EV Revolution!

[jtown,man]

I think we just found the most sensitive person on SSP. Battery production is really bad for the environment. I had a professor who studies nothing but climate change say that solar panels, for example, have a long way to go to becoming produced in an actually environmentally friendly way. And in reality, oil is produced in a more humane way using the Urban Political Ecology theory.

[SIGSEGV]

This paper (somewhat outdated, perhaps?) indicates that the battery impact is a small fraction of the environmental impact of building a new vehicle: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es903729a
Perhaps driving a used vehicle is a better alternative. Or, just don't own a car at all.

That said, lithium mining is no joke and certainly has negative local environmental impacts (although perhaps that can be improved).

[canucklehead2]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

I think we just found the most sensitive person on SSP. Battery production is really bad for the environment. I had a professor who studies nothing but climate change say that solar panels, for example, have a long way to go to becoming produced in an actually environmentally friendly way. And in reality, oil is produced in a more humane way using the Urban Political Ecology theory.

Someone is a delusional Trumpazee. You have shown no actual facts that can be verified just another worthless nobody. Drop dead, moron! #blocked

[canucklehead2]

i'll gladly change my mind once someone shows me verified scientific facts maybe I'll consider listening to a right-wing oil troll. Until then? Also tell me about your Flat Earth society... I am sure you're also a member of that movement...

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by canucklehead2

Someone is a delusional Trumpazee. You have shown no actual facts that can be verified just another worthless nobody. Drop dead, moron! #blocked

Jesus, you have issues bro.

#not blocked(because I am not scared of opinions)

[202_Cyclist]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

I think we just found the most sensitive person on SSP. Battery production is really bad for the environment. I had a professor who studies nothing but climate change say that solar panels, for example, have a long way to go to becoming produced in an actually environmentally friendly way. And in reality, oil is produced in a more humane way using the Urban Political Ecology theory.

This is just laughable. Leaving aside the severe environmental costs of oil, countries that are dependent on exporting oil are overwhelmingly less developed, less democratic, have a higher number of civil wars and other conflicts, and are more corrupt. Norway is largely the exception.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/le...d_politics.pdf

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by 202_Cyclist

This is just laughable. Leaving aside the severe environmental costs of oil, countries that are dependent on exporting oil are overwhelmingly less developed, less democratic, have a higher number of civil wars and other conflicts, and are more corrupt. Norway is largely the exception.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/le...d_politics.pdf

Less developed or less democratic?

I don't think the people of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, U.A.E, USA, or Canada are worse off because of oil. In any case, the people involved with oil are much better off than the people slaving away mining the shit for batteries(according to UPE).

[cabasse]

oil is used in every facet of modern life. tapping every last resource we can get our hands on (as quickly as we can) just so we can burn 95% of it away, mostly in very inefficient ICE engines, is just incredibly shortsighted.

the world's biggest lithium producer by far is australia, not some third world place. we also produce our own sources. tesla appears to source theirs from a mix of china, canada, the US and Europe.

[202_Cyclist]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

Less developed or less democratic?

I don't think the people of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, U.A.E, USA, or Canada are worse off because of oil. In any case, the people involved with oil are much better off than the people slaving away mining the shit for batteries(according to UPE).

Yes, both less developed and less democratic. The countries most dependent on exporting oil include Sudan, Venezuela, Libya, Iraq, Russia, Nigeria, and Iran. None of these are vibrant , diversified, economies. Reliance on oil exports to provide foreign revenue distorts economic growth in these countries and prevenare them from investing in their people. There is extensive literature describing this, a phenomenon know as the Dutch Disease.

https://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2016/042916.pdf

[202_Cyclist]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

Less developed or less democratic?

I don't think the people of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, U.A.E, USA, or Canada are worse off because of oil. In any case, the people involved with oil are much better off than the people slaving away mining the shit for batteries(according to UPE).

And, yes, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the U.A.E. Despite being wealthy countries, what do these countries export besides oil or natural gas? The answer is almost nothing. I read that little South Korea, with virtually no natural resources, has more patents than all of the Arab countries combined. Oil wealth, at best, provides a temporary sugar high.

Also, despite being wealthy countries, anyone with means in the Gulf states you mentioned s new their children abroad for both primary and secondary education because the public schools in these countries are mostly inadequate.

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by 202_Cyclist

And, yes, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the U.A.E. Despite being wealthy countries, what do these countries export besides oil or natural gas? The answer is almost nothing. I read that little South Korea, with virtually no natural resources, has more patents than all of the Arab countries combined. Oil wealth, at best, provides a temporary sugar high.

Also, despite being wealthy countries, anyone with means in the Gulf states you mentioned s new their children abroad for both primary and secondary education because the public schools in these countries are mostly inadequate.

True, there are countries with little resources that have become extremely developed. The question is would that be the case in Kuwait without oil? Would it turn into South Korea or Yemen?

[llamaorama]

Urban Political Ecology theory.

Sounds like some academic garbage if you ask me.

I don't think it's fair to compare point-source pollution from battery manufacturing and disposal to global scale climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. I believe that, at some cost, the former is something that could be feasibly engineered away. In contrast, you can't really fix CO2 in the atmosphere unless you had unlimited money and science fiction technologies.

