Better headline: "EVs are decarbonizing transport, but we have more work to do. Here's what we should do next."
From the article:
> This is not to imply in any way that electric vehicles are worthless. Analysis by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) argues that EVs are the quickest means to decarbonize motorized transport.
The headline feels like someone crafted it for maximum clickbait. The perpetual doomsday framing of everything, including the climate wins, only makes people tune out of the conversation.
> The headline feels like someone crafted it for maximum clickbait
It's written as a bait to people who have bought into the oil industry propaganda that EV's aren't a solution. "Where do you think the electricity comes from? Coal, gas and oil fueled power plants, that's where." If I had a dollar for every time I've heard this I could afford a Tesla.
I think this concern has to be balanced against the billions of dollars promoting the status quo. A lot of people want to believe that all we need to do is buy electric cars, and there are multiple industries pushing that since it’s good for business while politicians like not having to tell people that lifestyle changes are necessary.
Maybe instead of criticizing the way in which the article was written you could comment on some if its actual contents. I feel like people on HN get incredibly hung up on minor things like the title of an article and can't move past that. Climate change is a big deal and HN is full of smart people. It would be nice if we could use it as a venue for discussion about interesting topics instead of whinging about things that annoy us.
Individual automobiles have 100 problems. EVs solve 1 of them (tailpipe emissions), leaving the other 99. Yes, I guess it's better than nothing, but...
Meanwhile old boring things like trains, trams (frequent, comfortable, extensive), proper bike lanes, do more for climate change and general quality of life than replacing a petrol SUV with an electric SUV.
EVs aren't a climate win. It's just more consumption which ultimately means more energy which means more oil.
Aside from that the issue has nothing to do with where the oil is consumed, but how much. The only way to stop climate change is to prevent oil from being extracted. We're currently in the process of escalating a war to extract more so I'm not optimistic about this.
If EVs had an impact on US oil consumption you would expect that consumption to drop right?
But 2022 was nearly a record year for US oil consumption [0]:
> 20.40 million bpd in 2022 and 20.75 million bpd in 2023. That compares with a record 20.80 million bpd in 2005
EVs are just a way to keep you consuming while feeling okay about. It's not a climate win in the slightest.
People are hoping for a quick sustainability fix but that is not on offer. Our current footprint on the global environment took at least a century of population growth and technological expansion to manifest. Car based cities are just one of the designs we are stuck with.
EV's will play some role to keep that pattern workable, but it may well be that other ways of organising life and the economy will prove better adapted and more efficient in the midterm (~20 yrs)
Keep in mind that co2 is just one of the many constraints we are increasingly bumping against. The age of innocence is gone. On the other hand there is nothing sacred about how we organized things since 1900 or so...
> International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) argues that EVs are the quickest means to decarbonize motorized transport. However, EVs are not by themselves in any way going to achieve the goal of net zero by 2050.
Yep. Technically correct, but an example of shooting for the wrong goal, and failing entirely.
The goal is not making our motorized transport system low carbon. The goal is limiting the damage of climate change and keeping a lid on temperature rises. If we constrain our solution set to maintaining the same sort of motorized transport system we will fail.
I would like to hope that software engineers on this site reading this would recognize such a problem.
It is like when, fundamentally, the design of a program from the get go was wrong from the first foot forward and as a result it's simply too slow. No amount of fiddling around the edges, hacks and minor fixes will result in an adequate improvement. Only a new design is a real fix.
Thankfully in many ways it's actually easier to fix cities than to fix a major software project. For one thing we at least know the solutions, and they're easily achievable given political will and with not a great deal of money. (not easily around on a software project!)
Most of the issues come more from political restriction than anything else, and so much can be done by simply letting people do things that they're currently banned from doing (ie. let people build more housing). Couple that with some relatively affordable bike lanes and rapid bus lanes, and one can achieve remarkable improvements with relatively little capital expenditure and effort.
> Even a few US cities it might be livable without a car.
Musing that better things are maybe possible in "a few" US cities is dramatically low ambition and out of touch.
Consider that 45% of Vancouver's West End commutes to work by walking. That's a neighbourhood of 45,000 in a major NA city. There's absolutely nothing going on remarkably here that accounts for this excepting the simple fact that it's a bunch of 1960s era residential apartments in a pleasant tree lined area within a 20 minute walking distance of Vancouver's Downtown. That's it. I'm pretty sure this concept is quite replicable in cities across America.
