Pre-industrial CO2 levels were 300ppm. In my lifetime I saw us cross 400ppm of CO2; I may very well see it cross 500ppm before I die.
This move feels radical, but I don't see how we avert catastrophe without moves that feel radical. If we keep plodding down the course we're on we'll just sleepwalk into oblivion.
I agree. How about the radical move of deciding not to shut down a large nuclear power plant in California in 2025[1] that could power millions of these cars, carbon free. Trying to fix climate change without nuclear power is likely impossible at this point, but very few climate change activists support it.
I think you've got that a bit reversed, trying to fix climate change with nuclear is a bit impossible at this point. We can't build it!
Why is this plant shutting down? Not because of some sort of hate of nuclear technology, as many would have us believe.
No, the real reason this plant is shutting down is because, like every other thermal generation plant, extending its lifetime past the original license means complying with environmental impact laws on waste heat. Once-through waste heat systems are no longer legal [1]. So why not just build a waste heat system and keep it running? Because when the utility tried to come up with one, the cost of the cooling system alone ran into the billions of dollars!
Much better to just by a few billion dollars worth of batteries and site them on location. At current costs, today, $1B gets you 5GWh at 1.25GW, roughly. The very cheapest estimate for a cooling system was $7B and they ran to over $10B for a new cooling system [2]. So even without the inevitable cost overruns, one could purchase 35-50GWh and 9-12GW of batteries.
A 40GWh/10GW battery would be a far better grid asset for California, and massive increase reliability far beyond what Diablo Canyon could ever produce.
When the mere cooling system for nuclear is more expensive than a better battery, the technology is dead, dead, dead. We don't need it and we have better alternatives.
In the US, it's mostly can't. The last attempt caused massive risk to Toshiba as its subsidiary Westinghouse was destroyed by its attempts.
In the UK, at Wylfa, it's more "won't", Hitachi just refused to go forward with a new build, since it couldn't find external investors despite very generous guaranteed pricing for its energy.
At least, it appears to be "won't", because who knows if a construction project that was started would ever be finished.
If the new nuclear startups come through, everything has changed. But the new small ones they are designing are not really anything like the nuclear reactors of yore, so we have to wait and see if they pan out on costs. And in the decades they need to come online, storage and solar and wind keep halving in price every few years.
But at the moment, pretend you're Jeff Bezos and want to buy $50B of nuclear reactors, however much that ends up in practice. Who do you go to? Toshiba, Hitachi? No. EDF? Hell no. Maybe South Korea? But they had their recent corruption scandal for inspections of nuclear plants. Rosatom? Feel like getting into bed with Putin? What's left of the industry?
> "Couldn't find external investors despite very generous guaranteed pricing for its energy."
UK is a world leader in finding particularly sadomasochistic ways of financing critical infrastructure. This is like the PFI debacle all over again. Interest rates are at zero, the government should take out the cheque book and finance the plant directly. You can absolutely just buy a reactor and they are being built in China at record pace.
Private investment contributes nothing of value to this type of project, because spesification, location, and everything else was already decided
It only accrues extra cost because of higher interest rates avaliable to private investors and risk hedging. All the current government is trying to do, is keep the cost of the powerplants off the book, and hiding it from the national debt.
But why would the government want to provide the loans, when it is already providing a massive subsidy on pricing to guarantee good returns, which should be far more valuable to a buildable technology?
The reason, of course, is that nuclear is not very buildable, and nobody is willing to make a bet, even with very high returns.
If private investors would rather invest in offshore wind, or storage, why should the UK government be less wise with its money?
If the UK is going to take on billion debt for energy infrastructure (an excellent idea in my opinion that would benefit the UK greatly!) it should invest in more sound and reliable sources of energy like renewables, that have a proven track record of being built on time and in budget. And technologies where we learn when we build so that next year's project is even cheaper.
Renewables _always_ require a fossile backup. You are _not_ fixing the climate with just renewables.
Look at electricitymap.org and compare the emissions of Germany (50% renewables) with France (70% nuclear). Germany is 7 times dirtier in its electricity sector.
I don’t understand why people keep repeating that non-sense that renewables reduce emissions at large scale, they don’t.
And building NPPs fast is no problem, look at China and Russia. Heck, Japan used to build new plants in just about three years.
That's simply untrue. Iceland for example is already 100% renewable. Other grids with large installed hydro generation (eg New Zealand) could move to solely renewable with the installation of more intermittent generation and transmission infrastructure.
Yes, most grids still rely on non renewable resources. But that is simply a relic of the fact that they were built that way. The existing examples prove it's possible.
Hydroelectric power isn't quite as clean as many believe though.
>We estimate that GHG emissions from reservoir water surfaces account for 0.8 (0.5–1.2) Pg CO2 equivalents per year, with the majority of this forcing due to CH4.
That's between 2% and 3% of our global greenhouse gas emissions. About three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions come from energy production and about 15% of all energy production is hydro power if I recall correctly.
It's much better than fossil fuels, but not quite clean.
That’s the equivalent of saying “be born rich” to a poor person. Iceland is running on geothermal which most places don’t have and dams are a non-starter in the vast majority of river systems due to the ecological destruction.
There are no countries running on wind/solar, which is the only renewable technology that can actually run everywhere.
The comment I was replying to stated that "Renewables _always_ require a fossil backup". This is clearly untrue, as the multiple examples of grids that do not have or need fossil backup shows.
Certainly the examples I have given are those that have the easiest path to renewables. It is entirely logical that they would be the first to transition. But it proves that it's possible.
If the backup is run infrequently enough then that becomes a non-issue. I can definitely forsee a future where the fossil backup is only used once a decade in particularly abnormal weather conditions.
It would be possible if you have a huge well-connected grid, spanning thousands of kilometers, with low costs of sending energy over long distances and small energy loss (ideally, spanning multiple timezones, or connecting sunny regions and windy regions with the less renewable-friendly ones).
There has been some research into this topic, but we're not there yet. First, the connectedness of e.g. EU grid is not that high. Second, it's a very political subject in a way (everyone wants to be energy independent on its own, without needing to import too much). Finally, IMO Europe is not that big to be sustainable on its own regardless of weather (which is often similar on large part of continent).
Alternatively we build out masses of storage capacity, coupled with much more aggressive load shifting (this would be disruptive to the economy, but not overwhelmingly so). We're not there yet either, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem to me.
Every power source requires some reserve capacity; nuclear goes offline for long periods of time to refuel, for example. Large generators trip offline.
Germany emissions don't come from the 50% renewables, they come from burning 50% coal. I'm not sure why you are blaming renewables for those coal emissions.
Will you blame their current emissions on renewables? No because if you click on the "emissions" tab you'll see that it's almost all coming from gas, and second highest source of emissions are nuclear.
Does nuclear always require a fossil fuel backup? No, of course not, so there's no need to make up false rules about other sources. Wind reserves can come from hydro, geographically distant wind (offshore is running at insanely high capacity factors these day), batteries as we start to deploy them, and yes even from existing nuclear plants.
But having built nuclear many years ago, and Russia and China building some now, doesn't mean that France or Germany or the US will be successful when they try to build. However, the one thing they have been successful at is building more wind. I hope they lean into their strengths, instead of betting everything on something they have repeatedly failed at.
Germany coal percentage in electricity production in 2020 is 21% and 66% of electricity generation is 0 carbon (renewable + nuclear). Coal part in total production is decreasing year over year.
Of course Germany is using other country to import when wind is not blowing, but at the scale of a continent we can see that most west European countries can go soon to an almost 0% carbon electricity production.
Yes, I've looked at those, but I don't see what your point is. The carbon comes from coal, not renewables. When you see a mix of 50% coal and 50% renewables, and you blame Germany for high emissions by not even mentioning the coal, I kind of wonder what's going on in the poster's head. I have seen this repeated again and again in this thread, and I literally can not comprehend the logic that chains these types of statements together, because the only connections seem to be huge and incorrect logical leaps, so I therefore have not engaged with what seems to have no logical way forward for discussion.
I will say this: Europe has been decreasing its carbon emissions by replacing fossil fuels with renewables. Renewables reduce carbon emissions everywhere that they replace fossil fuels. This is just physics.
Because subsidy is an idiotic way to fund it. What's the point of seeking private investment if the government guarantees profit, selects the reactor design and it's location? What usefull funcrion do private investors fullfill, their funding is more expensive than a government loan.
They should contract EDF to build it for a fixed price, job done.
The point is that it motivates the builder to complete it in a certain amount of time, not just at some time in the future. However, that induces too much risk apparently.
In the US most contested have been for a fixed price, it's just that nobody meets that fixed price nor the schedule. And since nuclear front-loads 50 years of generation prices into the construction, Amy delay at all I'm starting service is a financial disaster.
The US and every other developed nation 'absolutely can'.
The tech, research and regulations are '40 years old' stuck in an old era.
The 'existential risks' from Nuclear are partly fallout but that can mostly be managed.
It's really 1) waste and 2) proliferation.
The waste ... might possible to be dealt with. We can re-process and turn waste into something that can reasonably sit somewhere safe for '100K years' - that sounds like a challenge but I think it's possible.
Proliferation is the real problem. Nuclear requires 'very responsible systems' from top to bottom. Advanced nations, with transparency and oversight and scrutiny, can handle it.
But as soon as US, Canada, France starts building reactors, then Chile, Ecuador, Afghanistan will want to as well, and who is going to stop them?
Then it's only a 'small bribe' from 'very bad actors' getting a hold of nuclear material, enough to build a bomb, or much easier, just a dirty bomb, enough to very easily do some very bad damaage.
I can see contamination being released in NYC, which maybe only makes a few people ill, another few thousands with 'somewhat unsafe exposure' - but which requires evacuation of Manhatten and 200 years of 'no go zone'. This is the real risk.
So the UN, West, China, Russia would have to all perfectly align on 'the rules' and be very serious about enforcing them.
Because it's political, I don't see it happening. Russia has tons of Fuel they want to sell to Kazhakstan, a civil war breaks out there, baddies get ahold of a reactor, and 'somewhere someone takes a bribe' and some bad materials slip out the back.
We can definitely save the world with nuclear, we just have to act responsibly on a collective level. Not sure if we can, sadly.
The proliferation risk of nuclear fuel is overblown. Reactors don’t use weapons-grade fuel, and purifying it to weapons-grade material is harder than making the fuel to begin with; if you can take fuel and refine it into a weapon, you might as well start with unprocessed uranium.
I find it interesting that spent nuclear fuel contains a fair amount of weapons grade Pu, but it also contains other isotopes of Pu which you wouldn't want and would be difficult to separate.
It could definitely be used for a dirty bomb, which could, if nothing else, cause significant economic damage from the fear of radiation.
"Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore. Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste into chemical forms that are totally immobilized.
France currently recycles their spent fuel. They put the remaining good nuclear fuel back in their reactors in the form of MOX fuel and immobilize the remaining waste in vitrified borosilicate glass.
The US had a recycling program featuring the use of advanced fast reactors (which have not been deployed on any major scale yet) that was shut down because it created Plutonium, which could be used to make a nuclear weapon. Were some plutonium diverted in the recycling process, a non-nuclear entity could be one step close to building a bomb. However, under programs such as the (now stalled) GNEP [wikipedia], where only countries who already have nuclear weapons recycle, proliferation-free waste recycling can exist. Since the many of the largest energy users are already nuclear weapons states, a massive expansion of nuclear could be done there with no additional proliferation concerns whatsoever.
If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That’s the weight of seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year! A detailed description of this result can be found here. If we got all our electricity from coal and natural gas, expect to have over 10,000 kilograms of CO2/yr attributed to each person, not to mention other poisonous emissions directly to the biosphere (based on EIA emissions data).
If you want raw numbers: in 2018, there were just over 80,000 metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between 1971 and 2018, nuclear reactors in the USA generated 3000 GW-years of electricity to make this waste.
For comparison, in 2007 alone the US burned 948,000,000 metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years! Granted, coal made a higher fraction of the country’s electricity, but the numbers are still crazy impressive for nuclear."
Interesting: "2018 Nobel Prize for Physics-winner Gérard Mourou has proposed using Chirped pulse amplification to generate high-energy and low-duration laser pulses to transmute highly radioactive material (contained in a target) to significantly reduce its half-life, from thousands of years to only a few minutes."
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I do not think nuclear waste and proliferation are a problem. Consider ITER, for example:
"Fusion reactors, unlike fission reactors, produce no high activity/long life radioactive waste. The "burnt" fuel in a fusion reactor is helium, an inert gas. Activation produced in the material surfaces by the fast neutrons will produce waste that is classified as very low, low, or medium activity waste. All waste materials (such as components removed by remote handling during operation) will be treated, packaged, and stored on site."
"Because the half-life of most radioisotopes contained in this waste is lower than ten years, within 100 years the radioactivity of the materials will have diminished in such a significant way that the materials can be recycled for use in other fusion plants. This timetable of 100 years could possibly be reduced for future devices through the continued development of 'low activation' materials, which is an important part of fusion research and development today."
Or to put it briefly: "No long-lived radioactive waste: Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. The activation of components in a fusion reactor is low enough for the materials to be recycled or reused within 100 years.".
Proliferation: "Limited risk of proliferation: Fusion doesn't employ fissile materials like uranium and plutonium. (Radioactive tritium is neither a fissile nor a fissionable material.) There are no enriched materials in a fusion reactor like ITER that could be exploited to make nuclear weapons."
To repeat: waste is not much of an issue CURRENTLY, and in the future we will have ITER and the like, i.e. fusion reactors instead of fission reactors that solve the nuclear waste and the proliferation problem. It is sad how many people are misinformed about nuclear (other comments). There is no higher electricity consumption without nuclear, like... just forget about it. But then again, the future, that is fusion reactors, are pretty damn great. Just check out the last link in this comment.
The one thing I hate about the waste issue is that it is nearly never priced in. "Nuclear is cheap and clean", is what many will say, but dealing with the waste will create costs for the public multiplied by a 100k years. And this assumes the public exists, knows and wants to manage these things for a timeframe that long. 10k years ago we were still in the ice age and roaming around in huts, hunting with sticks. It would be even a challenge to garantuee such a thing for a single century in the current climate and there would be 999 to go just to deal with the stuff that we made at one point.
This is purely a debt to the future generations, and as such we are very easily blue to take them, because we will not be around when it needs to be payed. If we ever realistically counted that stuff in nuclear would be completely and utterly unaffordable.
Sure thing, we could develope ways of reducing the half life time of the waste, building better and greater storage facilities that manage to stay functional 25 times longer than the pyramides, find newer cleaner ways of using the limited nuclear resources we have, etc.
This factor alone makes me unsure this really is the best way to generate energy. One thing many don't realise is that reducing production emissions alone doesn't cut it. We have to use less as well. Eat less meat, based on the methane the cows fart alone. All in all buy and produce less stuff. Which in turn would break capitalism, which we realistically won't carry through even if it would mean extinction.
Arguing for less consumption is a non-starter. It's a tacit admission that the solution to global warming is killing say 30% of the global population, just framed in an indirect manner so it doesn't sound like genocide.
Genocide? Really? I thought it was part of the HN codex not to read others opinions in a unfavourable way unless there is no other conclusion, but okay.
Deforestation to make way for livestock, along with methane emissions from cows and fertilizer use, creates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the world’s cars, trucks and airplanes combined.
The fertilizer has to be used for the life stocks food. If you eat 1 kJ of meat vs 1 kJ of the soy that is produced to feed it, there is less water usage [1], less CO2 emissions [2], less land usage etc.
If anything a move away from meat would help earth to accommodate more people. And that is only meat. What if you are able to buy one product that lasts a decade vs 10 that last a year?
This kind of "use the resources more efficiently"-stuff is what I mean when I say reduce consumption.
And that should by the way not be the task for individuals to tackle, we need higher standards when it comes to efficient resource usage, quality and lifetime of products, etc. This is not something that will be solved fast enough by consumers and their wallets.
Of course energy and transportation is a factor as well in all of this. If we don't want to move our planet into " lol maybe we go extinct"-territory, we will have to reduce individual transport and expand public transport and use renewable or otherwise more efficient means of converting energy.
The thing is: doing it later means we would have to do even harder changes. If we all started tackling this 4 decades ago we could have gone with a smooth, gradual change. Now even instantaneous change would be only amount to damage limitation.
The Greenlandic ice is over the tipping point. We cannot unmelt it. And heating 0°C ice to 0°C water takes the same amount of energy as it takes to heat 0°C water to 80°C water. This means thermally speaking our breaks are still working, but they will stop working any moment and we cannot stop them from loosing their function anymore.
The last year of reading up on climate science really made me realize that things are far worse than I thought they were.
But can it come back quickly enough to make meaningful impact on the climate catastrophe? By all means, try to bring it back, but please don't use the "only nuclear can possibly save us" rhetoric to delay a massive push towards other carbon free energy.
There was also a point not too long ago when there weren't any 3.5 inch floppy drives. If we are going to bring back obsolete industries, at least floppy drives could be thrown around the office for fun.
China and India are building some coal plants that they are going to highly regret, because it is even more onset than nuclear.
When building something new that lasts decades, and the current examples that have already paid off their capital costs are shutting down because fuel and maintenance alone is more expensive than newer tech, that is pretty much the definition of obsolete.
In India, the reason for coal and nuclear is that it's easier for local officials to take bribes. Not sure what the story is in China, as they are far more strict with the corruption penalties there. I suspect that it's mostly that there are old long term plans that haven't been updated for today's reality, a reality where renewables and storage got cheaper than even the most optimistic predictions.
That would continue a trend of willfull ignorance and stupidity that is not out of character.
Firstly, the evidence is that the Chinese are excellent at manufacturing and will likely be churning out high quality nuclear reactors.
Secondly, high quality energy production is a bad topic for nationalism. The West decided not to pursue nuclear decades ago. But it remains the most technically excellent form of energy production and we should be grateful that there are still nations in the world pushing technology and engineering forward. It isn't like there are a lot of choices; the obvious options the world has right now are either Chinese nuclear or Chinese solar.
But wha tid your remote be those artificial gov overhead costs designed to fail it out. Fro. What I understand the raw material is leased from the gov at high rates.
That is not the choice at all, and I have yet to see anybody make a serious case for it. There are lots of plans for renewable, carbon free grids out there. Most include nuclear, but not all. Nuclear is not an essential component of any of them, we have many alternatives, the only question is which will provide the cheapest energy. IMHO, it's unlikely to be nuclear, and I think that because those who include nuclear as a part of their future grids vastly underestimate the pace of change for renewables and storage.
I may have underestimate the potential of salt domes...
I think we will be making lots of hydrogen for decarbonization of industrial processes, and maybe even for aviation or shipping, so as long as we can dump electrons to Utah and find the water, this sounds great.
Would you believe the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that is stored in a large number of storage systems across the US? A good chunk of that is in very large cavities in salt formations. This is not new technology.
Average electric power generation in the US, on the grid, is a bit less than 500 GW. So, 15 TWh is about 30 hours.
There are lots and lots of other salt formations, both in the US and in the world. Also, aquifers and exhausted oil and gas fields can be used to store hydrogen.
I really think the economics behind nuclear traditional power plants are a bit screwed. It takes years to build and costs order of magnitudes more than a gas turbines. In addition gas turbines are particularly well suited to be turned on in a mater of minutes whenever there is peak demand. And you still need power when there is no wind or no sun.
Unless there is strong support from government, Nuclear Plants can’t happen.
I’m really putting a lot of hope in the next generation of mini self contained nuclear plants. I think Bill Gate is also looking into that. These have the potential to be successful both for the planet (get rid of gas turbines for peak demand when renewables fail) but also economically (easier cheaper to build).
The one thing most people don't realize, is that this is not only about producing energy more cleanly, this will definitly also mean things like driving less (or less individual), eating different, flying way less, making all things more usable etc. And this quite frankly is the harder thing to tackle because it means changing culture.
And that culture needed to change not now, but a while ago. If the whole world fully stopped emitting CO2 today, the latency till we could measure the first effect on climate would be roughly 13 years.
Most people I know are way too optimistic about what it takes to deal with this. A good way to get a feeling is to play with the sliders of this model here: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org
Edit: this is btw. not something that I am happy with. Like at all. It stresses me out to think about it. People down voting a post that simply states the scientific consensus on that topic doesn't make it any better to be honest.
France is able to produce 70% of their electricity through nuclear. Anyway, you do release the 40GWh electricity purchased would probably come from non-renewables.
France's efforts to come up with a new fleet to replace their current aging fleet have not been successful, they have had as much trouble as the US. They may be able to modify the EPR... but ever year that they fail to have a new more buildable design is another year that renewables and storage get cheaper while nuclear stays the same price or increases in price.
I think if you want to bring up a nuclear success story, Canada would be far better. Their CANDU has been really successful, and they haven't yet tried to build a new generation of reactors so they haven't yet failed.
Unpack this for me please, they were able to build a fleet of reactors in the past, but no longer can? Is the new design worse, or unbuildable? Old reactors could not be beluilt today? People with all the skills have kicked the bucket?
The new reactors that are permitted to be built, and that nuclear advocates stake safety claims on, are not economical, at least in the views of potential operators.
The old reactors are the things nuclear advocates dismiss and say modern designs are better than on issues like safety and other concerns.
I would also add that the word is very different Han 50 years ago. Some things have gotten very cheap, some things have stayed the same price.
So the technology that looked good, theoretically, in 1970 may not have the same outlook in 2020.
In particular, France's failing attempt is the EPR. There have been construction starts at three sites, and all have been massive off schedule. For the three not in China, they have been massively over budget. The build in China was the third to be started, but is the only one completed; planned construction time was 48 months, but it ended up taking twice as long. I don't know how to judge the pricing of construction in China, but if the Western world could do it in 8 years and at the stated cost of $7.5B, it would be a fantastic deal.
What has changed since the last time? I don't know. Maybe different sorts of people go into the same jobs. Maybe executive culture is to blame. Maybe engineering culture is to blame. Maybe procurement and construction is to blame. Nobody has provided a solid explanation of X, Y, and Z with concrete examples.
Some will say regulations are different and the cause, but at the same time nobody says that these are unnecessary regulations, or that there's a smarter path that would make them cheap, it's always just vague accusations without any specific call to action.
I mean, you began this thread by saying that they've added a new regulation on waste heat and nobody knows how to build a cooling system that satisfies it. Maybe we can begin by repealing that one and go from there...
We know how to build cooling towers. That's the $7B cost.
Why would we remove a common sense environmental regulation, when we can build cheaper better things that have less environmental damage? Why the obsession with nuclear, at any cost? What is the benefit and gain when we have cheaper better alternatives?
What was considered "cheap" in the 1980s is no longer the cheapest option. We have better, cheaper technologies.
And on top of that the US can no longer build big things. We don't have construction management competence.
> when we can build cheaper better things that have less environmental damage?
No we can't. The plans are to build nuclear plants that do exactly no environmental or social damage. Solar/wind/etc can't possibly compete to that standard. Try reliably isolating solar panel waste from the biosphere for even a century and see how much it costs. The figures would be too absurd to consider, which is why nobody is suggesting it.
I'd be happy to go with the cheapest thing if everything was to the same standard; but solar seems to getting a free pass that nuclear isn't, because people care about having to evacuate an area but have no fear of heavy metals poisoning. For reasons that continue to baffle the rationalists.
> The plans are to build nuclear plants that do exactly no environmental or social damage. Solar/wind/etc can't possibly compete to that standard.
I'm not sure if you're serious with post. "No" environmental damage, when we have to mine uranium, iron ore, and massive amounts of concrete? Yet somehow they "waste" of old solar panels is hazardous to the biosphere and impossible to separate? Nuclear waste is far more hazardous and we don't seem to have much problem isolating that in France.
And then you say that solar is getting a free pass, when you invent issues for solar that are far more difficult for nuclear to handle?
> when we have to mine uranium, iron ore, and massive amounts of concrete?
