this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
507 points (70.6% liked)
Memes
44890 readers
3687 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think electric cars address climate change Once we stop using coal and gas powerplants
Cause then all we are doing is shifting it
Not true. Large-scale power plants are WAY more efficient at turning fossil fuels into work than internal combustion engines. Even if all electric car power was generated by coal (it's not, almost half of electricity generation now is nuclear + renewables), electric cars would still have net emissions that are half of gas cars.
It's a process that is absolutely underway and making great progress, even the USA now generatea more from solar than from coal, many countries like Scotland are already producing over 90% of their electrical use from renewables with only 2% from fossil fuels.
It's worth noting too that these numbers are only grid based usage and a lot of solar is direct use, often being stored in an electric car rather than sold to the grid - with rooftop solar at home and at work it would be possible to use a car without requiring any of the oil extraction, transport and refining faculties. I don't know how many people it would take using solar cars before a single oil well goes untapped but I do know if we get to a point where no one is using gas stations then that'll be an awfull lot of horrible polluting infrastructure we don't need, just carrying the fuel through wires instead of in tanker lorries is a huge saving alone.
Only if we go balls deep on Nuclear
Looks at state of world...
Oh we're going balls deep in Nuclear my friend. Just not the kind you're talking about.
That's not a huge problem. Chernobyl and Five Kilometer Island were old reactor designs, and Fukushima mostly sustained an earthquake+tsunami (it would fully succeed under better corporation oversight)
Mmmm, spicy sexy times indeed.