Convenience über alles!

What is amazing in the debates over BEV adoption, is the sense of entitlement.

2,000 years ago, the Romans built pipes of lead and were slowly poisoned. 200 years ago, we tossed our trash anywhere we felt and suffered the disease. 100 years ago we mined resources without regard to the damage done and lived with being slowly poisoned. Now, all of those things are recognized as being harmful to our society and none are allowed. It costs us convenience and even money, but we recognize that it is important to not live in an environment of filth and waste.

Come the year 2000, we have despoiled our air with the fumes of toxic auto emissions, released enough CO2 to raise the temperature of the planet and are on our way to the blackening of the world we live in, not so different from the poisonous fogs of London. Yet, so many of us deny this reality and refuse solutions. In particular, with autos, they act as if spewing noxious emissions for our personal transportation convenience is a birthright!

There is no birthright to transportation, other than the right to walk. We have reached a point where, if we want to continue to roam the world in cages of steel and glass, we must abandon the most poisonous forms of transportation. Even with the existing regulations, fossil fuels continue to spoil our air and very importantly, release CO2, the most serious form of pollution in this century. Meanwhile, we are presented with a paradigm shift that can resolve much of the impact of our transport plight, the battery electric vehicle. Yet, so many refuse to consider it, simply because it is different, with different advantages and different liabilities.

If this were 120 years ago and we were presented with this sort of transportation, the world would jump at it and it would have swept aside all the noxious gas burning autos to become the only form of land transportation. We would have never known about smog or the disasters of oil spilling into our water ways, destroying miles of coastline environments. But mostly, we would all be enjoying the convenience of battery powered cars.

Instead, many of us think spoiling our environment is secondary to our convenience, as if we had a birthright to roaming the earth in ways that destroy the environment, our "convenience" is paramount! Convenience über alles!

Reply to
Ricky
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Not true.

The Victorians also used lead piping for drinking water and were not poisoned by doing that at all. Only the most acidic soft water off peatlands will dissolve any lead from water pipes. Most ordinary tap water has enough dissolved salts in it that the inside of the pipe furs up within the first year of use and no lead then escapes. The very name "plumber" comes from the usage of lead pipes until very recently.

The Romans were poisoned by using sugar of lead (aka lead acetate) as an artificial sweetener. Sweet things were very rare in antiquity.

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Lots of other food adulteration was going on though since antiquity with everything from brick dust to arsenic and white lead being used to bulk up or colour foodstuffs. This was at its worst in the Victorian era.

Whilst things have improved a lot in the past half century I am not sure that they will continue to do so. It is cheaper to ignore the problem.

Auto emissions are a part of the problem but aircraft and power plant emissions are also major contributors to global CO2 rise.

Mining the lithium for the batteries is a nasty business despoiling various pristine habitats with little concern for the inhabitants. Out of sight out of mind for those that want to pretend that there is no downside to electric vehicles and growth of Lithium batteries. They also end up with radioactive tailings in Peru (or uranium as a by-product).

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The main one from my point of view is severe lack of EV range even from new, an absence of decent charging points outside of major cities and of spare electricity in the UK with which to charge them. That charging hub at York still isn't open! They are claiming just a few more days now. (It is almost a year late, insanely over budget and cannot meet any of its originally claimed pricing - you cannot buy electricity today at the price that they were intending to sell it for)

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I'll let you know when/if it actually opens (and if it actually works).

You have a strange imagination. Chances are if this technology had been available back then only the very richest people would ever have had a car. Until mass production petrol cars were rich men's expensive toys.

EVs have proved difficult to mass produce economically.

The next generation can pay for it. Politicians can't ever see any further than the next election and often not even that far :(

Reply to
Martin Brown

Lifespans, nutrition, crop yields, access to education and medical care, human rights, practically anything you can name keeps getting better. Oil and gas are major contributors to human well-being.

