The electric car as a talisman of false hope

His argument distills to: solve it all-at-once, or don’t solve it at all.<p>This is an uninteresting and uninspiring line of thinking that ignores the nature of socially dynamic systems which don’t exist in a world of instantaneous cause-and-effect.<p>His conclusion states that electric cars make a difference, but they don’t make a <i>real</i> difference: “I do think they can slightly reduce unsustainability” but “by switching from a regular car to electric I might think that I am making a real difference”.<p>I’m sorry that the author doesn’t consider a <i>real</i> reduction in emissions a <i>real</i> difference.<p>Look, it’s simple, climate change will require a concerted effort to change in multiple markets across multiple arenas. And the solutions are not mutually exclusive. People that buy electric cars to help the environment or become vegetarian, are probably <i>more</i> likely to make additional changes in their life, and persuade others to make changes as well, to reduce emissions.<p>Most people arrive at the decision to purchase an electric vehicle exactly because they are questioning their way of life. Electric vehicles are not a talisman of false hope, they’re a singular step in the right direction.

Alot about our system of roads and cars strikes me as crazy. Most of the vehicles on the road have only one person in them, yet weigh as much as an elephant. Nobody drives under the speed limit, which is typically fast enough to result in hundreds of thousands of fatalities every year anyways. Every neighborhood designed primarily for these idiotically heavy vehicles, that occasionally drive over pets and children who made the mistake of wandering off a footpath. Then there’s the pollution, of course. I can’t imagine many people would accept the way we do things today, if we started from zero and someone proposed it, instead of the situation slow-boiling us over a period of a half century.

Seems to me a lot of people are so attached to carculture that they can&#x27;t even read the article properly.<p>The author sees all sorts of good things about electric cars. I drive them myself. I love cars. But...<p>The points the article makes about cars being part of a larger flawed system of urban and rural development are spot on.<p>&#x27;Self-driving&#x27; cars will only make this worse.<p>Even just the excessive prevalence of hard-top surfaces in roads and parking lots leads to environmental catastrophe when flooding begins.<p>Urban sprawl leads to farmland and natural area destruction.<p>The car is the ultimate symbol of entitled consumerist individualism, and it is becoming more and more unsustainable.<p>The net effect of every household being in car(s) with a population as big as we have is really bad, even if all emissions were to be eliminated.<p>If all the private investment money being dumped into self-driving technology at the moment were public money being put into urban mass transit, just think of what could be accomplished...

Electric vehicles would make a huge difference to me and many others that suffer from asthma.<p>Moving the emissions away from the vehicles , away from city centres and roads to the factories and power stations where they can be controlled would save thousands of lives.<p>Our children will look at us how we look at people during the industrial revolution. And a gradual change is better than no change at all.

&gt; To have any chance of slowing down climate breakdown rather than accelerating it further, we need to change our entire way of life...<p>I agree with him. And that&#x27;s why I keep saying that global warming is here to stay. We had better to learn to cope with it rather than hoping it can be reversed!

Honestly, I hope electric cars become commonplace just because of the reduction in noise pollution let alone PM and CO2 emissions.<p>Furthermore, I&#x27;m not really sure what the author thinks we should do? How can we maintain modern civilisation without factories etc.? Reverting to some primitive state seems neither realistic nor desirable.

The author has a point.<p>Out of all the other industries dominated by massive corporations - and we know how they go about doing business - the first priority to save the planet is for John Doe to buy a new product! Also, let&#x27;s create a culture where we feel justified to shame people who don&#x27;t do it.<p>Of course nothing is black and white. I love electric cars and will probably get one. I think they&#x27;re really cool and would love to do my bit in keeping things green.<p>BUT at the same, you got to see a bit of irony in the whole thing don&#x27;t you?

Are there examples of societies radically changing their lifestyles in order to prevent a disaster?

