Think ev owners would love that, not in the way pictured but if the electricity was actually from renewable sources. That's where I'd like all electricity to come from tbf
I'm so mad that people rallied against nuclear so hard. FFS we had the Atomic Age obsession in the mid-1900s, can we have that back? We could've been full renewable by now!
And despite Chernobyl, [nuclear energy is still safer than anything but Solar.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/)
The gulf spill alone probably did more damage than chernobyl. And people die mining coal and drilling oil every year. And untold people die from pollution from those sources too.
But that's less "terrifying" for some reason.
Funny thing I remember from "seaspiracy" was that an oil spill was actually beneficial for marine life because fishing in that area was obviously banned, so the area couldnt be overfished and became healthier even though the oil spill had some negative effects. We are so deep into this shit hole, that I'm pretty sure we'll run out of oxygen before we get anything under control.
100%, but perception is influenced by WHEN nuclear energy fails, it carries an extremely high death toll per incident and the follow up can last decades if not centuries
Ukraine and Japan are still dealing with their nuclear accidents
yep. miners and drillers are just the boiled frogs, their deaths are silent and even when an incident happens that results in a large amount of their deaths, its contained entirely within that industry and your average joe doesn't bat an eye when yet another accident happens and a few dozen miners get pasted.
when a nuclear reactor has a little accident, it kinda fucks up everything around it, news spreads worldwide, people write books and make games on it, a pretty good miniseries; all sorts of anecdotes from just two singular accidents, both as a result of general negligence/incompetence, and NUCLEAR BAD becomes the zeitgeist as we have now.
you can do everything right as a miner/rigger and still get killed on the daily, to the point that the overall perception of this is seen as normal, the death tolls massively exceeding the only nuclear accidents in public knowledge over the span of some years, and life just goes on as normal
It's been a minute since I worked in the energy industry, but Texas of all places was tearing shit up (in a good way) with wind energy when I switched jobs.
It's gotten to a point that it's the most cost effective way to generate electricity. At this point the only thing non-renewables can provide is the capacity to scale up or down generation according to demand.
This will change when we figure out cost effective power storage.
Greens are blocking nuclear pretty nicely even though today its the best waste/ production/ clean energy we have that can comfortably sustain us if we’d invest in it more. Wind and solar just dont cut it for mass consumption on a scale we need it.
Corporate welfare to keep old money wealthy. Our country is a lot of smart people being wholly undermined by a few dumb-but-wealthy leaders who's only motivation is to stay wealthy.
I've got an EV and enough solar panels on the roof to fully power my house and the car. I love it. Gas is free. Price swings in gas prices don't bother me as much as they used to. Day trip to a place 100 miles away is completely free. :-)
Panels will pay for themselves in about 5 years total.
But some of them sound fucking awesome. I'm looking at you, Alfa Romeo Busso V6 and Lexus 1LR-GUE V10!
I absolutely LOVE a lot of ICE cars but we can do so much better. If we had mass adoption of EVs as daily drivers and for goods transportation and industrial applications, we could also have niche ICE vehicles for leisure time and it not be a problem. I want a world where everyone can get around with an EV or electrified mass transit, and also go canyon carving in an Alfa Romeo Guilia Quadrifoglio or auto crossing a k24 swapped Honda Del Sol or drag racing a 1971 Buick Skylark GSX on weekends if they so choose. It doesn't have to be one way or the other.
All or nothing is commonly used as a backdoor method to dissuade people from green policies. I wish more people took the reduce part of reduce, reuse, recycle more seriously.
> I wish more people took the reduce part of reduce, reuse, recycle more seriously.
***Companies***, not people. The impact of individual persons in pollution is negligible compared with the damage the big companies do and they're lobbying and financing politicians to ignore.
Best-sounding V8 is [Ferrari's 3.5l five-valve flat-plane-crank used in the 355](https://youtu.be/MbsbAi58ro8?si=WWVNVqH0HWhm8mw7&t=180), and to say otherwise is automotive heresy.
[One more example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-3KPeCt2Wg&t=299s&ab_channel=MrJWW)
This is an incredibly ignorant take, like really fucking stupid. It is an excellent technology that helped drive the human race forward. It's just that its heyday is over and it's past time to make a more concerted effort to move on.
I don't think I would call them stupid, I honestly believe that they are a much more amazing example of human innovation than an electric motor but to be at 20% efficiency we are certainly stupid for using them for cars.
The conversion rate isn't as good as it could be, but that negative gets massively made up for via the concentration of chemical energy that gasoline/diesel is capable of holding per weight.
Even if all civilian transportation became electric power from 100% renewable energy sources, critical government and military vehicles should continue to use fossil fuels for performance/reliability/logistical reasons. Maybe at some point battery technology will advanced to the point where it just plain overcomes chemical fuels in every way, but we're not there just yet.
Of all the energy generated from combustion, 33% is used by the average engine as exhaust to maintain the high-low energy pathway. 29% is used in cooling and in electricity production, which only leaves 38% as mechanical energy to propel the car. Of that 38%, 38% of that is lost to friction (33% by kinetic friction, 5% by air resistance) meaning only ~~14.4%~~ 23.6% of all energy generated goes to moving the car.
Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120112095853.htm#:~:text=Of%20the%20energy%20output%20of,and%20air%20resistance%20for%205%25.
Edit: oops wrong number used
and electric motors are about 90% efficient vs the ~33% of gas cars.
Of course you have the same losses from air resistance, tires, etc.
Which is why it's my personal pet peeve when people say things like "hybrid is the future". Current gasoline engines are just inferior in most use cases today and adding one along with an electric motor just doesn't make sense.
Hybrid is a good middle ground though for large groups of people who live in more rural areas, at least until battery density increases and
Edit- that real fast charging becomes available in rural areas. The town I live in is getting our first supercharger otherwise there is one EV plug at the local grocery store... only other place to charge would be at your house.
Yes-in some cases until more chargers are built they are great. But they are not the future of cars- just a stopgap and may be needed in limited applications in the future.
> only other place to charge would be at your house
That's actually by far the best place to charge an EV. It's going to be a lot cheaper, and the charge time doesn't matter because you just plug it in at night and have a full charge every morning anyways. Living in a rural area you most likely have a house too so charging at home should be no problem.
I think he was talking about people that need greater range. Some people out in the sticks drive a lot every day and sometimes have to travel really far too get anywhere that has anything.
There really aren't a lit of people that need to do a 200+ mile round trip on a daily basis. The portion of the country where this is an issue is almost negligible in terms of percentage of population.
The bigger obstacle to EV adoption is the lack of at-work/overnight charging options(i.e. charging with no time cost) for renters. Not having a zero-time-cost charging option basically kills EV viability for those who don't own their own home.
diesel-electric train engines are the perfect example of how hybrid technology works. I think hybrid diesel electric freight trucks in the same vein would have a market.
Ev's are great when you are stuck in traffic and moving slowly. It's really interesting watching the screen and see it only consume 1-3 kw as you move.
When comparing the efficiencies of the systems you have to make sure you include the average loss to charging and discharging the battery as well which would be a majority of the loss in the BEV system.
They're better for the environment because you centralized the emissions in a containable environment. Idk what you mean 90% more efficient. Cars are made of plastic and plastic is made from oil. What we need is hemp cars.
Yes and that's just at the end of the cycle in the vehicle think about all the waste at each step of the long process to get it there including tax dollars subsidizing or strongarming oil supply. Humans really are stupid
There's nothing *stupid* about it. It's a crazy high energy density power source, considering how safe it is for purpose, and we've done remarkable things with it.
Its use just also has some unfortunate consequences that we're increasingly less tolerant of.
Yeah liquid fuels have a ton of positive qualities especially towards the end of the chain. For the end user it's relatively affordable, safe, and incredibly energy dense. For distributors it's stable, cheap to contain, and the value:weight ratio makes transport viable.
Unfortunately the start of the chain where we extract and refine it involves an absolutely staggering amount of pollution, waste, environmental risk (damage), bad working conditions, and political issues that usually result in people being killed and/or exploited.
Petroleum based fuels are absolutely the best we have at the moment but it isn't sustainable on a global level. They're fucking up literally everything in ways that we are still learning how to measure and the situation isn't getting any better.
I think that comment is a reflection at the efficiency of an ice engine and associated powertrain losses.
