• airrowOPM
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    3 months ago

    electric cars in the 70s

    actually I’ve read we’ve had them for a century: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/04/overview-of-early-electric-cars-1895-1925/

    I’ve also heard EVs were a suppressed technology with documentaries like “Who Killed The Electric Car?”

    A centrist take might be that both are just technologies, gas and EV… I think EV could become more popular but there are problems: lack of current infrastructure for EVs, they take longer to charge (range issues), seems like there would be a loss of energy transmitting to a battery and then using it versus the direct use of energy by gas vehicles when they burn it, and so on.

    Right now ebikes seem like an uncontested efficient vehicle versus gas vehicles, where they can replace a car commute

    The “skepticism” I have toward oil and gas is based on evidence so it’s not at all comparable to the conservatives’ view on green energy which is based on…fear mongering I guess?

    It’s actually surprising that you have this view… seems lacking understanding of the other side’s perspective? The conservatives would say you’re fearmongering that there’s a climate emergency that justifies needing “green tech” to solve it that’s not at all based on evidence. They would point to evidence that there have been many failed climate predictions: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/weve-had-six-years-left-to-save-the-world-for-the-past-50-years/

    pumped hydro / sand

    so is there somewhere I can buy them, or other consumers? So we can slowly begin the process of supplanting the “old tech” with the “new”?

    plant billions of trees … no profit

    I guess couldn’t you profit by selectively tearing down trees as they grow or harvesting from them as they grow (acorns or some thing that can be sold or wood?) to financially sustain such projects?

    liquid and solid pollutants

    Anything that could be done to mitigate these pollutants?

    pollution from creating the solar panels…yeah that’s gonna exist

    I think that’s probably a sticking point they’ll latch on to - “well solar pollutes too, so what’s the point?”

    Fossil fuels will never go away because we need them for other things

    Like a lot of the non-fuel uses? But could other plant-based plastics replace them?

    thx for the non-downvotes :)

    • glimse@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      The problems you described are the result of the oil/gas suppression. We’ve had no issues adding thousands of gas stations, why would it be so hard to set up EV infrastructure? It wouldn’t be - the industry just chose not to.

      As for green fear mongering, you don’t even need to look at climate change to see the benefits of green energy. Fossil fuel is dirty and creates tons and tons of pollution - not just emissions as discussed. So what’s the downside to green energy if climate scientists are wrong? Cleaner air? Oil barons losing their power over government? It’s win-win. But still, there’s decades of evidence on the harm caused by fossil fuels. The other side of the debate says that not all of the predictions have come true as if none of them have come true. I don’t think the two are really comparable at all - it’s people wanting a healthier world vs people who only care about making money.

      Pumped hydro and sand are large-scale solutions so you can’t really buy them yourself. They’re for replacing industrial energy storage, way too big for a single household. Check this link out for more info on the latter. For personal use, “traditional” batteries are used.

      We already cut down more trees than we plant. If that solution was profitable, they’d already be doing it and we wouldn’t even be discussing green energy right now

      Not much can be done about the byproducts of fossil fuel aside from burning less of it

      Saying “solar pollutes so why bother?” Is a bit asinine as it ignores the amount of pollution each causes. I don’t have the hard numbers but I’d imagine the pollution from producing enough solar panels to replace a gas power plant is significantly lower than pollution caused by one month of burning said gas.

      The non-fuel uses im referring to are things like coal for making steel and some plastics. There’s been a lot of progress in making plastic from plants but I haven’t seen anything with coal. Steel is will remain extremely important for a long time.

      • airrowOPM
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        3 months ago

        why would it be so hard to set up EV infrastrcture.

        fair, but I’d envision it being different. EV charging stations hook up to a power plant somewhere, or could to a big local battery. gas stations can be more flexible seemingly as they just can be a portable tank of gas basically.

        what’s the downside to green energy

        well have you looked up “green energy is a scam”? Here’s one article, curious about your thoughts on it: https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/green-energy-is-a-scam-it-isnt-meant

        The big problem I think is green energy isn’t efficient or as powerful of a resource at present. So it requires monetary or energy losses to make use of green energy? Are there also some unknown maintenance costs? The right seems to argue green energy is a net loss

        people wanting a healthier world vs people who only care about making money

        that sounds a little… limited in vision. the rejoinder is probably people think that the other side that’s for green energy is impractical and unprofitable. In fairness this reminds me that a lot of EVs seem poorly designed at present, in my view almost like they’re designed to make the technology fail in the public’s eye. Like say someone is a rightwing truck driver. Electric trucks are probably prohibitively expensive. So advocating for a trucker to use an unaffordable EV truck would seem harmful and impractical. This leads to dropping support for “green tech” that isn’t ready yet.

        hydro and sand are large-scale solutions so you can’t really buy them yourself

        oh… well again this becomes impractical for consumers.

        For personal use, “traditional” batteries are used

        Do you mean not green then? If true it would again sound like green tech isn’t there to be practical yet