More like 1.6x. But they break even by 11k miles in Europe. (The exact number varies by location; this is an average.)

You seem to be under the false assumption that Europe is forcing people to scrap ICE cars. They're not. They're forcing companies to not build *new* ICE cars. This is not changing the number of cars that get scrapped at all. It is ensuring that the cars that replace the cars that were being scrapped anyway are efficient.

No, it doesn't. The break-even point in Europe is about 11,000 miles, which is less than a year. So by one year after they are sold, they have reduced CO2 emissions by as much as was released producing them. There is no "per year for a decade" here, because by the end of a year of driving, the manufacturing becomes effectively carbon-neutral.

So no, you're not adding 650 million tonnes of CO2. It takes 9 months to break even, which means at any given point in time, the average extra emissions from manufacturing each car would be half of that, so add up the extra CO2 emitted by manufacturing all cars as EVs for 4.5 months, and that's how much you've added. Not cumulative. One-time.

But it gets better than that, because you don't stop driving these cars after 9 months. So after that, they're carbon-negative. That means after 18 months, they've used as much as the next 9-month group of cars produced during their manufacturing, and so have those cars, so your next nine months of manufacturing are free. So after 18 months, the total CO2 from the changeover becomes effectively zero. After 27 months, the total CO2 from the changeover is negative by several months of driving by the cars made in the last 9 months. And so on.

The problem is that you apparently still haven't realized that a car gets built once, but is typically used for decades, and that the emissions for manufacturing are tiny compared with the emissions used during their ongoing operation, so even massive increases to the manufacturing emissions result in reductions in emissions over the relatively *short* term, much less the long term.

Churning out the new cars is a drop in the bucket compared with the CO2 savings. Again, nine months after they are made, they've reduced as much CO2 as the excess CO2 spent producing them. Even if we assume that the ICE car wouldn't have been made otherwise (which is not the case), the break-even point would still be only on the order of three years. And after that, they're reducing CO2 emissions more than the total emissions from manufacturing the vehicle. So the time to question sustainability is *after* you transition everyone over to EVs, not before. Doing that now is saving a tiny bit of emissions in the short term while costing you a *lot* of emissions over the long term.

We've always been at war with Eastasia.

A large percentage of the people buying EVs have too much income to be eligible for the credit anyway. The median income for EV buyers is $140k, and for single people, the cutoff was just $150k. The purpose of the tax credit was to try to get EVs into the hands of people with more moderate income, but I suspect its main effect was cause people to lease the cars instead of buying them, where you could weirdly still get the credit.

IMO, Tesla needs a new CEO. The board of directors keeps trying to pump more money in his direction hoping that it will keep his attention and make him focus on Tesla, but IMO, the damage is done and won't magically go away just by convincing him to shut up and stop acting like a cartoon supervillain. Just two words (Mr. Trump's favorite two words), and the company's problems mostly go away.

Yes and no. Yes, Sega and Nintendo should talk to each other to figure out how to deal with it. No, that doesn't change the fact that as a non-owner, Sega giving it to a merchant is not adequate for that merchant to gain the right to dispose of it and grant title to it

Again, the merchant's right to grant title exists only if that transfer is done by the legitimate owner of the item or that owner's authorized agent. If Nintendo had done so, then the OP would be correct. If Nintendo had authorized it, then the OP would be correct. But even in the best case, it's legally grey if Nintendo was not involved and can show clear documentation that Sega was not the legal owner, because that would be approximately exactly the same situation as if someone took stolen jewelry to a jeweler and the jeweler sold it.

And just in case someone misreads that, the case linked above hinged on two key facts: first, that the person who gave it to the jeweler was not a dealer, similar to how Sega is not a dealer in Nintendo dev kits, and second, that the company that gave it to that person had an agreement that denied him the right to transfer title in it. So in terms of the material facts, other than the nature of the products themselves and possibly the timing of the events, that case is very, very similar to this one.

In general, law enforcement would expect the owner to be the one reporting a theft. By disposing of Nintendo's property without their permission, Sega likely effectively committed theft. It would be weird for the thief to turn themselves in and expect the police to undo what they did.

And I would argue that if Nintendo doesn't care enough to go to the police to demand the return of their property, then Sega probably doesn't have a right to do so as a non-owner.

