Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

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Can you explain how it's not a fallacy? Compare your lifetime emissions of replacing a gas car with an EV now versus at the "end of life" of the gas car. Emissions will always be lower if you replace now rather than later.

Imagine if everybody switched to EVs right now, en masse. Emissions over the next decade, and every subsequent decade, would be massively lower. Waiting for every gas car to reach end of life before switching is always going to be higher emissions, always.

Similarly, the "waste" already happened when the gas heater was manufactured. There's no additional waste when it's decommissioned. It's a sunk cost, there's no getting that back. The only question is if you switch to lower emissions now, or you switch to lower emissions later.

Now, if you bring money into it, sure, there could be a financial motivation to keep emitting higher amounts of emissions. But if you take monetary considerations out of it, it's always better to stop emitting sooner rather than later.

I'd love to have some serious push back against this. The best I've ever got is "that doesn't sound right..." without any engagement with the quantitation or the ideas. Which is exactly what I would expect if it was a fallacy.

I think you’re assuming when you switch to EV the ICE car disappears. But more likely it got traded to someone else who has less money, eventually making it possible for someone to own a car who otherwise wouldn’t have.

So the emissions stayed the same and you added the carbon embedded in the new EV.

What would that person have bought otherwise? Another ICE. If Person A kept the ICR there would be two people driving them instead of one ICE, one EV.

I do really appreciate shifting this from the "the consumer must make the right choice" to "what choices result in overall better outcomes" but we must do the full accounting.

not necessarily. if he bought your car and traded up from a real clunker with worse fuel efficiency the net result is likely better.

And maybe the clunker was junked, orrrrr it was subsequently resold, or put on a ship to the global south and it’s clunkers the whole way down…

Cars don’t last forever, and shipping junk cars from the US to the global south doesn’t make economic sense. Eventually there’s a bottom of the chain.

It does and they do. A used car is cheaper to source than a new one which means it can be sold to more consumers at higher margin.

Every taxi I rode in the Bahamas was a 2nd gen Jeep Grand Cherokee with the CEL on.

The bottom exists, but it’s not here.

I don’t doubt used cars are shipped out of the US, but I’m pretty confident quite a few cars are junked in the US as well, as any junkyard demonstrates. I’d be pretty surprised to hear that junk cars (a subset of used cars) are shipped and resold.

> So the emissions stayed the same and you added the carbon embedded in the new EV.

Well no, there will be a chain of people all upgrading their cars to better ones. The final car will drop off the bottom of the chain, so you trade an EV for what is likely to be the worst performing car environmentally.

> The final car will drop off the bottom of the chain

Maybe not. The $500 used car lot will take them, and some will get shipped off to third world countries.

But now you're dealing with probabilities, weighed against the certainty of the original EV purchaser emitting less.

Try this: if everyone in the US suddenly purchased EVs, and ditched their ICE cars, flooding the market with old ICE vehicles, would emissions decrease in the world or increase? I think it's pretty clear that the vast majority of the old ICE vehicles would be junked, and there'd be marginally more vehicle-miles-travelled, so the huge wins of everyone using EVs would counteract any increase in vehicle miles from suddenly having cheaper ICE available around the world.

So I would argue that the single person doing that action would have the general same trend as if everyone did it.

> But now you're dealing with probabilities, weighed against the certainty of the original EV purchaser emitting less.

Welcome to public policy.

> Try this:

No, I’ll stay in the real world. Your thought experiment isn’t possible, and extrapolating from it isn’t useful.

> Maybe not. The $500 used car lot will take them, and some will get shipped off to third world countries.

If you're saying electric cars are pointless, and we should keep making ICE cars, because for a period of transition from ICE to EV some older ICE cars will go overseas, then I'm not sure there's much else to say. I disagree that that's good logic, I suppose.

Yes, but same logic can be applied to EVs.

Someone that that switches to EV today will pass that EV to a second owner down the line. The sooner the fleet starts switching to electric, the sooner the carbon emissions, primary energy needs, gas usage and particle emissions dive.

> But if you take monetary considerations out of it, it's always better to stop emitting sooner rather than later.

No, it might or might not, depending on (a) the embodied emissions of creating the new product and (b) how soon it will be replaced by something even more efficient.

It's easiest to understand the importance of point (b) by going to extremes: Suppose that, every week, a new model of EV comes out that uses 99% as much energy as the previous year's model. If some nonzero proportion of electricity is generated from fossil fuels, then ignoring point (b) would imply that the rational thing to do would be to buy the new car each week, regardless of how much CO2 went into building it.

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