Battery based electric vehicles of today and tomorrow.

[Larry Caldwell]

Didn't they close the last store in Philly in the 70's?

The last one was maintained as a museum, and closed in '93, but yeah, they lost business to the drive-through.

 

[Agvg]

Reduced use of plastic is a very good thing, a lot of it should be banned, just look how much plastic junk people trow out on the highway as an example, the plastic pollution in the sea is horrible, and plastic reduces lifetime on many products as it is hard to repair and degrades with time on a manner that metal does not do.

 

[DieselBound]

Here's the critical diagram to understand:

The things at the top of the diagram are really important and worth just about any amount of money. They also have few or no alternatives.

At the bottom you have the waste product -- gasoline -- which subsidizes all the rest of it. As we move to EVs for small vehicles the real working fuels and critical feed stocks are going to get more expensive. Up to twice as expensive if we stop using gasoline and diesel for cars, pickup trucks, and lawn tractors entirely.

Would really appreciate seeing that diagram (maybe a link?).

It's the "junk mail" phenomena. US postal mail relies on junk mail pay the way of meaningful mail. Trucking is subsidized by the massive numbers of POVs. Without all those POVs there wouldn't be the economies of scale on fuel (for trucking); further, there's road construction and maintenance costs. EVs are presenting a challenge on the later, which should alert folks that EVs are going to be asked to increase their tithings; and, as the economies of scale in reverse continues its retrograde the numbers of POVs (paying pump taxes) will diminish and EV operators will be asked to pony up more. Waving a magic want and "solving" this dilemma with "we'll have a LOT more EVs on the road" is the very definition of "hope management." High debt levels, inflation (money inflation in order to try and nix the debt levels) and job destruction from those two things won't be advantageous for getting folks into EVs. Product prices go up because fuel prices are driving up trucking/shipping costs. Taking down the largest market is going to be a LOT more problematic than people could imagine.

"Twice as expensive" is understated. The "economy" Is based on perpetual growth. The continued decline (we're talking that largest trade market by far) will drag everything else down. Everything can been seen as a time slice, a moment in time. It's the long-curve, the trajectory, that matters.

I have ZERO ideas as to how to deal with any of this. And those that do are either working with half a deck or are hucksters (selling crap; no offense, people have to "make a living," but honest and admit it's crap- society needs to eventually come to this awareness).

 

[DieselBound]

Reduced use of plastic is a very good thing, a lot of it should be banned, just look how much plastic junk people trow out on the highway as an example, the plastic pollution in the sea is horrible, and plastic reduces lifetime on many products as it is hard to repair and degrades with time on a manner that metal does not do.

Plastic management is going to have to be the "solution." There has to be actual incentives. Banning plastic will essentially make most everything around that you see now (that's not, of course, nature itself) disappear. As I noted in a post not far up, I was shocked to realize that the Chevy Bolt's body was comprised of a LOT of plastic.

BTW - The thing that struck me most about my first visit to the Philippines was the amount of plastic bags scattered everywhere. Any eco-head types with heart problems best not go there.

BTW2 - Because we are all about perpetual growth everything (that's not on the currently "horrible" list) will eventually become "horrible." Pollution means TOO MUCH.

 

[Agvg]

Agreed, but in the 'no jobs' scenario they're envisioning the UBI covers your entire cost of living. As long as people have enough for rent, cat food, and their cell phone they don't need a job or hope. That's the whole idea.

Maybe, but we could demand that people do something for society, a lot of things should be done and no resources are available.

And it might change a lot to a more positive lifestyle, might revitalise small farming and people might move out of the city's and build a better way of living.

 

[Agvg]

Yes, mindless consumption is a ridiculous way to run the world, produce pure junk, and fill people's heads with "needs" witch have no real value except emptying the wallet and make them feel that they are failures, look how many young people struggling with self-esteem problems and ends up in all kinds of problems. What society are we making?

 

[Agvg]

Plastic is so cheap that from a pure economical view it's only good for throwing away, it has zero value. Should be no problem to ban styrofoam from take aways, and the same with chips bags and other one time use, paper will do fine and nature can handle it. And for EVs, they should have a much longer lifetime but probably our throw a way thinking will make them rust or have other mechanisms to ensure that a certain product death.

 

[DieselBound]

Lots of things might sound straight-forward, but incomplete thinking only makes it so. I've primarily used non-plastic, reusable, bags for groceries; but, I sometimes get plastic bags and those bags end up being used for other things (multiple use), things like waste can liners- if I don't have plastic grocery bags then I have to buy waste can liners, which are also plastic. My use, however, is likely not like most others as I tend to empty those waste can liners into a larger garbage bag, in which case the liners get reused many times (but the larger garbage bag only once). Our consumer society frowns on the word fugal! Anyway...

EVs should have built-in recycling for its various components, not just batteries. We need to think of it that way from the start: we're kind of doing that now by stamping most consumer plastics with recycle numbers (I won't pretend, though, that stuff is really being recycled in the way we think it is, but there's at least a kind of framework).

Increased paper bag usage is going to result in less trees. Scale that up and the impact will be as ugly as seeing a bunch of plastic bags floating around! Excuse me while I run up to the top of the building and jump off!

 

[travisbb]

Would really appreciate seeing that diagram (maybe a link?).

Sorry, it appeared fine to me. Try about halfway down here and about three quarters of the way down here. The precise numbers have a few percentage points of wiggle room depending on the refinery and source oil.

 

[DieselBound]

Hey! That looks like a link/page I recently posted (somewhere)! But anyway, people need to understand all of this. I'm not discouraging or encouraging anything other than people become aware of all issues that we need to face up to. And this is my biggest problem I have with so much of these "the future of" things, as they typically are founded on the promotion of a product much like any other marketing activity is undertaken, with just the notion of the product in some fairly myopic view of its use, a view that fails to place the product in full societal context. The argument that we'll save the planet from fossil-fuel pollution is all well and good, but it's still myopic. There's really no context, there's no discussion of how MANY EVs we say are going to be enough, how many would be TOO much? Is there even any idea of "TOO much?" It's still a push-to-consumer approach, the model is to sell, in which case sales is the REAL GOAL-again, is where is the limit? We can do just as much damage with too many EVs as we can/do with too many ICE vehicles.

"Renewable" isn't a suitable answer if we cannot state what sorts of overall load we're going for (HOW MANY EVs?). Nor is "more environmentally friendly," as, again, at some point anything can become too much: you can kill yourself drinking too much water! The production of ANY vehicle, no matter its destined propulsion mechanism, takes a lot of resources. Elon Musk was fine calling for coups against South American countries in order to get resources for his products. Sorry, but in no way can that be spun in any positive way. We don't know where we are going. We won't know when we get there...

There's an application for EVs. Pushing them on all of humanity, for humanity's sake, might not be the noble thing we think it is.