Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
I would consider buying an electric car if there were any lightweight options that are not packed to the brim with annoying and unnecessary electronics as well as surveillance tech.
But there seem to be no such options and thus I plan to keep my 2008 ICE car that still has none of that BS running as long as I can.
Its really odd that as a tech enthusiast you are forced to look for things with as little tech as possible, as the tech that is forced on you is so bad that I rather go without it.
An EV conversion is probably the only option, if you want a no frills EV
There are a few if you go into the wacky import market, especially in most of europe where light EVs don’t require full drivers licenses. That being said, when your 2008 ICE gives out i wouldn’t have much hope in finding a peoper replament outside of the classics. You’ll propbably have to delve into the wonderful world of finding a model where you can disable the transceiver no matter what drive train the car has by then.
The Aptera might fit the bill for a minimalist-ish EV, but I share your sentiment, and if that doesn't live up to what it's promised, I'll be sticking with my 1996 ICE as well.
Right, if you need a car, an electric car is best for rhe environment. Even better is to not need a car. Better still is for your parents to have not reproduced so as to create one less human on earth. Why didn't the author compare not existing to owning an EV? Because that's not a reasonable comparison.
An ebike is not a replacement for a car. Relocating to a walkable urban space with functional public transit is not feasible for most people. It is not unreasonable when comparing the relative benefits of different cars to limit the discussion to, you know, cars.
An ebike is not a replacement for a car. Relocating to a walkable urban space with functional public transit is not feasible for most people. It is not unreasonable when comparing the relative benefits of different cars to limit the discussion to, you know, cars.
No, the discussion should be about fixing the actual problem (lack of walkable urban spaces).
There are places in the world outside of urban spaces. Some of us even visit and/or live there.
Some of us even visit and/or live there.
"Some" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. In the US about 80% of the population is urban, which means we even if we only fix things for the urban folks and ignore the rural ones, we still solve 80% of the problem and that's pretty damn good.
Frankly, I'm really starting to get sick and tired of the "but I'm a special snowflake, what about me" rebuttal -- it's disingenuous, reactionary and misses the big picture, which is that folks with exceptional circumstances just don't fucking matter all that much, by definition. Sorry not sorry.
Cite your source. Pew Research reports that as of 2018 the mix was
Which puts your entire point in the shitter, by your own logic.
Edit- And if you cite Census.gov you should be aware they don't recognize a distinction between suburban and urban, and we both know that for walking and mass transit they're entirely different worlds.
Even if we go by your numbers, 30% is still negligible. ("Suburban" counts as urban, BTW.)
Also, my source is the US census and is newer than yours (2022).
Edit to reply to your edit: no, what you wrote...
we both know that for walking and mass transit they’re entirely different worlds.
...is bullshit. I absolutely do not accept that as a premise, because the suburbs are nothing more than defective urbanism. They are a straight-up mistake and should cease to exist. Every suburb, without exception, should either be densified to the point that walking and mass transit are viable, or razed and returned to farmland or wilderness.
See my edit note. Census.gov doesn't distinguish between Urban and Suburban. Do you really think 50% of the US population switched lifestyles in the last 5 years? Be reasonable.
See my edit note, and stop trying to condescend to tell me what "we both know" or that I'm not being "reasonable." You are not entitled to assume that your position is some kind of default unassailable truth.
The census is right not to make that distinction!
Yikes. I'm sorry you feel that way about the points I was trying to express. I'm frankly disappointed we couldn't have a pleasant conversation here.
Your solution requires we fix culture, infrastructure, housing, affordability, mass transit, and urban spaces. And do that all while minimizing the carbon footprint of gathering the necessary resources and implementing these decades worth of changes quick enough to make a significant dent in the carbon footprint we're all a part of.
Electric cars are a fantastic environmental improvement for the 70% (maybe a little less, adjusting for proximity to city center, seniors, with, etc...) of Americans that find themselves largely disconnected from urban environments where well implemented mass transit works wonderfully.
Reality can't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Your solution requires we fix culture, infrastructure, housing, affordability, mass transit, and urban spaces.
No, my solution requires we fix zoning. Just that; only zoning. A change that can be made at the stroke of a pen. The rest will get handled naturally as the market reacts to that change. (This is because the other problems you mentioned like lack of housing quantity and affordability and non-viability of mass transit are caused by restrictive zoning!)
Reality can’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
You want to talk about reality? Okay, here's the reality: suburbs are not natural. They only exist because we force them to exist via government policy. Rural areas have existed since the invention of agriculture in prehistory. Urban areas existed for at least 10,000 years. But suburbs? Car-dependent suburbs didn't exist until roughly the 1940s. Note that that's not the 1900s as a consequence of the invention of the automobile; it existed for decades without causing car-dependency. It wasn't until entities like Standard Oil and GM, along with misguided utopian planners like Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright (who presumably didn't realize how badly they were fucking up), managed to convince the Federal government to essentially force car-dependency via things like FHA lending requirements and massive road subsidies that the suburbs as we know them really took off.
