SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Who's forcing Marchionne and all the other major automakers to sell mostly money-losing electric vehicles? More than any other person, it's Mary Nichols. She's run the California Air Resources Board since 2007, championing the state's zero-emission-vehicle quotas and backing President Barack Obama's national mandate to double average fuel economy to 55 miles per gallon by 2025. She was chairman of the state air regulator once before, a generation ago, and cleaning up the famously smoggy Los Angeles skies is just one accomplishment in a four-decade career.
Nichols really does intend to force automakers to eventually sell nothing but electrics. In an interview in June at her agency's heavy-duty-truck laboratory in downtown Los Angeles, it becomes clear that Nichols, at age 70, is pushing regulations today that could by midcentury all but banish the internal combustion engine from California's famous highways. "If we're going to get our transportation system off petroleum," she says, "we've got to get people used to a zero-emissions world, not just a little-bit-better version of the world they have now."
We've seen campaigns to defend smoking and not wearing seatbelts and not getting vaccinated. Is this like that, or is there more to it?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Covalent on Monday August 03 2015, @08:27PM
I teach chemistry and physics and every year my students and I tackle some aspect of climate change. Last year we looked at the cost of absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere using solar, wind, and nuclear power. We decided on an amount of 350ppm and a timeline of 85 years, which by a convenient coincidence works out to about 2100 gigatons by the year 2100. Nice! The problem was somewhat simplified so that high school students could tackle it, but the cost is probably correct to within an order of magnitude. The motivation was also simplified: If we do nothing, the 3 - 6 foot sea level rise predicted to occur by 2100 will force the evacuation of most of Miami and Miami Beach. So we tried to compare the cost of saving Miami to the cost of abandoning it.
Care to venture a guess?
The cost to absorb CO2 (assuming we continue to produce it at the current rate, which is another simplification, but I digress) was around 1 quadrillion dollars.
That's 10^15 USD for those of you playing with your scientific calculators at home.
The cost of evacuating Miami is presumably several orders of magnitude less than that. But when you throw in New Orleans, Galveston, Manhattan, San Francisco, Seattle...and the list goes on and on and on...the amount of money stops sounding quite so insane.
So when people say "Oh, this is going to cost too much. It's going to damage the economy! Grumble Grumble They TERK ER JERBS!!" I like to respond with this:
"Which would you rather spend your trillions on? More fuel efficient cars, better power generation, cleaner air, etc. or the evacuation of millions of people to a sweltering hellhole?"
And if you don't think it's we, the average taxpayer, that's going to foot the bill for the mess we're making, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Monday August 03 2015, @08:41PM
Btter yet, it's not even us, it's our children. Strangely, the "think of the children" line works less well when there's any sort of money involved. We're a greedy species.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @09:15PM
Problem is, we are also a lying species.
When one herd of fatcats is attacking another "because ecology!" and it makes you believe they are really caring about someone, or something besides their bank accounts... Well, there is that bridge for sale somewhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @09:19PM
So you teach wild ass economic speculations as physical science? I think what you describe is bizarre. For example, why is the cost of saving Miama = cost of absorbing CO2? You could also just build a system of dikes and canals... That is just for example.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hubie on Monday August 03 2015, @10:02PM
No, he's teaching them how to think a problem through. To be a good scientist, you need to be able to attack these kind of order of magnitude problems. That's why Enrico Fermi cared how many piano tuners there were in Chicago [utexas.edu], among other things [umd.edu]. Too many people think Googling for an answer is a sufficient replacement for being able to think through problems.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @10:21PM
Not from that description. I find it difficult to believe that thinking a problem through would result in concluding that we need to either scrub X amount of CO2 from the atmosphere or evacuate miami. Either way, it is (extremely inappropriately in my opinion) presenting wild economics speculations as hard science. The Fermi examples are good, but they are a completely different beast. Estimating something is not the same as wildly speculating. If I said "CO2 is so bad it'll cost a quadrillion dollars to fix it", it is just as valid as the above which makes bizarre assumptions.
