Problem is that CO2 concentrations stay elevated basically forever once we dump it into the atmosphere.. This means that the temperature we hit is determined by the cumulative total emissions, not by the rate of emissions. So you can calculate how much we can afford to emit to have a 50% risk of crossing any given temperature threshold, such as 1.5°C or 2°C, between which we lose a lot of major ecosystems, and beyond which we end up outside the envelope where it’s clear that we can maintain civilization. This is a very limited emissions budget, so actually keeping temperatures under 2°C means cutting emissions roughly in half before 2030, and to zero by 2050. Since cars last on average about 20 years, deploying new fossil-fuel-burning-cars after 2030 is effectively a commitment to risk ending civilization.
Yes, it’s politically tough, but the alternative is to take on a really insane risk.
You’re throwing away the baby with the bathwater here. Hybrids, such as the Prius, reduce CO2 emissions by 30% to 50% compared to a normal vehicle by achieving 57mpg.
Switching all of our ICE vehicles to Prius (or other Atkinson Cycle hybrids, such as Ford Maverick) would instantly cut out 30% to 50% of our greenhouse gas emissions. And yet this is apparently not enough for yall. That’s insanity.
Secondly: Hummer EV (and other poorly designed EVs) will pollute more than some ICE cars (see ACEEE’s Greenest list of cars). 9000lb EVs use up so much electricity, that a typical ICE has fewer emissions (once we factor in the amount of coal / natural gas that turns into the electricity that’d power a Hummer EV).
Fortunately, these EPA rules are better written than the Advance Cars II standard (and really, that’s the one I’m pissed off about). But the extremist pro-EV groups have gone too far, to the point where EVs are more pollution causing than some other quite legitimate vehicles (ex: Prius).
As I said before: banning the Prius is a mistake. People will wake up to the madness as these kinds of regulations take effect, and we will miss out on our goals. At very minimum, the rules need to make sense and truly progress us as a people. Writing down bullshit because the extremist environmentalist faction is braindead is… well… counterproductive.
The alternative is go take a bet on the agricultural underpinnings of civilization being viable in a hotter world. That’s an utterly mad uncontrolled geoengineering experiment to try.
The alternative is to allow Prius, so that your political views don’t get laughed out of every discussion over the next decade and utterly ignored.
No one will seriously try to accomplish this goal if yall ban the Prius from the lineup of future cars for being “not environmentally friendly enough”.
You are literally banning the best car for our environment. Literally. There’s a lot of greenhouse-emissions and pollution from mining Lithium, Cobalt, and other rare-earth metals (magnets) needed to make an EV move ya know.
The ACEEE is a long-running pro-environmentalist groups that I’m citing as well. If that’s not “green enough” for you, you seriously won’t get any traction with this.
Filling your future economy with Hummer EVs will cook the earth faster my man.
9000lb EVs are worse for the environment than Prius. We need to have the correct regulations if you actually want to improve the world. All of that Hummer EV electricity is going to come from coal + natural gas, and with 3x the weight and like 4x the drag compared to a Prius, its going to literally burn more carbon and wreck the world faster.
If you can’t see that, then you’re an extremist EV fan who is beginning to literally hurt the environment with insane decisions.
Speak truth to power. And the truth is… some EVs are very, very, very bad for the environment. We need proper rules/regulations that truly improve our environment. Not just EV fanbois running the show.
I’m far from an EV fan. We’re better off with a lot fewer cars in addition to electrification of those which remain.
I’m just more of a fan of a civilization-supporting planet than burning fossil fuels. And that’s a physics-driven choice, not one constructed for ideological reasons
Hummer EV. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Hummer EV is worse for the environment than the typical ICE car, by huge margins.
If you don’t get this right, you’ll end up hurting USA (and the world) more than you think. That’s just physics. Sending 9000lb cars around with huge profiles with Coefficient-of-Drag in the 0.5+ range will eat up our energy and burn more coal/natural gas than any more reasonable car (even traditional ICE cars like Chevy TRAX).
That’s just physics. And organizations like ACEEE + Argonne National Labs are busy calculating / number crunching these statistics. Random assertions aside, pure EV is worse than many other possible regulations we could be doing. (In particular, encouraging the most efficient vehicles regardless of technology).
