You think those vehicles are useful? You should try a supermini for urban driving. Fits 5 people and lots of shopping, and yet small and thus nimble and easy to move around. I had one for nine years. But then, I'm in London
Um. If goods purchased with installment loans aren't covered, what's to stop people buying everything in this way? Certainly, high value items (many of which are already bought in this way) -- tech, jewellery, white goods, furniture, etc. And if there's a prebate for essential spending, then effectively, all that's getting taxed are nicer lunches than someone needs to have. Everything else is either exempt through the prebate or through avoidance by way of this installment loan wheeze.
The thing that pisses me off about these folks and their skepticism is that it is so domain-specific. You never see them claiming they know more than experts in, say, material science, or acoustics, or phytology, or quantum thermodynamics. They are totally happy to rely on the science and technology that provides them with nutritious food, warm clothing, electricity and hot water, the devices on which they write their ramblings, the cars with which they roll coal, etc. If they got a cataract, you can bet your bottom dollar they'd meekly accept the recommendations of an ocular surgeon and have the sedation administered by an anaesthetist without a fucking murmur of complaint. It's just performative bollocks about climate science because they don't like the idea that they'd have to restrict their creature comforts in any way for the benefit of someone else.
Not true any more. I suggest checking back at the website below in a few weeks, when they've had a chance to run the analysis. If you click into he link for any of the analyses they've run, you can see how they quantify the attributions.
This is no longer true in KSA, either. Women can drive there as well, and show their faces in public. MBS is obviously a bastard, but he's equally obviously determined to loosen up quite a lot of the restrictions that once existed for women.
First time I went to KSA, the food court in the local mall had a separate queue for women (about 2016). Last time I went (2021), there was only a mixed line.
There was no way I could have hugged goodbye to my female colleague, though. And she had to wear a headscarf when she stepped out of the office. But still, changes were happening. The biggest changes were in the workplace, where smart younger women were displacing bewildered, less smart, older men at a rapid pace. The CIO of a major public hospital was a woman in her 30s, for example.
The answer is the same as for the floods and fires in Australia, the fires in Greece, the floods in Pakistan, etc etc. A hotter, wetter atmosphere drives more extreme weather events, and we have created a hotter, wetter atmosphere through climate change because we burn too much fossil fuel.
It’s not fucking cloud seeding. It’s climate change. At least the fact that it’s happening in Dubai has some reasonable symbolism about it, given what Dubai represents and the role it played at COP. About time the chickens came home to roost
Yes, thank goodness fires at gas plants are so rare compared with battery plants. Why, I had to go all the way back to *seven whole hours ago* to find a story about a gas plant fire.
There's a third and fourth reason too:
1. Fewer charges per year. It's a minor but still useful additional convenience to only have to plug in once a fortnight instead of once a week
2. Fewer charge-discharge cycles per year, so the battery should last longer
No one is ever going to convince you to get an EV, and I'm not trying. I'm answering the specific point you previously raised, about whether the cars will last 15 years or not.
And it makes no sense to say "80%" isn't good enough. It all depends on the starting range. If the starting range were 10,000 miles, you'd be fine with 8,000 miles. If it were 10 miles, you wouldn't be OK with 100% or 80%. And anyway, among the many reasons you'd never look at a Zoe, it's only 80% of the size of a Camry. I'm just saying these calculations demonstrate how EVs can be expected to last the years.
No. Retiring carbon meaning retiring carbon. If I'd meant outsourcing to other states, that's what I'd have written, obviously.
Here in the UK, these guys have a great reputation for battery repairs:
https://www.cleevelyev.co.uk/
And they work their own vehicles pretty damn hard and they've stood up to the test:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I am very confident such vehicles will be available when they've been on the road that long, because the maths is pretty basic to work through. For my previous car, a Renault Zoe:
- 245 mile range at time of purchase
- Likely to hit 80% state of health (ie only delivers 80% of 245, ie 200 miles) after about 750 full charge-discharge cycles
- ((200+(45/2))*750 = 167,000 miles
- UK average mileage per day is about 20 miles
- 167,000/20 = 8350 days = 22+ years before the battery drops to a 200 mile range
Lots of variables in there, but all of it supports the truism that the batteries are going to outlast the chassis for most EVs
Interestingly, it turns out that even though early Leafs had shitty BMS, not that many have been scrapped.
The UK has detailed data on which cars are on the road from which years. It's a bit tough to work your way through it, even with the help of this clever website (https://www.howmanyleft.co.uk/family/nissan_nissan_leaf?make=nissan#tax), but it turns out that 73% of all the Leafs registered between 2011 and 2013 in the UK are still around today. That's not as good as a comparable ICE vintage car like the Ford Focus (89% remaining), but it's not too bad given this is a badly engineered primitive model with a tiny battery and lots of cycles. My previous EV, the Renault Zoe, with an equally tiny battery but much better BMS, does comparatively better but isn't quite as old -- 88% of the Zoes from 2013 to 2014 are still in use today. So much for the batteries "failing" after 8 years. Looks like even these early EVs will reach the same average age at scrappage as a typical ICE vehicle in the UK -- 14 or 15 years.
I know that on-site solar has benefits -- I'm a big proponent. It's just not a silver bullet. Thinking of energy systems in terms of a silver bullet is fundamentally misconceived in my view, anyway -- there are so many benefits from having a heterogenous approach, above all resilience. We massively benefit from diverse supply, storage, the ability to flex demand, etc.
We need a less centralised grid than today, but we still need plenty of large solar and wind projects.
Wind, because it’s roughly counter-cyclical with solar so it improves supply stability and cuts storage requirements (which remain more expensive).
Solar, because there’s plenty of uses that can’t be served by on-site solar (skyscrapers, for one). And large solar farms are substantially better bang for buck than on-site.
There’s room for it all, and we need all of it.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
