Earlier this month, the environmental committee of the European Parliament voted in favour of what, in case of wider support, would be a ban on the sales of petrol and diesel cars from 2035. The petrolhead in me laughed hard. Then she cried a little. Then she laughed again.
We are going to have to transition to another form of transportation eventually. Electric pick up trucks do not get it for me. The wife looked at a Lexus electric SUV but the range of these vehicles is honestly a joke currently. We live on a farm and distances we travel cannot be done most of the time in a EV. We live in rural countryside and the charging network is not even in place anywhere. The battery warranty on the batteries in the SUV was five years and if something goes wrong or they wear out your looking at almost 16k to replace them so we passed on he vehicle.
I think Japan is headed in the right direction with hydrogen fueled vehicles. Clean burning and no need to remake the entire infrastructure. The big problem currently is making hydrogen cheaply.
We like you keep our vehicles for a long time we have a 19 year old jeep and a 9 year old pick up.
Fuel cell cars are definitely more practical. But the tech is still very expensive, I gather. Plus the hydrogen cost problem you mentioned, especially if we want it green.
No the hydrogen fuel cell (fool cell) vehicle is a scam and always has been. Big Oil touted hydrogen circa 2000 in order to block the rise of BEVs, claimed they only needed a few years to get them practical. 20yrs later where are they? I'm still looking for a 3kw home fuel cell for electricity, heat & hot water. Far, far, far easier than a +100kw car fuel cell. Where are they? The hydrogen economy is bait-and-switch.
SmithFS they are not myths and as I stated they are too damned expensive for people to buy. Why? You hit it on the head, the fuel cell. Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe. Yet currently you must split water molecules to harvest the hydrogen molecule. This just takes too much energy to split the molecule. I am for filling a vehicle with hydrogen as opposed to splitting water. Hydrogen is very volatile.
EV battery packs are not cheap either they are just subsidized by the taxpayers of the world as is the whole EV thing.
"We are going to have to transition to another form of transportation eventually"
No, we really don't. The technology has been proven for producing synthetic hydrocarbon fuels using CO2 extracted from seawater, which ultimately comes from the air.
This makes the process carbon neutral. Estimates place the costs to consumers at about $5/gallon, which looked expensive a year ago and is looking pretty okay today.
Of course, the process is energy intensive. It was originally developed for use by nuclear powered air craft carriers so they could produce their own jet fuel at sea. Less need for a supply chain of fuel transports.
This is yet another reason why "green" opposition to nuclear power is so foolish.
With a large build-out of nuclear reactors, prices would fall as experience is gained, electricity can be quickly decarbonized as proven in France and Ontario, and we would have the energy to decarbonize transportation without having to replace our entire refueling infrastructure nor our vehicles.
I own a Model Y and an F-250 4x4 among other ICE vehicles in my family. My TLDR on EVs: the vehicles and the experience are male dominated and not ready for mass adoption. The Tesla UX is not intuitive to most, the charging (in the US) on trips is decidedly not friendly to women and older folks (they're always at the back of the lot).
That said, competition and the driving experience will solve those problems. And, if the govs would keep their hands out of price controls, the market will create less expensive and better UX vehicles (eg. the Ford E-150 looks awesome).
Re the chip shortage, etc: Musk talks (in the All In Pod Summit) about how Tesla vertically integrated their supply chain, not as there was something bad about suppliers, but as they weren't able to move at the right pace.
Last, we need to ramp UP fracking and drilling during this period, not the other way around. Let's not kid ourselves, India and China are polluting like crazy, so the west won't really put a dent in emissions. And along the way, we need to solve the problem of when I'm charging my Y, I'm burning coal to do it.
It’s not as bad a horse farming taking over in Europe.
The vast majority of the EV-only crowd of politicians are super old, and they will age out soon, hopefully by the end of the decade.
