this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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As a leftist, the fact that everybody has just gone along with the concept that battery-powered vehicles are an everyday necessity is pretty frustrating. Long-haul trucks with batteries instead of freight trains. There’s a trial in Germany powering trucks on freeways with overhead lines. People with range anxiety dragging around a 500km-range battery for their usual 40km daily driving, just so they can do their once yearly road trip. When better public transport could solve this. We don’t need new battery technology, we just need to actually spend the money to improve public transport.
Okay, I was with you in the first half. I live in Australia, there are plenty of places that you need a car. I clearly wasn’t talking about those situations though.
In my part of Australia, the grid is powered by burning brown coal. One of, if not the most, dirty form of power generation. We have no plan on how to stop burning it either. So electric vehicles are just going to make things worse.
Electric vehicles as a solution is the exact same brainwashing as recycling making a difference. When the biggest impact would be made by targeting corporate polluters.
Also, seriously, centuries? I forgot that trains were invented in the 1600s and that’s why the midwest finally had them by the late 1800s.
Unless you buy the most extravagant and silly EV on the market (the Hummer), EVs are still a win over ICE when powered by coal plants.
And yes, it would be incredibly difficult for these towns to transition to usable public transportation. There are decisions literally set in concrete. You'd have to tear down perfectly good buildings and replace them with higher density housing. The concrete you would need is itself a major CO2 emitter. You could basically let everyone drive ICE cars for an extra decade for the amount of concrete you'd need.
CO2 neutral concrete (or even CO2 negative) is out there, but it's not scaled up enough yet.
They'll probably never get there. Those small towns are losing population.
That said, more people should consider e-bikes. It's OK if you come to the conclusion that it won't work for you, but do some research. It might be that your objections aren't as insurmountable as you think.
Yes public transit.
But also the improvements in battery technology are helping make grid-level storage viable, which is making renewable energy like solar more useful.
Ironically, the US by some metrics has more freight rail than anyone else.
We're just using it to carry around rocks and coal and shit, and putting literally everything else in trucks. We SHOULD be using the trains for rocks and coal and shit, don't get me wrong, but it'd be nice to put some other stuff on it.
But the class 1 railroads mostly own the actual track and right-of-way. Norfolk and all their moronic lot. They're slaves to the lines going up and pass on good, sensible business expansions that would make them lots of money just because it would lower their profit percents by some tiny margin. Everywhere else in the world, the rail and right of way is a public good even if the service on them is deregulated.
Meanwhile Cincinnati just sold the Cincinnati Southern Railway to Norfolk Southern for a short-term cash injection. Fucking idiots. Norfolk TOLD them they were undervaluing the line by offering to buy it and they sold it anyway. And now that's one more route that has 0 chance of ever having meaningful passenger service.
My perspective...in the US, EVs are at the tipping point of displacing ICE on cost and practicality. Battery research plus scale production of batteries will only push that forward from here. Average car in the US is ~13 years old. If we're looking out 15 years to the entire US fleet of cars transitioning to EV, that's a staggering change in energy delivery...largely paid by joe six-pack buying their next car. More on that in a minute.
I have no idea where battery recycling/reuse will end up, or whether vehicle/grid storage will play out, but I am fairly confident that there is economic value that will be extracted at the end of the car's lifespan or the battery pack's lifespan in that car. So...joe six-pack's rational big battery EV purchase today not only completely rewrites US energy consumption in the next decade, it bought enough grid storage to meaningfully push through intermittency concerns of renewables.
Meanwhile, in my area of the country that has extensive mass transit networks, the outlook is bleak. My state subsidizes mass transit that primarily takes residents to another state for work, where they pay taxes to the other state, then primarily consume services in the home state. The federal government takes way more in taxes than it sends back to the state in support or services. Occasionally, federal democrats take control and send a bone, that gets yanked as soon as Republicans are back in. My state and the public transit agency get starved, service diminished, more cars. Rationally, the other state should contribute some of those tax collections to my state's mass transit, for efficiency, fairness, and to keep cars off the road, right? Instead, the other state imposed a gas tax that it refuses to apply to supporting transit agencies in surrounding states that send workers.
I don't see things getting better for mass transit in my neck of the woods. Big battery EV adoption might not be ideal, but at least it drives decarbonization and convinces masses of unsuspecting people to fund batteries that have lasting value.