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447 points Brajeshwar | 5 comments | 03 Sep 23 14:53 UTC | HN request time: 1.541s | source
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alexchamberlain ◴[03 Sep 23 17:11 UTC] No.37372056[source]▶
I'm starting to wonder whether the conventional wisdom of reducing carbon emissions in favour of more electricalisation is really solving the actual problem. As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier than their fossil fueled alternatives, and generate other pollution along the way. Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment, without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment or what impact the mines themselves will have.

With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?

Naively, it feels like we understand C, O and H, better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing in the name of climate change.

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1. runarberg ◴[03 Sep 23 17:43 UTC] No.37372392[source]▶
Electric cars are a terrible representative of electrification. When people talk about electrification as a climate mitigation a big part of that is the significant increase in the energy efficiency of electric systems. For example a heat pump in a well insulated house will significantly decrease the energy consumption over a gas heater. Likewise delivering electricity to a saw mill will yield power with much more efficient energy use, than an on-site diesel powered machinery.

Now electric cars are definitely more efficient than ICE cars (despite being heavier; excluding today’s monster trucks like the electric Hummer). However a the transportation needs of a significant majority of people could be much more efficiently solved with public transit, even if that public transit is diesel powered. This is why climate policy experts quite often point out how electrification of private cars is generally regarded as a rather poor (and expensive) climate solution, next to other options.

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2. DennisP ◴[03 Sep 23 19:09 UTC] No.37373344[source]▶
If we were playing Civilization, then public transit would be the way to go. For the world we live in, expanding public transit is a slow and difficult political process, but people happily buy electric cars because they're fun.
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3. runarberg ◴[03 Sep 23 19:30 UTC] No.37373535[source]▶
Your timeline doesn’t work favorable for our climate. Electric car rollout is even slower than public transit rollout. A willing city government can dedicate a lane or two in strategic arterials, build bus stops, orders busses, and hire more bus drivers in 3-5 years easy (even quicker if they—as many cities already do—have a plan in place).

So far battery manufacturing facilities and raw materials required for an electric car rollout with equal impact to public transit simply don’t exist, creating the infrastructure for these facilities and expanding mining operation to meet up with the demand of batteries for all these electric cars might take 5-10 years with heavy government involvement, including subsidies to manufacturers amounting to orders of magnitude more than public transit infrastructure would need.

A realistic rollout of electric cars of sufficient magnitude is north of 2035. A realistic rollout of public transit infrastructure is 2030 with benefits starting immediately.

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4. DennisP ◴[03 Sep 23 22:34 UTC] No.37375248{3}[source]▶
Public transport advocates have been saying things like that as long as I can remember but I'm not seeing much more public transport. What I am seeing is accelerating adoption of electric cars, along with an exponential drop in battery costs.

However, if you can get governments to finally roll out lots more public transport, definitely go for it. Preferably with something electric, we don't really need more fossil on the road.

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5. runarberg ◴[04 Sep 23 00:16 UTC] No.37375944{4}[source]▶
I don’t know where you live and perhaps you are not seeing more public transit usage in your area, however if you look at the data—and the data both exists and is relatively easy to find—public transit usage is on the increase in most major cities in the world, even in North America.

In my country of origin the public transit system is horrendous where politicians picked subsidizing electric cars (despite policy experts telling them what terrible climate policy that is [data exists too on that]) with minimum funding going to public transit expansion. And even there—with the exception of covid—public transit usage is on the rise.

In my current home city of Seattle a lot of funding has gone into expanding and maintaining the public transit system and usage has increased very dramatically as a result.

The reality is that electric cars are not a good climate policy by any standard. Even a lackluster implementation of public transit expansion beats a solid program of subsidizing electric cars.