Then we can at least have a younger set of minds who aren’t stuck trying to re-live the 1970’s. Practically no one under 50 is anti-nuclear, and most people under 50 would strongly prefer energy independence & security to the forced curtailment the elders prefer.
Sadly, it was the much younger crowd that filled European streets chanting they were going to die from climate change so stop all oil production That really lent momentum to the old green crowd.
If they really were serious about reducing ICE vehicles they would start a program to convert old ICE vehicles to BEVs. A shop can convert a car in one day. And you don't need the giant batteries. The avg car mileage is 30mi/day. Buying a cheap converted EV would be a city vehicle, avg use is ~20mi/day. Just a 40mi/10kwh battery pack would cost ~$2k in volume, another $2k for the conversion kit.
Also a faster way to get off of fossil and reduce emissions is use methanol for gas cars and DME for diesel vehicles. Both can burn directly in those vehicles. Both greatly reduce emissions, are superior to gas or diesel respectively, cost less and both can be made green from any carbonaceous input like biomass, flue gas(cement manufacture), forest overgrowth, CO2 from seawater. The PTB are blocking widespread use of methanol & DME, pushing the nutty hydrogen scam instead. In China both methanol & DME are in widespread use both for transportation, household heat and cooking fuel.
The solution isn't EV (not enough lithium, copper etc). The solution is LESS - ie everyone will have to live using what the average African uses today in terms of energy. Sorry, folks, its going to happen. We don't have a Jetsons future - think Flintstones instead.
No that is not a solution. The average African very much wants increased energy and that is to IMPROVE the environment and LESSEN the environmental impact of humans.
You need to read Shellenberger, some examples:
An Interview with Conservationist Helga Rainer:
"...The need to move to modern fuels is a bone of contention of mine. That we still talk about energy-saving stoves is disappointing..."
The REAL way the decimation of whales was prevented:
"...industrial chemists succeeded in making margarine almost entirely from palm oil, eliminating the need for whale oil. By 1940, palm oil, much of it coming from the Congo, had become cheaper than whale oil. Between 1938 and 1951, the use of vegetable oils used for margarine quadrupled, while the use of whale and fish oil declined by two-thirds. The share of whale oil as an ingredient in soap fell from 13 percent to just 1 percent. Whale oil as a share of global trade in fats declined from 9.4 percent in the 1930s to 1.7 per- cent in 1958, resulting in declining whale oil prices in the late 1950s.
Journalists realized what was going on. In 1959, The New York Times reported that “the growing output of vegetable oils . . . has forced down the market value of whale oil and may, in the end, save the whales.” By 1968, Norwegian whalers were reduced to selling whale meat to pet food manufacturers. The Times reported that “the market for once-prized whale oil has slipped from $238 a ton in 1966 to $101.50. It has lost out to Peruvian fish oil and African vegetable oils.”
This time, rising scarcity of whales did incentivize their replacement with vegetable oil. A group of economists concluded that “economic growth brought with it a declining demand for whale products, whilst decreasing stock levels fed back into more and more expensive harvesting effort . . .”
Whaling peaked in 1962, a full thirteen years before Greenpeace’s heavily publicized action in Vancouver, and declined dramatically during the next decade..."
Conclusion: Wise use of industry & best technological methods are the only path forward for achieving our goals.
There is no problem replacing all vehicles with EVs, though it would take 40yrs. And nuclear energy, even just fission, is essentially unlimited, it would power our civilization at 4X current levels for ~100Myrs, just with easily accessible Earth resources of uranium & thorium. And then there is the moon & asteroids. And fusion.
Zero population growth is a laudable goal and it is happening but degrowth is a nutty idea, has no basis in science and would be a disaster for the Earth, its biota and human civilization. Those are just the facts.
Dear Irina, I had the chance to drive an i3, as part of a car-sharing fleet. Yes, the design is questionable but the experience was rather good. I heard from friends who drove a Tesla that it is tremendous fun (the straight-line acceleration...the huge touchscreen...). And I regularly drive a Renault Zoe, probably the most basic EV ever, through another car sharing service (cambio.be). Apart from a little range anxiety, I'm very happy with them.