EVs in particular are going to be natural-gas powered for the near future. Fortunately Nat. Gas is 60% thermal efficiency rather than 30% (of typical ICE), but your margin for efficient vehicles is much smaller than you might expect. And there’s probably Coal-plants (~30%) that’d drag down the efficiency of our energy grid in practice anyway.
You have to look at this problem holistically. Randomly just white-knighting EVs all day every day is going to lead to more environmental problems.
There are plenty of sensible EV options, both cheaper and better than the $120,000 Hummer EV @ 9000 pounds. Actually, pretty much literally every other non commercial EV is better. That said, even the Hummer EV is still about 50% better than its ICE equivalent.
There are plenty of sensible EV options, both cheaper and better than the $120,000 Hummer EV @ 9000 pounds.
And all of them are less efficient than the 2024 Prius Prime for our environment. (See my ACEEE citation from above). Literally all of them.
You’re underestimating the efficiency of Prius, much like other EV fanbois. Prius is the most environmentally friendly vehicle today, even beyond small / efficient EVs like the Nissan Leaf or the GM Bolt.
The best vehicles for the environment is the Prius Prime PHEV, and #2 is Prius Hybrid. Other cars like Accord Hybrid, Camry Hybrid, and Corolla Hybrid are in the top 10.
EVs can win and seem to have significant advantages. But not enough to make the #1 slot. For EVs to win you need a relatively small battery pack (ex: 40kW-hr Leaf), and relatively lightweight. The Prius has a 800lb+ advantage over most EVs (most EVs, even small ones like Nissan Leaf, are 4000lb behemoths, far above the 3200lb Prius).
Yeah, EV Battery tech sucks today. Its still too heavy. Fortunately, 60% efficiency of large-scale Nat. Gas combination cycle plants magically gathers more energy than small ICE (like 40% Atkinson or 30% Otto Cycle engines), so EVs get some degree of advantage even when the grid remains highly Fossil Fuel based.
But you still have weight + mining + other dirty issues (rare-earth metals for significant magnets on those motors…) that add up to bad environmental effects.
Problem is that CO2 concentrations stay elevated basically forever once we dump it into the atmosphere.. This means that the temperature we hit is determined by the cumulative total emissions, not by the rate of emissions. So you can calculate how much we can afford to emit to have a 50% risk of crossing any given temperature threshold, such as 1.5°C or 2°C, between which we lose a lot of major ecosystems, and beyond which we end up outside the envelope where it’s clear that we can maintain civilization. This is a very limited emissions budget, so actually keeping temperatures under 2°C means cutting emissions roughly in half before 2030, and to zero by 2050. Since cars last on average about 20 years, deploying new fossil-fuel-burning-cars after 2030 is effectively a commitment to risk ending civilization.
Yes, it’s politically tough, but the alternative is to take on a really insane risk.
You’re throwing away the baby with the bathwater here. Hybrids, such as the Prius, reduce CO2 emissions by 30% to 50% compared to a normal vehicle by achieving 57mpg.
Switching all of our ICE vehicles to Prius (or other Atkinson Cycle hybrids, such as Ford Maverick) would instantly cut out 30% to 50% of our greenhouse gas emissions. And yet this is apparently not enough for yall. That’s insanity.
Secondly: Hummer EV (and other poorly designed EVs) will pollute more than some ICE cars (see ACEEE’s Greenest list of cars). 9000lb EVs use up so much electricity, that a typical ICE has fewer emissions (once we factor in the amount of coal / natural gas that turns into the electricity that’d power a Hummer EV).
Fortunately, these EPA rules are better written than the Advance Cars II standard (and really, that’s the one I’m pissed off about). But the extremist pro-EV groups have gone too far, to the point where EVs are more pollution causing than some other quite legitimate vehicles (ex: Prius).
As I said before: banning the Prius is a mistake. People will wake up to the madness as these kinds of regulations take effect, and we will miss out on our goals. At very minimum, the rules need to make sense and truly progress us as a people. Writing down bullshit because the extremist environmentalist faction is braindead is… well… counterproductive.
The alternative is go take a bet on the agricultural underpinnings of civilization being viable in a hotter world. That’s an utterly mad uncontrolled geoengineering experiment to try.
The alternative is to allow Prius, so that your political views don’t get laughed out of every discussion over the next decade and utterly ignored.
No one will seriously try to accomplish this goal if yall ban the Prius from the lineup of future cars for being “not environmentally friendly enough”.