I bought my EV for three reasons:<p>1. Traditional car maintenance is expensive and sucks<p>2. I&#x27;m betting due to natural disasters in the environment and in the Oval Office we will see fuel prices continue to rise<p>3. While I don&#x27;t think it will save the planet by itself, it can certainly save lives. Emissions are dangerous to breathe in and we are willfully ignoring it.

Two me, reading the graph in the article brings up two priorities:<p>1: transition to renewable energy<p>2: figure out how to lower the carbon emissions during<p>1&amp;2 sound a <i>lot</i> easier than completely transitioning off motorized personal transportation.<p>#2 can be done with appropriate government incentives, like a $100&#x2F;ton carbon tax + equivalent tariff. Producers will use alternate energy sources and otherwise eliminate carbon wherever it costs them less than $100&#x2F;ton to do so, and the $100 can pay for sequestration when it costs them more.<p>Of course #2 will significantly increase the price of a car. This will also help to convince people to use alternatives. But cars will still be significantly cheaper than they are in Denmark or Norway, yet those two countries are still fairly car oriented.

The charts on the page directly contradict the headline.<p>In the renewable energy case emissions are miniscule, and in fact only come about because the chart assumes large emissions during manufacture - a lot of the processes involved in producing an EV could be done with renewable energy, and would be if we instituted a carbon tax or otherwise forced the issue.

Electric vehicles are ranking number 26 in terms of total cost and total atmospheric reduction of CO2:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drawdown.org&#x2F;solutions-summary-by-rank" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drawdown.org&#x2F;solutions-summary-by-rank</a><p>So its not a talisman, but it is certainly a real step in the right direction. I don&#x27;t hear anybody saying that electric cars means we can just forget about the other causes of climate change?<p>A very contrarian article that just argues against a straw man. I suspect people who write articles like this are usually the ones who revel in being smarter than everybody else.

We could for example:<p>1. Incentivise retrofitting of electric transmissions to cars with internal combustion engines<p>2. Disincentivise the introduction of new models, visual updates etc. to existing cars via taxation<p>3. Incentivise durability and repairability - force car makers to produce cars that are modular and easily repaired, enforced limits on pricing of spare parts, force open-sourcing of designs etc.<p>Of course all of above would likely smash the car makers&#x27; current business model to pieces - and when you get down to it this is the real problem with the kind of genuine, general change we need to see in order to save the Earth.<p>Sustainable approaches simply will not deliver the kind of reduction in consumption required. Everyone is going to have to accept a much poorer lifestyle. The main blocker to me is the rich: how are they going to justify their continued opulence when the companies they own (are forced to) produce so little for the average person?

Looking at other articles the guy seems to be full in apocalyptic thinking - a few in he has an article on &quot;Collapse&quot; and lifeboat thinking. Those are words are downright toxic meme symptoms referring to paranoid and evil ideologirs respectively. They are like referring to science based medicine as &quot;alleopathic&quot; is a sure sign that they are off the deep ene in alternative medicine.<p>To explain &quot;collapse&quot; briefly there is even a &#x2F;r&#x2F;Collapse convinced of coming doomsdays from various sources from any fear de jure from ebola, economic meltdowns, or global warming.<p>&quot;Lifeboat ethics&quot; refers to a rehash of Malthusians and Eugenicists arguing helping people who are worse off is actively immoral and rapidly justifies travesties. There is a reason I skip straight to evil when describing them - when in power their actions can have no other end.

One of the things I like to do when half in the bag in a bar and blagging to a new friend is to say,<p>&quot;Look - pick a direction - any direction - and tell me what you see.&quot;<p>And what they see is plastic and metal and bar bottles with paint on them and more plastic and all the detritus of human society.<p>And every piece of it, as far as the eye can see!, will be garbage in 6 months to 20 years and sit on the ground and leech poisons into the Earth and nothing will grow from it.<p>Every.<p>Single.<p>Piece.<p>We, as human beans, have broken the cycle of life and death where something grows, flowers, dies, rots and something else grows and flowers. This idea that we can make a new shiny thing that will become more garbage to fix all our problems so we can keep eating more isn&#x27;t going to change that.<p>The solution is that we simply have to do with less. And people will kill each other before they admit that.<p>It&#x27;s already starting to happen now.

