this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Isn't that what they said with hydrogen fuel cells as they grifted away a decade continuing to invest in car infrastructure instead of pedestrian, bike, and rail?
EVs are the new hydrogen fuel cells. They're not about saving the environment, they're about saving the auto industry.
My understanding is they the problem with hydrogen is the conversion loss factor of air to hydrogen. It at least used to be a net loss of power by a significant margin to generate.
It was always completely impossible. Transportation was the biggest impediment, but it was just full of unsolvable problems. At the end of the day, the easiest way to crack hydrogen was from oil anyway. It was never intended to work. It was intended to buy time for the auto and oil industry by selling the people a fake solution.
The infrastructure investment needed to support EVs, when the electricity would come from natural gas anyway, is pretty transparently the exact same grift.
As hopeless as it feels sometimes, the US has opened two new nuclear power plants in the last 8 years and there Is broad support for new nuclear in the US.
And fusion is becoming viable at scale finally due to AI preventing spillover and runaway. Hope is late, but not lost.
Well that's great, but we solved the problem of efficiently moving people around 100 years ago and the auto industry destroyed it. EVs do not exist to save the climate, they exist to save the auto industry. That's always been the game.
Even if we do manage to actually get the electricity, where will the lithium come from? How will the charging infrastructure actually get built? None of these were ever meant to be solved, because the point of EVs has always been to push off the real changes just a little bit more.
EVs also make a lot of things worse. They're deadlier, they produce more tire microplastics, they do more damage to car infrastructure (which, uh, is HUGELY carbon intensive), and they're also hugely carbon intensive to build and ship. In terms of carbon today you're better off getting a small older ICE than a new EV.
They just make rich liberals feel better about themselves without actually needing to change their behaviour.
Hope isn't lost at all. A future that's still full of cars isn't hopeful. The hopeful thing is that we can solve all this today without any new technology simply by abolishing free parking, ending parking minimums, creating super blocks, and investing in mass transit, bike, and pedestrian Infrastructure instead of car infrastructure.
The thing that makes it hard to keep that hope going is that there are people who subscribe to /c/climate who think there will be a magic solution to climate change that lets everything go on exactly as it is without changing anything at all.
So volunteer to let them drill for oil in your back yard? Is that the answer since anything that takes more time or more money than that is obviously not a worthwhile solution.
Even expanding public transport takes time to build infrastructure and contractors would need to get paid, you know, "funnelling money" to them. None of it is a one presidency job and none of it is free.
This money is going to the auto industry. The same auto industry that lobbies against mass transit and bike infrastructure, the same auto industry that ripped out all the light rail and destroyed American cities. The auto industry that is selling everyone SUVs and trucks in order to evade environmental regulations. This is a massive subsidy to some of the worst people, instead of funding things that make the auto industry basically obsolete.
Those are the same people who sell electric cars. This is money for them, instead of bike lanes and mass transit. That's the problem. Work takes time, but what work you choose to do and who benefits from it actually matters.