Carbon is our enemy

not sure if all of it is fluff.

one thing I'm sure of, it's a really good way to promote more taxes.

 

Fairly mind-blowing the way our ability to do stuff kind of took off, starting when we stopped assuming everything happened for unlearnable reasons.

Even stuff we've SEEN as a (mumble) million year old species wasn't getting written down for most of the (mumble).

How many things we wouldn't know if looking at evidence weren't allowed.

 

Having a car with only one drive train is going to win out in the long run once all the supply chain and manufacturing issues are worked out. Why would third world car buyers want a PHEV (for a mass market car). They would end up using whatever fuel is cheapest. Period. So if electricity is cheaper why would they not want a BEV that has the range they need. Which for most people would be a smallish battery.

The author also fails in his overall argument because he is only addressing CO2. What about all the other issues with emitting smog forming chemicals into the air in places with more lax laws? What about air quality in all big cities?

I'm not arguing against PHEV. I've had a PIP for 9 years. (Now also a Model 3). Real enemy is ICE only cars, especially low mpg. The other enemy is car companies trying to delay EV adoption with anti-EV ads.

Mike

 

@ChapmanF would lead us into interesting waters:

https://priceonomics.com/the-guinness-brewer-who-revolutionized-statistics/#:~:text=Gosset%20is%20the%20%E2%80%9Cstudent%E2%80%9D%20of%20the%20Student%E2%80%99s%20T-Test%2C,a%20brewer%20for%20Guinness%20from%201899%20to%201937.

 

Concur, wholeheartedly!

Just look at ALL of the evidence, and do so agnostically, and perhaps with just a smidge of humility.

 

"...when we stopped assuming everything happened for unlearnable reasons."

Good point but I shall haggle. Human recognition and use of patterns came quite early (Stonehenge or other paleo astronomy). Human recognition and use of mechanisms was the turning point. They can be abstracted and applied elsewhere.

 

In a Broad sense, we know the climate cycle of the Earth, and what drives changes.

Last time CO2 levels increased so rapidly, I am aware of, was before the Great Dying; the Permian-Triassic extinction. That 'rapid' increase was from a lava field the size of, IIRC, Poland. We might be increasing CO2 levels faster than that with fossil fuel burning.

Compared to CO2 and global warming, those are local issues. Once the offending pollution sources are addressed, they also tend to clean up relatively quickly. Stop putting the offending chemicals into the air, and they get processed out.

If we hit carbon neutral emissions, it will take longer for CO2 levels to drop without human help. The natural processes that take CO2 out of the atmosphere are likely over saturated at this point.

 

@Trollbait , I never looked hard at those numbers This source:

Estimated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the Permian, shown... | Download Scientific Diagram

(full article free to download). Says Siberian traps covered 2.5 to 5 million km2 (Poland 313 thousand km2). Steepest part of increase shown in Fig 6 was +1600 ppm CO2 in 1.3 million years. About 0.001 ppm per year. However this is really old paleoproxy work, not as precise as we'd desire, and during that period there may have been times with faster increase.

Glacial cycles of about half million years ago offer more accurate records (unless one discards the whole thing as a hoax ). These graphs are all over the place, choose any. The two steepest increases work out to about 0.01 ppm per year. So they are steeper, but of course did not go so high, and so less CO2 was involved.

CO2 is now increasing by more than 2 ppm per year. This is half of fossil fuel emissions, with the other half going into terrestrial and marine sinks in about equal shares.

 

This https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22298-7 is using 75k years as the time period of the CO2 spike, putting the rate at 0.0277 ppm per year.

A MIT group has the rate at somewhat less than today.
CO2 build-up and great dying related | Earth | EarthSky
Calibrating the End-Permian Mass Extinction | Science

Then this study puts the decline in ocean carbonate happening over 2100 to 18,800 years.
High-precision timeline for Earth’s most severe extinction | PNAS

 

That PNAS is a 'keeper'. Arigato.