No, he's talking about Sega entrusting the goods to the scrap seller. Sega is not a retail merchant of electronics; it's a manufacturer. Entrusting that hardware to Sega almost certainly doesn't give Sega any particular right to transfer the title to someone else.

Nope. That only applies if the owner transfers those goods. What you're missing is that Sega didn't own this stuff in the first place, and therefore had no legal right to transfer it.

If someone sells stolen goods to a pawn shop and someone else buys those stolen goods, they still have to give them back if the rightful owner manages to track them down. This is legally no different, IMO.

Actually, he sold Nintendo property that was being held in Sega's custody, which makes it a very different matter legally. Now whether Sega has any legal right to repossess it is another question. Nintendo likely does, but Sega's only right is probably the right to tell Nintendo what they did and let Nintendo go to court to try to get it back.

Assuming that is based on real-world chargers and not some theoretical lower-speed charging, half at once is probably enough to allow everyone to switch without any non-software changes.

Most people drive under 40 miles per day. Assuming 30A charging at 240V, which is typical for home charging, that's only about two hours of charging. Most people's cars are likely to be plugged in almost continuously from 8 P.M. to 8 A.M., statistically speaking, so even if there's only enough capacity to charge a sixth of all cars concurrently, there would still probably be enough capacity to charge all of the cars.

So basically, as long as the car knows when you're likely to need to leave in the morning and communicates with servers at the power company to spread cars' charging out over the hours that it expects to be inactive, this seems likely to be a solved problem.

Of course, without a link to that MIT study, I can't say for sure what their assumptions were, so I could be way off base.

Already not paying it.

$9.99 with ads is way overpriced. Does this clown honestly think I'll pay them to shove ads at me? I'd maybe consider $9.99 with no ads. I'd certainly be okay with zero with ads, though I probably won't watch it any more than I watch my free-with-Walmart-Plus Paramount+ subscription with ads, which is to say approximately never.

If your service shows ads, I'm the product, and I'm not going to pay you to be the product.

I'm not aware of anything significantly better. Most of the carbon-neutral fuels produce a fraction of the energy that goes into making them. Technically speaking, so does ethanol, but we pretend it doesn't, because we ignore all the sunlight used as energy input. Carbon-neutral fuels are still in that "theoretically possible, but completely impractical" stage, where the cost to produce them and the energy loss involved makes them utterly infeasible as a real-world replacement for motor vehicle fuel.

We absolutely should be doing that research, and various companies are. But until there's some reason to believe that they will be successful, we can't count on that as a solution to the problem. More to the point, as long as actual gasoline is legal to sell, the only way those synthetic fuels will ever be viable is if they are cheaper than gasoline, and there's almost no chance of that happening, in practice. Even ethanol is more expensive. E85 has 71.1% of the power of gasoline, but costs 80% as much. The only reason anyone uses this stuff is because of government mandates to do so.

Gaseous energy sources are likely infeasible, because if you want to actually power a car with it, you're going to need it to have high energy per unit volume in the car's gas tank, which means compressing the gas, which wastes huge amounts of energy. We tried this with hydrogen, and the losses from compressing the gas alone made it impractical as an energy source even before all the other systemic losses from fuel cell efficiency, electrolysis, etc.

I'd be curious to hear it. My first inclination is to believe that you'd either have to inject the fuel at detonation time (which seems likely to damage the injectors) or massively reduce the compression, which would give you less power. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I'm having a hard time believing it should be done or that consumers would want it.

They modify diesel engines. For the same reason the market has rejected diesel cars, they will reject those. I'm pretty sure it's not a solution for replacing gasoline, unless by replacing gasoline, you mean after replacing the engine and the entire fuel system.

I'm not saying it's not an issue. I'm saying that it's pretty much the only remaining issue.

Except that none of those alternatives are economically feasible. The synthetic fuels currently being made are about an order of magnitude more expensive than gasoline. If people can't afford an extra $5k on the cost of their vehicles, they sure as h*** aren't going to be able to afford to spend $30+ per gallon for synthetic fuel. A person with average driving habits would break even on the EV in less than half a year of driving.

No, I really don't. Your wild guess is just that: a wild guess. See my comments elsewhere about most of the raw material for batteries being iron, and requiring far less iron than you lose by getting rid of the engine.

From what I've read, subject matter experts mostly say we can do it, though. It's mostly the auto industry pundits that are saying we can't, and it's because they don't want to, not because we can't.

