Is hatred towards EV's due to the belief in a apocalyptic future?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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People would have revolted and drowned with the ship if they were all forced to drive a Ford Focus EV or BMW i3 (let alone a GM EV1).

EVs are popular now because they no longer suck. And they no longer suck because of Tesla (and thankfully, Tesla now has reasonable competitors). There is still resistance, largely due to FUD, but it’s no longer a question of being forced to buy a tiny shitbox vs. a “normal” car. Normal people with normal needs can buy a normal-looking EV that meets at least as many requirements as any ICE would have.

I was actually largely agreeing with you up there. The wishful thinking is from the posters above that think we’re going to reinvent the suburban landscape in the next few decades, or install widespread public transport, or whatever. It’s not going to happen. But offering awesome electric vehicles that are better in almost all ways than ICE? That’s already happening.

The government mandates might help a bit, but the big driving force is technological. The mandates would not have succeeded without that.

There’s a certain subset of environmentalists that hate what Tesla has done, because it disrupted their dreams of eliminating the car completely. Sustainable personal transport is complete anathema to them. They wanted climate change to force a switch to public transport, or even a complete lack of high-speed transport, and it looks like that isn’t going to happen.

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I’ll agree that we lost 50 years, partly because environmentalists overreacted to nuclear and mostly because they won their case with the public, which was promised a simple answer to all their problems and the technology was nowhere near up to that. So some of both.

Eliminating cars was never going to happen, and the environmentalists lost every battle on that. However, public transport is terrible not because the technology never advanced but because of lack of government backing. And piles and piles of money from the auto interests and the real estate developers. Social engineering at its most disruptive.

Technology is necessary, but not sufficient. Social change is necessary, but not sufficient. Both have to work together.

203

Nitpick: Of course, environmentalists of all stripes are actually fine with genuinely sustainable forms of personal transport such as the bicycle or scooter.

I agree with you that of course automobile technology that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution and resource use is better than automobile technology that doesn’t. And there are indeed some environmentalists who are counterproductively stubborn about lumping all types of automobile use as equally “bad”.

But come on. Let’s not allow the American cultural brainwashing about the indispensability of the personal automobile blind us to the obvious realization that a whole lot of personal automobile use is just intrinsically stupid as a bag of hammers, irrespective of what kind of propulsion technology it involves.

For example, it is never not going to be intrinsically stupid, inefficient and wasteful to routinely use an individual automobile to transport one healthy active unladen individual a distance of, say, one mile or less over routes where alternative forms of transport are practically feasible. And given that somewhere around 20 percent of all vehicle trips are one mile or less, we’re not talking a negligible tiny minority of car use here.

The material requirements, fuel/energy use, wear and tear on roads and vehicles, space occupied in transit, parking space requirements, etc., are always going to be substantially greater when bigger and heavier vehicles are involved. That’s just basic physics. (And that’s even without taking into account the considerable health benefits of human-powered modes of transit as opposed to automobiles.)

So environmentalists are by no means just being fanatical or overzealous when they point out that automatically plopping our fat asses in a car every time we want to go anywhere at all, and taking it for granted that a non-disabled human always needs to drag 2000+ pounds of 40+ square feet of vehicle footprint along with them even over very short distances, is a fundamentally inefficient and wasteful approach to transport, no matter how comparatively “green” the car may be. But you are right that when it comes to substantially improving the “greenness” of cars themselves, environmentalists shouldn’t insist on making the best the enemy of the good.

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Obviously I have no problems with walking or bicycling; I do them all the time. And I think it’s kinda silly to drive short distances when walking is possible.

But I essentially disagree with your premise. Cars are an amazing good for most people. They are a portable, armored, climate controlled pod that can go virtually anywhere. I can drive around town, but on a whim go hundreds of miles in any direction (well, not the ocean). I’m not dependent on anyone else’s schedule, either for the exact departure/arrival time or the general time of day (my car doesn’t shut down at 9 pm). It sits there waiting for me to decide what to do and is instantly available when I do decide. And while the number of road deaths are definitely higher than they should be, they are still an amazingly safe form of transport.

