As a layman these sorts of reductions always seemed pretty strict to me. It seemed like a backdoor way of banning ICE's.
We know that we need to hit zero CO2. I think that regulations on emissions are the complete wrong way to go about it, though. Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater.
Tax the fuel, give incentives to renewable energies and batteries, and let the market sort it out.
Or, have the government seriously attack on the research front.
It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they? That would be a fantastic legacy for any president/prime minister/whatever.
The UK could take bits of land it owns, chuck homes there, give some fresh university grads in shit economic situations some research to crunch on. Like Manhattan 2.0.
You can't just say to people 'oh, your car is impossible, let's go and sniff each other's armpits on the subway, and you'll have to walk to the countryside'. It just doesn't work.
>"It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they? That would be a fantastic legacy for any president/prime minister/whatever."
Apollo wasn't very successful. I say this as someone who is personally an aerospace nut, and owns every space or aviation documentary he can get his hands on.
Apollo succeeded in getting a dozen men to the moon, but it did not succeed in promoting the exploration of space, or creating a great deal of technological innovation which benefited the populace at large (for the amount of money spent). Apollo was also very unpopular, except for a little while between Apollo 9 and 12. Most of the population would have been happier with a new refrigerator or air conditioner, and those appliances would probably have had a better lasting impact (for a number of reasons).
I agree in some ways, but I think energy research is different, because if it actually works it directly results in stuff for everyman.
The actual goal of Apollo was 'put a man on the moon'. Which is super cool, but obviously not all that directly useful.
By contrast, a program whose explicit goal is to make batteries better, or make solar more efficient, or bring fusion reactors closer to production, or even just generically 'do some energy research' is a lot more obviously 'good'.
Governments have a record of being very good at collecting and spending money on extraordinarily expensive projects, but are very bad at making things cheaper and more affordable.
GP's point was "tax the fuel". It doesn't matter what the govt does with the revenue - for my pov, current taxes on fuel don't compensate the huge externalities and side costs of it: Half the police is dedicated to roads, half the city space is roads and parkings, 75% military is attacking petrol producers, we have cancers and asthma, and the global warming will cost us natural disasters and economical inequalities. If we integrated that cost to the gallon of petrol, which would only be fair, the gallon would be 5x or 10x more expensive, and we'd watch the economy innovate, as GP said.
First we can immediately lower the income tax. Second, the current price is actually a loan on all of the victims. Third, the tax can progressively increase along the months, so industries can plan exactly when their renewable products will be market-competitive.
I don't think 'affordability' is the relevant metric here.
I'm talking about EROEI - the viability of doing it at all.
Private enterprise can play the capitalism game and make it cheaper. But it won't invent breakeven fusion to begin with. The risk appetite just isn't there at that level of investment.
I think the way to look at it would be to imagine that you are optimizing some utility function which incorporates some mean and some variance.
The risk of going for a clean energy project is massive. It can fail completely, it could work but not return much profit, there are lots of ways it can go wrong.
However - the problem here is that the 'do nothing' state is not static utility. Do nothing results in everything going to shit, with very little variance.
Our capitalist systems aren't really set up to deal with that, it's a tragedy of the commons. That's why you need things like taxes on oil - to force the utility function to accommodate bad things.
Why should space programs have any benefit for the populace in terms of transferable technology? Joe Public has no need for an ultra powerful rocket engine and the technology that runs that doesn't really have a place in his car or waster/dryer combo. The "technology transfer" argument has always been a bullshity way to get laypeople to support NASA. It has a dubious reality and no space program should have the goal of creating non-space innovations. How successful would SpaceX be if we had them worry about making the next velcro or whatever? Not very. It should just be a good space program. Funny I don't see this this weird standard applied to the Soviet space program, which sites like HN and reddit applaud uncritically.
Also I completely disagree with the top-down central planning argument you're suggesting. If we threw this kind of money at a better fridge, the government would have created a $10m fridge made by a dozen military contractors and each part made in each of the 50 states. You can't just throw money at every problem at expect wonderful results. The history of government spending proves this. The government is only good at large scale edge cases. Everything else is best served by private industry, free markets, capitalism, etc. There's a reason the Soviets were sending spies by the boatload to copy US chip and industrial designs. They just couldn't create this level of innovation via the top-down command method you think magically works.