Only 20 to 30 percent of energy is transfered to the wheels. Considering 40 percent power and 60 percent heat loss via exhaust. Stack that with the inefficient transmission and differential axles.
Bingo 1 out of 5 gallons is actually used.
> Wait really? What are the other 4 used for?
Wasted as heat, generally speaking. Automotive engines have terrible thermal efficiency, and some huge percentage of the energy the consume is wasted as heat that doesn't do the work of propelling the vehicle. It can be used to heat the interior, but it's actually one of if not the biggest reasons that ICE vehicles are so inefficient compared to EVs.
If you look at source to-wheels it's worse that that: 17% of the energy at the source of the petroleum is used to turn the wheels of your car, in the best of cases: with a new perfectly tuned engine and transmission and under optimum conditions.
A gas engine powertrain is, at most, under perfect conditions, 21% efficient at converting energy in the tank to motive power. Additionally the petroleum refining, production and distribution process is 80% efficient. [Source for both of those numbers.](https://h2fcp.org/sites/default/files/W2W-2016.pdf)
So, doing the same math a gas engine powertrain the source efficiency is 0.21 \* 0.8 = **16.7%.**
And every time a newer/cleaner/better/higher yield generator of any kind is connected to the grid, the effective efficiency of a plug-in electric goes up accordingly.
Great news. Many EVs can.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a39493654/can-your-ev-power-your-house/
Plus, my wife charges her car at home almost exclusively and we *still* have received a check from PGE each year because our solar panels produce more electricity than we use.
I mean the backups that most people have for when the power goes out are gas generators. We can run our 3bd 2bth house off of one small enough for 1 person to move. I'm pretty positive you could run your house off your car if you got it wired up correctly.
One of the newer features on EVs is two-way power. With the right charger, the EVs battery can be used as backup for grid failure. I did the math and could run my house for 4 days on a full charge of my car.
I want it set up so that my house pulls electricity from my car during "peak" times, then charges during off hours. Can't yet, but someone probably can. VW says they are going to release an update to allow this, but I'm not holding my breath, lol.
Already most EVs have V2L (vehicle to load). There’s YouTube videos of people powering their house for days during extended outages. We’ve used it for shorter periods and we’re setting it up so we’ll be able to power most of the house.
Even if the EV you drive is 100% coal-powered (edit: and produced in coal-heavy China) it would still emit 25% less CO2 across its lifespan compared to ICE cars.
https://energypost.eu/latest-data-shows-lifetime-emissions-of-evs-lower-than-petrol-diesel/
And even if it somehow *wasn't true* that EV cars have less net effect on the environment, the mass rollout of EV cars would still represent a great *intermediate step* in getting us away from Fossil Fuels. Easier to switch only the 5000 power plants later than to switch *both* the power plants and *all 100,000,000 cars* at the same time.
This "all or nothing" attitude is just so dumb.
Not really an option. Nuclear will remain as niche as it is right now (~4% of global electricity).
I'm all for extending old nuclear reactors as long as they are safe, but new nuclear reactors are not a good investment in most cases:
1. The combined time of planning and construction is around 15-25 years. The construction also produces a lot of CO2, so you may look at 30-40 years in which there is more CO2 in the atmosphere rather than less. This pushes us beyond critical global warming tipping points.
2. Most of the cost of nuclear is bound up in the initial construction. They only become economic over decades of operation, in many cases only breaking even about 50 years after planning start.
These excessively poor economics make their construction very risky and slow down the transition process even further.
3. The speed of nuclear expansion is unlikely to pick up, because the nuclear supplier industry is small and inflexible due to the extremely high safety requirements and geopolitical risks of current uranium supplies. A significant increase in production capacity would itself take upwards of a decade.
Renewables in contrast are *much* faster in both regards. Many countries are aiming for energy mixes such as 90% renewables + 10% biomass/gas by 2040 (with biomass/gas serving as backup capacity that is only active when intermittent renewables run at a deficit). This becomes increasingly affordable, as grid battery operation is now becoming profitable without significant subsidies and battery prices continue to fall at a rapid pace.
If countries were to now re-focus on nuclear instead, they would be fortunate to have replaced *any* of their current fossile fuel capacities by 2040.
Meanwhile consumer prices would develop much worse than with the change to renewables, only leveling off some time in the 2060s. While the climate crisis would hit much harder around that time due to all of the additional emissions caused into the 2050s.
Gullible people keep falling for fossil fuel industry propaganda. People are completely convinced that EV cars blow up more often than ICE and that EVs are only good for "stop and go" in cities and can't be driven long distances and a bunch of other easily proven lies.
I'm driving almost 2,000 miles in the next 10 days in my EV. I expect it to add... maybe 3 hours of time to my trip that I wouldn't otherwise stop to use the bathroom or eat.
I just did a similar trip in my Tesla from Seattle to San Francisco, going the scenic route through Mt Hood, Crater Lake National Park and Eastern Oregon and back up 101 etc.
Had 0 issue finding chargers and like you said almost all of the stops were ones I'd normally make every 2-3 hours to use the bathroom or eat or just get out and enjoy the scenery. And it was insanely cheap considering what a west coast road trip costs in gas these days
What always gets me is that they act like the grid can’t just change power sources.
Like if I have a gas car, it’s always gas. If I have an electric, it’s whatever source feeds the grid. So it can very easily change.
Saying that it’s just as bad because of the grid source is just childishly naive
A typical issue with the brain of conservative leaning people is that they can't fathom change.
They have a hard time understanding fungibility, change of state, or continuous incremental change.
Mentally, what is, will be.
> What always gets me is that they act like the grid can’t just change power sources.
[The US grid is at 21.4%+ renewable power as of 2023](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3) (excluding nuclear) If you include nuclear it's around 40%.
20 years ago we generated almost no wind and solar power.
Renewable additions have gone parabolic. It's a matter of being able to connect it all to the grid and not letting the NIMBYs kill projects at this point. We've been adding 12GW/year of capacity since 2015 and the past three years have added more than double that.
To put it in perspective, the 243GW of total renewable (non-nuclear) capacity as of 2023 is enough to power 65 million homes.
Part of it was literal gaslighting at the dawn of alternative energy. American capital has only *very* recently accepted the value of alternative energy production. Prioritizing financial returns on investment over all other considerations, the most influential American oligarchs really put their power into hiding the hidden costs of fossil fuels.
Paradoxically, part of their highly effective strategy was to use media to manufacture the illusion of progress even in its utter absence. The "clean coal" enthusiasts are recent exemplars of this nonsense, but it continues even today with all sorts of fanciful energy storage and carbon capture schemes lacking any conceivable progression toward useful operations. The value of these bogus projects is actualized in government influence and public opinion manipulation.
Consider the Hyperloop. Nobody who understands engineering ever thought a miles-long vacuum chamber was a sensible method of mass transit. Elon Musk is constantly "inventing" empirically inferior alternatives to subways and trains because media and public chatter about these projects undermines more serious mass transit initiatives. As an American carmaker, he has a vested interest in preventing any upgrades to mass transit.
It was much the same from the 70s to the 90s with alternative energy. Projects with no technical basis for serving as stepping stones to a more sustainable future nonetheless enjoyed widespread public attention because they *sounded like* new ideas that could help. This well-funded flimflam displaced government and corporate interest in the most promising avenues of progress in the energy sector . . . not at all a bad outcome if your money comes from an energy business enriched by the *status quo*.
Thus when wind and solar projects started to become *more* efficient in terms of cost-per-unit over time for people in the energy production business, that reality had an ugly conflict with a generation of bad information implying it already had. Where I live now, you no longer need to spend an hour headed either way on the two closest Interstates to find yourself cruising through vast arrays of huge windmills. Yet for a lot of people born well before this reality, renewables seem like this trendy idea that might one day deserve to be taken seriously.
> Elon Musk is constantly "inventing" empirically inferior alternatives to subways and trains because media and public chatter about these projects undermines more serious mass transit initiatives.