Although Americans may have a particular love affair with cars (due to our wealth and geography), it is hardly unique. Pretty much everywhere on Earth, people buy cars as soon as they are affordable. A desire for our transport to conform to our needs instead of the reverse seems universal.

Despite its much larger size, the EV is actually more efficient than the man on the bicycle. A person on a bike burns around 50 kcal per mile. That’s 210,000 J/mi. A Tesla Model 3 requires 250 Wh/mi, or 900,000 J/mi. Wait–isn’t that more? No, because the food energy took about 10x as much to produce, while the electrical energy was within a few tens of percent. So the bicycle is really about half as good as the car. Don’t tell me how Americans should be losing weight–it doesn’t matter how fat you are, the more calories you burn, the more you need to eat.

The car is largely iron and aluminum, both absurdly prevalent minerals. There is more than enough for everyone on Earth to have a car. Besides, it’s all highly recyclable.

There’s a possible future where all energy comes from solar/wind/nuclear, and we can have a lot more per person than the present day. It’s sustainable–we can keep going for thousands of years with that technology. And with the current population, we can manage an American standard of living, with cars and everything, with just a percent or two of land area dedicated to energy. In fact, if we do things right we can end up with far more land being given back to nature, by trading a little more energy use for high-density indoor food production. We use an absolutely incredible amount of land (and water) on food, on the order of 100x what’s needed, just because we still grow stuff out in the open like it was the Neolithic.

That’s the future I want–high energy density, but served easily by sustainable sources. We all get cars; hell, even flying ones (but electric, self-flying drones). Not to mention electronics and everything else that the first world gets. We can get there–I think we’re actually on the right trajectory–but it requires not listening to the propagandists and the nihilists.

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Of course they are. Having sufficiently abundant anything to be able to use it whenever and however you want, even inefficiently and wastefully, is an amazing good for most people.

That doesn’t mean that the inefficiency and waste itself is good, especially not at the societal scale.

Anywhere where society has already expended the resources to build (and maintain) roads for them to drive on and sufficient spaces for them to park in, that is.

This is what I mean by the “American cultural brainwashing” we get on the subject of cars. It’s just baked into our expectations that there will always be a sufficiently large driveable road to anywhere we want to go, and always adequate space to put the car at either end of the road and at various stopping points along it. The existence of those roads and that space, and all their accompanying consequences and compromises, is simply taken for granted from the outset as though a fairy godmother handed it to us.

This is an unconvincing argument for a few different reasons:

  • People driving a car, or even just sitting in a car, are also burning calories, although a lot fewer of them (maybe 5-10 per mile in local traffic, as opposed to around 50).

  • You can’t really fake your way out of the human/machine energy-budget comparison by restricting it so stringently to isolated trips. Humans do need both calorie intake and exercise to be healthy, and many people who burn calories for transportation are substituting that for other calorie-burning exercise they’d otherwise engage in.

If you can show me statistics that say that on average, people who use more human-powered transit are consuming more energy overall, from total personal calorie consumption plus vehicle ownership and use, than people who use more automobile transit, then you’d have a point. But I doubt that you can.

No, I am not in the least denying that individually owned cars are in many respects an amazing good, especially if they can continue to be made more environmentally friendly. But the extreme version of individual car ownership that American culture in particular aspires to, where the ideal is for every car-capable individual to have their own entire car personally available to them everywhere at all times and to use it for all transport over no matter how short a distance, is intrinsically highly inefficient. You can’t get away from that by rhapsodizing about how convenient and useful they are, which nobody here AFAICT is disagreeing with.

206

No, but I can get away with that by arguing that car ownership isn’t nearly as intrinsically costly as it’s thought to be. It’s costly in large part because energy is costly (and damaging) the way it’s currently produced (though this is changing).

