this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Electric cars are there to save the automotive industry not the climate.
The solution is in redesigning cities to be dense, walkable, and focused on active and mass transit.
Don't forget the international shipping logistics. Container ships are literally the worst.
Container ships are as clean as an electric train in kg/mile. They might use the nastiest fuel on the planet, but they also move an insane amount of mass. And their operators are motivated by doing it as cheaply as possible. So it's relatively simple to make them decide to be even cleaner.
Supply chains have become ridiculously complex, though. Like 20 years ago a cell phone manufacturer talked about how just about every piece of a phone was ultimately shipped back and forth across the Pacific about 6 times before being sold in the final product. As raw materials, as base components, as more complex components built from others, after branding, packaging, etc. And although perhaps more and more manufacturing has moved into Asia, I doubt the complexity has decreased or that any particular mind to this kind of waste has been designed into our system generally.
I'm sure there are things to fix about the container ships themselves, as others have pointed out. But another solution is simply to use them MUCH LESS!
Consumerism is a cultural problem, not a supply chain issue. Convince rich popular people to show off their frugality.
The answer to shorter supply chains is local resource exploitation. That means dirty mines and factories, or convincing China they don't really want money. Both of those are really hard to sell.
It is both. Capitalism encourages supply chains to be formed based purely on metrics such as cost on the production side. Nothing is planned further than what will minimize the cost to the company, so that profit is maximized. While roughly the same amount of consumption is done by the working class in its consumptive capacity, this does lead to greater consumption and waste by corporations as part of the production process. When we take control of our workplaces, we will be much better able to account for and make rational decisions regarding such externalities.
And to some degree, it's also pointless to try to separate "culture" from "economics". They influence each other. People don't consume simply to consume, but because of the pressures put on us by the system. We drive not just to drive, but because we need to get to work and school, and because capitalists have destroyed our public transportation options. The reverse—our affect on the system of capitalism—is much less powerful these days, as we've allowed ourselves to become powerless and subjugated ourselves more and more to the class war. Certainly cultural elements will be necessary to overcome this, like building a culture of loyalty to one's fellow workers and the unions which empower us, and eschewing advertising's daily effects on our habits. But to imply it is "just cultural" is missing a lot.
A worker controlled company will be just as profit focused, the only difference being who the profit benefits. It's not a fix for external costs.
Again, you're worried about the economics, not the culture and government. If you don't have a working culture, you're never going to have the economics you want.
First off, you're wrong. Capitalist-owned companies have a mandate to grow due to the ever-increasing demand for return on investment, and those who control the company have no disincentive for the maximization of profit (this shit is as old as the field of economics itself, so you might want to read some leftist literature and catch up). Worker-owned organizations can choose to grow or not, as they wish. And they have built-in disincentives against the maximization of profit, as they are the ones who must labor to produce it, and they also must suffer the consequences of bigger and more complicated work environments. So while capitalist organizations will ALWAYS be forced to the limit, worker-owned companies have much more room to choose, and to consider factors like how their behavior affects their communities, their environment (externalities), and the rest of their quality of life.
Second, I wasn't talking about a single capitalist company. I was talking about a whole economy built around them (capitalism). That, by the way, inherently includes talking about government (the modern nation-state is built to protect, uphold, and enhance capitalism, for capitalists). And it also inherently is about culture, which as I already pointed out is influenced by economics every bit as much as the other way around (far more so, in fact).
Are they though? What is the alternative? No trade?
Nuclear powered ships like the US Navy has used safely for decades. Wind/solar powered ships that have test beds in operation now. Global shipping emissions standards so they can't switch to bunker oil the second they hit international waters.
Cars aren't going anywhere. Achieveing a 20% reduction would be great, but people in developing countries are only now getting started with cars. The only choice: what kind of cars?
Public transport is good, the nearest city to where I live has free public transport (Tallinn, capital of Estonia) but people still use cars. Public transport cannot get everywhere.
I propose a few test cases: try transporting someone old and frail, or a sick child or pet. Go by public transport, walk 10 minutes to the stop, switch lines, wait, walk 5 minutes to the hospital / clinic. If the old person tires, you can't carry them. Now try the same route with 20 cm of snow on ground. Now try with ice on ground. Now try in a storm. If you have a car, you'll be starting it up (if you don't, you'll be asking a friend or hiring a cab).
The question will be "which type of car", "whose car" and "how often".