Note: Prius is #1 vehicle on ACEEE’s most green cars of 2024. https://www.aceee.org/greener-cars
You are literally banning the best car for our environment. Literally. There’s a lot of greenhouse-emissions and pollution from mining Lithium, Cobalt, and other rare-earth metals (magnets) needed to make an EV move ya know.
The ACEEE is a long-running pro-environmentalist groups that I’m citing as well. If that’s not “green enough” for you, you seriously won’t get any traction with this.
The alternatives to 100% EVs is no cars or a real chance of killing a few billion people.
Physics makes the final call.
Filling your future economy with Hummer EVs will cook the earth faster my man.
9000lb EVs are worse for the environment than Prius. We need to have the correct regulations if you actually want to improve the world. All of that Hummer EV electricity is going to come from coal + natural gas, and with 3x the weight and like 4x the drag compared to a Prius, its going to literally burn more carbon and wreck the world faster.
If you can’t see that, then you’re an extremist EV fan who is beginning to literally hurt the environment with insane decisions.
Speak truth to power. And the truth is… some EVs are very, very, very bad for the environment. We need proper rules/regulations that truly improve our environment. Not just EV fanbois running the show.
I’m far from an EV fan. We’re better off with a lot fewer cars in addition to electrification of those which remain.
I’m just more of a fan of a civilization-supporting planet than burning fossil fuels. And that’s a physics-driven choice, not one constructed for ideological reasons
Hummer EV. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Hummer EV is worse for the environment than the typical ICE car, by huge margins.
If you don’t get this right, you’ll end up hurting USA (and the world) more than you think. That’s just physics. Sending 9000lb cars around with huge profiles with Coefficient-of-Drag in the 0.5+ range will eat up our energy and burn more coal/natural gas than any more reasonable car (even traditional ICE cars like Chevy TRAX).
That’s just physics. And organizations like ACEEE + Argonne National Labs are busy calculating / number crunching these statistics. Random assertions aside, pure EV is worse than many other possible regulations we could be doing. (In particular, encouraging the most efficient vehicles regardless of technology).
EVs in particular are going to be natural-gas powered for the near future. Fortunately Nat. Gas is 60% thermal efficiency rather than 30% (of typical ICE), but your margin for efficient vehicles is much smaller than you might expect. And there’s probably Coal-plants (~30%) that’d drag down the efficiency of our energy grid in practice anyway.
You have to look at this problem holistically. Randomly just white-knighting EVs all day every day is going to lead to more environmental problems.
If we actually succeed, we end up with a decarbonized electric grid too, and the big EV’s emissions drop to zero.
I do agree that huge vehicles should be discouraged for personal transport, but that’s for livable-cities reasons, not climate.
There are plenty of sensible EV options, both cheaper and better than the $120,000 Hummer EV @ 9000 pounds. Actually, pretty much literally every other non commercial EV is better. That said, even the Hummer EV is still about 50% better than its ICE equivalent.
And all of them are less efficient than the 2024 Prius Prime for our environment. (See my ACEEE citation from above). Literally all of them.
You’re underestimating the efficiency of Prius, much like other EV fanbois. Prius is the most environmentally friendly vehicle today, even beyond small / efficient EVs like the Nissan Leaf or the GM Bolt.
The best vehicles for the environment is the Prius Prime PHEV, and #2 is Prius Hybrid. Other cars like Accord Hybrid, Camry Hybrid, and Corolla Hybrid are in the top 10.
EVs can win and seem to have significant advantages. But not enough to make the #1 slot. For EVs to win you need a relatively small battery pack (ex: 40kW-hr Leaf), and relatively lightweight. The Prius has a 800lb+ advantage over most EVs (most EVs, even small ones like Nissan Leaf, are 4000lb behemoths, far above the 3200lb Prius).
Yeah, EV Battery tech sucks today. Its still too heavy. Fortunately, 60% efficiency of large-scale Nat. Gas combination cycle plants magically gathers more energy than small ICE (like 40% Atkinson or 30% Otto Cycle engines), so EVs get some degree of advantage even when the grid remains highly Fossil Fuel based.
But you still have weight + mining + other dirty issues (rare-earth metals for significant magnets on those motors…) that add up to bad environmental effects.
It can’t run on sunlight or fission, so that’s a long term no-go.