That was always how it was going to work! I don't know how anyone believed that the "legacy" automotive manufacturers, with their fingers on the pulse of upcoming transportation regulations, would be "caught out" by the EV transition.
The NY Times does this kind of "presentation story" all over. I rarely read more than the first few captions, because I can't stand the continuous scroll format - it reduces the rate I can absorb the information in such articles by a factor of 4 or more, and increases the work required to get it (particular on the eyes, because reading text scrolling over pictures is hard eye work). I hate 'em. Give me text, charts and graphs, with pictures if they actually add something to the information in your story.
Luckily most of NRK's articles don't do this, but I agree. I always skim through articles to find out if I actually care enough to read it. And when I do read the whole thing, I often have to jump up a few paragraphs.
These articles completely break my reading flow to the point where I just give up.
That's because its propganda. The sleek feel is a diversion to lead your thoughts in a particular way. Not saying they are necessarily wrong, but that's all this is.
I kind of liked them when they first started popping up. But after you've seen a handful of them, you realize that they're basically just powerpoint presentations.
I've just re-created your "PID" controller, and was completely underwhelmed with the response. I just don't find it amazing that something using that much compute power can generate source code that multiplies an input by a constant.
If you can't write that quicker than the ChatGPT prompt you provided, then you probably should pay more attention to your class.
Ah, the mythical "super-rich" who could fund all of our solutions, if only we could prise their money out of their clutching hands!
It's funny how they always exist, even in countries like the UK and France which in reality have taxed them out of existence, and payscales are absurdly compressed compared to the US.
Careful what you wish for, you are someone else's "super rich".
>the UK and France which in reality have taxed them out of existence
You're making it sound like billionaires are an endangered species there. :) Last time I checked there's more than enough billionaires living in the UK and France[1].
That's the problem. The wealth of billionaires isn't tied to any particular country, so they always have the means to move their wealth to a tax haven. Calls to tax the rich always end up falling to the upper-middle/lower-upper classes (e.g. FAANG engineers who read HN).
> you mean you want an easy way to sort and aggregate the information in order to dispute this.
For a start, I need the list to include the country of origin of each person.
>he burden is on you to do this as you’re the one questioning the accuracy of the widely cited Hurun list.
I've pointed out that Hurun don't make public their list of billionaires per country, unlike the other providers of that data. As no-one yet has been able to show otherwise, my point stands.
Why? And if not, why can't we apply your argument to other things, eg, coal power plants?
>Even if you could get rid of most cars, that wouldn't be enough, and it wouldn't be able to happen quickly enough to avoid electrification.
Estimates for the lifetime CO2 savings of EVs vary from 40% to 70%. Assuming the be best case (70%), the CO2 impact would only be the same as "getting rid of most cars", which you say isn't enough.
Comfort, convenience, speed, separation from other people, etc, etc. Changing the balance there requires significant investment in alternatives which doesn't seem to be forthcoming (at least in my country).
We can't apply the same arguments to power plants because we don't have to go to / see / interact with the power plant in order to use electricity. It just appears at the wall socket like magic. Where it comes from is functionally irrelevant to the consumer.
This isn't a good comparison. A more appropriate one would be to compare the environmental damage, cost, and deaths due to cars to the "wall socket like magic" versus seeing a physical car on the road. You don't have to go to the hospital to see people who were maimed, and you don't really see the strip mining taking place to create cars, for example.
The person I replied to said (paraphrasing) "Why aren't cars going away? If they aren't, why can't you make the same arguments about coal power plants".
I'm saying:
- Cars aren't going away because they are much better than any available alternative for a large number of people from a short term perspective
- The same can't be said of coal power because electricity is electricity is electricity, there is no immediate difference, so the longer term differences have a greater impact on decision making
> We can't apply the same arguments to power plants because we don't have to go to / see / interact with the power plant in order to use electricity
My reading was that you were comparing physical presence of cars + coal plants and also the negative externalities of coal plants but not accounting for the negative externalities of cars.
But I may have misread and I apologize if I did :)
> Didn't realise these were valid arguments in the face of the Climate Catastrophe!
They're not even arguments.
I'm not saying that people should keep driving.
I'm answering the question "why aren't cars going away".
