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:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
A large number of high fuel users are also lower-income Americans who are far less likely to purchase new vehicles. Many of these drivers are likely waiting for cars to filter into the used vehicle market, a process that can take years.
Maybe give higher rebates for lower income households then
And tax the hell out of the rich who burn more fuel in a weekend then normal humans can in a year.
A small share of motorists burns about a third of America’s gasoline, a study found.
They are again, blaming normal people when the problem is the rich who don't deserve anything anymore.
My impression is that the super-drivers are actually middle-class individuals who have incredibly long commutes or jobs which involve large amounts of driving.
I think the other commenter was referring to the carbon footprint from elites using private jets and the like, versus normal Americans who use their cars for work and cant afford an EV even with a tax credit
I'm not in the demographic of high fuel users described in the article, but I am a prime candidate for an EV. I don't drive much, prefer urban living (live close to everything, shorter drives), and the occasional road trip is not more than 4 hours long and on city routes. The problem is charging. I live in an apartment with no chargers, and there aren't a lot of public charges close to me in my area. If my apartment ever does install charges, I'll have to compete with other residents. I hope they standardize chargers to be compatible with all models and have them everywhere.
While I don’t know the specifics of your situation, I would look into it and annoy your hoa or building group. While it is obviously very easy to install level 2 chargers if you have dedicated parking, even without it you can push for a few EV and handicapped spots. For you personally, if you don’t often do more than a hundred or so miles a day, any wall outlet within heavy duty extension cord range you can get acess might be enough to trickle charge while your asleep.
Also in north amarica there are three charging plugs, Chademo, which is a asian standard that is only found on older imports and is slow being deprecated, J1776/ccs, which is the open standard for the majority of chargers, and NACS, which is Tesla’s finally open own little plug shape for J1776/ccs. Because under the hood NACS uses the same charging protocol as J1776, it’s actually pretty trivial for an adapter to go from one to the other, and indeed many cars ship with one by default, even though most non Tesla charge points have both types of plugs available.
It would obviously be idea for everyone to standardize, and they did in Europe and Asia, but the reason we haven’t yet is mostly down to Tesla insisting on using a proprietary connection for a decade, then last year finally decided to open it up to other manufacturers to start a format war when the government finally stopped giving them money for building proprietary charging infrastructure. Hopefully that should have sorted itself out in the next five years or so, but until then you might need an adapter.
A good government map of public chargers if you haven’t seen it yet.
And it may not be workable, I don’t know how much you’ve looked into it or where you live, or how much your apartment management company sucks beyond the default, only that at a local level, the majority of the apartments that have them, have them because someone in the neighborhood spent a few dozen hours helping and annoying their building manager into makeing a small positive difference in the world. Or someone joined the city council with an agenda to mandate that all apartments had to offer them by request.
Wish Florida was on that list, i do field tech work & drive at least 120 miles a day, up to 400 some days if im scheduled to a different city for a few weeks.
I don't have a lot of money, am looking into a new car, & would LOVE to get an EV, but $18,000 for a decade old tesla, while doable & ideal, does not sound that nice versus an $8000 old toyota ICE i could run into the ground and know will have part replacements...
maybe invest in public transit?