He suggested solutions like drivers keeping the same car for longer periods of time
That’s what i have been doing… Is that wrong, or just too much anti-consumerism to be presented as a good thing in our society?
He’s right honestly, cars, especially electric cars, produce a large portion of their CO2 emissions when they are manufactured.
We would all be better off if people kept their “gas guzzlers” but only used them rarely. A car in a garage has zero co2 emissions.
Which is one reason this anti WFH campaign pisses me off so much. We could cut emissions quite a bit just from that but we can’t even do that little because: greedy assholes.
Was I the only one who, during covid lockdowns, was amazed at how fucking clear the air was? Did everyone just forget? Idk why most humans can’t look at that and go “we all need to make this permanent” and then do it. But we evolved to prefer the worst of us in charge.
Anyway. Yeah. I WFH and drive about 5000 miles a year. And we tend to keep our cars 10-15 years. It’s way more affordable than a new car every few years, assuming you get a car that has low maintenance costs. More people oughta do that.
Seriously… Covid was an eye opener me as well.
It was so much quieter outside. The air was cleaner. Animals were returning to previously deserted areas at remarkable rates.
Everyone was itching to get back to “normal,” but normal was what was causing all of the destruction on the first place.
The government should literally be paying people to stay home and do nothing. I remember reading somewhere that it is more cost effective in the long run. Rather than fixing damage and rebuilding cities after increasingly severe natural disasters.
Anti-WFH is because companies know workers have so much mobility and a virtual workforce can leave to work for any company in the world. It’s a form of lock-in. People don’t like disruption or change, so they are less likely to leave for a higher paycheck. To be honest I’m surprised more American companies haven’t leveraged work from home to shift non customer-facing white collar jobs to Eastern Europe.
Yeah, this is the industry blaming a famous person for making sense.
Replacing the gas guzzlers with EVs would be great, but the cost/benefit ratio isn’t there. If you need a new car and can afford an EV, get one.
Car manufacturers need to do more to make EVs more affordable. They need to do a better job making their argument that they are good cars with significant environmental benefits.
They won’t, because they still want to sell gasoline cars.
Conversions are another option that just aren’t being used because of red tape. The paperwork takes nearly as much work as the actual conversion.
They offset all those emissions by the time they’ve reached like 80k km in places where electricity is produced using coal (compared to a gas vehicle that increases its total emissions as time goes) so no, he’s not right actually.
That’s not even taking into consideration the wear on emission equipment and cars age.
If most people replace their cars every three years they’re not getting to 80,000 km before they buy a new one.
If like the guy further up this thread you only drive 8k km a year that’s going to take 10 years to reach parity. The Li-Ion battery may not even last that long.
Obviously if you drive for work or commute long distances that can’t be covered by public transport then an EV makes sense, but with the expansion of WFH it may not for many.
I live in a car city but I only use it to go groceries or maybe an event. I go twice a week tops.
All my friends told me I should have gotten a Tesla and that because I’m a tech guy that I’d buy a Tesla. I’m like, I don’t drive enough, so I bought a used Civic.
By the time this Civic needs to be retired, there should be plenty of affordable options for me? Or maybe I can move to a place that doesn’t require one.
nah even an ICE car in a garage is not neutral : it needs oil & filters changes every 1-2 years if you want to keep it running, and gas does not like to be stored more than 3-6 months.
This said, so you are so right we should stop using cars as much as possible and walk, bike, take public transports, or rent when needed.
Genuine questions:
Does the creation of lubricating oil actually cause a notable level of CO2 emissions? (I guess that depends on synthetic vs mineral?)
Does gasoline “going bad” and having to be disposed of produce CO2 emissions? or, since it’s destroying gas that would otherwise be burnt, is it actually carbon negative?
It depends on how much you drive, and what you drive. If you have a Prius and drive 2000 miles a year the emissions payoff for getting an EV would probably be longer than you’d even want to keep the car. If you’re in a diesel F350 and do 20,000 miles a year, mostly city, then yeah an EV will be net zero in like 5 years or less.
As I’m sure someone will mention inevitably, not using a car in the first place is the best option. Public transit, walking, biking, are all much better solutions.
A portion of the public thinks that anything saying that you shouldn’t immediately hop on the electric car bandwagon this moment is saying that electric cars are failures entirely. Drive your internal combustion car til it’s dead, it’s already here and will be phased out itself over time. No sense in making significantly higher artificial demand, leading to further pumping out cars that, no matter how you look at it, are expensive to the environment to build. Let the adoption come as cars start dying, let the EV industry keep advancing, and get one as your next car whenever that is.
No it’s not wrong. Hell, I drive EV and lots of people ask me about it, And of course I’d love if more people did it, to cut down on fossils, but realistically it’s always a financial decision, so I honestly tell them “If you already have a car, and don’t need a new car, then it’s a bad financial decision to buy a new car.”
However, when you do need a new car, then it’s likely a good decision to buy an EV, but you need to run the numbers if you want to know for sure. There are a lot of factors in this, some of which are dependent on your own personal milage and finances and others on where you live and what is available.
If you do run all the numbers for the duration of ownership, it’s likely always a good decision to buy a new EV in comparison to ICE cars, and the thing that made my decision was that in my case, it wouldn’t even make sense to buy the cheapest beater car, because over the years that I expect to drive this car, it’s cheaper to buy a new EV than to exchange and/or repair older ICE cars. But I’m sure it varies. You gotta have some idea of how much you need to drive for the next 5 years, and most people probably don’t.
