Electric Cars Good for planet or just bad?

Supersonos

DrEskimo wrote: »

I don't charge every time I park somewhere.

But what happens when you need to charge and the only available spaces are non-charging ones?

All the points you make are perfectly sensible, until you imagine a time when all cars are EVs. That just won't work. To keep 40 million cars "topped-up" requires an awful lot of charging points. And a lot of cables draped across parking spaces, pavements etc.

DrEskimo

TooManyPoints wrote: »

Yes there is



I would certainly support the second and would go further as to positively reward people for having no children at all. The Earth needs a reduction in the number of humans it has to put up with. There are various factions traipsing round the world prattling on about "climate change", "global warming" or whatever the current metamorphosis has produced. They all have hare-brained schemes aimed at "reducing carbon" or whatever varying from the ridiculous to the truly absurd. But none of them - absolutely none of them - grasp the bull by the horns and publicly recognise that the root cause of all the pollution that humans produce is caused by one thing - there are simply too many of us. When that is accepted and measures are taken to address it, then I'll worry about what light bulbs I use.

It is quite remarkable that you would even suggest this as a viable option given how badly it turned out in China....

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5944611/#R10

People generally will not willingly choose to only have 1 child, so China resorted to forced methods. Fine if you happen to live in a dictatorship, but thankfully we live in a democracy, and not many political parties will adopt it as part of their manifesto, as no one will vote for it.

Putting aside the massive ethical issues it presented (forced contraceptive methods on women, etc.), the debatable impact it had on reducing population levels, and the arguable impact it had on the sex ratio of the population, it was primarily dropped due to the issues brought about by a rapidly ageing population. Again, unless you advocate the culling of the older generations, we will see population rise as the current generations grow older and live longer. So if you introduce a policy to reduce the younger generations, you will inevitably reach a point where you have a top heavy population pyramid, with more older generations requiring care, and a reduced working population not able to support them. Not to mention the economic impact this will have on pension provisions.

It will never be a popular approach, and therefore It will not be adopted by political parties. But more importantly, it will not work.

Joe_Horner

Mmmm, electric charging points!




(Yes, that is a sodding great diesel generator powering it! )

DrEskimo

Supersonos wrote: »

But what happens when you need to charge and the only available spaces are non-charging ones?

All the points you make are perfectly sensible, until you imagine a time when all cars are EVs. That just won't work. To keep 40 million cars "topped-up" requires an awful lot of charging points. And a lot of cables draped across parking spaces, pavements etc.

I just charge somewhere else, at another time. Again, I don't only plan to charge when I have to. I charge whenever it's convenient.

It will be decades before every car is replaced by EV's. Over 2/3rds of residential homes have driveway or garages for private parking, allowing for home charging.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/6748/2173483.pdf

So already, 2/3rds will rarely use public charges. Why pay £0.20/kWh when you can charge overnight at £0.05/kWh (using electricity generation with CO2/Kt that is half that seen during the day, mainly due to an increase in wind generation, see national grid watch . Another reason EV's have such a low carbon footprint).

Considering people shop at a variety of different times, and using different shops, you will probably not even need 1/3rd of the parking spaces to have EV charging spaces.

As already said, the issue of cables cutting across pavements is being addressed by the solutions I outlined earlier.

Other technologies like Hydrogen may have become viable by this time. The biggest issue so far has been that the energy needed to create the hydrogen is greater than the energy it produces. Might as well just use the electricity directly to charge a battery as it is much more efficient. However one solution could be to use excess renewable energy produced during off-peak times, and essentially treat hydrogen as an energy storage device. Now you have a choice between hydrogen for those that need it, and EV's for those that can run EV's without issue. I still imagine EV's will prove to be the more popular choice, namely due to lower running costs, convenience and the fact it is suitable for large swathes of the population, where average commutes are <30miles and average yearly mileages are around 8k miles per year.

DrEskimo

Joe_Horner wrote: »

Mmmm, electric charging points!




