergh|6 years ago|reply
Also, solutions that rely on substantially reconfiguring living patterns - moving from driving-required suburbs to walkable communities also have large embodied carbon costs. It's all well and good to say that suburbs are energy inefficient but the US has a lot of them already built.
[+] [-] zzzcpan|6 years ago|reply
Surely switching to bikes or electric bikes is not that substantial and immediately eliminates a lot of car related problems.
[+] [-] flr03|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjourne|6 years ago|reply
Of course, Jussi Pasanen is still completely right. The only solution is to stop driving cars.
[+] [-] phtrivier|6 years ago|reply
Big cities can definitely phase cars put, and should electrify their public transportations for the people who can't bike.
Some form of "small number of passengers, not short but not long range" trips are going to have to be done ouside of cities, unless you displace people.
If "displacing people to cities" is your advocated policy, or "preventing people from traveling at all", that's a legitimate point to argue, but be prepared for fierce resistance from well meaning people (who're not going to massively vote for you...)