They've also made it very unpleasant to own a car in the West End - parking is extremely limited or requires a special pass. There are very few thru- streets so all car journeys are convoluted, etc.
And support for alternatives is plentiful - bus service is excellent, bike lanes and routes are abundant, there are numerous and frequent bike share stations, etc.
EVs seem to not be a very well thought-out long term solution in general, unless radically different batteries with very high energy density can soon be developed. Earth has 88 million tons of lithium, of which only 1/4 is economically feasible to mine. Each Tesla battery uses about 50 kg of Li, which means only about 18 Tesla batteries can be produced per ton, or about 396 million total Tesla batteries. Current global automobile production is about 80 million per year. If society were to totally switch to EVs, we would run out within a decade or so even assuming most of these cars used far less lithium (and thus had much shorter range, limiting practicality). This back of the napkin analysis also ignores all the other competing uses of Li...
Lithium is one of the most common elements on the planet. Earths crust contains ~0.002-0.006% Li by weight, or 1,220,000,000 million tonnes if you use the low estimate.
You seem to have confused the concept of "known reserves" - the 88M number is deposits that we've paid to map out and know exactly where they are.
As current deposits empty out, companies will invest in mapping out others.
Maybe governments are helping to prop up EVs as a means of covertly hoarding lithium. Even if EVs don't work out, having an abundance of lithium could be of tremendous value. /conspiracy
> Earth has 88 million tons of lithium, of which only 1/4 is economically feasible to mine.
This is outrageously spun. That number is (I assume, you don't cite a source) a count of total known reserves. That's not the way research extraction works; as industries develop (and this one is in its infancy) they discover new sources. This is the logic that led people to warn about "peak oil" in the 90's. They were hilariously wrong (because guess what? we "discovered" fracking as prices rose!).
The "1/4 economically feasible" bit likewise assumes, again, current prices and production method. You don't think it's possible to reach a price equilibrium and technology balance that makes that worthwhile to extract? Why? It's happened for every other resource we use.
And the big mistake here is that you're assuming that we throw the batteries in the trash when a vehicle reaches end of life. In point of fact battery elements are among the most effectively recycled materials in the modern economy. A junk NMC battery is, in essence, a very highly concentrated cobalt/lithium ore just waiting for smelting. We don't "run out" like you posit. At steady state, we need enough to cover growth and loss only.
Basically: you're wrong. There's lots and lots of Li out there long term. In the nearer term, though, yeah: we can't mine remotely enough of the stuff and batteries will remain expensive as the industry grows.
Truly, micromobility like E-bikes are cheap, require much less space, healthier and are more social. Governments do not know how to build for micromobility yet it seems.
1) Climate modeling is hard. There have been substantial shifts in the climate over time, including five ice ages.
2) Climate change predictions have been repeatedly wrong. In the 80's they said the Maldives would be submerged by 2000, for example. Maldives are still there.
3) if the models are good then things like the costs of coastal real estate should show it. Coastal real estate is still premium so either the models are wrong or the banks are ignoring the models and lend huge amounts on property thar will soon be reclaimed by the sea.
4) There are people and countries with trillions on pil reserve wealth who will be reduced to poverty in a fossil free world. Are they going to cooperate with their own impoverishment based on weak, poorly performing climate models produced by antagonistic western states?
5) There is a huge installed base of fossil fuels in the developing world. The energy density and portability of fossils is great for places with limited infrastructure. How do you convert them?
6) Nuclear is the only realistic approach to mass scale decarbonization. Why is this ignored. If you believe the climate models then we should accept the stochastic risks of nuclear over the absolute risk of climate in the near future. Is not the risk of an occasional Chernobyl better than planet wide destruction and degradation.
7) The past few years have demonstrated the danger of alarmists reacting to scary looking model data that they don't fully understand.
8) Addressing climate change directly at the source is intractable for the reasons I've listed. Mitigation approaches are going to pay much better dividends than multi moon shot green technology agendas.
> Climate change predictions have been repeatedly wrong
This is fossil fuel industry propaganda - whoever told you this is untrustworthy and literally banking on you not fact-checking their claims. The consensus predictions since the late 1970s have been increasingly accurate, especially since the 1980s.
