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from the ban-gas-instead-of-passing-it dept.
France and the United Kingdom are doing it. So is India. And now one lawmaker would like California to follow their lead in phasing out gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles.
When the Legislature returns in January, Assemblyman Phil Ting plans to introduce a bill that would ban the sale of new cars fueled by internal-combustion engines after 2040. The San Francisco Democrat said it's essential to get California drivers into an electric fleet if the state is going to meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets, since the transportation sector accounts for more than a third of all emissions.
"The market is moving this way. The entire world is moving this way," Ting said. "At some point you need to set a goal and put a line in the sand."
California already committed five years ago to putting 1.5 million "zero-emission vehicles," such as electric cars and plug-in hybrids, on the road by 2025. By that time, the state wants these cleaner models to account for 15 percent of all new car sales.
Could the hills surrounding Los Angeles one day become visible?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday September 30 2017, @02:18PM (16 children)
Seems that running combustion engines on fuel produced from atmospheric CO2, or accelerated living biomass to hydrocarbon transformations (which ultimately comes from atmospheric carbon), rather than fossil fuel, should be okay. What's wrong with using ethanol produced from corn? Supposedly, current methods of ethanol production use a lot of fossil fuel, but I see no reason why they have to. Clean up ethanol production, and maybe that will ultimately prove better than the electric car.
Battery production can be plenty unfriendly to our health and the environment. For instance, I know of a lead-acid battery facility that was caught polluting the surrounding area with lead. Lithium is cleaner, but too much of anything generally causes problems. Short lived batteries are another problem. Takes so much energy and material to produce them that if they don't last at least 5 years, it's not worth doing.
A blanket ban on internal combustion engines lacks nuance.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RS3 on Saturday September 30 2017, @03:41PM (13 children)
I strongly agree. One question: does some of the carbon in ethanol come from the ground, or all from atmospheric CO2?
Although I strongly support wind and solar power (and have installed many PV systems), still much electricity comes from coal and natural gas burning, so rushing to electric cars will not stop CO2 emissions. I'm sure someone will argue (correctly) that electric cars cause less CO2 emission due to electricity generation from fossil fuels being more efficient than IC engines...
My beef with the IC ban is: hydrogen-fueled vehicles. They can be run very cleanly. The only problem is NOx production and there are many ways to minimize that problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @03:52PM (12 children)
These don't even exist and are dead before they even exist.
The world is moving to battery power, whether we like it or not. The positive thing about electric cars is you can charge them during the day from all that PV power. It may be crazy enough that it may just work.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @04:03PM (10 children)
Says who, you? 'Cause last I'd checked, the battery-powered vehicle market is so niche as to be effectively nonexistent. People do not seem to be eager to spend their hard-earned money on EVs with severe limitations compared to ICE vehicles. That doesn't seem to be in danger of changing until something incredible happens, like an improvement of an order of magnitude or two in electrical storage technology.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mhajicek on Saturday September 30 2017, @04:16PM (5 children)
I've been seeing a fair number of Volts on the road here, and a couple Teslas. The trend is indeed in that direction.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @06:32PM (3 children)
Have you considered in conjunction with your fair Volts and few Teslas the amount of subsidized funds extracted from taxpayers that affected the financial decisions of the people who bought said Volts and Teslas (not to mention the subsidies handed out to the manufacturers)?
How do you see that trend being affected in the absence of such artificial subsidies?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @07:38PM (2 children)
Have you considered in conjunction with your fair ICE vehicles the amount of subsidized funds extracted from taxpayers that go to fossil fuel industry?
Aside from the (already enormous) direct monetary subsidies, don't forget to include a large percentage of the military budget, as well the entirety of anti-terrorism related spending. You should also factor in the millions of lives lost or destroyed in the Middle East, countries plunged into civil wars, support of oppressive regimes, the erosion of our civil liberties enabled by the "threat" of terrorism, environmental destruction (oil spills, hundreds of earthquakes caused by fracking)...