Where I suspect we can find plenty of common ground is that we have nevertheless massively subsidized car ownership in a variety of ways, not just in pollution terms (though that is a biggie). Where I live, we have these absurd minimum parking level laws that require X spaces per square foot of business/whatever. These are ridiculous and represent a huge handout to car owners because that space could almost certainly be better used in other ways that might generate revenue (never mind that there’s often a huge mismatch between the required spaces and the amount required).

So I’m all in favor of ending these subsidies and finding some way of charging car owners to reflect the cost. And I essentially agree that there’s some degree of “brainwashing” that there are no costs, or that they’re somehow all accounted for by our minimal gas taxes, despite the obvious fact that there are all kinds of things that just get paid for out of general funds regardless of whether the taxpayer uses a car or not.

Despite all that, I think it is both possible and desirable to have widespread car use around the globe while being highly sustainable. It almost all comes down to energy in the end. Cheap, clean, sustainable energy solves many ills.

207

I agree. I think one of the key strategies to achieve that will be various forms of car sharing, in addiiton to existing forms of ride sharing and similar.

Especially now that we have digital technologies to allow people to coordinate scheduled access to resources in real time, it just becomes sillier and sillier to retain the default model of universal individual vehicle ownership where the vast majority of the vehicles sit unused more than 95% of the time.

208

Try to get him to drive a Tesla. (you can rent them these days)

I doubt he will think it is a toaster on wheels after that.

209

Yeah, I’m sure I could get away with running a really long extension cord from my apartment window down into the street or parking in front of a neighbor’s single family home and asing to plug into a socket on their porch. The thing is the reason I don’t want an EV is that I really don’t want a V at all, but I leave in a city with poor public transit (at least it’s old enough to have missing middle housing). Indeed even with that poor public transit I could go without a car (supermarket, pharmacy, etc in walking distance) in daily life, but then I’d be condemned to work at home, which I hate, and it’d extremely hard to visit my elderly parents who live in the country every week or two.

210

The endless advocacy for ultra-dense housing is a huge waste of effort and pretty misplaced. Personal transportation is not actually that big a slice of greenhouse gas emissions, and there are myriad ways to push those numbers down dramatically without discouraging people from being able to own private plots of land in lower density residential areas. The dogmatic approach that I often see from the inflexible environmentalists (the same type that mostly guaranteed global warming would not be solved in our lifetimes by torpedoing nuclear energy) around this topic smacks mostly of lefties wanting to tell people how to live, with no real association with reality.

211

This is in incredibly poor taste within a week of Roe being canceled.

212

Let’s not for a second pretend that conservatives aren’t far more divorced from reality on the subject of climate change. A few loonie lefties have impeded progress on nuclear energy use, but ultimately they are trying to solve real problems. The right is still in denial that a problem exists at all.

We can solve climate change without nuclear power–in fact, it’s probably the wrong technology at this point, being too expensive and slow to deploy in contrast to solar and wind. But we can’t solve climate change if we think it doesn’t exist.

213

That’s a tu quoque fallacy, pointing out that the right is even worse doesn’t absolve the people I was lampooning.

I would definitely agree c. 2022 nuclear isn’t going to be a huge part of the solution, but nuclear was being built out at scale in the 1970s and that could have accelerated dramatically–some countries in fact almost fully nuclearized, and it seems like environmentalists were a major source of derailing that in many cases.

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I’d suggest it was mostly NIMBYists using environmentalists for cover.

“But the loonie lefties!” is very nearly a strawman. They certainly exist, but they aren’t a significant obstacle today. We have the tools to fight climate change and the resistance to their deployment comes largely from the right.

