Lemdro.id

27 points

1 year ago

Electric cars will not save the planet. Electric cars will save the car industry.

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4 points

1 year ago

But they’re a whole lot better for the planet than gas cars. And cars won’t go away till we make alternatives. Which we should do as quickly as possible, but will still take a while.

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3 points

1 year ago

It’s not good enough. Cars are a bigger problem than their immediately obvious issues like pollution.

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1 point

1 year ago

??? I hugely disagree that cars are a bigger problem than green house gas pollution. I can live in an unwalkable city. I probably can’t live on a +4°C earth.

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1 point

1 year ago

Designing a city to be hostile to cars takes more vehicles off the road than trying to push people into electrics. Less cars (of any type) in the city means less health hazards means billions saved means billions to use on climate change research. Please don’t forget that tires are the major polluting factor right now, not exhaust gasses. I strongly believe this is more effective than trying to slowly push people into electrics which will still pollute the air with microplastics and make a ton of noise when they race through the city. Lithium is also not particularly clean to mine, so I’d prefer it was used to make batteries for bikes and other similarly sized vehicles. The world does not have the mining and processing capacity to support converting everyone to an electric car.

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DeprecatedCompatV2@programming.dev

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2 points

1 year ago

I usually visit my closest city for one of two reasons: 1) I have some kind of appointment or 2) I know some who lives there. Right now I’m able to drive there and park on the street. What should my alternative be once the city is “hostile” to cars? Remember, I live 30+ minutes away by car and take a highway to get there.

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2 points

1 year ago

What’s your source on tires? This estimates 75k miles for tire replacement. That amount of gas would emit 30000kg of co2, vs 350 kg co2 for 4 tires.

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2 points

1 year ago

I think co2 ghgs global warming is by far the biggest environmental catastrophe coming our way. So the most important factor will be how will it impact co2 emissions.

As I said, we should make alternatives to driving in cities as quickly as we can. But that will still take a while. What are you suggesting in the mean time? Not going places?

EVs are much better than gas for minimizing co2 emissions. I think we should encourage them as a transitional solution till we have trains and walkable or bikeable cities.

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1 point

1 year ago

I think we should encourage them as a transitional solution till we have trains and walkable or bikeable cities.

This is my problem. I don’t think we’ll ever reach that point when we accept half-solutions. It wouldn’t take more than a single decade to uproot our city design if we had any ambition left, but alas.

Our disagreement is that I think the societal cost of cars is more than you think, not that I think electric cars are a bad transitional step. But I also think that we live under an economic model that will kick, fight and scream the whole time we try to uproot such a massive portion of it, being the oil industry. It’s possible we just can’t fix it at this point except by radical change. I don’t have ultimate solutions, I’m just wary of electric cars because lithium mining is just as bad as oil drilling from a different direction and electric cars will kill just as many kids in the street as combustion cars.

By all means make electric vehicles- just please not cars.

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3 points

1 year ago

Cars are simply not a good method of individual transportation, regardless of what energy they consume. Theyre just too big.

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Iron Lynx@lemmy.world

2 points

1 year ago

You’re still lugging around 1500 to 2000 kg of steel, glass & plastic to move around little more than your butt. You can do something more efficient than that, assuming the infrastructure is rigged up to handle it.

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1 point

1 year ago

Yup, not ideal. But the available infrastructure is the key point as you said. A lot of places in the US there just isn’t an alternative.

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excitingburp@lemmy.world

4 points

1 year ago

… so long as you’re not leasing them, the lifetime energy cost is night and day.

The current rhetoric against EVs is reminiscent of the rhetoric against nuclear power. Yes, it’s not great. Yes, it’s not renewable. However, it gives us more time to more deeply address these issues. The successful anti-nuclear Green Peace campaigns against nuclear have done immeasurable damage to the environment in the long-term (I’m now convinced they were a big oil sock puppet all along). The same could be said for the anti-EV crowd, but the “EVs are sexy” campaign seems to be gaining more traction this time round.

Make no mistake though, the “EVs are just as bad” is a myth perpetuated by big oil.

If you can do a bike, then please do a bike (or a scooter, or one of the many options). If you can’t, then an EV is a good choice. If you can’t afford an EV. But never, ever, lease.

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GreenM@lemmy.world

0 points

1 year ago

Actually, they are not common yet because car manufacturers knew they could potentially lose profit as it`s simpler (mechanically ) machine and thus car should break less and they would sell less as result.

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