American Electric Cars Generally Meet the 2030 climate Goals, and Almost the 2040 Goals.
I'm not a fan of electric cars, because, um, I'm not a fan of cars period.
All of the dancing around claims that cars are, or can be, made sustainable is a ridiculous fantasy. The rise of the automobile and the car CULTure it enabled is the primary example in my mind why distributed energy is a very dangerous idea. Other than fire pits and coal and wood burning stoves, the car is the oldest, and perhaps most pernicious form of distributed energy there is and every bit of the environment has suffered as a result of their rise, the atmosphere, fresh water resources, oceanic and other saline water resources, the soil, indeed the bedrock of land masses from Greenland to North America to South America, Asia, Europe, Australia and Africa.
Distributed energy requires distributed pollution, and there is no living thing on the face of this planet which is free of automotive waste of one type or another, and there is no mechanism for remediating this pollution.
I consider that the support for the Tesla automobile, for one example, which is inexplicably popular on the left despite the fact that these piles of future electronic waste, the Tesla cars, are designed for and by billionaires and millionaires is an absurd crime against the future, but no one is asking my opinion.
Tesla cars have nothing, nothing at all, to do with what once were the traditional goals of the Democratic Party which used to be providing a path for all people to enjoy the benefits of our national resources, and not just the ultra rich and yet if one hangs out on Democratic Party websites, one will see people drooling all over one another in praise of this, um, consumer junk.
This said, people nonetheless set "goals" for reducing automotive pollution, just like people set goals for a wide variety of other pernicious practices, like say preventing the wide spread use of sugary soft drinks to reduce diabetes rates. (Diabetes has never killed as many people as air pollution, but no matter...)
The graphic below comes from a publication in one of my favorite journals, Environmental Science and Technology.
Here is a link to the paper, which is behind a firewall, but can be accessed if one is not a subscriber, in a good scientific library:
Personal Vehicles Evaluated against Climate Change Mitigation Targets (Marco Miotti†?, Geoffrey J. Supran†‡?, Ella J. Kim§, and Jessika E. Trancik*†∥ , Environ. Sci. Technol., 2016, 50 (20), pp 10795–10804)
The graphic speaks for itself. Here's the caption though:
Some excerpts from the text:
...Here, we address two missing elements in the literature by both reflecting the diversity of personal vehicle models available to consumers and assessing these options against climate change mitigation targets. When comparing personal vehicles against climate targets, it is important to understand the wide range of models available for purchase because consumer choices are defined by this available set.
In particular, we focus on the trade-offs between costs and emissions that consumers face in selecting a vehicle model. Although cost is not the sole influence on consumer purchasing decisions,(26-31) low-carbon vehicles will only achieve a dominant market share if they are affordable to a majority of the driving population. (Our proxy for affordability is the relative cost of low-carbon vehicles versus popular, conventional vehicles on the market.) Here, we address these issues by examining a comprehensive set of 125 vehicle models on sale today, covering all prominent powertrain technology options: internal-combustion-engine vehicles (ICEVs); hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs); plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs); and battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Our analysis also includes the 2016 Toyota Mirai, one of the first commercially available fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs).
We evaluate vehicle models on a cost-carbon plot(32) to answer the overarching questions: How do the costs and carbon intensities of vehicle models compare across the full diversity of today’s LDV market, and what is the potential for various LDV technologies to close the gap between the current fleet and future GHG emission targets? Specifically, we ask: Do consumers face a cost-carbon trade-off today? Which models, if any, meet 2030 GHG emissions reduction targets? Finally, in the longer term, which vehicle technologies would enable emissions targets for 2040 and 2050, designed around a 2 °C limit, to be met? What role can advancements in the carbon intensity of electricity generation, powertrain efficiencies, and production pathways for liquid fuels play? The insights and choices identified in this study may be of interest to car owners, cars manufacturers, and transportation policymakers alike.
The, um, "2 °C limit" is my opinion a joke. The effort which we are making to meet it, which consists of whoring about endlessly on the topic so called "renewable energy" while burning ever larger quantities of dangerous fossil fuels because, um, so called "renewable energy" hasn't worked, isn't working and won't work, has led to an acceleration in the rate of new accumulations of carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere and not a reduction in - or elimination of - that rate.
The authors use figure for carbon dioxide emissions resulting from electricity:
(GREET is environmental life cycle analysis software that's become something of a standard these days.)
This figure, 623 gCO2eq/kWh is uncomfortably close to the figure for dangerous natural gas electricity, about 500 to 550 depending on who you ask, and it is very unlikely, given current policies which are all gas centric - including the expensive "investment" in the worthless and gas dependent solar and wind industries - to ever fall below that level in the lifetime of anyone now living, although this will not stop the assholes at say, Greenpeace, from offering stupid statements that begin with the words "by 2100..."
And here is what the authors say about the expected use of the cars they analyze:
169,400 miles is roughly 272,600 km if you're looking at the chart above.
So let's look at the chart: The Tesla piece of shit comes in at around 125 g of CO2 per km. This means that one will release, at 20,000 km per year, one would release about 2.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year or 35 metric tons in the cars putative lifetime. (How would you store 35 metric tons of carbon dioxide in your "distributed" waste dumps, by the way?)
A quick Google search suggests that there are between 250 and 260 million registered cars in the United States.
Thus if all of us were rich fools driving Tesla cars, at 2.5 tons per year, - we haven't been, we aren't and we won't be - we would be releasing each year about 625 million tons of carbon dioxide each year to drive.
This is less than we generate now to drive but it is hardly zero.
And let's be clear, since we will never again record a level of carbon dioxide below the current value of a shade over 400 ppm, what we can afford at this point is precisely that which we clearly have no intention of reaching, zero.
The cost of manufacturing this car crap - which will rise as the materials used to manufacture them deplete requiring the use of ever lower grades of ores - can be seen in another graphic in the paper:
The caption:
It says nothing of the cost of disposing of the existing 250 million cars as we mindlessly motor ourselves toward the consumerist goal of "all new stuff" in the mistaken that acquiring "all new stuff" passes for environmentalism. It hasn't; it doesn't; and it won't.
I suppose I'd be more fun if I told you what you want to hear, rather than the truth, but I haven't, I'm not, and I won't.
Have a nice evening.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Well, where I live there is no mass transit, so people have to fucking drive an automobile or the don't get to eat; they can't fix things at home, or even their cars. And the roads are not even paved here. It's 15 miles one way to the nearest grocery store.
Your ideas are really screwed up for us here.
NoRec.
