this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
54 points (95.0% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
6377 readers
319 users here now
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.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
EVs were always a way to save the auto Industry, not a way to solve the climate crisis. Add them to the list of greenwashing grifts (carbon footprint, plastic recycling, hydrogen fuel cell cars, etc) and move on to the real solution: bike infrastructure and mass transit, with cars as an absolute last resort until they can be eliminated.
EVs solve one of the numerous problems with cars, and make some of the others much worse. People should have seen EVs as a grift the whole time, it just took the biggest grifter to blow his cover to start making it obvious.
False narrative.
Not wanting something to be true doesn't make it false. Oh where have I heard people reject inconvenient truth before?
The gist is that renewable energy can fill the gap in a more centralized manner than gas does. As the grid modernizes into solar, wind, and nuclear power backed by battery plants, driving an EV will become increasingly much less impactful to the environment than driving a gas car around.
I suspect your mind is made up, though.
Ok, what do cars travel on? What lithium do you use to make all the batteries? How do you make the all the steel you need for those wind farms and the power lines you need to get the energy from the farms? How do you store it?
I'm not going to go in to all the problems, but I don't think you've every questioned this story.
The grid is going to expand capacity and modernize whether EVs take off or not. Part of that modernization is storage of renewable energy using large battery plants. Those batteries will be primarily sodium based in the future.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_energy_storage_system
The materials used in making EVs are not a huge factor; I think that is a disingenuous argument. Gas vehicles require rare earth metals to build as well. Oil refineries, the distribution of gasoline, gas stations…the whole ICE car infrastructure has plenty of its own environmental impacts. There’s a whole area of the southern United States called “Cancer Alley”, where people living nearby experience a much higher rate of cancer cases than normal. It’s primarily due to all the refineries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Alley
There are environmental impacts to everything humans do. I’m not saying that EVs completely negate that impact, but they will reduce it significantly and lead to healthier environments for humans and animals alike.
It's not ICE or EV, it's cars or not cars. Cars are not sustainable.
🙄
I take it you don’t live in America. That’s fine, but unfortunately, mass transit isn’ta thing here except for densely populated cities. Cars will be on roads for the foreseeable future here.
No, I left because I had the opportunity to get out while there was still a chance. I grew up in the US, and I couldn't do that to my children knowing I could get out.
https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw
But if you're not able to leave the US, you can still make it better.
https://www.strongtowns.org/
The simple fact is that you have to live in a world without cars, or where cars are much more rare, because it simply isn't possible to build a sustainable society around them. This isn't even a climate thing, it's simply geometry. Cars take up space. In order to make space for cars, density has to go down. High population places with low density can't afford infrastructure because there isn't a concentrated enough tax base. Basically, most US cities are insolvent and are ticking time bombs that will collapse, like Flint and Detroit in time. As Trump increases economic pressures, American cities will become bankrupt faster.
American infrastructure is crumbling all over the place, because no one can afford to fix it. That's a car problem. Car infrastructure costs too much to maintain. That's not even taking into account climate change. The US has never built back from several of the climate disasters that have destroyed critical infrastructure, and these will continue to accelerate.
The US was built around trains, horses, streetcars, and bikes. It's only within the last 100 years that it's been completely redesigned around cars. That experiment has been a complete failure, and it was only possible to try because of cheap fossil fuels. That's gone... and I'm only talking about one of the many headwinds.
So you do have to live without cars. That's not actually a question. The question is if you will do that on your terms or by the force of complete economic collapse.
I left behind all my friends, a high paying job, a big house with a garden we'd been working on for years, and everything else I lost and sold, to get out because I don't believe people like you will be able to accept these facts. Oh, and before you say something about me never living outside of a city, I spent the majority of my first 20 years living in places like Gates, OR and Cobb, CA. You can google those if you care to.