this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world.  About 1C of total warming.  Second chart:  about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability.  Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases.  About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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[–] dragontamer@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (13 children)

PHEVs are lighter than every EV on the market of equivalent size.

Prius Prime is 3500lbs, while Nissan Leaf is 4000 and Model Y is like 4300.

EV batteries are the real waste when you actually measure how heavy the battery packs are. The engine + transmission system of ICE is far, far, far lighter.

you have diminished range due to the weight of the ICE engine

More like the 800lbs of extra batteries you carry (and rarely use) are a waste on the full size EV. Like, how often are you running your battery down and using all 1000lbs of Li-ion effectively?

Yes, an Ioniq 6 is over 1000lbs of battery. Most engines are just a hundred or so lbs. You seriously can't make any kind of "weight" argument here, EVs are so heavy its not a reasonable comparison. Any weight argument immediately swings in favor of ICE, Hybrid, or PHEV.


The far lighter weight of the Prius (3200lbs) and Prius Prime (3500lbs) is one of the reasons why they have much better efficiency than their pure-EV competitors. And is likely a major influence on why they reached #1 on ACEEE's greenest car of the market list.

have to pay for a lifetime of maintenance with it

$35 an oil change x 15 oil changes == $525 over ~10 years of a car's usage. People are seriously overdramaticizing the costs of oil changes.

https://www.cartalk.com/extended-warranties/tesla-maintenance-cost

Tesla’s Model Y has a 100,000-mile maintenance cost estimate between $8,250 for base trims and $15,000 for the performance trim. This does not include repairs. By comparison, a Toyota Highlander in the Car Talk fleet had a 100,000-mile maintenance and repair cost of $14,029. A Honda Accord had a 100,000-mile maintenance and repair cost of $7,684. If there is a cost advantage to Tesla with regard to maintenance and repair, we cannot find it.

Meanwhile, a single Tesla 3 set of tires is like $1000, and because the weight of the vehicle, the tires wear out faster and spew microplastics everywhere.

And because Tesla vehicles have absurdly overpowered motors, people tend to wear out their tires faster.

[–] Snapz@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Your response is just overflowing with odd takes...

  1. You decided to zero in and fixate on weight alone? The conversation is weight along with range/efficiency, emissions and lifetime maintenance. Yes, some cars weigh less... which also means they have less electric range. You also think an American lobbying group is your shining example of integrity in their endorsement?

  2. You focus in on tesla as your main example of EV maintenance - they are a known bad actor generally, in a walled garden that gouges cost for every single thing and lives near exclusively to cater to out-of-touch tech bro class and their families on corporate expense accounts.

"It's impossible to cook at home! Wagyu streak costs $4000 a pound!!!!"

[–] dragontamer@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

You decided to zero in and fixate on weight alone? The conversation is weight along with range/efficiency, emissions and lifetime maintenance. Yes, some cars weigh less… which also means they have less electric range. You also think an American lobbying group is your shining example of integrity in their endorsement?

No. I use ACEEE's numbers because they factor into:

https://greenercars.org/greenercars-ratings/how-we-determine-ratings/

Many factors determine the environmental impact of a car or light truck. Tailpipe emissions and fuel efficiency are clearly important, but impacts also depend on the type of fuel used and the materials that go into manufacturing the vehicle. A scientific approach for estimating the environmental impacts of a product is known as lifecycle assessment, since it traces the impacts of a product from “cradle to grave”: materials production and product manufacturing; emissions and other effects when the product is in use; through end-of-life effects of disposal and recycling. We developed the green scores and class rankings according to the principles of lifecycle assessment, using available data that are sufficiently standardized to be applicable to all makes and models.

Four types of vehicle-specific data form the basis of the ACEEE’s ratings: tailpipe emissions, given by the emissions standard to which a vehicle is certified; fuel economy, based on EPA test cycles; vehicle mass (curb weight); and battery mass and composition (for hybrids and plug-in vehicles).

https://www.aceee.org/greener-cars

And #1 vehicle after their analysis is the Prius Prime and Prius respectively. Weight is one factor, but there's other factors (such as Tesla's use of NCA chemistry for their Li-ion) that drops Tesla down severely compared to cleaner chemistries from other companies. But even when we look at the best EVs on the market for environmentalism (such as Nissan Leaf or Ioniq 5 or whatever...), the Prius reigns supreme from above.

You focus in on tesla as your main example of EV maintenance - they are a known bad actor generally, in a walled garden that gouges cost for every single thing and lives near exclusively to cater to out-of-touch tech bro class and their families on corporate expense accounts.

Prius beats even well recognized brands and environmental cars like Nissan Leaf on ACEEE's study.

There are also cheap economy-cars / hybrids, such as the Toyota Corolla Hybrid and Accord Hybrid (not in the top 10, but still a score of >60) that are popular and green choices despite using gasoline as their primary transportation, because tailpipe emissions aren't the only environmental effect at play here. When Hybrid / ICE cars reach 50mpg (or high 40s, like the Accord Hybrid), tailpipe emissions start to matter less-and-less, and yes... weight of the car starts to matter more and more (particulates from tires wear becomes the #1 pollution factor on EVs). There's also significant issues with how dirty the mining industries are to make EVs (Lithium, Nickle, Cobalt, etc. etc.) And a lack of recycling today. Meanwhile, Steel is 90%+ recycled in the auto-industry, making for some of the most environmentally friendly manufacturing in practice.

There's a lot of little things that add up. EVs are not the silver-bullet that EV fans think they are, but I'm glad that EVs have brought efficiency to the forefront of the minds of people. But we need to think holistically: what is the best path forward that overall reduces pollution (including CO2) from our system?

The answer may surprise you, especially if you're one of the people tricked into the EV-only mindset. There's many other technologies that are competitive.

[–] nxdefiant@startrek.website 3 points 8 months ago

Those ACEEE numbers are predicated on placing an economic cost on pollution. If you assign a larger price to the pollution, even the PHEV's fall right off the chart. The E in their name stands for "Economy". They're focus is framing clean as a function of the economy. In their model, you can kill a bunch more people and the price of pollution only goes up a little. They even say they've left that number constant since 1998. If you value pollution in a logarithmic scale that gets way worse as time goes on, it becomes obvious that the only acceptable vehicles are the ones that have negative pollution costs. Since we dont have vehicles that can remove pollution from the air, getting one that gets as close to zero is the best bet. Right now, EV's get the closest to zero.

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