If you include the mining that tips the scale even further in the favour of nuclear. A renewables-first strategy use substantially more iron ore and concrete and many more rare-earth metals (which are typically mined in China last time I checked, because they are environmentally damaging to produce). Less uranium with renewables, for obvious reasons, but you can power a country with a very small uranium mine. And again, uranium mines are typically held to higher standards than other mines because they are so small and relatively easy to manage.
> ... Nuclear waste is far more hazardous and we don't seem to have much problem isolating that in France. ...
You seem to be inching towards enlightenment. Keep following that thought.
> you invent issues for solar that are far more difficult for nuclear to handle?
I care about the environment when it is convenient. Nuclear remains hands-down the most environmentally friendly option. The only defence renewables have against it is economics (which is a compelling case, I must admit).
The question is energy density and economics. Can solar/wind with the same environmental impact per kWh become cheaper than nuclear? Maybe it's already cheaper. Who knows. So far no one has really pointed at data in this thread.
Because renewables don’t help reduce emissions as much as nuclear does.
Renewables need fossile backup plants.
Go on electricitymap.org and see how Germany has among the highest emissions in the electricity sector in Europe despite 50% renewables in their electricity mix.
Because the projects are started before they should have been. The permitting process should be a lot more final, the construction process should be monitored, and unless it exceeds some metric (too loud, too polluting, too costly), it shouldn't be stoppable just by simply filing a motion in court.
Of course the plans should be a lot more rigorous.
And then of course prices would go up. But cost overruns would go down.
Also, the fact that "the West" has stopped its building boom led to the construction industry atrophying. There is no efficiency, because there's no scale.
For starters, all the old designs are built with analog automation which is no longer available, so at the very minimum, you need redesign the automation system. Keep in mind, every component you install will need to be certified and tracked from raw materials up to follow stated processes, which need to be nuclear safety certified too. And you need to have two separate families of parts so the requirement of diversity in implementation is fulfilled, to avoid coinciding typical failures. At least now that EPR projects are close to completion, there's now a precedent that it is even possible to implement digital automation in accordance to western nuclear safety standards.
Also the mechanical safety standards are way stricter now, so you can't really just take an old design and add digital bus automation. You need more redundant safety systems, corium catcher and stuff. Not so easy.
China thought they could build them in 48 months, and it ended up taking more than twice as long.
Is China planning any more EPRs? I can't find any evidence of them.
I would agree that it's a bureaucratic problem, but it's a bureaucratic problem of the construction industries in all Western nations. And nobody can even figure out what exactly the problem is, or how to change it.
> It’s not a fundamental problem with nuclear power as both China and Russia build new reactors safe and economically.
Well, they've built them.
Even unsafe nuclear plants (at least historically) are higher frequency of still-rare but potentially-catastrophic failures, not regular failures that are likely to be obvious after a handful of years of a small number of reactors being in operation, its far from clear that they do so safely. (And, since neither of these regimes favors transparency, its not like you can easily externally analytically assess likely safety, either, and even the economics before considering safety may be less clear than they superficially seem.)
But, yes, getting things done that some currently-in-power faction would prefer is more complicatdd in systems in which the dominant faction is constrained by competing power bases rather than free to run roughshod over them. Though that's not something that has recently changed, its always been true, and those constraints have been a feature of the West for centuries, and most people in the West consider it a feature, not a bug; what is new in regard to nuclear power since the 1950s is that there are both more alternatives and more understanding that it has risks at all.
Every time I hear of heat from power plants and industrial processes treated like waste, I wonder if it can be repurposed to low-grade heat desalination [1], or other co-generation processes [2]. We can always use more potable water, for example. I'm sure they ran the numbers and worked out the opex isn't worth the effort, and/or the capex hurdle is too high.
But man, I'd love a tap into that industrial quantity supply of "waste" heat piped just to my backyard. I'd heat my pool in the cold months, run my spa and sauna all the time, and use it to run an absorption chiller the rest of the time. And of course skim some for my hot water heater.
I wonder the same thing! District heating would be an excellent use, if you could transport the heat to a site with dense population. But transport is the challenge, and why we convert energy to electricity in the first place.
As far as district heating goes though, it could be an absolutely fantastic way to solve the fuel oil problem in the north east; if we could store heat generated in the summer underground in large stores for clusters of houses, it could provide a great way to heat all through winter with simple heat pumps.
Well heat transport it, like any other industry, its own niche of expertise. I doubt plant operators suddenly want to turn into distribution experts, and the outsourcing is likely to be way more expensive.
Either climate change is an existential threat to life on this planet or it's not, and if it is we should be willing to discard the OTC regulations for it.
Of course climate change is an existential threat. But that doesn't mean drop all environmental considerations, especially when we have cost effective tech that passes environmental regulations.
France has the same problem of aging nuclear reactors that at some point have to be taken down, with problems building new ones in a timely and cost-efficient manner.
Flamanville 3 will probably cost 19 billion alone and won’t start regularly generating electricity by at least 2023 with construction having started in 2007.
In a thread of people arguing about existential threats, 19 billion dollars is not a very interesting figure. 19 billion would be a pretty good argument most of the time, it just happens that in this specific thread it is not a very well placed response.
The argument is "we could have avoided an apparently existential threat at any time with this tech, and there is evidence what we're actually doing won't avoid the thread" and the response is "nuclear isn't free". There is a mighty disconnect here somewhere.
1990 a kWh in Germany produced 800g CO2. That 400g figure would look better if instead of replacing nuclear with renewables we would've replaced more coal with renewables, but the political landscape didn't allow that.
The renewables would have helped, but only if we wouldn't shut down nuclear plants...
Effectively we're replacing nuclear power plants with renewables, which was one of the Green party's original goals (they were born out of the anti-nuclear movement).
It's a threat because it fucks up the environment, so discarding regulations doesn't really seem to help. (Yes, one could argue that it only does so "locally", but we need thousands of new plants.)
You should check out the recently approved in the US nuclear reactor by NuScale[1]. It is what everyone has been waiting for. A small (60MW electrical output) reactor built in a factory and shipped to the power plant site. This could be a real game changer.
They had to spend $500 million on just paperwork to get it approved, but they did it.
I have been following this closely, as well as the other nuclear startups. If nuclear becomes buildable again, it will almost certainly because of the efforts of NuScale, Terrapower, or other small scrappy startup. As you say. It would be a game changer, and the game must be changed before we start deploying nuclear.
But they haven't built anything yet. It's fairly easy to design something and show that it's safe. The AP1000 got approval, but the designs turned out to be too difficult to build, with the builders saying that some parts of the design were "unconstructable", resulting them in building their own design instead, which then had to get reapproved.
NuScale's bet is that factory-based construction will drive down the construction cost to the level that it compensates for the lack of scale that the larger reactors' teams used as justification for going really big.
"It's fairly easy to design something and show that it's safe." To spend 2 million man hours and 1/2 a billion dollars on creating documentation for certification? I would agree that one never knows if something will be successful until it is, but if it was "fairly easy" to get approval to build working reactors then a lot more people would be building them. I think a way to get a lot more innovation in this space would be to designate an area in the US, maybe the former nuclear testing area, as a place where the radiation protection rules could be relaxed and work on reactors could be done at a much quicker pace.
The problem is not with radiation. It's cost. There's no efficient way of "trying out" a design. Even if we would allow anyone to build almost anything with constant NRC monitoring, the cost would kill the project. (And we wouldn't really gain much insight, because of complexity. This is basically the same problem that we have with the FDA. Yes phase I-II-III clinical trials are expensive, but biology is complicated.)
Now, that said, the whole problem is that of scale. There's no real money in building nuclear power plants. It's basically a few fanatics doing it at new and old companies.
If the US would announce a 2T USD new plant budget, there would be competition.
And even then, probably we would need to build a few very similar plants to have some sort of efficient design.
Renewables don’t help with climate change. Germany has 50% renewables in its electricity mix and they’re one of the dirtiest producers of electricity.
You're ignoring the other 50% to make broad general claims about the first 50% not helping? That's not correct, on many levels. Moreover 'has in the mix' doesn't equal 'produces locally' so for all we know Germany is just importing all of it, and producing locally only using gas and coal. Which it isn't. tldr; you might have a point, but its way more nuanced than what you're presenting here (without evidence)
Personally I don't support it because the plant is on an earthquake fault, the design lifetime of that plant is near the end of life anyway, upgrade of nuclear plants has gone bad in CA before[1], and finally the upgrade resources could be better applied to renewable resources.
Operating generation two reactors makes no sense. There is a risk of a meltdown with them and it has happened multiple times which has had negative impact on the adoption of nuclear reactors. We need to shut them all down and replace them with generator 4 reactors. They are more efficient and produce less hazardous waste. Most importantly they are much safer which will help restore public opinion of nuclear power.
Technology has a way of making things cheaper, it's not limited to renewables. You'll be shocked when you see what's available in a few years from Gen 4 and beyond reactors.
I agree about not shutting down nuclear but I also disagree about it being impossible without it (see: https://model.energy/ ) as well as disagree about "very few climate change activists support it."
Renewables (as well as storage) have reduced in cost (and continue to reduce in cost) much faster than has been expected by groups like the EIA.gov. While I fully support nuclear of all sorts, it's likely not to have a massive impact beyond the ~19% of electricity it provides today. It just takes too long to build, and proving a new design that'd be faster to build would also take a while, so it'd be supplemental to the energy transition, not the primary power source.
This is much different from 20 years ago when even wind power was still much more expensive than it is today, when off-shore wind was an expensive science project, when solar was literally over 10x (EDIT: more like 20x) the price as well as battery storage. At that point, yeah, I would've agreed nuclear was our only option for a rapid transition.
> If Germany hadn’t shutdown 11 nuclear power plants since 2011, emissions in the electricity sector would now be 50% to 70% lower.
That's the thing where you're very likely wrong, as you ignore the political situation where all of this happened.
Germany had a huge boost in renewables for a couple of years after Fukushima, which politically was closely tied to the (hugely popular) nuclear phaseout. This wouldn't have happened otherwise.
The alternative to the nuclear phaseout in Germany realistically would've been having no nuclear phaseout and much less ambition with renewables. Given that the German renewable energy program basically brought down solar prices for the world this would've very unlikely be a win even if you only look at CO2. The alternative of "Germany could've shut down coal earlier, keep nuclear longer and still have a massive development of renewables" is only theory, as that option was never politically on the table.
I agree with your point that Germany shouldn’t have shut down their nuclear plants, but their emissions problem isn’t the 50% renewables, it’s the ~40% that comes from burning coal.
I believe the point being made was that if it had not shut down its nuclear plants it would not need baseload generation from coal. Nuclear for base plus renewables and some small amount of storage capacity seems to be the ideal mix for cutting CO2 emissions.
A new nuclear reactor design that is faster to build, smaller, and much safer has just been approved in the US (after 500 million dollars spent just on the paperwork for approval). Check out NuScale Power[1]. The reactors are small at 60MW electrical output so that many of the large capital cost and scaling issues of nuclear power are much less of an issue. The reactors are built at a factory and shipped to the power plant.
Yep it just takes will and educated folks to realize that nuclear is a better contemporary solution right now. The NIMBYs have killed it though. I think California will have to become an ash pile first before people will consider it.
Every nuclear power plant in the United States has been a money pit and produced the most expensive electricity. Not a single one has opened on time or stayed within its budget, and all have required government assistance. Plus, the spent fuel has no place to go, it stays on site in concrete casks, potentially forever.
Maybe it's expensive because it's regulated to death.
> Plus, the spent fuel has no place to go, it stays on site in concrete casks, potentially forever.
Great! Seriously, there are zero problems with that.
'In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.' [0]
> Maybe it's expensive because it's regulated to death
If by “regulated to death”, you mean, “heavily subsidized and granted special liability regimes to reduce individual operator risk exposure”, that would be true.
20 years, or even 50 years, in the context of critical infrastructure and state level debt obligations is not that long. Nor is it sensible to consider “competing technical innovations” as if, say, solar and nuclear were mutually exclusive technologies. California can and should build both, now, and not wait for some other technology or price point to come and save us.
>Every nuclear power plant in the United States has been a money pit and produced the most expensive electricity.
How much have carbon emissions cost individuals in the form of negative health outcomes? Diablo Canyon cost 14b in 2019 dollars to build and has been producing carbon free energy for half a century. The state's total spending in 2017 -- State and federal funds -- was $256b.
The fuel could go to Yucca, or it could to go to Finland, which regularly takes nuclear waste. Or it could stay where it is just fine.
>The fuel could go to Yucca, or it could to go to Finland, which regularly takes nuclear waste.
Did you just wake up from a coma?
Nothing will go to Yucca Mountain because it isn't operational. Obama terminated funding in 2011. Trump has opposed reactivating the project and Congress hasn't funded it. This isn't surprising considering Nevada doesn't want to be America's nuclear waste dumping ground. There is strong opposition from its residents, including Native Americans, and state government.
Finland doesn't take nuclear waste. It used to ship its waste to Russia (and the Soviet Union) for reprocessing. That stopped in 1996 due to legislation in 1994 that mandated domestic long term storage.
> Every nuclear power plant in the United States has been a money pit
Let's pretend that this is unequivocally true. Sometimes doing things for public health and safety costs money. It seems like the main question we should ask is "would switching to nuclear significantly save lives and improve the environment?". Most research says yes.
And since that's the case, then we can ask a new question: "Does your 'money pit' statement account for the benefits of reduced mortality and greenhouse emissions, or are you only thinking about the electric bill?"
I don't have to pretend, it is true. Not a single nuclear plant in the United States has opened on time and on budget. Not a single one. In the 1950s, nuclear power was heralded as the cheapest electricity possible, so cheap that it would be almost free. Electricity generated from nuclear is about four times more expensive than solar and wind.
>Does your 'money pit' statement account for the benefits of reduced mortality and greenhouse emissions, or are you only thinking about the electric bill?
I don't live in fantasy land, somebody has to pay for it. I am already on the hook for PG&E's misdeeds.
Having tens of nuclear graveyards, especially close to population centers is not a good idea when California is covered with active faults. Nuclear needs water and lots of it. Perhaps you are not familiar with California.
> I don't live in fantasy land, somebody has to pay for it.
Well, I hear that the air force has so much extra money sitting around that they are working on yet another fighter jet. Maybe we could dig in the military industrial couch cushions a bit. "Somebody has to pay for it" is not the same as "we can't afford it". We absolutely could afford it.
> Having tens of nuclear graveyards, especially close to population centers is not a good idea when California is covered with active faults.
Given that California currently gets a third of its power from entirely outside of the state, clearly it's possible to build them not directly on top of the fault lines.
> Nuclear needs water and lots of it. Perhaps you are not familiar with California.
Looking at a map, it seems California is right beside a fairly large body of water, the Pacific Ocean. Maybe you could place your thermal power plants by the coast rather than smack in the middle of Death Valley? Perhaps not coincidentally, both Diablo Canyon and San Onofre nuclear power plants are sited right beside the ocean, and use(d) ocean water for cooling.
You concede you know nothing about California geography, climate, or politics.
Perhaps you should look at a fault map of California. Diablo, the only nuclear plant still operating, sits on an active fault that wasn't discovered until 2008. Not surprising, many new faults have been discovered recently. The Hollywood Fault was mapped in 2014 and many buildings in Los Angeles sit on it. Zoning was changed because of that discovery.
The coast of California is eroding through a combination of rising seas and sediment reduction. In 2010, an entire city block in Pacifica was red tagged because it was close to falling into the ocean. Many asked, why were these buildings allowed that close to the cliff? Well, in 1962 they were about fifty feet away.
Perhaps you should do some reading on the California Coastal Commission. The consensus is we need to retreat from the coast.
Let us imagine we can build magic nuclear plants. Where are we going to build them? Not Southern California. Well, maybe Camp Pendleton or Vandenberg, but that is federal land and they would be operated by the military. Maybe we can sneak one in the top of the northern coast near Oregon.
> You concede you know nothing about California geography, climate, or politics.
Says the person who was not aware California is right beside the biggest body of water on the planet.
> Perhaps you should look at a fault map of California. Diablo, the only nuclear plant still operating, sits on an active fault that wasn't discovered until 2008. Not surprising, many new faults have been discovered recently. The Hollywood Fault was mapped in 2014 and many buildings in Los Angeles sit on it. Zoning was changed because of that discovery.
Great. So when/if California builds a new nuclear plant, they can use the new information and not place it on top of a fault line. And earthquake-proof it as well, just to be sure.
> The coast of California is eroding through a combination of rising seas and sediment reduction. In 2010, an entire city block in Pacifica was red tagged because it was close to falling into the ocean. Many asked, why were these buildings allowed that close to the cliff? Well, in 1962 they were about fifty feet away.
How is that relevant wrt to siting a nuclear plant? Fifty feet in 50 years. So build the plant 500 feet away and make a tunnel for the cooling water.
> Perhaps you should do some reading on the California Coastal Commission. The consensus is we need to retreat from the coast.
If so, the incremental cost to build thermal power plants with dry cooling is not even a rounding error compared to the cost of moving cities with millions of inhabitants.
Can you cite any sources for this?
And, the fact that a project didn't complete on time and within budget does not mean that is unprofitable for the rest of its lifetime.
There is only one nuclear plant operating in California, the twin reactor Diablo Canyon, owned by PG&E. They stated in 2016 it will close the first reactor in 2024 and the second in 2025. PG&E estimates the decommission will take twenty years and cost $4 billion. Of course, it will never be closed since the spent fuel will exist in concrete casks on the property.
Since it was built in 1968, two faults were discovered, one a few miles offshore and another less than a mile inland. PG&E made structural changes to the plant in 1981. In 2011, PG&E told the NRC to hold the twenty year renewal permit until the company could do a seismic study in wake of the Fukushima disaster because coastal California suffers from both earthquakes and tsunamis. PG&E determined it was too expensive to continue to operate the plant and it could not take on the liability if a Fukushima type disaster happened at Diablo.
I'm not saying I completely agree with closing the plant, but to be fair to the argument they make, the agreement does seem to spell out that the plant will be replaced with greenhouse gas free energy sources, including renewables + storage.
IMO the biggest problem with nuclear is the cost and time to construct. I don't think the energy industry would be so keen to shut them down if they were cost effective.
I'm not sure about that goal, California currently imports around 32% of its power now. That number will likely increase if we shut down all of the remaining nuclear.
How much night time solar can Arizona and Nevada give them, today, or in say ten years? Serious question.
The nice thing about Nuclear is that it's boringly reliable. You buy a 500MW nuclear power plant, you're getting ~500MW from that maybe 80-90% of the time. Own a half dozen of those (3GW nameplate capacity) and you can have 2GW or more pretty much always.
You buy 3GW of solar panels obviously they don't do anything for a big portion of every day because the sun is on the far side of the planet, so then either you're also buying a lot of storage and more panels, or you don't have a replacement for the nuke plant.
Now, if you have 3GW of molten salt concentrated solar maybe you can hit that 80-90% reliability on the individual units and replace the nuke plant, but do Nevada and Arizona have any of those today? Are they expected to build a California nuke plant's worth any time soon?
Serious answer: as much nigh time solar as you want, via battery storage, at cost competitive prices. Here's a three year old project in Arizona for solar plus storage at less than $45/MWh:
Since then, the public bidding processes in Nevada and Colorado have revealed many more projects at similar costs. Since utility planning is typically on a five year timeline, bids are expected to be at the cost of storage at the time of delivery, and since the cost of storage is falling 20% per year, outsiders think that these projects are taking future cost drops into account. But if a three year old project is so affordable, anything delivered in the next six months will be pretty equivalent.
We'd need to seriously advance battery technology to make it better than nuclear in the terms we're talking about here. Batteries require minerals from mining, including strip mining, and that's going to fail the environmental test. Mining involves slave labor, and that's going to fail the humanitarian test. They also have a short lifespan and tend to explode.
Maybe if sodium proves out then batteries will be acceptable. Right now, though, we don't have a viable technology that serves the purpose.
It's not like we are going to stop mining copper tomorrow, because it fails the "environmental test," so I'm now sure why batteries are held to a completely different standard than every other single aspect of our economy.
We don't need any big leaps in battery tech, just the current learning curve will serve us wonderfully.
As for environmental damage, I've never ever heard that strip mining is essential for any battery component. Could you clarify? Neither is child labor necessary.
Current grid storage has warranties longer than a decade of daily cycling. Fire suppression is greatly improving.
All the hurdles are easily surmountable. Certainly far more easily surmountable than the difficulty of building new nuclear. There are clear and easy paths for all of batteries, and we are going to be building TWh of them for cars anyway, so we may as well clean that up then use the same industrial process for grid storage.
We are building our massive energy stowage factories. Car companies are scrambling to create supply chains. This is happening really fast.
Since I did not estimate the amount of energy to store for a day, I don't know why you think I underestimated it. If you think we will turn off all generation for an entire day, ignoring solar and wind and hydro resources, and just run off batteries for no good reason, I'm not sure why you would think that.
What is the real resin that Germany is building gas plants? And how do they justify new gas plants, economically, in this day and age? They will be stranded assets in a few years, so it sounds like corruption or ignorance. Surely the economics can't be so different there than what exists in this Rocky Mountain Institute analysis of US costs, where we have super cheap gas?
> We find that the natural gas bridge is likely already behind us, and that continued investment in announced gas projects risks creating tens of billions of dollars in stranded costs by the mid-2030s, when new gas plants and pipelines will rapidly become uneconomic as clean energy costs continue to fall.
Will be large scale batteries very soon, as the grid storage market is growing at an exponential pace.
As battery prices fall, entirely new markets open up. Right now batteries beat the cost of natural gas peaker plants. In Arizona, where solar is so cheap, batteries are becoming economical for correcting the duck curve in the evening.
Germany has plenty of wind overnight.
It's not like an entire country's grid will ever be powered by a single source of energy, so I'm not sure what the point of comparing hydro capacity to total energy consumption is.
194MWh would be a lot for you but it's not enough for this context. Suppose it's dark for just 10 hours. 194MWh over ten hours is 19.4MW which is enough to power a small town.
The primary purpose of that Tesla battery is to manage short-term discrepancies, it can do 200MW power output for ten minutes without problems and that's enough time for relatively slow standby systems to spin up.
To give a comparison hydro storage systems of 10GWh (almost two orders of magnitude more) are totally a thing. Why didn't Australia buy one of those? Well the problem is geography, the hydro storage needs a mountain because what it's really storing is gravitational potential energy, and er, that bit of Australia is a bit flat.
The project you linked can store... 1 hour and 10 minutes of its own electricity. Now, maybe Tucson has much shorter nights than anyplace else on Earth, but where I'm from that'd fall badly short of overnight power.
It's honestly so weird to read comments like this that presume no one else has ever realized before that the sun sets every night. I would guess that the California power regulators actually do know this and have plans for it.
Assuming the competence on the part of California power regulators seems unwarrantedly generous in the light of recent (and less than recent) failures.
They are expensive and take long to construct because of political and environmental requirements on them. This is not an inherent property of nuclear, and can be solved with a single stroke of the pen. This is not going to happen, though, because people tend to think that if something is "environmental", then it must be good.
No, companies are extremely happy to make huge capital expenses, if they expect to make a good profit on them. For example, California's PG&E is planning to spend a whopping $40B in investment over next 5 years, because California government guarantees 10% annual return on investment.
Wtf is the point of sourcing market investment if you are going to guarantee profits? All the usual market mechanisms to ensure efficiency don't work, you are just handing out free money at the expence of the taxpayer.
You might as well just issue bonds and invest money directly.
Maybe in California. In Plattsburgh, NY, electric rates are 75% less than the state average. Pretty sure the other municipal utilities are similar. (About 30 in NY)
With civil service employees, management overhead costs are usually way lower. Corporate management usually gets overpaid.
Right. There are many things the government could possibly do, and it could theoretically do them as well as private sector does, and in many case even better than private sector (as governments enjoy many privileges that private companies don't). However, this is upper bound of what we could get from governments running things. Most of us need to settle with governments as they actually exist, and the actual outcomes. The track record does not seem encouraging, and arguments of the sort "this time it will be different, we'll just put our people in charge, who are better than people who were previously in charge" aren't particularly appealing.