As for "culture:" people think all those millions of single-family houses everywhere exist because "that's what people want" and the "Free Market" makes it happen, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Single-family homes are, in a sense, subsidized by the zoning code. It holds down property values by eliminating competition from developers who would build out the lot to its highest and best use given market demand and instead lets single-family home buyers compete only amongst themselves. The macroeconomic result is that makes dense development more expensive than it should be and makes single-family houses cheaper than they should be (but still too expensive for a lot of people to actually afford, since overall supply is so restricted by the massive inefficient use of land). It also forces quite a lot of people to either buy or rent single-family houses, when they actually wanted (or would have wanted, if prices weren't skewed to make houses look unnaturally favorable) a unit in a multifamily building instead. Besides, "what do people want" is not the right question to begin with; the right question is "what do people deserve." Are you really going to argue that relatively wealthy people who can afford to buy single-family houses deserve a subsidy at (generally less-wealthy) renters' expense?! 'Cause that's what restrictive zoning gets you!
Of course, not being "natural" isn't a problem in and of itself, and unjust subsidies are a viable (albeit evil) policy choice. The real problem is that the suburbs also aren't sustainable -- and I don't just mean they aren't ecologically sustainable; I mean they aren't even economically sustainable! Generally speaking, suburbs do not produce enough tax revenue per acre to build and maintain the amount of infrastructure per acre that they require. (To understand what I mean, a concrete example might help: say you've got an apartment building with 100 feet of street frontage and 20 units. The occupants of each unit need to pay enough taxes to maintain 5 feet of street. But if you've got a single-family house on that lot instead, the occupants need to pay enough tax to maintain the entire 100 feet of street -- but of course, they can't afford that unless the house in question is a damn mansion.) In fact, the suburbs are both subsidized by the densely-developed areas of the jurisdiction they're in -- a subsidy that's on top of the zoning-induced subsidy I explained in the previous paragraph, by the way -- and a Ponzi scheme that causes jurisdictions without large densely-developed ares to go bankrupt once the wave of greenfield development moves out past their borders.
This has to be fixed -- we literally can't afford not to, in a way even more direct and immediate than climate change. And electric cars do absolutely fuck-all to help with it. In fact, in this sense electric cars are worse than useless: they're a red-herring that deludes people into thinking suburbs are less of an eminently nonviable catastrophe than they actually are. When you combine the fact that ending car dependency is better for the environment than electric cars with the fact that ending car dependency is better for solving literally every other major problem we have, from housing affordability, to crime, to poverty, to homelessness, to obesity, to even mental health, social cohesion and civic engagement than electric cars (which, again, do fuck-all to help any of it), it should become really fucking obvious which solution is the one we should be -- which one we have to be -- focusing on!
Ok. Build walkable urban spaces across America. In the meantime, people who need cars should get electric ones.
Yeah, that's fine. It's just important that it be understood that it's a band-aid, not a cure.
I'm immediately put off by "relax." Complacency is not the solution to the climate crisis. Consumerism is not the solution to the climate crisis. It's going to take continuous collective action. It will take doing things that feel uncomfortable at first. Your flashy new EV that lets all your neighbors know you have EV money is not a boilerplate one size fits all solution. Your local municipality buying a garage to house and maintain a fleet of EV buses that transport ~2 people at a time is the solution.
People misunderstand how to assess if a bus is helping. They see a mostly empty bus and declare that it would have been better to have the two bus users in EVs when the reality is that as soon as you have the emissions of a bus divided across 2 people, you've already beaten any possible single vehicle configuration thanks to scale. Not to mention, you want some leeway at 11pm so that at 5pm (rush hour) you have crush capacity.
The other thing with bus advocacy is that buses are not sexy like light rail or metro rail solutions, but you can effectively implement them immediately. They're a magnificent transitional mass transit solution, and one you will probably want to have even after you have a light rail or metro rail solution because sometimes you'll need to do track maintenance and move transit passengers onto buses for those portions, and that the attractiveness of your mass transit solution is all about the final mile of transit. You can put a bus stop almost anywhere, ensuring that people can arrive conveniently and safely at their destination, even if there's absolutely no way you could put a rail station nearby.
"Relax, Electric Vehicles Really Are the Best Choice for the Climate" screams of privilege...
I’d argue that trollybusses are a better option since they let you massively cut down on needed battery capacity at the cost of NIMBYs, but i doubt the average NY Times opinion reader is very likely to be convinced to take a bunch of time to get involved in local politics.
They might however be convinced to go with an EV instead of mindlessly buying another gas car like they were planning. Is it perfect, fuck no. Is it far better than the alternative, yes. EVs cannot solve climate change, but they are a way the average american that has a vague care for not getting killed by climate change can help.
