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Some Electric Car Drivers Might Spew More CO2 Than Diesel Cars, New Research Shows (bloomberg.com)
bricko shares a report from Bloomberg with the caption, "Making batteries is a mess": Beneath the hoods of millions of the clean electric cars rolling onto the world's roads in the next few years will be a dirty battery. Every major carmaker has plans for electric vehicles to cut greenhouse gas emissions, yet their manufacturers are, by and large, making lithium-ion batteries in places with some of the most polluting grids in the world. By 2021, capacity will exist to build batteries for more than 10 million cars running on 60 kilowatt-hour packs, according to data of Bloomberg NEF. Most supply will come from places like China, Thailand, Germany and Poland that rely on non-renewable sources like coal for electricity.
An electric vehicle in Germany would take more than 10 years to break even with an efficient combustion engine's emissions. "We're facing a bow wave of additional CO2 emissions," said Andreas Radics, a managing partner at Munich-based automotive consultancy Berylls Strategy Advisors, which argues that for now, drivers in Germany or Poland may still be better off with an efficient diesel engine. The findings, among the more bearish ones around, show that while electric cars are emission-free on the road, they still discharge a lot of the carbon-dioxide that conventional cars do. Just to build each car battery -- weighing upwards of 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) in size for sport-utility vehicles -- would emit up to 74 percent more C02 than producing an efficient conventional car if it's made in a factory powered by fossil fuels in a place like Germany, according to Berylls' findings. Yet regulators haven't set out clear guidelines on acceptable carbon emissions over the life cycle of electric cars, even as the likes of China, France and the U.K. move toward outright bans of combustion engines. It all has to do with manufacturing. According to estimates of Mercedes-Benz's electric-drive system integration department, manufacturing an electric car pumps out "significantly" more climate-warming gases than a conventional car, which releases only 20 percent of its lifetime CO2 at this stage. "Just switching to renewable energy for manufacturing would slash emissions by 65 percent, according to Transport & Environment," reports Bloomberg. "In Norway, where hydro-electric energy powers practically the entire grid, the Berylls study showed electric cars generate nearly 60 percent less CO2 over their lifetime, compared with even the most efficient fuel-powered vehicles."
An electric vehicle in Germany would take more than 10 years to break even with an efficient combustion engine's emissions. "We're facing a bow wave of additional CO2 emissions," said Andreas Radics, a managing partner at Munich-based automotive consultancy Berylls Strategy Advisors, which argues that for now, drivers in Germany or Poland may still be better off with an efficient diesel engine. The findings, among the more bearish ones around, show that while electric cars are emission-free on the road, they still discharge a lot of the carbon-dioxide that conventional cars do. Just to build each car battery -- weighing upwards of 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) in size for sport-utility vehicles -- would emit up to 74 percent more C02 than producing an efficient conventional car if it's made in a factory powered by fossil fuels in a place like Germany, according to Berylls' findings. Yet regulators haven't set out clear guidelines on acceptable carbon emissions over the life cycle of electric cars, even as the likes of China, France and the U.K. move toward outright bans of combustion engines. It all has to do with manufacturing. According to estimates of Mercedes-Benz's electric-drive system integration department, manufacturing an electric car pumps out "significantly" more climate-warming gases than a conventional car, which releases only 20 percent of its lifetime CO2 at this stage. "Just switching to renewable energy for manufacturing would slash emissions by 65 percent, according to Transport & Environment," reports Bloomberg. "In Norway, where hydro-electric energy powers practically the entire grid, the Berylls study showed electric cars generate nearly 60 percent less CO2 over their lifetime, compared with even the most efficient fuel-powered vehicles."
This doesn't seem to take into account that many grids are rapidly improving in terms of how much solar and wind they have in the grids. If an electric car hits breakeven compared to a highly efficient diesel car given 5 years given current rates for example, then in practice we should expect that to happen even earlier. Moreover, electric cars have very long potential lifespans since they contain few moving parts (there's correspondingly less maintenance on an electric car than on an ICE car). Of course, the most efficient thing to do is still to not have a car, and use public transport; unfortunately for many people that isn't a practical option.
Just goes to show you how frightened some people are regarding electric cars. I don't see why so many people (that are not in the gas-powered car industry) are scared of them.