Also, there will always be people working in the other end of the city, or in the countryside (where cars are practically required since public transport may be miles and hours away). People often have to decide whether to move near their job or move near their relatives (moving is an big hassle, it is not always possible to sell / buy / rent when needed, property prices differ, moving into a rich neighbourhood may be unrealistic) or commute. Smarter planning may reduce the flow, but there will be a flow. And industries are hard to integrate into living districts.
developing countries are absolutely choosing EVs and actually 2 wheeled EVs because they are cheap, reliable, and take up less space. So this idea that they'll be all ICE cars is not right in the least. In fact China and India both of which are developing countires are adopting these in droves. The data is there.
The snowball has started and very quickly oil demand will be in terminal decline. Doesn't do anything to the short term problem, but does help with the very long term problem.
For now we need to figure out how to get carbon out of the atmosphere that's where governments need to step in and find scientific solutions to this problem while we transition. But.... The GOP is everywhere unfortunately
The problem with redesigning cities is that they weren’t exactly built with the possibility of being redesigned in mind. You’re talking about a goal that is hundreds of years of incremental change away. Electric cars are part of the short term solution, but redesigning cities is a much much longer term solution.
Why hundreds of years? American and Canadian cities became car-dependent sprawls in the span of a few decades. A concerted effort to redesign them would not of course have results in months, but 10-20 years are enough to completely transform them.
Also, when we are talking "redesigning", don't imagine SimCity like buldozing and rebuilding. It can start with doing away with zoning regulations mandating single family homes everywhere, doing away with strict commercial/residential zoning, doing away with parking minimums and allowing people to sell off parking lots for development. Then couple this kind of libertarian-style deregulation, with socialistic-like public investment on public transit and amenities (that should be much cheaper for denser neighbourhoods). In the US and Canada, good public transit will probably mean trams and trolleys, or (sigh) buses. Finally, establish norms that require good cycling infrastructure on any new road being built and any old road being repaved. It won't be too long for change to happen.
Finally, one more thing: E-bikes and e-cargo-bikes, along with quick infrastructure fixes (e.g., blocking off some roads or blocking off one direction in stroads with islands to make them transit and bike-only) are a much much better stop-gap solution than electric cars. The vast majority of car trips are with only a single person. Why haul a few tonnes of steel and plastic around? Instead, ebikes need much smaller batteries, and cost only a fraction of the cost. They are fast, and comfortable and can cover larger distances and you don't need to be sweaty when you get there.
The problem is that the current trends reflect what people have wanted, if you want a change in the system then you need a clear cut plan, not just deregulation.
It's not as if there are no people who have thought deeply of this. For example: https://www.strongtowns.org/
The deeper I look at them the more insane cars actually seem. I understand the usage of freight trucks and things like that but cars are genuinely wasteful in most senses.
In cities personal cars are terrible.
In rural areas they are vital.
Agreed but, not always. Not every rural town in the world implies isolated homes. Besides if you look at it more as a principle and less of a rule, as town grows you invest in adding public transportation as needed. But yes the more rural a place is the more car dependent it's going to be, but that's not that bad, most rural places also have much less population so it also has a much smaller impact.
The Netherlands did it in about 30 years, and nowadays we have more knowledge on how to build efficient cities, it can be done.
The US is a different beast from European countries, sure, but it doesn't mean it's impossible or that changing would literally take centuries. And even if it did require hundreds of years, isn't that more a reason to start as soon as possible?
Electric cars aren't here to save the planet, they're are here to save the auto industry. The solution is ditching euclidian zoning and increasing bike lanes and public transport.
I think you should use 'cartesian zoning' unless you have a flat earth agenda.
That aside is both a nitpick (the curvature of Earth is small enough on the local scale of a city that the differences are negligible) and it is wrong, as cartesian coordinates are planar and aren't useful for accounting for spherical curvature. "Euclidean" and "cartesian" are basically synonyms for this purpose.
Euclidian geometry is used for things on a globe.
non-euclidian spaces are those that are not spherical. Such as a flat earth.
Caretesian means to exist in an X-Y plane. Such as a grid in a city. Seems closer to your seeming intent.
This is incorrect. Euclidean geometry deals with planar geometry such as that which cartesian coordinates are used to describe. I mean, here's a quote from Wikipedia:
Spherical surfaces are even used as kind of the classical example of non-Euclidean geometry. For example, you can form a triangle along great circles on the surface of a sphere and have all three angles be right angles (90-90-90); something not possible in Euclidean/planer geometry. See the linked text.
