Technology

I own a gasoline car. I was being too flippant. I would point out that our car centric culture is inefficient no matter how you swing it. I agree it's a part of solving climate change, but cars of any type are still a problem, we need to massively overhaul our urban transit and get away from cars in urban areas.

In the end all transit only accounts for 15% of the overall problem. Our spread out infrastructure caused by car convenience has many other negative externalities though, like the increased need to maintain more roads, electric loss over longer distribution, heating and cooling in large single family homes made possible by cars bringing you to your job while living way out in the suburbs (arguably way more serious than the cars themselves), etc. The suburban experiment was an environmental disaster, and I say this as someone that lives in a large house in the suburbs currently pumping out AC, so I'm not judging.

But plugging in your personal tank isn't really solving the problem. It's just ignoring it. Cars are the problem no matter the fuel source, because of the impact they have had on how we spread out and grow our consumption... We need multi use zoning, dozens of train lines in every city, bike infrastructure, work at home, massive reduction in fossil fuel based power plants... A reordering of society around alternatives to spreading out, a massive worldwide effort of urban densification. As well as a massive effort to hold corporations accountable for their energy use as well. That and we need to stop having so many fucking kids, the world can't support this level of consumption forever.

Not disingenuous. True. Grid power is still dirty so electric cars are still dirty. Probably about a 50% improvement in carbon emissions based on the most common fuel mix in the US for an e car.

Clean transportation by car is a luxury that we do not yet have.

A small house for 74,000? Lol, you'd need at least double that in the Northeast part of America.

Completely agree, people are not zooming out enough to understand the real problems. Our spread out car centric infrastructure has externalities past just the fuel issues on the cars themselves. Our car centric culture is largely responsible for a huge boom in energy consumption outside of just driving. There is a huge cost to spreading out beyond cars. I think the biggest is our trend in occupying larger and larger single family homes and larger and larger office spaces which require heating and cooling (Which is a little more than double the environment cost of cars iirc). One of the benefits of densification is that you often share a wall with someone else that is also heating and cooling and there is far less energy loss. Those energy costs far exceed our transit issues, but are directly related, in that cars allow density to reduce and therefor people to consume more energy at home and their place of work. And if people are still unwilling to densify then we need to greatly increase the energy efficiency of single family homes and businesses by 4 fold. Better insultation, better windows, better appliances, across the board.

The thing that bothers me about the communication around electric cars is not that they are an improvement, because they most certainly are a good stop gap to one of our many issues, but people like to singularly focus on car fuel type like it is the focal point of climate change when it really is urban and suburban car centricity that is a much larger issue. Electric cars wont stop climate change, they only slow it down a little. Countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc are far closer to becoming carbon neutral partly because car centricity is not a focus in these places, people live closer together and use all types of transit that supplement each other. And yet no one would claim any of those places are unpleasant to live, far from it they are some of the most desired places to live in the world. We need to start modeling the rest of the world off of the design improvements those countries made over the last 60 years.