Obviously it's better to concentrate all the emissions at the factories that produce batteries and mitigate the pollution concerns there, rather than at the tail pipe of all the cars that are coming out of the factories.
ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/437/
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
For a diesel Volvo vs a Tesla model S, assuming the average 2015 power mix in Europe the break even point is about 28.000Km.
I did take some big shortcuts tho. I compared 100kwh worth of Panasonic LiPo batteries + power to the diesel fuel needed to drive the volvo the same distance using Tesla Model S power usage figures.
There are way to slew this in one or the other direction - for instance I did also add CO2 Equivalent for refining the diesel.
Considering where Berylls Strategy Advisors is located and the fact that the German car companies still have no mass-market ready electric car my guess is that this is fake news and can be disregarded.
I'm admitting that I just looked at the summary. So assuming it's accurate...
Why is it that so many people misunderstand the purpose of electric cars? I don't know why for years now on Slashdot we keep getting posts about articles that nitpick about electric car manufacturing. "Ooh, at one place in your manufacturing chain for 1 second you involved coal, so the whole idea is trash." No it's not. First of all, electric cars don't burn gasoline. Big win there. Reducing petroleum use is a Good Thing. Second, with time electricity sources to both charge said vehicles and produce the batteries could come from renewable sources. The fact that we aren't there today doesn't mean we won't be there soon enough. Having production lines in place to make these vehicles is smart and when the production sources are from renewable energy, what will they complain about next?
Hasn't it been known for some time that most CO2 is produced during a vehical's manufacturing rather than during use
Except that's not correct. The average car emits six tons of carbon dioxide per year. A medium-sized car produces 17 tons of carbon dioxide in manufacturing. That is not negligible! But once you've kept your car for three years, then no, more carbon dioxide is produced in driving the car than in making the car.
and the most low carbon approach is to keep trying the same vehicle for as long as possible rather than buying a new electric car.
Maybe. This site https://www.greencarreports.co... says not, but it depends on how you analyze the numbers.
You mean like from nuclear power? Lowest CO2 energy source we know of, safest energy source we know of, and as "renewable" as solar power because there is enough thorium and uranium on Earth that we'd never be able to burn it all before the sun consumes the planet.
This is standard FUD. Of course you can do twisted calculations where you penalize battery production for the fact that existing electricity and transportation systems burn coal and hydrocarbons and claim that we can't build new electric transportation infrastructure because it requires energy. But their option of sticking with hydrocarbons is a long term disaster, both because of CO2 and because it keeps getting more expensive and energy intensive to extract hydrocarbons. If you also penalize hydrocarbon burning for the waste and pollution produced by oil extraction, batteries still end up ahead in the current US or European economies (on emissions, not yet on cost). If we as a global society plan to shift to sustainable CO2 emissions, we have to switch to driving less, and using renewable electricity for the driving we do.
The solution is relatively obvious; manufacture electric cars using energy from solar arrays or other renewable sources. The cost of solar arrays has dropped so much in the last decade that this is practical now; it does mean you'll want to site car manufacturing plants (and more notably, battery manufacturing plants) in locations with abundant solar energy, but that seems doable-- stay out of Seattle, go for Las Vegas. Wait, that's where Tesla's battery plant is sited.
OK, I read this article and it seems like the definition of FUD. The headline is "The Dirt on Clean Electric Cars", and there's a lot of largely-irrelevant charts and statistics. The most damning statement they make is:
An electric vehicle in Germany would take more than 10 years to break even with an efficient combustion engine’s emissions
Yet further down, they have to admit:
To be sure, other studies show that even in coal-dominant Poland, using an electric car would emit 25 percent less carbon dioxide than a diesel car
So basically, on the worst emitting grids, today, an EV might have about the same emissions as the cleanest diesel; everywhere else they are clearly lower. And the grid in most places is getting steadily cleaner; a diesel made today will not be getting better emissions in 10 years.
U should have read the article and listened. It all depends on Where and how the battery is made. For example, we own a model S. The cells came from Japan. Ok clean. Not great, not bad. However, the model is in not just in Nevada, BUT Tesla is adding massive solar to power the manufacturing of the cells and batteries, and about 1/2 of the drive train. Supposedly, they have added batteries to run the plant at night ( also get cheap charge and help in daytime ). The model 3 is not only the cleanest made car, but likely one of the cleanest made product.
