Climate Change Tracker

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.

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...

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.

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)

Solar + electric cars is an excellent solution for transportation. It's basically the whole problem gone as fast as you can build the new infrastructure.

But solar still has the same storage problem in the power grid. You need something to keep the lights on at night. Lithium batteries are cost effective when it means you can avoid the cost of the whole ICE powertrain and replace buying gas with cheap daytime solar -- which also means that the production capacity for lithium batteries is going to go there.

But then you start talking about electrifying heat, for which the peak demand is when it's colder. At night. And for that it makes sense to build some more nuclear reactors.

First, it shouldn't be solar+storage but solar+wind+storage. Solar and wind work well together because wind is strongest at night.

Second, you need to specify what kind of storage you are talking. We will need a lot less short-term storage for overnight than we need for cloudy, calm days. Batteries make sense for short-term storage but are too expensive for long-term. Generated fuels, like hydrogen, may work well for long-term storage and we'll them for other things.

Third, we can overbuild solar and wind. It might be cheaper to make 3x or 5x than needed. Finally, we are going to need extra energy for carbon capture and generating fuels.

> First, it shouldn't be solar+storage but solar+wind+storage. Solar and wind work well together because wind is strongest at night.

The trouble is they're both intermittent, even independent of time of day. For solar that's much less trouble because the demand is higher during the day, and aligns extremely well with air conditioning load in the summer.

But if you're relying on wind at night and then there isn't any, and you also have no solar because it's night, what's left?

> Generated fuels, like hydrogen, may work well for long-term storage and we'll them for other things.

At which point you have to add the cost of production, storage and generation facilities for some other generating technology.

> Third, we can overbuild solar and wind. It might be cheaper to make 3x or 5x than needed.

But how does that fix it? Sometimes it's calm for weeks, so your wind turbines are generating at 5% capacity for that long. Are you going to overbuild by 20x? Or build enough storage to power the entire grid for that long, even if you only use it for two weeks every three or four years?

> Finally, we are going to need extra energy for carbon capture and generating fuels.

This is a generic argument for building more of any kind of non-carbon generating capacity.