>> The bad news is that energy-related emissions rose in 2023. But the good news is that continued expansion of clean energy technologies meant that global energy-related emissions rose less strongly than in 2022, even as total energy demand growth accelerated.
>> Emissions increased by 410 million tonnes, or 1.1%, in 2023 – compared with a rise of 490 million tonnes the year before – taking them to a record level of 37.4 billion tonnes.
>> An exceptional shortfall in hydropower due to extreme droughts in the US, China, and several other economies resulted in over 40% of the rise in emissions in 2023 as countries turned largely to fossil fuels to plug the gap. Had it not been for the unusually low hydropower output, global emissions from electricity generation would have declined in 2023, making the overall rise in energy-related emissions significantly smaller.
It's impressive that the world (admittedly, driven by advanced economies) is getting a place of increasing our global energy production while decreasing emissions.
I can recommend Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Richie if you want to see many long-term plots about pollution per country. The West is mostly decreasing emissions already where other countries will hopefully also switch to newer technologies and reach a peak in emissions too.
I’m optimistic that with better energy tech we have multiple potential routes (solar+storage, fission, fusion, geothermal) to create energy abundance in the future. It can bring about great human flourishing if we don’t burn or blow up the world first.
I'd be fascinated by any modern studies on energy output per total energy unit input (manufacturing, construction, operation, and decommissioning, including carbon/pollution externalities).
Until success is assured, can’t let up in any meaningful fashion. It’ll be used to let up on pulling the trajectory more vertical. Success is not yet assured. The forces at play are unfathomable. We are having to be dragged to a cleaner future, and the momentum must remain, if not accelerate.
If people think no progress is being made at all, then then they may just give up thinking everything is hopeless — so it’s important to celebrate the successes too
We put in all of this work and we’re still doomed? I don’t know, man. I’m going to take it easy.
Environmentalists told me I shouldn’t recycle, offset with Terrapass, or live in the city. Now they’re telling me that the things we are doing are not going to work? Then why are we doing them?
Unless I'm misreading, emissions still increased, only slower than they did last year. It's not dissimilar to inflation going down meaning that prices increase slower than they had previously. The difference here is that emission increases are given in absolute amounts vs. a rate.
> [EVs] played a significant role in keeping oil demand (in terms of energy content) from rising above pre-pandemic levels.
Oil demand increased by 2.4% from 2022 to 2023 according to the IEA's own report [1]. In what world is an annual increase considered "curbing demand"? This is twisting the meaning of words to an extreme degree.
The time series analysis in question uses the unrelated pandemic dip to cherry-pick a time period that looks most favorable to EVs. The article makes no mention of the recent annual change (which is the only thing caused by new car sales), taking pains to avoid it.
I'm rooting for the EV transition to work, I really am. But we need to be brutally honest in the assessment of our progress or we'll never get there. A little light greenwashing can be hugely detrimental to our cause; we have a moral obligation to do robust scientific inference.
I have no way of knowing if the omission was intentional or an oversight, either way it undermines the validity of the message.
Demand grows with population and GDP growth. Also, less developed countries become more developed and people demand more energy usage. So 2.4% could have been 5%, and that it was only 2.4% is how growth was curbed. This is probably mostly coming from Chinese, who have slowed the increases in their oil usage from an aggressive push into EVs.
In 2022, the world bought 99.8 million barrels per day. In 2023, we bought 102.4. The IEA data says explicitly that demand is growing. There is no debate about that.
But I get your point re: the word "curbed". The word is mathematically vague and means effectively "restrained". Which doesn't tell us if that's a reduction of the metric itself or a simply a reduction in the rate of increase (the second derivative of the metric). Or the relative rate of increase per capita. So depending on your interpretation, you may or may not believe emissions are 'curbed'
My take is that the atmosphere doesn't give a shit about the rate, or which specific countries are curbing what. The only thing that matters from a climate perspective is the absolute global tonnage of greenhouse gas emissions. Unless we reduce that, we're losing the climate fight. I'm increasingly frustrated with our tendency to chase after irrelevant metrics and claim success. I'm not celebrating until we actually reduce emissions.
There is a lot of confusion between position, velocity, and acceleration when discussing these things. Prices have decreased is different from price growth has decreased, and even the rate at which prices are growing has decreased.
> My take is that the atmosphere doesn't give a shit about the rate, or which specific countries are curbing what.
The atmosphere doesn't care period. In the long run, the Earth will recover from whatever we throw at it, humanity just might go extinct earlier than expected. But at the same time, you can't tell people in the developing world that their lifestyle isn't allowed to improve because we need to save the planet. Some fairness is needed. So emissions are going to get worse before they get better, and hopefully they start getting better soon enough.
> you can't tell people in the developing world that their lifestyle isn't allowed to improve because we need to save the planet.
This is nonsense. It's easier for developing countries to adopt renewables because they don't have to compete against existing infrastructure. When the US has a coal-fired power plant that was built 30+ years ago, the capital expenditure is paid off and it's only paying for operations and fuel, and renewables are still out-competing them.
