Ta squirrelking

Reuse means to use the object as you find it, like the water bottle in his example. Recycling is what you do when you can no longer reuse something, you break it down and turn it into something else. They are very much not the same thing.

yeah this is Blue Peter level stuff really. It’s a massively important distinction. Recycling is better than throwing something into landfill but it’s not the goal.

Really interesting thread. The bit that particularly resonates with me is about reducing the overall amount of miles that are travelled by car. It’s all of the short journeys in built up areas that really frustrate me in particular. But I understand why it happens.. people want convenience and the incremental cost of that 1 or 2 mile round trip is so small in comparison to the total cost of car ownership it might as well be zero. This incremental cost is even smaller for EVs where with the right electricity tariff you can get down to almost 1ppm for fuel. I’m currently on a tariff not well suited to charging our EV but it’s still only about 3.5ppm. There is absolutely no way on earth people’s behaviour will change until it is hitting them in the pocket big time.. Even though the environmental cost now and for future generations is so blatant.

The behaviour is shocking really when you take a step back. We live in a small town on the outskirts of Newcastle with a lovely high street full of shops, restaurants, pubs, etc. but every single time I walk down there it is littered and I mean LITTERED with cars just dumped wherever the **** people want.. bus stops.. zig zags for crossings.. you name it, if it’s a car sized piece of tarmac (not even always tarmac actually) it will have a car on it. If I walk to the high street I might see 10 people walking but I’ll easily see 300 cars.. obviously some will be travelling further but I’d bet a good deal of them of just driving to the high street and dumping their cars in the places I mentioned up there ^^^.

I absolutely despair, I really do.. There’s a chap round the corner from me puts his dog in the boot of his car and drives less than 1km in a 4 litre V8 motor to the entrance to the woods.. madness. I’d say 75% + of other families we know drive SUVs “because of the kids”. The guy round the corner who goes up and down our road about 10 times a day trying to extract maximum pops and bangs from his Golf GTi just for the craic. I could go on but it’s depressing.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this other than venting (which I’m finding useful) but I just don’t know where we go from here re. personal transport or how we improve things. It really gets me down and I’m by no means an eco-warrior.. I’ve moved from a thirsty petrol engined car to and EV and have significantly reduced the amount of miles I do but it’s baby steps and the majority of people don’t give a single solitary ****.

It’s all of the short journeys in built up areas that really frustrate me in particular

It is frustrating because it’s unnecessary, and is just a symptom of people’s laziness, and I fully agree..

BUT

it doesn’t actually use up that much fuel, even though it’s less efficient, because the distances are small. My wife has to do the school run (don’t ask) by car, for now, and she very infrequently fills up. When I was driving for work I got through much more fuel. And I’d guess that’d be dwarfed by the transport emissions derived from buying tat from China and flying fresh Asparagus in from Chile and so on.

I’m surprised no-one has mentioned the actual reason that so many new cars are hybrids – the latest European Fleet Emissions standards mean it will be practically impossible to sell a petrol-only car.

You could argue that this is government-driven greenwash that largely benefits automotive manufacturers and their supply chains (including a complete dependence on rare-earth minerals), but then people might accuse you of being a planet-killing conspiracy theorist.

Also – just to stick my oar into the ongoing debate – the unsustainble part of car ownership is the idea that every person can own a large motorized metal box that can take them perfectly clean and dry to any destination they wish, and not the fuel used to propel that box.

In all of this debate, it should be remembered that “CO2” is a proxy for “energy”. Yes, CO2 is also a greenhouse gas, but IMHO we should largely be focussing on the enormous scale of personal energy usage. The amount of energy required to construct, operate, and maintain “green” energy sources (unless you include Nuclear), and then construct battery-powered EVs to take advantage of that “greenness”, is considerable. The cost of an energy source is proportional to the energy required to construct it, so wind power is not free or cheap because the wind blows. This is the idea of “Energy returned on energy invested”, or EROEI.