Having said that, it is astonishing that nobody, literally nobody mapped out the transition in detail. That is, except China, who are now sitting on the majority of rare earths and other key minerals needed for electrification and renewables. This is the reality, these are the constraints we need to consider.
Luckily for the EP, taking reality into account is not part of their job description, neither will voters hold them accountable for it. As an EU institution with a democratic deficit bigger than Russia's gas revenues. they have both the space and the motivation for grandstanding.
Anyways, apologies for the long rant. Excellent thoughtful article, as always.
No apologies necessary! Thanks for sharing your experience. The Zoe actually looks like a car, I like the Zoe. :) My personal aversion to EVs actually has nothing to do with batteries and rare earths, and all the other problems I write about from a more objective, I hope, perspective. It has to do with the suspicion that they are too easy to drive. I don't want easy, easy makes you stupid. And I can't imagine surrendering control to a "laptop on wheels" as Musk called Teslas to be even remotely fun. I live in a near-perpetual state of software anxiety as it is. Teslas are for software fans and that's perfectly all right. I love the design of the Model 3 and I can appreciate all the tech specs but I wouldn't drive one.
To me the fundamental problem with EVs is that they perpetuate the EU mentality of throwing money at a problem and hoping that more consumption will solve everything. The answer isn't EVs and banning combustion engines. It should be less cars overall and longer use of those we already have.
People in Belgium (where I live) throw away cars when they reach an arbitrary limit (4 years or 100k kms), even if said car has 0 problems. Of course, EVs aren't going to be reparable - when the battery pack is gone, they lose their values and will be 0 interest in repair.
Not to mention the almost complete lack of recycling infrastructure and/or lack of financial incentives for recycling. But this is general problem across RES. I won't hold the EVs responsible for that.
We definitely should be using all our tech as long as it can be used. Why are the Belgians so quick to get rid of their cars? Not that I'm complaining, we get most of Western Europe' car rejects and are happy to drive them for another 10 years.
The reasons are very complex, including 1) 4 years marks the beginning of annual technical inspections for new cars 2) rapidly diminishing residual values after 100k 3) a desire to have the "latest tech", e.g. gadgets and options built into new cars 4) the fear of breaking down with an "old" car 5) the average nr of years for a car loan is 4-5 years and 6) the seemingly bottomless market for 2nd hand cars from Western Europe. But these are just my guesses.
I think 3 is the worst, consumerism at its, well, worst. Number 1 is silly - how much of a hassle can a regular checkup be? Number 2 is silly as well, cars start losing value the moment you buy them, and 4 is outright stupid - cars don't just start breaking down because they've turned 4. Number 5 is a sad example of the credit mentality, which says it's okay to live on loans rather than own your things. All good points, though, sad but good points.
That's what people are buying when they buy an "EV".
Don't forget too, that batteries don't last forever and ALL those currently-on-the-road Battery Vehicles will be needing their batteries REPLACED and replaced regularly.
The more Battery Vehicles on the road, the greater the demand.
ICE vehicles don't have that problem.
The Battery Vehicle industry will be literally tearing the earth apart looking for minerals.
You mean all those smiling politicians standing at a Battery Vehicle charging station, making it look like they're filling their "tank" like people do with gas, will actually stand there and smile for very long time?
We are going to have to transition to another form of transportation eventually. Electric pick up trucks do not get it for me. The wife looked at a Lexus electric SUV but the range of these vehicles is honestly a joke currently. We live on a farm and distances we travel cannot be done most of the time in a EV. We live in rural countryside and the charging network is not even in place anywhere. The battery warranty on the batteries in the SUV was five years and if something goes wrong or they wear out your looking at almost 16k to replace them so we passed on he vehicle.
