Climate Change Tracker

Curb weight:

  Ford Taurus: 3917 lbs.
  BMW 330i: 3536 lbs.
  Tesla Model 3: 3862 lbs.

> 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?

There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it. But those things are all theoretical or uneconomical right now, so until that changes we should carry on with the thing we know works.

We have a small car (that transports four adults in comfort) that weighs almost exactly half what the Taurus does. It's also really easy to park!

> There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it

Perhaps instead of trying to ban new ICE vehicles, the taxes should be gradually raised on diesel and petrol to include an additional levy which covers whatever mitigation strategy is appropriate to deal with the emissions.

Any new technology like making hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide requires the spending of a very large amount of money before becoming cost effective.

There are already several decades since almost all companies have stopped doing long-term research. Now everybody does research for things that will either become profitable next year or in any case when they are multi-year projects they are just improvements of established techniques, with known market, so that there is a very low risk that they might not be profitable.

The only way in which hydrocarbon synthesis would see the level of investment that is required for making it cost effective would be with some form of governmental intervention.

We could have had already today cost-effective hydrocarbon synthesis if a lot of money and research time would not have been wasted with research in various directions that have been considered as futile by most since the very beginning, especially for methods of hydrogen storage and for hydrogen fuel cells.

These vehicles were chosen because they are approximately the same size as the Model 3. You can make whatever kind of vehicle in whatever size you want. There are electric bikes that weigh 40 pounds.

> Perhaps instead of trying to ban new ICE vehicles, the taxes should be gradually raised on diesel and petrol to include an additional levy which covers whatever mitigation strategy is appropriate to deal with the emissions.

Raising energy costs before the existing infrastructure is replaced would be catastrophic, because replacing everything overnight is impossible and in the meantime the poor would go bankrupt and the middle class would become poor. The only sensible way to implement a carbon tax is to refund all of the money to the population.

But that's also all you need to do, because then people would have a monetary incentive to avoid the tax by reducing emissions in whatever way they find most efficient.

But you might not. That kind of technology is highly questionable thermodynamically. You're going to burn coal for energy and then turn the CO2 back into fuel for somehow less energy? Good luck with that. Just leave the coal in the ground where you found it.

The most promising thing in that ballpark is biofuels, but they compete with food production for farmland. Which could plausibly work for aviation but isn't likely to scale to transportation in general, much less production of electricity.

What's the average occupancy in a Model 3? Like I said, our tiny car can happily transport four adults plus shopping or a moderate quantity of luggage...

If everyone drove smaller, lighter vehicles, they'd use less fuel (of whatever variety), right?

We are already able to do the conversion from solar light to electrical energy at better efficiency than the plants and sooner or later we should be able to reach similar efficiency with the plants at carbon dioxide reduction into hydrocarbons.

If someone will succeed to solve the difficulties of the direct electrolysis of CO2 or of carbonates, we may exceed the efficiency of the plants, which reduce CO2 indirectly, with hydrogen obtained by the photolysis of water.

The conversion of CO2 into hydrocarbons is precisely the only solution to the CO2 problem that cannot be questioned in any way, because it is the only solution about which it is known with certainty that it works, as anyone can see by just opening a window and looking outside.

Using energy from fossil fuels for carbon capture is so obviously absurd that nobody could do such a silly thing.

Normally any carbon capture installation must be powered by solar or wind energy, simultaneously solving the problem of the energy storage.

I'm not sure how helpful it is to compare different cars.

Here's a more apples-to-apples comparison: a 2023 Kia Niro (which is itself a conventional hybrid, with a gasoline engine and a small battery and electric motor) compared to a 2023 Kia Niro EV. Almost everything is the same except the drivetrain. The EV[0] is ~500-800lbs heavier than the hybrid[1] depending on trim level and options, which is basically the difference between an empty car and one loaded with four adults and some luggage.

[0]: https://www.kiamedia.com/us/en/models/niro-ev/2023/specifica...

[1]: https://www.kiamedia.com/us/en/models/niro/2023/specificatio...

The energy comes from sunlight. If you actually use plants, that's biofuels.

> The conversion of CO2 into hydrocarbons is precisely the only solution to the CO2 problem that cannot be questioned in any way, because it is the only solution about which it is known with certainty that it works, as anyone can see by just opening a window and looking outside.

Anyone can also see that you can charge an electric car with solar panels and operate the entire country of France on nuclear, hydro and renewables without ever burning anything.

> Normally any carbon capture installation must be powered by solar or wind energy, simultaneously solving the problem of the energy storage.

Then you've made the economics even worse because your facility can only operate during periods of surplus generation, which everyone else will be trying to minimize by spinning down peaker plants, charging their electric cars and otherwise using competing storage technologies with lower costs.

And the fossil fuel plants are the ones you'd want to shut down during those times, which implies you'd also have to store the CO2 for later use, which requires tanks and compressors and more energy -- energy that comes out of the inefficient side of the system because you have to do that during the times you don't have surplus generation.

It's not really that surprising that this isn't currently cost effective and it's not obvious that it's the most cost effective area of research either.

Which is kind of the problem, because it implies they took a frame designed for the ICE powertrain and stuck some batteries it, which isn't the optimal way to do it.

Even then the difference is in the nature of 20%, which doesn't seem huge?

And the weight is going to be directional proportional to the size of the battery, which can be of arbitrary size. Electric vehicles with a >250 mile range are nice, but the average commute is a sixth of that.

I'm fairly expecting someone to soon make a sporty little sedan with a 75 mile range and a trailer for road trips that adds +300 miles worth of battery and gives you a place to put your luggage. And then you don't need the trailer 98% of the time and that thing is going to be actually lighter than the equivalent ICE car.

Comparing an electric car to a gasoline motorcycle is silly. Comparing an electric car to a gasoline car of a similar size, the electric car is going to be modestly if any heavier and significantly more efficient.

"Batteries are heavy. That’s why, generally, electric cars weigh considerably more than otherwise similar gasoline-powered vehicles"[0]

"Electric vehicles can be anywhere from hundreds to thousands of pounds heavier than similarly sized gas vehicles because EV batteries are so much heavier than engines."[1]

EDIT: I just looked up the weight of my little car's engine, it's just 69 kg (152 lbs). The weight of the battery in a Renault Zoe is 326 kg (719 lbs).

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/07/business/electric-vehicle... [1] https://www.axios.com/2023/04/28/evs-weight-safety-problems

Knoll's law.

> I just looked up the weight of my little car's engine, it's just 69 kg (152 lbs).

Gosh, so heavy. That's more than twice as much as the 365hp motor in the Model S!

How much is the transmission, alternator, water pump, radiator, coolant, exhaust system, fuel tank and fuel?

The main difference here is that the weight of a gasoline car is proportional to the size of the car, because a bigger car needs a bigger engine and transmission and all of that. A bigger electric motor adds a trivial amount of weight and you recover most of what's needed to accelerate a larger mass from regenerative braking, so the weight of the battery is proportional to the range.

But for a normal midsized car as you might see in the US, the weight is about the same even for a range in excess of 300 miles. It should be possible for an electric truck to weigh less, because you can put a 500hp electric motor in it (which is still light), remove the 900lb engine and 350lb transmission and all of that, and have well over 1000lbs left for the battery before it's actually heavier.

If you want a tiny little thing you can still make it arbitrarily light, you're just going to have to charge it more often then. But the average commute is 41 miles.