413
Cummins pickup truck engines systematically tricked air pollution controls, feds say
(www.usatoday.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
413 points (99.0% liked)
News
23664 readers
3641 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Electric appliances are generally more efficient than appliances powered directly by non renewable sources though. And a single oil/gas powerplant is probably more energy efficient than thousands of individually gas and oil powered appliances. So just changing to electric appliances will already reduce emissions.
And it sets the city up to upgrade to renewable energy in the future.
NY apartments also notoriously have zero ventilation
Sadly, no. Your electric heater is 100% efficient, yes, but that thermal power plant is lucky to hit 50%, especially if it's old tech which many are.
On the other hand, burning natural gas at the point of use can be done at 95% efficiency by a condensing boiler or furnace.
That's not even taking into account transmission losses. With them in play, even a ground-source heat pump has higher emissions than a natural gas furnace.
The only way electrification of heating makes sense is to decarbonise the grid, which should be the first priority. Nuclear and hydro baseload with solar/wind peaking and elastic loads and load shedding to take advantage of the variable supply.
Since we're talking efficiency I'm sure you also know that several smaller consumers are gonna be far less efficient than one big consumer.
I'm not sure where you're getting that information about a heat pump being worse than a literal fire burning furnace but that fire burning furnace is still less efficient as a small appliance than the power generation. What's also important here is the heat pump can run on natural gas electricity, nuclear electricity, hydro etc. it is energy agnostic which the furnace is absolutely not.
That's the point I'm making. It's counterintuitive. They are actually far more efficient, even though that "feels wrong".
Thermal power generation is limited by the Rankine cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle with a MAXIMUM efficiency of only 42%.
You are burning fuel, turning a temperature differential into motion, into electricity, transmitting the electricity, then turning it back into a temperature differential.
In the specific application of heating, it makes far more sense to burn the fuel on site, where you are running at far lower temperatures and capable of condensing the exhaust to hit 95% efficiency.
I've worked with heat pumps, even built my own custom unit and I know that with the right refrigerants, low temperature distribution and oversized ground loops you can hit as high as a COP of 7. But the average affordable crappy air sourced unit is more like 2-3 and in a Canadian winter will not function at all, falling back on resistive heating at COP 1. And let's face it, nobody has $20-50k for an amazing oversized ground sourced system and a rework to hydronic floors. They're buying a reversible mini-split, DIY installing it and being disappointed when their heating bill goes up.
So with a COP of 2 and a power plant efficiency below 50% you are not even back to where you started if you were just burning the fuel in a furnace. And that's best case, perfect conditions at the plant, no transmission losses, warm day, no Iosses in the heat pump.
It gets worse if your power comes from burning coal like ours does.
I'm just saying there's no perfect drop-in solution, you can't just handwave heat pumps in as a magic problem solver. In many cases there are bigger gains to be had from efficient furnaces than a massive electrification program, at least in the short to mid term.
Thanks for your comment. Very informative and insightful.
However, your argument only works when electricity is sourced from 100% non renewable sources. If your city power uses some hydro, nuclear or other renewable sources, the efficiency of electric appliances goes up and will likely be at least comparable with the average gas powered home appliance. And it will keep going up as power plants become renewable and thermal plants are decomissioned.
We should be moving away from gas and oil entirely instead of just saying "no one can install these in your homes anymore", it's just shifting the load.
If you insist on waiting for that magical “silver bullet” That will fix everything with no downside, you’re not getting anywhere. You’ll never improv. Things will never get better. You’re frozen in over-thinking.
“No more new gas hookups” is a tiny step forward. By itself, not too significant and would take over a century to have an impact. Nevertheless, it is a step forward. As we talked more such steps, we’ll be able to move right along
You could also argue “no new gas hookups” as a consumer protection thing, whatever is the consumer of that. You’re saying that we don’t expect the new infrastructure to be productive long enough to justify the cost
Then there’s the medical impact, at least for inside appliances. You may try to argue it but the best medical knowledge has a strong correlation of childhood asthma and other lung problems with indoor gas appliances.
The problem is "public health" vs "private funding from businesses with interest" and we know the latter almost always wins. It's two steps forward and one step back, which is still progress, but self defeating progress.
That's never been how technology shift or legislation works though. Everything comes in phases.
True, but we both know that the oil and gas industry has a stranglehold on the US in pretty much every way, shape, or form. It seems like this is just another "look we're doing something good for the environment!" when in reality it's just "theater".