Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

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> Norway is largely there regarding transitioning, despite having a cold climate. Took less than 15 years and their grid didn't collapse

[Norway] "Sep 2022: Over 25% of all cars on the road are plug-in electric"[0]

They're just over 1/4 of the way there, I'm not sure I'd call that "largely there".

Persuading people with plenty of money to buy an EV is relatively easy, as one can tell from the tone of the comments here from EV owners, who seem broadly very happy with their vehicles.

Q: How do we propose to persuade the rest of society to switch? Apparently it won't be by throwing cash at the problem if one looks at Germany's take on the issue:

"Germany will reduce financial incentives to buy electric cars next year after an agreement within the governing coalition, as the vehicles' growing popularity makes government subsidies unnecessary, Germany's economy ministry said on Tuesday.

The incentives, or premiums, paid to buyers of electric cars will expire completely once an allocated sum of 3.4 billion euros ($3.44 billion) from the next two years' budget is spent, according to government sources."[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_N... [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/german-coalition-parties-...

In Norway the electric cars now drive more miles per year than ICE cars, which means if they are 25% of the cars, they account for more than 25% of the miles driven.

And both numbers are increasing.

Charge petrol users the true costs of their transport choices and there will be no choice but to buy an electric car (or no car at all - especially in cities)

> Charge petrol users the true costs of their transport choices

Petrol/diesel users still massively outnumber EV users, and [at least in most places] everyone has a vote. Many less well-off voters are way more concerned about their family's immediate needs than they are about the long term future of the planet.

Politicians may be wondering if that's really a wise fight to start? At least, not right now.

There are two ways around this: either tax the buy/sale transaction of petrol vehicles, which would severely harm the poor and the ones not living in megacities; or tax the fuel itself, which would make current inflation look like fun and games, as all countries logistics run on fuel.

The proper environmental solution would be going "fuck it, let's do it anyway", yet unfortunately, there is a whole planet outside of Sweden/Norway/Denmark, and they'd be more than happy to burn all of the fuel to pick up the economic opportunities that opened up.

Politics is hard.

Good point not often mentioned. The entire EU could be CO2 neutral by 2030, destroying itself in the process, and yet the net climate impact would be around 0.1C of average temperature reduction by 2100.

The thing with fighting climate change is that it isn't actually an emergency. We're way past that. It is also not a disaster like a flood that would cause damage so abruptly that only preventive measures make sense.

For a human timescale, climate change has been slow to set in and will be slow to slow down. The upswing of that is that we truly have time to adapt. Other species don't, unless we specifically protect them. It's a disaster in slow motion, and like everything else happening in slow motion, we'll outscale it by a large factor.

With human development, our ability to minimize damage from natural disasters vastly outpaces any (experimentally uncertain so far, but should happen according to predictions) growth in the amount and severity of disasters such as hurricanes and droughts.

Well that was a wild tangent. Anyway, main point is, unless all BRICS countries are involved in anti-emissions measures so drastic they will never agree to them, there's nothing that can be done to meaningfully prevent temperatures to climb at least 2C by the end of the century. Sorry, there's geoengineering too but we should also avoid that if possible.

Also we really aren't only talking about BRICS, but all other countries in South America, Africa and Asia as well. With sizable populations who certainly want to increase their quality of living by most means possible.

I think the number of countries ready to limit their increase of living standards if not already high are only those that are truly impacted. For everyone else they will try to find some other way around issues. And probably anyway end up better of than they are now.

I really believe that would start an actual war in the US. Would not advise attempting this.

The price target for companies like Climeworks is $100/ton for ambient CO2 removal. Assuming that price, it'd be a dollar a gallon. The gas price fluctuates more than that year to year.

That's a lovely target and I'll eat my hat if they get below $300/ton.

Why would you lower the cost of burning fossil fuels? It seems counterproductive.

Separating out the road use taxes like that will have to be done eventually. Is this a "rip off the band aid" approach?

> Separating out the road use taxes like that will have to be done eventually

Across Europe, "fuel taxes vary greatly [...] [taxes account] for 65-80% of unleaded petrol price and 60-80% of diesel prices"[0]

All those [EDIT: hundreds of] billions raised from the sale of petrol and diesel is going to have to be found somewhere else instead.

Taxing electricity more, or taxing charging - or driving - somehow, or by taxing the sale of EVs themselves?

[0] https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/ENVISSUENo12/page024....

in the UK this will probably be achieved by a "per-mile" charge registered on vehicle odometers to replace the lost revenue from fuel duty.

That would be far more sensible (perhaps with different amounts based on co2 generation) - especially the crazy vehicle excise duty where two identical cars will pay the same, whether they do 3,000 miles a year or 130,000 miles a year.

But that would be far easier and cheaper than implementing some GPS tracking system in 31 million vehicles, where's the 9-figure contracts that can be given to the mate of a minister?

The things to no longer subsidize would be road use (as part of a land tax) and generated externalities of pollution, including the military and political cost of maintaining a stable oil-producing middle east, the change to the global climate, and more local issues such as oil spills and rubber particulates.

However road users like socialism when it's stuff they want to be subsidized.

Taxing sales directly doesn't make sense - sure recoup the externalities of lithium mining when the manufacturers buy the lithium, but to charge a consumption tax unrelated to damage done doesn't seem much sense to me.

How does food for 8 billion people get grown without fossil fuel inputs for fertilizer? What happens to the other 80% of uses for them?

That sounds like a great way to grind the economy to a halt. The folks who are left include the long tail of people who make ~30k in a year.

Yup. This has always been The Correct Answer™. Since the beginning.

Sounds like a great way to make all the EVs travel at a walking pace, as people just walk along the roads that they cannot afford to drive on.

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