And yes, most of the rest are produced in China in some of the worst locations. To make matters worst, all the lead-acid and li-ion batteries made in China is some of the most polluted on the planet. As such, wind and solar do not play a part for them. So when Tesla goes to China, those batteries will be made/used in China. Compared to a new clean ice vehicle, the Tesla may never fully recoup the massive co2 added
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Every major carmaker has plans for electric vehicles to cut greenhouse gas emissions". Not because the market demands it or because their customers want it.
For people who want electric cars, they have their Priuses, Volts, Teslas, etc. That market is served by several manufacturers and it expands as the demand grows. However *every* manufacturer has to comply with government regulations like CAFE and such. So everyone makes at least one "compliance" model to reduce the average fleet emissions to within regulations. Otherwise - fines, more expensive cars, consumers pay more or the company can't compete and goes bankrupt.
Even a driver-friendly company like Mazda, recently had to kiss the ring and announce "compliance" models. Which no customer of their usual fast-and-fun-to-drive cars wants. So these models fill fail in the market and the costs will be paid by the customers.
You mean like from nuclear power? Lowest CO2 energy source we know of, safest energy source we know of, and as "renewable" as solar power because there is enough thorium and uranium on Earth that we'd never be able to burn it all before the sun consumes the planet.
I'd like to see somebody start making thorium-fueled nuclear power plants; the hype sure makes it sound like a good solution. But so far it's not being done.
Uranium fueled plants, on the other hand, actually have a pretty limited amount of fuel available-- not a problem with the world currently using only about 2% of its power from nuclear sources (*), but if we went to 100%, there's only about 5 years (!!) of fuel.
Some data:
https://phys.org/news/2011-05-...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1104_scr.pdf
This can be solved by reprocessing spent fuel, and by going to breeder reactors. But governments don't want to do that because of fear of nuclear terrorism.
*(nuclear generates 14% of the world electrical production, but electricity is only a small fraction of the world energy use)
BNEF has access to good research and should have written a better article. Instead they've constructed a clickbait article full of gibberish that obscures rather than illuminates what data they do deign to present:
1. An average EV is less polluting, per mile, than even the best gasoline or diesel vehicle.
2. If that EV were built with dirty power, and charged throughout its life with dirty power, it would still be a net win, albeit a small one verging on a tie, on lifetime emissions.
3. We're projected to be be building a whole lot of new EVs.
And there's no mention of the obvious objections to this sort of facile analysis:
1. The average new EV probably displaces a purchase of an average new gasmobile, so the comparison with the most-efficient gasmobile is unrealistic. If the average new EV driver is particularly eco-conscious, and would otherwise be buying a highly-efficient gasmobile, that new driver is probably also sourcing the power from cleaner-than-average supplies, so calculating as if it were charged from the average local grid is unrealistic.
2. Grid carbon intensities are dropping worldwide, and the speed of this drop is accelerating as renewables get cheaper and cheaper relative to fossil-fueled plants. New renewables are cheaper than new thermal power plants almost everywhere, and we're only a few years away from new renewables being cheaper than continuing to fuel an already-built thermal plant in some parts of the world. Over a 15-year lifespan, EVs will keep getting cleaner per-mile, whereas gasmobiles will wear out and become less efficient.
3. While the article focuses on manufacturing emissions, their own graphs show that these correspond to only about 2 years worth of tailpipe emissions. A worthwhile target for reduction, for sure (and one that will happen naturally, as large manufacturers consistently seek to reduce their power costs by buying cheap renewable energy), but not the big target that we should be focusing on. The running costs dominate lifetime emissions, so we should tackle them first (especially as cleaning up electricity generation world-wide would also significantly reduce manufacturing emissions).
BNEF usually produces much better analysis than this. I'm disappointed in them.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
All the article is saying is if you make dirty batteries, you get a dirty product. The spin on it was impressive saying fuck electric cars. (disclosure - telsa owner)
After some google and linked in stalking, all the partners at the firm Berylls Strategic Advisors are a mouthpiece for the big oil think tank part of the Oliver Wyman firm.
However the partner of Berylls (whom came from Audi and OW) is saying buy diesel cars instead.