It also makes it easier to build because of different expectations. In the US if you wanted to shut down existing natural gas peaker plants in favor of renewables you'd see objections or demands to back them up with something expensive for times of low generation. In a developing country, building enough in renewables to power 60% of the homes 80% of the time is a bigger win than spending the same money to build enough fossil fuels to power 40% of the homes 100% of the time, and then you can add the expensive reliability technology at the end as the country becomes more developed.
When that's the case it makes no sense to be building new fossil fuel power plants in countries where they don't already exist. They have to pay construction costs, and can be expected to be even more out-competed in the future, implying that the construction cost will be a waste of that country's finite resources. The countries doing it are doing it for political reasons, e.g. they have a domestic fossil fuel industry to subsidize, which is not a sympathetic excuse.
> This is nonsense. It's easier for developing countries to adopt renewables because they don't have to compete against existing infrastructure. When the US has a coal-fired power plant that was built 30+ years ago, the capital expenditure is paid off and it's only paying for operations and fuel, and renewables are still out-competing them.
Are you going to tell Chinese that they can't take advantage of their coal resources because they were 30 years too late in their development?
> In a developing country, building enough in renewables to power 60% of the homes 80% of the time is a bigger win than spending the same money to build enough fossil fuels to power 40% of the homes 100% of the time, and then you can add the expensive reliability technology at the end as the country becomes more developed.
Sure you can spend a few 100 billion to build a giant dam, and that might give you something, but all your industry and water is in the east, while all your solar and wind resources are a few thousand miles away. Heck, you still need natural gas for heating, or you might use it for cars (like Thailand) because you have gas but not oil. You still can't go renewable alone with the investment they require, and maybe you will be able to, but not yet.
> The countries doing it are doing it for political reasons, e.g. they have a domestic fossil fuel industry to subsidize, which is not a sympathetic excuse.
That's just downright cynical. There might be some of that in the middle east, but most countries aren't so resource rich (with the exception of Australia and Russia) that this is going to be a dominating factor.
> Are you going to tell Chinese that they can't take advantage of their coal resources because they were 30 years too late in their development?
Precisely.
> all your industry and water is in the east, while all your solar and wind resources are a few thousand miles away.
There are only a small handful of countries that even have an "a few thousand miles away" in the same country. The large majority of developing countries are rather near the equator and can put solar anywhere.
> Heck, you still need natural gas for heating
In early-stage developing countries, heating is generally wood because they don't have the infrastructure to distribute anything else. In late-state developing countries, you put a nuclear reactor in the city and use cogeneration for heat. This is one of the other advantages of the infrastructure not being built yet.
> you might use it for cars (like Thailand) because you have gas but not oil.
This is soon going to be irrelevant. The bulk of cars in developing countries are the used cars from developed ones, so as developed countries transition to EVs, everybody does. Which is all the more reason to build renewable generation now, because charging those batteries at the right time of day can smooth out the load but also requires more generation, and that's going to be needed not a lot of years from now.
> You still can't go renewable alone with the investment they require
Renewables are cheaper than the operating cost for already paid off coal-fired power plants, much less new ones. If you can't afford to build renewables then how can you afford to build something even more expensive?
> There might be some of that in the middle east, but most countries aren't so resource rich (with the exception of Australia and Russia) that this is going to be a dominating factor.
> Are you going to tell Chinese that they can't take advantage of their coal resources because they were 30 years too late in their development?
One of these seems to contradict the other.
Also notice how the countries you're trying to make an exception out of are some of the largest CO2 emitters. Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Australia all have per-capita CO2 emissions higher than most of Western Europe. Meanwhile China is the highest on total CO2 emissions of any country in the world by a factor of two, accounting for almost a third of global CO2 emissions and higher emissions per capita than the UK or France.
> There are only a small handful of countries that even have an "a few thousand miles away" in the same country. The large majority of developing countries are rather near the equator and can put solar anywhere.
It’s not like they aren’t installing solar power in those countries at all, but with the cost, it’s still slow going. Philippines is up to 1.62 gigawatts, but they use 90k gigawatts, so only 88.4k to go.
Everything costs money to build. The question is, why are they spending the money building fossil fuel power plants that cost more? "Because they have a local fossil fuel industry" is not a good reason, but it's a common one.
In Ireland I've seen some private dealers saying that they won't accept EVs as trade-ins (outside of manufacturer warranty) because of the liability on them if something goes wrong.
Basic model ID.3 is already €39260 with no extras.
VW seems to be trying to get a subscription model for a lot of features that come standard in most cars.
> Your not telling me, that you are just now discovering VWs price list for options, are you?
The relevant part of their paste is the price is specified as a recurring monthly subscription, not that there's such a thing as a price list for options.
But you knew that and conveniently ignored it because Snark.
An obvious end-goal for car companies is turn all ownership into ten year leases, at the end you give the car back and they recycle it replace the battery and sell/dispose of it.