Unless you think that people just aren't aware that public transport / riding / walking is more environmentally friendly than driving, the only conclusion I can come up with is that people care more about the factors I mentioned than environmental impact (or at least, that time-discounting of delayed negative externalities is significant).
> It's by far the most convenient and quickest to burn coal.
For who? I'm talking about the factors that influence consumer choice, not producers.
An electric car produces no CO2 over its lifetime. It uses electricity, not a fossil fuel.
If you are observing that electricity is currently being produced with some fossil fuels, I will respond that we should get rid of fossil generating capacity. This does not require getting rid of electric cars.
In the ultimate zero fossil fuel economy, we can still build and operate electric cars. This will not involve any release of CO2 whatsoever; do you imagine this would create carbon atoms out of nothing?
There are two things involved: CO2 emission inherent in operation and construction, and CO2 emission that just happens to be occurring today because of how the materials and electricity are presently generated.
The anti-EV argument is deliberate confusion of the former with the latter.
There is no inherent CO2 emission required in construction and operation of an electric car. This is unlike gasoline powered cars, where petroleum has to be involved in their fueling.
From a policy point of view, an EV that replaces a gasoline car is a good thing, even if there is at the moment some CO2 emission in the construction and operation of the EV. It reduces CO2 emission in the near term, while also pushing EVs down their experience curves to enable total replacement (and abolition of CO2 emission) in the far term.
Ignoring the fact that there are no renewable energy-powered EV factories, there are also plenty of industrial processes that inherently emit CO2. Steel manufacture first comes to mind.
By your same argument, I could say that there's no inherent CO2 emission required to manufacture petrol (as in, there theoretically is a way to do it).
>The anti-EV argument is deliberate confusion of the former with the latter.
I'm not confused about the distinction between the two. The pro-EV crowd seem happy to ignore the former, as long as it's far away, or could be solved by some as yet unimplemented technology.
Steel manufacture does not inherently emit CO2. The current CO2 emission is overwhelmingly from reduction of iron ore to iron metal with coke, but this can be replaced by reduction with hydrogen. Some carbon needs to then be added to the iron to make steel, but this is small compared to the carbon that was in coke, and is not an energy source and need not come from fossil fuels.
The pro-EV people are not ignoring the distinction here. Stop putting your lies in other peoples' mouths.
They're not going away because nobody is seriously talking about getting rid of cars because it makes no sense.
Figure out how to convince people to do it worldwide, figure out how to replace all auto transport with other modes, then build those alternate modes. I'll bet that will take longer and result in more CO2 emissions than electrifying cars.
We don't solve global warming by fantasizing about deleting cars, we solve it with good engineering and passable policy.
We won't know what the cost of solar/battery will be in a sustainable energy economy, until someone builds a solar-powered solar panel and battery factory. At the moment, productions costs are heavily (as in, entirely) subsidised by fossil fuels (mostly coal).
You miss my point. The reason solar is so cheap right now (along with the huge amount of government subsidies) is that the huge amount of energy required to manufacture them is currently done with very cheap coal in China.
>Cost of current production is an upper bound.
Under the current state of the energy economy, maybe. If we had to replace all manufacturing power sources with renewables - absolutely not.
Maybe - with government grants, and coal-powered manufacture of all of the associated generation equipment.
That's not very interesting though - what is interesting, which has been my topic of conversation this entire time, is what the energy economy would look like if it were not still fundamentally rooted in fossil fuels.
Given that coal and other fossil fuels are basically free energy - it does not take much at all to get energy from it (ie, set it on fire), it is not physically possible for PV generation to beat that. Therefore, it follows that renewable power will be more expensive than fossil fuel power. I don't see why this is so hard to acknowledge - we are living in a time of unreasonably cheap power, fuelled by several million years worth of stored solar energy. It can't last.
You make the same mistake fission boosters make. Converting heat to electricity is expensive. Solar and wind skip the expensive step, going straight to electricity. Electric power from solar and wind is already much cheaper than coal, without subsidy, for this reason, and because coal has to be dug up and transported. Coal has a high operating cost. Solar and wind have extremely low operating cost, and also very low capital cost, always falling.
Solar and wind, un-subsidized, are the cheapest power the world has ever seen, and their cost is still falling at exponential rate.
Why not? Plenty of places have enough sunlight to do so even in winter. Parts of Alberta have similar sunlight mid winter to PNG mid summer.