You could argue that this is government-driven greenwash that largely benefits automotive manufacturers and their supply chains

In the short term it does, and I’m sure the EU are well aware of this. But there is a long term aspect to this as well, isn’t there?

Although the EU and the UK are only nudging behaviours at a small scale. As I’ve been saying all along, any really serious effort to reduce travel emissions would include a big incentive for companies to have their staff home-work. And we’ve seen during the pandemic how much of an economic restructure that would require.

To be honest I don’t think any one of us is wrong, we are all coming to this from different directions but I don’t thing many or indeed any of the overall arguments are factually incorrect.

@twrch you have probably summed up the modal shift argument that @tjagain was advocating whilst touching upon the greater sustainability argument. Fact is no one thing is a solution here and we require a raft of diverse measures to come up with a sustainable solution.

Sustainabikity in this context being resource, environmentally and economically based.

Fact is no one thing is a solution here and we require a raft of diverse measures to come up with a sustainable solution.

@squirrelking I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s how we end up nibbling at the edges of the problem (like mandated hybrid cars) without really getting into the meat of it (a complete change in the way the National Grid produces, stores, and supplies energy). IMHO, there are two solutions:

1. A radical (order of magnitude) reduction in personal energy usage, including all of the hidden energy cost in manufacturing everything we own (to give an idea, a laptop takes about 1,700kWh to manufacture, which is about what an EV would use to travel 5000 miles). Cars as personal transport do not fit into this solution, not even electric ones. A lithium battery pack takes approx. 400kWh of energy to manufacture per 1kWh of final battery capacity, so an 85kWh pack (as found in a Tesla S) takes 34,000 kWh to manufacture. In my opinion, the total energy efficiency of EVs is marginal at best.

2. Nuclear power.

The simple fact is that fossil fuels provide an enormous amount of energy quite cheaply, and energy economics based entirely on renewables like wind and solar would result in energy costs rising significantly. Transportation is also only about a third of the UK’s energy usage (ignoring imported goods), so you’d also need to cover things like heating.

Just one more comment – the only way we call EVs or hybrid cars at all environmentally friendly is that we let dirty coal-burning countries do all the manufacturing, and pretend that our 25% wind/solar mix in the UK grid makes everything ok. Yes, I am a cynic.

So what’s your solution then? Clear the countryside, move everyone into conurbations and have efficient mass transit as the only means of travel?

That’s clearly impractical so we still need personal transport. How we provide motive power for that transport is not a one size fits all solution so we need a diverse energy mix for a) practical and b) sustainability reasons.

But yes, we need to radically change, tinkering with how we do business as usual isn’t a solution.

So what’s your solution then?

Funny you should ask that, on a cycling forum! 😉

Personally, I think that the only realistic way to maintain anything like our current lifestyle without using fossil fuels is nuclear. That way, we also wouldn’t need to faff about with the fluctuations of wind/solar and grid storage, etc.

Reduction in energy usage also can’t hurt. If we all re-jigged our lives a bit so that cycling most places was viable, turned down the thermostat a degree or three, and stopped buying new electronics every year or two, that would save an enormous amount of energy.

Just for fun – here’s a back of the envelope calculation. If you stopped driving 5000 miles a year and instead cycled 2500 miles, that’s 1700kWh saved. I already gave the embodied energy of a laptop as 1700kWh. I’ll just guesstimate some other typical electronics – if a mobile phone is half a laptop, a TV is 3 times a laptop, Apple Watch / Garmin is 1/4 a laptop, and cable box / hifi / everything else is another laptop, and we assume that people typically swap them out every 2 years, that’s (1700 + (1/2 * 1700) + 3*1700 * (1/4 * 1700) + 1700) / 2 = 5000 kWh per year. Turning your heating down 2degC is another 3000kWh, so we’ll call that 1000kWh per person. So, those behaviours save about 7500kWh per year per person. According to the internet, the average person in the UK uses about 33000 kWh per person per year, although I’m not sure if that includes the energy used to manufacture imported products. In any case – quite a significant impact, in relation to the average UK usage.

