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Comment by tarboreus | Hacker News Reader

If by "electrification" you mean "switch to public transportation," I agree with you. If by electrification you mean "burn dinosaurs four miles away," then I don't agree with you.

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This argument is dead wrong and impeding progress. As other commenters have mentioned, stationary sources are much easier to filter. They're also more efficient than thousands of small internal combustion engines. They also produce pollution away from where people are breathing it.

Electrification of surface transportation is a huge win for people regardless of how the electricity is generated.

The argument for public transportation is not dead wrong nor impeding progress. Expanding bus systems is something communities can do today in order to reduce their carbon footprint and their traffic levels.

The argument tarboreous put forward, as the parent, is presumably the one under discussion.

The problem is it presents a false dichotomy, or at least a choice which highlights merely a current state and not a move towards future improvements, and uses that blindless to make a case against EVs.

Thing is, even if a country is 100% coal and ICE right now (which is already not the case, China is not 100% coal), moving the fleet to EVs is still a good move. Putting aside an argument as to whether central power generation is 'cleaner' than distributed (ICE) generation, as long as a country also makes moves to renewables in it's centralized power generation, then the two things work in conjunction.

A lot of the current 'omg greenwashing' push-back is people confusing arguments for 'better' solutions with those for 'perfect' solutions. Which don't exist. Better is still worth doing, and paralysis until 'perfect' comes along is a big ol' waste of everyone's time.

Not a power engineer, but I'd expect burning dinosaurs in one stationary place should allow for cleaner & more efficient combustion, with better scrubbing of noxious gasses from the exhaust. One really big, really heavy, really good catalytic converter instead of millions of small lightweight ones, clunking over bumps & quietly rusting out.

In economic terms, the biggest impact from air pollution is particulate matter in densely populated areas, not CO2. Burning dinosaurs four miles away (more accurately, 40+) has a huge positive impact, because the worst of the particulate matter falls to the ground by then.

As someone who works in filtration - one of the primary ways to reduce pollution - stationary sources are easier to filter.

Vehicles have limited under the hood space and are distributed.

Yeah you can use electrostatic scrubbers and wet scrubbers on stationary plants. Can't do that with a car.

Burning dinosaurs 40 miles away will improve air quality in cities, even if it's the same amount of pollution, the bulk is away from dense population

It's also much, much easier to filter the output from one plant instead of 40,000 cars. Even if the same amount of pollution were produced (it wouldn't be), nowhere near the same amount would be released into the air.

But we definitely need to improve power plant emission standards as we move to electric.

The solution to pollution is dilution!

On top of the excellent comments made by rayiner, tfha, and jwr, we wouldn't even be burning dinosaurs miles away if we switched entirely to nuclear power.

That's never going to happen.

(but no mention of solar, wind, drastically reducing our energy consumption, etc?)

Or Solar or Wind or Hydro. In places like California and parts of Europe renewable sources are 1/3 or more of the electricity mix.

But when we look at the datas, country that use nuclear power are way way ahead of those that use renewable mix.

Easy to look at : https://www.electricitymap.org

I'm not arguing against Nuclear, just pointing out that it's one of several low-pollution options.

Burning dinosaurs is much more efficient in bulk at a huge power plant than by transporting them to your local storage (gas station) and burning them in your tiny engine. So even if you do burn dinosaurs, you're much better off burning them at scale.

> burn dinosaurs four miles away

It's mostly plants and zooplankton

Regenerative braking. Max efficiency at urban speeds.

>Max efficiency at urban speeds.

If by "max efficiency" you mean "less terrible than just wasting that energy" then sure but it's still a lot less efficient than a highway cruise.

Public transportation that runs on the power grid also burns dinosaurs if it's powered by fossil fuels.

Edit: why the downmod? Energy is energy.

Because moving a person on a train is so much more power efficient than moving one person in a car that they are barely even comparable?

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