No such thing as "Zero Emissions".

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Ed Hartouni

Trad climber
Livermore, CA
Dec 12, 2018 - 12:05am PT
Sorry, Ed, but you lost me there. What happened to Chinese output of CO2 when China "developed" post-Mao?

Reilly's question/statement.... you should follow a bit more closely.

coal is a very cheap source of energy, the US burned a lot since the 1940s and the current administration wants to burn more now, it seems nonsense to say current economic gains won't pale in the loses tomorrow, pay now or pay a lot more tomorrow.

difficult to leave cheap stuff in the ground,
and really bad to burn it and exhaust it into the atmosphere.

China is doing it, India, Poland, not good.

The US did a lot, also not good.
High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber
Dec 12, 2018 - 09:51am PT
I'm not an Elon Musk fan...

Why?



crickets
Ken M

Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
Dec 13, 2018 - 12:13pm PT
Ed, only one thing I'd dispute: the 37 foreign bases.

There are over 800, in 70 countries, and that does not count the secret bases that are difficult to enumerate.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321
Ken M

Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
Dec 13, 2018 - 12:20pm PT
The OP seems to be s simple luddite. He does not believe in progress, and the incremental pace involved. It shows you what Edison, Marconi, and the Wright brothers faced.

I imagine that the OP's buggy whip factory seems threatened.
tooth

Trad climber
B.C.
Dec 14, 2018 - 05:13pm PT
It used to be that kids had a dumb idea and before they could get it out there their mom would smack them upside the head for their stupidity and that would be the end of it. They would go to schoool and learn, never entertain the thought again. Now, those same thoughts make it onto the internet at the speed of thought, coalesce with others in a self-affirming mass of social media, and before mom can smack the stupid outta you, a protesting mass of idiots are telling each other that their thoughts are genius. Since everything on the internet is true, mom never has a chance and now people have to deal with the likes of this OP.
wilbeer

Mountain climber
Terence Wilson greeneck alleghenys,ny,
Dec 14, 2018 - 07:23pm PT
That ^^^^^^is pretty damn good.
Bad Climber

Trad climber
The Lawless Border Regions
Dec 15, 2018 - 07:20am PT
I get the OP's point, however: The sanctimony is pretty damn annoying, especially since owning a Tesla means you're still consuming the hell out of buttloads of resources. The "Zero Emissions" label is virtue signaling of the first order. And tires are a huge and interesting problem. Another issue is that, green or not, cars themselves are a kind of pollution, like enormous beer cans littering the landscape. All that said, I admire EV's, and I suspect I'll one day own one, and the world will be a cleaner place if we could all drive them. The transition, I think, is going to be a long, drawn out affair.

BAd
MikeL

Social climber
Southern Arizona
Dec 15, 2018 - 08:01am PT
Bad: I get the OP's point, . . . .

I do, too.

Buying any new car simply to be green strikes me as just plain stupid.

Fuji ships its pristine water all over the world. And people buy it. Shipping water!
Tom Turrentine

Trad climber
Santa Cruz
Dec 15, 2018 - 09:03am PT
The label Zero Emissions is not originally related to carbon reductions, rather was used in the late 1980s to refer to vehicles that potentially could radically reduce criteria emissions in urban air basins like LA. At the time we were talking primarily of zero tailpipe emissions, and looking for vehicles that could shift emissions away from where people lived, hence electric vehicles could move emissions to locations out of the air basin, and away from sidewalks, bedrooms, schools, neighborhoods, etc..

(I have worked in research in this topic for the University of California for 30 years- just retired)

The idea of Zero Emissions vehicles has been extended to carbon reductions in the past three decades, and all knowledgeable scientists in this arena realize no vehicle is emission free. It is a goal, and the Zero Emissions Vehicle program in California is a technical development program, not directly an emissions reduction program like the Low Emission Vehicle program, which regulates most vehicles.

Production emissions are on average about 10% of the full lifetime emissions of a car, but there is great variability and for example, BMW has been systematically removing all emissions from productions of its line of electric cars, developing and installing wind and solar power at the plants that produce the parts and do assembly.

The operation of electrics in most locations is not emissions free, for example in North Dakota a mile of driving in an electric is for the most part not much different than a combustion vehicle, but in California the operation of an electric is much lower in carbon, and as California continues to add solar and wind this gets better almost every year.

Some locations, such as Norway, the operations of electric vehicles per mile is near zero emissions, especially if driving an electric built by BMW.

Huge progress has been made in making combustion vehicles cleaner, and lower carbon, but reality is that the number of vehicles in the global fleet will double in the next 30 years from about 1 billion today to 2 billion. So even cutting the carbon in half for each vehicle will not be a solution. We need a mixture of zero and near zero emissions to meet climate and urban air quality goals for future generations. Electric drive is a big piece of that solution set along with clean electricity and production.
Chaz

Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
Dec 15, 2018 - 09:08am PT
China has one overseas military base...

And for thousands of years, they had exactly zero. Until very recently, China has always focused inward. Mongolians? F them. China built a wall. China has never felt the need to project their power outward.

Why the sudden change?
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