Likewise, its unfair to lump in the carbon emissions from energy inputs needed to make batteries when arguing about the merits of renewable energy because the end game is convert everything to carbon-free sources of electricity. In that respect, if it takes a lot of energy to make a battery but the energy comes from the sun, so what? Any counter-arguments to this deviate from the core issue of climate change.

I'm not sure what the end game people who are skeptical of battery tech are advocating for. Is it one where everyone is poor and lives like a Cuban in the 1990s because that's what sustainability without tech or engineering looks like. Or, more likely, are they just apologists for the status quo, who want us to think that it makes more sense to run cars on gasoline forever?

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

Sounds like some academic garbage if you ask me.

I don't think it's fair to compare point-source pollution from battery manufacturing and disposal to global scale climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. I believe that, at some cost, the former is something that could be feasibly engineered away. In contrast, you can't really fix CO2 in the atmosphere unless you had unlimited money and science fiction technologies.

Likewise, its unfair to lump in the carbon emissions from energy inputs needed to make batteries when arguing about the merits of renewable energy because the end game is convert everything to carbon-free sources of electricity. In that respect, if it takes a lot of energy to make a battery but the energy comes from the sun, so what? Any counter-arguments to this deviate from the core issue of climate change.

I'm not sure what the end game people who are skeptical of battery tech are advocating for. Is it one where everyone is poor and lives like a Cuban in the 1990s because that's what sustainability without tech or engineering looks like. Or, more likely, are they just apologists for the status quo, who want us to think that it makes more sense to run cars on gasoline forever?

I am not arguing that batteries are bad or that oil extraction is awesome. Or anything. I was just pointing out to the OP(who seems kind of insane, honestly) that we should look at all costs in how we get our energy. Yeah, thinking about some poor person in Africa working in a mine or whatever might not be as important as our collective carbon emissions, but it's just something to think about and include when we are making important choices.

I personally think people should just go 100% nuclear. The positives outweigh the negatives by far.

[llamaorama]

Yeah, thinking about some poor person in Africa working in a mine or whatever

But then that's a more complex issue. Big mines in the Congo and elsewhere are legitimate businesses, but there are also wildcat mines that use slaves and government bureaucrats who control the wholesale market enabling it.

All those problems would also be solved if we mined for lithium and rare earth metals from huge known deposits here in the US or in Canada.

[canucklehead2]

I am sure jtown is just heart-broken over child slavery in the Congo... As most oil defenders are... ;-)

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by canucklehead2

I am sure jtown is just heart-broken over child slavery in the Congo... As most oil defenders are... ;-)

Oil defenders? Why all the attacks? You seem really angry.

In any case, we all use oil products. So there.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

...
in reality, oil is produced in a more humane way using the Urban Political Ecology theory.

Odd phrasing, considering that Urban Political Ecology theory isn't really about reality, but in creating a top-down framework for trying to predict what different changes in urban behaviors would result in. While not everone involved with UPE would agree with my assessment that it's more of a predictive model than a representative model, I think there's ample evidence to support describing it that way. Predictive models aren't dealing with defining reality, just in enabling predictions. There's nothing wrong with that - there's a reason engineering still mostly uses Newtonian physics to design things, even though we now know that Newtonian physics is an inaccurate description of the reality of the Universe. Predictive models can be useful for prediction, but they should never be confused with descriptive or definitive models because that's not what they are.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

...
I personally think people should just go 100% nuclear. The positives outweigh the negatives by far.

I'm not sure I agree we should go 100% nuclear, but it should play a much bigger role than it currently does, and I thought it was one of Angela Merkel's biggest mistakes to cave to anti-nuclear forces and essentially shut down Germany's nuclear industry. I'm glad to live in a state with a significant amount of nuclear production, although I'll admit the risk of contaminating Lake Michigan before the Zion plant shut down in 1998 was concerning. Even though it was very unlikely, rendering the drinking water for tens of millions of people undrinkable for potentially hundreds of years and potentially irradiating plants and animals for hundreds of miles is legitimate reason to tread extraordinarily cautiously. It can be hard to accurately quantify the risk-reward ratio with fission because the extreme ends of the tails in a risk bell curve still have the potential for catastrophic impact at the continental scale. You can tell people all day that the risk of some Very Bad Event are 1:1,000,000,000,000 but if the Very Bad Event includes fatally contaminating one of the world's largest sources of fresh water, the focus will be on the badness of the event and not the minuscule risk of it happening.

I think most of the current concern with nuclear energy will go away if/when we can replace fission plants with economical fusion nuclear plants. Too bad the amounts of needed hydrogen in play would be so small that it's not a likely source of significant helium production. Running out of helium will be sad. I still don't understand why we got rid of the strategic helium reserve.

[canucklehead2]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

Oil defenders? Why all the attacks? You seem really angry.

In any case, we all use oil products. So there.

Classic deflection...

[canucklehead2]

Tesla Semi Truck is testing in Canada... https://electrek.co/2020/02/12/tesla...inter-testing/