We all know German diesel cars are totally very much extremely only the best people clean. re: audi, vw
Just to build each car battery -- weighing upwards of 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) in size for sport-utility vehicles -- would emit up to 74 percent more C02 than producing an efficient conventional car
10 years to break even Meaning that you know since cars last more than 10 years..... electric cars would beat ICEs under even the most pro ICE environment......
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Yeah, I think that vehicular homicide is not something to brag about.
This is false. Germany still runs majority of its nuclear plants. Less than half was closed after Fukushima (8/17). The current plan is to phase them out as their useful life span ends, and not upgrade/build new ones. This phase out is ongoing and is being constantly postponed at this point as reality of having no chance of meeting CO2 targets with all the coal fired plants they have to run to compensate is starting to dawn on non-crazy parts of environmentalist movement.
The problem is that those closed plants alone accounted for a sizeable chunk of energy, so Germany went from net exporter to net importer overnight, while having to fire up all of its mothballed coal plants, and import from Poland which built up a lot of coal power near German border with correct expectations that Germany will need it.
Thing is though, coal power is still a lot cleaner than gasoline/diesel automotive ICE in almost every metric. A LOT cleaner. Even in just the CO2 aspects, without getting into the whole "particulates, NOx, etc" brouhaha, which is close to zero on modern coal fired plant, but significant and emitted at surface level by automotive ICEs. Which is still one of the major causes of harm to humans in more congested areas that has nothing to do with global warming.
The problem is in some ways worse than stated since they are front loading the CO2 emissions now rather than later.
However, the same is true of corn ethanol. That too doesn't actually reduce CO2 since about as much petroleum energy goes into raising and drying corn as you get out of it.
The argument for Corn Ethanol is NOT that is it less polluting but that it is the leading edge of a transition to other sources of ethanol that are not yet on the market but consume less petroleum. For example, cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass or poplar.
You need to start transitioning a fleet about 30 years before you want the full transition because that's how long it takes to build the infrastructure, economics benefits to accrue, and to replace the vehicles.
So starting out with Lithium and Ethanol made inefficiently but competitively isn't a terrible idea. And since the numbers of units sold is also low at the start it also isn't a big impact on total CO2.
On the otherhand, Ethanol is probably a lousy idea compared to either Algal fuels or Electric cars. But alagal fuels are not ready for mass production yet.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It dosent help that in many regions of the world the electric grid is powered substantially by fossil fuels. If we are talking CO2, electric car mileage is only as clean as the electricity you use, powering it from a coal plant doesn't generate much or perhaps any CO2 savings. Throw in the fact 5 to 40 tons of CO2 go into manufacturing traditional vehicles, and electrics tend to be even higher, and the actual CO2 savings isn't as much as most people want it to be. You can still save in emissions, but where I live the power is so dirty I'd get 35-45mpg (depends on time of day) equivelant unless I went solar so I'd need to drive that electric for a heck of a long time to break even.
Way more complicated then what people think.
When we think global warming we normally think about our Car. Because we have to pay for around 10-20 gallons a week we regularly see thousands of cars, and when the weather get cold we see the exhaust coming from the pipe. The automobile is the symbol of pollution.
However it is a major polluter it isn't the biggest one. Even for your personal carbon count. Normally your home is #1 if you are using Oil heat (using that because it is a popular form of heat that is most similar to gasoline) You car may use 1000 gallons a year, while if you live in the north east with oil heat you can burn 1400 gallons of oil a year. Then combine your home electricity your home which most people only use 1/3 of the time. is spewing more carbon then your car.
I have switch my home to wood pellets, and to keep my home warm for the winter I need 4 tons of pellets. Over the year at best I probably have 10 lbs of Ash. the rest is exhausted out of my home and polluting the air.
Now all that said. Moving cars to Electric will not stop global warming or even slow it down, because the extra carbon needed to make them, will offset the normal life of the car. However we have begin to shift the pollution hard to regulate areas (your own stuff) to centralized locations, which can be better regulated, and upgraded over time to more green methods.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That is why science does actual studies
In fact, science does do actual studies... but this isn't one of them. This is an article in a business magazine, which cites a study from Berylls Strategy Advisors, which they list as "a Munich-based automotive consultancy".
So, no, this isn't a scientific study; this is an advocacy piece disguised as a scientific study.