For example, the first IPCC report from 1990 had estimates which we now have data to judge them against:
Similarly, Dr. James Hansen (director of NASA's Goddard Institute) testified before Congress based on his 1988 study predicting global warming and his numbers were very close to what we saw over the subsequent 3 decades:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
If you believe that “ice age” talk was real, remember that the source of that was a couple of speculative papers which were never widely accepted and were refuted by the late 1970s.
2) By "they said the Maldives would be submerged by 2000", this seems to be one report which was the basis for for a full study of the problem by the UN. Do you agree there have been notable, significant, temperature rises over the last 100 years, which appear to be a significantly faster change than in previous ice ages?
Don’t know where to put this, but utility rates in northern California have gotten to the point where it’s cheaper to drive my prius than my EV from a fuel standpoint, and that’s using the special off peak EV rate.
If you have net metering and solar, great, but at this point if you’re not a homeowner with grandfathered nem 2.0, Evs make no sense in northern ca.
Pretty much the same in most of Europe. Electric trams are stopped where I lived, council resigned from buying electric buses, some nearby cities even turn on only one side of street lights, charging EV is more expensive than diesel for the same range.
I think any solution that involves things getting worse for people is a non-starter. EVs will soon reach the point where it makes no sense to purchase an ICE vehicle. That is the model to shoot for - make the bad stuff obsolete. When the bad stuff is obsolete already (WFO is a good example), lets do our best to take advantage of it.
EVs absolutely help, but they don't address any of the myriad of problems inherent in low occupancy vehicle transportation. One person in a car requires more resources (energy, parking space, space on the road while in use, the cost of the vehicle and its maintenance, damage to roads, injuries/deaths from crashes, etc)
If we spent even some money spent on self-driving vehicles on public transit infrastructure, we'd get immediate gains and it would in particular help those who are on the bottom rungs of the ladder economically - making it easier for them to contribute toward society, and causing fewer problems to boot (such as the enormous costs of trying to maintain a cheaper/older car, causing a crash because their vehicle is poorly maintained, or they fell asleep while driving from working 2-3 jobs, etc.)
Governments don't tax land so they have no incentive to invest in good public transport. Most transportation projects massively increase property values which is then captured by landlords instead of governments and then everyone complains that public transport doesn't work and can't fund itself and people wonder why politicians invest in boondoggles to immortalise themselves instead of acting more like a business that prioritizes useful investments because it increases future tax revenue.
Land value taxes make way more sense than income taxes because they are location based. If a politician makes a mistake and you move away they will get your income tax regardless. So they have no reason to invest in any given location.
Even factoring in probable range increases and advances in charging tech, it will still be necessary to incrementally, if not fully, charge EVs in public. One thing that doesn’t seem to occur to our elected officials… there is nowhere near enough real estate to charge that many vehicles around town.
We are talking 2050 right? Why would most people keep a separate self-driving EV in the garage? Just hail one through an app and it will drive you on your trip, 1 mile or 500 miles. Some people just enjoy shaming others for living pleasant lives when technology is already available to preserve each activity while keeping carbon emissions down and is not standing still - in fact the rate of technological advancement of humanity is accelerating over time. Lab grown meat can be cheaper, tastier and healthier than one from a whole animal. See your less important travel destinations in high quality VR. Or if you still want organic meat or a non-VRable beach vacation, enjoy, we have carbon capture and biofuel tech to get you covered. Progress is about giving choices, not taking away choices.
The Economist wrote a few months back that an EV in Japan actually produces more carbon per mile than an ICE because almost all of their energy comes from coal plants. I'm not sure if America has a radically different coal plant design which produces less carbon somehow, but ~60% of electricity in America comes from coal. [edit: 60% is fossil fuel generated, ~20% is coal]
Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs, and America is not well situated for public transport since we built out instead of up.
I don't want anyone to get the impression that EVs are bad, but people act like they're saving the world by buying a Tesla. It's not that simple. This is a very, very difficult problem and every solution has trade-offs.
Coal provided 23% of US electricity generation in 2021, 20% in 2022, and is forecast to fall to 19% in 2023. The US now burns less than half of the coal it did in 2007.
On US average grid EVs get 93mpg equivalent. On the dirtiest (most carbon intense) grid in the US that figure is 42, the cleanest 256. Of course for EVs those numbers will get better each year.