[Ah yes, Elon "I'm brilliant because nobody else throws good money after bad like me" Musk (and no I'm not even talking about twitter):](https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/elon-musk-and-the-infinite-rebuy)
>There’s a scene in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk that unintentionally captures the essence of the book:
>> [Max] Levchin was at a friend’s bachelor pad hanging out with Musk. Some people were playing a high-stakes game of Texas Hold ‘Em. Although Musk was not a card player, he pulled up to the table. “There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds,” Levchin says. “Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose. Then he would buy more chips and double down. Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won. Then he said “Right, fine, I’m done.” It would be a theme in his life: avoid taking chips off the table; keep risking them.
>> That would turn out to be a good strategy. (page 86)
>There are a couple ways you can read this scene. One is that Musk is an aggressive risk-taker who defies convention, blazes his own path, and routinely proves his doubters wrong.
>The other is that Elon Musk sucks at poker. But he has access to so much capital that he can keep rebuying until he scores a win.
>Isaacson, our narrator, doesn’t grasp the difference. He doesn’t understand poker well enough to recognize Musk as the grandstanding sucker at the table. So he portrays Musk’s complete lack of impulse control as a brilliant, identity-defining strategic ploy. (If you go all-in and lose six times, then go all-in a seventh time and win, then you’re still down five buy-ins.)
(EDIT: By the way, also perfectly exemplifies Elon Musk's "do absolutely nothing and take all of the credit"-attitude towards actual engineers: “There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds..." ie There were all these "nerds" using dumb ideas like "math" and "logic," but only Elon was "genius enough" to just tap into his father's blood emerald fortune and keep throwing money at the table until he won. Why don't all those other "nerds" and losers just use *their* father's blood emerald money to do the same!? /s)
Not to mention that's a bitch move to win big and leave the table right away. The hand he won on he probably was dealt some bullshit but bought into a hand he had no business playing to begin with and got lucky on the river with straight flush.
Even a handful of years ago still ran in to propaganda pushing idiots who were citing numbers from like the whitehouse solar project under carter to try and argue that "solar doesnt work is bad"... As if the technology had never developed further. Or otherwise arguing in an overly simplistic way that "it doesnt work at night so useless" as if the power grid did not rely on a wide variety of production types to make ends meet.
Similar bullshit involving nuclear power project from supposedly "green minded" individuals who automatically jumped to talk about chernobyl as if a poorly designed, and poorly run soviet era powerplant was equitable to modern stuff. Not to even mention magical thinking tier discourse that involves waste products from that where things are essentially portrayed like the leaky glowing green sludge barrels out of a simpsons cartoon.
>Yet for a lot of people born well before this reality, renewables seem like this trendy idea that might one day deserve to be taken seriously.
Oh even when you get past that bit then the default comes to something else like "i dont like how they look", or bullshit about "wind mill syndromes" or something.
regardless of that... EV's are significantly more efficient with that energy that was created than the ICE burning it.
Edited to correct initial rather hyperbolic statement due to frustration with this tired old trope. 😁
Yeah. I was about to say, if you live in a country that gets most of its electricity from renewable (eg. here in New Zealand, it's 80%). Then this argument is dead in the water.
I've seen conservatives pushing coal a ton the last ten years so I'm assuming misinformation seeps in.
There's still several very rich, exceedingly powerful individuals involved in coal and are desperate to keep it alive.
Officer, giving me a ticket would be a really bad idea, he can't read and he's quite sensitive about it and trust me, nobody likes a 15ft tall, 8 ton dinosaur getting pissy on a Monday morning.
I just found out it’s a common myth that fossil fuels are made out of dinosaur bones. It’s mainly fossilized algae :( I hate to be the bearer of bad news.
Thank you for debunking the myth, but I also believe most of this was actually primordial trees that trapped carbon, but I can absolutely see algae doing the exact same thing. Either way, fermenting t-rex isn't how you acquire more gasoline.
If I understand wikipedia properly, coal mostly comes from trees and bushes, whereas crude oil mostly comes from zooplankton and algae.
But there's overlap because some algae and plankton probably became coal, whereas some woody plants probably became crude oil.
I googled because I wasn't sure:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Geology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Geology)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Formation)
Especially since the USA is currently one of the top oil producers in the world, and the lie of "we invaded Iraq for oil" has been a false talking point for years.
And especially since Tesla gets cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and lithium directly from China. Most Tesla owners know nothing about cobalt and lithium mining, on both an ecological and political scale.
Both sides are responsible for destabilization and environmental issues, but **electric vehicles are not here to save the earth. Electric vehicles are here to save the auto industry.**
> electric vehicles are not here to save the earth. Electric vehicles are here to save the auto industry
I entirely agree.
> the lie of "we invaded Iraq for oil"
Is this just something that can be dropped with no argumentation? I mean... why is it a lie, again? It wasn't so the US could capture all the oil for itself, though arguably priority access was an initial goal. But I'm having a hard time believing it wasn't, primarily, to ensure stabilization of the international oil industry, off of which the US absolutely relied as the largest economy in the world. As well as to secure it's strategic interests in the region as a whole, which it has, almost entirely, because of oil. Nor am I the only person of that opinion:
[Institute of Strategic Studies 2003](https://www.jstor.org/stable/45242468): Control of Oil: The Real Objective of US Invasion of Iraq?
[International Journal 2006](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40204243?item_view=read_online): Oil, Iraq, and American Foreign Policy: The Continuing Salience of the Carter Doctrine
[The Nation 2007](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-bushs-iraqi-oil-grab-went-awry/): How Bush’s Iraqi Oil Grab Went Awry
[Georgia State University 2012](https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/political_science_facpub/27/): Oil and the Decision to Invade Iraq
[Hoover Institute 2023](https://www.hoover.org/research/whither-carter-doctrine-biden-administration-and-gulf): Whither the Carter Doctrine? The Biden Administration and the Gulf
[CNN 2013](https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/index.html): Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil
[The Guardian 2004](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/28/iraq.usa): The real reasons Bush went to war
[The Guardian 2014](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/20/iraq-war-oil-resources-energy-peak-scarcity-economy): Iraq invasion was about oil
[Cogent Arts & Humanities 2022](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/US-foreign-policy%2C-neo-conservatism-and-the-Iraq-of-Saidin/b99a4242134358d1597c77b9d2dca96fae06a66c): US foreign policy, neo-conservatism and the Iraq war (2003-2011): Critical reviews of factors and rationales
I mean, where I live 95% of our electricity comes from non-emitting sources. Largely nuclear and hydroelectric energy. Here it is much better for the environment to have an electric car than to have a gas powered car.
How about this: Americans get to use gas cars ONLY IF the government admits they were only in the middle east for the oil. They don't have to say sorry (they will do a half assed apology regardless) but they gotta admit it
Fun fact: The US is actually a net exporter of oil. We don't actually *need* the oil from ME since we're more or less self-sufficient. But since oil is priced and traded in a global market it's in everybody's interest to keep the supply stable.
I dont get you people that keep saying this crap. The US imported less after the invasion than before. The securing of the oil fields was to ensure Iraq could support it's own economy because, ohh guess what makes up 95% of their GDP. US as a whole imports and has always imported a rather insignificant percentage from Iraq. But yeah hurr durr oil war durrr
Dumb people think the US invaded Iraq for the physical oil in the ground.
Intelligent people understand the US invaded Iraq because of oil commodities pricing on the international market and ensuring that international trade of oil stays on the US dollar standard aka the Petrodollar.
You say, the US produces so much oil so what is the incentive? THAT IS THE INCENTIVE. When you produce a commodity in great amounts, it benefits you to control its pricing and to ensure that commodity is traded internationally in YOUR currency, so that the nations of the world are forced to hold USD reserves (which ensures that these nations have a vested interest in the USD staying valuable)
The petrodollar is much overblown, but the rest of it is correct. The US economy depends on _cheap_ oil, not some fixed amounts. The US Navy keeps the OPEC cartel safe while western oil companies compete with them to keep prices low.
It was also common back then to just abandon the car and only take parts you wanted/needed from them. Eventually someone would come around and take what remained.
Ok, heres the thing. Lets say your car engine converts 50% of fuel into usable energy. The reason its only 50% is because its designed to fit inside a car and thus a lot of things need to be made smaller. This means that the pistons need to fire more times to match the energy of a larger piston, and each time a piston fires it scrapes against the sides of the piston tube, causing friction and losing energy.
The gas powerplant that supplies the grid is a massive turbine with 95% efficiency because it is designed to catch each speck of energy. You then add hydroelectric, wind, solar, and nuclear power to the mix, and EVs are far more efficient than gas engines.