It's also only looking at CO2, and ignoring the other pollution. Diesels put out a lot of harmful particulate matter right where people live and breathe.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That is not negligible! But once you've kept your car for three years, then no, more carbon dioxide is produced in driving the car than in making the car.
It's likely better to have all of the energy generation for electric cars done in a central location, even if it's all done with coal power, but simply having an electric car doesn't meant that running it is CO2 free. You wouldn't claim that having an electric car is a good green alternative if the person who owned was charging it with a diesel generator every day.
Having an electric car is not CO2 free, but even the current mix of electricity in the US ensures it's about 50% cleaner in total. See figure ES-2 in this document. With low-carbon sources spreading, it's going to get even better.
Ezekiel 23:20
"Some ... might ..."
Just more FUD from the petro and ICE mfgs showing how EVs are bad for everything. Sigh.
A slightly better read:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/e...
(disclaimer: I've only driven an EV for almost 5 years. We've got over 60K combined miles on our LEAF and Model S)
Although you might be correct, the usual proceeding for comparisons of this sort is referring to the worst case ("even the dirty diesel..."). Also I understood that they implicitly took diesel as the paradigm of all what is bad for the environment, as opposed to everything else including gasoline. Because you know... current trends (of ignorance).
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
The biggest advantage of electric cars is not the 3x efficiency, it's not the incredible acceleration, and it's only partly the lack of post-purchase carbon emissions. It's that everything is much more fungible. I do not delude myself that my electric car is not polluting, I get my power from the texas power grid, which is 34% natural gas and 30% coal . The 3x efficiency combined with getting 28% from less polluting sources is a big step forward, but ultimately just part of the solution.
The main advantage is that it is easier to pressure ERCOT to change their ways than it is to cause millions of texans to change their ways (and buy new vehicles, which itself is pretty nasty for the environment). If the major source of carbon emissions for electric cars is the manufacturers, we can get after them. These entities are capable of working with their governments to come up with a timeline, and a way of managing the expenses to make change happen. Joe Sixpack in his 1967 pickup is unreachable, possibly couldn't afford to fix it if he wanted to, and might not comply if he didn't.
As long as people are driving around with combustion engines, we can pass laws and scream and yell and nothing will change.
Buried superconducting conduits might make sense in some niches, but for the long haul stick to HVDC.
HVDC would survive solar storms by design too, not that retrofitting the existing grid to be solar storm immune would be all that costly ... but no one is doing it, because there is no profit motive to do so.
An ICE tops out around 30% when it's running at it's peak efficiency. That requires an immaculately maintained engine and operating it within a very narrow part of its functional range. Whenever your ICE vehicle is doing anything other than cruise control at its most efficient speed it is way off that efficiency number. Power plants will spend much more of their lifetime operating at or near peak efficiency than an ICE in a car will. Electric motors are also far more efficient with a much broader functional power band than any ICE. Of course we use transmissions in ICE vehicles to try and get more use out of the narrow operating range, but that adds more moving parts that need maintaining as well as more power losses.
There is also the matter of the amount of energy that goes into processing petroleum so that it can be used as a fuel in a car. The fossil fuels used in most power plants, coal and natural gas, don't require nearly as much processing. There is also a lot of value in centralizing, or outsourcing as you say, the CO2 production. Because the CO2 is being generated at one place instead of thousands of individually maintained tailpipes, it is much easier to control and maintain.
Which brings up the fact that most people don't do much for maintenance on their cars. They might get the oil changed regularly. I knew one guy that had never changed the oil in his Taurus that had over 150K miles, just added a quart here and there. For the most part people only take their cars to a mechanic for a tuneup if something is obviously wrong and interfering with their daily use.
This is a terrible argument, and a poorly written article over on Bloomberg. The writer got themselves so flustered that they couldn't be bothered to proof-read, or make a coherent point that doesn't stretch credulity. I would call this, "panic journalism."
You can't do statistics this way because methods of generating power are shifting. Coal plants are dying off across the world. Part of the problem with this article, not to defend coal, is that there is no one way to measure coal emissions. It depends largely on when the power plants were constructed, what the local regulations are, and the size of the plant. You can't just run an average on it, and hope to be close to the truth of the matter. Even comparing Poland to Belarus is silly. And it gets sillier when you start talking about Germany and France.