To appreciate how bad things were, read this:

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Reply to
jlarkin

It can be be. It doesn't have to be.

They can. It is a matter of choice. The fact that uranium deposits were found nearby is a coincidence, and the choice about what to do with them is entirely independent.

Battery cars were popular early on. There weren't many of them so they were just as expensive as petrol cars.

Twaddle.

Oil and gas were major contributors to human well-being. Now that we've burnt enough of them to generate appreciable global warming, the downsides are starting to become more obvious (not that John Larkin wants to know).

<snip - reversion to the Middle Ages isn't the only choice available>
Reply to
Anthony William Sloman

Rick, your point about personal convenience reminded me of the New Scientist article, "33 reasons why we cant think clearly about climate change", and its theory of "dragons of inaction"

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behind a paywall) Basically, we all tend to be subject to cognitive fallacies, weak logic, short-term-time dominance. And (as many other articles have explained) these weaknesses are exploited by political groups and big business. We really need "inoculation" at a young age to be critical thinkers. What schooling & parenting should be... regards, rs

Reply to
Rich S

"There is no birthright to transportation, other than the right to walk."

Then again, nobody ASKED to be born into a country called the USA that was designed around the automobile and had much of its public transportation infrastructure dismantled in favor a long time ago.

For someone espousing some kind of green revolution you sure know how to give lots of people who might otherwise be interested the big f*ck you from the window of ya luxury car..

Reply to
bitrex

In favor of the personal vehicle, rather

Reply to
bitrex

Well, how about a big "f*ck you" here, instead? Is that what you think when you see someone driving a BEV, they are saying "f*ck you"? What was I saying when I drove the same pickup truck for 20 years?

I don't really have a reason to say "f*ck you" to you, personally. But I am happy to say "f*ck you" to Google, who keeps making the usenet experience worse every time they change things. Not entirely unlike Tesla fixing things in the UI which aren't broken.

Reply to
Ricky

I think there should be a birthright to a lot of things in the so-called "Greatest Country" in the world. Right to nutritious food to eat, a place to live, affordable healthcare, an education, the right to not be gunned down by some whack job while trying to get said education, the list goes on.

And if transportation is required to get any of those other things then yeah there should be a right to affordable transportation, also.

But, far from being the "Greatest Country" (more like a shithole country) people will tell you its the greatest country while meanwhile saying that as citizen of said greatest country you don't have a right to shit. Might be funny, if it weren't so sad..

"if we want to continue to roam the world in cages of steel and glass, we must abandon the most poisonous forms of transportation."

Who's "we"? If a gas-burner is what someone is currently using to approximate their right-to-transportation such that they can afford it what should they do differently. Buy a BEV they can't afford? You gonna pay for it? Elon Musk gonna pay for it?

Elon Musk doesn't give a f*ck if any particular person can get to the grocery store or not.

Reply to
bitrex

On 2022-05-31 01:05, Rich S wrote: [...] We really need "inoculation" at a young age to be

Disagree. Ideas drilled into you at a young age are uncritically accepted as beliefs. Critical thinking comes later. Weak logic and cognitive fallacies are of all ages, but advanced education helps, even if it's no panacea.

Jeroen Belleman

Reply to
Jeroen Belleman

No. The USA was "designed around" horses and mules and canoes and sailing ships and wagons. People like to move themselves and their stuff around. If anything designed our country, it was the collective personal preferences.

Bicycles, trains, steamboats, tractors, busses, cars, airplanes, and electric unicycles just followed the trend.

Here we have more public transport infrastructure than ever and are planning more. Some people do fine without cars.

There is no conspiracy to shape our transportation systems. Companies and (sometimes) governments do what people want.

Reply to
John Larkin

Sorry that you are not able to understand what I wrote. Nowhere did I say anything about prying cold, dead hands off steering wheels. I guess you have an ICE reaction like some people have when trying to discuss gun control. No one is trying to take your guns, but we want to have more controls over who can buy them.