That implies they can avoid competitors doing something different. The hardest part about building an economical electric car has been cost-effectively producing the battery. Within a few years that will be a commodity.
Then what stops a new car company from forming that will sell you a car that lasts for 20+ years and you own it? Only the inability to get customers because the incumbents are offering a better deal. So to stop it they'd have to be offering a better deal.
Coincidentally, I personally noticed an uptick in general negative press toward EVs in 2023. Lots of articles and news stories along the lines of “people are rejecting the electric vehicle pipedream” and “things don’t look so rosy for EV automakers”. I’m not sure if I simply noticed it more because I bought an EV at the end of 2022, or if there actually was an uptick in negativity.
Disclaimer, I’m biased as an EV owner and I generally like them.
What's the reporting on how much of advanced economies emissions have been exported to elsewhere in the world
edit:
> lower emissions per capita now than they did at the beginning of the 21st century
Given the US for instance has grown by ~70 million people since the start of the 21st century, does this per capita reporting obfuscate a growing net impact?
As expected, a "consumption based" approach to measuring CO2 shows advanced economies with higher emissions than otherwise reported and big manufacturing exporters like China with lower emissions. The good news is that advanced economies are still making real progress: they have lower emissions per capita now than they did at the beginning of the 21st century, even after adjusting numbers for offshored manufacturing.
EDIT: on an absolute (not just per-capita) basis, the US has also reduced its consumption based CO2 emissions in the 21st century:
It's a clever accounting trick. Try it with a random selection of countries instead of a cherry-picked sample. We have seen no decrease in global emissions.
Advanced economies rely on international trade for their emissions-heavy industries, effectively outsourcing emissions. Carbon molecules don't respect international boundaries and the atmosphere doesn't care what country burned it. From a climate perspective, global CO2e in tons is what matters, everything else is accounting tricks.
You can build a more complex model to deal with the carbon accounting intricacies of trade. Or you can analyze on a global scale. But analyzing national data without proper controls is straight up invalid scientific inference.
Clever accounting trick? AFAIK noone has strict enough rules to make people bother with clever accounting tricks.
I think it's more likely to mean that ① advanced economies have advanced further in the transition, ② advanced economies are also economies with few children and global per-capita emissions peaked about a decade ago, or ③ both.
In case there is a language barrier or something going on... by "clever accounting trick" I meant that the analyst in question committed a well-known scientific fallacy. Yet the author published it anyway because it proved favorable to their thesis. Whereas publishing the scientifically-valid statement would have undermined it.
You're right though, let's not call it a clever accounting trick. That's confusing. Let's call it what it is - journalistic misconduct and scientific fraud.
No. I want people to do good science and to stop doing bad science. Especially when it comes to climate change, we have a moral obligation to root out bad ideas and invalid methods.
I'm happy to have a conversation about the invalidity of the national GDP:emissions ratio method. That's the topic of this thread.
Unfortunately there is no separate Earth for the "advanced economies" only. The Earth is shared and the emissions are shared, and the resulting greenhouse gasses are shared and the resulting temperature rise is shared. And so far if we skip numbers which can be fudged and manipulated straight to the actual measurements of the atmosphere, and not some "estimations", they show that GH gasses in the atmosphere are only ever increasing.
That's precisely what I was talking about - his links all talk about emissions. Emissions can't be measured, they can only be guessed and estimated. Every outlet now talks about how emissions are decreasing, draw fancy graphs pointing downward and so on. There is a slight problem - we can and do measure results of said emissions, the actual gasses in the atmosphere.
Imagine a pool with a water with two underground pipes, one ingress, another egress. There is no way to measure flow in either of the pipes. But there are partially available documents mapping pipes and their diameters across whole neighborhood. And there is access to some of the water plants in the area and some of the big consumers (not all). So you can hire a whole university of scientists to estimate how the whole water pipe network works at different times, estimate all inaccessible plants and consumers too, account for rusting and leakage and so on and so forth, and estimate the flow of water in and out of the pool this way.
Or you can put a measuring stick in a water directly and measure with a clock the actual amount of water and dynamics of its level.
And if thousand scientists say that their models say that a net inflow of water is decreasing, but the measuring stick shows stable increase year over year... Well, it's time to change something in the official papers.
You know, that's actually surprising to me. I would have thought we'd see more EV minivans before so many EV SUVs - given how low the minivan center of gravity is already and the lack of necessity for speed/acceleration tuning.
How much of this was China? My understanding is the government subsidizes the industry there, and the size of the market could make it have a very large impact.
The average is being brought up by Europe and China. I don’t have exact numbers, but I believe of the two, Europe is lower total sales, higher percentage, whereas China is higher total sales, lower percentage. The rest of the world is low total, low percentage.
So, yeah a lot of it is China, but Europe is leading as well.
I gather you haven’t actually read or watched anything from the EV community? Everyone talks about battery durability.