But even that is mundane when you put it in the terms stated. Europe, as we all know is working hard to solve the power problem. They're doing it in ways that are a lot more radical than anything we've seen in the US. To start talking about carbon footprints, as they stand today, before the industry has even taken hold is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
Of course, when it comes to panic journalism, that's kinda the point, so I can't fault them for that.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
This doesn't address the fact that they are raping the earth for the minerals to build these batteries.
Huh? Lithium comes mostly from evaporite deposits. Don't see why you would "rape the Earth" to get at evaporites, which generally don't require deep mining. You want to see what "raping the Earth" means, look at coal mining: https://grist.org/business-tec...
Steel and Aluminum now are some of the most recycled materials there are. And there is plenty of the product left to recycle.
Well, lithium is one of the most easily recycled materials there is. And, of course, not just internal combustion cars, but electric cars are also made out of steel and aluminum.
Not saying Electric is bad, I just prefer honesty when promoting them.
Diesels put out a lot of harmful particulate matter right where people live and breathe.
No more than diesels do. And if they're cars without a catalyst, like my 1982 300SD or my lady's 2006 Sprinter, then the soot they DO emit is much larger than the soot that gassers spew out. In fact, nearly all of it is large enough for cilia to sweep it out of pockets in your lungs, and for it to be removed during normal sputum production and expectoration. It's only diesels with catalysts which emit primarily PM2.5 and smaller.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think that electric is the future
I believe that synthetic liquid fuels are the future of transportation. We won't have electric airplanes. We won't have transoceanic shipping. We might be able to electrify trains but that requires lots of infrastructure which requires lots of costs. Trains will be running on diesel fuels for a very long time. Personal commuter cars are just a part of our transportation needs. Lots of people and goods move by long haul trucks and buses, and those won't be running on electricity any time soon. Electric trains cannot solve this either because trains need rails and a truck needs only a beaten down track of dirt.
In fact, CO2 isn't even the main concern when trying to reduce emissions from ICE cars.
We've got fuels that are very low in sulfur so that's not much of a concern. Catalytic converters and other technology means there's little particulate or carbon monoxide emissions any more. There might be some NOx but I have to wonder how much even that is a concern.
Then there's increasing evidence that CO2 isn't all that great of a concern. I'm sure that comment will get me modded down. Whatever, the debate is not over no matter how much Al Gore says it is.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
transmission losses are just too high.
HVDC has transmission losses of about 3% per 1000 km.
The world's longest HVDC runs 3300 km from Xinjiang to Jiangsu. It transmits 12 Gw of power at 1.1 megavolts, with transmission losses of less than 10%.
Second the improvements in the grid often take place on the decades scale,
Not really, the US went from 58% coal to 23% coal in the last decade, so the improvement is pretty rapid and with wind, solar, and battery tech really hitting the ramp phase in the mass production cost reduction scale it's likely to accelerate globally. As far as replacement battery cost, Tesla is already down to ~$100/kWh at the pack level so future replacement packs aren't going to be anywhere near $30k unless you're talking a medium duty truck. Also, other than the Leaf which lacks active thermal management almost every EV has way better battery degradation than originally feared.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I always found it fascinating that CO2 levels moving from 200ppm (0.0002) to 400ppm (0.0004), a change of 0.0002, is the cause of all this warming.
Yes, isn't it fascinating? The fact that small fractions of trace gasses can dominate the atmospheric infrared absorption was discovered by John Tyndall in 1859. https://earthobservatory.nasa....
We now know that this is because the tightly-bound diatomic molecules don't have vibrational modes in the infrared energy range, of course, but at the time, it was indeed quite fascinating that miniscule amounts of water and carbon dioxide could absorb more than the vastly larger concentration of oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere.
Tyndall was quite an amazing man. He's also the person credited with coming up with the first reasonable answer to the question "why is the sky blue"? https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/e...
(his answer was "scattering", which is right as far as it goes, but of course it took the mathematics of Rayleigh scattering fifty years later to understand the actual details.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"Every so often" is a bit non-specific.
Kia and Hyundai are offering unlimited mileage warranties on their batteries in the US, or 200k km in other regions. Leaf batteries have proven to be good for 350k km+.
Consumer Reports puts the average lifespan of a car at 250k km (150k miles). Obviously there will be outliers either side. So realistically few people will be wearing out their batteries, and for them the most economical and green option will be to get a used pack from a written off car.