Even if you still run off coal you are decoupling energy source from the vehicle allowing the vehicle to run off any source that currently makes the most sense. You can't run a gas car off coal but you can run an electric.
Power plants are more efficient than small combustion engines as well as having more sophisticated emission controls with no concerns for weight or size with a full time staff to maintain them.
The grid needs to increase 30% to support all cars, it only took 40 years for it to increase 5X from 1960 to 2000, about 4% per year, so less than 10 years to support all cars, easily doable.
> The Economist wrote a few months back that an EV in Japan actually produces more carbon per mile than an ICE because almost all of their energy comes from coal plants. I'm not sure if America has a radically different coal plant design which produces less carbon somehow, but ~60% of electricity in America comes from coal.
It is easier to upgrade a (comparative) small number of power plants than it is to make everyone's ICE engine more efficient.
> Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs.
The amount of work needed to upgrade our grid to handle the increased usage of air conditioning due to global warming is greater than the work needed to support EVs.
The article headline sets up a straw man. EVs do two important things: take a diffuse source of CO2 and other pollutants, and confine the problem to large-scale power plants. They also cut smog in cities where people are most exposed to pollution.
Other commenters here have noted that small EVs like scooters are an important part of electrifying transport. A lot of cities would smell a lot better with electric scooters replacing gas scooters.
I feel like I'm missing something fundamental about the whole EV thing.
1. Produce/transport a bunch of electric vehicles, producing massive emissions
2. ???
3. Somehow billions of tonnes of carbon get removed from the atmosphere
I fail to see how EVs do anything to actually do something about the problem i.e. REMOVE CO2 from the atmosphere.
I see on some days, that electricity generation in Germany is 45% coal and 20% gas. With all transmission and storage losses the EVs are almost coal powered then. I know, it’s very rough estimation. But with coal powered cars not much positive can be done against climate change.
EVs have the most effect on atmospheric carbon when they are saving money over an ICE vehicle. If the all-in cost (vehicle, fuel, parts, repair, etc.) per mile traveled isn't less, it's very unlikely there is lower carbon emitted.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|3 years ago|reply
From the article:
> This is not to imply in any way that electric vehicles are worthless. Analysis by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) argues that EVs are the quickest means to decarbonize motorized transport.
The headline feels like someone crafted it for maximum clickbait. The perpetual doomsday framing of everything, including the climate wins, only makes people tune out of the conversation.
[+] [-] labrador|3 years ago|reply
It's written as a bait to people who have bought into the oil industry propaganda that EV's aren't a solution. "Where do you think the electricity comes from? Coal, gas and oil fueled power plants, that's where." If I had a dollar for every time I've heard this I could afford a Tesla.
[+] [-] acdha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfpotter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aqme28|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|3 years ago|reply
Meanwhile old boring things like trains, trams (frequent, comfortable, extensive), proper bike lanes, do more for climate change and general quality of life than replacing a petrol SUV with an electric SUV.
[+] [-] PheonixPharts|3 years ago|reply
EVs aren't a climate win. It's just more consumption which ultimately means more energy which means more oil.
Aside from that the issue has nothing to do with where the oil is consumed, but how much. The only way to stop climate change is to prevent oil from being extracted. We're currently in the process of escalating a war to extract more so I'm not optimistic about this.
If EVs had an impact on US oil consumption you would expect that consumption to drop right?
But 2022 was nearly a record year for US oil consumption [0]:
> 20.40 million bpd in 2022 and 20.75 million bpd in 2023. That compares with a record 20.80 million bpd in 2005
EVs are just a way to keep you consuming while feeling okay about. It's not a climate win in the slightest.
0. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-crude-output-petroleum...
[+] [-] college_physics|3 years ago|reply
EV's will play some role to keep that pattern workable, but it may well be that other ways of organising life and the economy will prove better adapted and more efficient in the midterm (~20 yrs)
Keep in mind that co2 is just one of the many constraints we are increasingly bumping against. The age of innocence is gone. On the other hand there is nothing sacred about how we organized things since 1900 or so...
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|3 years ago|reply
Yep. Technically correct, but an example of shooting for the wrong goal, and failing entirely.
The goal is not making our motorized transport system low carbon. The goal is limiting the damage of climate change and keeping a lid on temperature rises. If we constrain our solution set to maintaining the same sort of motorized transport system we will fail.