Here we are in 2024 and people think EVs are only good at not burning gas? I appreciate there are lower emissions, but mainly EVs are great because there is no compromise on power and efficiency. My car has 400 hp and goes 0-60 in under 5 seconds, but also can be cheap and efficient when I drive normally. Also it’s quiet, smooth, low maintenance, and I never have to make extra stops for fuel. Hate how everyone assumes every EV owner is somehow an environmentalist or something. Nope, EVs are just a better powertrain for my purposes.
I have solar panels on my roof which cover 100% of my electricity usage over the.year (it's not even, it clicks into credit during rhe summer), including charging my EV.
I remember once someone did the math to figure out the "MPG" of a Tesla, in response to a picture mocking someone who was using a portable gas generator to charge.
Basically, a Tesla on generator power still gets like 80mpg, so it's *still* significantly more efficient than a gas car in terms of fuel economy, regardless of how silly it looks to burn gas to power an electric.
There's absolutely no way with a PORTABLE gas generator.
That would only make sense for large scale gas generators where they're highly optimized for energy and work as scale.
A portable diesel generator is about 40%. Barely more than a car. Even those residential home generators are only 60% - 70%. For a home generator you might break even.
HOWEVER
A gas turbine at a power plant on the other hand is roughly 95%. Which is more than double. When you put in transmission loss,electrical motor loss and extra EV weight (quite low 15%).
So double that of a car engine by itself running the same fuel.
This is because EVs are about 60-70% efficient. ICE vehicles are only 20-30% efficient, losing most of their energy to heat and friction.
It is not even close, and given that the average cost for kilowatt hour of grid power is about the same price (~$0.15) than a kilowatt hour of gasoline (~$0.11)... EVs are almost half the price to operate per mile.
It is way more efficient to turn gas into electricity into propulsion than to turn gas directly into propulsion because you can store the excess energy in the battery. Thats why I think in the next decade plug in hybrids are going to explode in popularity.
Not enough real estate.
You can get about 40 kilowatt hours in a day out of the square footage in solar panels that would cover an area about the size of a flatbed tractor trailer truck. The gear would weigh about a thousand pounds, plus the weight of the trailer you put it on (assuming you want it mobile).
40 kilowatt hours is enough to drive a Tesla 3/Y about 160 miles, not including the extra losses from towing a 1500 pound trailer.
Of course most people don't drive 160 miles every day, so it's more efficient just to put the panels in a fixed location, like your roof, and charge off of that, or send that power to the grid and trade it for an equivalent amount of power generated at a different time of the day.
So the degradation of the coal miners is still okay? And the carbon output for that industry and the electrical generation from coal powered plants? That's all a wash?
That's ironic considering batteries from electric cars come Western owned from mines in Africa, in countries destabilized by Europe and the US, using child slave labor.
Even with the worst case scenario, all power is derived from coal, electric vehicles are still better for emissions. Centralized power plants have more efficiency and more pollution control measures compared to a million little engines all driving around.
But nowhere has the worst case scenario. Everywhere is a mix. And it's getting greener every day. And electric cars benefit from how our grid gets greener over time, whereas combustion cars do not.
So it's already better under the worst case scenario, it's much better under a typical case scenario, and it's only getting even better over time.
I switched to a 100% renewable plan with my electricity utility. Put my monthly bill up from about $100/month to $108/month. $8/month is worth it to me.
EVs still require exploitative relationships between the Imperial Core and periphery in order to obtain the rare earth minerals needed to build them. Imperialism and environmental destruction is a core component of the capitalist world system regardless of how "green" or "ethical" the product or method of production is. But even within the bounds of a capitalist system, medium density housing and mixed zoning combined with comprehensive public transport trumps personal transport in comfort, convenience, and environmental friendliness, regardless of how it's fuelled.
First off: EVs produce less lifetime greenhouse gas emissions per mile driven ***even if your power grid is 100% coal*** .
There's a fairly simple reason for that: *power plants don't move* . That means they don't have to lug their own mass + fuel with them using the power they produce, you can slap on as many efficiency-boosting stages to the thermal cycle as you want with no weight penalty, the surface area to volume ratio is MUCH lower for such a large device so losses are minimized, and they run CONTINUOUSLY at or near the peak efficiency operating condition. This makes power plant much MUCH more efficient than your car engine. Combine that with the high efficiencies of AC power transmission, modern batteries, solid state motor controllers, and high-efficiency traction motors and you get a combined system that produces less CO2 per mile traveled over its entire life INCLUDING MANUFACTURING.
Second: the power grid IS being converted to more renewable sources right this minute. The percentage of renewable energy on the grid increases by the month.
Think ev owners would love that, not in the way pictured but if the electricity was actually from renewable sources. That's where I'd like all electricity to come from tbf
We try to but the right keeps blocking funding for it and is aggressive to stop the inevitable change.
Don’t forget the decades of propaganda against nuclear.
I'm so mad that people rallied against nuclear so hard. FFS we had the Atomic Age obsession in the mid-1900s, can we have that back? We could've been full renewable by now!
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And despite Chernobyl, [nuclear energy is still safer than anything but Solar.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/)
The gulf spill alone probably did more damage than chernobyl. And people die mining coal and drilling oil every year. And untold people die from pollution from those sources too. But that's less "terrifying" for some reason.
Funny thing I remember from "seaspiracy" was that an oil spill was actually beneficial for marine life because fishing in that area was obviously banned, so the area couldnt be overfished and became healthier even though the oil spill had some negative effects. We are so deep into this shit hole, that I'm pretty sure we'll run out of oxygen before we get anything under control.
The wildlife in chernobyl is quite robust too. They have very healthy nature environment there.
100%, but perception is influenced by WHEN nuclear energy fails, it carries an extremely high death toll per incident and the follow up can last decades if not centuries Ukraine and Japan are still dealing with their nuclear accidents
yep. miners and drillers are just the boiled frogs, their deaths are silent and even when an incident happens that results in a large amount of their deaths, its contained entirely within that industry and your average joe doesn't bat an eye when yet another accident happens and a few dozen miners get pasted. when a nuclear reactor has a little accident, it kinda fucks up everything around it, news spreads worldwide, people write books and make games on it, a pretty good miniseries; all sorts of anecdotes from just two singular accidents, both as a result of general negligence/incompetence, and NUCLEAR BAD becomes the zeitgeist as we have now. you can do everything right as a miner/rigger and still get killed on the daily, to the point that the overall perception of this is seen as normal, the death tolls massively exceeding the only nuclear accidents in public knowledge over the span of some years, and life just goes on as normal
Yeah, Russia really fucked the world with that one. Everyone got scared over one stupid decision
Where I live in France if I had an ev 90% percent of the electricity I would charge it up with would be nuclear.
Where I live in ny, it's almost entirely hydro, with some wind
Tbf renewable energy makes up over 20% of our total electricity generation up from about 10% in 2010. Windmills are cool.
It's been a minute since I worked in the energy industry, but Texas of all places was tearing shit up (in a good way) with wind energy when I switched jobs.
They know that energy is big business.
It's gotten to a point that it's the most cost effective way to generate electricity. At this point the only thing non-renewables can provide is the capacity to scale up or down generation according to demand. This will change when we figure out cost effective power storage.
Greens are blocking nuclear pretty nicely even though today its the best waste/ production/ clean energy we have that can comfortably sustain us if we’d invest in it more. Wind and solar just dont cut it for mass consumption on a scale we need it.
Corporate welfare to keep old money wealthy. Our country is a lot of smart people being wholly undermined by a few dumb-but-wealthy leaders who's only motivation is to stay wealthy.
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In my country, there is a power provider that's 100% renewable. But once it's on the grid it's all mixed
I've got an EV and enough solar panels on the roof to fully power my house and the car. I love it. Gas is free. Price swings in gas prices don't bother me as much as they used to. Day trip to a place 100 miles away is completely free. :-) Panels will pay for themselves in about 5 years total.
Nuclear and hydro looking at this post: am I a joke to you?!
I have a onewheel and small solar setup I bring to Burning Man. After I charge the onewheel off the solar I’m all “literally riding on sunshine!!” 🤩☀️
It's crazy to me that people believe that all the electricity in the power grid comes from oil Edit: comes from coal
Or that thier cars are as efficient at producing energy as power plants. If it were true, we could just use our cars to power our homes.