From my European perspective, this reads like a typical leftist pov. First of all, <i>of course</i> everyone has to change their way of living. This has been the corner Stone of left ideology since forever.<p>And then <i>of course</i> the attack on EV, because it is not about the climate, but about individuality. Individual travel simply does not fit into a world view where everyone has to change their way of living into <i>the</i> rational way. And offering a different solution is heresy.

Why is the embodied carbon in the manufacture of the car the same in all the energy mix scenarios? Surely quite a lot of electricity is used in manufacturing electric vehicles.<p>Also, solutions that rely on substantially reconfiguring living patterns - moving from driving-required suburbs to walkable communities also have large embodied carbon costs. It&#x27;s all well and good to say that suburbs are energy inefficient but the US has a lot of them already built.

We can imagine that the energy mix in EU will lean towards more renewable energy, increasing the benefit of electric cars over conventional cars. If indeed not decreasing yet, the number of cars sold seems to flatten and I can see that Europeans cities are transforming to make life more complicated for cars owners (ie LEZ tax in London) and easier for pedestrians and bikes. Several reasons to be optimistic.

reminds me of slavoj zizek&#x27;s point of how corporations use problems caused by consumption and come up with a solution that increases consumption, like the &quot;2% of profits goes towards planting trees&quot; type of scenario

The numbers are somewhat contested. See potholer54&#x27;s well-sourced video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hwMPFDqyfrA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hwMPFDqyfrA</a> He cites ghg savings of about 20-30% for a common mix of electricity production sources.<p>Of course, Jussi Pasanen is still completely right. The only solution is to stop driving cars.

Electric batteries gives the most effect in shared transport such as buses and taxis. If I remember correctly it’s 50x more efficient with batteries in such public vehicles. This is due to higher utilization they buses drive all day vs private cars mostly are parked.<p>This we should electrify public transport first for maximum carbon reduction.

“Still, in most cases an electric car is slightly less bad for the living planet than a comparable car with an internal combustion engine – if you can afford to buy one.”<p>Bad article all around. There is bias in that statement alone referencing the price of EV’s after an admission that they are actually better for the environment already. This article also references almost every negative trope about BEV’s.<p>What many of these articles fail to explore is any future advancements in technology that can solve some of the issues listed. Nothing in BEV technology is static, almost everything is improving from motor efficiency all the way to removing things like cobalt from batteries. It’s also possible that we will see a lot more localized solar and wind power for charging stations over time.<p>Lastly, autonomy is coming which will be a game changer when paired with BEV technology.

I have an electric car because it lets me get in the carpool lane. I understand that investing the delta between an electric car and an ICE into some sort of carbon capture technology would likely be better for the environment, but then I wouldn’t be home for dinner 15min earlier.

It&#x27;s much more impactful for the tech community to push for remote work everywhere except where it&#x27;s physically necessary than to convince everyone to buy a battery car. Where i live it&#x27;s impossible to use one anyway due to non-robust electicity network. Despite being an island that is sunny year round, its not possible to incorporate more renewables into the system, so the main source of electricity remains oil. I bet the main buyers of battery cars live in big cities anyway.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;image.slidesharecdn.com&#x2F;emissionsfromdrivingtowork-1213018860684874-9&#x2F;95&#x2F;emissions-from-driving-to-work-4-728.jpg?cb=1212993525" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;image.slidesharecdn.com&#x2F;emissionsfromdrivingtowork-1...</a>

This is an extremely counter-productive line of thinking. Slowing climate change to manageable levels requires massive costs and sacrifice, but not insane levels. In terms of cost, single figure trillions.<p>IOW, similar to the Apollo project or the Iraq war. A heck of a lot cheaper than WWII.

&quot;Electric cars give us a sense that we can have change without having to change at all. They are a talisman of false hope.&quot;<p>On a tangent issue: it going to get even worse. The automotive industry predicts total annual miles driven to go up by 300% when autonomous driving comes through.