BEVs aren’t clean energy. Cars are not energy. They are vehicles.
BEVs are fundamentally more sustainable that ICE cars. Battery recycling is already ramping up, even though we haven’t seen that many EV battery packs expiring yet.
Some battery packs die early, especially if they have many miles on them. But then that’s a good thing: those battery packs have offset their CO2 emissions many times over. Battery packs are resource intensive things. They SHOULD be used, not sit around doing nothing.
If you consider how battery cell chemistries and battery pack construction is improving so rapidly, then recycling an old battery pack to make a new one is not a bad thing: you get a LOT more out of those precious materials if you make a new battery pack with 100% SOH and even better energy density.
And you should probably be allowed one, assuming total cost of all externalities is appropriately priced in.
And possibly only for use on private roads and tracks because there doesn't seem to be a fair price for poisoning the air that the other people in your city/town/village breathe.
I agree with you, but consider — for an Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle, wear and tear on the tires probably contributes more to local environmental degradation than the fossil fuels used. EVs have no answer to that, nor will they — tires are by nature ablative.
IOW we need to factor externalities into EVs as well, just like IC cars.
I think a statement like that merits a source. You mentioned tires being ablative. 30k miles of tires being worn off ~= few pounds of material vs 600 gallons of fuel (assuming a 50mpg ulev).
If only there were some way to use harder materials like metal on metal instead of rubber on asphalt. One which doesn't ablade as much. Of course, you'd need to have some system of metal lines on the ground, and have vehicles with matching metal wheels. Those vehicles would be confined to run on these metal road line things, but you could put them in areas where there area lot of people in a small space and people could use them to move from place to place. I know it's a crazy idea so it'll never work but just wonder with me for a second. What if we could build such things? What a wonderful world that might be!
- AWD, especially of the fancy computer controlled type, in electric cars is much easier to produce, since you don't have to mechanically transfer power to all the wheels, and should decrease tyre wear end emissions by spreading the load from acceleration to all the tyres
- brake pads also a significant source of similar pollution, and there has been an effort to make them rely more on adhesive friction, decrease metal contents and what not, so maybe something similar is possible/being done already with tyres. Also, regen braking is probably more gentle on tyres and does not use brakes at all, so it's a win-win also.
Though both of those might be cancelled out by evs being generally heavier bc batteries and what not.
People being unable to install obnoxiously loud exhaust is a plus too, wish the same was true for obnoxiously loud sound systems.
brake pads on Teslas don't get used as much, thanks to regenerative braking though, to the point that they start rusting (until Tesla updated the firmware). So EVs come out ahead there.
The downside of EVs getting better batteries is that the range anxiety goes away, and because the car speakers are powered from those same batteries, EVs with extremely loud stereos will be able to blast their music for all of their neighbors to enjoy for an extra long time without sacrificing the vehicles ability to get there and back.
Nice breakdown of the actually relevant figures.
>> The bad news is that energy-related emissions rose in 2023. But the good news is that continued expansion of clean energy technologies meant that global energy-related emissions rose less strongly than in 2022, even as total energy demand growth accelerated.
>> Emissions increased by 410 million tonnes, or 1.1%, in 2023 – compared with a rise of 490 million tonnes the year before – taking them to a record level of 37.4 billion tonnes.
>> An exceptional shortfall in hydropower due to extreme droughts in the US, China, and several other economies resulted in over 40% of the rise in emissions in 2023 as countries turned largely to fossil fuels to plug the gap. Had it not been for the unusually low hydropower output, global emissions from electricity generation would have declined in 2023, making the overall rise in energy-related emissions significantly smaller.
It's impressive that the world (admittedly, driven by advanced economies) is getting a place of increasing our global energy production while decreasing emissions.
I can recommend Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Richie if you want to see many long-term plots about pollution per country. The West is mostly decreasing emissions already where other countries will hopefully also switch to newer technologies and reach a peak in emissions too.
I’m optimistic that with better energy tech we have multiple potential routes (solar+storage, fission, fusion, geothermal) to create energy abundance in the future. It can bring about great human flourishing if we don’t burn or blow up the world first.
I'd be fascinated by any modern studies on energy output per total energy unit input (manufacturing, construction, operation, and decommissioning, including carbon/pollution externalities).
Post-scarity, prima facie, would be a ratio > 1.
Curious how close we're getting...
Greta should mention this, something to balance out the doom and gloom for the kids that have eco-anxiety.
I'm serious, not trying to be facetious.
Until success is assured, can’t let up in any meaningful fashion. It’ll be used to let up on pulling the trajectory more vertical. Success is not yet assured. The forces at play are unfathomable. We are having to be dragged to a cleaner future, and the momentum must remain, if not accelerate.
If people think no progress is being made at all, then then they may just give up thinking everything is hopeless — so it’s important to celebrate the successes too
Also, you know, honesty and facts.
We put in all of this work and we’re still doomed? I don’t know, man. I’m going to take it easy.