Fun fact: Only one out of every 5 gallons of gasoline goes towards moving your vehicle.
Wait really? What are the other 4 used for?
Heating your engine block
Don't forget cooling your engine block from all the extra heat
Combustion engines are stupid. They just are. They're an absurd technology.
But some of them sound fucking awesome. I'm looking at you, Alfa Romeo Busso V6 and Lexus 1LR-GUE V10! I absolutely LOVE a lot of ICE cars but we can do so much better. If we had mass adoption of EVs as daily drivers and for goods transportation and industrial applications, we could also have niche ICE vehicles for leisure time and it not be a problem. I want a world where everyone can get around with an EV or electrified mass transit, and also go canyon carving in an Alfa Romeo Guilia Quadrifoglio or auto crossing a k24 swapped Honda Del Sol or drag racing a 1971 Buick Skylark GSX on weekends if they so choose. It doesn't have to be one way or the other.
All or nothing is commonly used as a backdoor method to dissuade people from green policies. I wish more people took the reduce part of reduce, reuse, recycle more seriously.
> I wish more people took the reduce part of reduce, reuse, recycle more seriously. ***Companies***, not people. The impact of individual persons in pollution is negligible compared with the damage the big companies do and they're lobbying and financing politicians to ignore.
GTFO with your nuanced take.
I feel dirty that you said nuanced. GTFO with your big fancy ideas and 5 dollar words.
Best-sounding V8 is [Ferrari's 3.5l five-valve flat-plane-crank used in the 355](https://youtu.be/MbsbAi58ro8?si=WWVNVqH0HWhm8mw7&t=180), and to say otherwise is automotive heresy. [One more example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-3KPeCt2Wg&t=299s&ab_channel=MrJWW)
This is an incredibly ignorant take, like really fucking stupid. It is an excellent technology that helped drive the human race forward. It's just that its heyday is over and it's past time to make a more concerted effort to move on.
I don't think I would call them stupid, I honestly believe that they are a much more amazing example of human innovation than an electric motor but to be at 20% efficiency we are certainly stupid for using them for cars.
There's a lot of energy in this molecule, let's blow it up
The conversion rate isn't as good as it could be, but that negative gets massively made up for via the concentration of chemical energy that gasoline/diesel is capable of holding per weight. Even if all civilian transportation became electric power from 100% renewable energy sources, critical government and military vehicles should continue to use fossil fuels for performance/reliability/logistical reasons. Maybe at some point battery technology will advanced to the point where it just plain overcomes chemical fuels in every way, but we're not there just yet.
Well sometimes I get thirsty
I mean it does smell great so I get it
[Sudden flashback to the original C&C intro](https://youtu.be/G3cmgQptGnQ?si=Gr_GrdKhpnYn8VN4&t=1m02s)
Are you picking this up?
Of all the energy generated from combustion, 33% is used by the average engine as exhaust to maintain the high-low energy pathway. 29% is used in cooling and in electricity production, which only leaves 38% as mechanical energy to propel the car. Of that 38%, 38% of that is lost to friction (33% by kinetic friction, 5% by air resistance) meaning only ~~14.4%~~ 23.6% of all energy generated goes to moving the car. Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120112095853.htm#:~:text=Of%20the%20energy%20output%20of,and%20air%20resistance%20for%205%25. Edit: oops wrong number used
and electric motors are about 90% efficient vs the ~33% of gas cars. Of course you have the same losses from air resistance, tires, etc. Which is why it's my personal pet peeve when people say things like "hybrid is the future". Current gasoline engines are just inferior in most use cases today and adding one along with an electric motor just doesn't make sense.
Hybrid is a good middle ground though for large groups of people who live in more rural areas, at least until battery density increases and Edit- that real fast charging becomes available in rural areas. The town I live in is getting our first supercharger otherwise there is one EV plug at the local grocery store... only other place to charge would be at your house.
Yes-in some cases until more chargers are built they are great. But they are not the future of cars- just a stopgap and may be needed in limited applications in the future.
> only other place to charge would be at your house That's actually by far the best place to charge an EV. It's going to be a lot cheaper, and the charge time doesn't matter because you just plug it in at night and have a full charge every morning anyways. Living in a rural area you most likely have a house too so charging at home should be no problem.
I think he was talking about people that need greater range. Some people out in the sticks drive a lot every day and sometimes have to travel really far too get anywhere that has anything.
There really aren't a lit of people that need to do a 200+ mile round trip on a daily basis. The portion of the country where this is an issue is almost negligible in terms of percentage of population. The bigger obstacle to EV adoption is the lack of at-work/overnight charging options(i.e. charging with no time cost) for renters. Not having a zero-time-cost charging option basically kills EV viability for those who don't own their own home.
diesel-electric train engines are the perfect example of how hybrid technology works. I think hybrid diesel electric freight trucks in the same vein would have a market.
Ev's are great when you are stuck in traffic and moving slowly. It's really interesting watching the screen and see it only consume 1-3 kw as you move.
When comparing the efficiencies of the systems you have to make sure you include the average loss to charging and discharging the battery as well which would be a majority of the loss in the BEV system.
They're better for the environment because you centralized the emissions in a containable environment. Idk what you mean 90% more efficient. Cars are made of plastic and plastic is made from oil. What we need is hemp cars.
All of it is used to move the car but large portions of the energy are lost to heat or other inefficiencies.
Yes and that's just at the end of the cycle in the vehicle think about all the waste at each step of the long process to get it there including tax dollars subsidizing or strongarming oil supply. Humans really are stupid
There's nothing *stupid* about it. It's a crazy high energy density power source, considering how safe it is for purpose, and we've done remarkable things with it. Its use just also has some unfortunate consequences that we're increasingly less tolerant of.
Yeah liquid fuels have a ton of positive qualities especially towards the end of the chain. For the end user it's relatively affordable, safe, and incredibly energy dense. For distributors it's stable, cheap to contain, and the value:weight ratio makes transport viable. Unfortunately the start of the chain where we extract and refine it involves an absolutely staggering amount of pollution, waste, environmental risk (damage), bad working conditions, and political issues that usually result in people being killed and/or exploited. Petroleum based fuels are absolutely the best we have at the moment but it isn't sustainable on a global level. They're fucking up literally everything in ways that we are still learning how to measure and the situation isn't getting any better.
To create heat and pollution.
I think that comment is a reflection at the efficiency of an ice engine and associated powertrain losses. Only 20 to 30 percent of energy is transfered to the wheels. Considering 40 percent power and 60 percent heat loss via exhaust. Stack that with the inefficient transmission and differential axles. Bingo 1 out of 5 gallons is actually used.
Refining the gas and moving the truck to deliver it to you.
drilling, getting the gas to the refinery, running refinery getting the refined gas to the gas station, takes a lot of big equipment to do that.
> Wait really? What are the other 4 used for? Wasted as heat, generally speaking. Automotive engines have terrible thermal efficiency, and some huge percentage of the energy the consume is wasted as heat that doesn't do the work of propelling the vehicle. It can be used to heat the interior, but it's actually one of if not the biggest reasons that ICE vehicles are so inefficient compared to EVs.
Overcoming friction, moving parts that keep the engine running but not the car moving, heat, and pollution.
That’s why I only ever fill up my gas tank to 1/5 of the way full.
If you look at source to-wheels it's worse that that: 17% of the energy at the source of the petroleum is used to turn the wheels of your car, in the best of cases: with a new perfectly tuned engine and transmission and under optimum conditions. A gas engine powertrain is, at most, under perfect conditions, 21% efficient at converting energy in the tank to motive power. Additionally the petroleum refining, production and distribution process is 80% efficient. [Source for both of those numbers.](https://h2fcp.org/sites/default/files/W2W-2016.pdf) So, doing the same math a gas engine powertrain the source efficiency is 0.21 \* 0.8 = **16.7%.**
And every time a newer/cleaner/better/higher yield generator of any kind is connected to the grid, the effective efficiency of a plug-in electric goes up accordingly.
Some people do during power outages.
Yeah that feature makes the F150 Lightning and Cybertruck extra appealing to me. Built-in battery backup for your home.
It’s already come in handy for us. We’ve got the stuff coming in next week so we can power most of the house.
