[masraum]

Originally Posted by Shaun @ Tru6

That's ridiculous of course. It's just building infrastructure. In fact CHina has 1.419 million public EV charging stations. Let me say that again. China has 1,419,000 (that's million) public charging stations, NOW. Not 10 years from now. They have them now. Now.

By the way there are varying numbers on this. Some sources say 2.2 million. So whatever. Yeah, building out an EV charging infrastructure is WAAAAAAAYYYYYY to hard and will take decades.

China does what China wants the population be damned. Chinese govt also lies. China builds stuff that's not safe. China builds stuff that sometimes doesn't work or will never be used. I'm not sure China is a good comparison.

First, he wants to change human behavior. That's pretty easy. I mean when 100s of thousands of people were dying from a virus everyone, and I mean everyone, to the last man, put on a mask and proudly wore it to protect his fellow citizen.

So yes, modifying human behavior, especially of humans who don't believe in climate change, is CAKE.

Were you here for Covid. There were people that refused to wear masks, and there was a lot of complaining about masks and other mandates. Hell, it wasn't just the general public. THere were a lot of folks on this board that thought it was BS and a bad move.

But then, you've modified your behavior but you live in an infrastructure designed around moving around by car, at least here in the U.S. More on that later. So now it's easier to change how people live and where they live and how they move around. OK, moving on.

It is a little ironic that he uses an apartment complex in Europe to show all these cars there that people need to use to go to work and such but dollars to donuts, he was filming at 2PM on a Tuesday when everyone was at work. Why? Because the majority of people in cities in Europe use their EXCELLENT MASS TRANSIT SYSTEMS to go to work. Americans drive 14000 miles a year. Europeans drive 7000. Why the difference? Do Europeans only drive to work accounting for that 7000 and then never touch their cars at night or on weekends? Of course that's the answer.

So that bring us to:
Americans: 14K
Europeans: 7K
Japan: 3.8K
India: 7.5K
China: 7K

So yes, we drive more that anyone in the world and we should change our behavior but we DON'T HAVE EXCELLENT MASS TRANSIT SYSTEMS so we don't use them to go to work. So we can either build an EV infrastructure of charging stations or create a whole new mass transit system in every city above 100K. That's easy and cheap, right? I mean compared to installing charging stations. Cake.

Comparing the US and EU is not the best comparison since the US is more than double the size of the EU with a lower population. That means that the EU has a much greater population density (more folks in a smaller area). Accomplishing the same sort of mass transit in the US would be a different undertaking to what exists in the EU.

The United States (9,826,630 km2 / 3,794,080 sq mi) is larger than the European Union (4,233,262 km2 / 1,634,472 sq mi). The US has a population of 328 million people, while the European Union has 447 million people (2020).

And why the **** does he even go into how much time it takes to charge your car when you charge it at home and at work. Just so he can tee up how hard it will be create charging stations at apartment complexes. What a waste of time. And you get to install some solar on the tops of buildings to help. Every little bit helps.

What's most annoying about him is his position that because no magic silver bullet solution has fallen from the sky, we just say **** it and keep going full steam ahead with no thought to the future or the very nature of progress is incrementalism which, wait for it, sometimes creates magic bullets either through happy accidents or through the continuous process of scientific achievement. His absolutely moronic 1930 hp to 2018 hp illustration should have told anyone watching this that he's just getting you to click so he can get another surf shark payment. The complexity of that comparison is way beyond the scope of this discussion taking government regulations in terms of gas mileage into account more than anything.

And then we get to power plants and mining for lithium. It's been only a decade since we've taken renewable energy seriously. There is tremendous room for growth. Yes, coal sucks. And Chinese and Indian coal sucks more. But it's easier to clean coal plants than millions of cars. Wind and solar are just getting going. And again, there's money to be made in scientific advancement in these areas so it's not like anyone said, hey, let's put windmills up and we're done, let's go get a beer. Why aren't we building out nuclear. that's your question.

On lithium mining, that's a problem. And there isn't as much as we would like in the Earth. Quick googling shows sodium isn't as energy dense but it works. And we've got a decent amount of salt on the planet. But that's not even the point. The point is Li-ion batteries aren't the end solution. They are a stepping stone. They will be used for years to come but I'm pretty sure within 5 years from now the flat-earthers will have another battery to ***** about.

The net net is he glued all kinds of random thoughts together to get to a 5 second money shot that most of the world is already doing. And of course he doesn't say how you can effect change. Maybe send Greta a Christmas card or something.

I don't actually think his position was "EV is junk and should never happen." I watched the full video months ago when it was first posted here. I only watched a couple/few mins. At least in the beginning, it seems to me that he was addressing the people that comment that we should stop all development on ICE and go with EV. I believe his point is that we are not ready to shutdown all ICE production, fueling, etc... and switch to EV either today or in the near term. EV is still in its infancy and before we can/should stop all development of ICE, we need to wait for EV to be more mature.