Environmentalists told me I shouldn’t recycle, offset with Terrapass, or live in the city. Now they’re telling me that the things we are doing are not going to work? Then why are we doing them?
If we’re doomed I might as well enjoy things.
The person you're replying to didn't say we were doomed. They said we have to keep pushing if we want to succeed.
This! I appreciate you helping me communicate the idea.
? 2023 is still a new record year in term of emission.
Greta is fighting for a decrease in emission not a decrease of increase. It's an improving trend but not a win.
Unless I'm misreading, emissions still increased, only slower than they did last year. It's not dissimilar to inflation going down meaning that prices increase slower than they had previously. The difference here is that emission increases are given in absolute amounts vs. a rate.
? Emissions did not decrease in 2023 it increased 1.1% with a new record of 37.4 billion ...
Production became more efficient but only at the level of slowing the increase rate not decreasing ...
See the last part of the quote.
> [EVs] played a significant role in keeping oil demand (in terms of energy content) from rising above pre-pandemic levels.
Oil demand increased by 2.4% from 2022 to 2023 according to the IEA's own report [1]. In what world is an annual increase considered "curbing demand"? This is twisting the meaning of words to an extreme degree.
The time series analysis in question uses the unrelated pandemic dip to cherry-pick a time period that looks most favorable to EVs. The article makes no mention of the recent annual change (which is the only thing caused by new car sales), taking pains to avoid it.
I'm rooting for the EV transition to work, I really am. But we need to be brutally honest in the assessment of our progress or we'll never get there. A little light greenwashing can be hugely detrimental to our cause; we have a moral obligation to do robust scientific inference.
I have no way of knowing if the omission was intentional or an oversight, either way it undermines the validity of the message.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-2023
Demand grows with population and GDP growth. Also, less developed countries become more developed and people demand more energy usage. So 2.4% could have been 5%, and that it was only 2.4% is how growth was curbed. This is probably mostly coming from Chinese, who have slowed the increases in their oil usage from an aggressive push into EVs.
In 2022, the world bought 99.8 million barrels per day. In 2023, we bought 102.4. The IEA data says explicitly that demand is growing. There is no debate about that.
But I get your point re: the word "curbed". The word is mathematically vague and means effectively "restrained". Which doesn't tell us if that's a reduction of the metric itself or a simply a reduction in the rate of increase (the second derivative of the metric). Or the relative rate of increase per capita. So depending on your interpretation, you may or may not believe emissions are 'curbed'
My take is that the atmosphere doesn't give a shit about the rate, or which specific countries are curbing what. The only thing that matters from a climate perspective is the absolute global tonnage of greenhouse gas emissions. Unless we reduce that, we're losing the climate fight. I'm increasingly frustrated with our tendency to chase after irrelevant metrics and claim success. I'm not celebrating until we actually reduce emissions.
There is a lot of confusion between position, velocity, and acceleration when discussing these things. Prices have decreased is different from price growth has decreased, and even the rate at which prices are growing has decreased.
> My take is that the atmosphere doesn't give a shit about the rate, or which specific countries are curbing what.
The atmosphere doesn't care period. In the long run, the Earth will recover from whatever we throw at it, humanity just might go extinct earlier than expected. But at the same time, you can't tell people in the developing world that their lifestyle isn't allowed to improve because we need to save the planet. Some fairness is needed. So emissions are going to get worse before they get better, and hopefully they start getting better soon enough.
> you can't tell people in the developing world that their lifestyle isn't allowed to improve because we need to save the planet.
This is nonsense. It's easier for developing countries to adopt renewables because they don't have to compete against existing infrastructure. When the US has a coal-fired power plant that was built 30+ years ago, the capital expenditure is paid off and it's only paying for operations and fuel, and renewables are still out-competing them.
It also makes it easier to build because of different expectations. In the US if you wanted to shut down existing natural gas peaker plants in favor of renewables you'd see objections or demands to back them up with something expensive for times of low generation. In a developing country, building enough in renewables to power 60% of the homes 80% of the time is a bigger win than spending the same money to build enough fossil fuels to power 40% of the homes 100% of the time, and then you can add the expensive reliability technology at the end as the country becomes more developed.
When that's the case it makes no sense to be building new fossil fuel power plants in countries where they don't already exist. They have to pay construction costs, and can be expected to be even more out-competed in the future, implying that the construction cost will be a waste of that country's finite resources. The countries doing it are doing it for political reasons, e.g. they have a domestic fossil fuel industry to subsidize, which is not a sympathetic excuse.
> This is nonsense. It's easier for developing countries to adopt renewables because they don't have to compete against existing infrastructure. When the US has a coal-fired power plant that was built 30+ years ago, the capital expenditure is paid off and it's only paying for operations and fuel, and renewables are still out-competing them.
Are you going to tell Chinese that they can't take advantage of their coal resources because they were 30 years too late in their development?
