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447 points Brajeshwar | 3 comments | 03 Sep 23 14:53 UTC | HN request time: 0.705s | 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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whats_a_quasar ◴[03 Sep 23 18:00 UTC] No.37372583[source]▶
Electric cars vastly reduce the environmental impact of cars. Everyone who's run the numbers agrees on this [1][2][3]. Battery vehicles aren't that much heavier than gasoline vehicles, and the volume of metals needed to make a battery is a tiny fraction of the volume of oil needed to fuel a car across its lifecycle. Power plants are much more efficient than small engines in cars, and as the grid decarbonizes the emissions of battery electric vehicles move towards zero. Electric cars really are far better for the planet than burning gas, there isn't a catch.

I get the worries, Lithium mining causes ecological damage, but every sort of resource extraction causes ecological damage. Every kilogram of pollution generated from lithium mining prevents many times more pollution generated from oil extraction and emissions. Lithium, cobalt, and the rest aren't exotic materials, the battery industry is huge and has many decades of experience building batteries.

Synthesizing hydrocarbons is an important technology. But that process is incredibly energy intensive, and it's much more efficient to use electricity to just charge a battery. The scale of production of synthetic hydrocarbons isn't anywhere close to where it would need to be to make a dent in climate change. I think that electrofuels will be very important in aviation - they're the only apparent pathway to run jet engines without emissions. But it will be a long time, if ever, before that technology is mature enough to fuel passenger vehicles at a meaningful scale.

[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/comparative-l...

[2] https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...

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AnthonyMouse ◴[03 Sep 23 18:12 UTC] No.37372716[source]▶
It's not just that. Solar is already cheaper than other generation methods, except that it's intermittent. So it needs some kind of storage technology.

The batteries in electric vehicles are a storage technology, so all you have to do is charge your car while the sun shines. If you need the batteries anyway it makes much more sense to put them there so you can also stop burning gasoline.

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lovecg ◴[03 Sep 23 18:22 UTC] No.37372833[source]▶
Yeah I became convinced over the last couple of years that solar + batteries is pretty much the solution and all the technology is here, everything else (degrowth, nuclear) is a politically infeasible distraction. We need larger scale and faster adoption which is a whole set of challenges on its own (see CA lagging behind Texas for example in what is a complete self-own)
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1. palata ◴[03 Sep 23 22:13 UTC] No.37375106[source]▶
> all the technology is here, everything else (degrowth, nuclear) is a politically infeasible distraction.

You need to replace fossil fuels with <whatever you think is the solution>. If you are convinced that solar + batteries can do it, then you need to rethink about orders of magnitudes.

Even nuclear cannot reasonably replace fossil fuels in the timeline that we need (i.e. before global instability that may well slow down many things). Solar is far behind.

Also never forget that we are living a mass extinction right now (it is happening, it is a measurable fact), and that is solely due to human activity in a world with abundant energy. If you find a solution to replace fossil fuels, you may save what remains to be saved on the climate front, but you will finish killing biodiversity. I don't know about you, but that is catastrophic to me.

Conclusion: we need to use much less energy, and therefore we need to be more minimalistic and stop growing just for the sake of growing. It's called "degrowth", but some people don't like that word because they think it means "go back to Middle Age". Instead it just means: engineers (like everybody else) need to work hard on clever solutions that rely less on energy. That's not Middle Age, it's just not the Silicon Valley world.

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2. AnthonyMouse ◴[04 Sep 23 00:21 UTC] No.37375965[source]▶
> Conclusion: we need to use much less energy

Your thinking is that we can't build solar panels and nuclear reactors fast enough, but we can build housing fast enough to move a significant fraction of the population to higher density areas where they don't have to drive as much? Because that's the low-hanging fruit on energy consumption, and it's a massive scale long-term construction project with significant political opposition.

And we should still do it, if only to get housing prices out of crazyland. But what makes you think we can do it any faster than we can build generation capacity?

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3. palata ◴[05 Sep 23 05:12 UTC] No.37388115[source]▶
I don't think I said that. Actually big cities are a problem themselves, because we need trucks to bring food to cities. So I don't think we want to have super big cities either.

I guess my point generally is that it is super hard to solve, because it touches everything. But it seems clear that we won't be able to compensate for fossil energy in the needed timeline. For nuclear plants, because it's super slow to build. For solar/wind, well we can't control them (if there is no sun, you get no photovoltaic energy) and we can't properly stock the energy they produce. And in any way, changing everything everywhere to work with electricity instead of fossil fuels is super hard, time consuming, and won't work for everything (oil is used for everything, not just cars).

So yeah, it's super challenging, it requires a lot of work and care everywhere. But the first step is to accept that we can't solve the problem by throwing more technology to it. We need to use technology wisely to get as much energy as we can, but in any case we have to drastically reduce our consumption, and therefore change society.