Comment by xte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xte | Hacker News Reader

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So they became more vulnerable, dependent on big (mostly private, despite the "public" word in the name) transport network and forced to live in a city.

I suggest you a small game: we all depend on society but there are various level of dependency; for instance in a country house you may:

- have fuel stocks enough for a month or two or even three so while you still depend on fuel supply you may not depend too much on constant supply like you do not suffer casual strikes, emergencies etc;

- have food stocks (big freezers in garage) that let you live comfortably for a month and you may integrate them and re-supply from various sources, including a little bit from nature (hunting, fishing, vegetable garden+proper preservation);

- have enough water stock (rainwater recovery / sources) to not suffer both aqueduct outages or contamination;

- have enough tools and prime matter to being able to repair a bit your home in case of need for long time;

On contrary in dense cities you haven't space to stock food, water, fuel, ... you can't even heat yourself in the winter burning wood in a stove. So you depend completely on city infrastructure, without option in case of even short outages. City infrastructure in turn depend on few countrywide networks that's are similar but LESS important than the countryside.

Today's, and not from today's, people inhabited to have anything at their fingertips do not think at those vulnerabilities not much different than many today's programmers that treat web services like a thing that always run and it's always available...

We have only to wait to see the results.

So we should actively destroy the environment. Kill ourselves from pollution and space out urban sprawl because maybe one time in the future you might need a supply of petrol.

First we still need petrol because look around you vast majority of anything you use is plastic, plastic that can't be substituted by bioplastic, from electric insulation to large part of your washing machine to dress. That's without counting lubricants that came from petrol, tires, sweeteners used everywhere, planes, ships, trucks, all heavy machines. So thinking that with EV the need of petrol vanish is mere marketing.

To avoid pollution we need a "circular" economy as much as possible. We do a little in that sense, like using aluminum that we can fully recyclable instead of steel that can't essentially be recycled (at maximum you can recycle high quality steel to low quality one, one single time). We can restart mass using glass instead of plastic for many food containers even if being heavy means a higher transportation cost, we can recycle paper and cardboard but not forever, at maximum one/two time so we need to use it far, far less to being able to have forest grown again etc.

Things are complex and the vague and simplistic idea that we can have smart Riviera's (did you see how most of "green future houses" are single isolated homes in the nature, not cities?) or never-really-designed smart cities it a sketch from a dream and marketing, not reality.

You probably pollute FAR more with EVs than actual car's, only perhaps you pollute someone's else land, for a while, until climate change and environment contamination knock at your door and in that's case is too late.

Needing plastic is totally irrelevant because we can still create plastic without cars.

>You probably pollute FAR more with EVs than actual car's, only perhaps you pollute someone's else land, for a while

Every study I have seen does not confirm this so I would like to see your source.

> Every study I have seen does not confirm this so I would like to see your source.

Me, myself and I, as a reasoning citizen even before being an engineer... I see exactly zero conclusive study about how to dismantle/dismiss used EV batteries and actual solution is to ship them in some part of Africa and least developed countries of Asia, the same for ship demolition, plastic etc. So there is NO viable strategy. Few peoples push totally absurd ideas like "reuse them for home energy storage" of various kind but again beside they are absurd because of costs they do not say a word about what to do when even least residual capacity will be over.

And even beside that there is exactly no real conclusive study on the effective environmental impact of EV batteries production, again the problem remain cached since work is done in China or other non-western countries.

Please do not confuse press-spread ideas from unknown with scientific study, they are a totally different beast and you can even quickly discover many of them simply thinking on what they say instead of being pampered by well constructed dreams.

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