> In a developing country, building enough in renewables to power 60% of the homes 80% of the time is a bigger win than spending the same money to build enough fossil fuels to power 40% of the homes 100% of the time, and then you can add the expensive reliability technology at the end as the country becomes more developed.
Sure you can spend a few 100 billion to build a giant dam, and that might give you something, but all your industry and water is in the east, while all your solar and wind resources are a few thousand miles away. Heck, you still need natural gas for heating, or you might use it for cars (like Thailand) because you have gas but not oil. You still can't go renewable alone with the investment they require, and maybe you will be able to, but not yet.
> The countries doing it are doing it for political reasons, e.g. they have a domestic fossil fuel industry to subsidize, which is not a sympathetic excuse.
That's just downright cynical. There might be some of that in the middle east, but most countries aren't so resource rich (with the exception of Australia and Russia) that this is going to be a dominating factor.
> Are you going to tell Chinese that they can't take advantage of their coal resources because they were 30 years too late in their development?
Precisely.
> all your industry and water is in the east, while all your solar and wind resources are a few thousand miles away.
There are only a small handful of countries that even have an "a few thousand miles away" in the same country. The large majority of developing countries are rather near the equator and can put solar anywhere.
> Heck, you still need natural gas for heating
In early-stage developing countries, heating is generally wood because they don't have the infrastructure to distribute anything else. In late-state developing countries, you put a nuclear reactor in the city and use cogeneration for heat. This is one of the other advantages of the infrastructure not being built yet.
> you might use it for cars (like Thailand) because you have gas but not oil.
This is soon going to be irrelevant. The bulk of cars in developing countries are the used cars from developed ones, so as developed countries transition to EVs, everybody does. Which is all the more reason to build renewable generation now, because charging those batteries at the right time of day can smooth out the load but also requires more generation, and that's going to be needed not a lot of years from now.
> You still can't go renewable alone with the investment they require
Renewables are cheaper than the operating cost for already paid off coal-fired power plants, much less new ones. If you can't afford to build renewables then how can you afford to build something even more expensive?
> There might be some of that in the middle east, but most countries aren't so resource rich (with the exception of Australia and Russia) that this is going to be a dominating factor.
> Are you going to tell Chinese that they can't take advantage of their coal resources because they were 30 years too late in their development?
One of these seems to contradict the other.
Also notice how the countries you're trying to make an exception out of are some of the largest CO2 emitters. Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Australia all have per-capita CO2 emissions higher than most of Western Europe. Meanwhile China is the highest on total CO2 emissions of any country in the world by a factor of two, accounting for almost a third of global CO2 emissions and higher emissions per capita than the UK or France.
> There are only a small handful of countries that even have an "a few thousand miles away" in the same country. The large majority of developing countries are rather near the equator and can put solar anywhere.
It’s not like they aren’t installing solar power in those countries at all, but with the cost, it’s still slow going. Philippines is up to 1.62 gigawatts, but they use 90k gigawatts, so only 88.4k to go.
Everything costs money to build. The question is, why are they spending the money building fossil fuel power plants that cost more? "Because they have a local fossil fuel industry" is not a good reason, but it's a common one.
In Ireland I've seen some private dealers saying that they won't accept EVs as trade-ins (outside of manufacturer warranty) because of the liability on them if something goes wrong.
Basic model ID.3 is already €39260 with no extras.
VW seems to be trying to get a subscription model for a lot of features that come standard in most cars.
------------------------------------
--- Assistance Package - €29.94 €/month (RRP €1,540.00)
— Anti-theft alarm system, interior monitoring, backup horn, and towing protection
— Central locking system "Keyless Entry" with fingerprint "two-stage unlocking"
— Outer ambient lighting (variant 1)
— Park distance control, front and rear with rear view camera preparation
— Passenger Protection System
— Rear View Camera
------------------------------------
--- Assistance Plus Package - 53.47 €/month (RRP € 2,750.00)
— Anti-theft alarm system, interior monitoring, backup horn, and towing protection
— Area View
— Central locking system "Keyless Entry" with fingerprint "two-stage unlocking"
— Interior ambient lighting, type 1
— Lane change assist
— Lane keeping system plus semi-automatic vehicle control in a medical emergency and traffic jam assist
— Memory feature for park assist pro
— Outer ambient lighting (variant 1)
— Park distance control, front and rear with rear view camera preparation
— Passenger Protection System
------------------------------------
reference: Why I won't sell pre-owned electric vehicles | Newstalk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uuz3UQpiqQE
Your not telling me, that you are just now discovering VWs price list for options, are you?
> Your not telling me, that you are just now discovering VWs price list for options, are you?
The relevant part of their paste is the price is specified as a recurring monthly subscription, not that there's such a thing as a price list for options.
But you knew that and conveniently ignored it because Snark.
No, I did not. After all we already had heated front seatsvas subscription from BMW, so no, no surprise VW would do something similar.
Also, none of this has anything to do with the article, does it?
Pretty sure you still have the option to buy it outright, hence the second price.
