Nothing to see here

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-in-antarctica

You realize if everyone bought an electric car Your power would go off more often as everyone needs to charge their cars.

We need to go Nuclear

I have an electric car!

But its a Chevy Bolt and it has been recalled. I have an appointment to have my dealership do an inspection to see if the battery and battery housing are susceptible to ignite. It is true that only 16 have self ignited out of 141,000 but still I've been lucky so far. On the bright side they are going to replace the housing and battery if necessary. The downside is that the parking garage near Whole Foods won't allow Bolts to be parked anymore. And I am pretty sure they aren't going to make exceptions for Bolts that have been recalled with batteries and housings replaced.

As far as the power going off if we all had electric cars, my guess is its not as simple as that. In NY State Con Edison has offered a discount if you charge your car from 12am to 8am (it has amounted to about $17 a month for me over the last two years which has been about 50% off for electricity at that time). Con Ed also offers an extra $20 per month during the summer months (June through September) if you don't charge your car from 2pm to 6pm.

So at least in NY they are solving the overcharging problem during the day by incentivizing night time charging.

I'm also guessing that they will improve on how they charge cars as well. If the power grid is being overtaxed then they will figure out how to shut off the charging during stressed periods. You may ask how that is possible? Well, in order to get my ~$280/year cash back reward I have to plug in a Cone Ed electric module that has a GPS and some kind of communication device with Con Ed so they know when I am charging my car at home in NY. It plugs into the same socket that the dealership uses to evaluate the cars status. So they surely can come up with a device that can shut down the charging or at least work with the car manufacturers to get it done.

Also the net reduction in gasoline and diesel usage should provide a cheap way for electric companies to ramp up electric production if needed. My car gets about 150 mpg equivalent in the summer and probably about 125 mpg in the winter. How do I know this? Con Ed sends me a recap of my electricity usage as well as how my engine brake has regenerated electricity.

Also given the high cost of electricity now, I am contemplating getting solar panels (which should pay for themselves in about 7 years given tax incentives). Unfortunately my wife doesn't like how they would look on our house. And in fairness not everybody lives in their own house. City dwellers would not be able to do that.

Ultimately though I am surprised that there hasn't been a more concerted push for Hydrogen Fuel cell cars. Given the bad environmental impacts of lithium and cobalt mining for car batteries, I would have thought that the Hindenburg approach would have gained some steam.

Covid should have proved to everyone that there is not a chance in hell of climate change being stopped. I have zero belief it's possible without some technological miracle.

You may get that tech miracle but lol a comparing covid to climate change.

Its funny here in Alberta one of our Utility companies is spending $$$ to research how we can get folks to not charge electric cars at peak times. It seems like common sense like NY is doing

Curious what you mean by my engine brake has regenerated electricity and why you chose the Volt?

We couldn't come together for a clear and immediate threat in Covid. It's not happening for a less obvious and more complex problem.

On my steering wheel is a hand brake. It slows the car down much faster than the foot brake. When I apply the hand brake (which apparently I do about 90% of the time according to Con Ed) the engine slows the car down and it doesn't use the brake pads. In theory I might not have to change my brake pads for the life of the car.

I have a Chevy Bolt which is 100% electric car.

The Chevy Volt has been discontinued and was a hybrid+ kind of car (the battery could go for like 50 miles and then it would shift to gas powered hybrid mode).

I chose the Chevy Bolt for several reasons.

I was actually most interested in the Prius Hybrid+ but when I went to the Prius dealership they had me test drive a car that had a dead battery. So it was on gas/hybrid only. And the salesperson knew nothing about the car. It turns out when I did research that the hybrid/gas engine kicked in when the Prius exceeded 45 mph (so on highways). So I lost interest because I wanted a car that used mostly the battery.

I went to a Chevy dealership to find out about the Chevy Volt and again the salesperson knew nothing about hybrid+ or electric cars. But they could get me any colored car (probably from other dealerships) if I wanted.