(Yes, that is a sodding great diesel generator powering it! )

If it was the i3 REX, it already had one of those on board!

buglawton

DrEskimo wrote: »

It is quite remarkable that you would even suggest this as a viable option given how badly it turned out in China....

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5944611/#R10

People generally will not willingly choose to only have 1 child, so China resorted to forced methods. Fine if you happen to live in a dictatorship, but thankfully we live in a democracy, and not many political parties will adopt it as part of their manifesto, as no one will vote for it.

Putting aside the massive ethical issues it presented (forced contraceptive methods on women, etc.), the debatable impact it had on reducing population levels, and the arguable impact it had on the sex ratio of the population, it was primarily dropped due to the issues brought about by a rapidly ageing population. Again, unless you advocate the culling of the older generations, we will see population rise as the current generations grow older and live longer. So if you introduce a policy to reduce the younger generations, you will inevitably reach a point where you have a top heavy population pyramid, with more older generations requiring care, and a reduced working population not able to support them. Not to mention the economic impact this will have on pension provisions.

It will never be a popular approach, and therefore It will not be adopted by political parties. But more importantly, it will not work.

At that time China's population had doubled in 30 years with 25% of worlds people living on 7% of its arable land. China had near zero foreign exchange to import food with in those years.
Estimates are that without that policy todays population of China would today be 300m higher.
That policy has now been all but abolished and oddly, couples are having 1 child anyway. Due probably to the rat-race conditions for bringing up families, that we in the UK are also now getting used to.

Sea_Shell

I don't think the world's politicians need to worry about population.

It will eventually become self limiting.

I believe that as we move ever closer to the critical mass of what the planet can sustain, nature will take over and do the culling for us, regardless of our modern medicines.

The problem is, it'll become a s**t place to live in the meantime.

DrEskimo

buglawton wrote: »

At that time China's population had doubled in 30 years with 25% of worlds people living on 7% of its arable land. China had near zero foreign exchange to import food with in those years.
Estimates are that without that policy todays population of China would today be 300m higher.
That policy has now been all but abolished and oddly, couples are having 1 child anyway. Due probably to the rat-race conditions for bringing up families, that we in the UK are also now getting used to.

Yea a lot of Asian countries are seeing lower than global average birth rates (even those like Japan and Singapore without being forced by policy...). The main driver is hypothesised to be an increase in the education of females and a greater focus on careers.

The only outlier is sub-saharan Africa. High infant mortality rates still dictate the need for increased fertility. It is only through reducing poverty, leading to better healthcare, sanitation and living conditions, will you see infant mortality rates drop, and finally fertility rates decline.



But main point was not that the one-child policy didn't reduce population levels to some degree, or indeed that increased populations are not an issue. My point is that forcing people to only have one child comes with problems of it's own. It will never be adopted in a democratic state, and therefore you need to look for other solutions.

Reducing populations is difficult, so you need to look at reducing consumption. Considering the richest nations represent only a fraction of the world population, but consume many times more of the world resources shows there is plenty of scope for cutting back on consumption levels.

Aylesbury_Duck

Isn’t it a bit rich to point at China and India and criticise their contribution to pollution, when a lot of their manufacturing- and transportation-based consumption of resources and production of pollution results from the unnecessary plastic and electrical crap we are continually buying from them and asking them to ship and fly around the world to us? We can hardly claim total innocence of any blame in their contribution to the problem.

motorguy

Supersonos wrote: »

But what happens when you need to charge and the only available spaces are non-charging ones?

All the points you make are perfectly sensible, until you imagine a time when all cars are EVs. That just won't work. To keep 40 million cars "topped-up" requires an awful lot of charging points. And a lot of cables draped across parking spaces, pavements etc.

You dont need to keep an EV topped up all the time. Just charge it when you need to.

As has been subsequently said, charge it up later or the next day.

The problem is you're thinking like an Internal Combustion Engine user and not grasping that we will have to adapt our lifestyles slightly to suit EVs.

Its not going to work if everyone says - "oh well i'm not going to accept an electric car unless it has a range of 600 miles and i can charge it in two minutes like i can get a fill of petrol".