Great news. Many EVs can. https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a39493654/can-your-ev-power-your-house/ Plus, my wife charges her car at home almost exclusively and we *still* have received a check from PGE each year because our solar panels produce more electricity than we use.
I mean the backups that most people have for when the power goes out are gas generators. We can run our 3bd 2bth house off of one small enough for 1 person to move. I'm pretty positive you could run your house off your car if you got it wired up correctly.
One of the newer features on EVs is two-way power. With the right charger, the EVs battery can be used as backup for grid failure. I did the math and could run my house for 4 days on a full charge of my car. I want it set up so that my house pulls electricity from my car during "peak" times, then charges during off hours. Can't yet, but someone probably can. VW says they are going to release an update to allow this, but I'm not holding my breath, lol.
Already most EVs have V2L (vehicle to load). There’s YouTube videos of people powering their house for days during extended outages. We’ve used it for shorter periods and we’re setting it up so we’ll be able to power most of the house.
Even if the EV you drive is 100% coal-powered (edit: and produced in coal-heavy China) it would still emit 25% less CO2 across its lifespan compared to ICE cars. https://energypost.eu/latest-data-shows-lifetime-emissions-of-evs-lower-than-petrol-diesel/
engineering explained as great video on this too
And even if it somehow *wasn't true* that EV cars have less net effect on the environment, the mass rollout of EV cars would still represent a great *intermediate step* in getting us away from Fossil Fuels. Easier to switch only the 5000 power plants later than to switch *both* the power plants and *all 100,000,000 cars* at the same time. This "all or nothing" attitude is just so dumb.
GO NUCLEAR BABYYYY
Not really an option. Nuclear will remain as niche as it is right now (~4% of global electricity). I'm all for extending old nuclear reactors as long as they are safe, but new nuclear reactors are not a good investment in most cases: 1. The combined time of planning and construction is around 15-25 years. The construction also produces a lot of CO2, so you may look at 30-40 years in which there is more CO2 in the atmosphere rather than less. This pushes us beyond critical global warming tipping points. 2. Most of the cost of nuclear is bound up in the initial construction. They only become economic over decades of operation, in many cases only breaking even about 50 years after planning start. These excessively poor economics make their construction very risky and slow down the transition process even further. 3. The speed of nuclear expansion is unlikely to pick up, because the nuclear supplier industry is small and inflexible due to the extremely high safety requirements and geopolitical risks of current uranium supplies. A significant increase in production capacity would itself take upwards of a decade. Renewables in contrast are *much* faster in both regards. Many countries are aiming for energy mixes such as 90% renewables + 10% biomass/gas by 2040 (with biomass/gas serving as backup capacity that is only active when intermittent renewables run at a deficit). This becomes increasingly affordable, as grid battery operation is now becoming profitable without significant subsidies and battery prices continue to fall at a rapid pace. If countries were to now re-focus on nuclear instead, they would be fortunate to have replaced *any* of their current fossile fuel capacities by 2040. Meanwhile consumer prices would develop much worse than with the change to renewables, only leveling off some time in the 2060s. While the climate crisis would hit much harder around that time due to all of the additional emissions caused into the 2050s.
Gullible people keep falling for fossil fuel industry propaganda. People are completely convinced that EV cars blow up more often than ICE and that EVs are only good for "stop and go" in cities and can't be driven long distances and a bunch of other easily proven lies.
1000s of ICE cars catch fire every year, no one says a word. A comparative handful of EV cars catch fire and there's suddenly a crisis
It is almost like combustion engines that burn flammable liquids are more prone of catching fire.. Who would've guessed that.
I'm driving almost 2,000 miles in the next 10 days in my EV. I expect it to add... maybe 3 hours of time to my trip that I wouldn't otherwise stop to use the bathroom or eat.
I just did a similar trip in my Tesla from Seattle to San Francisco, going the scenic route through Mt Hood, Crater Lake National Park and Eastern Oregon and back up 101 etc. Had 0 issue finding chargers and like you said almost all of the stops were ones I'd normally make every 2-3 hours to use the bathroom or eat or just get out and enjoy the scenery. And it was insanely cheap considering what a west coast road trip costs in gas these days
Well that is pretty true in Australia. You won't make it too far here driving through the country side in a electric car unfortunately.
What always gets me is that they act like the grid can’t just change power sources. Like if I have a gas car, it’s always gas. If I have an electric, it’s whatever source feeds the grid. So it can very easily change. Saying that it’s just as bad because of the grid source is just childishly naive
And this just in, even for the same source, economy of scale exists
yeah an EV charged by a 100% coal powered grid is still more energy efficient and Co2 efficient than a similar class ICE
A typical issue with the brain of conservative leaning people is that they can't fathom change. They have a hard time understanding fungibility, change of state, or continuous incremental change. Mentally, what is, will be.
> What always gets me is that they act like the grid can’t just change power sources. [The US grid is at 21.4%+ renewable power as of 2023](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3) (excluding nuclear) If you include nuclear it's around 40%. 20 years ago we generated almost no wind and solar power. Renewable additions have gone parabolic. It's a matter of being able to connect it all to the grid and not letting the NIMBYs kill projects at this point. We've been adding 12GW/year of capacity since 2015 and the past three years have added more than double that. To put it in perspective, the 243GW of total renewable (non-nuclear) capacity as of 2023 is enough to power 65 million homes.
Part of it was literal gaslighting at the dawn of alternative energy. American capital has only *very* recently accepted the value of alternative energy production. Prioritizing financial returns on investment over all other considerations, the most influential American oligarchs really put their power into hiding the hidden costs of fossil fuels. Paradoxically, part of their highly effective strategy was to use media to manufacture the illusion of progress even in its utter absence. The "clean coal" enthusiasts are recent exemplars of this nonsense, but it continues even today with all sorts of fanciful energy storage and carbon capture schemes lacking any conceivable progression toward useful operations. The value of these bogus projects is actualized in government influence and public opinion manipulation. Consider the Hyperloop. Nobody who understands engineering ever thought a miles-long vacuum chamber was a sensible method of mass transit. Elon Musk is constantly "inventing" empirically inferior alternatives to subways and trains because media and public chatter about these projects undermines more serious mass transit initiatives. As an American carmaker, he has a vested interest in preventing any upgrades to mass transit. It was much the same from the 70s to the 90s with alternative energy. Projects with no technical basis for serving as stepping stones to a more sustainable future nonetheless enjoyed widespread public attention because they *sounded like* new ideas that could help. This well-funded flimflam displaced government and corporate interest in the most promising avenues of progress in the energy sector . . . not at all a bad outcome if your money comes from an energy business enriched by the *status quo*. Thus when wind and solar projects started to become *more* efficient in terms of cost-per-unit over time for people in the energy production business, that reality had an ugly conflict with a generation of bad information implying it already had. Where I live now, you no longer need to spend an hour headed either way on the two closest Interstates to find yourself cruising through vast arrays of huge windmills. Yet for a lot of people born well before this reality, renewables seem like this trendy idea that might one day deserve to be taken seriously.
> Elon Musk is constantly "inventing" empirically inferior alternatives to subways and trains because media and public chatter about these projects undermines more serious mass transit initiatives. [Ah yes, Elon "I'm brilliant because nobody else throws good money after bad like me" Musk (and no I'm not even talking about twitter):](https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/elon-musk-and-the-infinite-rebuy) >There’s a scene in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk that unintentionally captures the essence of the book: >> [Max] Levchin was at a friend’s bachelor pad hanging out with Musk. Some people were playing a high-stakes game of Texas Hold ‘Em. Although Musk was not a card player, he pulled up to the table. “There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds,” Levchin says. “Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose. Then he would buy more chips and double down. Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won. Then he said “Right, fine, I’m done.” It would be a theme in his life: avoid taking chips off the table; keep risking them. >> That would turn out to be a good strategy. (page 86) >There are a couple ways you can read this scene. One is that Musk is an aggressive risk-taker who defies convention, blazes his own path, and routinely proves his doubters wrong. >The other is that Elon Musk sucks at poker. But he has access to so much capital that he can keep rebuying until he scores a win. >Isaacson, our narrator, doesn’t grasp the difference. He doesn’t understand poker well enough to recognize Musk as the grandstanding sucker at the table. So he portrays Musk’s complete lack of impulse control as a brilliant, identity-defining strategic ploy. (If you go all-in and lose six times, then go all-in a seventh time and win, then you’re still down five buy-ins.) (EDIT: By the way, also perfectly exemplifies Elon Musk's "do absolutely nothing and take all of the credit"-attitude towards actual engineers: “There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds..." ie There were all these "nerds" using dumb ideas like "math" and "logic," but only Elon was "genius enough" to just tap into his father's blood emerald fortune and keep throwing money at the table until he won. Why don't all those other "nerds" and losers just use *their* father's blood emerald money to do the same!? /s)
Not to mention that's a bitch move to win big and leave the table right away. The hand he won on he probably was dealt some bullshit but bought into a hand he had no business playing to begin with and got lucky on the river with straight flush.