You are missing the point entirely, the state or the market are fine, each approach has it's strengths.
Deals like this one are unacceptable because they are a Frankenstein monster - state guarantees profit, so the state bears all the risk. The normal market mechanisms don't work, inefficiencies and wastefulness is not punished, but profits are still private. It encourages the worst possible behaviour.
The advances in reactor design, especially from a safety standpoint, are pretty amazing IMHO. Shut it down and and start building these newer reactors like crazy is what I say.
They're trying to build newer EPRs in Europe, but 3 out of 3 are a decade plus delayed and way the hell over the budget. (The only ones actually operating are in China, and even those were years late.)
What always seems especially disingenuous in these discussions, is the abnormal focus on nuclear projects going over budget (regardless if it's a first pass or not).
It's almost a truism at this point, to say that a look large infrastructure project is going to go over time and over budget. But when nuclear is in the picture, this seems to be wheeled out like its somehow a fault of nuclear alone.
Perhaps because solar and wind are orders of magnitude less complex. So they are less likely to go massively over budget. Because most of the work streams can be bought at fixed cost from reliable contractors.
It would be truly radical to keep this plant running that far past its originally designed life time. In fact it will be more like suicidal. Not to mention that it is in a seismically dangerous area.
There is plenty of energy in renewables that is far cheaper and safer than nuclear.
Why is everything a whataboutist answer to nuclear fans?
Diablo Canyon is over 50 years old. It's not considered a particularly safe design. Stretching a few more years out of it isn't going to make a significant impact, certainly not relative to the auto regulation under discussion.
I mean, look, sure. I "support" extending Diablo Canyon in principle. But that takes a ton of money, and I'd like to see numbers showing that isn't better spent on a bunch of wind farms.
My understanding is that, at least depending on your goal, this isn't nearly radical enough. Some experts think we not only need to stop selling gas-powered cars _immediately_, but also actively remove existing fossil fuel cars/appliance from the economy.
15 years is nonsense because it's beyond the time horizon of political office. Future politicians won't feel obligated by their predecessors commitments and current ones will just kick the can on meaningful action.
Unless there's actual measurable promises made by politicians that can be falsified before their next election, it's mostly puffery. Make hard, publicly verifiable 6, 12, and 18 month commitments otherwise it's just fluffy words to get votes.
Also this can't be a politics-only solution. We have to dip into ye olden term of "political economy" - that second term is integrally tied to the first. The restructuring has to happen at how the politics And economy operates otherwise it doesn't work - there's no way to do anything meaningful, it's just words on paper if we only look at politics.
Personally I think profit maximization for the energy sector has to go. It's not how we run our fire, parks, library, courts, postal service and it can't be how we do energy, at least not right now. Greenhouse gas minimization has to determine things.
It's possible. The best universities for instance, aren't determined by the highest profits and the best police aren't the ones that hand out the largest fines and the best parents aren't the ones that extract the highest value labor from their children. We can restructure how energy is done as well.
> 15 years is nonsense because it's beyond the time horizon of political office. Future politicians won't feel obligated by their predecessors commitments and current ones will just kick the can on meaningful action.
Living in California over the past month feels apocalyptic.
This year isn't isolated and it's likely to repeat, refreshing in voters minds why this policy was put in place.
It'll certainly get far worse. The rapidity of the increase has fundamentally destabilized the global climate
The Arctic was 65 degrees above average this summer with days reaching over 100.
The temperature difference between the latitudes that governed the jet streams and global sea circulation has been fundamentally disrupted
That's why you're getting muggy 80 degree nights in California now.
Meanwhile that cooling system has wobbled lopsided like a melting hat bringing arctic cold weather and crop failure to a bunch of northern latitudes.
In the mid-latitudes, the tropical glaciers in places like the Himalayas that are the water supply for over a billion people are in an accelerating decline causing unprecedented flooding, soil erosion and soon, starvation.
Meanwhile ocean acidification is making the bottom of the food chain unable to survive and thus causes a cascading effect leading to a global ocean dieoff.
At the same time, the ice sheets are breaking up so rapidly that glaciologists can't even keep up with it and at least one fell to his death this year because things are happening to quickly to survey.
And then there's that insect apocalypse. All the while humans are making bold proclamations and patting themselves on the back while they point fingers at the "other countries" as if it's a game.
Global feedbacks due to the emissions have chains of effects that can be mapped out over decades. If we magically stopped all emission right now, there's still years of warming and disaster baked in until any kind of stability (reversal in our lifetime is frankly out of the question)
We're not doing that though. Instead, pipelines slated to last 40 years are being constructed as I type this. Exploratory missions for drilling that wouldn't even start until years from now are still being done. More coal power plants were funded and greenlit just last month. They won't even start until years from now.
We're still committing ourselves to an oil future despite all of this. Over half the greenhouse gases were emitted After we started the annual global climate summits. It has done effectively nothing.
So yes, things will be getting worse. These are the good days.
Look up "alien resurrection deleted ending"... Except for the space crafts, I don't think the depiction is inaccurate unless we take major life altering action immediately. The window to start an "ambitious" 15-year transition closed somewhere around 1990.
The world will eventually recover. The carbon dioxide emitted from the car that just rolled down the street, 90% of it will finally be gone in 100,000 years. The coral reef will recover in 2,000,000 years from the ocean acidification since 1950. We'll get to a level of biodiversity equal to 1930 by about 10,000,000AD. Even the amount of fossil fuels we burned in the past 200 years will eventually come back in 400,000,000 years --- but that's only if we somehow stop today. We're not doing that.
> but that's only if we somehow stop today. We're not doing that.
There is literally nothing we can do to stop what's going to happen over the next hundred years. Elimination of emissions and massive investment in CO2 capture over the next hundred years might make the next hundred less terrible?
So my philosophy is to try and enjoy what we have as much as I possibly can and vote and support what little change I can.
Sadly, as climate declines, I suspect there will be a negative feedback loop. Economies will decline and the capability & willpower to invest in the future will decline along with the funds needed to improve the world.
It's possible to actively support positive change at the same time as having little hope our collective actions will avert catastrophic climate change.
Agreed. I'm not having kids and trying not to get too down on the daily about the future of our species. Based on what I know about human nature I see almost no realistic way out of this without some sort of technological deus-ex-machina to come and save us.
Yep. I'm beginning to feel this is true. 2020 has been a crap year in many ways. But I expect 2020 will be one of the better years compared to what is coming.
This year problems also was not caused by Climate Change (at least not the primary cause) but rather decades and decades of Poor forest management and poor infrastructure maintenance which has nothing to do with eliminating gas burning cars.
Even if you reverse all carbon output today, if you do not change the forest management you will still have massive fires, and if you do not improve infrastructure maintenance you are still going to have brown outs and black outs in summer
Ok, why then are the largest fires in Russia, Australia, Canada, and Bolivia? Is that also bad management from the Democrats?
Cool let's look at US only, because that will be your reply. We have the 2004 Alaska fire, the 2017 Montana wildfire or the fires in Idaho and Georgia in 2007 that were over 500,000 acres. Are those also meddling Democrats and Environmentalists?
What about the largest fire in Kansas history that went into Oklahoma in 2016. The largest fire in Utah was in 2007 as well.
When doing a proper survey, there's literally not a shred of empirical evidence to back your claim. This is a global phenomena exhibiting exactly zero bias towards any particular political party.
We're at the anger/bargaining stage of denialism with some people. Which is fine, but it shouldn't be used as a basis for public policy.
I never claimed a political party was to blame, and It is not a CA only problem, the US Forest Service has had decades of bad management as well under both Republicans and Democrats
It is a GOVERNMENT problem, both parties are terrible.
>>We have the 2004 Alaska fire, the 2017 Montana wildfire or the fires in Idaho and Georgia in 2007 that were over 500,000 acres
Isnt that kinda of the point, the claim is that Climate change is the cause, but fires of this kind have been happening for decades
Fire happen in forests, and proper forest management will lessen their impact (it will not prevent them)
Forest fires have been happening since before humans existed on this plant, and they will continue to happen long after we have killed ourselves with our own stupidity
Of course they will. People die naturally without smoking cigarettes as well. Smoking however, has a real effect.
This is a matter of frequency, ferocity, and number of locations, that's why it's "instability"; the 60 degree change in Colorado over 8hrs for instance.
Or the multiple hurricanes at once phenomena recently almost like they're lined up in a queue. Or that crazy one in New York, or that disastrous one in Houston, rare extreme events are increasing in frequency due to climate disruption.
The statement "hurricanes happen" is about as valid as saying "people die" in order to dismiss the health concerns of cigarettes.
Nobody is claiming they don't. The claim, to use cigarettes, is that statistically speaking, a significant amount die when they usually wouldn't. Early deaths dramatically increase in frequency. Also pointing to the climate equivalent of the 100 year old smoker doesn't discredit things either. This is a statistical argument, not an absolute one.
If a better sports team has an upset defeat, they're still the better team because of their statistical performance.
The claim here isn't that these things didn't exist but that they're more numerous, more dramatic, and occur more often, globally, in every country. The numbers clearly back that story.
Even if I agree to the premise (which I do not.. ) it still does not address many many many of the concerns people have around these types of laws including the fact they are largely regressive in nature impacting poor people the most, they are more Climate Theatre than actual effective policy on changing any kind of Climate change, and the unintended effects could be worse either for humans or for the environment
There are many things I think can be done for Climate change, Banning gas powered cars is not one of them
Yes, this is meaningless unenforceable pablum to curry votes prior to an election.
A serious effort would be to do say, an enforceable statewide boycott of imports from nations that are still building fossil fuel plants the same way the abolitionists got rid of global slavery in the 1800s.
A seizing and decomission of all state fossil fuel power production and a disbursement of the war chests to the laid off workers the same way we got rid of global whaling could help too.
There's lots of precedence for this, but we'd need to do some command economy level actions to achieve it.
You'd also need a bunch of political leaders willing to kamikaze their careers to achieve it. I don't see it happening tbh.
> This year problems also was not caused by Climate Change
The abnormally hot and dry summer was absolutely a root cause of the fires.
> if you do not change the forest management you will still have massive fires, and if you do not improve infrastructure maintenance you are still going to have brown outs and black outs in summer
"Forest Management", the classic euphemism for "Aggressive Logging" is at least partially responsible for the explosive spread of the Holiday Farm Fire and many of the fires which have been part of this year's disastrous wild-fires in Oregon. In the Holiday Farm Fire, 76% of the lands burned were previously clear cut, most of it was private forest and heavily logged BLM land. The national forests adjacent which have a far lighter "management" burden, less logging and much more healthy 1st and 2nd growth trees didn't burn near as much. The difference is so stark, the fire line almost ends at the boundary between heavily managed land and the National Forest.
I'm not sure that makes sense, actually. We didn't remove the profit motive from CFC production or refrigerator companies. We just banned CFCs and moved on.
Honestly, we do need a more aggressive approach, but climate won't be the catalyst for totally changing the economy that many on the left hope it will be.
Yes, it will be interesting whether this includes any meaningful action within his term of office. In the EU and UK there are requirements for average emissions for each manufacturer, which get tougher every year, and already are requiring about 5-10% of vehicles to be electric.
> Some experts think we not only need to stop selling gas-powered cars _immediately_, but also actively remove existing fossil fuel cars/appliance from the economy.
That's targeting the wrong side of the supply/demand equation. Which is also why this initiative of California's will not work.
Just keep building better power sources!! You will never reduce demand, you can only make a better supply.
Nuclear nuclear nuclear. There's nothing else that can do it fast enough.
If California actually cared about the environment that's what they would do, instead it's only lip service.
Even today, where we haven't done all that much with electric efficiency, US power generation has been virtually flat for over a decade since the last recession: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=38572
Considering how much low-hanging efficiency fruit there is still lying around, reducing demand is a perfectly valid strategy for reducing carbon emissions.
In the second graph, industrial sales flatline then decline after 2000, which doesn't match up with the peak electricity generation in 2007. Both residential and commercial slow or stop growing after 2007.
> Nuclear nuclear nuclear. There's nothing else that can do it fast enough.
Maybe in theory, but not in practice. How much new nuclear generation has been brought online in the last decade in the US? How much solar/wind?
Clearly, the only carbon-free power generation that is actually actively being brought online is solar/wind. With batteries, we'll actually get somewhere with the decarbonization of our power generation.
It still won't be fast enough at the current pace, though...
US EPA[0] / CA ARB[1] data on emissions shares by sector:
* 28%/41% - transportation
* 27%/15% - electricity
* 22%/24% - industry
* 12%/12% - commercial & residential
* 10%/ 8% - agriculture
58% of US transportation (~16% of the US total) is passenger cars and light-duty trucks, the focus of this announcement. CA accounts for about 6-7% of US CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalents), so this action targets roughly 1% of our national emissions, not nothing but certainly more symbolic than impactful (even considering spillover effects). electricity and industry must be tackled as well, coordinated among a majority of states.
the US, ~4% of the world's population, produces about 15% of the world's emissions (2nd to china, EU together is 3rd). this is why it's even more critical that the US, china and the EU especially come together on climate change (e.g., the paris accords) rather than giving the middle finger like we americans did recently.
You can't assume that CA's action will exist in a vacuum. In the optimistic case this will help drive the rest of the country / world towards electric vehicles.
This isn't just optimistic thinking. A lot of the current American consumer laws, emissions standards etc. are de facto set by California rather than the Federal government.
That is more of a cost matrix, if CA demands a label on a product it is too costly to just make a CA only package so manufacturers will inform the entire nation that to the State of CA everything under the sun causes cancer....
However if you start outlawing entire segments of a product that does not mean that Ford is going to stop making Gas powered F150 that 49 other states Love, they will just stop selling them in CA and many CA Truck owners will drive to NV to buy one. I have a feeling the border will have a Nice Big Truck Dealership in short order
We already see that in some markets where for example my Tractor can not be sold in CA, but I bought it just fine in my state
Sure, we see that with stuff like tractors, lawn mowers, and occasionally motorcycles -- but 16 other states hopped on board with CA when it comes to passenger cars. "49 state cars" were commercially viable for a while, but I'm pretty sure that "34 state cars" don't exist...
16 other states are NOT on board with banning ICE vehicles, they have adopted CA's MPG and other emissions standards under the carve out that allows CA to set higher standards than the federal government. The only state that gets that authority, which itself should be repelled, either all states have the power or no state should, CA should not get a special carve out in the law
Yes, I know. The question proposed is whether California has enough influence to change that. Historically, it took about ~15 years for the rest of the country to fall in line with CA. I’m not suggesting they’ll adopt those standards now, but in 2050, maybe so.
Your point is sound, but don’t ignore the supply side. Manufacturers will produce more electric cars to satisfy the California market, driving down prices which will increase adoption elsewhere.
We’ve already seen this story. They make “compliance cars” that are sold (typically with a subsidy) and are impossible to get outside the target market. Now maybe California won’t actually allow IC vehicles in any shape or form and that will finally force hands. But I suspect that whatever is actually done will be watered down and have enough loopholes that it won’t.
again, the spillover effects will be minimal because, unlike the CAFE standards for instance, this affects a relatively new subclass of vehicles, and the costs are not minimal for broad conformance. it will help move the US overall toward electric vehicles a little bit, but it won't lead to wholesale changes by itself.
Did not read all the comments, but it seems like many think California is first. This is not a symbolic act or something radical. This is joining in with the other countries and territories who have similar plans [0].
The average age of a vehicle in California is ~12.5 years. So if they stopped selling ICE cars, within 5 years there would be 25% fewer cars on the road...
At that point, the profitability of owning a gas station would go way down and people would start finding better uses for the land. Within 10 years, gas stations would be driven out of bigger cities.
Now people get "range anxiety" thinking about buying EVs, but people can charge an EV cars at home. When gas stations get harder to find, the biggest advantage of owning an ICE car vanishes.
If (and it's a big if), you can't sell new ICE cars, they will be uncommon 10 years later. After 25 years (your 2060 number) it will be difficult to do a road trip without careful planning around for gas stops.
Median age of cars in the US is ~12 years, but has trended up since 1970 when it was ~6 years, which I assume is due to more reliable and durable vehicles.[1]
25% of cars are 16+ years old.[2] So by 2051, you'd expect 25% of cars to still be on the road.
For light trucks, the average age was 19 years old.[2]
How much quicker are those cars going to get retired out quicker when resale prices start dropping and gas prices start increasing so gas stations can stay profitable?
There is a whole economy around keeping ICE vehicles on the road. Without a constant supply of new ICE cars that economy gets trashed.
SF is a wealthy city, but drive around some of the low income neighborhoods and look at the cars. They are 15+ years old and will be driven until they no longer work. These folks can't afford a new ICE car, let alone a new EV car (they don't have garage to charge anyways). These folks will be buying the used ICE cars in 2035 and driving them for another 15 years.
There will be a big enough market for ICE cars and gasoline for a while.
No doubt we'll see ICE cars disappear, but I just don't think it will happen that quickly.
Gas stations are already on decline in SF as more profitable businesses (and housing) find better uses for the land. If there are even 10% fewer gasoline cars cars on the road, that puts a huge dent in profitability those stations.
People may want gasoline cars, but owning one is going to be a hassle, particularly in places where real estate is at a premium.
> These folks can't afford a new ICE car, let alone a new EV car (they don't have garage to charge anyways).
The cost of EVs is coming down fast and will continue to decline. The cost of used EVs will also come down quickly, particularly since right now newer models are quite a bit better than EVs just a few years old.
> No doubt we'll see ICE cars disappear, but I just don't think it will happen that quickly.
"Quickly"?
There is nothing quick about it. We're talking about 25 years in the future as opposed to 50 years in the future. It's just your idea of cars driving around for a 15 years with no gas stations and increasingly hard to find mechanics that I question.
i wonder how much transportation & commercial emissions could be reduced solely by providing the right incentives for remote work & keeping non essential employees from driving to and from the city center everyday. covid already served as a model for this hopefully we can learn the right lessons.
as a personal bias i'd like to see schools move in a similar direction as well towards more decentralized satellites with fewer students traveling less far from home.
another elephant in the room (really it's a whole room full of elephants) is that cali's grid is already clearly beleaguered and not keeping up with demand so what does that mean when you have something like 20 million EVs that need to plug in every night?
This move isn't as radical as I'd like, but I genuinely think it might stick. Having Ford on board is a big deal. Seems like the big auto makers feel like it's a "reasonable" timeframe. Would love to see this take effect sooner, and also include an eventual ban/restriction on used gas-powered vehicles, but it looks like we may finally be making a meaningful change.
We basically need to try absolutely everything and see what sticks.
0) Remote work as much as possible - redesign cities to minimize vehicle traffic. (When people go remote - you can make small communities with new layouts)
1) Electric vehicles.
2) Renewable energy as fast and far as we can go.
3) Nuclear power for baseline load.
4) Fusion power research.
5) Encourage movement away from animal based protein.
This does not feel radical. This feels like pandering. My unborn child will be driving by the time this goes into effect. Radical would be new vehicles must be zero emissions in 2025, which still gives even the Dodges of the world enough time to get their shit together.
Cars with new drive trains being ready for sale in 5 years for legacy manufacturers, in addition to the supply chain to produce the batteries? I think that is too ambitious.
Doesn't eel radical enough to me. It's about on par with what a lot of Europe has already committed to. Seems like with $100 billion we could get there in 10 years or sooner, not 15.
At least CA is working on it. The biggest polluters, China and Russia don't see to even acknowledge that any other country sees climate change as an issue.
Meanwhile, we are being pounded in Canada with extra taxes to discourage burning of fossil fuels even though we only emit 1.6% of the worlds GHG's. And a large part of that comes from home heating by natural gas, to which there is no viable alternative, so its not discouraging anything, its just another cash grab.
They should be making it more expensive to run gas vehicles to reflect their actual environmental damage and make it cheaper to run EV, not outright banning them. California is navel gazing at their own moral superiority on this one.
NOTE: I don't really care about downvotes and try my best not to comment on them. They are pointless without engaging the author. Please take the time to explore the simple exercise I present here and understand. If you don't, and your power is in the form of a downvote, what you are doing is becoming part of the problem and behaving in a manner that is no different from climate change deniers. Can you at least try to understand? In the years I have been talking about this I have yet to see anyone challenge the simple findings that can be had from looking at a simple graph. Interesting.
> This move feels radical, but I don't see how we avert catastrophe without moves that feel radical. If we keep plodding down the course we're on we'll just sleepwalk into oblivion.
One of the most frustrating things for me in the global warming debate is the total lack of interest in the scientific truth on BOTH sides of the issue. The truly odd scenario it sets-up is one where both sides are, well, to be kind, confused.
It's weird, deniers don't know what they are talking about --because it is most-definitely real-- and advocates are confused because they are ignoring the most basic science on the subject.
What is the truth?
There is nothing whatsoever we can do about it. Plain and simple.
This is a planetary-scale problem that cannot be solved in thousands of years even if the entirety of humanity and our technology left this planet at once.
If we all left earth immediately, at best, it will take somewhere in the order of 50,000 to 100,000 years for atmospheric CO2 levels to come down by 100 ppm.
That's the truth. And it requires everyone leaving earth right away. A consequence of this is that no partial measure anyone can cook-up can even begin to make a dent. In fact, we have years-long research findings concluding that, even if we converted the entire planet to the most optimal forms of renewable energy not only would atmospheric CO2 not go down, it would continue to grow exponentially.
And yet everyone ignores the most basic of scientific analysis that confirms this reality. Scientists don't want to speak-up because it would mean losing grants and likely having their lives and careers destroyed. Nobody wants to go against something politicians and others are too happy to use to gain votes and make money. And so, the scientific truth is suppressed and lay-people believe nonsense.
OK, so, what is this simple analysis that proves this idea that it would take 50,000 to 100,000 years for CO2 levels to come down by 100 ppm if we all left earth?
We know EXACTLY how quickly natural processes reduce atmospheric CO2 through historical ice core sample records going back 800,000 years. In case it isn't obvious, this means we know the rate of change for a planet without humanity.
Here's were you will find the 800,000 years of ice core data:
Here's a paper that explains why it is that atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise exponentially even if we switch the the most optimal forms of renewable energy world-wide:
Take that graph into your favorite image editor and fit lines to it for the decline phase in every cycle. Measure the slope for each cycle. Take the average or median, your choice. The number is in the tens of thousands of years. Not hundreds. Tens of thousands.
Then read the paper and understand how a transition to clean energy is an exercise in futility.
I challenge anyone to show how anything short of all of humanity leaving earth can produce a rate of change dramatically better than tens of thousands of years per 100 ppm. No magic hand-wavy stuff. Whatever anyone proposes must include analysis of energy and resources needed to execute a planetary scale solution that is able to force a change at a rate up to a thousand times faster than the natural "no humans on earth" rate.
This is not to say there aren't a lot of good reasons to clean-up our act. There are. Of course. We just need to stop lying to ourselves, understand reality and start talking about how to adapt for the sake of future generations. We must also free-up our brilliant scientists so they can deal with this issue factually without fear for the destruction of their careers and loss of funding. The current path will lead nowhere. Converting California to all electric vehicles in the name of climate change is farcical at best and potentially detrimental.
There isn't anyone alive who can solve a scientific problem by ignoring evidence and data.
"There's nothing whatsoever we can do about it" makes it sound like a 600ppm world and a 1000ppm world are indistinguishable. Or that carbon sequestration at less than 1000X natural processes is equivalent to none at all. Your own links dispute that.
Not sure how you morphed what I said into what you are saying. I did not say that a "600ppm world and a 1000ppm world are indistinguishable" anywhere.
We cannot stop it" much less reduce it. The amount of energy and resources this would require is far more likely to kill everything on this planet than fix anything.
You have to think in terms of planetary scale. California is a rounding error. Switching every car in CA to electrics is a rounding error. Switching everyone to solar and wind power is a rounding error.
The comparison is to every human being not being on this planet* and our technology shutting down. And in that we know we are looking at tens of thousands of years for a 100 ppm drop.