The used packs are also highly recyclable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Even in just the CO2 aspects, without getting into the whole "particulates, NOx, etc" brouhaha, which is close to zero on modern coal fired plant
Not sure where you get that idea, using 3mi/kWh and the average coal plant in my region I figured out that the NOx emissions from an EV running on coal are several times worse than the current EPA standard for passenger vehicles, about as dirty as the dieselgate VWs in fact. Particulates are harder as the PM2.5 and PM5 are going to be in places with low population densities which is probably an overall improvement for health. For CO2 it's close, a hybrid is cleaner than a 3mi/kWh EV when running on coal. But put a reasonable amount of renewables into the mix and use natural gas instead of coal and the EV wins by a large amount.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Prius is not an electric car, you fucking idiot.
The Prius Prime (aka "Plug-in Prius") is.
It has an internal combustion back-up for long trips, but unless you do long road trips, it's pure electric.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This is for shitty cars by traditional companies that are based in those places where the grid is shit.
Tesla's, no matter what you have to say about them, make their batteries in Reno. That's where the gigs factory is, where solar is king. So, this argument doesn't apply to them. They are also the largest installer of batteries on the planet, so this makes me think this article is oil company FUD.
This is the ultimate result of going down the rabbit hole of, "externalities".
Second the improvements in the grid often take place on the decades scale, not necessarily in time to make a large change to vehicles bought today.
The longer we wait to start those improvements the longer it will take to complete.
I remember having a conversation where oil drilling in ANWR came up. I argued that we know that there is oil there, lots of it, and if we went to go get it that would lower energy prices. The person I was conversing with said that drilling in ANWR was pointless because it would take years for oil to flow and make prices go down. Five years later oil price reached record highs. Would oil have still peaked at that point if we drilled in ANWR five years prior? We can't know for sure but it is unlikely to have made it worse.
You want to see CO2 emissions lower in 20 years? Then start building lots of nuclear power plants today. I don't care if it takes 10 years to build a reactor because by not building them we are placing all our faith in solar and wind to save us. That's waiting at port for a ship that might not come. We know we can build a nuclear power plant in less than 5 years because we did this regularly decades ago. The reason it takes so long to build a nuclear power plant today is politics, not technology. Get rid of the politics and make it happen.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I always found it fascinating that CO2 levels moving from 200ppm (0.0002) to 400ppm (0.0004), a change of 0.0002, is the cause of all this warming.
If you compressed the atmosphere to a layer of equal density, it would be about 8 km thick. If you're walking outside in the sun, wearing 2mm thick sunglasses, the ratio of sunglass to atmosphere is 0.25ppm.
Do you find it fascinating that 0.25ppm worth of sunglasses blocks most of the light ?
If we moved all the CO2 from the atmosphere to a single pure layer, then 200 ppm would mean a layer of 5 feet, and 400 ppm would be 10 feet. IR works as a "sunglass" for IR.
I have switch my home to wood pellets, and to keep my home warm for the winter I need 4 tons of pellets. Over the year at best I probably have 10 lbs of Ash. the rest is exhausted out of my home and polluting the air.
In terms of CO2 from your pellet stove/furnace, it isn't pollution.
The CO2 was in the air a year or so ago, became part of a tree, and you released it back into the air. Net result: A slight reduction in atmospheric CO2 from the carbon in the ash.
As solar and energy storage get better, the need for large centralized fission plants will fade.
Until that happens we need nuclear power today.
I keep hearing on how we need to act RIGHT NOW on lowering CO2 but when nuclear power is brought up the response is how solar and batteries will be better than nuclear in 5 or 10 years. Well, can we wait for this to happen or do we have to act RIGHT NOW? If we can wait then let's wait, and shut up already on having to act RIGHT NOW. If we can't wait then stop coming up with excuses on why we can't use the safest and lowest CO2 producing energy source we have today.
Oh, but it takes 10 years to finish a nuclear power plant build? Well, then what are we waiting for? Even if we get this new solar technology on the time frame it is promised it will still take years for it to be brought to market and deployed. In the mean time we'll be building an electricity source that can power the factories that will be building these next generation solar collectors.
Here's what I'm suspecting on why solar and wind advocates oppose nuclear power, they can't compete against nuclear power.