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:19PM
Thank you! This is exactly the point. Not to assume that my two "solutions" are the only ones, but rather to consider options and analyze them for feasibility. Aka critical thinking. Apparently the AC hasn't heard of that idea. ;)
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 03 2015, @10:00PM
You know, we abandoned Detroit and nobody really gave a F. I'm not thinking abandoning a couple more cities is going to matter.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by M. Baranczak on Tuesday August 04 2015, @03:44AM
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday August 03 2015, @11:56PM
You're talking about a city that's over 3,000 miles from where I live. You're also talking about a sea level rise that won't affect me, my kids, my parents, nor anybody I know. You're talking maybes and ifs. To balance that you want me to spend extra money now to avoid something that may or may not happen (not saying it won't happen, saying 2100 is so far off my grandkids will be dead by then).
Hope you like rolling that rock uphill forever.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday August 04 2015, @01:14AM
> You're also talking about a sea level rise that won't affect me, my kids, my parents, nor anybody I know.
Unless you don't like your Orange Juice to taste a bit salty and you live in the kind of place South Beach [bleep] could consider for relocation.
Thank you for illustrating (I call Poe's Law) the effect of claiming to be one happy United People, when the US is more like a sum of its mostly-convergent selfish parts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @02:54AM
It sounds like you are near the West Coast where the land rises quickly as you move away from the ocean.
Seaports, however, are at sea level.
Most people get significant portions of what they consume via ships and seaports.
As sea level rises, the port(s) that serve(s) you will have to be rebuilt--even though they aren't on the East Coast|Gulf Coast (which will be clobbered even harder).
Whistle in the dark if you like.
There's some bad shit coming for you and/or your descendants.
The old saying is "Pay me now or pay me later".
...and I really like the "a system of dikes" AC who, apparently, doesn't know that water will go around the end of that thing unless you make it go continuously all the way up the coast.
...not to mention that that doesn't address the problem of ever-bigger storms, and an ever-hotter, drier climate that keep coming with climate change.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday August 04 2015, @12:27AM
There's another easy way to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere: it's called "planting a tree". Plant lots of trees, and you'll absorb huge amounts of CO2. Of course, the trees eventually die and fall over and the CO2 is released, but while they're alive they make seeds and those grow into even more new trees to replace their parents. The main danger is forest fires (though that frequently helps clear out old trees and helps new seeds grow).
The other thing we should be doing, besides planting lots of trees, is building the SkyTran system. Then we can get around with a tiny amount of energy (much less than even Teslas), plus we'll get to our destinations much faster since there's no traffic lights and the pods travel at 100mph. It costs much less per mile to build than a highway, and will have huge economic benefits by saving people so much time as well as money, since most people won't need private cars any more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @05:37AM
Are you saying we could either spend a quadrillion dollars or each plant a tree?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:19AM
Bamboo grows faster and is a really versatile source of material inputs. You can make flooring with it, build whole houses with it, make paper with it, eat it, and even spin its fibers into tough, silky yarn.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday August 04 2015, @02:11PM
I would like to grow it but it sounds like the stuff will spread like crazy beyond my yard. The containment solutions online are marketed like some terrible Jurassic Park thing. "They will never escape containment!"
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:06AM
Yeah, but how long does it live?
If you're looking for a way of sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and turning into a useful raw material (a wood-like product in this case), then yes, bamboo is a great idea. It grows faster than trees.
However, if you just want to plant a bunch of plants, and have them suck carbon out of the atmosphere for as long as possible (and then reproduce so their children do the same), it seems like large, deciduous trees are the better choice. They can live for centuries. Large fir trees might work too (things like sequoias and redwoods); those things are giant, and probably live a pretty long time too, though I don't know offhand. It seems to me that bamboo probably does not have a very long lifespan, so unless you plan to harvest it, it would not be a good choice here.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @08:40AM
About 120 years. That's roughly equal to pine trees.
Washington DC delenda est.