I would like to hope that software engineers on this site reading this would recognize such a problem.
It is like when, fundamentally, the design of a program from the get go was wrong from the first foot forward and as a result it's simply too slow. No amount of fiddling around the edges, hacks and minor fixes will result in an adequate improvement. Only a new design is a real fix.
Thankfully in many ways it's actually easier to fix cities than to fix a major software project. For one thing we at least know the solutions, and they're easily achievable given political will and with not a great deal of money. (not easily around on a software project!)
Most of the issues come more from political restriction than anything else, and so much can be done by simply letting people do things that they're currently banned from doing (ie. let people build more housing). Couple that with some relatively affordable bike lanes and rapid bus lanes, and one can achieve remarkable improvements with relatively little capital expenditure and effort.
> Even a few US cities it might be livable without a car.
Musing that better things are maybe possible in "a few" US cities is dramatically low ambition and out of touch.
Consider that 45% of Vancouver's West End commutes to work by walking. That's a neighbourhood of 45,000 in a major NA city. There's absolutely nothing going on remarkably here that accounts for this excepting the simple fact that it's a bunch of 1960s era residential apartments in a pleasant tree lined area within a 20 minute walking distance of Vancouver's Downtown. That's it. I'm pretty sure this concept is quite replicable in cities across America.
[+] [-] longitudinal93|3 years ago|reply
And support for alternatives is plentiful - bus service is excellent, bike lanes and routes are abundant, there are numerous and frequent bike share stations, etc.
It's definitely a great place to live.
[+] [-] jakewins|3 years ago|reply
Why would IEEE use a quote from 2017 from some Norwegian blog to make it seem IEAs position is the opposite of what it actually is?
[+] [-] pyrrhotech|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakewins|3 years ago|reply
Lithium is one of the most common elements on the planet. Earths crust contains ~0.002-0.006% Li by weight, or 1,220,000,000 million tonnes if you use the low estimate.
You seem to have confused the concept of "known reserves" - the 88M number is deposits that we've paid to map out and know exactly where they are.
As current deposits empty out, companies will invest in mapping out others.
[+] [-] mjrpes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] triyambakam|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajross|3 years ago|reply
This is outrageously spun. That number is (I assume, you don't cite a source) a count of total known reserves. That's not the way research extraction works; as industries develop (and this one is in its infancy) they discover new sources. This is the logic that led people to warn about "peak oil" in the 90's. They were hilariously wrong (because guess what? we "discovered" fracking as prices rose!).
The "1/4 economically feasible" bit likewise assumes, again, current prices and production method. You don't think it's possible to reach a price equilibrium and technology balance that makes that worthwhile to extract? Why? It's happened for every other resource we use.
And the big mistake here is that you're assuming that we throw the batteries in the trash when a vehicle reaches end of life. In point of fact battery elements are among the most effectively recycled materials in the modern economy. A junk NMC battery is, in essence, a very highly concentrated cobalt/lithium ore just waiting for smelting. We don't "run out" like you posit. At steady state, we need enough to cover growth and loss only.
Basically: you're wrong. There's lots and lots of Li out there long term. In the nearer term, though, yeah: we can't mine remotely enough of the stuff and batteries will remain expensive as the industry grows.
[+] [-] jhp123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasttense01|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diebeforei485|3 years ago|reply
Do you have a source for this figure?
[+] [-] MaysonL|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zip1234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] andrepd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fwungy|3 years ago|reply
2) Climate change predictions have been repeatedly wrong. In the 80's they said the Maldives would be submerged by 2000, for example. Maldives are still there.
3) if the models are good then things like the costs of coastal real estate should show it. Coastal real estate is still premium so either the models are wrong or the banks are ignoring the models and lend huge amounts on property thar will soon be reclaimed by the sea.
4) There are people and countries with trillions on pil reserve wealth who will be reduced to poverty in a fossil free world. Are they going to cooperate with their own impoverishment based on weak, poorly performing climate models produced by antagonistic western states?
5) There is a huge installed base of fossil fuels in the developing world. The energy density and portability of fossils is great for places with limited infrastructure. How do you convert them?