Because 2050 is the EU's target for being net zero carbon. And you're right that we won't hit that. But if all new cars are EVs by 2035, *most* cars will be BEVs by 2050. And by then we might actually be able to produce enough carbon-neutral fuel for the few percent that remain.

*shrugs* It might happen at some point, but after decades of research, it still hasn't gotten much cheaper, which makes me believe that it is unlikely to be commercially viable unless you ban the much cheaper gasoline alternative. And you can't do that unless they can get their production up by many orders of magnitude, and they won't ramp up production to those levels until it is commercially viable, so there's a chicken-and-egg problem. You're talking about what can be done. I'm talking about what will actually work in the market.

And by doing so, you prevent using that energy in more efficient ways. We already capture waste heat to produce electricity, and to the extent that we don't, we could. It will almost certainly never be more efficient to use waste heat to produce hydrogen or synthetic fuels than it is to turn that waste heat into electricity and power an EV. Even if your fuel production produces as much energy in the output as it takes in energy input (which seems unrealistic, given the current state of the industry), the energy efficiency for converting the synthetic fuel to locomotion from a gasoline engine would still destroy efficiency so badly that various thermoelectric energy capture strategies going into BEVs would be more efficient. And it gets worse when you factor in real-world efficiency for synthetic fuel production.

So because we can't solve the whole problem, we shouldn't solve any of the problem?

Carbon neutrality, not zero fossil fuels.

What are you talking about? We do know how to do it. Car companies have a strong disincentive to do it. Dealers don't want to deal with EVs because they make most of their money on service, not on sales. EVs have much lower service needs. Dealers are therefore strongly incentivized to tell people that they don't want an EV, and to not carry them on their lots, so much so that many folks who want to buy an EV have had a really hard time doing so. This is well documented.

The auto industry didn't even start taking EVs seriously until a few years ago. EVs were mostly compliance cars. And at least in the U.S., nobody but Tesla was building HVDC charging in the quantities needed to get the job done, so eventually the entire industry basically threw up their hands and gave up and switched to Tesla's charging system.

This is not evidence that the problem is hard. This is evidence that the manufacturers dragged their feet as hard as they could to avoid doing it.

*shrugs* You still need a source of raw materials to feed into that, and this is where a big chunk of the energy gets spent.

One last time, you're going to have to give me some actual citations, because what I'm saying is consistent with what I've read on the subject.

Except that the worst offenders are spare batteries for vape pens and similar, and 18650 batteries are actually the most common battery type for those. Camera batteries tend to be better quality and better protected from damage, but that's because the manufacturers know what they're doing and don't have giant exposed metal pads a quarter inch apart that can get easily shorted out by your keys, and the manufacturers ship a plastic cover that goes over the batteries, so people don't usually leave them unprotected.

No, you can't exempt anyone. If the regulations are designed correctly, the camera batteries should pass the regulatory approval process with little effort. The whole point should be to make the regulations be onerous for companies that build garbage and trivial for companies that design things correctly.

Ethanol just barely produces more energy than goes into making it. So unless you're running all of the farm equipment, transportation equipment, etc. on pure ethanol, you're only reducing your fossil fuel consumption by maybe 20% by doing that.

I think you're mixing up AVGas with jet fuel. Jet fuel is kerosene. A car can run on AVGas. Running a car on kerosene would likely require *major* changes to avoid the fuel prematurely detonating on compression, because kerosene is roughly the equivalent of 15-octane gasoline. I mean, I guess you could put a lot of lead into the fuel...

Most folks who have ever actually spent time driving a BEV will tell you that we passed that point a decade ago, with the exception of that last part (price).

If it were possible to do that, they would have done it already. The reality is that BEVs cost more in up-front costs, and probably will for the foreseeable future. So your only two real choices for putting your finger on the scale at that point are to either subsidize BEVs or to reduce the supply of non-BEVs.

Wild guess, indeed. In Europe, 15% of new cars sold are currently BEVs. This would mean increasing battery production by less than a factor of 7, and that's not factoring in the fact that an additional 35% are hybrids, which by definition have batteries, just smaller ones. Add those into the current production numbers, and it is probably closer to a 5x increase in EV battery production.

But it's not a big shift. There's less lithium and cobalt and other low-yield metals in each generation of batteries. The bulk of modern LiFePO4 batteries (by weight) is iron. And a typical car engine, assuming it has an iron block, contains enough iron for about five battery packs. Graphite, aluminum, steel (unknown alloy), and copper are next on the ingredient list in order by weight. By the time you get down to the stuff that isn't already mined in vast quantities (read "lithium"), you're only talking about 6 kg for a 60 kWh battery.

