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[Richard230]

According to the attached article, which was published in my newspaper yesterday, the U.S. EPA prefers ICE-powered vehicles and doesn't pay much attention to electric vehicles. Likely because ICE keeps them busy testing emissions and dreaming up new pollution rules, whereas EVs don't give them much to do. Not good for their employment futures. 

[JaimeC]

Not to mention how much money the fossil fuel industry pours into political donations...

[Richard230]

Not to mention how much money the fossil fuel industry pours into political donations...

Well, there is that. 

[Eicas]

Job security!

[hiura]

Job security!

And the contributions to the economy. The naiveté of people is astounding if not surprising. Swaths of America are drowning in the opioid crisis due in no small part of outsourced jobs and no reasonable hope for a better life. So, lets just eliminate hundreds of thousands of other jobs with the stroke of a pen because there certainly won't be any negative downstream societal consequences and 2016 is an aberration rather than portending the obvious future where people who have no hope but a brick will make themselves heard.

The EV world is majority elite buyers and this is certainly the case compared with the rest of the world. We need to continue to transition to electric and nuclear but this takes time if you want to avoid chaos and social disruption. I'll get flak for pointing out the obvious, but people would rather virtue signal online than actually read a history book and take the effort to recognize patterns.

[Crissa]

We don't have time to transition.

It needs to be done yesterday.

-Crissa

[testdepth]

I agree - the time for a painless transition is passed - we squandered it arguing the economics & the science ... and protecting our consumerist lifestyle

[EV Moto]

Job security!

The EV world is majority elite buyers ... We need to continue to transition to electric and nuclear but this takes time if you want to avoid chaos and social disruption. ... read a history book and take the effort to recognize patterns.

RE:
Elite buyers — because the government hasn't backed & subsidized the EV industry enough to help Economies of Scale kick in, in that industry, as it has for the oil industry for many decades — with cost of production reduced & POINT-OF-PURCHASE rebate incentives, like Biden is considering, then all car buyers can take advantage of a government incentive to help them afford buying an EV & not just car buyers that can take advantage of a tax deduction.

Transition takes time — it really doesn't have to take this long (especially considering there is a climate crisis) — consider historic patterns like when the government led the country in the right direction, in directing manufacturers to contribute to winning WWII, RETOOLING their factories IN MONTHS, to produce very different products (going from manufacturing cars to planes/ships/tanks/etc.) — retooling from ICE to Electric vehicles is MUCH, MUCH LESS RETOOLING. 

Chaos and social disruption — like with the retooling to win WWII or the transition from horse and carriage to autos, there was no chaos (that's absurd) — disruptions are necessary sometimes, to keep humanity advancing (otherwise we'd still be living like cavemen), there've been disruptions throughout history and are necessary when the current situation is effing things up.

We don't have time to waste on thinking about excuses — our time needs to be spent on thinking of solutions like business models, creative financing, inventions, etc..

[Eicas]

I also agree that the world is running out of time because of excess pollution.  EV or hydrogen power will help a lot, but that by itself is not enough.  Our new world order of using disposable products rather than fixing and reusing carries a lot of the blame, has also contributed to the loss of high skilled jobs.  Really, who fixes there old TV, dishwasher, etc.

If you want to have nightmares think about all of the plastic bags, cups, lids, etc floating around the world and slowly working into our food chain.

One thing to consider is that when we buy an EV, what do we do with our old vehicle. We sell it for someone else to use.  So although we feel good about how we are saving the environment we are actually just kicking the can down the road!

We need some kind of scrapping program where old vehicles are recycled or maybe even converted into EV for this to be truly helpful.

[flynnstig82r]

Even then, you'd be scrapping a perfectly-serviceable vehicle for a brand new one with all of its up-front environmental costs to build and ship. A typical electric car takes 3 years to break even with a gas car in terms of carbon emissions because of the higher manufacturing footprint. When replacing an already-built gas car, the break-even is even longer unless the old one is a true gas guzzler. If everyone rode e-motos for transportation instead of cars, it might be different, but electric cars are not a solution to the crisis of carbon emissions.

The only real way to reduce the transportation footprint is simply for people to drive less. If someone can cut down their driving to a few thousand miles per year and find a way to take transit or active modes for most of their daily trips, that is way more sustainable than buying an EV. It goes back to your first point about maintaining and reusing instead of disposing. The auto manufacturers would love for us to scrap all of our gas cars so they can sell us a billion+ shiny electric ones, but there's nothing sustainable about that.

[Crissa]

EVs only get a better footprint, over their lifetime, while ICE gets worse.  More renewables on the grid means lower impact over time.

The average car is held 10 years, so a three-year break-even is pretty good.

-Crissa

[flynnstig82r]

Sure, but that's like declaring something health food because it's slightly better for you than a Big Mac. If everyone living a car-dependent lifestyle switched to an EV tomorrow and continued driving just as many miles, we'd still have a major emissions crisis on our hands. Switching to an EV is better than nothing, of course, but it's a band-aid on a gunshot wound. Compared to carpooling, transit, active modes, or even car sharing services like Zipcar, EV's represent a huge amount of investment for a comparatively tiny reduction in environmental footprint.

[Crissa]

If everyone living a car-dependent lifestyle switched to an EV tomorrow and continued driving just as many miles, we'd still have a major emissions crisis on our hands.

Not exactly.



-Crissa

[Sklith]

Not exactly.

I think what flynnstig82r is saying is that even if all transportation vehicles in the world became effectively zero emission we'd still be in a bad situation since that would only eliminate emissions 14% of all greenhouse gases. Other sectors have to follow suite as well if we hope to get things under control.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data

[flynnstig82r]

Not exactly.

I think what flynnstig82r is saying is that even if all transportation vehicles in the world became effectively zero emission we'd still be in a bad situation since that would only eliminate emissions 14% of all greenhouse gases. Other sectors have to follow suite as well if we hope to get things under control.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data

That too, but what I was getting at is that sources like the excellent summary video that Crissa linked make a definitive case that EVs are better than ICE cars for personal mobility. However, that compares them with literally the worst possible thing you can do for the environment in terms of personal transportation. It doesn't compare them with genuinely sustainable transportation options like bicycles and public transit (see attached image). Crucially, it also doesn't compare them with the amount of Co2 that each of the Earth's 8 billion inhabitants can emit if we are to stay below 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius rise in temperatures. Buying a new car blows your Co2 budget on the manufacturing emissions alone even if the per-mile emissions are extremely low.

In addition, to be sustainable requires not just low environmental footprint, but also financial stability and equity. For cars of any powertrain to be the dominant mode of transportation requires massive infrastructure subsidies that create large distances between people and activities and make sustainable transportation options like walking, cycling, or transit artificially expensive in time, risk, and/or operating costs. This is in addition to other externalities from driving like crashes and additional health care expenses of a sedentary mode of transportation. EV's may be more sustainable than ICE cars, but solo driving trips using EV's are still not sustainable by a long shot.