Look, I don't like this reality any more than anyone else. I just want us to stop lying so we can look at this issue from a far more honest perspective. We cannot fix this. We cannot create an artificial solution for a planetary scale problem that would take longer to solve without us around than humanity might survive.
Look at the massive forest fires we've had just this year in CA. Care to guess how much CO2 these fires released? I've done the numbers for other fires in the past. It's hard to estimate but I think it is very safe to say that these annual fires easily release YEARS of equivalent transportation CO2 into the atmosphere every year.
In fact, that's how the planetary system works!
If you go back to the 800,000 years of CO2 data there are two obvious questions anyone inquisitive enough should be asking:
How did CO2 increase without humanity around? Massive continental scale fires across somewhere in the order of 25,000 years.
How did CO2 decrease without humanity around? Weather. Rains. Hurricanes. Cyclones. Water precipitating CO2. And, yes, trees and plants growing back after the massive fires.
Destruction is always easier and faster than reconstruction. These are basic principles. If you curve fit the charts you'll come up with about 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase due to massive fires and 50,000 to 100,000 years for a drop of the same amount due to weather.
Another question that comes up is: Well, we were able to increase it by 100 ppm in a few hundred years. How does that make any sense?
Good question. Easy answer.
We did it by burning through billions of years in accumulated energy in the form of petroleum". When we burn one gallon of gasoline in a car or one ton of bunker fuel in a cargo ship we are burning something that took an exceedingly long period of time to "manufacture". It took energy in the form of solar energy and an unimaginably large amount of raw materials (plants and animals) to produce the black goo we pull out of the ground and burn. So, yes, in a few hundred years we were able to burn energy that took millions of years and, again, unimaginable amounts of biomass, to produce.
And that's another reason for which fixing the problem is impossible. I challenge anyone to name one problem that can be solved with less* energy than that which produced it. If we start with the premise that nothing can be 100% efficient and add to that the sheer scale of the energy and mass that went into what caused this problem the answer, which is right there in the graphs, is beyond obvious. It's high school physics.
We need to stop lying if we want a chance to understand the future and make it a better one.
> Not sure how you morphed what I said into what you are saying. I did not say that a "600ppm world and a 1000ppm world are indistinguishable" anywhere.
It's a direct consequence of "There is nothing whatsoever we can do about it."
We're at 400ppm right now. For there to be "nothing we can do", there would have to be no appreciable difference between keeping our current trajectory (1000+) versus slowing emissions down to 600, or 500, or 400.
If what you're actually saying is that "nothing we can do will bring us down to 300ppm", then that might be true, but that's a statement about a hundred times weaker than what you actually said. Being stuck at 400 would not be a tragedy. 400ppm is not what people are extremely worried about.
Please argue against the data. What I say does not matter.
Go through the very simple exercise I describe in my original comment.
Pull-up the 800,000 year ice core sample CO2 chart.
Determine the natural "no humans on earth" rate of change for the reduction of atmospheric CO2.
Then explain how anything we do --anything-- can deliver a 1000x improvement on this rate of change.
Even a 100x improvement on this rate of change would mean, at best, 500 years and at worst about 1,000 years.
This isn't very complicated but people seem intent in ignoring it.
I have yet to find someone, anyone, from lay persons to PhD's who, when forced to argue against the data we have don't go "Oh shit. You are right".
The problem is people read the words and never really take the time to engage in a simple high school geometry exercise that, from my perspective, represents a mind-bending revelation for most folks. It was for me. I set out to understand the subject and ran into this irrefutable wall. I am still looking for someone who, having honestly looked at the data, is able to honestly explain why the conclusion is wrong.
Can you?
Have you looked at the data?
Ignore me. I'm just some fool typing words. The data is what matters here. My words don't. Argue against the data. That's how you prove me wrong. I don't think anyone can. And that's a pretty serious statement.
The problem with the down-votes on something like HN is that they are a cheap, low-effort and no consequence to muzzle opinions in the laziest of ways. It eliminates any degree of engagement and does not promote dialogue or learning. Having just watched "The Social Dilemma" this seems par for the course. Radicalization by "cancel culture" rather than dialogue.
At least you are engaging with me.
Now I am asking you to stop focusing on my words and please take some time to go look at the data, just the data, nothing more, nothing less. And then answer the question yourself and refute my conclusion if you can.
BTW, I am DESPERATE for someone to actually tell me how my conclusion is wrong. I don't like this conclusion. I would very much prefer to be wrong and learn how.
Great comment chain. The one thing sticking out to me though is what appears to be an assumption you made in that the speed of natural processes in removing co2 is the best possible baseline.
If we are talking hypotheticals here, if humankind managed to shift all energy production to renewables and effectively reduce their carbon footprint to zero (this is pretty much an impossibility with current technology and culture), all carbon capture schemes would in fact be increasing the rate at which co2 was sequestered (faster than just natural processess alone).
We are talking about technologies like bio-engineered trees that grow incredibly fast and are then harvested and stored safely. And there will likely be a myriad of technologies we can not even fathom right now to directly pull out and sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
Are any of these things likely to happen in the next 20, 50 100 years? Maybe, maybe not.
You did mention that scientists should be freed up to work on aiding humans in adapting to this inevitable future, and these kinds of technologies would likely be researched in parallel to that effort, in order to bring the Earth back into a more hospitable condition for us.
I very much doubt it will take thousands of years to reverse the course we find outselves on, once there is enough political capital available to actually make change.
> assumption you made in that the speed of natural processes in removing co2 is the best possible baseline.
No, sorry. That's not what I meant. What the ice core data gives us as a baseline is what will happen if humanity and all of our technology leaves the planet. Let's call it 100K years for 100 ppm reduction.
This is a real baseline based on highly accurate scientific data. The first thing I did when I reached this conclusion was to try to invalidate ice core sample data. It turns out this data is extremely accurate and, I think I can say, irrefutable.
And so, this is the baseline from which, I propose, we need to evaluate any proposal that says: Eliminate X and we save the planet (fix the problem, stop climate change, etc., pick one).
In other words, I propose it proves a simple idea:
We cannot fix this problem by eliminating anything.
We can say this because we know that if eliminate humans and human technology --let's call that "everything"-- it will take 100K years to drop 100 ppm.
Every such proposal should be measured from this baseline.
Eliminate cars? Nope, you can't just do that and fix it faster than 100K/100ppm, if at all.
Eliminate cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships? Nope, that is still less than humanity evaporating. It's still, at best >100K/100ppm.
Eliminate all fossil fuels and all of the above? OK, now we are getting stilly and it still isn't going to be any less than 100K/100ppm. Because for 100K/100ppm by elimination of human sources of CO2 we have to leave the planet.
If you haven't I urge you to read the paper I linked to in my top comment. The researchers had enough and were convinced that the solution was a world-wide shift to renewables. They say so in the paper. And --thankfully-- they are also honest enough to say that they were astounded to discover that what they knew to be true was, in fact, false. We need honest scientists that are isolated from the consequences of looking at the truth of these issues.
Their conclusion, paraphrasing, was something like: Even if we switched the entire world to the most optimal and efficient forms of renewable energy (yet to be invented) atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise exponentially.
That is a sobering though.
As to solutions like bioengineered trees, etc. From what I've seen the main issue (other than the potential for horrific unintended consequences) seems to be that when you look at the energy and resources it would require to develop, manufacture, deploy and manage such technologies you realize they would cause more harm than good.
I don't know the answers. What I think I know is that we need to stop lying because the narratives being pushed are false and dangerous (because they prevent our scientists from working on the real problem).
You need to remove 30 gigatons per year to eliminate all the CO2 humans generate. This is the "what if humans disappeared" baseline you mentioned.
If we eliminated 30 gigatons annually, yes the earth would recover at the rate you describe.
If we increase above 30 gigatons or reduce emissions, we shorten the time dramatically.
Growing trees or grasses, pyrolizing them into syngas and biochar, and sequestering the char could, in theory, supplement natural processes.
It's a process that can be run with an energy surplus, but it does require a lot of labor and land.
You'd need hundreds of thousands of square miles wholly dedicated to the effort.
DACCS facilities are expensive, but achievable. You'd need roughly three major industrial DACCS facilities for every coal fire plant worldwide, which would be incredibly challenging but not impossible.
I think where some of these ideas run afoul of reality is that they ignore the scale of energy and resources necessary to make them happen. And the probability distribution of each idea being realizable at scale.
It's a planetary scale problem, which means the numbers are very large no matter what anyone suggests.
I have no clue how much CO2 t-shirt manufacturing produces when you consider the entire supply chain and human footprint. If you add-up t-shirt manufacturing world wide, the number likely isn't trivial. And yet, even if we stop making t-shirts the need for clothing does not evaporate. I would be willing to bet that t-shirt manufacturing is now optimized almost as far as one could go and the providing an alternative form of clothing to billions of people around the world would be dirtier and consume more resources than just making t-shirts.
This is frustrating to me because I can't find a path. The minute one includes the pesky little reality of conservation of energy things become real.
I can't think of a single problem --regardless of the domain-- that can be fixed with less energy than that which created it in the first place.
And so, if that's true --and I think it is true without dispute-- this idea of being able to control atmospheric CO2 concentration at a planetary scale is in a range between hubris and lunacy.
Another way to put it is: We cannot fix it by subtraction.
This means we cannot fix it by simply going down to zero CO2 generation, no matter what the approach might entail. That, at best, gets us to 100K years for a 100ppm reduction in CO2.
I admit, this is a defeatist view. Yet, I believe this is reality and what is being pushed out there is fantasy. My fear is that, yes, we need to start doing a number of things to make human life better (the planet will do fine without us) but none of this work will begin until we frame it from a truthful baseline.
As I have said before, there are tons of reasons to cleanup our act globally --and we should-- but let's not lie to ourselves and pretend that this is to save the planet or reverse climate change. We can't. We won't.
And we won't because, even if we go to zero CO2 the planet itself will not cooperate. If you look at the charts for the 800,000 year ice core sample CO2 data one of the questions should be: How did CO2 increase, we were not around to make it happen?
The answer is, for the most part, massive continental scale fires.
So, we go CO2 neutral and cover the planet with trees.
And then fires, massive fires, fires we cannot control, contribute more CO2 to the atmosphere than we ever contributed before with our non-carbon-neutral technologies. Just look at what happened this year in California alone:
It is hubris to think we can control this at a planetary scale. We can't control it in a US state that recently surpassed the entire United Kingdom to become something like the fifth largest economy in the world...and we can't stop massive forest fires. From the article:
"The fires have already generated more than 91 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is about 25% more than the state’s annual emissions from fossil fuels."
I wish I had answers. All I am able to do is point out that we are lying to ourselves in hopes that, if enough people stop to think and understand this reality we will switch tracks and empower our scientific community to look at this from a different perspective. Maybe then someone with a unique perspective might discover a way to deal with it. We don't need to fix it, I don't believe we can, we need to understand how humanity can survive the cycle we are on.
This is frustrating to me because I can't find a path. The minute one includes the pesky little reality of conservation of energy things become real.
I can't think of a single problem -- regardless of the domain -- that can be fixed with less energy than that which created it in the first place.
Accelerated silicate weathering is one approach that takes less energy than turning carbon dioxide back into carbon and oxygen [1]. Natural silicate weathering has a low thermodynamic cost but is kinetically hindered. Accelerated silicate weathering only spends energy to accelerate the kinetics of natural silicate weathering and needs much less energy than combustion-in-reverse.
Iron ocean fertilization is also possibly another case where the required human energy input for drawdown could be much smaller than reversing combustion. I say "possibly" because it has not been tested with enough rigor and scale yet.
You can see from my comment history that I agree with you about how slowly natural processes alone can bring atmospheric CO2 levels back down to pre-industrial levels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24297363
> Accelerated silicate weathering
> Iron ocean fertilization
The real question is what it will cost in terms of energy and CO2 to mine, produce, prepare, deploy and manage such processes.
I have a very hard time accepting that we can use less energy to reverse something than the energy it took to create it. I have to admit it would take a lot of research on my part to fully break down these processes and quantify them from start to finish. I am just going to trust physics and say that I suspect perpetual motion machines are still impossible.
What truly scares me about ideas like iron ocean fertilization is the massive potential for causing a disaster that could damage sea life and ecosystems for hundreds of years. It's one thing to run an experiment on one beach or two. It's quite another to do this at a scale sufficient enough to affect things at planetary scale.
That's where, frankly, my brain short circuits a bit. I can't imagine some of these things done at a planetary scale without expending massive amounts of resources and producing equally massive amounts of pollution, CO2 and potential ecosystem damage.
Now, here's a twist. If the thought is that we can deploy any one of X approaches and deliver results a thousand times faster than the natural rate of change (100KY/100ppm) we have to be truly scared about what the unintended consequences might be. It's almost like that story about when they detonated the first nuclear weapon and thought there was some probability of the entire atmosphere igniting. I am not sure if the story is true, but it illustrates the point well enough.
I think we (and anyone who truly stops to look at the data and apply critical thinking) agree that this is a difficult problem that is being made far more complex by a narrative that is patently false (or distorted) all both extremes. This is a sad reality. Science should not work this way. Scientists should be free from political forces.
Accelerated silicate weathering is not a perpetual motion machine. Do you understand the difference between thermodynamics and kinetics, in the context of chemical reactions? (Not trying to condescend, just calibrating how much background to include in my next explanation.)
There is a big difference between "this approach is impossible according to physics" and "this approach might work but I'm worried about the side effects." It seems like for iron ocean fertilization you're asserting something more like the second statement than the first.
I'm interested in active atmospheric CO2 removal approaches because emissions cuts alone aren't enough to get back below 400 ppm CO2 on human time scales, as you have noted. Shying away from mitigation approaches because they could have unknown side effects at large scale is just committing to suffering the unmitigated brunt of AGW. Anything effective will have to be large scale.
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I was making a general comment about "solutions" being offered while completely ignoring the entire resource, energy and CO2 generation chain required to actually deploy the solution. A silly example of this is using huge "air filters" in every city...which some have actually proposed.
I need to go learn more about silicate weathering, don't know enough.
> thermodynamics and kinetics, in the context of chemical reactions
I regret not having paid more attention in university during chemistry class. Paid lots of attention during multiple years of physics (it was more interesting to me at the time).
Wait a minute...isn't chemistry just applied physics? :)
In general terms, I think we need to take this perspective on the problem:
1- We can't fix it on a human time scale (let's define that as a number between 100 and 1000 years)
2- We need to free-up our scientists (and fund them) to start thinking about and working on this implications and the solutions we will actually need
3- We need to start working on having to live with the reality of more intense weather events
4- We need to start working on mitigating effects for food supplies and other essentials
5- We need to be super careful about the potential for unintended consequences. I always think about what happened in places like Australia, New Zealand and others when we dared to think we could exercise control:
When compared with trying to produce a planetary scale effect, these ecosystems are but a rounding error. This is what worries me the most. We can't "fix" something on an island and we have the hubris to think we can actually "fix" the planet and not kill everyone on it as part of the process.
This, BTW, is why I tend to be a proponent of learning to live with it while cleaning-up our act to the extent possible without being so arrogant as to think we can do anything about it on a human time scale.
5- We violently remove politics from this. I do not mean this in terms of physical violence, I am using the term to mean "faster than fast". In other words: Go sit in the corner while the intelligent adults in the room have a conversation.
This isn't a simple problem and we need to be exceedingly careful not to be led by the nose by political and other forces into something that could destroy more life on this planet than we can possibly imagine.
The weathering of alkaline silicates naturally draws down atmospheric CO2. It's a slow acid-base neutralization reaction. CO2 dissolved in water forms carbonic acid, which reacts with alkaline rocks. Calcium silicate plus carbon dioxide turns into calcium carbonate plus silicon dioxide. The reaction is spontaneous under ambient conditions on the Earth's surface, meaning that it is thermodynamically favorable. It doesn't require any added energy beyond that naturally present in the environment. The reverse reaction that separates carbon dioxide from calcium carbonate again is thermodynamically disfavored. It requires a large energy input, as in the making of quicklime from limestone for cement production.
The geological carbon cycle based on silicate weathering is what will naturally neutralize human CO2 emissions on a time scale of hundreds of thousands of years.
The reason it takes hundreds of thousands of years is that the chemical kinetics -- rate -- of the natural reaction are very slow, being limited by the available reactant surface area. This is the same reason that e.g. a steel hammer left outside in a rainy region takes years to completely disintegrate to rust, while steel wool under the same conditions will disintegrate to rust in under a year. The thermodynamics are the same in both situations: iron oxidizes spontaneously. But the kinetics are much faster when the material has a large surface area exposed.
Most of the exposed weatherable silicates on Earth are in the form of huge chunks: boulders, mountains, and region-spanning plateaus. The idea behind accelerated silicate weathering is to crush huge chunks of silicates down to sand-size particles so that the surface area and reaction rate increase dramatically. If the crushed material is dumped into shallow ocean water near shores, wave action also provides additional "free" mechanical grinding to further accelerate the process. Using these silicates to neutralize excess soil acidity on agricultural land, where limestone would normally be used, is another way to further accelerate the chemical transformation.
The human energy input required for accelerated silicate weathering is still large in absolute terms, but much smaller than trying to turn CO2 back into carbon and oxygen. It might take 5% of a coal plant's electricity output to crush enough silicates to offset its CO2 emissions. (Though ideally you would run the process on renewables, since crushing can be scheduled flexibly and only annual throughput really matters.) The process reverses ocean acidification effects of CO2 as well as reversing warming effects from CO2 in the atmosphere. It doesn't require artificially concentrating CO2 out of the atmosphere.
I believe that accelerated silicate weathering can bring atmospheric CO2 back below 300 ppm in less than 1000 years, though still more than 100 years. That's assuming that anthropogenic emission rates decline over time, mind you.
It makes sense that the vast majority of the discussion around AGW mitigation is still about cutting emissions. While emissions are still growing, even ambitious plans like large scale accelerated silicate weathering can't offset them. Still, if you look at the IPCC reports and other scholarly literature, scientists are looking ahead beyond emissions cuts. The term they use is "negative emissions."
This is valuable insight to add to my knowledgebase.
One way I am thinking about what you are saying is the concept that a block of ice melts at a much lower rate than the same mass of ice in small cubes. The principle being that a greater exposed surface area produces a higher rate of heat transfer from warm air to ice, accelerating melting.
I am trying hard to frame this issue in the simplest possible terms so that it is easy to consume the information by those who might not have the scientific background. I don't think the effort to shift the conversation will succeed if it is framed by equations impenetrable by the average person.
What you highlight --that the limit rate of CO2 "consumption" is a function of available reactant surface area-- is a valuable tool with which to communicate the idea that this process is beyond human time scale. In other words, the natural rate of change is what it is due to physical realities of this planet. It cannot be a thousand times faster just by installing solar panels or banning IC vehicles. I can see a YouTube video using the simple example of ice melting as a way to explain this.
I'll do a bit more reading and shamefully steal some of your insight. Like I said, I regret not having paid more attention during Chemistry class in college. The good news is, it's never too late to learn.
The simplest analogy I might try to use is that table sugar crystals stirred into water dissolve in seconds while a piece of hard candy will take minutes to dissolve.
You're talking about undoing already released CO2.
The people discussing mitigation are talking about decreasing the release rate of new CO2, so the peak value or the value a hundred years from now can be smaller.
Your math is right but you're solving the wrong equation.
If humans all disappeared right now and CO2 stayed at 400ppm approximately forever, you're treating that as the "failure" case. Everyone else is treating 400ppm as a mild success, and their "failure" cases are far far higher levels like 1000ppm.
If your goal is a binary "not get punched in the face" then it's too late after you get hit a couple times. But it still makes a big difference whether they stop after a few punches, or keep going until you're in the hospital!
> There is nothing whatsoever we can do about it. Plain and simple.
[citation needed]
Humans could never fly. We could never destroy entire mountains. We could never drain an entire sea or make an island. We could never split an atom. We could never walk on the moon. We could never have an international network sending live video around the world at near light speed. We could never burn so much fuel that we heat up the earth in a measurable degree.
Yet people did all of these things.
Just because it seems impossible now doesn't mean it won't be possible someday.
> I challenge anyone to show how anything short of all of humanity leaving earth can produce a rate of change dramatically better than tens of thousands of years per 100 ppm
If a single person right here, right now, could do that in an economical fashion, they'd be a trillionaire before the decade is over. Nobody in 2001 was single handedly making pocket-sized GPSes that played games, streamed video, and had AI facial recognition in the sub-thousand dollar price range either, but that changed fast. Anybody who proposed using solar panels and windmills as a main power source for cities in 1910 would've been called a kook just as well. It's incremental change.
Go back and read my top post and go through the exercise I delineated. I provided everything you need to verify the claim. It is so simple a high school kid with a ruler could do it.
That's what's so frustrating about this. People like to say things like "well, just because cows don't fly today". Well, no, that's not a counter-argument. This is about physics. What's interesting is that it is about physics so simple the answer can be discovered with a printed chart, a ruler and a pencil.
If you bother to go through the exercise, the baseline you should discover is that, in rough terms, it takes 100K years for a 100ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2. 100KY/100ppm.
What does that mean?
That's the baseline for any subtractive approach to "saving the planet".
It's the baseline that says: We know it's 100KY/100ppm if we eliminate EVERYTHING.
It's simple logic to understand that if we engage in partial elimination the rate of change will not be better than 100KY/100ppm. It cannot.
If you erase the entire United States from the face of the planet, will the rate be better than 100KY/100ppm. No way. Impossible. And we just erased the largest economy on the planet.
Meanwhile, the governor of California is virtue-signaling by trying to eliminate IC cars in 15 years? How is that going to even make a dent?
He is far more likely to trigger an industrial shift that will result in far more CO2 being produced to retool and shift to manufacturing and support electric vehicles than IC vehicles ever produced.
Simple logic: Do anyone have any idea how many high power charging stations a fully electric-car CA would require?
Well, there are over 10,000 gas stations in CA. I am going to say we likely need at least twice that many high power charging stations. Why? Because you can fill your gas tank in 5~10 minutes and it takes 75 MINUTES to charge a Tesla at a Supercharger station. So, yeah, 2x might actually be a low number.
Any idea of the resources and industrial mobilization required to build 20K, 30K, 50K charging stations? Any idea how much CO2 this construction process would entail?
And then we have the small issue of powering them. Current Tesla Supercharger stations consume about 1.5 MWh PER DAY. This means that 20,000 stations would consume 30,000 MWh PER DAY. This assumes the same utilization level (about 50 sessions per day). Anyone visiting a gas station knows this number is laughable.
Let's put 30,000 MWh into some context: A typical nuclear power plant produces about 1,000 MW. This supercharger network would consume the output of THIRTY nuclear power plants. We would have to build one nuclear plants per year for thirty years to be ready for full scale electrification of transportation in CA. If we extend this to go nationwide we would likely end-up with, I don't know, a thousand nuclear power plants.
And don't even think about saying "solar". I don't even want to imagine the pollution China would generate if tasked with producing 30 GW in solar panels, not to mention the CO2 produced to ship and install that infrastructure...and it only covers part of the day...which means you now have to manufacture and install massive battery banks...etc.
Where is your CO2 footprint now?
This is all very simple logic and very simple math. All it requires is a bit of critical thinking applied to pencil and paper. Not that difficult. We are being sold barrels of lies right and left (I mean that politically).
This has been studied. It is likely the most promising idea. The problem is scale in terms of both plants and time. And, of course, energy.
Growing trees is precisely how the planet regulated CO2 levels over the 800,000 years of data we have. And we can see precisely how long it takes to come down by 100 ppm. The answer is 50,000 to 100,000 years.
And so the question becomes: How are we going to deliver results 1000x faster than that? On a human time scale rather than a geological scale.
We can't.
Because of the third dimension: Energy.
You can't get something for less energy than what it took to create the problem in the first place. The energy that created this problem is unimaginably large and it was deployed over a scale of millions to billions of years, consuming a staggering amount of material to store it in the form of petroleum.
We can't magically grow enough trees to "fix" it 1000x faster without energy and resources we likely do not have.