So the 12.2 million cars made in Europe each year would use 73.2 million kg of lithium. In 2024, the worldwide production of lithium was 240,000 metric tons. So putting a 60 kWh LiFePo4 battery in every European vehicle would require increasing worldwide lithium production by only about 30%, assuming I did the math correctly. That's not small, but it isn't huge, either. And that's over 10%, which means it would be just a 3% increase in production each year. That's not a lot at all.

Mind you, doing that worldwide instead of just in Europe would obviously increase that number considerably. :-)

There is no credible path to producing zero-carbon fuel in the quantities required for worldwide automotive use by 2050 (the zero net emissions target), whereas electrifying nearly all vehicles is almost certainly possible by 2050.

Huh? No. I'm pretty sure what the original poster was saying is that only a third of the energy in a gasoline engine makes it to the wheels, and the rest gets wasted as heat. And the energy used to produce chemical fuel from electricity and raw elements results in an additional massive loss of efficiency. So you're talking about using 6x as much input energy in terms of kWh to produce the same amount of locomotion. And honestly, that 2x part seems wildly optimistic to me.

Unless you can find a way to make that additional *huge* increase in power production be from 100% green sources, you're almost guaranteed to make climate change worse. And even if you can find a way to produce the new power in a 100% green way, you'd still be massively better off by switching to battery-electric vehicles that would use a sixth as much energy per mile of locomotion, because then all that extra green power could replace a large percentage of existing non-green power consumption used for other purposes.

IMO, the only place where synfuel makes sense is air travel, and even then, only because of the amount of energy needed to keep the extra mass from batteries aloft, and even then, probably not in the long term.

But we actually know how to build batteries in quantities. It's just a matter of doing it. We don't know how to produce gasoline in large quantities from electricity, only in small lab experiment quantities. Think about the state of lithium ion batteries in 1980, and we're roughly at that point right now with synthetic fuels.

And there's also the problem that the cost of synthetic fuels is way, way too high to compete against oil, so short of governments either banning oil or subsidizing it, you probably won't see much real-world reduction in carbon emissions from synthetic fuels over the next several decades.

This seems like a huge stretch. In general, EVs charge at night when power consumption is lowest, so the impact on the grid is usually minimal, and more than half of all cars sold in Europe today are already either hybrid or battery-powered, so clearly there isn't a problem building enough electric motors, building the HVDC wiring, etc. So that basically just leaves battery production and expansing the HVDC charger networks for trips.

Remember that to be able to ban new ICE cars, you don't have to be able to accommodate all of the cars suddenly being EVs. You just have to be able to accommodate the roughly 4% annual replacement rate being EVs. This really should not be an impossibly high bar to reach in a decade.

That tends to have unintended consequences.

First, if the extra per-unit price is more than the cost of an extra meter, you'll suddenly see them adding extra meters to avoid it.

Second, it means that things that inherently use lots of power, like arc furnaces, become unprofitable, and suddenly you end up depending on imports for all of your metal. You end up storing your data on servers in third-world countries because the server farms cost too much here. You end up with more and more businesses moving overseas to avoid the extra costs.

Third, it is likely to result in higher emissions. No realistic amount of power reduction will ever cause a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, because most clean base load power is either very limited in where it can be built (hydro) or is extremely expensive (nuclear), while the cheapest base load power (currently natural gas) is not so clean. So if you reduce usage, the folks producing power are likely to try to cut the most expensive power production first, and that means you are very likely to end up polluting *more*.

Pushing for power conservation is pretty much always a mistake. If you want to reduce the environmental harm of power production, start phasing out fossil fuels for non-emergency power purposes, and set a hard end date by which all power production must be green. Let the industry figure out how to meet those standards, whether by building nuclear plants, solar, wind, battery storage, or some other means. The cost of power will go up, but you've actually solved the problem.

The notion of conserving our way to clean energy is, IMO, pure fantasy unless the cost of solar (including storage) ends up being so much lower than the cost of natural gas that nobody considers building the latter. Until we reaching that tipping point, you either mandate that the percentage of non-zero-emission power plants gets smaller each year until it reaches zero or you fail to make power production cleaner. That's just basic economics.