I think Japan is headed in the right direction with hydrogen fueled vehicles. Clean burning and no need to remake the entire infrastructure. The big problem currently is making hydrogen cheaply.
We like you keep our vehicles for a long time we have a 19 year old jeep and a 9 year old pick up.
Fuel cell cars are definitely more practical. But the tech is still very expensive, I gather. Plus the hydrogen cost problem you mentioned, especially if we want it green.
No the hydrogen fuel cell (fool cell) vehicle is a scam and always has been. Big Oil touted hydrogen circa 2000 in order to block the rise of BEVs, claimed they only needed a few years to get them practical. 20yrs later where are they? I'm still looking for a 3kw home fuel cell for electricity, heat & hot water. Far, far, far easier than a +100kw car fuel cell. Where are they? The hydrogen economy is bait-and-switch.
SmithFS they are not myths and as I stated they are too damned expensive for people to buy. Why? You hit it on the head, the fuel cell. Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe. Yet currently you must split water molecules to harvest the hydrogen molecule. This just takes too much energy to split the molecule. I am for filling a vehicle with hydrogen as opposed to splitting water. Hydrogen is very volatile.
EV battery packs are not cheap either they are just subsidized by the taxpayers of the world as is the whole EV thing.
Thanks for the reply.
"We are going to have to transition to another form of transportation eventually"
No, we really don't. The technology has been proven for producing synthetic hydrocarbon fuels using CO2 extracted from seawater, which ultimately comes from the air.
This makes the process carbon neutral. Estimates place the costs to consumers at about $5/gallon, which looked expensive a year ago and is looking pretty okay today.
Of course, the process is energy intensive. It was originally developed for use by nuclear powered air craft carriers so they could produce their own jet fuel at sea. Less need for a supply chain of fuel transports.
This is yet another reason why "green" opposition to nuclear power is so foolish.
With a large build-out of nuclear reactors, prices would fall as experience is gained, electricity can be quickly decarbonized as proven in France and Ontario, and we would have the energy to decarbonize transportation without having to replace our entire refueling infrastructure nor our vehicles.
solid article
I own a Model Y and an F-250 4x4 among other ICE vehicles in my family. My TLDR on EVs: the vehicles and the experience are male dominated and not ready for mass adoption. The Tesla UX is not intuitive to most, the charging (in the US) on trips is decidedly not friendly to women and older folks (they're always at the back of the lot).
That said, competition and the driving experience will solve those problems. And, if the govs would keep their hands out of price controls, the market will create less expensive and better UX vehicles (eg. the Ford E-150 looks awesome).
Re the chip shortage, etc: Musk talks (in the All In Pod Summit) about how Tesla vertically integrated their supply chain, not as there was something bad about suppliers, but as they weren't able to move at the right pace.
Last, we need to ramp UP fracking and drilling during this period, not the other way around. Let's not kid ourselves, India and China are polluting like crazy, so the west won't really put a dent in emissions. And along the way, we need to solve the problem of when I'm charging my Y, I'm burning coal to do it.
It’s not as bad a horse farming taking over in Europe.
The vast majority of the EV-only crowd of politicians are super old, and they will age out soon, hopefully by the end of the decade.
Then we can at least have a younger set of minds who aren’t stuck trying to re-live the 1970’s. Practically no one under 50 is anti-nuclear, and most people under 50 would strongly prefer energy independence & security to the forced curtailment the elders prefer.
Sadly, it was the much younger crowd that filled European streets chanting they were going to die from climate change so stop all oil production That really lent momentum to the old green crowd.
The worst part of this new cult religion of the world ending is how quickly the politicians everywhere were so quick to sign up.
“… EU roads will be quite a sight in 2035, if the ban is in fact adopted.”
And here you have the real reason for the insanity.