And then there's the question of what happens with so much vegetation. Which, again, is answered by the 800,000 year ice core record: Huge continental scale fires that load-up the atmosphere with CO2.
Here in California we have probably put so much CO2 in the atmosphere in the last several months that you would have to shutdown the economy for a year to compensate.
Nature is violently heartless. It does not care about us and our toys. Plant a trillion trees and see what happens when a major forest fire burns across thousands of miles without us having any ability to control it. Not a simple problem.
Do you have a study of this idea? At first glance it seems that the problems of fermentation, transportation, and resources needed to produce at that scale would be too large to overcome.
I do not. I made it up since I think it could work. Most studies assume the switchgrass will be burned in place of coal (which still helps).
Fermentation might not be a problem, I'm hoping the switchgrass would be harvested when very dry, to cut down on that. Grass for silage, (which ferments) is cut when green, but hay is dry and does not ferment.
Transportation and resources would be something, yes, but if you take a look at what we've built to make use of hydrocarbons, I think we could manage.
Your comment is puzzling. It is true that there is nothing we can realistically do about the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. Whoever lives on this planet will have to deal with it for thousands of years. But we can do something about the CO2 that has not yet been released. The question is not to go back to pre-industrial levels, but to prevent Earth to become an unlivable hell within the next 80 years.
Not quite right. Please read the paper I linked. We can't stop CO2 accumulation by doing things like switching to electric cars everywhere and switching the entire planet to renewable energy sources.
This is a shitty conclusion but I have yet to find anyone who, after having had an honest look at the data can explain how the conclusion is wrong.
BTW, even if we go back to pre-industrial levels it will take tens of thousands of years for levels to come down.
That's the point. If it takes 100,000 years to come down by 100 ppm without humanity on earth how can it possibly take less than that with 8 billion people on the planet?
Even worse, how can the reduction in CO2 happen a thousand times faster?
How can it happen that much faster without expending so much energy and utilizing so many resources that we are far more likely to kill everything on the planet than to "save it"?
EDIT:
With regards to what you say about not adding any more CO2 to the atmosphere. That's also a nonstarter. I understand how it might be easy to think in those terms by creating a simple mental model of reality. However, anyone who understands the industrial economy that makes it possible for nearly eight billion people to live on this planet understands that we cannot eliminate CO2 production to the extent necessary to have an impact.
Put simply, if we erased the United States from the planet on Monday, the output of countries like China and India would continue to grow CO2 at alarming rates.
Erase them from the planet. CO2 would continue to grow.
Erase all of humanity and in 100,000 years CO2 levels will have dropped by approximately 100 ppm.
First we need to start by not lying. I think that almost 100% of the crap out on this subject are lies. We have religious camps that deny it all and religious camps who think we can fix it with magical pixie dust.
We need to free-up our scientists --who are genuinely scared to speak-up-- so they can start to think about reality rather than this fantasy they need to push in order to receive grants and have a job.
Next, with real conversations happening, we need to also understand that there are very compelling reasons to clean-up our act. And these reasons have nothing whatsoever to do with saving the planet, because we can't.
A simple example of this is the ridiculous fleet of container ships (some 15,000 of them on the oceans) burning the most horrific fuel available: Bunker fuel. This stuff is horrible across all axis. And nobody talks about it.
While the governor of California scores virtue-signaling points by banning IC cars by 2035 (doubt it will happen) he does and says NOTHING about bunker fuel pollution that produces, by some accounts, more contaminants in a single day than the entire transportation system of the US (cars, trucks and plans) in one year.
This is why I think the dialogue based on lies is just crazy. We are ignoring issues at scale to focus on things that are politically valuable (and likely financially too) that will deliver questionable results, if that.
So, no, I don't have an answer. I am just yelling out loud "This is wrong". Just like I was years ago about Facebook's algorithms and today there's a documentary on Netflix highlighting precisely what I predicted 8 to ten years ago. I mean, people in my own family were saying I as crazy. Now they are calling me to tell me to watch this documentary on Netflix that is saying the things I was saying years ago. Interesting how the world works.
Specifically your point about bunker fuel, this is now out of date a bit. The International Maritime Organization rules about ultra-low sulfur fuels came into effect 1/1/2020.
Ironically though, this just affects sulfur, and so while a lot fewer people will die of air pollution as a result, the reduction in particulate matter (and complementary rise in greenhouse effect) is actually predicted to result in a marginal increase in global temperatures.
I agree with you that much of the environmental movement in the West feels inadequate or focusing in insignificant problems (plastic straws anyone?), but from my experience in the renewable industry, people are talking about this, just too few of them.
Thanks for the update and link. I am glad they are cleaning-up their act.
In my research I also discovered cargo ships are responsible for other forms of pollution nobody talks about. One of them is what's called "species pollution". As they fill and empty their ballast tanks they suck in, transport and expel wild life from one location to another. In this fashion invasive species damage ecosystems not prepared to receive them.
That said, CO2 from container ships represents somewhere in the order of 3% of total world-wide emissions. For reference, this is greater than the CO2 output of all of Germany.
As you said, too few people are having conversations about the realities of these matters. The issue has been politicized to a ridiculous level on both sides of the spectrum and we are wasting time focusing on nonsense.
Thanks for the detailed response. Proceed along with your premise as true and go further. Assume the macro-scale organizations' incentives are broken, and will/can not take material action until near-term (organizationally fatal?) effects are threatening their hold on power. Is your worst case scenario aligned with RCP 8.5 [1] or even worse?
I do not anticipate any foreseeable feasible scenario where the economic political structure will allow scientists to lay out the facts without fearing for their livelihood to meet their basic physiological and safety needs. So turning on its head the question of how to change the economic political landscape, assume their basic needs are met, what exactly do the scientists and engineers need to gather the data and analyze it, and to what end?
I'm a little confused about the thesis chain for that matter. I see at the beginning the "we cannot save the planet" thesis, but I'm not clear on what follows other than an ambiguous "clean-up our act" thesis. Clean-up what, specifically? By what metrics?
I'm okay with accepting the premise that we will experience the worst-case scenario. I've yet to be convinced we as individuals need to wait for broader and deeper consensus to study and make large-scale decisions as a civilizational whole before taking effective action ourselves, like move towards the poles away from the equator, secure essential localized supply chains, secure potable water production, identify and practice essential skills like various disciplines of tech tree repairs, etc. I can see a need for scientists like entomologists to help identify which insect populations will shift with the bands of increased temperatures, or identify more closed-cycle and efficient permaculture without external industrial-reliant inputs. But until there is perceptible change in leadership to grasp reality, I'm not clear on the benefits of advocating for top-down change, though I certainly welcome any insight on this that I'm missing.
For me personally, the thesis that follows from "we cannot save the planet" is "decentralize and decouple myself from a happy-path-bound grid", take what accidental happenstance cooperative opportunities arise, and hope for the best on the broader economic political scale.
Regarding the first part of your comment. I can't prove what I am going to say due to reasons that will be obvious, but this is the best I can do right now.
I believe RCP 8.5 will not happen.
Why?
One more time, I go back to the 800,000 year ice core CO2 data. The earth obviously has a regulating mechanism that brought CO2 down from the 300 ppm range to 200 ppm. The way it did it is brutal and simple: Weather.
It is my hypothesis that the planet is reacting to the increase in CO2 right now by activating that mechanism. I think I can say that we are seeing more and more violent storms, hurricanes, etc. Which, in turn, precipitates more CO2 than we could ever dream of capturing through artificial means.
And so, what I am saying is that we need to start thinking about living in a world with massive powerful storms, "finger of god" class storms. The climate change problem isn't a problem for the planet, it's a problem for humanity.
> I'm a little confused about the thesis chain for that matter. I see at the beginning the "we cannot save the planet" thesis, but I'm not clear on what follows other than an ambiguous "clean-up our act" thesis. Clean-up what, specifically? By what metrics?
Me too!
Frankly, I think this is precisely the reason we need to make a push for stopping the lies and allow our brilliant scientists all over the world to focus on real solutions to real problems.
If I may offer a second hypothesis, it is that, if we stop the lies and allow them to do this work the remarkable genius of our global scientific community will reframe the problem in the proper terms and, with time, deliver relevant solutions, not to "save the planet" but rather to save humanity.
What catastrophe? Did you miss the California fires 2 weeks ago? Improvement in farming also clearly came from improvement in agriculture, you seem to imply that the rise in climate temperature is the only explanation.
And no, there is no evidence that temperature has ever increased that fast.
And even if you keep denying the impact of climate change, think alone of the change in AIR QUALITY in a place with so many cars like Los Angeles. The increase in air quality alone in big urban centers is worth it on its own. It's already been improved quite a bit in recent years (at least in the west) and this can only get better. I live next to a big road here in my city and I just can't wait to have less emission vehicles on the road.
Tell that to the people facing 5-digit battery replacement bills at mileages that are far short of what a good ICE car or truck can deliver. (I know several people here in Texas with old pickups that have 300-400K miles on them. One has only changed the oil and replaced accessories like alternators and pumps.)
They salt the roads where I am and the winters tend to bounce between frigid and just cold - so there's often consistent freeze/thaw cycles from December to March. The amount of wear that puts on exhausts and piston rings would blow your mind.
It's also conducive to EVs - my Leaf is pushing 70k and hasn't lost more than 2% of battery capacity (and possibly less - it's capacity loss is a rounding error) in the time that I've had it. It's active cooling is just how blooming cold it is here for a lot of the year.
The other issue is that here diesels are much more popular than petrol/gasoline. And diesels are just an unreliable nightmare of sunk costs. The amount that can and does fail on a modern diesel and costs four figures to get fixed is scandalous (and that's not even counting DPFs and flywheels).
The most that's ever gone wrong with this car is a bulb going out. I fully expect to get 100k out of the car while I have it, and I'd be astonished if it doesn't do 200k or more in it's lifespan.
> a bad electric car is outright better than almost any ICE car.
You are right, and I want to add more perspective that in your proposal there are now 2 cars on the road. Your electric and your used ICE car. The better situation is to drive your ICE car to its end, and only then replace it.
Our over consumption is a part of the problem as well.
This doesn't really make sense... the person who bought the used car wasn't just going to not drive if it weren't for sale, they'd just buy a different one. Now, there is one ICE car and one electric car on the road instead of two ICE cars.
If half of the world immediately upgraded to electric cars, sure there would be a temporary surplus of vehicles, but it would only last until the old ones broke down.
> If half of the world immediately upgraded to electric cars, sure there would be a temporary surplus of vehicles, but it would only last until the old ones broke down.
Exactly. There'd be a temporary surplus of (newer, better-condition) ICE vehicles. And people who are otherwise faced with a $1500 bill to repair their old one "kinda needs repairs, burns some oil but a quart a week isnt too bad", will instead buy a more efficient ICE. Most new BEV will get an old shitty ICE off the road.
It takes someone young to be this ignorant. The emissions of modern car engines are truly negligible. And air quality used to be really horrible.
Modern electronic engine controls have slashed emissions so effectively that the exhaust of a modern car running there is actually be cleaner than the ambient air of that time - Yes, a modern car running in LA in that era would actually be cleaning the air!
If you want to clean up the air, go after all those Chinese container ships burning bunker oil that is literally one step up from tar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_fuel_oil
Fixing these filthy ships would make orders of magnitude more difference than eliminating all fossil-fueled cars from the road.
You’ve missed the point completely, and very little of what you’ve said is relevant to the OPs statement.
Famines didn’t suddenly stop because of global warming.
Quality of life and length of life have increased depending on which metrics you use, but in any case wealth inequality has never been greater, and length of life has increased due to medical technology, not increased atmospheric carbon.
What constitutes a “marginal”difference in temperature? Keeping the rise below 1.5c is still far too much and too much to ask (apparently).
Famines drastically reduced because of modern agriculture, which is dependent on fossil fuels at all stages of food production.
Quality and length of life increased, again, primarily because of modern agriculture, with vaccination and obstetrics as a second and third factor.
Wealth inequality is up because of the unimaginably vast amount of wealth available, which has disproportionately accumulated at the very top. Poverty, as measured in simple material terms, has never been lower, except in the absolute sense that, again due to modern agriculture, we're able to sustain such a vastly greater population.
How to solve the climate crisis, without a massive dieoff and collapse to a pre-industrial standard of living, must always be the question. Remember that it's always an option, and that cure would be worse than the disease.
I didn't say modern agriculture requires fossil fuels, I said modern agriculture is dependent upon fossil fuels.
We can imagine a world with electric tractors, made with steel coked with biocarbon in solar-thermal furnaces, where the Haber process is run with hydrogen derived from clean electrolysis. But we don't inhabit that world at the moment.
That's a distinction that makes no difference. Agriculture uses only about 1% of our energy, so if we can move industrial society off fossil fuels, we can easily move farming off fossil fuels. Alluding to the specter of famine is just scaremongering.
That we have made progress 'over here' doesn't discount the risk 'over there'.
Also, the advantages of 'farming tech' may not be of the same scale as 'climate change'.
Specifically 'forest fires' are a pop culture issue, we're not ever going to be threatened by them.
Regular temperature increases will likely yield 'systematic problems' that go far, far beyond 'possibly more fires' but the issues is different because of the 'risk profile' and the 'existential' nature of climate change. It's not like 'a chemical in some food products' we can get rid of. It's an issue that affects 'everything' with potential catastrophic outcomes at the riskier end of the scale.
All of that said I would much more prefer 'Mr. Face' Governor to be investing more heavily in solutions rather than just happy legislation.
Newsom+California bureaucracy is an inefficient, bloated mess, Cali could save itself 2x more quickly if they did their jobs well.
It's not clear what "zero-emissions" should mean, but in the context of California environmental regulations it refers specifically to vehicles that don't emit any pollutants from their onboard power source, e.g. electric or fuel-cell cars.
FWIW, I think no one is proposing to apply a requirement of an end item decarbonization to the entire logistics chain behind a product. Most proposals want to apply regulation to many individual links up and down the chain directly.
I downvoted because it is very clear and if you want other people to answer a question you have to put in some work. I don't care to see trivial questions so I downvoted and banned that guy from my view.
Thank you. We need to think about these things because if we are just satisfied with "no emissions from the tailpipe" we are doomed. Buying a Tesla is not buying an fossil fuel free product. Teslas require fossil fuels to make and the more Teslas we buy, the more fossil fuels we emit.
Wrong. Freezing temperatures are by far the most challenging environments for plants to deal with and only a limited set of species are well adapted for cold climates. Meanwhile warm climates mean year round growing seasons and the widest range of species that thrive, this is why you can grow almost anything in tropical zones and get much more productivity out of that growth.
Hardiness zones are really useful for human cultivated plants. Many seeds require a certain amount of time below a low temperature to germinate and a hundred other variables. You seem to also be assuming many biomes in the northern hemisphere turns into a rainforest rather than a desert from increasing temperatures.
The best warmth for a given species of plant is usually the one its adapted to. At the very least warmer temperatures can lead to populations of harmful insects to go out of control. Like bark eating beetles
If that were generally true then tropical zones would be overridden with bark eating beetles. Vastly more biodiversity occurs in tropical zones than in Arctic and Temperate zones.
Apparently you dont understand how evolution works. Trees in colder climates dont have a resistance to certain pests because freezing weather keeps them in check. Changing the climate quickly allows these pests to overrun the tree populations. This isn't an issue in warmer climates because life evolved differently there.
This move is not radical. Government lags private sector. Private sector knows it can go zero-emission and have given governmnet the green light. California just likes to look like its ahead of the curve but its not.
It's literally announced 15 years in advance. Plenty of time for the public to elect politicians who will roll it back (indeed, the cynic in me assumes that is the whole reason it was able to be announced).
Over the last few years, a number of mostly European countries have passed regulations to ban new petrol/diesel cars by 2030-2040, with some cities to ban then as early as 2025. So from the industry's point of view, this is more of the same, and not unexpected. It would arguably be weird if the markets moved much; this sort of thing should be priced in.
> Over the last few years, a number of mostly European countries have passed regulations to ban new petrol/diesel cars by 2030-2040
They haven't, EU countries cannot do that since it is against EU law. Instead there have been several proposals for phasing out fossil fuel cars that are still discussed, but nothing is decided. That is how politics and regulations are usually done.
Debates on major topics during a campaign aren't really known for their scientific quality and attention to nuance, so I'm not really sure we should be upset if anyone's passed up on the opportunity to debate acceptable fuel emissions during campaigns. Between healthcare, immigration, criminal justice reform, etc. there isn't exactly a shortage of topics to debate and pick a side on during a campaign. And unlike (perhaps) the market, it's not like mother nature gives points for democracy either.
In Australia, the debate was so popular that it continued after a carbon tax was successfully implemented, which resulted in the tax being repealed in 2014 and not much action on climate change since then. Maybe “debate” is not the right word for what happened, but engaging the public on climate policy seems to have had perverse effects in Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Australia
Sounds like you would get better results if you created a policy people are happy with instead of just doing something that will get reversed and create more future opposition against green solutions.
It’s a good time right now because the fires in California have put a spotlight on environmental issues.
Also you have to adapt to changing conditions and then take actions accordingly. This is true generally, and possibly even more so for politicians and governments.
> It’s a good time right now because the fires in California have put a spotlight on environmental issues.
Some people are blaming the wildfires on global warming, but many (on the left and the right) are saying forest maintenance has been the primary cause. [1]
Also, the recent rolling blackouts have shown the risk of relying too much on solar and wind power. I'm not sure that the specific timing makes too much sense, unless the goal is to have this largely overshadowed by the presidential election and recent passing of Justice Ginsburg.
I’m a bit saddened people didn’t react more positively to the Tesla battery day event.
I’m not talking about stock speculators (gamblers gonna gamble, whatever) but just generally I thought it was very encouraging that Tesla’s main goal right now is to dramatically drive down the cost of energy storage while driving up the density and production capacity.
Is it enough? Not on their own, but if others can adopt their methods to produce more batteries then it’s effectively printing money for those companies for the next thirty years (as even the laggards are forced to move to zero emissions across their grids).
It would be nice if this creates the kind of fierce competition E.M. set out to do with Tesla originally. We need more energy storage than we have now by several orders of magnitude.
what makes you think the blackouts have to do with the power generation type? my understanding was that the blackouts have to do with danger to/from power distribution infrastructure
The cause that was announced was that there was not enough power available. These weren't PSPS (public safety power shutoffs), which are driven by fire-related concerns around infrastructure.
CA regularly amends its constitution via voter initiatives, so I'd say we (Californians) actually do live in a fairly direct democracy.
Also, I'm not sure anyone has ever characterized representative democracy as: politicians campaign on certain issues, and then after getting elected — and with no material intervening factors — they enact sweeping regulations that they never even hinted at during their campaign (or decades-long prior political life).
> we (Californians) actually do live in a fairly direct democracy
California has direct democratic elements. It is not a direct democracy.
There is a lot of writing and research on why direct democracies are probably not a good idea for all questions, from antiquity to the modern era. One field that dies with proximity to democracy is law, e.g. the ancient Athenian system of trial by popular assembly. Another is the management of commons, e.g. fisheries, forestry and, I would argue, our atmosphere.
Note that such delegation doesn't mean usurpation. It just means the elected leaders negatively consent to, and constrain, rule making. This is the basis of the agency-driven civil service model, which first–to my knowledge–flourished in China before making it West by way of the Middle East.
Why do you believe management of the commons would fail under direct democracies? That seems like an arbitrary claim but maybe I don't understand the reasoning. I feel like any flaw that is claimed about direct democracy can be claimed about high-turnout representative democracy as well (and therefore broadly about democracy in general). After all, we elect representatives effectively on popularity contexts, echo chambers squeezing out marginal leads, and poor/manipulable information flows.
A related question: wouldn't a representative democracy always perform more poorly than a (benevolent) technocracy?
Pretty sure the original concept of representative democracy didn't involve campaigning on issues at all, it was more like "the people decide who they want to represent them by picking the wisest and most honorable citizens, and then the representatives decide what to do about the issues."
Hiding your true intentions and then showing your 15 year plan after you get elected is not in the spirit of representative democracies. Here in Sweden we discuss these things before elections and in general have more climate measures than California, so I don't see why a politician would need to be this heavy handed.
> In terms of loss of life and damage to property, the data shows the worst fires have all been in the past 10 years or so - except for one fire in 1991 in Alameda County.
> And this year, there have also been unusually strong winds combined with periods of drought across parts of the western US. Six of the largest fires recorded in California have all happened this year.
> Prof Doerr says a combination of drier, hotter and windy conditions is the key factor in these recent fires.
> He adds that even in areas where there have been attempts to reduce flammable material in forests, it's not clear how much difference this would have made.
> "The bottom line remains that the extreme meteorological conditions are the main drivers for these extreme fires."
But climate change is not the main driver of recent wildfires, and it at most one contributing factor among many. If old growth trees remained, if forests were cleared of dead trees, if stands were thinned, if logging companies were allowed to harvest in a timely/economical fashion, or if controlled burns were used with the frequency they used to be, most of these fires would not happen. If there are fewer fires, the smaller number of bad fires that do still happen are much easier to put out quickly, because we would not have to spread fire fighting resources too thinly.
Here's a survey of articles covering the West coast fires (CA, OR, WA) that make this clear:
- https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/899422710/to-manage-wildfire-... mentions that before 1800, several million acres were burned every year through indigenous burning and also lightning-caused fires. In 2019, California committed to burning just half a million acres a year, but is far from reaching even that modest goal.
- https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/911592361/are-recent-wildfire... mentions that California needs to address 20M acres every year (through thinning or burning). In 2019, $160M was spent putting out wildfires in CA, but the economic damage was $80B - and yet preventative measures are not being taken.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/19/us/california-today-100-m... notes that California's focus on fire suppression has led to mass quantities of dead trees resulting from a lack of smaller fires and increased infestation (due to increased forest density enabling transmission of pests/disease)
- Both the WA state Department of Natural Resources (https://www.dnr.wa.gov/StrategicFireProtection) and WA timber industry (http://www.wfpa.org/sustainable-forestry/reduce-wildfire-ris...) have been increased investment/assistance/regulatory support in thinning forests and conducting prescribed burns. Despite these calls being made for over a decade, despite ever increasing state budgets, and despite a consistent single-party rule, the governor and legislature have done little to respond to those calls for help.
The reality is that all three West Coast governors - Newsom (CA), Brown (OR), and Inslee (WA) - are operating in states that have left-leaning legislatures, judiciaries, and executive leadership. The failure to prevent wildfires or manage them effectively is entirely their fault. It's much more convenient however, to blame an externality like climate change, than to be honest about their own failures. And at the same time, the political theater of blaming wildfires on climate change allows them to forward their political/ideological agendas through far-reaching proposals like Green New Deal, which are much broader than just environmental issues.
It does seem to me that blaming the whole situation on climate change is an exaggeration. However, it is a politically savvy move from Newsom et al. as west coast states are solid blue. They are pandering to their audience. It also happens on the right with different issues.
I agree, this is something politicians on all sides try to do, and I am not trying to single out the left for it more generally. I am just especially frustrated in this instance, because this issue directly affects me, my friends, and family. Our governor in Washington state, Jay Inslee, blamed climate change for wildfires in a round of press conferences back in the 2018 season as well, and he's doing the same thing now. His own Department of Natural Resources has been consistently asking for more investment in prevention before 2018, between 2018 and 2020, and still today in 2020. And yet there has been little to no movement from Inslee on the matter, so I feel he is lying to us. However, due to how polarized politics are these days, most constituents are giving Inslee a pass and blindly accepting his claims without examining the facts or surveying a diverse set of expert opinions.
Forest management is helpful, but the task is unsurmountingly vast and yet compared to climate change, it’s dwarfed. But we have to tackle the big one because it has so many other effects that are catastrophic. Forest management is basically lost in the noise with climate change.
I think that environmentalists want prescribed burns, right-wingers want to just cut all the forests down, and the compromise position is to do neither and then call the fires an act of God.
