Comment by sxates | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sxates | Hacker News Reader

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I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure it's analogous. Lets say the cost of gasoline triples in the next 5 years because we're killing all subsidies, ending federal leases, etc., enough to justify everyone to make investments in electric cars. We literally can't make them fast enough. Making a million CDs was easy, but our heavy industries take a lot longer to tool up. Tesla is struggling to scale their supply chain, and they're consuming almost half the world's battery supplies right now to make a few hundred thousand cars per year.

And that's just cars - not including semi-trucks, farm equipment, buses, trains, shipping, etc.

Best case we need a decade to start manufacturing those things at scale and two decades to manufacture them at a pace that can start replacing all the existing vehicles. That's a long time for anyone stuck paying for gas.

And it's a similar situation for the Electricity sector, Cement and construction, and dozens of other industries that emit carbon. It's a really complicated transition - far more than switching media formats.

Making a million CDs involved building entire new factories to meet demand. Making a lot more electric vehicles could reuse a lot more existing factories (and/or recently shuttered factories) if demand shifted enough away from internal combustion to retool a lot of existing lines in place. The difference between an EV and an ICE car on the factory floor are fewer than between a cassette tape and CD.

Whether or not, say, Detroit is still capable of making a rapid shift to such a demand change is certainly a new question, and indeed supply chains would have to follow. On the other hand, again, the supply chains are a lot closer between EVs and ICE Vehicles, and if anything EV supply chains are simpler on paper with one big exception (batteries). But that big exception is one that is already busy scaling drastically and generally seems to know how to scale to demand (because it touches so many other industries such as computing).

It's a chicken-and-egg nightmare, certainly, that heavy industries aren't going to scale it unless they have no other choice, and the reasons to give them no other choice may have some transitional hiccups. That said, the capability to make that rapid shift is theoretically in a really strong place, we have the technology and wherewithal if we made it a priority.

The real issue here is that there is a natural market replacement rate. You sell a million cars a year even though there are 25 million of your cars on the road. That means it will take 25 years to replace all of the cars even if you switch 100% to the new type. If you want to replace them all in 15 years then you would have to sell below cost in order to induce more than the typical amount of demand for new cars.

So replacement at the natural rate is economical, replacement at a faster rate gets expensive quickly. To do that you have to force people to replace cars they otherwise wouldn't have, which either means more subsidies (expensive) or taxes (expensive), or both. On top of that it requires the resources spent on the existing car to be lost when it gets removed from service before its natural end of life, and it causes you to have to build excess manufacturing capacity to build more than the natural amount of new cars, which then goes idle and has to be written off once all cars are of the new type and the measures to artificially stimulate demand are discontinued.

All this to say that it's quite important that the transition starts now with as many electric vehicles as possible, because the more we do now the less we have to compress the timeline later and pay all of these costs.

I think that's part of what I was getting it: that precisely because it would be a useful challenge for our somewhat complacent heavy industries, it may be something useful to force their hands, because they probably aren't likely to do it until it is too late unless forced. Because it would be a challenge isn't a reason not to force it. It's a "Moon shot" problem, we can go to the moon this decade, but we need to be forced.

The problem right now is that carbon isn't priced and there consequently isn't much incentive for individual companies to do it at all, much less right away. Change that and there is suddenly much more demand for new vehicles that don't burn carbon, at which point industry knows perfectly well how to manufacture to meet market demand.

I agree. We should have been taxing carbon as far back as at least the 70s around when the idea was first proposed. Establish cap and trade then too if we are asking for ponies that were PRed to death by business men to avoid externalities.

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