Texas Tech University's Jennifer Guelfo was part of a research team that found the use of a novel sub-class of per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) in lithium ion batteries is a growing source of pollution in air and water.
You’d need both, honestly. Electric cars are a great idea in a lot of situations. The problem with electric cars is that countries like the United States will need 300 million or more just to match current car usage because the country is so car dependent. I grew up in a rural area in the US and had to drive 30+ minutes just to get to a grocery store. If I wanted to take public transportation I’d need a ride from someone with a car to get to the station or walk 2+ hours. Not only that, but most cities that are car dependent don’t even have the infrastructure for mass public transportation. They’d have to redesign the entire city just to get anything besides buses. The car dependency is so deeply built into cities that it would cost astronomical amounts of money just to get a basic train system. It’s why most cities just opt for a new bus route.
Buses are still good. They have electric buses in Prague. There’s the BRT invented in Brazil and brought over successfully to England. Mass transit doesn’t need to be trains. Turn a lane into a dedicated bus lane and put some ticketing stations outside and you have a BRT solution.
Edit: hit submit by mistake.
And restructuring our cities to live a less carbon intensive live is critical. Yes it will cost a lot. It’s still needed.
I don’t disagree. I would use public transportation if I could. I do think that it is kinda silly to say electric vehicles will solve everything about climate change when the top 20 corporations produce 80% of pollution. The restructuring of our cities to support these kinds of things is very important as well. I’m just saying that electric vehicles will be a necessary component that we, unfortunately, cannot rule out. Even if everyone had access to public transportation we would still need vehicles. And it would be better to have electric ones.
Mass Transit and walkable cities are a lot of things and has a lot of benefits that makes it worth expanding, but they are not an full climate solution or anything like a replacement for electric cars.
Neglecting that even in small very dense countries with cities built wholly around high quality mass transit still have freeways and millions of cars, the facts that it almost always takes over a decade of construction to establish a new light rail or metro line in north america, that it takes many such cycles to fully build out a network, and that it can take years to even establish a simple bus line, mean that it cannot be built fast enough to be relevant to anything under a 2.5 to 3 degrees warming senecio at best.
We quite similarly don’t have the carbon budget to keep emiting two tons of carbon dioxide per year per vehicle for another half century while we wait for the best case where effective 24/7 transit with fifteen minute headways is extended to even the most conservative small town with politicians elected on culture war issues like eliminating public transit. Not when we have a nearly drop in solution that can be scaled up to the point where it can have eliminated nearly all personal transit related carbon emissions in the time it takes to build two stages of a single metro line.
And I haven’t even touched on the infatuation north america has with diesel, battery electric, and even hydrogen buses over seeing trollybus or tram wires, or the sudden pushback and NIMBYism you see in even very blue cities in blue states like Los Angeles the second you start talking about connecting the rich white neighborhoods to the poor block ones, or that time the Koch brothers quashed a new light rail line a small North Carolina city had spent hundreds of millions working on to provent woke walkable cities, or the third of north amarica that doesn’t live in or near a city, or the infatuation that both the liberals and conservatives who control north america have with running public transport at a profit.
Again, this isn’t to say that mass transit isn’t worth it or that we shouldn’t be building a whole lot more of it than we currently are here in north america, just that it is not something we should be expecting in time to reach net zero.
Work from home is great and something that should be encouraged for a whole host of reasons, but it isn’t something that most jobs with an actual physical output or effect on the world can do.
Mass Transit and walkable cities are a lot of things and has a lot of benefits that makes it worth expanding, but they are not an full climate solution or anything like a replacement for electric cars.
Nobody is advocating that. There is strong advocacy for electric cars instead of mass transit, fueled by the automaker industry. You can see influences of it even in this very article.
If we’re talking about the biggest impact to climate change, that is definitely industry activity, followed by cattle farming and only then transportation, of which daily commuting is a fraction. All the press seems to do is talk about “responsible consumption”, which is corporate speak for “don’t regulate us”.