If anything, Apollo is a tremendous success on so many levels. Its amusing that you consider putting a dozen men on the moon to be a "meh" accomplishment. I've noticed a lot of younger people have this strong anti-NASA view which is ahistorical and overly critical. Its a shame this level of angry contrarianism is in style as it diminishes the amazing accomplishments NASA was able to do, usually under strict budgetary concerns with endless political meddling.
Among other things Apollo was also really expensive propaganda with a lasting impact. In that context it worked well. 50 years later and the US is still the country that put a man on the moon where probes are generally forgotten outside of Voyager.
Energy research similarly has a lot of indirect value outside of simply changing local emissions. By reducing costs you can push world wide adoption through economics not just politics. And create economic incentives to keep improving things over the long term. That's a lot of leverage and well past what direct spending on 'clean' energy could have achieved in the 1980-2000 timespan.
The only way that I can think of to respond to a derailing comment in an effective and meaningful manner would be to engage its substance while synthesizing it with the underlying topic of the thread. Otherwise one is just perpetuating the obfuscation of the original topic of conversation. Whether the Apollo project was "successful" depends on how one views its nature and objectives; germane at least insofar as whether this is a plausible model for research as a strategic state investment, whether such action would be possible or effective, as contrasted with the alternative course of reframing the context in which undirected economic activity was occurring so as to induce a similar degree of investment and subsequent change in the commonly used technologies.
So what nickff is actually saying is that when considering the Apollo program as a model for the response to the CO2 crisis, it would be important to understand the ways in which it failed the putative goal of human expansion into space. I think that he would view the Apollo program as analogous to the discovery by Americans that the Chinese had succeeded in generating a net gain of power for a few minutes from a research fusion reactor. Responding to this by declaring that the US would build the first commercially functioning fusion reactor "not because it was easy, but because it was hard" might go a long way towards quelling the moral panic brought about by the appearance of Chinese ascendency and American decline, but it might be problematic insofar as sustainable and optimal investment in energy (source) research was considered.
As a self described "space nut" how can you fail to see the investment in innovation without the immediate return on ROI that the program brought? That's what makes the Apollo program special. We did something outside of the capitalism system but was funded from it, to achieve something no other company would even touch. That's where the magic lies.
> The proper way for you to indicate this sentiment is to downvote my post, and avoid commenting, as per the Hacker News guidelines.
Eh, I'm hoping dang will come by and detach the comment. It was a pretty classic middlebrow dismissal. "No need to read the comment! Someone compared something to the apollo project!", and etc.
> My point was that governments are unlikely to support 'moonshots', because the 'moonshots' are unpopular, as well as being bad investments.
There are other categories of public sentiment than popular and unpopular. It's not at all true that we don't fund things to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year in the face of public lack of attention and apathy (and, actually, sometimes approval).
I have heard many people say that a 'green energy Apollo project' is necessary, and I am pointing out why Apollo is a bad example. I did not intend to dismiss the parent's ideas, though I disagree with a few of them.
> Most of the population would have been happier with a new refrigerator or air conditioner, and those appliances would probably have had a better lasting impact (for a number of reasons).
Except for the tons more CFCs this would have put into the atmosphere, and CO2 produced from running non-replacement unit. Refrigeration would likely be net positive to quality of life, but it has drawbacks as well as benefits.
> It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they?
I think we're scared we won't find a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels. At least for a few generations. Confronting the reality that society will have a smaller energy budget going in the future compared with the past is a scary prospect for democracy, because it challenges a leg of the "growing pie" assumption.
The idea of 'cheap' makes increasingly less sense going forward as the abstraction of money falls apart due to automation.
What matters is EROEI with externalities included (e.g. energy cost of carbon capture or sea barriers or whatever).
But even if we play that game, in the UK we already pay something like a 75% combined tax rate (probably higher now) on car fuels. So we've already priced in 4x. And household electricity bills are generally trivial compared to stuff like land cost. We can, and will, afford it in monetary terms.
I don't see how this is an externality though. Whatever benefits fossil fuels provide in the form of cheap energy and synthetic building blocks should surely be already factored into its market demand?