Atkinson is sort of right in advising people to hold out a while. The prices are dropping and in just a few years, it won’t even be a question. However I also understand the criticism, because as a public figure he should not be passing out blanket statements like that. There are likely people who will not buy an EV now because of his statement, even if it’s against their own self interest.
I drive an EV and I always tell people not to buy one for this or that reason. The truth is that I don’t want too many other EVs on the road because I bought it just to feel superior to others, and I can’t do that if everyone else also drives an EV.
Eh, keep your superiority by being proud to be a super early adopter. Then everyone wins. "Oh, you got an EV in 2024? I’ve had one for YEARS! "
It’s sky news, a far right media outfit with questionable factual credibility. Notice they didn’t say that this what they attacked him on, only that it was in the piece that they were criticizing. It’s intentionally misleading to make you think their position is ridiculous.
Don’t fall for this propaganda.
Yeah, i’m driving a 20+ year old car and while i feel guilty about the higher emissions older design have, it’s still run and in awesome shape. Got talked by my ex for still using an old car, but meh, if it still run it still run.
Definitely getting an electric car next though, if i ever have that budget. Even then the local electricity production is still not ready for clean energy.
A new Toyota Corolla makes roughly 100g of CO2 per km driven and a car produces on average 5.6T of CO2 when being manufactured. You’ve driven through the CO2 equivalent of manufacture in roughly 60000 kms. I chose the Corolla for this comparison because it’s pretty fuel efficient.
Assuming your numbers are correct, the Corolla emits 6000 x 100 = 600 000 grams of CO2. That is 600 Kilograms, not 6 tons.
The lifetime emissions of an EV are lower than an ICE car. Engineering explained has a good video breaking the math down. If you’re planning on keeping your car for more than 3 or 4 years and you’re able to, it makes sense to buy an EV
Seymour Skinner ‘Am I out of touch?’ meme:
- top panel caption: are EVs too expensive and not practical enough yet?
- bottom panel caption: No, it’s Mr Bean’s fault
On what the article touches, he is not wrong. Buying a new car, even if it’s an electric one, will have more impact than a lot of time using a gasoline one, especially if the country doesn’t produce electricity in a sustainable way.
Also, if you want to help the environment, you shouldn’t be replacing cars, but removing them, public transportation, and walkable cities are so much better in this regard.
Yes, thank you for mentioning the real solution - less cars of any kind. Public transport, cities where you can walk around, and bikes are pretty great too.
I want to see my town ban cars downtown in my lifetime please please please please 😩🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻
Except that no, he’s not right and if you’re going to drive, the sooner you switch the better
The rule of thumb is: if your ICE car is still in working order, it’s less damaging to the environment to just keep driving it. If you absolutely must buy a new car, get an electric. That being said, I don’t trust that Rowan won’t be “Mr. Car Guy” and promote his bias towards ICE cars due to his extreme wealth and love of exotic whips.
The thing is that cars have a huge secondhand market.
So if you buy a new car, you sell your old one to someone else, who sells their car to someone else, who sell their car to someone else, … all the way until one of the horrible gas guzzlers at the bottom gets finally replaced.
So in a way it is improving the environment if you look at the whole picture.
Yeah there is far more game theory than the other post implies. Supporting companies in producing EVs and are driving EV technology in a healthy way, and considering down pressure effects for the secondhand market are far more important than your individual emissions over a short period of time.
Also, not fully convinced by the rule of thumb. It works well when considering the sustainability of static things, but I think it falls apart when considering things that have active impact like cars.
Here is an article where Reuters found that you only need to drive 13500 miles before an EV is cleaner than an ICE in the US. At a certain point, it is better to push ICE cars into retirement and build EVs.
I forgot whip was slang for a car and was thinking he had a collection of the other kind of whip.
Not true. Watch this https://youtu.be/L2IKCdnzl5k?si=yVCXvZw00SQlwI7Y
There are a lot of issues with his calculations.
For people driving 12,000 miles a year their mpg will be higher, more highway miles.
The 10mpg difference in new car vs old for similarly sized cars is over 20 years. The 2001 impala I used to have got 25 mpg.
People that buy new cars typically have cars less than 10 years old that they are replacing. People typically don’t go from a clapped out 20 year old car to a brand new one. The “old” car most people are trading in is getting 30-35 mpg.
I’d put the number at 5-7 years for a car that’s less than 5 years old.
Similar to the theory that The Simpsons made a generation not trust nuclear power.
I think 3 mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima and Sosnovy Bor and Ibaraki and Forsmark were probably more influential in terrifying the general public about nuclear power.
Yeah it’s also people using those incidents for fear mongering. Especially when coal and oil have killed way more people than every nuclear incident combined, including nuclear weapons.
The psychological impact of a meltdown versus slow poisoning is important. Similar to how fire bombings were more deadly and destructive than the nuclear bombs were, but the nukes have a bigger impact on us mentally
I’ve heard people say shit like “after Chernobyl, two fishermen were instantly vaporized and only boots left on the bank!” Like, no, that never happened since it wasn’t an atomic bomb.
Chernobyl showed that an accident could make an entire region unlivable indefinitely, Three Mile Island showed that an accident could happen in the US too
Nuclear accidents became real. People could no longer trust that all the safeguards and safety culture could prevent it. And the impact of how serious an accident could get outweighs the rarity.
Or a more objective and dispassionate way to look at it, is the seriousness of any potential accidents caused enough process safeguard to make nuclear power too expensive to be worthwhile