No it’s not. You can be more effective with mass transit and incentivizing work from home.
All those things can happen simultaneously
Never said they couldn’t. Just said that electric cars aren’t critical. Mass transit, however, is.
You’d need both, honestly. Electric cars are a great idea in a lot of situations. The problem with electric cars is that countries like the United States will need 300 million or more just to match current car usage because the country is so car dependent. I grew up in a rural area in the US and had to drive 30+ minutes just to get to a grocery store. If I wanted to take public transportation I’d need a ride from someone with a car to get to the station or walk 2+ hours. Not only that, but most cities that are car dependent don’t even have the infrastructure for mass public transportation. They’d have to redesign the entire city just to get anything besides buses. The car dependency is so deeply built into cities that it would cost astronomical amounts of money just to get a basic train system. It’s why most cities just opt for a new bus route.
Buses are still good. They have electric buses in Prague. There’s the BRT invented in Brazil and brought over successfully to England. Mass transit doesn’t need to be trains. Turn a lane into a dedicated bus lane and put some ticketing stations outside and you have a BRT solution.
Edit: hit submit by mistake.
And restructuring our cities to live a less carbon intensive live is critical. Yes it will cost a lot. It’s still needed.
I don’t disagree. I would use public transportation if I could. I do think that it is kinda silly to say electric vehicles will solve everything about climate change when the top 20 corporations produce 80% of pollution. The restructuring of our cities to support these kinds of things is very important as well. I’m just saying that electric vehicles will be a necessary component that we, unfortunately, cannot rule out. Even if everyone had access to public transportation we would still need vehicles. And it would be better to have electric ones.
Alright, so we’re saying the exact same thing.
Mass Transit and walkable cities are a lot of things and has a lot of benefits that makes it worth expanding, but they are not an full climate solution or anything like a replacement for electric cars.
Neglecting that even in small very dense countries with cities built wholly around high quality mass transit still have freeways and millions of cars, the facts that it almost always takes over a decade of construction to establish a new light rail or metro line in north america, that it takes many such cycles to fully build out a network, and that it can take years to even establish a simple bus line, mean that it cannot be built fast enough to be relevant to anything under a 2.5 to 3 degrees warming senecio at best.
We quite similarly don’t have the carbon budget to keep emiting two tons of carbon dioxide per year per vehicle for another half century while we wait for the best case where effective 24/7 transit with fifteen minute headways is extended to even the most conservative small town with politicians elected on culture war issues like eliminating public transit. Not when we have a nearly drop in solution that can be scaled up to the point where it can have eliminated nearly all personal transit related carbon emissions in the time it takes to build two stages of a single metro line.
And I haven’t even touched on the infatuation north america has with diesel, battery electric, and even hydrogen buses over seeing trollybus or tram wires, or the sudden pushback and NIMBYism you see in even very blue cities in blue states like Los Angeles the second you start talking about connecting the rich white neighborhoods to the poor block ones, or that time the Koch brothers quashed a new light rail line a small North Carolina city had spent hundreds of millions working on to provent woke walkable cities, or the third of north amarica that doesn’t live in or near a city, or the infatuation that both the liberals and conservatives who control north america have with running public transport at a profit.
Again, this isn’t to say that mass transit isn’t worth it or that we shouldn’t be building a whole lot more of it than we currently are here in north america, just that it is not something we should be expecting in time to reach net zero.
Work from home is great and something that should be encouraged for a whole host of reasons, but it isn’t something that most jobs with an actual physical output or effect on the world can do.
Nobody is advocating that. There is strong advocacy for electric cars instead of mass transit, fueled by the automaker industry. You can see influences of it even in this very article.
If we’re talking about the biggest impact to climate change, that is definitely industry activity, followed by cattle farming and only then transportation, of which daily commuting is a fraction. All the press seems to do is talk about “responsible consumption”, which is corporate speak for “don’t regulate us”.