So, how do you see fossil fuel availability being affected in the absence of such artificial subsidies?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 30 2017, @10:25PM
And where does the electricity for the EVs come from?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 01 2017, @12:43AM
You raise very valid points. All subsidies need to be abolished immediately, along with the Nuclear Regulatory Committee. ICEV and EV can then fight it out in the marketplace when we have fail-safe nuclear molten salt reactors producing a wild surplus of zero-emission electric energy along with all the Fisher-Tropsch-produced gasoline, diesel, and other petrocarbons making use of the high industrial heat of MSRs and the waste product of domestic thorium mining: coal.
Tear down all the illegal economic kickbacks.
(Score: 4, Touché) by slap on Saturday September 30 2017, @07:30PM
I've seen more PT Cruisers than Bolts, Volts, or Teslas in my neighborhood. Must mean that PT Cruisers are coming back in a big way.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Saturday September 30 2017, @04:50PM (3 children)
Every time I take a trip across the (not massive) state I see a few EVs. I've never seen a hydrogen car in my life despite the fact that half of the car companies pushed it hard before it became clear that electric was the way to go.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @06:53PM (2 children)
And how many ICE vehicles do you observe during those same trips?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @07:44PM (1 child)
Mass-market ICE vehicles had about a century of head start.
How many smartphones have you seen around in the first two decades or so of their existence? And how about a year or two after iPhone was introduced?
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday October 01 2017, @01:40AM
> Mass-market ICE vehicles had about a century of head start.
How so? The first cars were EVs, there was a time when both ICE and EV vehicles new tech, and were competing for market share.
ICE won because it was better and more convenient than EVs. The poorer engine efficiency of the prime mover was dwarfed by cheap, easy to refill fuel, making the car have a longer range, and a faster fill up time.
Over a hundred years of investment, both in battery and fuel/ICE tech, and the results haven't changed. Best answer would be a liquid fueled EV. An ethanol fuel celled EV would have the benefits of liquid fuel (fast refill, long range), with the benefits of EVs. Nothing beats liquid fuels for energy density, and batteries won't ever reach it.
This battery EV just seems like a gimmick that just won't scale, and an overall bad idea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 01 2017, @07:58AM
> [Hydrogen-fueled vehicles] don't even exist and are dead before they even exist.
They exist. There are laughably few of them, but they exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fuel_cell_vehicles#Production [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @03:50PM
There is not enough biofuel capability on the planet for that.
Also, I'm sure in year 3000 you'll find some old VW that runs on whale oil, so don't panic. Laws like this are to give guidance to manufacturers. That's all.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday October 01 2017, @01:32AM
This is a good point. It isn't the CO2 that is the problem, it is the open carbon cycle, where we are digging up locked in carbon and releasing it to the atmosphere.
If we then locked up the carbon and burned it again in a closed cycle, there would be no net increase in CO2. The fuel would just be an ultra dense energy storage medium, that can be used in EVs or ICE without problems. Using something like BioEthanol would work, and would have the benefit of decentralising fuel production (because humans have been making Ethanol for millennia.
This whole "Ban ICE" and force battery EVs just goes to show the distinct lack of knowledge on the part of the proponents and politicians about how this works. It is treating the symptom, not the cause. Assuming it it ignorance, and not just corruption with a side of authoritarian power grab (which I suspect it is, but the motives don't really matter to the results).
The irony is all this energy put into researching batteries, which never will be able to store the same energy density as chemical fuel (as that energy is stored in chemical bonds), where they could be working on improving the efficiency of production/conversion of said fuels and fuel cells.
Imagine an EV with an ethanol fuel cell. All the benefits of current cars (long range, using existing infrastructure and quick refill time), but with the benefits of EV. Not to mention giving a way for a transition from old tech, and a way to keep ICE cars on the road for those who want them, while no longer dumping excess CO2 into the atmosphere. Seems like a win all round to me.