None of your assertions are backed by logic. You imply that politicians can only do things that they promise on the trail, without responding to things real time. This would be disastrous. You imply that without "debate" it is likely to be reverted, which has no basis in theory or fact.
A 15 year plan isn't urgent and requires very strong support in order to survive when the next leader gets elected. Doing this without a public discussion doesn't make sense in any way.
Also we have known about climate change for decades, there has been no huge revelations about it the past year, there was no reason this couldn't have been a part of his campaign.
I like the idea, but there's a lot of questions that need to be answered.
The term "zero-emissions" is borderline BS when the energy is coming from a source that emits pollution way off in the distance. If I remember correctly, California has been closing more nuclear power plants than it has been opening, so it while it's nice that our cars won't be putting out smog someday, we aren't going to take climate change seriously unless we move to nuclear.
To extend off that question, I've yet to hear an explanation as to how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time. During the summer California struggles to keep the lights on, so I'm wondering whether we will be investing in electrical infrastructure this time. Nuclear can help solve that. Same with natural gas to electricity conversion(like what Bloom Energy does).
> California has been closing more nuclear power plants than it has been opening,
California has brought far more solar/ wind power online over the past 20 years than they've retired nuclear power plants. They are also slowly phasing out non-renewable power. Though the pace isn't as fast as many would like, it's happening.
> To extend off that question, I've yet to hear an explanation as to how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time.
For the typical 10,000-20,000 mile/ year driver, an electric car uses less power than it takes to air condition a California home. If you have even a small solar install—which makes tons of sense in California—the load on the grid is near zero.
> an electric car uses less power than it takes to air condition a California home.
The recent blackouts demonstrate that California doesn't have enough dispatchable power to support the current air conditioning footprint. We need to add more EVs and more air conditioning on top of that.
Replacing coal/ natural gas burning with solar is the priority by a big margin.
Unless there are safety issues, it makes sense to maintain nuclear plants at least until after any natural gas/ carbon emitting plants are shuttered.
At that point, it's cost/benefit & safety. At the current rate, it sounds like the cost of solar plus storage is likely to be less than nuclear by then regardless so this whole argument will be pointless.
The tiny nuke plants look pretty cool to me though!
Also keep in mind that California now requires solar panels on all new home construction. The supply of renewable power in the state is expanding rapidly - our sources for power are not static.
Funny hitch - they don't require batteries. When the grid goes down you're left without power because your solar system isn't storing locally. Of course, you can add your own battery array, but many people didn't/haven't and have suffered through these blackouts like everyone else connected to the grid.
If the mandate in the article goes through, most people will have a battery capable of powering their home for several days -- it'll just happen to be on wheels.
With the use of efficient lighting, running the AC or electric heat is probably the biggest energy usage for a house. Having solar panels supplying power during the day can help reduce the load on the grid from everyone running their AC. It's more of a benefit to the grid and everyone else to have panels without a battery than it is to your own energy needs.
One can run the numbers. Average car drives 12500 miles a year. Is ~35 miles a day. EV's get 3-4 miles a kwh. So what? consume ~12 kwh/day.
That's not much. $2 worth of electricity. And $3-4,000 worth of solar panels will produce that much a day. Compare that to the car that costs ten times as much.
Most EVs allow you to schedule charging so your car charges during off-peak hours, usually after midnight. While apparently California has shifted so the ideal time to charge is 10am until 2pm or something like that, during the early morning isn't bad either. Shifting to more solar power and more EVs will likely complicate things.
I don't want to talk about what my electric bill was like when I lived in California, and the number of 100+ degree days has gotten worse since we moved out.
Is this a useful metric in California? In the states where I have lived, the total installed system cost has always been the driver, and the panels typically are only one component of many there.
$3-$4k sounds reasonable until you realize that you need to spend $25k on top of that to be able to use your $4k of panels.
I failed in that I didn't state my point. The point is the cost of an electric car is say $40,000 and the marginal costs to provide the power for it is $4,000. So the ratio is 10 to 1. One could argue and say it's 5 to 1 and I won't die on that hill.
Good argument that supplying electricity doesn't change the economics much.
It's definitely true that for solar the total system cost is higher, often a lot higher now than the cost of panels. On the other hand the marginal cost of electricity for a power company is lower than residential panels. So I would use that as the cost basis.
Also remember gasoline has a huge infrastructure behind it.
> $3-$4k sounds reasonable until you realize that you need to spend $25k on top of that to be able to use your $4k of panels.
I doubt it. I installed a ~2.5kW system in CA 4 years ago, and all in it was like $6500 after the tax credits. Panel prices have dropped 16% since then, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if now the same system were around $4k including installation after tax credits.
I haven't looked into stats, but I wouldn't be surprised if most people in California aren't able to charge at home. It would be neat to see incentives for adding charging infrastructure to apartment and other dense living situations
Home charging is the most convenient form of charging, and should be encouraged, but people tend to be home when it's dark and (excluding the pandemic) away when it's sunny, so this doesn't align well with solar generation.
The panels can help reduce total grid usage during the day to help supply power to businesses where people are during the day. A home AC shouldn't be running much during the day if no one is home so that helps with reducing the load. Once it gets dark, the load shifts back to homes where people are charging their cars and running the AC more heavily. I imagine the heaviest load times would be in the evening when solar panels aren't providing much power, the AC is starting to run to cool the house down, and people are starting to plug in their cars. Large power storage systems should be in place to help smooth out these increases in demand.
> The panels can help reduce total grid usage during the day to help supply power to businesses where people are during the day.
Daytime load is basically not a problem in California or elsewhere in the US. In fact, load minus solar is already lower at noon than at midnight. [0] This is referred to as the "duck curve".
As such, load shifting should be the opposite of what you suggest - we should be doing things like cooling houses to 60 degrees during the day so that the AC doesn't have to be run in the evening, encouraging people to charge cars during the day and other things like that.
> we should be doing things like cooling houses to 60 degrees during the day so that the AC doesn't have to be run in the evening
I'm dubious that this is a good idea. Cooling your house to 60 degrees on a hot day burns a huge amount of power needlessly. The amount of energy loss in a typical house is so big, this is a massive waste. Your assumption seems to be that you can bank power, using air temperature to try and story energy when it's inside a big leaky box is futile.
Keeping the indoor temp at 78 all day and cooling it to 72 around an hour before you get home is going to be far more efficient. If you want to burn power during the day, run your dishwasher and run a timed dryer load. If you want to bank it, buy a battery.
While I know "Zero Emissions" doesn't mean EV but assuming most people end up with one and chargers are ubiquitous (and free) you could use the EVs as grid storage.
There are plenty of people who live in apartments where plugging into the grid at work makes a lot of sense.
And on your second point, having a large number of electric vehicles may actually help smooth out load -- it's easier to temporarily throttle charging during peak load than it is to get everyone to turn off their air conditioning. Public charging stations, like Chargepoint, already do this.
You can even imagine a future where you could tell your car to discharge its battery to power your home during peak demand and then charge back up overnight when power is cheap and plentiful.
Which is 10 years farther out than this car mandate.
I just wish people would read about France, which despite their current stupidity, rolled out 34 reactors in something like 10 years back in the 1970's. Thereby not only going energy independent, but nearly 0 emissions. Now during the past decade or so, not only are they one of the cleanest (if not the cleanest) countries in the world, they have some of the cheapest electricity in Europe, and are also the largest net exporter.
So, if anyone in politics actually had a brain about this, they would drive a similar mandate through with a < 10 year time-frame, so that rather than powering all those batteries with natural gas, they would be carbon free.
But, no, in the USA that wont happen until we get to the point that all the 1d10t politicians (and their supporters) start starving due to food production problems or massive wars.
And the average age of a car on the road is 11.9 years, so all new cars are zero emission by 2035 and nearly half of the cars on the road are zero emission by 2045 when energy generation is 100% clean.
This sounds like exactly the right plan, get one of the biggest and most distributed users of dirty sources to electric, then worry about converting the highly concentrated (relative to cars) power producers to go to 100% clean energy.
I'm not sure how your measuring "dirty" but in many places, its the electric cars which are "dirty". Modern gas/petrol car's exhaust is only really adding CO2+H2O to the intake air. When you look at things like
(which is slightly dated, but only a small portion of the coal has been replaced with NG, and the wind+solar is negligible) its not really a pretty picture.
So, yes, once all the power sources are C02 free, or at least lower than traditional petol, its a net win, but its a mistake to think that moving to electric cars by itself is anykind of win. Particularly, in the current climate where your just moving to NG for the majority of the additional load despite the claims of wind/etc.
Put another way, for every KW of wind/solar being installed your also getting a KW of NG. So best case if you live in a nuke/hydro/coal free area, your shifting to ~30% NG. Which isn't any way to solve the climate problem, its a feel good measure for ignorant people.
Good thing the last generation of nuclear plants is only ten years behind schedule (was supposed to be done in 5 years, now estimate is 15) and 5x over budget
All nuclear problems tend to be political, not practical. Makes sense when every other energy source is afraid of losing to what would be the sole power source (besides some scattered wind farms, dams, and solar panels where practical) if properly done.
> France, which despite their current stupidity, rolled out 34 reactors in something like 10 years back in the 1970's
And those will (or already have) passed their design life. At some point those will need to be shut down too. Will you then change your stance and say they're stupid then? Would you rather these nuclear power plants continue to run at unsafe capacities and risk failures just to make you happy?
BTW, this human component of "just keep them running at all costs" is the main reason many are against nuclear, not because they think a well-running plant is dangerous.
Électricité de France (EDF) – the country's main electricity generation and distribution company – manages the country's nuclear power plants. EDF is substantially owned by the French government, with around 85% of EDF shares in government hands. 78.9% of Areva shares are owned by the French public sector company CEA and are therefore in public ownership. EDF remains heavily in debt. Its profitability suffered during the recession which began in 2008. It made €3.9 billion in 2009, which fell to €1.02 billion in 2010, with provisions set aside amounting to €2.9 billion. The Nuclear industry has been accused of significant cost overruns and failing to cover the total costs of operation, including waste management and decommissioning.
> I've yet to hear an explanation as to how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time
Really well actually, done correctly it will actually make power production cheaper per watt for everyone.
Since cars spend the vast majority of their time idle they can charge whenever. Whenever in this case being the middle of the night when the lack of workers causes power usage to bottom out.
The power companies would prefer a flat usage line and having cars that can intelligently start charging when ideal can totally help with that.
Additionally I would point out that while zero-emissions is a bit disingenuous electric cars are the only real path forward to zero-emissions. The only other technology is hydrogen which also requires electricity to produce.
I run numbers and then years later only remember the rough result. But for a gasoline powered car 10-20% of the CO2 emissions are from manufacturing. So EV's help reduce CO2 emissions a lot. EV's emissions during manufacture are currently a bit higher than gasoline powered cars but not by much.
That said cars and the infrastructure needed to support them requires enormous amounts of resources, EV's don't change that much. But what what are you going to do?
On the other hand for California zero emission also means no NOx, SOX and PM2.5 tail pipe emissions in cities where most people live. Granted EV's produce some PM2.5 from tires and brakes. But that's a percentage of tail pipe emissions.
> The only other technology is hydrogen which also requires electricity to produce.
I am happy to be corrected, but I believe the only industrial scale production of hydrogen is splitting hydrocarbons. Using electrolysis is hugely inefficient.
If this is true, a lot of talk of hydrogen is submarine marketing for the fossil fuel industry.
> Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are supposedly meant to be powered by electrolysis
Yes, that's what people imagine is happening when talking hydrogen powdered cars. But I believe that electrolysis is so inefficient that it's not a realistic option for producing hydrogen on an industrial scale. This leaves us with breaking down hydrocarbons, hardly a "green" option.
To address centralized polluting, the advantage is that it's refactored out of millions of cars into one grid. As they adjust the sources in the future, all the cars keep going. Also, centralizing generation allows for easier observation.
One thing you didn't mention is efficiency. Electrics are around 60% and gas around 20%. Once you have some power at the car, you make better much use of it.
>> During the summer California struggles to keep the lights on...
That was my first thought as well. Gotta love rolling blackouts. But EV charging will likely take place at night when air conditioners are pulling less power so maybe it will smooth things out? They're still gonna have to support the peak load and do so more often.
> how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time
Glad you asked.
The typical driver drives 12k to 15k miles per year. That's about 33 to 41 miles per day, or about the range of a 1st Gen Chevy Volt.
The thing is, you can recharge a Volt overnight from a normal household outlet (the kind you already have in your living room, kitchen, or garage). In other words, it uses only about as much power (~1.5 kW) as your toaster, coffee maker, hair dryer, or vacuum cleaner. It is dramatically less power than a central AC unit (around 4 to 6 kW).
So, no, this is not going to cause a massive problem for the grid.
> During the summer California struggles to keep the lights on, so I'm wondering whether we will be investing in electrical infrastructure this time.
This is more of a PG&E problem than a California problem. LA and Santa Clara both have municipally-owned electrical utilities (including generation and transmission) that don't have a problem keeping the lights on.
There are questions that still need to be answered. I will respond to your comments as there are some inaccuracies and understanding the problems and solutions in greater detail can lead to better dialogue.
1. Zero-emissions - you are arguing semantics - if you are an EV and are sourcing your energy in CA your carbon emissions are very low.
2. CA is closing Nuclear plants and are doing alright. The loss in baseload power is getting replaced by inventive policies DR policies, energy storage, solar and some natural gas. No, the answer isn't just more Nuclear - can Nuclear be part of the solution? Maybe - Nuclear is really expensive and has some siting and health challenges.
3. The grid will tolerate a change in the overall load profile (i.e. more EVs) by dispatching new programs, new price signals and new assets that are variable.
4. California doesn't struggle to keep the lights on in the summer - it had rolling blackouts that have yet to be determined the first time in 19 years this year (19 years ago was due to illicit energy trading i.e. Enron trading). It does do rolling blackouts for risks to wild fires.
I can't find the link right now, but I read a paper recently that electric cars are about twice as efficient as gas cars, so even if we only switched to electric cars, we'd massively reduce our energy consumption.
we aren't going to take climate change seriously unless we move to nuclear.
A nuclear plant is still a steam engine, so it would require significant amounts of water to cool, which aren't that easy to come by in a land where droughts happen so often.
Also there's so much sun there and solar panels are so cheap nowadays that waiting 7-odd years for a plant to start producing power doesn't look like a viable option.
China is leading the world in new nuclear power deployment, but still in terms of delivered GWh wind overtook nuclear there in 2012 and the gap is widening. Solar will cross that point in a few years.
If even a totalitarian state can't deploy nuclear at a pace competitive with alternatives, how is a place like California supposed to?
Many nuclear power plants suck in water from the ocean. In fact, 3 of the 4 in California are on the coast. You can see one of them on the drive between LA and San Diego.
In California we have droughts. We also have really poor water management. Lack of storage and dams. Then there's the delta smelt issue. They basically created a dustbowl in many locations because of their very poor resource management, which isn't contained to water. Hello rolling blackouts.
I like it conceptually, but isn't there missing technology still? Batteries have improved mildly, but energy to weight ratio (and energy to cost) remain problematic.
If we witnessed a jump in battery technology, we may not even need to wait for 2035 for the market to do this for us. But in the meantime we're still seeing electric cars that cost at minimum 10K more than their gas counterparts (with the low cost of oil/gas right now only making that look worse).
I'd love to own a Tesla Model 3 for example, but realistically it is a $37K car that competes with $25K gas vehicles or $27K Hybrids. When is THAT going to change? When is electric going to be affordable for the average person?
The $7.5K federal tax incentives also disappeared (and we never had state incentives here).
> When is electric going to be affordable for the average person?
The average price of a car bought in May of 2019 was $36,718. A Model 3 is $37,990. Given the offsets in maintenance and gas, I'd say the answer to that question is "now".
Just because you can spend the average amount, it doesn't you have to spend the average amount. A car can cost well under even the base model Model 3 and have 90% of the same functionality (the price disparity gets even larger if you opt into Autopilot); albeit it won't be the status symbol that is a Tesla.
From what I know, this is due to trucks and SUVs - which there are not comparable alternatives in the electric world. (A Model X is way too expensive and there is no electric truck available now or anytime soon in mass quantity)
So that turns the question into "When is used electric going to be affordable for the average person?" My gut says the answer to that is going to be ~5 years after new electric vehicles are more prevalent. But if electrics continue to retain their value the way the have been it might be a little longer, which is obviously a good thing; a car that last longer has even lower impacts.
You can't expect new cars to trickle down to the used market that quickly.
Used sales are about 2x new car sales [1] and the average used car is probably north of $20,000 [extrapolated from 2]. The best estimate I see of Teslas retaining value is 90% over 3 years [3]. If that holds then it would take 15 years (probably much closer to 10 given inflation, other cars coming up, and the average of other cars going up) for these to hit the used market at an average price point.
Also, the average person doesn't live in California, where the median family income was almost $10,000 higher than the country as a whole [4 and 5].
Part of the reasoning for this move is to create an incentive for battery researchers and manufacturers to serve the massive California auto market by or before 2035.
Meh, the maintenance costs on the PGE website are highly overrated. It also assumes your insurance costs for a Tesla are going to be the same, and they aren't. You also don't get a Tesla for 27000 net of incentives, unless you make so little money that it doesn't make sense.
That $27K is saying that you can buy it for $37K and sell it for $10K 5 years later. That's super conservative, you should be able to get at least 40%.
You can click on the "include vehicle resale" box to remove the resale factor.
The fact that PG&E is clearly advocating for electric cars should give everyone pause.
Gasoline cars can be filled by gas from any company, so there's actual competition. But an electric car mandate will expand PG&E's monopoly by billions of dollars per year. Imagine how poorly they will behave when they have a lock on both electricity and transportation.
PG&E and the CPUC need significant attention to come to serve the people. CA pays some of the highest rates in the nation but gets some of the shoddiest infrastructure in return. Check out slide 28 in [1] and read the entirety of [0].
2035 is still a long way away - by this time the German manufacturers will have gone to battle stations on EVs. VW group's R&D budget is roughly comparable with Tesla's revenue, they may need a kick up the arse to get going but when they do EVs will definitely go up a gear.
I also think SUVs should possibly be banned fairly soon (Bad for cities, bad for roads, bad for parking, emissions etc.)
Not only do I think a national ban on SUVs and pickups will be politically impossible in the next 10 years, I think it’s a terrible idea. If you think it’s likely to happen you should spend more time out of whatever urban core you live in.
If you have a family of more than 4 an SUV is both practical and economical. The whole family can go places together, with enough cargo space for a beach weekend or a costco run.
If you ban pickup trucks you’ll essentially ban private boat ownership. You’ll also upset the many people that use their truck for both personal and business common for construction/agri/landscaping.
Why would we even ban SUVs or pickups? If you are concerned with global warming it seems to me that pollution should be taxed and if some people are still choosing to do so they can. And then keep raising these goals so we get rid of inefficient SUVs. This is what EU is doing pretty successfully with the German car manufacturers being dragged kicking and screaming into making low polluting cars.
SUVs can certainly be practical, though a crossover or minivan can do many of those things too. With better fuel efficiency and less weight on the road.
Would it actually have a large effect on boat ownership? Something like a Model X (or many regular crossovers as well) can tow 4-5000 lbs, which should cover the common ones right? I don't really know much about boats, but some quick research suggest that covers the common ones. I also didn't realize just how common boat ownership is in the US, but apparently its ~1 in 10 households.
But you are right, we are certainly not close to being able to replace trucks for business use at this time. The F150 is the top selling vehicle, and has been for many years. Mostly because of business uses. I don't think trucks are going anywhere for a long time in the US.
There are a lot of merits to an SUV over a crossover/minivan. The SUV will be able to hold more cargo — you can tow a boat or a small trailer. An SUV will be able to handle off road situations much better —- perfect for taking the family camping, skiing, or to the beach. An SUV is generally more comfortable and roomy than a crossover.
Yeah, many people can an do operate with a crossover or an EV instead. Smaller crossovers, like the RAV4, would be very crammed and feel underpowered with filled with 5 people, enough of their stuff for a week’s vacation, towing a 3000lb boat, and going up hill.
In Europe there are a good number of EVs you can buy today for around the €35k mark. Most countries are offering between €5k and €10k of incentives on top of that, so if you compare a similar sized ICE car the prices are not that much different.
VW ID.3 €35,574 300km
Pegeuot e208 €29,682 340km
Hyundai Kona €33,971 305km
(Prices are for base models in Germany, including taxes, excluding incentives)
The Model 3 is around €50k here, so even with the discounted price it's still going to expensive compared to other cars. Now of course it has a greater range, but I am wondering if Tesla are going to bring out a more budget model for Europe to compete.
SUVs are basically required in many parts of the US. Or at very least, it's much worse to have a sedan in the snowier and hillier parts of the country. Not to mention towing capacity or the more rural areas where off-road capabilities are important.
There is no chain control in most cold+rural areas. But if you are in a place that would benefit from AWD, there are plenty of non-SUV AWD options, including sedans.
IIRC, the federal tax incentives phase out per manufacturer, based on the number of qualifying vehicles sold. So buyers of VW's newly-announced ID.4 will be able to claim the full credit, but buyers of Tesla's Model Y won't.
The ID.4 starts $40K base without destination charges or local taxes. Even with the $7.5K federal tax credit that's an incredibly expensive compact SUV (you can get full SUVs for $5K less, let alone compact SUVs).
I doubt it with multiple large manufacturers discontinuing cheaper cars and continuing to push up market. If there was a market for cheaper cars, there wasn't enough demand to be sustainable.
Lightly used cars have become far better value than new cheap cars.
You know a car without any safety features could be even cheaper. Petrol with lead and sulphur is cheaper. Houses with asbestos are cheaper. Why do you feel entitled to a certain price on cars?
That's absurd hyperbole. $25K gas vehicles or $27K Hybrids represent Toyota, not "vehicles without safety features."
Also, you're putting the cart and horse in the wrong order, nobody felt entitled to anything, we were discussing EVs making sense without states needing to push/mandate them which means competitive pricing that's affordable relative to other offerings in the existing market.
Your whole argument feels like a way to shut down discussion.
> $25K gas vehicles or $27K Hybrids represent Toyota, not "vehicles without safety features."
I agree, but I think their point was something along the lines of: gas cars are cheaper, and there are ways to make cars even cheaper than those cars (ex. removing many safety features), so where do you draw the line for how cheap cars should be vs the minimum level of responsibility they should comply with -- safety, environmental, morality, etc.
I'm sure before the government regulated a lot of safety features, had they asked the public if they would want those responsible features forced on them if it was going to drive the base price of cars way up, they too would have said no. But today, it seems absurd in hindsight not to have seat belts, the same way it will probably seem absurd in 35 years that we have minimal environmental regulations in place right now.
That doesn't make it right, but it's an interesting dynamic to think that we've exhausted the low hanging personal safety fruit and now we need to address more environmental safety features.
I think you misunderstood the point there. That $25k gas vehicle would be much cheaper without its required safety features. We are fine with the government mandating an increase in price in order to guarantee safety features. It isn't that much of a stretch to have them mandating an increase in price in order to guarantee zero emissions.
There may be cost to doing this but car prices have never factored in their environmental cost and now they absolutely have to. If you consider both the TCO of an gas vs electric vehicle and the long term cost of climate change, it's a bargain.
Yeah, I'm sure that'll work out just like the Model 3 for $35,000... There was one strippo version of the Model 3 available (as special-order-only to severely limit the number sold) for what, maybe three or four months?
It's also competing with low-mileage $12-15K used cars that you can actually take on a cross-country trip. The Tesla store here in Austin recently confirmed for me that a trip to South Florida would take more than three times as long in a Tesla as a gas-powered car, after figuring in charging stops and the twisty routes required to get to the chargers. (And that was a $100K Model S!)
And remember folks, EVs aren't zero emissions, they're just remote emissions!
One decade ago, he said Tesla would be delivering 500,000 EV in 2020. This looks more and more probable as we get closer to EOY.
That's the most important criteria to evaluate the success of Tesla (in addition to profitability). I'd say he's been the most reliable executive in the industry. No wonder why he's the CEO in auto with the longest tenure.
