I know BC at least solved this problem a few years ago by just legally requiring landlords to provide L2 chargers when asked and suddenly EVs were very popular with apartment owners.

While L2 chargers are definitely the ideal for household charging, it’s worth noting for places with street parking and such that you absolutely can charge an EV overnight with an household outlet and an extension cord, At least you can if you’re not averageing more than 60 miles(100km) per day, and if you’re dependent on street parking you’re probably closer into town than that.

Ideally the government would institute a similar must provide L2 if asked for employees at places with electric service, as that would ensure that they could not only get 170miles (290km) during a 9-5 shift, but allow for bidirectional charging to actually help with bulk grid storage, or at least incentivize charging at times when solar is plentiful instead of at night where you’re going to be drawing from a grid scale battery or hydro resivor.

On the grid front, while electrification will require expansion of capacity, it is worth remembering that this is not a unprecedented surge in growth so much as a return to the normal rate of grid expansion after decades of austerity. Even in north america, with our sprawling suburbs built on long freeway car commutes, our average EV consumes less power than our average air conditioner does over the entire year.

Admittedly optimizing for grid distribution means charging overnight though, when all the infrastructure that feed those hungry air conditioners during the day is siting around with unused capacity, so the optimal mix will depend on whether upgrading distribution infrastructure is more expensive than upgrading grid storage infrastructure and nighttime generating capacity.

Precisely, their a gas company. Helping the planet means just turning everything off and never turning it on again, so you know the only green promise they want to keep is the green in their share price.

No shit, in a fossilized economy everything emits carbon, and low co2 new steel production is still in its infancy. Nevertheless it emits far, far less carbon than running a natural gas plant for the same power, and as the article points out, can and is continually reused forever with no new carbon emissions beyond that of the enegy used to transport the material and power the arc furnace.

The startup cost in carbon just means there is a delay in between when a turbine is built, and when it is produceing zero carbon energy. Studies show that even the most steel intensive offshore turbines repay this debt in under a year, and again, this is why we need to be getting as much wind energy online as soon as possible.

If going to a smaller turbine design means that you save four months worth of startup carbon, but means a wind farm only captures two thirds as much wind energy over its three hundred month design lifespan then going with the smaller design will have effectively cost nearly a hundred months worth of output to save four. While that two thirds number is going to very by project constraints, the reduction doesn’t need to be very large to work out to a net carbon savings, even if you couldn’t recycle steel at all.

As things like available project land, projected ongoing maintenance budget, and most often capital availabllity ultimately constrain a given projects size and net generating capacity, it makes sense to go for the larger turbines that more efficiently make use of these limited resources, instead of the practically unlimited in this context supply of steel.

In short, optimizing for steel use is effectively producing kilotons of ongoing co2 emissions to save tons of co2 once.

Of course, and busses (or at least trolley buses) are and for all of the foreseeable future will continue to be the best form of mass transport for rural, near rural, towns, and suburbs. I’m just jaded by politicians who seem to think that a big bus completely equivalent to a tram or light rail, and despise thouse who take half decent tram proposals and downgrade them once more into f-ing BRT, which is at best a slightly cheaper to build worse tram, and which rarely live up to even that goal.

I mean they’re using an effectively off the shelf reactor which if outputted as promised would fatally irradiate anyone in the area, so i’m not sure the’re really set up to do much beyond separation of fools and money.

I mean they did go green. An average of ten percent growth in earnings per year over the last five years, seems like things were pretty green over there to me. I mean it’s a gas company, what other kind of green could they have been talking about?

I’m not the one who said making China’s suppply chains as transparent as the US’s would end the system of using minorities as prison labor in Xinjiang, just the one who pointed out that the implementation of said transparency here on the same problem has not lead to the end of said practice.

Precisely, good stable wind blowing when we need power is not something we have an unlimited amount of, like times we can recycle steel. The steel in todays wind turbine is the steel in a thousand years from now’s turbine, where as the co2 that got pumped into the atmosphere because that turbine wasn’t enough is also the co2 killing people in a thousand years. The higher you get a turbine above the ground, the less turbulence it will see, and the more constantly it will be in the right range to generate power.

The more you can count on it, the less battery and hydro you need to cover when the winds not blowing, and thusly the less space and turbines you need.

As for labor efficiency, i’ve always though of the goal of solarpunk to be a world where we’ve settled out into a way of life that can be maintained long term and where people are free to do what they want and help out where they can instead of worrying about if they’ll earn enough from the megacorp to have heat and food next month.

While you still need someone to do dangerous and unpleasant things like climbing turbines, ideally you’re only asking as few people as possible to do so as you need.