'The book received mixed reviews, with Jay Lehr of The Heartland Institute saying, "Written in a conversational style that is easy to read and understand, this book can serve as a layman's guide, refuting the absurd claims that man controls the climate, while explaining why the current abundance of oil and gas due to hydraulic fracturing will leave all efforts to impose wind and solar energy in our rear-view mirrors."'
So obviously a book containing some ignorant claims doesn't rule out it containing insightful claims, but rejecting global warming outright is pretty damning - what positive externalities, exactly, does he refer to?
An externality is a cost or benefit not borne by the parties to a transaction. Cheap electricity is not a "positive externality" because the benefit inures to, and is fully captured by, the buyer of the electricity.
I don't know you'd compare it. What's the true cost of dependence on, ultimately, human muscle power? With, uh, slavery and such. GDP per capita took a vertical path after 1790 , when it'd been flat since the Babylonians began brewing beer.
Well, if the outcome is loss of our habitat then the eventual cost is the sum of the world's economy times however many years it would likely have gone on without the abuse of fossile fuels. And we don't have to compare to muscle power since there are existing methods (since at least the advent of nuclear power) on how to run a CO2 neutral economy with only a moderate immediate loss compared to what we're doing.
I'm afraid it's probably more necessary then, because you need sound justification for any action to be taken. I have to admit - I use models in my day job, and I'm nervous about binding law and treaties based on them.
And I don't see any projections where total loss of habitat is on the table. It'll be more like Mesa Verde, where pre-Industrial warming presumably rendered the home of the Anasazi uninhabitable. Even them that's 100 years out.
> And I don't see any projections where total loss of habitat is on the table.
The more I read about it, the more it seems to me that valuable information continues to be poisoned, clouding our judgement.
See for example the following extracts from wikipedia [1]:
> "Research carried out in 2008 in the Siberian Arctic has shown millions of tons of methane being released, apparently through perforations in the seabed permafrost,[20] with concentrations in some regions reaching up to 100 times normal levels.[22][23] The excess methane has been detected in localized hotspots in the outfall of the Lena River and the border between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea. Some melting may be the result of geological heating, but more thawing is believed to be due to the greatly increased volumes of meltwater being discharged from the Siberian rivers flowing north.[24] Current methane release has previously been estimated at 0.5 Mt per year.[25] Shakhova et al. (2008) estimate that not less than 1,400 Gt of carbon is presently locked up as methane and methane hydrates under the Arctic submarine permafrost, and 5–10% of that area is subject to puncturing by open taliks. They conclude that "release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time". That would increase the methane content of the planet's atmosphere by a factor of twelve,[26][27] equivalent in greenhouse effect to a doubling in the current level of CO2."
Yet in the same section, you know what the introduction text reads currently?
> "Most deposits of methane clathrate are in sediments too deep to respond rapidly, and modelling by Archer (2007) suggests the methane forcing should remain a minor component of the overall greenhouse effect.[17] Clathrate deposits destabilize from the deepest part of their stability zone, which is typically hundreds of metres below the seabed. A sustained increase in sea temperature will warm its way through the sediment eventually, and cause the shallowest, most marginal clathrate to start to break down; but it will typically take on the order of a thousand years or more for the temperature signal to get through.[17]"
So let me get this straight: Because someone found a model from 2007 that makes things look mostly fine, we ignore empirical data from 2008 that shows that a Clathrate Gun of 50 Gt could go off at any time? Please someone tell me how I'm wrong just so I don't have to go crazy here.
So, you want precedent for a loss of habitat? How about [2]? Now look, I'm not saying that this is a certainty. But one has to assign a percentage of risk for this happening. I can't do it, I'm not enough of a modeller, but so far I haven't found any conclusive evidence that would either lead to such a calculation or could tell us with certainty that the risk is close to zero. If it isn't close to zero, I'd argue that we have to do everything we can to make sure it is. Because the insurance policy for a catastrophic damage happening at, say, 1% chance, is worth paying up to 1% of that catastrophic damage. My intuition is, it's way more than 1%.
This stuff is different from and often at odds with CO2 emissions. Taxing fuel works great for CO2, since the amount of fuel you burn corresponds very strongly to the amount of CO2 you emit. But it doesn't work at all for other sorts of emissions like these, because they depend heavily on how you burn the fuel, not just how much you burn. Often, burning everything cleanly means burning more fuel overall.