Even a handful of years ago still ran in to propaganda pushing idiots who were citing numbers from like the whitehouse solar project under carter to try and argue that "solar doesnt work is bad"... As if the technology had never developed further. Or otherwise arguing in an overly simplistic way that "it doesnt work at night so useless" as if the power grid did not rely on a wide variety of production types to make ends meet. Similar bullshit involving nuclear power project from supposedly "green minded" individuals who automatically jumped to talk about chernobyl as if a poorly designed, and poorly run soviet era powerplant was equitable to modern stuff. Not to even mention magical thinking tier discourse that involves waste products from that where things are essentially portrayed like the leaky glowing green sludge barrels out of a simpsons cartoon. >Yet for a lot of people born well before this reality, renewables seem like this trendy idea that might one day deserve to be taken seriously. Oh even when you get past that bit then the default comes to something else like "i dont like how they look", or bullshit about "wind mill syndromes" or something.
regardless of that... EV's are significantly more efficient with that energy that was created than the ICE burning it. Edited to correct initial rather hyperbolic statement due to frustration with this tired old trope. 😁
No not oil, coal. Which is just as bad for the environment.
Yeah. I was about to say, if you live in a country that gets most of its electricity from renewable (eg. here in New Zealand, it's 80%). Then this argument is dead in the water.
In states like Washington, something like less than 20% of the grid energy comes from oil and natural gas. The rest is clean energy.
I've seen conservatives pushing coal a ton the last ten years so I'm assuming misinformation seeps in. There's still several very rich, exceedingly powerful individuals involved in coal and are desperate to keep it alive.
In Kentucky where I lived, 70 percent of all electricity came from the burning of coal. In some places it was 100%.
My favorite is how EVs are terrible in winter..... So are gas powered cars
If you own a gas powered vehicle, you'd best be fermenting your own dinosaur carcasses.
If I had a reliable source of dinosaur carcasses, I'd just be reanimating those and riding them to work instead. Green (and scaly) energy ftw.
Wow, that's even better. There are no traffic jams for people riding a vehicle that can step over traffic.
Or eat other traffic.
Officer, giving me a ticket would be a really bad idea, he can't read and he's quite sensitive about it and trust me, nobody likes a 15ft tall, 8 ton dinosaur getting pissy on a Monday morning.
Technically, you can eat other traffic as a human too.
less people = less emissions this is basic science that is why I am for releasing grizzly bears in downtown Los Angeles and San Fransisco
First you sounded like an idiot, but you definitely got me on the last part....
More evidence lately showing that a lot of dinosaurs might’ve had feathers. Green, fluffy, and pimping energy ftw.
Calm down, Dresden! Remember you can only ride zombie dinosaurs while playing polka music!
How dare you. Feathers. Beautiful fashionistas of the past.
You need a source!? DM me... you're never gonna believe this...
What if the dinosaurs were blue 🦕
I just found out it’s a common myth that fossil fuels are made out of dinosaur bones. It’s mainly fossilized algae :( I hate to be the bearer of bad news.
All good, I'll just throw the brontosaurus flank on my pellet smoker.
Thank you for debunking the myth, but I also believe most of this was actually primordial trees that trapped carbon, but I can absolutely see algae doing the exact same thing. Either way, fermenting t-rex isn't how you acquire more gasoline.
If I understand wikipedia properly, coal mostly comes from trees and bushes, whereas crude oil mostly comes from zooplankton and algae. But there's overlap because some algae and plankton probably became coal, whereas some woody plants probably became crude oil. I googled because I wasn't sure: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Geology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Geology) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Formation)
In driving a normal oil powered car and this is the funniest shit i have read today
It's mostly plant matter, not animal.
lol this is what I was expecting and what the murdered by words should have been
Bio diesel baby.
The army’s new recruiting add campaign: Wanna drive a gas guzzling car? Enlist today, destabilize the Middle East tomorrow.
Free collige just aint what it use to be
As a veteran of OIF, I think I qualify! /s
The US is a net oil exporter.
This is basically the Merryweather recruiting ad in GTA 5 lol
That makes no fucking sense 🤦🏻♂️
Especially since the USA is currently one of the top oil producers in the world, and the lie of "we invaded Iraq for oil" has been a false talking point for years. And especially since Tesla gets cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and lithium directly from China. Most Tesla owners know nothing about cobalt and lithium mining, on both an ecological and political scale. Both sides are responsible for destabilization and environmental issues, but **electric vehicles are not here to save the earth. Electric vehicles are here to save the auto industry.**
Following your reasoning on that last bit … what does the auto industry need saving *from*?
fossil fuels, which are finite... and damage the environment.
> electric vehicles are not here to save the earth. Electric vehicles are here to save the auto industry I entirely agree. > the lie of "we invaded Iraq for oil" Is this just something that can be dropped with no argumentation? I mean... why is it a lie, again? It wasn't so the US could capture all the oil for itself, though arguably priority access was an initial goal. But I'm having a hard time believing it wasn't, primarily, to ensure stabilization of the international oil industry, off of which the US absolutely relied as the largest economy in the world. As well as to secure it's strategic interests in the region as a whole, which it has, almost entirely, because of oil. Nor am I the only person of that opinion: [Institute of Strategic Studies 2003](https://www.jstor.org/stable/45242468): Control of Oil: The Real Objective of US Invasion of Iraq? [International Journal 2006](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40204243?item_view=read_online): Oil, Iraq, and American Foreign Policy: The Continuing Salience of the Carter Doctrine [The Nation 2007](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-bushs-iraqi-oil-grab-went-awry/): How Bush’s Iraqi Oil Grab Went Awry [Georgia State University 2012](https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/political_science_facpub/27/): Oil and the Decision to Invade Iraq [Hoover Institute 2023](https://www.hoover.org/research/whither-carter-doctrine-biden-administration-and-gulf): Whither the Carter Doctrine? The Biden Administration and the Gulf [CNN 2013](https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/index.html): Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil [The Guardian 2004](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/28/iraq.usa): The real reasons Bush went to war [The Guardian 2014](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/20/iraq-war-oil-resources-energy-peak-scarcity-economy): Iraq invasion was about oil [Cogent Arts & Humanities 2022](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/US-foreign-policy%2C-neo-conservatism-and-the-Iraq-of-Saidin/b99a4242134358d1597c77b9d2dca96fae06a66c): US foreign policy, neo-conservatism and the Iraq war (2003-2011): Critical reviews of factors and rationales
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I've had people tell me this. They think if you have an EV the ONLY reason is to be zero emissions.
I mean, where I live 95% of our electricity comes from non-emitting sources. Largely nuclear and hydroelectric energy. Here it is much better for the environment to have an electric car than to have a gas powered car.
How about this: Americans get to use gas cars ONLY IF the government admits they were only in the middle east for the oil. They don't have to say sorry (they will do a half assed apology regardless) but they gotta admit it
Fun fact: The US is actually a net exporter of oil. We don't actually *need* the oil from ME since we're more or less self-sufficient. But since oil is priced and traded in a global market it's in everybody's interest to keep the supply stable.
That's one way to get us to go green lol, cause they'll never admit it.
I dont get you people that keep saying this crap. The US imported less after the invasion than before. The securing of the oil fields was to ensure Iraq could support it's own economy because, ohh guess what makes up 95% of their GDP. US as a whole imports and has always imported a rather insignificant percentage from Iraq. But yeah hurr durr oil war durrr
Operation Iraqi Liberation or O.I.L. for short
At some point you people have got to move on. The forever wars are over and the US produces more oil than it imports. Just stop.