The quality surveys and several owners I know would beg to differ. Tesla has had, and continues to have, horrendous quality issues. Don't get me wrong, Tesla does do some things well, and they're certainly not afraid to innovate, but they're anything but "excellent vehicles".
I don't know a single Model S owner that hasn't had the door handles fail. It's a $900 repair, unless you haggle with them for weeks ant threaten to sue them, at which point they'll agree to pay for it, because Tesla knows they don't work.
Oh, and a tire/wheel budget of $3000+ a year is pretty excessive, too. (On Teslas, both are notoriously unable to withstand potholes and dips that even other cars with low-profile tires can just drive over. All that battery weight is a really bad combo with low-profile tires and thin-cast wheels.)
> When is electric going to be affordable for the average person?
Maybe never... A lot of today's technology runs on fossil fuel. It may very well be the case that our standard of living will decrease as we won't find comparable source of energy.
I enjoy driving cars. With engines that go vroom-vroom.
One of the benefits of a carbon tax is that I could continue to drive cars with engines that go vroom as long as I want so long as I can afford to pay the tax. And there is a very realistic situation that all of my carbon can be offset for just a few hundred dollars a year, if we have the resources to invest in next gen offset technology.
But we are in a political situation where it is easier to outright ban this than simply ask people to pay for the cost.
I say this as an EV fanatic and Tesla owner, but I'm with you that outright banning ICE cars is the wrong solution.
It totally fucks anybody that can't charge at home. Do you know how many millions of people live in apartments? Do you think they're really going to shell out the cash to build EV chargers in all their parking spots?
The problem is, increasing taxes on gas will disproportionately affect the poor who can't afford to buy an EV (and again, are unlikely to live somewhere with a charger), while also having side effects of increasing the cost of all physical goods that need to be shipped. Semitrucks become more expensive to run, and while Tesla is working on a semi, it's only going to be useful for intra-city distribution, since semis used for inter-city travel are almost constantly on the road and will be driven by multiple drivers to keep moving, so they don't have time to charge.
> increasing taxes on gas will disproportionately affect the poor
People who are poor are already pay disproportionally by living in a culture that requires a car.
Having been poor most of my life, my problem has not been "I can't afford an EV". My problems have been "I can't afford to live somewhere with decent public transit options."
1) Regard apartments, the government should make funds available to add charging to existing apartment buildings. It could also do stuff like add chargers to light posts, as I believe some European countries do. Also, we can normalize running extension cords out to your car as a temporary measure :). People do this with their $100k PIH Volvos in my neighborhood.
2) This is why I like the "carbon dividend" approach some have proposed. Tax people, but let some of the money flow back to the poorer members of society so that they can still live. I also think as a society we really need to question why we accept that there are just tons of poor people. Why not raise the floor a bit? Climate change (and pollution as well!) disproportionately affect the poor as well, so delaying action to fight it will hurt them in the long run.
> The problem is, increasing taxes on gas will disproportionately affect the poor who can't afford to buy an EV (and again, are unlikely to live somewhere with a charger)
But banning ICE cars is clearly even worse for those unable to afford an EV, right? Unless policy-makers think that precommitting to ban ICE cars by 2035 will lead to a sudden flurry of new EV development _that wouldn't have happened if they had just precommitted to adding large carbon taxes by 2035.
In some ways it’s worse. Even if all major car manufacturers offer EVs by 2035, how many used $2000 EV Civics will be on the market by then? I am all for going all in on EV but let’s not pretend like it’s a simple matter of pressing your thumb on the neck of the manufacturers to suddenly fix the problem. How many places in the US are specifically built to be human sized and not car sized? NYC? Maybe a few other very specific larger cities? So if you don’t want the CA economy to tank overnight in 2035 (who is going to show up to work if they can’t drive their cars?), you will need to also subsidize car prices because even ICE based vehicles are increasing in price way faster than inflation while wages are stagnant.
> So if you don’t want the CA economy to tank overnight in 2035 (who is going to show up to work if they can’t drive their cars?)
Why would it tank overnight?
Did you misinterpret the requirement? It's not a banning on owning ICE, it's a ban on selling new ICE cars. You would still be able to buy, own, and drive a used ICE.
That’s fair. The above comments were alluding to theoretically banning all ICE cars so I was I guess thinking of that when I wrote my comment.
Yes if it’s just on the sale if new vehicles that could potentially work though I still worry that the manufacturers will normalize $40k cars and use this as an excuse.
This only bans the sale of new ICE vehicles. Presumably, lower income households will continue to drive their ICE cars after this ban, and then move into an EV sometime down the road once the post-2035 used car market has enough EVs at the right price.
I genuinely wonder if the prices of used EVs with decent range (say a long range model 3 available now) will reach the same price as an older Honda Civic. I figure the batteries will be worth quite a bit still in the car. Essentially making the possibility of buying a used $2000 electric car impossible.
We built the infrastructure to pump stale dinosaur juice out of the ground in Saudi-Arabia, refine it, and deliver it to your gas tank. We built the infrastructure to bring potable water to every home.
Just because we don't have the charging stations today doesn't mean we'll never have them.
Its really not a big deal if that's what you're worried about. Just go out of state or get some collectable car status. I'm sure there will be plenty of loopholes for enthusiasts willing to jump a few hoops. This is about changing the retail experience.
The order seems vague enough that zero-emissions could possibly include net-zero emissions but I'm not sure we know all the details yet.
> But we are in a political situation where it is easier to outright ban this than simply ask people to pay for the cost.
You can claim this is radical, but I suspect the auto manufacturers won't be building ICE cars by 2035 anyway.
EV cars are simply WAY cheaper to build than ICE cars. For example, GM quit manufacturing the Volt because the Bolt is stupidly cheaper to manufacture.
Given the current trends with people not buying cars anyway, this is effectively inevitable.
I think that in general, liberals are under-appreciative (scared, even) of markets, and conservatives are under-appreciative (scared, even) of regulation and government. The fact that a carbon tax system is both government regulation-based and a market-based probably contributes to its lack of traction.
Use the right tool for the job. In this case, a free market solution (i.e. carbon tax) would drive carbon offset prices down, optimizing the solution without centralized control. What if moving fully to electric vehicles is only the 10th most cost-effective way of reversing climate change? With laws like this one, we're committing to a potentially sub-optimal solution, which means we have to find more dollars than we otherwise would need to solve the problem.
Note that the carbon tax (which I assume would include offsetting programs as the sources of carbon credits or the sink for tax dollars) does have some significant regulatory requirements and challenges; if you sell me an offset, how do I actually know that those 10 tons of CO2 were actually captured from the atmosphere? I think you'd need pretty strong regulation for there to be a workable international market in carbon tax credits, for example.
This is not about reducing carbon within CA's borders. This is about levering CA's market power to spur changes to the behavior of multinational corporations.
A carbon tax is only effective if everyone pays. Nevada doesn't care if California pays for carbon. However, if CA incentivizes electric vehicle production, multinational car companies can sell the same cars elsewhere.
Extinction of humans is not a possible result of global warming. Such a result is only put forward by people without political or scientific understanding. Worst case global warming (as in we continue to pump out and put every bit of buried accessible CO2 that's in the ground into the atmosphere) only returns us to an age of tremendous amounts of vegetation and coastal cities being flooded. It also causes wars and massive population movements, but it does not cause extinction. It might also cause advanced civilization to revert to an earlier stage of development, but Earth cannot become a Venus-like planet or anything close to it with current levels of buried CO2.
Granted this is a very bad experiment to run, and we should not do this, but it's not an existential crisis.
Well, I assume that it is a possible result. Those wars could always escalate to a nuclear apocalypse, with a combination of famine and climate disasters picking off the survivors.
The same way that a sugar tax can price out death by diabetes.
Study after study proves that people respond to price incentives. If you set a price for carbon (even less than the cost to sequester it from the atmosphere), people will reduce their output.
And there is a lot of low hanging fruit we could start with before we start ripping cars from people.
> Clean transport transition leader Norway hit a huge 70.2% plugin passenger vehicle market share in August, up from 49% a year ago. Pure battery electrics alone took 53% of the market.
Yes. 0% sales tax was what it was at. Whereas ICE was at 100%. Norway isn’t a good example of a country to follow because it’s an incredibly wealthy one that uses all its oil money to fund stuff. The people also get paid much more there than in other countries.
In Norway, buying a Tesla was cheaper than buying a Honda Accord. It was also cheaper to maintain and run because you didn’t pay large tolls or what not either. Basically, everyone else was subsidizing electric car owners.
Imagine paying $60k for a Honda Accord, having to pay large tolls, expensive gas, and so forth... and a Tesla isn’t taxed on any of that stuff. You’d get the Tesla just because it’s way cheaper!
I wish these articles would also count many are primary cars (i.e. a household replacing or buying a car, meaning they don't otherwise have one), and how many are secondary cars (i.e. in addition to another car, particularly non-EVs). My anecdotal evidence from Norway suggest most people get EVs as their secondary cars. I wish I had more numbers.
> The study found that 63% of Norwegian households with electric cars also have a fossil car or hybrid car, down from 70% in 2017. The survey also found that among respondents having only one car in the household, one third (32.4%) are electric car owners, up from 26.3% in 2017.
A free market would account for it's externalities. If it costs 80k to remove the emissions your 20k ICE causes, then once the externalities are accounted for, your free market ICE should cost 100k...
As EV ownership rises gas stations are going to become rare enough to be a real hassle. That’s likely to push people to 95+% EV around 2040ish. At which point the remaining IC cars stop being a big deal.
We already went though something similar with catalytic converter requirements. Some people are going to drive 40+ year old cars, but they quickly become irrelevant.
EV’s could use in road charging to get effectively unlimited range on highways. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/12/worlds-f... But, I think that’s completely unnecessary. Charging at home actually saves time traveling to gas stations more than making up for spending an extra 5-10 minutes on the extremely unusual 400+ mile road trip.
Remember, we are talking about 50+% of cars being EV that means plentiful charging infrastructure.
EV’s are already shipping with 400+ mile ranges and 180 miles of charging in 15 minutes. 2 different 15 minute stops for food, bathroom breaks, and just stretching over 10 hours means your EV is doing 750~ miles per day, that’s well past what most people are willing to spend in their cars, and it can completely charge overnight.
Doesn't need to be equally fast. If you roadtrip a lot, it matters. But if you charge almost exclusively at home, then the number of times you have to recharge on a strict schedule is quite limited. The time savings from never going to the gas station is pretty significant compared with taking a half hour to recharge when you're on a long trip.
Even if you road trip significantly; Human physiology suggests eating, waste disposal, or at least moving around (to prevent blood clots) at about half the current range of Teslas (3 hrs or 180 miles). And current charging technology allows fast charging particularly well at these percentages.
Ie, charge for 30 minutes every 3 hours, 1 hour every 6 hours, and on either the 12 or 15th hour you charge for 4+ hours (and sleep)
If that’s your benchmark, EV’s can average about 5MPH slower over very long trips at highway speeds than ICE engines. It’s worse on ultra long trips or if you’re doing 100+MPH trying to break the cannonball run record etc, but that’s frankly illegal anyway.
PS: As an edge case benchmark, a 2018 model 3 has done the New York City to Los Angeles in 45 hours and 16 minutes or 61.5MPH including breaks. I only see that time dropping as EV’s improve.
Sub 26 hours in an ICE averaging over 110 MPH and a top speed of 175 mph. That’s not just lose your license but head straight to jail territory.
But sure as I said, if that’s what your going for ICE engines currently have a significant advantage using current technology and infrastructure. However, in terms of capacity to do a real world road trip the difference is already minimal.
PS: Don’t forget electric trains do 375 mph and can maintain that indefinitely. Assuming EV is always just going to be a battery technology is far from proven at this point.
Honestly not as big of a deal as many make it out to be. With EVs, the cars can be constantly charging when stopped. Even for longer trips, the newer, faster chargers can do 180 miles of charge in 15 minutes. This, combined with being able to charge virtually any time the car is stopped, can make electric cars even more convenient when it comes to filling up.
Also, having your car at 100% at the start of any day more than makes up for those rare occasions when you're going on a 500+ mile road trip.
I expect there will be other measures in the future. Heavier taxes on gasoline and such, and higher DMV registration fees, growing over time. And EV sales will grow as more people test drive the better EVs. People looking for a used car will be trying to find a good used electric. Gasoline car resale value is going to crash hard.
How I wish we could phase out cars. I know that they're necessary for some, and a huge convenience for most. But I would LOVE to be able to walk down a street and not have to worry about getting run over by a 1T steel object because the driver was reading a text.
Probably sooner. In 2034, a year before this takes place, gasoline car sales will probably be small to negligible. In 2045, it'll be a hassle to own a gasoline car when most of the gas stations are closed.
“ Following the order, the California Air Resources Board will develop regulations to mandate that 100 percent of in-state sales of new passenger cars and trucks are zero-emission by 2035 – a target which would achieve more than a 35 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and an 80 percent improvement in oxides of nitrogen emissions from cars statewide. In addition, the Air Resources Board will develop regulations to mandate that all operations of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles shall be 100 percent zero emission by 2045 where feasible, with the mandate going into effect by 2035 for drayage trucks.”
The subtitle says all vehicles sold must be zero-emissions, so that presumably includes diesel. But this seems to only target passenger vehicles, not freight carriers.
Since you posted almost exactly the same comment further up the thread. It's important to consider that ICE vehicles have been puking out air pollution and CO2 for more than a century, killing thousands, if not millions of people and contributing greatly to climate change, which is getting worse.
It frustrates me that people take umbrage at being charged money for using energy and polluting the environment.
>It frustrates me that people take umbrage at being charged money for using energy and polluting the environment.
I take issue with it when those people are mostly only the people who do so because they cannot afford to do better (which will likely be the case in 2035+).
There's a difference between a subsidy and kicking who's already down.
I was questioning the need for a government mandate in 2035 by pointing out that electric cars are soon to be viable without subsidies so if the market's gonna go that way anyway what's the point of the mandate?
My take is it's actually a reactive move to counter his issuing more fracking permits in 2020 than 2019. This is CA, he's vulnerable on climate issues. I do believe he (like most CA residents) are acutely worried about climate change, but I think this particular action is more about optics than change.
Because the state EPA sets the rules and the EPA is an executive branch function. State congress can overrule it by passing a law, but policy of an executive branch of government can be decided at whim by the governor.
I completely reject the validity of this as it is being done through an Executive Order. Newsom doesn't get to decide this on his own, it needs to go through the Legislature to be valid.
I'm wondering how they will replace all the gas/diesel 4WD vehicles used by ranchers and vineyard managers here in Sonoma / Napa CA. The wine / grape industry is $1.5B+ for sonoma county alone - Napa is at least that or more.
You need reliable 4x4 vehicles to access and work in the remote areas where many grapes are grown up here now.
4x4 / all terrain doesn't seem to be much of an issue for electric vehicles. Electric motors are torquier, and it's easy to design drivetrains that use multiple motors. It seems pretty likely that electric trucks will be here by then (Rivian, Cybertruck, freaked-out traditional manufacturers jumping in a few years later).
The bigger issue is probably range, for users that need to work in truly remote areas. But big trucks can carry a lot of batteries, too. I think the number of operators that genuinely need more than ~500 miles or so of range is probably pretty low.
Looks like there's an exception for certain use-cases, and extreme range requirements would probably fall into that. Fuel cells might be an option for that requirement.
On the reliability front, electric vehicles have far fewer moving parts than IC vehicles. If the world switches entirely to electric, really great electric 4x4s will appear.
I can't recall a time that I've used a cordless drill and thought to myself, "man, this thing would be so much better if it were powered by a two-stroke motor".
This advantage is especially clear in the case of a 4x4: one need not include viscous couplings and fancy differentials.
>electric vehicles have far fewer moving parts than IC vehicles
Not true. You still have the suspention system which has a lot of moving parts. there are also the moving parts of the brakes. Then the steering system. In theory you don't need a transmission, but in practice you do.
There are a few less moving parts, but not substantially less. The moving parts you lose are mostly in a controlled environment with plenty of lubrication and no dirt (though there are other acid combustion byproducts).
> I can't recall a time that I've used a cordless drill and thought to myself, "man, this thing would be so much better if it were powered by a two-stroke motor".
I have a cordless chainsaw and weed whip. Both would be better with an IC engine. Batteries are much heavier than gas, and this is really noticeable when using them for a while. These are new Dewalt 60 volt systems, not some old technology. Of course there are advantages to battery - I won't got back to gas, like I would have 20 years ago when I first used a battery weed whip. I like the low noise and there is plenty of power. However the gas engine would be lighter.
I've also seen gas powered drills and I'm sure that the same applies, batteries are good, but the extra weight to get the same power is a factor. Most drills are used indoors of course so gas was never a real option and that is why battery drills become popular as soon as they worked at all.
> >electric vehicles have far fewer moving parts than IC vehicles
> Not true.
What? It is absolutely true.
Yeah, you still have suspension, steering, and brakes.
But the transmission is a single reduction gear. No clutch or torque converter. No shifting mechanism. No planetary gears, dog tooth gears, synchronizers, etc. Just a single pair of gears that are constantly meshed.
And no engine means no pistons, crank shafts, valves, camshafts, timing belts, fuel pumps, oil/fuel filters, etc. And that doesn't even begin talking about ICEs with forced induction.
The suggestion that EVs don't have fewer parts is insane. You've replaced a complicated transmission system to a single reduction gear. An entire engine and all of its complexities replaced with a far simpler electric motor.
> I have a cordless chainsaw and weed whip. Both would be better with an IC engine.
In a small application like that, yeah you might want ICE because a chainsaw requires a lot of power which would mean a heavy battery.
For a weed whacker, I use a Ryobi which gets the job done because I have a small yard. It's pretty light, but I imagine it wouldn't be enough for anybody with a large perimeter. It's good enough for most houses though.
There’s a detailed explanation of the differences between an electric motor and an internal-combustion engine (ICE). The latter is far more complicated - it requires a crankshaft with counterweights to translate the linear motion of the pistons into rotational motion, a flywheel to smooth power output, a DC motor for starting, an alternator to charge the battery, a cooling system, and a host of other gadgets that an electric motor doesn’t need. An induction motor, which produces direct rotational motion and uniform power output, is much smaller and lighter. Tesla’s induction motor puts out 270 kW of power and weighs 31.8 kg, whereas an ICE that produces 140 kW of power is going to weigh around 180 kg. [1]
Teslas use electric motors that have two moving parts, and single-speed “transmissions” that have no gears. The company says its drivetrain has about 17 moving parts compared with about 200 in a conventional internal combustion drivetrain.[2]
Far fewer moving parts, and a transmission with no moving parts.
Electric cars are so efficient that they are actually bad for the economy - by some estimates it may cut the number of jobs in auto manufacturing by 50%. [2] Who knows how many jobs will be lost with the reduction in fossil fuels and the disappearance of gas stations, fuel deliveries, fewer mechanics... Electric motors also last for decades with negligible degradation compared to ICEs. The advances in battery technology will make older EVs that much more valuable, since their range will increase over time with battery upgrades that will probably be cheaper than buying a similarly sized IC engine.
The press release only mentions passenger vehicles, not farm equipment. Within a couple of decades I think there will be some good choices for electric off road vehicles. Polaris already sells an EV side by side [1]
Maybe there will be a special class for certain niche applications, like off-road motorcycles and light trucks used in rougher applications in remote areas.
I would love to have a diesel-powered 4x4 light pickup with a 5-speed.
"light trucks used in rougher applications in remote areas."
I am sure there will, indeed, be special carve-outs and I am sure the auto manufacturers will find a way to exploit those carve-outs such that every dude in the state can continue to pretend they're a rancher (as they drive their quad cab 1.5ton to and from their apartment building every day).
What if you live in the city but go camping or mountain biking in the mountains every other weekend? Then you gotta own something that doesn’t look like it fits in the city.
EV models of such vehicles are starting to be produced in "demo" models now, so it doesn't seem like a technical barrier to have them in mass production by the time this takes effect.
I've driven over 30k miles this year across 3 vehicles. Mostly on road trips. Almost 5k of that was on unpaved roads in a 4x4 full size lifted diesel truck. I carry between 35 and 100 gal of gas at a time to do those kinds of trips. Seems like fantastic business opportunity for out of state registration via a llc or something.
That depends - The vast majority of 4x4s never go far enough off road that the advantages of gas matter. For the tiny number of people who do that, the ability to bring extra gas with is important. Note that batteries are so heavy that it isn't an option to bring batteries with - the weight is a negative in many 4x4 situations even if the truck could handle it.
Would be interesting to see California continue over-playing their hand and eventually swing back to being a Red state.
California seems to have the curse of having enough going for it climate / business-wise that an incompetent and over-controlling government is tolerated by the population.
I think the bigger risk is that California fails to fix the most pressing issues (mainly housing). Lots of people are leaving the state and lots of people can't afford to live where they work, which causes all sorts of problems, like forcing people to drive long distances and pushing people to build in fire zones.
In the context of the issues facing people, climate regulations just aren't top of mind, excepting the tea party folks.
I fully support the governor in general, but this feels like a band-aid on poor fundamentals. In the case of housing, the state is incompetent and _under_ controlling. I also tend to think the state is _under_ controlling when it is hard to breathe because the air is dirty, something that's happened to me regularly since I've moved here.
The housing problem is because of _over_ control. Anyone with a hint of economics teaching could tell you that. There are very strict zoning laws everywhere in the bay area that prevent the building of massive apartment complexes and restricts everything to 3-4 stories at best. This causes massive housing undersupply causing the prices to rocket upwards. San Francisco is especially bad with their government's constant effort to pour amber over all of their "historical" districts full of decrepit falling apart housing that need to be bulldozed and have sky scrapers installed in their place.
If you add rent control to try to lower the prices all you will cause is a massive increase in the price of any non-rentcontrolled housing (such as houses). If you think 1.5M dollar houses is expensive, wait till you see 3-4M houses.
You've written as if you disagree with me, but I don't think you do.
It is very important when discussing political issues to make a distinction between state and local control over issues. I live in a community that is desperately fighting any attempt to build more, denser housing. They are working hard to find loopholes around state initiatives to build more housing.
This is a case where the state should be more controlling, specifically by preventing cities from interfering with the creation of housing. Cities should not be allowed to pour amber over historical districts.
I guess it's a mixture of terminology. I view control as control no matter what level it's happening at. The state preventing a local government from controlling is not adding more control, it's reducing it.
If you tell people that housing is an investment and treat it like an investment, people resisting changes which would hurt their investment is entirely predictable. You can't complain about NIMBYism when the system is explicitly designed to promote it. The system is the problem.
As long as the 3-4 story limit exists, then rent controls are the wrong answer. If you want rent controls, then developers need to be able to produce more housing.
In other words, if rent controls mean a landlord can only profit $X per unit, then if they want to be able to produce $X*100 in profit, then they need to be able to produce 100 units.
We've also made it extremely slow to do anything. A million small rules. Now the planning department has to check every detail of your plan against all of them. And it means that it takes at least a year and a huge amount of labor to even come up with blueprints.
Well between a huge exodus of people leaving for other states[1], a 11% unemployment rate[2], non-stop protests/riots over the summer, there won't be much of California left. I moved out of San Jose/south bay area as I couldn't deal with trash overflowing into the freeways from thousands of homeless encampments[3], illegal fireworks every night for 2-3 months straight[4](sending my dog into extreme panic), packages being stolen off of our doorstep, public schools that were outright terrible all while every 3bdrm+ house is almost $1.5M or more. Forgot to mention the wildfires making the areas air toxic[5] and PG&E turning off power due to the wind[6]. I stayed in state however and will not be voting for any CA incumbents for obvious reasons.
California state assembly districts are geographically-contiguous, large, evenly populous, and generated by computer program vetted by both parties. If there's a failing, it doesn't happen in how representatives are chosen.
There's definitely a lot more to a political process than district sizing, though. For example:
- open primaries
- approval/score/ranked choice voting
- banning political ads
- ending two-party system (some of the above would help)
- effective voter education (the state pamphlet is a start...)