I also suspect that the relax was aimed at the more commonly stated viewpoint on these sorts of articles, which is that EVs are a horrible scam and you should be driving the largest gas truck you can becuse its cheaper, not really, and actually better for the environment becuse cobalt mining is so horrible and climate change is really just a myth.
Trollybusses are indeed an excellent filler in transit quality between a bus and a light rail solution. An ideal metropolitan mass transit solution has tiers. The first tier is "Walkable 15 minute neighborhoods," the second is "A bus to get you to the trollybus," the third is "A trollybus to get you to the light rail system," and the fourth is "A light rail system to get you to the next town over." And obviously, you don't have to hit every tier in the mass transit scheme to get from your current location to your final destination, but the mix of types of transit helps each type of transit support eachother, allowing transit users to get from place to place quickly and cheaply. My argument is mainly "you start with a bus" because the implementation cost is low. It's a bridge solution that helps you get from your current level of mass transit to your ideal goals, and one that you'll likely want to make use of even when your ideal transit solution is implemented, as it has a degree of flexibility that no other solution offers.
The other thing is buses can even make sense in exurbs and even rural areas. I grew up in a rural area in Appalachia that implemented a county level bus system that taxpayers immediately argued was going to be a waste of money, but when it was implemented, the buses out in the most remote portions of the county saw the most usage as it allowed elderly passengers, and very poor passengers, to go visit their relatives in town, as well as anyone with a broken down car to make a trip to AutoZone to get the part they needed to get their car back on the road again. A lot of the time, it's not just about making it possible for people to get to city services, it's also about getting city services out to the people.
We got the first to replace our 10-year-old, gas-powered Subaru, and after only two years of driving, the E.V. has created fewer emissions over its lifetime than if we had kept the old car.
That's no way this is true, if the carbon footprint of the manufacture of the new EV is considered.
Most of the recent studies I've seen estimate over 40% of life cycle carbon debt from cars is making them. ~15 years ago I heard Peter Singer say it was over half.
If you need a car, don't ever buy a new one.
From what I’ve see it can very with make and model, but typically about seventy five percent of a gas cars carbon emissions come from the fuel alone, which goes up to ninety percent if you count the carbon emissions of making and delivering that fuel aswell.
By contrast about sixty five percent of an EVs emissions come from our current mix of electricity generation, and thirty five percent from manufacture.
Also worth noting that the portion from manufacture is so large becuse the total emissions are so much smaller, as the EV only requires at worse about twenty percent of the gas cars total emissions. Given the average life span of a car is 12 years, two years to pay back the additional five to ten percent manufacturing cost is quite reasonable provided the author lives in a place with a good renewable energy mix.
an illustrative estimate of lifetime emissions on theoretical aver 300 mile range EV vs an average new gas car. https://www.epa.gov/system/files/styles/large/private/images/2022-06/lifecycle-ghgs-ev-gas-cars-670px.png?itok=2RCNUe6A
The average gas passenger vehicle will produce about 4.6 tons of carbon dioxide, about twice its weight, each and every year it is on the road.
In short, given the choice between a new electric car or a used gas car, there electric is the better choice if you plan to use it for more than two to four years.
Better than trains that can last decades and run fully electric without batteries that will inevitably go obsolete and dumped? I know it can't be a solution for everyone but don't tell me a city like LA couldn't do more and eliminate the need for cars for half it's population. Cut the $20b of oil subsidies and start building up passenger routes
fuck cars
and fuck people selling technology as a solution instead of system change.
Technology got us into this mess starting in the 1800s, it's not magically going to get us out of it
Every single solution proposed in this post is technology. This comment chain is nonsense.
What makes you so sure that the author didn’t look at having one less car, or lives in a place where mass transit even exists? I mean there’s currently half a foot of snow and ice on the road in front of my house, you can’t exactly expect everyone to bike though that. The whole point of EVs is that they are completely compatible with our existing infrastructure and don’t require the forcable resettlement of hundreds of millions of people to dense cities during an, amitidly artificially created, housing crisis.
Mass transit would be great if everyone had it, but they don’t, and no ones really trying to do so now. To say nothing of the fact it generally takes about ten years to complete even a new light rail line in this country and we don’t have ten years to maybe reduce emissions. If mass transit is better than driving, and that’s not hard because driving sucks, then people will take mass transit.
Sorry if this comes off as argumentative, but assuming what works for you works for everyone and the only reason that they wouldn’t do it is because they can’t think of it is rather silly.
They didn't talk about it as even an option.
Of course they didn’t, they were talking about their own experiences, and if the have the options the average american has then they wouldn’t have any local transit to even compare it to. It’s an opinion piece for the New York Times on EVs, not an exhaustive comparison of all possible transit modes.
Relax. EV’s really are the best choice for auto-industry executives.