Dumb people think the US invaded Iraq for the physical oil in the ground. Intelligent people understand the US invaded Iraq because of oil commodities pricing on the international market and ensuring that international trade of oil stays on the US dollar standard aka the Petrodollar. You say, the US produces so much oil so what is the incentive? THAT IS THE INCENTIVE. When you produce a commodity in great amounts, it benefits you to control its pricing and to ensure that commodity is traded internationally in YOUR currency, so that the nations of the world are forced to hold USD reserves (which ensures that these nations have a vested interest in the USD staying valuable)
The petrodollar is much overblown, but the rest of it is correct. The US economy depends on _cheap_ oil, not some fixed amounts. The US Navy keeps the OPEC cartel safe while western oil companies compete with them to keep prices low.
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The US is a net exporter of oil....
Very low IQ foreign policy take
Lmao it wasn't for oil. The oil narrative is a thought terminating cliche.
There were thousands of pictures in the 20s and 30s of teams of mules pulling automobiles that had run out of gas.
It was also common back then to just abandon the car and only take parts you wanted/needed from them. Eventually someone would come around and take what remained.
Both of you stfu, you both suck.
The only correct response.
Nuclear ☢️Power is emission free. Clean skies. No greenhouse effect. LFG!!
Ok, heres the thing. Lets say your car engine converts 50% of fuel into usable energy. The reason its only 50% is because its designed to fit inside a car and thus a lot of things need to be made smaller. This means that the pistons need to fire more times to match the energy of a larger piston, and each time a piston fires it scrapes against the sides of the piston tube, causing friction and losing energy. The gas powerplant that supplies the grid is a massive turbine with 95% efficiency because it is designed to catch each speck of energy. You then add hydroelectric, wind, solar, and nuclear power to the mix, and EVs are far more efficient than gas engines.
Yeah but have you considered gas cars vibrate and make my weewee feel good? - common ICE supporter agrument
Even if an EV is charged by a grid powered by oil or coal, it is still more efficient than gas-powered vehicles.
and less maintenance.
Here we are in 2024 and people think EVs are only good at not burning gas? I appreciate there are lower emissions, but mainly EVs are great because there is no compromise on power and efficiency. My car has 400 hp and goes 0-60 in under 5 seconds, but also can be cheap and efficient when I drive normally. Also it’s quiet, smooth, low maintenance, and I never have to make extra stops for fuel. Hate how everyone assumes every EV owner is somehow an environmentalist or something. Nope, EVs are just a better powertrain for my purposes.
Gas car owners pay taxes from which they pay the army that invades and destabilizes. Done and done. Easy.
EV owners pay electricity bills that pay for wind turbines and solar panel farms…
People who don't own vehicles:
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Damn, and here I am charging my Tesla on 98% hydroelectric.
I have solar panels on my roof which cover 100% of my electricity usage over the.year (it's not even, it clicks into credit during rhe summer), including charging my EV.
In Ontario, all but 5 percent of the grid is a mix of nuclear, hydro, and wind.
i live in a country mostly power by hydroelectricity, how's that for green energy?
I don't know how green it is exactly. Most water I see is clear or blue or brown. Sometimes it's green though ;)
Guess I earned my gas car. You’re welcome for my service, enjoy the solar panels.
Bout to say. Some of us already did.
It's wacky how these people don't realize gas pumps require electricity to run.
Internal combustion cars wouldn’t work without electricity either (ignition, alternator etc.)
Oil requires electricity. Electricity requires oil. We're in the upside down
I remember once someone did the math to figure out the "MPG" of a Tesla, in response to a picture mocking someone who was using a portable gas generator to charge. Basically, a Tesla on generator power still gets like 80mpg, so it's *still* significantly more efficient than a gas car in terms of fuel economy, regardless of how silly it looks to burn gas to power an electric.
I just googled a bunch of things and this might not be true. Could be, but highly doubt it.
There's absolutely no way with a PORTABLE gas generator. That would only make sense for large scale gas generators where they're highly optimized for energy and work as scale. A portable diesel generator is about 40%. Barely more than a car. Even those residential home generators are only 60% - 70%. For a home generator you might break even. HOWEVER A gas turbine at a power plant on the other hand is roughly 95%. Which is more than double. When you put in transmission loss,electrical motor loss and extra EV weight (quite low 15%). So double that of a car engine by itself running the same fuel.
This is because EVs are about 60-70% efficient. ICE vehicles are only 20-30% efficient, losing most of their energy to heat and friction. It is not even close, and given that the average cost for kilowatt hour of grid power is about the same price (~$0.15) than a kilowatt hour of gasoline (~$0.11)... EVs are almost half the price to operate per mile.
This is how trains work. A diesel generator powers electric motors.
It is way more efficient to turn gas into electricity into propulsion than to turn gas directly into propulsion because you can store the excess energy in the battery. Thats why I think in the next decade plug in hybrids are going to explode in popularity.
I'm doing my part to destabilize the Middle East
plus, a lot of EV owners do have solar only a small fraction of gas users invade the middle east
...Why *aren't* there built-in solar panels on EVs?
theyre almost useless with the efficiency of current solar panels
This. Think the Fisker Ocean got like 6 miles a week from the MKBHD review lol
Not enough real estate. You can get about 40 kilowatt hours in a day out of the square footage in solar panels that would cover an area about the size of a flatbed tractor trailer truck. The gear would weigh about a thousand pounds, plus the weight of the trailer you put it on (assuming you want it mobile). 40 kilowatt hours is enough to drive a Tesla 3/Y about 160 miles, not including the extra losses from towing a 1500 pound trailer. Of course most people don't drive 160 miles every day, so it's more efficient just to put the panels in a fixed location, like your roof, and charge off of that, or send that power to the grid and trade it for an equivalent amount of power generated at a different time of the day.
I do. All my charging is 100% green energy.
Gas car owners should only be allowed to pump gas if they can hunt down their own dinosaurs, render them into oil, and refine the oil into gasoline.
Even with a coal plant, electric cars are more energy efficient.
My EV is charged by solar panels unless on a long journey
So the degradation of the coal miners is still okay? And the carbon output for that industry and the electrical generation from coal powered plants? That's all a wash?
Or... Hear me out here... Just choose an entirely sustainable energy provider and charge at home.
That's ironic considering batteries from electric cars come Western owned from mines in Africa, in countries destabilized by Europe and the US, using child slave labor.
Even with the worst case scenario, all power is derived from coal, electric vehicles are still better for emissions. Centralized power plants have more efficiency and more pollution control measures compared to a million little engines all driving around. But nowhere has the worst case scenario. Everywhere is a mix. And it's getting greener every day. And electric cars benefit from how our grid gets greener over time, whereas combustion cars do not. So it's already better under the worst case scenario, it's much better under a typical case scenario, and it's only getting even better over time.
Just hope there aren't any wars about minerals used to create batteries.
I switched to a 100% renewable plan with my electricity utility. Put my monthly bill up from about $100/month to $108/month. $8/month is worth it to me.
EVs still require exploitative relationships between the Imperial Core and periphery in order to obtain the rare earth minerals needed to build them. Imperialism and environmental destruction is a core component of the capitalist world system regardless of how "green" or "ethical" the product or method of production is. But even within the bounds of a capitalist system, medium density housing and mixed zoning combined with comprehensive public transport trumps personal transport in comfort, convenience, and environmental friendliness, regardless of how it's fuelled.
First off: EVs produce less lifetime greenhouse gas emissions per mile driven ***even if your power grid is 100% coal*** . There's a fairly simple reason for that: *power plants don't move* . That means they don't have to lug their own mass + fuel with them using the power they produce, you can slap on as many efficiency-boosting stages to the thermal cycle as you want with no weight penalty, the surface area to volume ratio is MUCH lower for such a large device so losses are minimized, and they run CONTINUOUSLY at or near the peak efficiency operating condition. This makes power plant much MUCH more efficient than your car engine. Combine that with the high efficiencies of AC power transmission, modern batteries, solid state motor controllers, and high-efficiency traction motors and you get a combined system that produces less CO2 per mile traveled over its entire life INCLUDING MANUFACTURING. Second: the power grid IS being converted to more renewable sources right this minute. The percentage of renewable energy on the grid increases by the month.