Clear the countryside, move everyone into conurbations and have efficient mass transit as the only means of travel?

Why do we need to all be in cities? Clearly many of us don’t.

What we have seen in the pandemic is only a small part of what’s possible, with regards redistributing where we do our work.

Carbon tax based economy. All taxation is based around the CO2 production.

Why do we need to all be in cities? Clearly many of us don’t.

Which was my entire point 😉

Yes it would make things more efficient but its totally impractical.

Carbon tax based economy. All taxation is based around the CO2 production.

Why not resource based? CO2 production isn’t the be all and end all especially if its still supporting an unsustainable lifestyle.

Which was my entire point 😉

Yes it would make things more efficient but its totally impractical.

You appear to be saying both that we don’t all need to be in cities, but it’s impractical if we’re not – that seems contradictory.

Anyway – make it practical. It needs to be done.

Why not resource based? CO2 production isn’t the be all and end all especially if its still supporting an unsustainable lifestyle.

Resource based is more complex and co2 is a decent indicator of resource use. Make it pollutter pays tho and make all taxation based around the amount of pollution created. could be em beded energy as well.

CO2 based taxation has the beauty of simplicity

Carbon tax based economy. All taxation is based around the CO2 production.

In theory, all things being equal, things that take more energy to manufacture will cost more. It’s very skewed in practice by international trade, and government incentives. Using the numbers I gave above, there’s a lot of incentives to buy an electric car, when they require a lot more energy to manufacture.

You appear to be saying both that we don’t all need to be in cities, but it’s impractical if we’re not – that seems contradictory.

First bit is right but the second is the wrong way round. It would be utterly impractical for everyone to live in the same area.

Resource based is more complex and co2 is a decent indicator of resource use. Make it pollutter pays tho and make all taxation based around the amount of pollution created. could be em beded energy as well.

Embedded energy starts getting tricky though and doesnt take other pollution or environmental factors into account. It doesn’t factor the use of finite resources either.

As said, there is no silver bullet, you can pick the same holes in resource based as it doesn’t factor how those resources are extracted.

CO2 based taxation has the beauty of simplicity

I think we’re in the shit now because politicians have promised us simple solutions to complex problems…So; rich people get to continue a polluting lifestyle filled with convenience and luxury, international flying and so on, and poor people don’t, brilliantly simple…

But these rich people pay multiple times the taxation which then creates surplus which can be used to mitigate issues

But these rich people pay multiple times the taxation

This is supposed to already happen…(the wealthy paying more tax) Given that there always seems to be a way around paying your taxes, aren’t you just creating a market for “greenwashing”? ie giving the rich another incentive to avoid taxation.

But these rich people pay multiple times the taxation which then creates surplus which can be used to mitigate issues

Surely the solution isn’t to have the issues in the first place? If you’re mitigating it’s already too late. We already pay tax on tailpipe emissions in this way and I don’t see much progress in that respect.

Plus, as pointed out, a regressive tax impacts the poor more than the rich and the actual rich can fiddle things so as not to pay tax.

There is no simple solution to such complex problems.

TJ, if you’re ever bored in retirement I’d thoroughly recommend the OU T213 and T313 courses, they go through all this in great detail, otherwise look for their textbooks Energy Systems and Sustainability (there is a new edition due out in January) and Renewable Energy. I have the old versions which are rather dated in terms of technological content but still convey the same overall info, once my new ones come in I’d be happy to fling them to you. They are drawn from Without the Hot Air quite heavily IIRC.

Surely the solution isn’t to have the issues in the first place?

There will always be issues. 7bn humans will always have a massive impact on the planet. So we will always need mitigation.

Squirrel. I meant .mitigating the issues from taxation changes

You can’t fiddle taxes on consumption

There will always be issues. 7bn humans will always have a massive impact on the planet. So we will always need mitigation.