No one is going to bike 15 miles for a dozen eggs, and no one is going to build a supermarket closer than that, and I'm nowhere near an extreme case. It will take more than a century to restructure the US away from individual vehicles, if it's done at an insanely fast pace.
Public transport relies on the value of having a public around the stops, or the ability to concentrate the public in crossroad areas. It's already too late for that in the US, and will take multiple generations of land transfer to fix it. The entire country was literally built on expansionism and isolationism. Fixing our cities is the easy part, and that alone will take more than all government expenditure ever, over half a century at the least. And that's assuming we don't go bankrupt simply supporting the retiring population we have right now, let alone additional expenditures.
Supermarkets would be replaced with multiple markets in walking distance after removing the zoning that excludes retail from being within walking distance of residential areas.
No one is building shit within walking distance of nowhere. There's less than 200 people within 20 miles of me, and I've moved to a more crowded area. No market is going to fix that. The nearest zoning law is probably a hundred miles away. And supermarkets didn't defeat small stores because of zoning, it's because economies of scale are more efficient.
In rural areas where population is the issue and not zoning, that is true.
In any city with 10 thousand residents or more it tends to be the zoning that keeps stores from opening up in the suburbs and other new development. There they tend to go big becsuse they are far enough away that they might as well be big enough to draw from as far away as possible.
Most people live in the latter areas and that is what is being discussed.
They're talking about replacing cars with public transportation which is fucking ridiculous for the majority of the country due to low population density and large distances. There's no amount of zoning changes that are going to fix that. Also, creating walkable cities is a great goal, with zero chance of happening in the US. It would be asking home owners and businesses to throw away existing investments, or forcing them to. Guess how well either of those options is going to go over. Especially in an aging populace with nothing but investment income.
Doable but rather ambitious I would imagine considering how much infrastructure is built to scale without the idea of modularity or portability in mind
Edit, removed due to bad math, oc explained below why their commute/fuel economy sucks
I had a $400/mo gas bill. 37 miles' commute each way, in an SUV I got for cheap (just 10k, 87k miles on it, perfect condition). But it's not like I could just simply move, and this was the first job I got that paid more than $8/hr. So I kept at it for a few years.
Point is, that's not an entirely unrealistic figure. And while it's not something one should be doing, a lot still are doing so because it really is the only option they have commuting from suburbia to the city. (ESPECIALLY living in a county that has a history of being anti-public transit, like Cobb and Cherokee in Georgia)
You're right, I based the math off a week, not a month. My mistake. You're absolutely right though, witout a much stronger focus on public transit, many people are stuck living far away from work due to housing costs. An EV is better than an ICE. But WFH or integrated quality mass transit systems are far superior. I wish more Americans had that luxury.
For me, I live an hour away from my job. I have no interest in living in a city. The amount of land and size house I have would be double the cost if not more near my work. On top of that the city I work in is at times the murder capital of US.
Well assuming 70mph travel speed as an upper bound and a 1 hour commute, we can safely assume a 140mile e-bike range would be sufficient. Assuming you are willing to pay those savings forward to help others reduce their car use; collective investment in improving your situation would be mutually beneficial in the long run.
Would you ride an ebike twice a day, everyday, 30+ miles each way? Dunno about you, but that sounds positively exhausting. Get up early, get dressed in weather-appropriate clothing, put on helmet, sit on bike for the next two hours, then work for 7-9 hours, just to get right back on the bike for another 1-2 hours, maybe more? No thank you.
Yes, if that is what is needed to provide for my family. But my job isn't hard physical labor but more sitting in meetings and writing code.
Lol an ebike huh? You're freaking hilarious.
Well you didn't specify additional cargo or other reasons for limitation.
For example if the issue is travel time: electric motorcycle if the issue is cargo: electric bike with travel trailer if both travel time and cargo: gas to electric conversions are affordable (with the batteries being the highest cost [and the determining factor for range])
basically the less mass needing to be accelerated, the less energy required. The lower the acceleration acceptable, the less energy required.
Treat it as an engineering problem to solve or improve upon.
I'll stick to what I have thanks lol. I'm actually saving up for a motorcycle to go to work. Not an electric motorcycle though as they are still very expensive and have a lower range than I need. Sometimes looking at issues from a real world perspective can help. I work with engineers and unfortunately they cause issues at work not thinking in real world terms.
They're being hyperbolic and you're being nitpicky