And given that even in that future people will still be paying the price in lives for the GHGs we emit today, we owe it to them and possibly us if we live long enough to shrink the river of co2 we’re putting out as fast as we can, as every fossil plant that is replaced by clean energy today is decades of that’s plants cost gone.

I mean the transparency available in the US still hasn’t resulted in an end the same system of minority prison labor here at home.

Ya, I agree people should be getting a fair wage, I just don’t see how a tax on products sold more directly helps with that in this case. People will just shrug, say it’s still cheaper than the same model on Amazon, and buy it all the same. A company is always going to try and pay the lowest price they can while pocketing the rest, and the best you can typically do is help the workers bargain for more.

I mean things like BDS can work, but they have to be targeted very carefully and specifically to get a board of directors to take a specific action, and the wider the net you cast the more dilute it gets and the more likely companies will call it the cost of doing busines.

US condemnation of the system would probably also have a bit stronger effect if it wasn’t using the same system of minority prison labor farmed out to various companies and saying it’s perfectly ethical fine so long as the people you arrested on thin pretext for race get a few dollars an hour that they then spend right back at the prison.

Put another way, if the EU put the same import tax on products and companies that made things in Mississippi on us because of the general prevalence of undocumented black prison labor in the region, do you think that the we would suddenly change things?

This predisposes that much more expensive one sold locally is not also the same model and manufactured in the same factory. When so much of what is sold at Amazon or Walmart originates from Alibaba or bulk orders from said factory, the only difference in the exploitation is if Bezos gets a cut on top.

Functionally, I think you’ll have a lot more luck pushing for and requiring supply chain transparency from the Amazons and Walmarts of the world, or directly using national economic and political pressure, than focusing on increasing the cost on the small market of people going direct to the source.

Admittedly though this is less true as it has become more widely known that Temu and the like have the same product selection as Amazon, and indeed that seems to be the actual reason this legislation has been proposed.

Nevertheless I can’t see the US government taking slightly more of a cut having much of an effect when most of the products which heavily involve Uyghur labor are meant for internal use or export to the third world. You would need to propose serious practical consequences for the leadership of the CCP and follow though on those consequences to force external end to a political project that’s popular domestically like this, or at least a very closely and precisely targeted BDS campaign, and not just continuing business as usual but with higher taxes.

They use steel more effectively, but use other resources like wind, land, labor, and electronics less effectively, and all of which are harder to recycle. It also didn’t mention household or village scale as much as was still comparing very large grid scale systems, which is important as once you get much smaller than that energy efficiency falls off a cliff.

Finally, while a detailed look into a specific resource can be very interesting, it’s important to take a holistic look at how energy sources compare and not just evaluate on one figure.

Ultimately, as our ability to manufacture steel is not currently a major constraint to decarbonization, more important limitations like installation and maintenance costs are going to be dominant at least for the next few decades. Similarly as the low hanging fruit like electricity generation make up less and less of our collective GHG emissions, we’ll have more resources like plentiful wind energy to throw at problems like decarbonizing steel, as its still a problem will have to solve sooner or later.

Though as per tradition, as you and the ten foot radius around you are engulfed in flame the DM would like to remind you that Fireball is often the poor spell to cast for hostage rescue, especially in tight spaces.

The bendy busses will continue to be built until morale improves.

The problem is that people are conditioned to blame the president for the current cost of gas, and that gas should always cost the same. If not, then inflation is too high, never mind that keeping the cost the same means the real cost is falling. Or that right now gas costs two cents lower than it did in 2013 pre inflation.

Amaricans would absolutely blame the current government for gas going from $3.52 a gallon to the sill subsidized to an extent EU average $7.31 a gallon. Throw in the more realistic costs of actually cleaning up said co2 with direct air carbon capture at a $100 a ton and you get $8.20 a gallon, which is actually nowhere remotely near as bad as I expected it to be, though that would require someone to actually do carbon capture at scale. Electricity of course beats the pants off of all of the above at an US average cost of about $1.90 per gallon equivalent.

You also have the inflationary effects of the US being very dependent on trucks for most goods transport, due in no small part to rail companies entering a state of ‘managed decline’ and looting said infrastructure for scrap at a time where everyone from China and India to Ethiopia and North Korea were electrifying, and thusly being stuck with trains that cost nearly twice as much to run as electric lines run by an industry of managers who think that their customers are going to replace a single train with gravel with several thousand trucks any day now so might as well sell the tracks off.