6) Nuclear is the only realistic approach to mass scale decarbonization. Why is this ignored. If you believe the climate models then we should accept the stochastic risks of nuclear over the absolute risk of climate in the near future. Is not the risk of an occasional Chernobyl better than planet wide destruction and degradation.
7) The past few years have demonstrated the danger of alarmists reacting to scary looking model data that they don't fully understand.
8) Addressing climate change directly at the source is intractable for the reasons I've listed. Mitigation approaches are going to pay much better dividends than multi moon shot green technology agendas.
[+] [-] acdha|3 years ago|reply
This is fossil fuel industry propaganda - whoever told you this is untrustworthy and literally banking on you not fact-checking their claims. The consensus predictions since the late 1970s have been increasingly accurate, especially since the 1980s.
For example, the first IPCC report from 1990 had estimates which we now have data to judge them against:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...
Similarly, Dr. James Hansen (director of NASA's Goddard Institute) testified before Congress based on his 1988 study predicting global warming and his numbers were very close to what we saw over the subsequent 3 decades:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97... If you believe that “ice age” talk was real, remember that the source of that was a couple of speculative papers which were never widely accepted and were refuted by the late 1970s.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...
[+] [-] CJefferson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkingsy|3 years ago|reply
If you have net metering and solar, great, but at this point if you’re not a homeowner with grandfathered nem 2.0, Evs make no sense in northern ca.
[+] [-] agilob|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] osigurdson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KennyBlanken|3 years ago|reply
If we spent even some money spent on self-driving vehicles on public transit infrastructure, we'd get immediate gains and it would in particular help those who are on the bottom rungs of the ladder economically - making it easier for them to contribute toward society, and causing fewer problems to boot (such as the enormous costs of trying to maintain a cheaper/older car, causing a crash because their vehicle is poorly maintained, or they fell asleep while driving from working 2-3 jobs, etc.)
[+] [-] imtringued|3 years ago|reply
Land value taxes make way more sense than income taxes because they are location based. If a politician makes a mistake and you move away they will get your income tax regardless. So they have no reason to invest in any given location.
[+] [-] andrepd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AstixAndBelix|3 years ago|reply
Heavily push for EVs.
Allow combustion engines when actually necessary instead of banning everything like a bunch of blind ideologues.
Clean up the air from carbon to compensate.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mulcahey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffrogers|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cat_plus_plus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giardia|3 years ago|reply
Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs, and America is not well situated for public transport since we built out instead of up.
I don't want anyone to get the impression that EVs are bad, but people act like they're saving the world by buying a Tesla. It's not that simple. This is a very, very difficult problem and every solution has trade-offs.
[+] [-] kiba|3 years ago|reply
It's currently economically unsustainable. We will need to densify and abandon non-viable area, get rid of minimum parking, and reduce lanes of roads.
[+] [-] philipkglass|3 years ago|reply
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184333/coal-energy-consu...
[+] [-] thinkcontext|3 years ago|reply
https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/plug-in-or-gas-up-why...
[+] [-] SigmundA|3 years ago|reply
Even if you still run off coal you are decoupling energy source from the vehicle allowing the vehicle to run off any source that currently makes the most sense. You can't run a gas car off coal but you can run an electric.
Power plants are more efficient than small combustion engines as well as having more sophisticated emission controls with no concerns for weight or size with a full time staff to maintain them.
The grid needs to increase 30% to support all cars, it only took 40 years for it to increase 5X from 1960 to 2000, about 4% per year, so less than 10 years to support all cars, easily doable.
[+] [-] com2kid|3 years ago|reply
It is easier to upgrade a (comparative) small number of power plants than it is to make everyone's ICE engine more efficient.
> Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs.
The amount of work needed to upgrade our grid to handle the increased usage of air conditioning due to global warming is greater than the work needed to support EVs.
[+] [-] ezfe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|3 years ago|reply
Other commenters here have noted that small EVs like scooters are an important part of electrifying transport. A lot of cities would smell a lot better with electric scooters replacing gas scooters.
[+] [-] sillywalk|3 years ago|reply
1. Produce/transport a bunch of electric vehicles, producing massive emissions 2. ??? 3. Somehow billions of tonnes of carbon get removed from the atmosphere
I fail to see how EVs do anything to actually do something about the problem i.e. REMOVE CO2 from the atmosphere.
[+] [-] lnsru|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timbit42|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnx|3 years ago|reply