I know many of these sound pie-in-the-sky, but it's hard to imagine truly responsive government (ie; higher quality government than consumer services) without all or most of them.
I can't reply to the below comment, but it's worth pointing out that we also have an open primary system in California, where all the candidates of every political party are on the primary ballot and the top two vote getters advance to a runoff in the general election. Also, several of our cities do have ranked choice voting, including in the Bay Area. California's government is the result of effective democracy reform.
Plugging your car in overnight is a matter of course. You drive home and plug it in every day. It becomes muscle memory like anything else you do in life. You can rarely forget of course, but it's not like it's inconvenient. And for daily driving you can actually do many days of daily driving already without charging on standard electric vehicles today already, that'll have improved in 15 years as well.
In Tesla's new announcement the other day one of the other things they mentioned is like a 10x increase in battery charge times with the new cell design which will be ready in 3 years or so. So give it time.
Easier said than done (I'm not familiar with the specifics, but my understanding is that many buildings with the cladding that led to Grenfell burning down remain unfixed)
Unless you don’t have parking meters where you park... It’s very rare that I park somewhere with parking meters near.
For myself and many others, our cars will never see a driveway, a garage, or any place that could have a charging station. I think this will be a hugely limiting factor in adoption.
As it stands, electric car owners are home owners more often than ICE purchasers and I don’t see that changing - maybe ever.
This is a big thing. Not just because I can and would forget to plug in at home, but a very large amount of people just aren't going to be able to charge at home. If you find out you need to take a longer trip than you had planned for quickly it would be hard to sit for an hour while the vehicle "quick" charges
> What if there's a power outage or I forget to plug in my car overnight?
Is making a trip to a gas station just to fill your car up a good use of time? Or is it better to accept responsibility and make sure you've plugged it in at home? Have you ever forgotten to fill up your gas tank and been stuck on the road? C'mon.
Do you remember to put gas in your internal combustion car today? It will become something you just remember to do. Companies will start offering drive-out quick-charge services, and it'd probably be an option from AAA.
This is a good point and does not get that much attention. Electric cars are still large machines with a large environmental input. It is more environmentally friendly to just build out transit and encourage density. The vast majority of people would not need personal cars were they to live in a walkable area with good transit. Not only that, road building and maintenance is a far greater money sink than transit. People are just used to it and don't think about it.
There will always be a need for some people to have personal cars. There's no silver bullet to climate change, and moving to electric is a good thing. However, we realistically need to reduce total consumption (in terms of environmental resource input) massively. Making it easier for people to live without cars is relatively low-hanging fruit, and increases quality of life, to boot.
You could argue it's a good thing they're more expensive while the alternatives are phased out, more people would need to use public transit or live within walking distance of places they use cars to reach today.
I'm waiting for California to start taxing the hell out of ICE-powered vehicles to discourage their purchase on the used market, or just hike gas prices so high it's an enthusiasts-only tolerated kind of thing.
You can buy a rust-free used V8 SUV for like 2-3k in CA, and it'll be on the road for another decade if maintained.
More fitting is taxing new ICE purchases. Lower income folks could still afford cheap, used vehicles, but folks trying to purchase a 50k, 18mpg sports car will find they'll have to pay an additional ~20k based on the car's emissions. You can make it easier to vote for by being tax-neutral and any revenue is used to fund credits towards new EV purchases -5k. The emissions tax and EV discount will be adjusted yearly to maintain revenue neutral. We should be optimizing a maximal ICE tax and maximal EV discount that minimizes emissions across all new cars. People dropping ~35k+ on new ICE cars, while there is an equivalent 35k EV, must pay to account for their externalities in a true market.
This was an executive order, not a law that was passed. Given that multiple new governors will likely have taken office in California between now and 2035, and any one of them can rescind or modify this based on the then-state of the electric car market and the economy, it doesn't really mean anything.
If the electric car market is mature enough by 2035 for this to not cause major economic issues for car dealers and others throughout the state, then it will stand. But if that's the case, the majority of car sales will be electric with or without this order. If that's not the case, it will be quietly rescinded or modified by the then-governor. So this order, effectively, is just political posturing and changes nothing that won't naturally happen (or not happen) anyway.
It’s unlikely that the order will be legally tested until 2035, so that’s the beauty of a statement like this...he gets to play to his base on the eco side of things, and won’t ever have to deal with the fallout.
Sorry for being late to the game, but we have an as-open-as-it-can-be tool to compare petrol, gas, battery, and fuel cell cars, both today and in the future, available here:
One nice thing about our tool is that it calculates life cycle emissions including projected changes in the electricity grid of the region you live in. Of course, these are uncertain, but most other academic analysis just use the current grid mix.
It's important to realize that, even with the advances in electric vehicles, while they are better than combustion cars, they are far from zero-emission. Lifetime emissions for an electric car could still be 200 g CO2/km, split almost evenly between the electricity supply and everything else. Depending on usage, which of course has wide spatial variation, just road construction and maintenance itself could be 20 g CO2/km (this number is valid for Switzerland, which has very high utilization rates).
I think most people who are have seriously investigated the current system and possible future developments in the next 10 to 20 years have come to the conclusion that a lot of the change has to be in consumer behaviour - clean tech is not clean enough, or can't be scaled up enough in the current economic and political climate, to reach any reasonable climate goal.
http://carculator.psi.ch/start
"Simple" doesn't work and fails with an error "We have not been able to detect the country to run the analysis for. Please wait a few seconds and try again."
Unfortunately for me, I can't access simple analysis since the site can't figure out what country I'm in (no permissions were even asked for), and when I click on the intermediate analysis, the link doesn't seem to be valid. Only the advanced seems available to me. It would be great to not have to make an account as well.
Although his reputation would suffer by signing an order and then not taking steps to implement it, the current governor will almost certainly be retired or holding national office by the time it becomes possible (near 2035) to take practical implementation steps, and as far as I know there is no way for proponents of this measure to compel or pressure future California governments to implement this order.
So unless I am missing something, unlike most executive orders, this order is merely symbolic and does not commit the government or anyone else to anything.
Seems like this opens up a long-term opportunity for someone to build some car dealerships on the CA/NV and CA/OR borders, since it doesn't outlaw bringing existing cars into the state.
"North America’s first lithium-ion battery recycling hub is coming to New York"
Li-Cycle, a Canadian battery recycling firm has chosen the location for its first commercial lithium-ion battery recycling Hub: Eastman Business Park in Rochester, New York.
Construction of the $175 million Hub facility is set to begin in 2021 and the facility is planned to be fully operational in 2022.
As of 2017, California had statewide emissions of 424 million tons CO2-equivalent [1]. "CO2-equivalent" emissions include the global warming effects of CO2 plus methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases, normalized to the global warming potential of CO2. (For example, emitting a ton of nitrous oxide is roughly equal to 298 tons of carbon dioxide on a 100 year time horizon [2].)
Using California's Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventory Query Tool [3], I searched for transportation, on road, light duty vehicles only, CO2 only.
For 2017, the emissions were 58 million tons from light duty trucks and SUVs plus 58.4 million tons from passenger cars.
The total of 116.4 million tons is about 27.5% of all California emissions. Since according to [1] the transportation sector accounts for 41% of all CA emissions, light duty road vehicles account for about 67% of California's transportation emissions.
Heavy duty trucks account for another 32.3 million tons of CO2 emissions.
What about trucks that transport goods across the state, including Amazon, UPS, and USPS trucks as well as traditional cargo trucks? Are those still going to be diesel powered and leaving a significant amount of brake dust in their wake?
What about the ships that burn the dirtiest fuel imaginable right up until they near California ports? Are they still going to be greeted with open arms?
What about all of the methane leaks from natural gas operations in the state? Will those actors face consequences?
What about the oil drilling that happens all along California's coast? Will they still be able to extract fossil fuels without paying royalties to the state?
Passenger vehicles are such a small portion of CO2 emissions, and implementing these restrictions pisses off a lot of people who do not want to change. High hanging fruit that is barely ripe.
If the vehicle is garaged or primarily used in California, it must be registered here. The state already has a problem with people keeping their vehicles registered in other states when they move here. For interstate trucking, companies will probably register in Nevada or Arizona, but intrastate transport companies are going to face large fines if caught.
It’d be great if modern society could make smaller vehicles for personal use. Average number of occupants on the road has to below 2.0, seems terribly inefficient. The industries and costs associated w car ownership would have to adjust too for this too happen. Legislation is also necessary to deal with mutually destructive nature of not wanting to be on the same roads as larger fortified vehicles; i.e. lanes/roads dedicated to smaller personal vehicles.
Above all, as a society, we have to start giving a damn about environmental destruction. Rethink the status quo, rethink urban planning, rethink overuse of plastics, rethink leaf blowing...
What's funny is that California is probably going to be one of the last oil producing states. They have been endowed with six fields that are over a billion barrels, with the largest reserves in the nation behind Prudhoe bay.
Millions of curbs and apartment lots don't have electrical outlets, much less metered 50 kW supplies that would enable the public to move past hybrids.
(But I suspect charging your car at a public fast charger will cost more than charging at home.)
FWIW: I believe fast chargers at grocery stores and similar destinations will be the tipping point for electric cars for renters. It's easier to just charge your car while you buy groceries than to make another stop at a gas station.
Related: Yesterday Tesla announced that their new tabless battery will support even faster charging speeds. Not sure if it will be able to go to a full charge in 2-3 minutes; but to be honest: Every EV I've owned has been able to finish "fast charging" by the time I'm done pooping in a public restroom.
Condo dweller here with anecdotal confirmation: I would absolutely consider an EV if they had charging stations at my local supermarket. I had looked into one for tax reasons, but passed due to the charging situation.
Not that I paid it much thought, but this does change how I see it. Cheers.
That can change quick. When landlords start losing renters (or have to reduce rent to get them) they will react. The longer wait doesn't do anything to help - most landlords won't spend money on outlets until there is demand.
The entire new annual fleet will have to hit 100% electric before that, which is a massively steep curve.
I recently started https://tryelectricnow.com to connect EV owners with car buyers to try to have a larger, distributed impact. One ride will 'click' for most people, and they won't go back.
I don't see how this doesn't end up with people buying property out of state so they can register vehicles to that address.
I say this is a EV, plugin hybrid, gas, and diesel owner. The EV/PHEV were 100% purchased because of commute/climate reasons... but you can pull my diesel truck from my cold dead hands.
I want to be able to drive a _large_ vehicle with 4 people, 2 dogs, and "back woods" camping gear on open highway for 24hours with out stopping. When I do stop it needs to be less than 30 minutes, and cost similar price to a diesel truck that gets 20mpg.
In general, it seems like a good idea, but I worry...
Because PG&E is such an aging, unreliable electricity network I seriously worry about what this will mean for how people expect to reliably charge those cars in northern CA during the summers of rolling blackouts etc without huge amounts of infrastructure rebuild.
Car carbon capture to retrofit existing cars is this idea in my head that refuses to go away. Barriers: what to do with extra CO2, parasitic load, lost storage space. But if the result is zero emissions and I can pay, I dunno, $1000 and drop my fuel efficiency by 20%, I may go for it.
Motorcycles also pollutes more per mile than a light truck. They generate less carbon dioxide but produces four times more hydrocarbons, thirty times more nitrogen oxides, and eighty times more carbon monoxide.
I hope they do something about power infrastructure like aggressively promoting solar just as much because our current power infrastructure cannot support this. Decentralizing our power generation through solar would really mitigate our current situation much faster and support the future.
That's pretty brilliant thinking on Newsom's part: shut down all remaining nuclear and fossil fuel power plants (which has led to rolling blackouts already) and require that all cars are electric. Bold strategy. Let's see how it plays out.
It would be great to make sure: (1) our grid is safe and ready for that and (2) we don’t buy dirty electricity (like we do now more and more buy buying from Utah) and instead use renewables + nuclear mix
It's easy for politicians write laws that suppose to take effect in far future as it won't be them who will enforce them and be responsible for the failures in the process.
Who's working on expanding electric vehicle infrastructure in rural California? This will become increasingly important late next year when electric trucks begin hitting the market.
Current BEVs are relatively big and very heavy due to battery. Is it worth to replace very efficient sub compact car with ICE (Possibly HEV) to big BEV?
BEVs in the US are mostly large, but that is because Americans prefer larger cars in general.
There are small EVs like the Mini Cooper or the Fiat 500. It's true the Mini Electric is heavier than the non-electric version, but only ~15%, and it actually improves handling.
Fighting climate change takes courage and passion. Efforts such as these are the only way to win this battle. We need to further these efforts globally.
I don't know what percentage of electricity generated in California comes from renewable energy. If it's not 100% renewable then the EVs won't be Zero-emission either! Let's not even talk about range anxiety, charging times and long queues at the charging stations during a long weekend. If Hydrogen can be manufactured/extracted efficiently, that's definitely going to be a lot better than EVs. At least there won't be millions of used batteries to be disposed.
Presumably they hope to use wind, or solar, or some other power generation technology. That is one of electric vehicle's actual points of benefit; the power generation source is modular.
Yes, that's the hope. Less than 20% of the electricity is produced from renewable sources in my state (Victoria, AU). If the number of EVs increase that's just going to put more pressure on the grid and will require burning more coal. I don't know if the pollution from cars is worse than burning coals in a power plant. I'm guessing it's not. I'm hoping for hydrogen as the future. There is company working on Hydrogen here. Even Toyota and Honda have been working mostly on Hydrogen not battery based EVs. I've nothing against Tesla. In fact I admire Elon Musk as an engineer. But given the choice I'll probably go with Hydrogen fuel cell cars if it can be made readily available like Petrol.
diesel-powered cars seems like an obvious loophole.
Edit: I see it says "the California Air Resources Board will develop regulations to mandate that 100 percent of in-state sales of new passenger cars and trucks are zero-emission by 2035"
So its phasing out non-zero-emission cars/trucks.
its not the governments job to deal with this. europe made the same bullshit law. if electric can beat gas at the same price point people will naturally pick that. especially if elon is correct about his telsa stuff. if you could spend 25k and get a model 3 that did almost 400 miles and RWD i think it would kill a lot of car models.
The free market solves for things that we price. It often fails when externalities are not accounted for.
Ironically free market advocates often are against pricing in externalities through things like a carbon tax. If we priced carbon appropriately decades ago then the market would look drastically different today and this new zero-emissions requirement wouldn't be needed.
It is the governments job to deal with this. Polluting the atmosphere may be cheaper for an individual consumer, but is a negative externality for everyone else on earth.
If the government didn’t involve itself in any green energy, Tesla would not be profitable.[1]
Right... Unless you have something like an aggressive carbon tax (at the consumer level), why would the free market work? Climate Change is clearly a tragedy of the commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)
The technology is clearly possible, but getting past a local equilibrium requires some energy.
Why is California (and perhaps the political left in general) obsessed with banning or requiring things? Bit by bit the choice individuals could make privately or locally is being taken away from them. In a very real way, freedom is being replaced with decision-making by the state at broader and broader levels of jurisdiction. This is not a good way to manage society.
If the value in adopting electric vehicles is there, let people recognize that value on their own and decide on their own to adopt it. Alter incentive structures in minor ways but don't override an open-ended libertarian choice architecture with top-down authoritarian decision-making. More about this in a book called Nudge, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_%28book%29
In 1952, due to a combination of weird weather and coal emissions, a smog in London lasting four days killed at least 4,000 people over its duration and possibly as many as 12,000 people over the next few months.
This lead to the phasing out of domestic coal in cities, regulation on power plant flue gas, and so forth, over the following decade. People, and the energy industry, kicked and screamed, but the government (at the time controlled by noted lefties the Conservative party) did it anyway. There were two more incidents in 1957 and 1962 killing 750-1000 people each, but that was about the end of it.
Maybe in a parallel universe the libertarian government of the UK did nothing, and people reduced their emissions on the same timeline anyway. But I think it's somewhat more likely that in that parallel universe people are still dying horribly in their thousands every time the dangerous weather conditions (cold, no wind) repeat. People are notoriously bad at externalities.
Anyway, an electric car can run off of pretty much any energy source. It's much more expensive to make gasoline from sunlight or nuclear power than charging a battery.
(And, if you're wondering, yes, making gasoline from sunlight (biofuels) is a thing, and no, it isn't practical, and yes, people DO try.)
As has already been acknowledged in other comments, this is basically asking to be overturned before 2035. If you really mean it -- i.e. you're not just doing it for some kind of brownie points while never needing to show anything for it -- why not set a much sooner date and be the one that actually implements it?
An analogy I keep coming back to is a kid putting his hand in a stream to divert the flow, then being surprised when the water continues doing the same thing but in a more complicated way, due to the topography of the landscape.
This is going to be terrible for everyone who doesn't drive new cars because you can bet your ass that if they actually hit their goal and no new fossil fuel cars are sold in 2035 by 2040 they'll have massive "polluter" (or whatever they want to call it) surcharges (aka taxes in disguise) on what's already the highest registration prices in the nation.
So the people who are driving a 2020 Camry in 2040 are gonna get screwed hard.
If they truly believe electric will soon be economically viable without government subsidy (as all the headlines proclaim) then what's the point of the law?
I think the point of the law is to paint a picture of where we want to go as a society (of Californians). It’s 15 years away, so these things are more a signal that “hey this is where we’re going”. This in turn makes you think “hmm maybe I should buy electric” which in turn makes manufacturers go “hmm I guess we should go electric if we want to sell in California.” Its a self fulfilling prophecy, a mission statement and a confirmation of what we already know: electric cars are here to stay, they are likely to improve massively over 15 years, and they are the future of transportation for CA.
Anyone buying a Camry in 2020 should have done an analysis of the TCO of a Camry versus a base config Tesla Model 3.
Same goes for most SUVs versus Model Y. Many gas cars at this point are already a very bad economic decision especially when you consider tanking resale value. In a few years it will be the same for trucks versus electric trucks which will have up to 600 miles range.
Legislation though... that is a longer topic. Basically the gas car companies have a lot of reasons to resist and come up with seeming deals so without a law they will perpetuate gas for much longer.
The economics for EV are there. But people still need a nudge in the right direction for the behavioral changes. Need to charge your car fully ahead of a long road trip. Need 20-30 minute pit stops during road trips.
People are still making enormously bad environmental decisions all based on the 1-4 road trips they’ll do per year.
Shouldn't radical decisions come from the people? I guess Authoritarianism is great if one agrees with the outcome?
Newsom is the governor of a state that lauds itself as being the most insightful and aware of Climate Change -- yet for all these years the wise leaders have been doing nothing to prepare. We've been in drought and fire mode for about a decade now. How many new reservoirs have been proposed and built? What forestry practices have changed? Basically, none.
His state is on fire, and he cannot keep the power on at peak times. This grand move is an attempt at deflection and distraction from his (and his predecessors') lack of true leadership.
Please educate me, isn't climate change a lost cause now? We know its inevitable and despite wide awareness, no one basically does anything. Individual action is not going help and US government does not even believe that any such thing is happening and has relaxed EPA regulations on polluters and such, so is CA restricting sale of fossil fuel vehicles going to matter in the long run?
> Please educate me, isn't climate change a lost cause now? We know its inevitable and despite wide awareness, no one basically does anything.
Er, no. It is inevitable, but the degree of change absolutely continues to matter.
> US government does not even believe that any such thing is happening and has relaxed EPA regulations on polluters and such, so is CA restricting sale of fossil fuel vehicles going to matter in the long run?
Here's the context you might be missing: CA is a huge automobile market, and has historically set a number of requirements that automakers eventually incorporate into all cars sold into the US market. It's cheaper to build one SKU than two, as long as the CA SKU is only mildly more expensive than the non-CA would be.
Additionally, auto manufacturers will have similar requirements for the EU market on a similar timeline.
> US government does not even believe that any such thing is happening and has relaxed EPA regulations on polluters and such, so is CA restricting sale of fossil fuel vehicles going to matter in the long run?
Operative word being 'the long run'. The current US government may be replaced within the next few months with one that might be expected to take a more normal view on the problem, so what it's doing now is arguably fairly irrelevant, when you're talking about 2035.
Many European countries have recently made similar moves, with the EU as a whole and China making noises about something similar (though probably on a longer timescale; 2040 or later). So this isn't just a weird California thing.
Everyone is hesitant to make change because "it's going to cause too much economic impact". If someone demonstrates that it's possible to change without screwing over their economy, it's likely other states and countries will follow.
Just because the USA has federal administration that doesn't want to act on climate change right now doesn't mean that it won't get a greener administration in the future.
As for being a lost cause, isn't it preferable to minimize the effect, at least? would you rather the sea levels go up by 2.0 meters or 1.5 meters?
Our leaders need to be ballsy enough to make unpopular decisions to solve climate change. In the short term, things will be harder, more expensive, jobs will be lost. That's because the externalities of life have been free for our society. We need to be brought into a green world kicking and screaming.
The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. So, while this isn't anywhere near sufficient, this is a step in the right direction.
Yeah seems going electric just shifts things but maybe they are also hoping the tech and cheaper happens by then. Seems like right now they’d be pushing out the middle and lower class people even more, making California some elite state only for rich people. Like for example mandating solar on new homes seem noble on paper but makes things cost more when housing is already expensive.
Directing the population from one form of consumption to another huh? A real drastic measure would be to ban all non-service related advertising and social media. People are driven to consume by the infinite comparisons available all around them. The only people immune to this are those who practice asceticism.
Another drastic measure would be to ban citizen ownership of cars. Local, regional, and national transportation services could fill in the gaps. When I was in Brazil, you could pay 2 Reals($) to hop in a van that ran on a circuit like a bus, but cheaper. People will fill the gaps if there's money in it for them.
Another drastic measure would be to move all the money being dumped into self driving cars and electric cars to public transportation infrastructure/services.
Another drastic measure would be to heavily tax processed food, so less energy is consumed to feed us. (And it will make people healthier, which will save a lot of energy in health care.).
Another drastic measure would be to ban imports on most goods and force them to be produced locally. Now that we're forced to piss in our own pool, that will really motivate clean manufacturing. And we'll spend less energy getting the goods to the consumers.
But no, the American way of solving problems involves adding more to the equation, not taking away.
Not only will this not make a dent in the broader climate problem, this is a direct tax on the poor and forced transfer of money to green business like Musk's. I wonder if California is trying to convince Musk to keep Tesla in town.
In any event, California also already cannot keep up with its electricity demands. Onboarding more renewables with batteries is not the solution, especially as California's car market will drastically increase demand for battery production.
There are so many layers to why this is stupid.
- Battery production is already a highly polluting operation. The mining needed to put the batteries together is not going to get easier or cleaner as the demand for batteries is artificially exponentially increased via California mandate.
- How are you going to produce enough power for all these electric cars? Solar and wind aren't going to cut it, and they need to be supported by large battery or backup generation infrastructure. The batteries won't be available in large enough capacity. The backup generation is - wait for it - powered by gas, and less efficient for transportation than directly burning gas in the car's engine.
- I'm predicting many individuals purchase gas generators as backups for their home, given how inconsistent power availability will be in California.
- All these inconveniences will be absorbed by wealthy folks, like many of the commenters here, who pat themselves on the back for their virtuous actions. All the while callously creating ever greater burdens on the lower and middle class.
> this is a direct tax on the poor and forced transfer of money to green business like Musk's
Poor people aren't buying new cars. They're buying 10 year old cars that can still run on gas, be hybrids, or be electric. The same situation as now.
> - Battery production is already a highly polluting operation.
So is gas, "both ways". EG: exploration, drilling, refining, shipment, and actually burning it. Not to mention spills. This is a straw man.
> - I'm predicting many individuals buy gas generators as backups for their home, given how inconsistent power availability will be in California.
This is a PG&E problem.
Don't hate progress, dude. New cars must not pollute in 15 years time. You could raise a kid to have a better understanding of the environment than a lot of people in that same time. This is a long time.
This move feels radical, but I don't see how we avert catastrophe without moves that feel radical. If we keep plodding down the course we're on we'll just sleepwalk into oblivion.