> >> Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater.
which isn't true. Moreover, you didn't really give an argument for why this shouldn't be tackled at both ends of the problem. The smell is the least of our worries with particulate emissions.
You're aware that Tesla has driven the cost of batteries below $200/kwh 5 years ahead of schedule? Batteries than can go in light vehicles, heavy vehicles, any sorts of vehicles. They will only continue to get cheaper.
Its really frustrating, its impossible to get work as a researcher - even for shit pay !
Money has really dried up ( or maybe there are too many graduates ). In the UK their is a push from universities for students to self fund their Phd in aeronautical engineering !
Its the most regressive thing you could do, but whatever - democracy.
This is an incomplete description of what is happening here. The world of academic research is undersupplied in funding, but massively oversupplied in researchers.
There is no need to add more researchers; we can't fund the ones we already have. Efforts like the one you describe are demotivating people from training in a function that we don't need more of, which is a reasonable thing to do.
I agree. It's ridiculous to say that 99 parts per million of pollutants "passes" and 100 ppm "fails". There's no incentive to do better.
But a tax of $1 per ppm multiplied by the annual number of miles driven will create powerful demand by consumers for lower taxed cars, and the car makers will do what they can to meet the demand.
CO2 reduction will happen one filthy, grotty transaction at a time. It'll take exactly as long as it will take and there's probably [sweet fanny adams] anyone can do about it, other than build a thing that helps it along.
I have living relatives who saw the transition from mules to tractors. It wasn't just nicer, it meant killing yourself much less slowly. Yes, they are that old, and they all look like tintypes from the 19th century - that gaunt, hollow look that working that hard gives you.
> there's probably [sweet fanny adams] anyone can do about it
That's a pithy defeatist statement. Personally I got a job at a renewable energy company. There are many avenues you can take to help tackle climate change.
Excellent! Just please realize probably two-ten percent of the people I know were in alt. energy the first time around, after the Gas Scare in the 1970s. It just takes a while ( and the "defeatism" was just related to how long it will take.)
You proving me wrong would the best possible outcome.
Yeah, tell me about it! The urgency (or lack of it) is what drives me crazy. At least there is hope though, for example huge changes are happening now in China at a crazy pace. I hope it won't be too little too late, the magnitude of what we need to do is daunting.
>The UK could take bits of land it owns, chuck homes there
"Chucking homes there" would be a good place to start improvements, actually.
Designing zero-energy homes and offices is not hard, but housing developers have been slow to adopt the practice. Looking around, it seems like most modern house plans/blueprints have no preferred orientation to the single greatest energy source: the sun (or if they do then housing developers ignore them). When there's literally no "sunward"[1] on the map, then the cheapest of all energy reduction strategies -- passive solar design -- is all but impossible.
Why isn't the climate zone given on a house plan? Because the assumption is that you'll just consume energy (typically fossil fuels) to make up the difference. We're designing buildings totally backwards: starting at form and bolting on function.
The ideal would be adjustable parameters based on local conditions. South facing windows based on heating-degree-days, overhangs based on latitude, floorplans that adjust to ground topology and microclimate, etc. So you punch in the site conditions (or sense them), hit "compile", and it spits out blueprints for a zero-energy passive building specifically suited to those exact local conditions.
This is more similar to how plants develop -- by sensing and adapting to local conditions, they incrementally design themselves to suit their habitat.
[1] that is, south in the northern hemisphere and north in the southern hemisphere
Actually, strict bright-line artificial limits like this are a great way to encourage innovation by using regulatory power to harness market forces to achieve a well-defined goal. In this case, the goal of MPG standards is actually not CO2 emissions or health, but using less oil. The international market for oil is quite broken and easily manipulated, and the global resources of oil are limited.
I absolutely support government-funded research into improving automobile technology. As you say, clean energy is critical. The obvious place to focus energy research these days is on storage technologies from small scale chemical batteries to large-scale potential-energy solutions. We have the technology to generate clean energy relatively cheaply today, but we're missing the storage solutions to even out cycles in wind and solar power, and the continent-scale electricity grids we need to efficiently distribute the power to where it's needed.
It's one thing to trick the tests by 2x, maybe even 3x, if the tests are too strict for the real world. But not by 40x like VW did...And I believe they said only to gain a 10% performance boost. That's just stupid on VW's part.
