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.

> Solar is already cheaper than other generation methods...

In a world that mostly relies on abundant fossil energy. We tend to ignore that and interpolate from "solar improved 3x in the last year, so in X years it will have replaced oil", but that is just wrong. Solar today depends on fossil fuel, and it is absolutely not a given that it can ever replace it (e.g. see next point).

> ... except that it's intermittent.

Yep. So it's not enough. We are at a point right now where it is very likely that what we cannot change anymore (the consequences of what we already emitted) will already cause global instability. I find it crazy that people have the faith to count on technology that does not exist yet.

We need to use (much, much) less energy, that is the only solution. People don't like the word "degrowth", so let's call it differently: let's say we need a "smarter society": less bullshit, less over-consumption, more efficient everything, more minimalistic everything. Probably cryptocurrencies, cheap rockets and SUVs are not part of this world, though.

The production of solar panels requires lots of energy which currently uses fossil fuels. But the whole point of making solar panels is to decarbonize energy. We will need to use fossil fuels for a while longer to make the transition.

You didn't mention why this transition isn't possible. There is also not enough green energy currently to stop using fossil fuels. It is either transition or death.

You mention things that have a small effect. They would be good to get rid but they won't get us there. To use much less energy, we would need to give up cars, trains, AC, and heat. You probably say we should bicycles, and we should, but guess what gets used to make bicycles. We might have to give up food since industrial agriculture is required to feed everyone.