The second Chevy dealership I went to though had a saleswoman who was expert on the Chevy Volt and Bolt. That got my interest. It turns out that Volt was discontinued so I could only buy a used one and the only used one they had was like 3 years old and burnt orange (which I loved by the way). And aside from a brand new Bolt they had a used Chevy Bolt that had 5,000 miles on it (it was being used by their financial person who told me how much she loved the car). They offered it to me at a huge discount (almost 50% off the MSRP) and I was eligible for the tax rebate in the US (which in September 2019 was $3,750 or half of the tax rebate if you bought the car in the first 3 months of the year). So I bought it!

I was surprised that the saleswoman did not own one herself. Because she could charge it for free at work. That's why the Financial person was a bit sad... But the finance person ended up with the Volt again. The Volt itself had a story. The original owner had filled the gas tank only 3 times in the two years he owned it.

One of the perks of my electric car is that Foxwoods charges it for free. Still.

That and that it's already far too late to stop it. I agree that as with covid, science and tech make the most difference. We make choices but it's science/tech that make the big good choices possible.

and eventually the only hope for humanity and the planet is that we **** off. That's all down to science and tech.


Maybe but the vaccines and treatments changed the game.

While there is some truth to what you say, the comparison has a big flaw. Much more immediate and dramatic change was required for Covid, and that makes a huge difference.

That said, it certainly has highlighted that humans aren't optimized for "greater good" sacrifices, and that will impact how much we are able to mitigate the impacts of climate change. I have more faith in technological innovation than in behaviour change. Both are happening, and will continue to happen, but it will likely remain the former that helps more than the latter.

In my mind, there will not be enough will to make substantive changes (because the threat is too obscure), even if they're less painful and more gradual than Covid lockdowns, until the negative consequences of climate change are undeniable and it will be far too late at that point.

Isn’t undeniable already ??

Maybe world war 3 will be between climate deniers and people who want to save the world. Sad thing is the climate deniers would win the war and the world would be doomed.

I'm not sure it's quite as binary as that, but this is definitely a danger.

It's not undeniable to some and it's not undeniably at a point where we need to make changes to many.


I was being a bit hyperbolic.

Well u really were speaking about yourself….

Clearly the will won’t come from .
What you ask as undeniable is when it will be too late for sure .

I'm not quite following you. My position is not enough is being done now and even if it is potentially pointless to make an effort because the head winds are too strong, we should still attempt to do more. I'm not advocating giving up, I'm just pessimistic about the outcome.

Anybody else here share the (controversial?) opinion that "fixing" "climate change" won't actually make the slightest difference to the timeline of humanity's eventual collapse?

Juk

Reality is it is a world problem and you have so many folks in India and China now escaping poverty and what will they buy? cars and AC .

Greed will never allow us to do anything so all we can hope for is technology and adapt

Probably not

Unless it's catasrtrophic and wipes out life on the planet befere we **** off then it will make no difference to humanity. But it will make a hell of a lot of difference to the billions who have to live through it.

Ok my bad .
I didn’t had the feeling You were just pessimistic.

All good. I can see how it came off as nihilism.

That's pretty much my view.

I just don't know.

But I do think this conversation is more like the recent pandemic than nuclear war.

What I mean is that it is likely that global warming will cause hundreds of millions of deaths due to flooding of coastal cities in mostly poor countries, food shortages, droughts, wildfires, famine, resulting wars to move out of unlivable areas, etc. But out of 8 Billion people on the planet it may be only 3% to 10% of the world's population. So it is a question of everyone banding together selflessly to turn this around at significant cost individually vs. we are each on our own and get to choose for ourselves how to live without any regard of the impact to others ("Live free or die" vs "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves." Philppians 2:3). The other similarity is that for established big business they will fight for profits over human lives. And will be backed by at least one political party who they are funding and significant segments of the population in the US who will believe the lies...

The other thing to consider is that the impact in lives lost will be skewed towards poorer countries. So as we have seen, the wealthier countries that have been essentially responsible for the current catastrophic trend will not be inclined to sacrifice their cost of living to save the lives of people in hazardous and fragile areas.

There's never been a better/safer time to be alive. Humans have never been safer from the environment, the environment has never been cleaner and extreme poverty is rapidly declining. Climate catastrophists have been claiming a crises for 40 years and have been horribly wrong!