Anyway, the emissions scandal + the rise of EVs, will finally make all manufacturers try and push as many EVs on the market by 2022, when the new Euro 7 standard is official. They will need to lower their "fleet's" emissions, and the only effective way to do that is to push as many EVS into the market as possible.
So in the end these regulations served their purpose. I'm happy for it.
While I agree that the comment was off-topic and not really adding to the discussion, the issue is not getting old. The leaks happened barely a month ago, with no obvious repercussions (save Iceland).
The story has been swept under the rug as much as possible and I will support anybody keeping it in the limelight.
Perhaps we are at the extreme limits of emissions reductions and no real further gains can be made unless more active equipment is used on the exhaust such as electrostatic precipitators for diesels, and extra direct treatment like catalytic converters do.
The fraud reported here impacts CO₂ emissions, not particulates. Plenty more can be done to reduce CO₂ emissions through increased thermodynamic efficiency, hybrid drive trains, weight reduction, and drag reduction. We are nowhere near the extreme limits yet, it's just a question of cost effectiveness.
Gasoline engines with modern emissions control systems already emit tiny amounts of particulates and other pollutants. Diesel engines are probably not going to be viable for light passenger vehicles much longer as the limits get stricter.
Mitsubishi is a bad one to judge by. Aside from this, there's:
In what was referred to as "one of the largest corporate scandals in Japanese history", Mitsubishi was twice forced to admit to systematically covering up defect problems in its vehicles. Four defects were first publicised in 2000, but in 2004 it confessed to 26 more going back as far as 1977, including failing brakes, fuel leaks and malfunctioning clutches
Basically, I don't trust them further than I can throw them.
Besides, this latest scandal goes back 25 years, and we definitely have made large strides in fuel economy over that time. (Though much of the gain has been offset by things like increasing vehicle weight for safety & comfort)
The penalty for automakers should be based on the law as it was written. They need no exemptions based on the scale of their crimes. If they broke the law and knew about it, then someone has to go to jail. That's how the law works, and the only thing that will prevent another 25 years of false governance.
I agree decision makers should still go to jail, but we're not going to suddenly dissolve automakers who employee hundreds of thousands of people (witness the US government stepping in to save GM).
If you can't build petrol cars that meet emissions standards, you must build electric vehicles.
OK for whom? The US gov't clearly does not think its OK. I doubt the employees think its OK. I don't think its OK. We need cars now. In the present. Not in a decade or two when the major ones manage to make affordable electric ones and when our electric grid can handle that.
Battery technology is already five years ahead of predictions. If Tesla can make a $35K electric vehicle that 400k people are waiting 2 years for, why can't major automakers?
Also, the current electrical grid (at least in the US) can easily support 100% of light vehicles if they all transitioned to electric vehicles. The DOE did a study on this about 6 years ago. Need more power? Build more solar and wind, and use electric cars to soak it up.
The major automakers can of course make 100K luxury automobiles, electric or not. They don't replace the 17 million normally-priced cars the rest of us buy each year.
Studies and predictions are nice, but to build it and make it work takes decades. We have a massive infrastructure in the country. And of course, it won't work the way we planned. Everything changes and pivots, not just SV startups.
> Studies and predictions are nice, but to build it and make it work takes decades. We have a massive infrastructure in the country. And of course, it won't work the way we planned. Everything changes and pivots, not just SV startups.
No, no it does not. Existing overnight electrical generation can satisfy replacing every internal combustion vehicle with an electrical vehicle, today, in the United States. Any statements contrary are outright lies.
> Existing overnight electrical generation can satisfy replacing every internal combustion vehicle with an electrical vehicle, today, in the United States.
This isn't so obviously true that it can be asserted without justification. Based on the statistics I'm seeing from the EIA, replacing every light-duty automobile in the USA with a Tesla Model S would increase demand on the electric grid by more than 50%.
"The US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory calculated that the grid’s excess capacity will support over 150 million pure electric vehicles.
150 million means that nearly 75% of the vehicles on our roads today could be electric and the grid would have the capacity to support them all."
That leaves 25%, right? Right. Considering this is three years ago, it doesn't take into account the rapid expansion of solar and wind generation capacity (which is ~98% of all new generation capacity in 2016). The production tax credit has been extended for another 6 years; you're only going to see more wind and solar projects on the horizon.