That being said, a high vehicle registration tax on gas and diesel vehicles combined with an effectively free one on new energy vehicles seems to have demonstrated more of an effect, though admittedly places that have tried that have also tended to have a far less subsidized cost of fuel in the first place so it may only have an potent effect in combination.

Functionally the US also needs an equivalent to or allow import of the French Ami and similar such cheap city cars as well as Canadian style legislation demanding that landlords must install L2 chargers if asked if it wants for cars to still be an option for poor rural people, which unfortunately given the need to cut carbon now and the demonstrated ability of US cities to take a decade and millions of dollars to put in a bus lane it probably does. City dewellers will of course just use bikes if they can get their city to stop wasting money on far more expensive to maintain per person-mile car lanes.

All in all this problem needs a lot of complex legislation to solve, but I sopose the benefit of WAITING THIRTY FUCKING YEARS AFTER IT DECIDED THAT CONTINUED EMMISIONS WERE A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO THE VERY EXSISTANCE OF THE NATION is that most of the possibilities have already been tried before so you can pick what works and skip what doesn’t.

Especially since the raw materials for grid scale storage are almost all mined in Australia, mass packaged into batteriy cells in China, then bought back. Australia could absolutely move up the value chain on these if it wanted to and the government put investment into it, but that would require the best nation in the world for solar to stop trying to subsidize fossil fuels at every opportunity.

China even gives you a clear step by step example of how to do it. Just take the billions they are trying to make contingent on nuclear and instead use it to provide a minimum order guarantee for LFP and Sodium Ion cells.

If you realy wanted to commit, you could join up with Chile and Argentina, all agree to build battery plants, then raise export tariffs on the raw stuff and become OPEC but with three quarters of the worlds battery production instead.

It is absolutely possible for the largest supplier of lithium in the world to package it into battery cells instead of just selling it raw, and all that it would take is the smallest bit of future planning and not outright bowing down to a dead end industry, which of course means that it’s never going to happen and the government will continue to prop up coal, petrol, and gas while its citizens continue to buy back actually useful energy infrastructure from China.

Note, since the 80s the vast, vast majority of piston driven aircraft engines have been able to operate on unleaded fuel. We know this because for decades GA pilots have been filling out the paperwork for an experimental fuel variance and then running these engines unmodified on the cheaper unleaded they got from the gas station down the street without any apparent issue or rise in engine maintenance/failures among pilots that do this. The main hurdles being the necessary and not insignificant paperwork as well as concern over insurance rates.

From my understanding there was a problem with one series of engine in the seventies that was suspected to be due to unleaded fuel among the more modern product line of a major manufacturer, and while the engine was modified to fix it neither Lycoming nor Continental, the two primary piston engine manufacturers who make up the vast majority of the market, saw significant pressure to drop the official recommendation for unleaded until relatively recently.

Since the US finally started to get serious about phasing out leaded avgas in the 2010s, and the aditude of its been fine so far so why risk any change has run up against said pressure, both have to my knowledge dropped the requirement retroactively with no modification necessary for the majority of their historical and current product line.

You might need to re-engine or more likely just get an exemption for flying history aircraft, but the benefit to the hundreds of thousands that live near GA airports in terms of reduced damage to children’s nervous systems far outweighs the nebulous cost of switching the default form of avgas.

What does that have to do with the drivetrain of the car? That would be due to things like better hood and road design, better enforcement of speed limits, and since you cited a stat that includes drivers as well pedestrians over forty years the move to requing roll over protection, expansion of airbag systems, more available crash modeling, and of course the near worldwide mandate that cars include seatbelts.

Most of this is either structural and thusly uneffected by a drive train conversion, or governmental.

The biggest dangers involved with a drivetrain conversion are going to be the same as any major home automotive work, namely something heavy fall or slips during work, followed by getting fingers/hair/clothing caught in moving parts, etc…

None of this is going to endanger the public, at least not to the extent that it can compete with the chance of getting distracted driving and plowing through a pedestrian or right hooking a cyclist.

Honestly the unsafe part is that they are a ton or so of metal going at speed only decimeters from civilians with only the concentration and control of your average idiot there to prevent manslaughter.

Compared to that, there is very little you can actually do to a car that will move the needle on safety, especially for anyone but its occupants.

The biggest concern in this place is the effect on collapsing the aquifer like has happened across the border in Pakistan. Overuse of water rights is difficult to enforce, but at least farmers had to trade one valuable liquid for another. By contrast with solar your only cost is upfront, and as such farmers are effectively penalized for turning off the pumps and not taking all they can to an even greater extent.

Now obviously it’s better to not be burning diesel and this was still a problem before electrifying, but it’s still seems bittersweet in this case.