It seems that analyses of P/T extinction have not found +CO2 to have reached 1 ppm/year. We might conclude that no better understanding of it can emerge, because 'paleosensors' have limitations.

It seems fair to me that glacial-cycle rates should be smaller than that P/T because they only 'move the deck chairs'; they do not invoke new large sources.

Fossil-combustion-driven CO2 increase was at 1 ppm/year as soon as Keeling got set up in Hawaii. I suppose he arrived early enough to catch most of the +1 ppm/year era.

 

And I am positively sure that is a statement that is promoted by a warped political view.

 

funny how some people call everything that differs from their opinion "warped", and others just look at it as another opinion.

buying a set of tires now has a "disposal fee" tacked into it. they're still dumping tires in the exact same manner they always did, but now the govt charges more than just sales tax for the privilege. (govt loves extra taxes, for any excuse)

have you noticed that electric cars are now given extra fees on their tax/title ? yup, they're still paying sales tax on their tires, electricity, fluids, polishes, etc... but since the global warming/climate change garbage is happening, they need to pay extra taxes. this doesn't prevent them contributing to the global warming/climate change garbage, they just get charged more because the gov loves to tax, for any excuse.

is Tesla owner x going to stop driving because he's taxed more during his title assessment ? no. he's going to pay the tax and keep rolling.

where does this tax go ?
who does it benefit ?
is inflation effected by it ?
does climate change/global warming stop because of more taxes ?

 

btw...

when I was dumping tires a month ago, it took at least ten phone calls to 5 different land fills, to find one that would accept tires. during a conversation with a sheriff's deputy at a lease area where I was picking up tires to take along with mine, I pointed out how difficult it was too find legal places to accept tires.

his response, "well heck, I guess that's why everyone just rolls them down a hill and drives off!?!?”

yuuuuup, as I was loading the tires, I wondered if the govt actually wanted to "keep the environment clean!" when they charged $10 per tire to accept used.... the same govt that charged $4 each during the sale of tires door "disposal fees".

it's weird, warped world

 

If it does not go to the right places and benefit the right people.......then your outrage should be with the corrupt politicians and NOT with taxes themselves.

Taxes are a necessary evil.
Corruption in their administration is NOT.

 

Having a hard time logically following the argument from Gill Pratt. He mentions his commuting about the average US distance using his Model X, but finding it wasteful with its 300 mile range battery. But then he mentions "we hardly ever put gas into our RAV4 Prime PHEV".

He notes he is a 3+ vehicle household. So in his case, if his purported concerns were really so, he would have been better off with two shorter range BEVs to commute and then to use an efficient hybrid for his rare long distance commuting (or even rent a long range BEV).

 

^.....'only' 2 BEVs and a PHEV.
That's why "being green" is mostly a one-percenter's hobby.

Elon (showmanship and social issues notwithstanding) at least WANTS BEVs to be democratized in the end.

Kinda.

 

An (actual paid) author's perspective on Toyota, hybrids, etc.:

Toyota bet wrong on EVs, so now it’s lobbying to slow the transition | Ars Technica

 

TIM DE CHANTTim De Chant covers technology, policy, and energy at Ars. He has written for Wired, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, and he teaches science writing at MIT. ...De Chant received his PhD in environmental science from the UC-Berkeley.

Clearly an unbiased observer.

FWIW, I think he's right about Hydrogen, but I think he's missing the whole point about Toyota's strategery.
Personally I think that they're going to 'stand on the shoulders of giants.'

They might have to tinker with H for a while since they face much different infrastructural issues than we do in the much warner, sunnier, and more open norteamericana.....but I'm sure that they'll get there in the end.

 

I suppose that a good way to detect an unbiased observer is to read their observations:

Tim De Chant | Journalist & Editor

 

His field of peer reviewed publications not entirely unrelated to the field of a certain DAS?

Tim De Chant | Research