“It took us 40 years to get to 1 million installations, and it will take us only two years to get to 2 million,” said Dan Whitten, vice president of communications at the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). “This is a time to mark when the solar industry started to accelerate at warp speed.”
"At the end of 2015, the U.S. solar market hit a total capacity of 27 gigawatts. That represents just 1 percent of the current U.S. electricity mix, but it could triple to 3 percent by 2020. This year alone, the U.S. solar market is projected to grow 119 percent, which represents an additional 16 gigawatts of new installed capacity and more than double the record-breaking 7.3 gigawatts added in 2015."
Did you know they give wind power away for free in some parts of Texas because of the excess power they can't transport out? Delicious, clean wind power for electric vehicles.
So! You said my assertion wasn't obvious. I concede that is correct. The statistics you're seeing from the EIA are grossly inaccurate for comparing internal combustion vehicles to electric vehicles when you compare how much more efficient an electric vehicle is.
I stand by my thesis: the current US electric grid has sufficient generation capacity to support 100% electric vehicles
There are a lot of warning signs regarding he current US infrastructure, several people have talked about the inability of our current infrastructure to efficiently manage most/all cars suddenly usig the electric grid.
But the bigger problem is that you simply can't take a long trip on battery only, without significant delay. I take a twice-yearly trip that takes about 10 hours in a car, with two small kids. That would be hell in an electric car.
I've had to clarify this several times before on HN* - for the current generation of electrical vehicles well-to-wheel efficiency is not higher than for hybrid gasoline vehicles, meaning that unless the electrical power necessary to support them is generated from non-fossil fuel sources there is no net benefit.
That I find myself restating this over and over is just a testatement to how effectively Electrical Vehicles have been marketed.
Seems like the necessity is simply that the average CO2/joule needs to be lower than a car's ICEs.
It's certainly not zero right now, but we're up to 11% hydro/solar/wind[0], so it seems like it likely is cleaner, and it's getting better at a faster rate than ICEs are.
Do you think that's not also going to involve laying off thousands of employees as they retool factories to build cars for which there is little demand?
17.5 million cars were sold in the US last year. GM, for example sold nearly 200k cars in March. Just March. If they went from that to selling 400k cars every 2-3 years, that would be a horrendously precipitous decline in sales with massive layoffs.
Not to mention retooling factories. They can't just spin around on a dime and start making electric cars instead of gas ones.
Oh, and where's the charging infrastructure for everyone to drive an electric car? The Tesla stations are great, but they still take 30 minutes or so to fully charge a car. Go look at the throughput at a busy gas station and imagine every one of those people waiting 30 minutes. They'd basically never get to leave the gas station.
You're going to see a drop in auto sales regardless with autopilot and ridesharing services reducing the need to own a car. Note GM investing in Lyfy (smart; they see the writing on the wall).
Auto jobs are going away, but that's an argument for basic income for another day.
Retooling factories can be done quickly. It only took Tesla ~10-14 days of downtime to retool from Model S-only production to Model S and Model X. Electric vehicles are so so much easier to produce than an internal combustion vehicle, as its only a battery and electric motor for a drivetrain.
Charging infrastructure? Every home with at least 100amp/220V service is a charging station. Not to mention every Tesla destination and Supercharger station.
I don't disagree with any of that. The poster I was originally replying to above was saying we shouldn't shut down the automakers because it would put thousands of people out of work in one sentence and then saying we should forbid them from making their primary source of revenuein the next. I'm just pointing out that these are effectively the same thing.
You can't taking a company with a 50+ year infrastructure built around doing one thing, tell it to stop doing that overnight and expect it to stay in business and continue employing 100,000 people. It just doesn't work that way.
Without a vastly better charging infrastructure most people in cities, where the current pollution problems really matter, can't buy an electric car because they have nowhere to charge it.
Geez, that's a weak excuse not to build them. The government did a deal with VW, I think their deal should've been to produce and sell electric cars with a certain price, as well as (or...) to provide the charging infrastructure for them. Obviously not throughout the whole country, maybe e.g. in big cities. There were talks of 18 billion dollar fines, how many charging ports would that build.
That's not really how the law works. You don't use it as a weapon against people you don't like, and you especially don't let judges come up with completely arbitrary penalties that benefit a popular political position.