Yeah I’m not even sure why I wrote that, looking back it doesn’t make sense. You’re right.

Squirrel. I meant .mitigating the issues from taxation changes

Ah okay.

You can’t fiddle taxes on consumption

Sure you can, BIK, C2W, business expenses, the list goes on. Hell, I can buy TVs, computers and other crap tax/NI free through work as a deductible if I wanted to. There’s always a way to fiddle the system..

There is no simple solution to such complex problems.

A wealth tax. The problem with that is that any country that adopts one suffer capital flight. And there’s unlikely ever to be a world wide concensus on adopting one.

On the dual powertrain thing, what’s wrong with an engine coupled to a generator separate to the drivetrain like you see in trains?

Mazda are possibly going down this route, using a single rotor Wankel engine set horizontally into the floor of the car, specifically to generate a constant supply of electricity for the main battery and electric motors.

Squirrel – only if you leave loopholes. if you don’t? simply make the tax on everything based around resources / co2/ embedded energy and remove all those loopholes. You cannot for example do the Starbucks thing of exporting the profits – because thats not what you are taxed on. starbucks are taxed on their energy useage. No tax avoidance possible

you cannot hide energy consumption!

There was an article a while back (Can’t remember where unfortunately, think it was on LinkedIn) that suggested that synthetic fuels that is made from CO2 is likely to be the future, beyond electric vehicles. These synthetic hydrocarbons are carbon neutral and would work with existing ICE technologies, and would not be harmful to the environment as harmful compounds such as benzene can be removed completely.

The problem with electric is that a lot of rare earth elements are required for batteries, and with current technology, there is no where near enough resources of these elements on earth to make every vehicle on the road electric, unless battery cell/motor technology dramatically improves in terms of the materials used in their production.

As for hybrids, I don’t see the point. Having two engines is inefficient in terms of embedded CO2 in the production process and means a hybrid is on par with petrol/diesel over the lifetime of the car.

These synthetic hydrocarbons are carbon neutral and would work with existing ICE technologies, and would not be harmful to the environment as harmful compounds such as benzene can be removed completely.

low carbon maybe but cewrtainly not zero carbon
1) the plant to make them would have embedded energy
2) there are always loses converting energy from one form to another
3) if used in an ICE you will get pollutants like oxides of nitrogen

TJ, you do realise that EVERYTHING has embedded carbon don’t you? And that can be offset.

Yes, we need to be carbon negative but not forever, the world can take an amount of carbon release though obviously less is better.

And yes, nitrogen oxides are a problem but only where they cannot be easily dispersed or eliminated. That’s why you take a range of measures so the impact of one doesn’t overwhelm the system. As I keep saying you need a diverse range of solutions, in this case these fuels seem ideal for heavy haulage.

Of course i do

Just pointing out that synthetic fuels are not carbon neutral or pollutant free

Surely their neutrality is dependent on how they are produced? If its fossil fuel power then no, not carbon free but other forms of power are available.

None of which are carbon free

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As for hybrids, I don’t see the point. Having two engines is inefficient in terms of embedded CO2 in the production process and means a hybrid is on par with petrol/diesel over the lifetime of the car.

Various studies have said that’s not the case, and particularly so for PHEVs, but that’s not the point I want to make which is that hybrids are not only about CO2, but also local air quality i.e. less brake dust, NOX, diesel particulates etc in city centres.

The only hybrid that makes any sense is an eBike 😉

None of which are carbon free

You are aware of what offsetting is no?

You’re literally arguing with someone who has studied this in the past and is now specialising in it for their degree. I’ve given you the resources so go read them. Stop arguing semantics.

Which is why I am listening and indeed learning

If you can count offsetting the carbon cost of synthetic fuels why not the same for fossil fuels

The only hybrid that makes any sense is an eBike

Yeah those don’t seem to matter where the batteries come from.