Plus storage is a thing. Using a heat pump to dry NaOH or melt Sodium Acetate, or heat a large pond can store low grade heat economically for months. Ammonia, or methanol can do so indefinitely.
Then there's transmission. HVDC can transport energy 10GW pernline for thousands of km at costs comparable to local generation.
I'd be very surprised if you could avoid using a solar panel to heat your home in 40 years even if you go out of your way to do so.
We're talking about the cost of power. Putting aside the unbelievable idea that Alberta has as much mid-winter solar energy available as at the equator, using solar to heat my house is more expensive than burning some stuff inside.
Bifacial isn't in this model, but it boosts the snowy region by about 20% and the tropical one by about 5%
And what will the stuff available to burn be made from when there are plants producing ethylene or methanol or ammonia in chile or saudi arabia or mongolia for less than what gas costs to dig up?
So the energy that is cheaper than coal and driving operating coal plants out of business will make the cost of producing it go up when the share increases?
These mental gymnastics routines are olympic level.
The reason we can ignore the huge manufacturing energy inputs required to make solar panels, is because it's powered by cheap domestic coal in China.
>driving operating coal plants out of business
Any specific ones? The only coal plants I've seen get shut down are because of environmental reasons (or age). Some countries, like Germany and China, are re-opening or building new coal plants.
Talking of mental gymnastics - fundamentally, the energy economy boils down to EROI (energy returned on energy invested). It's just wishful thinking that we can replace energy sources that are basically free (coal, oil, gas), with those that have energy payback periods in the mid-double digits of their expected lifespan (solar).
Try a new solar panel rather than one from the 90s. Your Shellenberger tripe about EROI went off when the EROI of solar surpassed that of nuclear and EPBT dropped below 18 months (or 6 months in sunny countries). Then it went even more ranc
If you're really worried about it, buy a panel from europe, the polysilicon (90% of the energy) comes from hydro, wind, and nuclear powered countries.
Even if all the money for a solar module went to coal generation at chinese or indian prices and nothing else it would pay back that power in under two years.
If the only activity involved in making PV was to spend the entire system cost on lignite and burn it directly at the mine front, it would *still* produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.
It's absolutely laughable that you think you can keep spouting this ridiculous lie.
That's exactly the problem. This is a significant portion of the lifetime output of the panels.
>it would still produce more energy in its lifetime than putting the coal in a coal plant.
I'm not arguing that solar panels are a net negative, as you seem to be implying. I'm arguing that the energy economics of a world fuelled entirely by solar (and other renewable technologies - solar is about the worst for EROI) would look very different to what we have now.
Crystalline Solar panels have a benchmark lifetime of 30 years and are consistently outperforming predicted degradation rates. None have worn out yet, but the best guess is a median 40 year lifetime. A new panasonic or jinko mono panel installed in india has epbt under 6 months and an eroi around 100.
You're the one making the insane claims. You back them up.
Prove new solar in a median location is lower EROI than the median for new gas using up to date info on the whole process and solar cells you would buy for a project started now such as 155 micron wafer mono PERC.
Nope, I said that it's lower than other sources of power, and thus an energy economy based on solar will look very different than what we currently have.
Given that electricity represents a relatively small percentage of our power usage, in the majority of cases (materials manufacture, industry, heating, etc), the EROI of renewables will be worse than fossil fuels.
Prove that thermal energy from shale oil or tar sands is higher EROI than that same solar panel using a resistor or arc furnace then.
Then add heat pumps and PV+Heliostat or PV+CSP derived hydrogen compounds to your equation and realise that adding heat and chemical stocks shipped from distant places to the equation makes it favour renewables even more as you can turn 120MJ of electricity and 40MJ of direct sunlight at Chile's 35% capacity factor into 120MJ of hydrogen or 100MJ of Ammonia you don't have to refine. With the heat pump you'd get more low grade heat even if you burnt the fossil fuel for electricity.
Wind + PV is a pure upgrade from an EROI perspective, and electrolysers and CSP are following very close behind.
Tell me about it. I was told many times that we should have "locked down harder", like "sensible countries" including Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea.
>the rest of the west were letting it rip in 2020~2021
That's funny. As restrictions started to lift during 2021 (UK/Wales), some complained that the government was now letting it rip. Just shows - anyone more cautious than you is needlessly scared, and anyone less cautious is an idiot.