If they really were serious about reducing ICE vehicles they would start a program to convert old ICE vehicles to BEVs. A shop can convert a car in one day. And you don't need the giant batteries. The avg car mileage is 30mi/day. Buying a cheap converted EV would be a city vehicle, avg use is ~20mi/day. Just a 40mi/10kwh battery pack would cost ~$2k in volume, another $2k for the conversion kit.
Also a faster way to get off of fossil and reduce emissions is use methanol for gas cars and DME for diesel vehicles. Both can burn directly in those vehicles. Both greatly reduce emissions, are superior to gas or diesel respectively, cost less and both can be made green from any carbonaceous input like biomass, flue gas(cement manufacture), forest overgrowth, CO2 from seawater. The PTB are blocking widespread use of methanol & DME, pushing the nutty hydrogen scam instead. In China both methanol & DME are in widespread use both for transportation, household heat and cooking fuel.
The solution isn't EV (not enough lithium, copper etc). The solution is LESS - ie everyone will have to live using what the average African uses today in terms of energy. Sorry, folks, its going to happen. We don't have a Jetsons future - think Flintstones instead.
No that is not a solution. The average African very much wants increased energy and that is to IMPROVE the environment and LESSEN the environmental impact of humans.
You need to read Shellenberger, some examples:
An Interview with Conservationist Helga Rainer:
"...The need to move to modern fuels is a bone of contention of mine. That we still talk about energy-saving stoves is disappointing..."
https://environmentalprogress.org/extinctions:
The REAL way the decimation of whales was prevented:
"...industrial chemists succeeded in making margarine almost entirely from palm oil, eliminating the need for whale oil. By 1940, palm oil, much of it coming from the Congo, had become cheaper than whale oil. Between 1938 and 1951, the use of vegetable oils used for margarine quadrupled, while the use of whale and fish oil declined by two-thirds. The share of whale oil as an ingredient in soap fell from 13 percent to just 1 percent. Whale oil as a share of global trade in fats declined from 9.4 percent in the 1930s to 1.7 per- cent in 1958, resulting in declining whale oil prices in the late 1950s.
Journalists realized what was going on. In 1959, The New York Times reported that “the growing output of vegetable oils . . . has forced down the market value of whale oil and may, in the end, save the whales.” By 1968, Norwegian whalers were reduced to selling whale meat to pet food manufacturers. The Times reported that “the market for once-prized whale oil has slipped from $238 a ton in 1966 to $101.50. It has lost out to Peruvian fish oil and African vegetable oils.”
This time, rising scarcity of whales did incentivize their replacement with vegetable oil. A group of economists concluded that “economic growth brought with it a declining demand for whale products, whilst decreasing stock levels fed back into more and more expensive harvesting effort . . .”
Whaling peaked in 1962, a full thirteen years before Greenpeace’s heavily publicized action in Vancouver, and declined dramatically during the next decade..."
Conclusion: Wise use of industry & best technological methods are the only path forward for achieving our goals.
There is no problem replacing all vehicles with EVs, though it would take 40yrs. And nuclear energy, even just fission, is essentially unlimited, it would power our civilization at 4X current levels for ~100Myrs, just with easily accessible Earth resources of uranium & thorium. And then there is the moon & asteroids. And fusion.
Zero population growth is a laudable goal and it is happening but degrowth is a nutty idea, has no basis in science and would be a disaster for the Earth, its biota and human civilization. Those are just the facts.
Regression is not going to happen. You think the entire history of human development is just going to end?
Omg i wanted to be a smartass and comment that I'm starting a DAO to invest in horse farms! You stole my line!
It's an excellent idea, though, you should definitely do it!
Dear Irina, I had the chance to drive an i3, as part of a car-sharing fleet. Yes, the design is questionable but the experience was rather good. I heard from friends who drove a Tesla that it is tremendous fun (the straight-line acceleration...the huge touchscreen...). And I regularly drive a Renault Zoe, probably the most basic EV ever, through another car sharing service (cambio.be). Apart from a little range anxiety, I'm very happy with them.