A subscription to use the camera that the car has is insane
An obvious end-goal for car companies is turn all ownership into ten year leases, at the end you give the car back and they recycle it replace the battery and sell/dispose of it.
Car as iPhone. Trillions.
That implies they can avoid competitors doing something different. The hardest part about building an economical electric car has been cost-effectively producing the battery. Within a few years that will be a commodity.
Then what stops a new car company from forming that will sell you a car that lasts for 20+ years and you own it? Only the inability to get customers because the incumbents are offering a better deal. So to stop it they'd have to be offering a better deal.
Coincidentally, I personally noticed an uptick in general negative press toward EVs in 2023. Lots of articles and news stories along the lines of “people are rejecting the electric vehicle pipedream” and “things don’t look so rosy for EV automakers”. I’m not sure if I simply noticed it more because I bought an EV at the end of 2022, or if there actually was an uptick in negativity.
Disclaimer, I’m biased as an EV owner and I generally like them.
The source report is presented very nicely. [0]
And this is an extremely interesting data point that we should all be celebrating!?
> Emissions in advanced economies fell to their level of 50 years ago [1]
[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2023
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2023/emissions-...
What's the reporting on how much of advanced economies emissions have been exported to elsewhere in the world
edit:
> lower emissions per capita now than they did at the beginning of the 21st century
Given the US for instance has grown by ~70 million people since the start of the 21st century, does this per capita reporting obfuscate a growing net impact?
Our World In Data has a good collection of data sets and explanations for emissions adjusted by import/export. Here are a couple of them:
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
As expected, a "consumption based" approach to measuring CO2 shows advanced economies with higher emissions than otherwise reported and big manufacturing exporters like China with lower emissions. The good news is that advanced economies are still making real progress: they have lower emissions per capita now than they did at the beginning of the 21st century, even after adjusting numbers for offshored manufacturing.
EDIT: on an absolute (not just per-capita) basis, the US has also reduced its consumption based CO2 emissions in the 21st century:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-emissions...
It peaked in 2005 and has been below the year 2000 emissions level every year since 2009.
Good Point. It is easy to look green on paper if you outsource your industry to China.
One of the most pervasively common tricks in greenwashing ...
It's a clever accounting trick. Try it with a random selection of countries instead of a cherry-picked sample. We have seen no decrease in global emissions.
Advanced economies rely on international trade for their emissions-heavy industries, effectively outsourcing emissions. Carbon molecules don't respect international boundaries and the atmosphere doesn't care what country burned it. From a climate perspective, global CO2e in tons is what matters, everything else is accounting tricks.
You can build a more complex model to deal with the carbon accounting intricacies of trade. Or you can analyze on a global scale. But analyzing national data without proper controls is straight up invalid scientific inference.
Clever accounting trick? AFAIK noone has strict enough rules to make people bother with clever accounting tricks.
I think it's more likely to mean that ① advanced economies have advanced further in the transition, ② advanced economies are also economies with few children and global per-capita emissions peaked about a decade ago, or ③ both.
In case there is a language barrier or something going on... by "clever accounting trick" I meant that the analyst in question committed a well-known scientific fallacy. Yet the author published it anyway because it proved favorable to their thesis. Whereas publishing the scientifically-valid statement would have undermined it.
You're right though, let's not call it a clever accounting trick. That's confusing. Let's call it what it is - journalistic misconduct and scientific fraud.
You really want someone to be Bad and Guilty and Nefarious, don't you?
No. I want people to do good science and to stop doing bad science. Especially when it comes to climate change, we have a moral obligation to root out bad ideas and invalid methods.
I'm happy to have a conversation about the invalidity of the national GDP:emissions ratio method. That's the topic of this thread.
Unfortunately there is no separate Earth for the "advanced economies" only. The Earth is shared and the emissions are shared, and the resulting greenhouse gasses are shared and the resulting temperature rise is shared. And so far if we skip numbers which can be fudged and manipulated straight to the actual measurements of the atmosphere, and not some "estimations", they show that GH gasses in the atmosphere are only ever increasing.
Nothing to celebrate really.
Please see philipkglass’s reply to wahnfrieden’s peer comment, there is indeed good news.
That's precisely what I was talking about - his links all talk about emissions. Emissions can't be measured, they can only be guessed and estimated. Every outlet now talks about how emissions are decreasing, draw fancy graphs pointing downward and so on. There is a slight problem - we can and do measure results of said emissions, the actual gasses in the atmosphere.
Imagine a pool with a water with two underground pipes, one ingress, another egress. There is no way to measure flow in either of the pipes. But there are partially available documents mapping pipes and their diameters across whole neighborhood. And there is access to some of the water plants in the area and some of the big consumers (not all). So you can hire a whole university of scientists to estimate how the whole water pipe network works at different times, estimate all inaccessible plants and consumers too, account for rusting and leakage and so on and so forth, and estimate the flow of water in and out of the pool this way.
Or you can put a measuring stick in a water directly and measure with a clock the actual amount of water and dynamics of its level.