215

The climate crisis wasn’t caused by nuclear protests, it was caused by burning fossil fuels, and made worse by oil companies who knew decades ago that what they were doing was going to create global warming, but then they covered up that research, and fought continuously to create doubt and denial about the relationship between fossil fuels and greenhouse gases. They continue to be a problem, with methane leaks associated with fossil fuel extraction.

A few more nuclear plants would not have done anything to decrease the climate crisis. Getting started on fighting climate change 50 years ago would have been a big help.

Reworked mass transit, to better serve the people in the area, is an excellent idea.

High density housing is great, but not going to happen. What can happen with buildings, and is a necessary step in limiting carbon production, is to fix the buildings we have, and make strong environmental regulations for new buildings. Many of these things aren’t even cutting edge technology. Easy stuff, like better insulation, high efficiency heating and cooling, and other low hanging fruit can go a long way towards decreasing a building’s carbon footprint.

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Ah, the famous “rebut a claim someone hasn’t made” patented Doper behavior.

Yeah, maybe that’s why I said if nuclear had been adopted at scale, it would have. If you don’t think countries going fully nuclear (and thus not using coal power, for example–one of the actual biggest contributors of carbon emissions over the last 100 years) would have impacted things then you are speaking in opposition to fairly well established science.

Nonetheless, I did not actually at any point say nuclear (especially a few plants) was going to totally solve global warming. What I said was basically bringing the industry to close probably made it impossible for us to have even a shot (not a guarantee, a shot) of solving it in our lifetimes.

217

Sorry, I guess I read too much into

More and better nuclear plants would have been a big climate win. What we got though were lots of huge boondoggles of nuclear plants that never got built, or were built at massive cost overruns, and never produced as much as promised. Lots of blame to spread around. Anti-nuclear activists and government regulation? Sure, How about corrupt construction companies that needed heavy regulation, and utilities that gamed the system, because they could raise rates as long as construction continued.

Bringing it back to this thread. I think EVs are part of the solution, but they have to overcome lots of prejudice against them created by bad EVs, and lies from ICE propagandists. Nuclear might be part of the climate solution, but new and proven technology needs to overcome the accidents of the past. New designs also are necessary that can be built in less than 20 years. Nuclear proponents bring out pebble bed (or whatever the latest things are) that are supposed to solve these problems. Maybe they will. Perhaps it will take somebody as abrasive and posturing as Musk to do for nuclear what he did for EVs.

218

Gonna need a cite in order not to throw this onto the “But-the-loonie-lefties! strawman” pile.

I agree that environmentalists in general are pushing for an average increase in overall housing density, and would like to put more “ultra-dense” housing in urban areas where it’s desperately needed, but I’m definitely not seeing such an un-nuanced approach to housing policy as you’re trying to paint.

What does “not that big” mean? AFAICT, as of 2020 transportation accounted for 27% of all US greenhouse gas emissions, and “light-duty vehicles” for over half of that 27%. So that’s about 12-15% of all US GHGs down to personal transportation? Not huge, but one-eighth to one-seventh of all those emissions for personal transportation is not negligible either.

Got a plan for implementing them? Because just sitting around saying “gee we really could reduce those numbers” while American conservatives are throwing mass shitfits about “socialist mandates” and swearing that they’ll never relinquish their low-mileage ICE SUVs, etc., isn’t actually doing anything to push the numbers down.

219

Can you cite American Conservatives are throwing mass shitfits about EV’s. I literally don’t know anyone who isn’t looking forward to one down the road when the infrastructure catches up.

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Re-read what I said: I said that they’re throwing mass shitfits about so-called “socialist mandates”. Which they seem to imagine are being applied, or are just about to be applied, to “force EVs down their throats”.

Well, I guess that’s what we’ll have to wait for in order to be able to significantly reduce GHG emissions from personal transport, then?

Considered as an implementation plan, it’s kind of disappointing compared to the earlier claim of there being “myriad ways to push those numbers down dramatically”.

But then, you aren’t the one who made that claim, so AFAICT you’re off the hook.