Having said that, it is astonishing that nobody, literally nobody mapped out the transition in detail. That is, except China, who are now sitting on the majority of rare earths and other key minerals needed for electrification and renewables. This is the reality, these are the constraints we need to consider.
Luckily for the EP, taking reality into account is not part of their job description, neither will voters hold them accountable for it. As an EU institution with a democratic deficit bigger than Russia's gas revenues. they have both the space and the motivation for grandstanding.
Anyways, apologies for the long rant. Excellent thoughtful article, as always.
No apologies necessary! Thanks for sharing your experience. The Zoe actually looks like a car, I like the Zoe. :) My personal aversion to EVs actually has nothing to do with batteries and rare earths, and all the other problems I write about from a more objective, I hope, perspective. It has to do with the suspicion that they are too easy to drive. I don't want easy, easy makes you stupid. And I can't imagine surrendering control to a "laptop on wheels" as Musk called Teslas to be even remotely fun. I live in a near-perpetual state of software anxiety as it is. Teslas are for software fans and that's perfectly all right. I love the design of the Model 3 and I can appreciate all the tech specs but I wouldn't drive one.
Vive la Zoe!
To me the fundamental problem with EVs is that they perpetuate the EU mentality of throwing money at a problem and hoping that more consumption will solve everything. The answer isn't EVs and banning combustion engines. It should be less cars overall and longer use of those we already have.
People in Belgium (where I live) throw away cars when they reach an arbitrary limit (4 years or 100k kms), even if said car has 0 problems. Of course, EVs aren't going to be reparable - when the battery pack is gone, they lose their values and will be 0 interest in repair.
Not to mention the almost complete lack of recycling infrastructure and/or lack of financial incentives for recycling. But this is general problem across RES. I won't hold the EVs responsible for that.
We definitely should be using all our tech as long as it can be used. Why are the Belgians so quick to get rid of their cars? Not that I'm complaining, we get most of Western Europe' car rejects and are happy to drive them for another 10 years.
The reasons are very complex, including 1) 4 years marks the beginning of annual technical inspections for new cars 2) rapidly diminishing residual values after 100k 3) a desire to have the "latest tech", e.g. gadgets and options built into new cars 4) the fear of breaking down with an "old" car 5) the average nr of years for a car loan is 4-5 years and 6) the seemingly bottomless market for 2nd hand cars from Western Europe. But these are just my guesses.
I think 3 is the worst, consumerism at its, well, worst. Number 1 is silly - how much of a hassle can a regular checkup be? Number 2 is silly as well, cars start losing value the moment you buy them, and 4 is outright stupid - cars don't just start breaking down because they've turned 4. Number 5 is a sad example of the credit mentality, which says it's okay to live on loans rather than own your things. All good points, though, sad but good points.
Battery-on-wheels.
That's what people are buying when they buy an "EV".
Don't forget too, that batteries don't last forever and ALL those currently-on-the-road Battery Vehicles will be needing their batteries REPLACED and replaced regularly.
The more Battery Vehicles on the road, the greater the demand.
ICE vehicles don't have that problem.
The Battery Vehicle industry will be literally tearing the earth apart looking for minerals.
Car batteries with proper cooling and software management can last a *very* long time.
"... with proper cooling and software management ..."
Battery vehicles remind me of the search for perpetual motion machines.
Not sure what you mean by that. They're not so different than gas powered vehicles in basic theory. They just take a long time to refeul.
So Battery Vehicles don't run on fairy dust?
No. They run on electricity. Like ice cars run on gas. The biggest practical difference to the typical user is the time it takes to refuel.
Noooooooo!! It HAS to be fairy dust!!
You mean all those smiling politicians standing at a Battery Vehicle charging station, making it look like they're filling their "tank" like people do with gas, will actually stand there and smile for very long time?
They wouldn't deceive us now, would they?
Of course not. They'd *never* do that.
Horse farming has a bright future in Europe. That one got to me in big way.