I have no problem with wind and solar power, only the people that say we need to use these and not even try with nuclear power. We have seen the US government issue only a handful of permits to build a new nuclear power plant in the last 40 years. Before then they were issuing dozens per year. It's not that people weren't asking for permits, applications were still being submitted. The government simply stopped issuing permits. There's nuclear power plants that have been under the application process for decades and still did not get a permit. Stop this madness, fix the process, and issue some permits already.
Whatever problem one can raise opposing nuclear power is nothing compared to global warming. If global warming is the threat that it's claimed to be then any problems nuclear power might cause are nothing by comparison.
At this point if you oppose nuclear power then you are denying the catastrophic effects of global warming. If we should fear nuclear power more than global warming then global warming cannot be all that bad.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
About the same amount of CO2 is released from the wood if it decomposes on the surface as if it is burned. Much of it comes from waste, or fast growing hybrid poplar trees.
What has been happening however is that plants are getting bigger from the increases in CO2, and their nutritional value has been rapidly decreasing, which has a knock-on effect.
That is only half the story. - and the scare-mongering side at that.
Yes, increasing CO2 does decrease nutritional value per unit volume by about 8%. However, increasing CO2 also cuts water use by 5-20% and increases plant volume by 40%.
So yes, you need to eat 8% more to get the same nutritional value, but you end up with 40% more to start with, so it's not an issue. You can, in fact, feed more people (approximately 28% more people) and also increase your freshwater reserves significantly as well. A higher CO2 level would, in fact, provide a solid food/water bump for the world.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Unless I'm misreading the summary, the statistics here are kind of dodgy too. It seems like they're saying that the percentage reduction of CO2 won't be so impressive if the car is manufactured using dirty energy. That's not to say that an electric car won't produce way less CO2 in operation than a diesel one - only that operation is only part of the CO2 footprint of a car. So what? Sure, we need to clean up our power generation grids too. But that's no reason not to be reducing the actual CO2 emissions of the car itself.
And, at the risk of sounding like I'm mixing my liberal rationales, dirty power generation doesn't render us 'powerless' to criticize Saudi Crown Princes who assassinate and dismember their critics willy-nilly. There are other reasons than carbon reduction to wean transportation off of oil...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
But after the Fukushima disaster, they closed down all their nuclear power plants.
What did Fukushima have to do with nuclear power in Germany? Fukushima was hit by an earthquake and then a once in 500 year high wave. Are these German nuclear power plants prone to earthquakes? Are they even close enough to an ocean to even have the possibility of a once in a thousand year wave?
Fukushima had nothing to do with nuclear power in Germany. All it did was give an excuse for the already anti-nuke politicians to shut them down. A very weak excuse. If Germany was serious about reducing their CO2 output then they'd keep their nuclear power plants open and build more of them for the future.
The German government has already announced that they'd fail to meet their CO2 reduction goals set during the Paris Agreement. If they kept their nuclear power running then they might have been able to meet their goals.
No nation that wants a modern economy will be able to get one or keep it without nuclear power. That includes Germany.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This kind of trade-off may not be something you'll have to consider in the relatively near future. There are already some hybrid-electric vehicles available which do precisely what you're suggesting here (e.g. Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid). They'll typically get much better gas mileage than a similar gas-only vehicle, and if they're a plug-in hybrid like the Pacifica, they'll also have enough range to use little to no gas for shorter trips.
To provide a personal example, I have a 2017 Chevy Volt. It gets 40mpg when running in hybrid mode (almost independent of driving conditions), and has about 400 mile total range. On a full battery it gets between 40-60 mile range (it depends upon the weather: more in summer, less in winter, as the heating system eats up the battery). Most days, I'm able to use electric-only, as my work commute is well within the battery range. Depending upon how many longer trips I take, I can often go 1,000-2,000 miles between refills of the gas tank. Also, because it has a fully-electric drive system (the gas motor is an electric generator and isn't connected to the wheels in any way), the car has tremendous torque making for a very fun driving experience.
Hybrids like this are still fairly expensive. But I probably won't ever want to go back to a gas-only vehicle again. I doubt I'll shed the hybrid for electric-only, either, as electric-only vehicles seem like serious headaches on longer trips. Maybe someday, but not with current technology.