Some perspective on EVs: Project Drawdown lists CO2 reduction by adoption of better cars as #49 in it&#x27;s ranked list of of climate change solutions. #1 and #2 are refrigerant management and onshore wind turbines respectively.

You can see this false hope expressed all the time in media articles that assume that we will just electrify all the cars with no other changes to how we do transportation. That hope is why we are told how important it is to get chargers absolutely everywhere, that charging needs to be fast and how important it is that electric cars have the same range as petroleum cars.<p>The thing is, cities don&#x27;t want <i>any</i> sort of cars these days. So in most cases the type of energy used to propel a car is beside the point and a lot of this discussion doesn&#x27;t matter any more.

About 300,000 cars cross the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge every day.<p>I think the author&#x27;s point is that if they were all electric, there would _still_ be 300,000 cars crossing the bridge each day, and the problems of road maintenance costs, pedestrian safety, and soul-deadening commute times remain. Fewer GHG emissions, to be sure.<p>A good next step would be to focus on reducing the total energy of the system. Minimizing 1&#x2F;2 m v^2 is your friend here -- reduce weight and reduce speed.

Have anyone seriously studied the impact of switching to all-electric cars on a global scale ?<p>I read that there are over a billion passenger cars right now, let&#x27;s say we manage to shift them all to electric by 2050 (not saying this is realistic), sure it&#x27;ll move the air pollution out of the city, but what about long term pollution, manufacturing, recycling, &amp;c. ? Would it really solve the problem or simply move it out of our sight for a few decades ?

More inconvenient truth in TFA. Note that the market price of electricity hit $9.00&#x2F;kwh in Texas last week. IICC, that would be maybe a couple of Benjamins to charge an electric car, suggesting that there will have to be bigger changes than electric cars if we really want to keep things the way they are.

Once we get self driving, there could be far fewer cars per person. If you amortize that part of the bar chart of emissions which comes from producing the vehicle and divide it by, say, 20, and continue to develop new solar and wind farms, the BEV looks really amazing compared to current non-self driving ICE cars.

So we transition to EV&#x27;s <i>and</i> we change power to non-fossil fuels. It&#x27;s not hard it just costs money and requires some sacrifice. I&#x27;m on 100% renewable now. If I wasn&#x27;t already, I&#x27;d happily pay twice what I pay now to ensure I was at least on non-fossil if not on renewable.

I made this same point on an article about &quot;where will apartment dwellers and city dwellers with street parking charge their EVs&quot;. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20678842" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20678842</a><p>It was a question that was completely missing the forest for the trees. Just like this article is claiming all the EV boosterism is doing.<p>An EV car is still a car. It&#x27;s still three tons of steel that goes way too fast and gets used in all manner of inappropriate ways. As an EV owner, you are still part of the problem. Not to mention that you just bought a fantastically expensive vehicle to signal how much you &quot;care&quot; about the environment, but not enough to give up any creature comforts. And how many anti-malaria bednets could you have bought instead if you got a used fuel efficient ICE or, gasp, no car at all?<p>Much higher impact would be accelerating retrofitting our cities and towns for other modes of transportation: bikes and scooters, massively expanded public transit, and walking.

Too little too late? That&#x27;s the best the writer could say? Pessimism is not what we yearn for.

What an absolute garbage piece.<p>Solving environmental impact is extremely political and is fought every step of the way by those with vested interests.<p>This adds nothing to help improve things, it actually does the opposite.<p>Yes, we know if we went back to pre-industrial revolution we&#x27;d stop impacting the planet. Good luck with that.

Everyone can drive an electric car with the Green Nuclear Deal.

Ok, so the author suggests nothing.. He fails to describe the solution(if any). May be the solution is population control.

&quot;Tesla sales are up seven-fold from Q3 2015 to Q3 2018&quot;<p>Wow. I consider that a good sign. Electric cars <i>are</i> progress.