And if thousand scientists say that their models say that a net inflow of water is decreasing, but the measuring stick shows stable increase year over year... Well, it's time to change something in the official papers.
I would love for my next vehicle to be an EV, but right now the scale of quality to price is still too far off from ICE for me to consider.
I believe the scale is much closer for SUVs and larger vehicles but those are not something I’m in the market for.
I hope that the rising demand for EVs eventually translates into better value for coupes and sedans.
The only thing remotely EV in the minivan class is the Pacifica Hybrid, and that’s $10k more than everything else.
VW is coming out with a EV minibus, let’s see.
You know, that's actually surprising to me. I would have thought we'd see more EV minivans before so many EV SUVs - given how low the minivan center of gravity is already and the lack of necessity for speed/acceleration tuning.
Tons of people (like me) would love an EV minivan. But tons of people (like me) ain’t got the cash to pay extra for one, even with the subsidies.
The market delivers what is demanded that makes them the most moolah.
7.6% in the USA if you were wondering (Tesla a little more than half the EV total). https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q4-2023-ev-sales/
How much of this was China? My understanding is the government subsidizes the industry there, and the size of the market could make it have a very large impact.
In the US, apparently the percentage is about 1/3 of the global 20%: https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q4-2023-ev-sales
The average is being brought up by Europe and China. I don’t have exact numbers, but I believe of the two, Europe is lower total sales, higher percentage, whereas China is higher total sales, lower percentage. The rest of the world is low total, low percentage.
So, yeah a lot of it is China, but Europe is leading as well.
I looked it up. China is 26% and Europe is 20%.
source? i’ll edit
Nobody talks about battery durability :(
Battery cars aren't clean energy
I gather you haven’t actually read or watched anything from the EV community? Everyone talks about battery durability.
BEVs aren’t clean energy. Cars are not energy. They are vehicles.
BEVs are fundamentally more sustainable that ICE cars. Battery recycling is already ramping up, even though we haven’t seen that many EV battery packs expiring yet.
Some battery packs die early, especially if they have many miles on them. But then that’s a good thing: those battery packs have offset their CO2 emissions many times over. Battery packs are resource intensive things. They SHOULD be used, not sit around doing nothing.
If you consider how battery cell chemistries and battery pack construction is improving so rapidly, then recycling an old battery pack to make a new one is not a bad thing: you get a LOT more out of those precious materials if you make a new battery pack with 100% SOH and even better energy density.
That’s nice. I still want a loud, manual, fun gas car. But I guess if you just want an appliance an electric car will do just fine.
And you should probably be allowed one, assuming total cost of all externalities is appropriately priced in.
And possibly only for use on private roads and tracks because there doesn't seem to be a fair price for poisoning the air that the other people in your city/town/village breathe.
I agree with you, but consider — for an Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle, wear and tear on the tires probably contributes more to local environmental degradation than the fossil fuels used. EVs have no answer to that, nor will they — tires are by nature ablative.
IOW we need to factor externalities into EVs as well, just like IC cars.
I think a statement like that merits a source. You mentioned tires being ablative. 30k miles of tires being worn off ~= few pounds of material vs 600 gallons of fuel (assuming a 50mpg ulev).
Exactly. My driving created ~400 kg CO2 a month, no way tires are contributing anything close to that. How would they even.
If only there were some way to use harder materials like metal on metal instead of rubber on asphalt. One which doesn't ablade as much. Of course, you'd need to have some system of metal lines on the ground, and have vehicles with matching metal wheels. Those vehicles would be confined to run on these metal road line things, but you could put them in areas where there area lot of people in a small space and people could use them to move from place to place. I know it's a crazy idea so it'll never work but just wonder with me for a second. What if we could build such things? What a wonderful world that might be!
Break pads also. But from my understanding:
- AWD, especially of the fancy computer controlled type, in electric cars is much easier to produce, since you don't have to mechanically transfer power to all the wheels, and should decrease tyre wear end emissions by spreading the load from acceleration to all the tyres
- brake pads also a significant source of similar pollution, and there has been an effort to make them rely more on adhesive friction, decrease metal contents and what not, so maybe something similar is possible/being done already with tyres. Also, regen braking is probably more gentle on tyres and does not use brakes at all, so it's a win-win also.
Though both of those might be cancelled out by evs being generally heavier bc batteries and what not.
People being unable to install obnoxiously loud exhaust is a plus too, wish the same was true for obnoxiously loud sound systems.
brake pads on Teslas don't get used as much, thanks to regenerative braking though, to the point that they start rusting (until Tesla updated the firmware). So EVs come out ahead there.
The downside of EVs getting better batteries is that the range anxiety goes away, and because the car speakers are powered from those same batteries, EVs with extremely loud stereos will be able to blast their music for all of their neighbors to enjoy for an extra long time without sacrificing the vehicles ability to get there and back.
I very rarely even use the brake pads on my EV thanks to regen braking. They’ll last forever.