If you want that, you can go to Europe or China.
Frankly, your suggestion is as ridiculous as a judge sentencing you to a career in pouring concrete for sidewalk repairs, because you let a tree root upend your sidewalk and caused a trip hazard.
A judge simply can't sentence free-spirited US citizens to do work favoring some politician's political platform.
No need for more technology. Just increase the price of gasoline about 100-200% and people will start using their brain instead of their belly (or dikk) when buying a car.
First, there is a strong economic case that, if an activity harms society as a whole, policies that raise the cost of that activity to a level commensurate with that harm are good policies.
Second, it has been demonstrated time and again that keeping gas prices low is an ineffective and wasteful way to help the poor.
Third, as the price of gas rises the value of older, less efficient cars falls, so buyers of second-hand cars won't be too badly affected. Of course, it's a different matter for those who already own an inefficient car.
Old low maintenance cars can be a great deal even with $5 gas. How many mechanic trips does it take to justify doubling your gas mileage? (Depends on the car obviously, but it's a question any penny pincher will ask)
It is wonderful how altruistic people become against the poor if the subject are gas prices. Most do not care about health care, good education or equality of opportunities for the poor. But as soon as we talk about gas prices the poor are the number concern even for most neoliberal.
This is why the carbon taxes that are being introduced in Canada are revenue neutral (carbon tax revenue flows back to people via income tax cuts/credits). This way people aren't immediately negatively impacted by spiking costs.
The high gas prices though create a huge incentive for people to change their lifestyles and avoid high carbon priced goods. People that switch to a fuel efficient vehicle or just ride a bike instead get to keep their revenue from the tax cut and their savings from using less/no gas.
It's not a binary dichotomy between electric and ICE vehicles. The proliferation of SUVs is a completely preposterous phenomenon in an era where smaller, lighter, more fuel-efficient cars should be the norm.
But there's a bit of an arms race problem, people are afraid of being crushed by those gas-guzzling SUVs, which makes them want to buy equally huge vehicles for protection... Depressed fuel prices likely aren't helping either, if people had to pay more to fill their large tanks, they might also be looking longingly at something electric.
Right, I currently drive a very small car, but I am getting tired of not being able to see around every other larger car on the road. So I am tempted to buy something taller next time.
Yes, well, the free market does not handle negative externalities well. Thus, regulation or taxation to make heavyweight gas-guzzlers prohibitively expensive.
My new gas car cost me 8000€ and gets 40mpg in practice (manufacturer says 50mpg but its obviously wrong) and I just happenbto be commuting roughly 40 miles (roundtrip) per day. That's about 800 miles a month just for the commute. At $5 per gallon that's $100 per month. Would you really say I'm rich?
Of course, I come from a 1st world, EU country, where average national income is just over 10k Euro/year. Very few people buy new vehicles, even if they cost "just" 8k Euro. In here anyone buying a new car is very rich to afford it.
European fuels are easily 200-300% of the US price and people still drive fine. If you increased the price 2x again you would hear a lot of crying, but in the end if you have to drive to get to work you are going to buy fuel and burn it.
"Investors responded by pushing Mitsubishi shares down by 10%. The fuel test scandal has now erased half of the company's market value, and its shares are sitting at a record low."
Shouldn't a 10% drop in their shares result in a 10% drop in the company's market value? Not 50%? I don't know much about this kinda stuff - please be chill.
As a layman these sorts of reductions always seemed pretty strict to me. It seemed like a backdoor way of banning ICE's.
We know that we need to hit zero CO2. I think that regulations on emissions are the complete wrong way to go about it, though. Health issues in cities are irrelevant if global warming means the cities are underwater.
Tax the fuel, give incentives to renewable energies and batteries, and let the market sort it out.
Or, have the government seriously attack on the research front.
It feels a bit like we're sitting here with this 'money' abstraction and pretending that energy research is too expensive, when realistically, governments across the world have the might to make clean energy the next Apollo project. Why aren't they? That would be a fantastic legacy for any president/prime minister/whatever.
The UK could take bits of land it owns, chuck homes there, give some fresh university grads in shit economic situations some research to crunch on. Like Manhattan 2.0.
You can't just say to people 'oh, your car is impossible, let's go and sniff each other's armpits on the subway, and you'll have to walk to the countryside'. It just doesn't work.