Likewise, with BEVs, no one is going to be forced to give up any vehicles. But we can't continue to keep making the same nasty, pollution machines that we've driven for the last hundred years. So, at this time, everyone has full choices. Buy and drive what you want. In 15 or so years, some jurisdictions will, in the interest of the greater good (as is not at all uncommon), there will be restrictions on what is sold, but none on what is driven. I don't personally see a reason to restrict what is driven, other than the typical safety based restrictions. ICE will surely fade out once the number of gas stations is a small fraction of today. You can't drive what you can't fuel.

I think most of your rationale comes from the fact that we *have* been driving gas burners for over 100 years, and in spite of what the courts say about it being a "privilege", people like you seem to feel it is a "right". The only difference between guns and cars is that cars were not mentioned in the Constitution. Other countries don't have that particular legal precedent, so they are not so fundamental in their objection to restrictions on things that are already restricted.

Try driving a wood burning car. You won't get far before being pulled over and towed off the highways.

Reply to
Ricky

Absolutely, oil and gas are too valuable to be burnt in cars. Better to save them for other industrial uses. EVs are only half of the solution, but better than none.

Reply to
Ed Lee

I agree, partially, Jeroen. To me "young" is as "old" as 18 y.o. :-) Anyway, I hypothesize, we (educators in U.S., in particular) generally underestimate the age at which the brain can begin to think critically. True, you don't want the students to be disruptive, and begin challenging everything being taught. But if we (in U.S.) are treating 18 y.o. as an adult, legally, with some serious responsibilities and decisions (that affect them, me, and everyone around them) then we better prepare them accordingly. Unfortunately the source for this preparation is increasingly dependent of the public schools. regards, RS

Reply to
Rich S

I don't own any guns. But the gun control hoopla is something both factions in the US tend to get wrapped up in while ignoring the entirely more relevant point that the US has a peculiarly violent culture made up of large numbers of peculiarly violent and self-centered people, and that can't be changed in a day by legislation or the Supreme Court.

Most intelligent people can see that with estimated 400 million guns already in circulation whether there are 300 or 500 or what the number is precisely probably doesn't matter too much once you're into the nine figures.

It's just something people like to squabble about & accomplishes nothing but it feels good to squabble about after every mass shooting because it feels like _some_ kind of song and dance needs to occur instead of nothing, "mission accomplished."

If the US government cared about getting gas-burners off the roads any more than it cares about reducing the number of guns in circulation it'd offer an attractive buy-back/incentive program to encourage people to trade them in for a cleaner alternative. Hey you could bring both and get double the points towards your purchase.

But the US government whether Democrat or Republican cares about neither. Joe Biden has even been known to exclaim "When in God's name will we stand up to the gun lobby?" like he forgets who the leader of the so-called Free World is, sometimes. He probably does.

For most of US history a 2nd Amendment interpreted to mean "a personal right to bear arms" was never codified, and that the "shall not be infringed" part applied to anyone but the Federal government was not clear either, these things were only clarified by the Supreme Court very recently (and with a lot of work put in by the NRA etc. cajoling them in that direction.)

That is to say that firearms were regularly restricted and this was understood to be entirely congruent with the Constitution throughout the bulk of US history is no big deal to these "strict textualists" and you can rewrite that but that abortion was restricted for the bulk of US history is somehow a matter of great importance that has to be respected from a historical perspective. /shrug

Personally I think Supreme Court justices tend to be paid hoes, prove me wrong.

Cars are a pretty poor solution to getting large numbers of people where they need to be in general, and the electrified self-driving kind are a typically American over-complicated solution-looking-for-a-problem.

Reply to
bitrex

The roads in many areas of Boston tend to be laid out about where the carts went, there doesn't seem to be a lot of design to it though.

Trolleys and light rail used to be an integral part of urban life, now they tend to be amenities. That is to say planners tend not to build out light rail to make bad neighborhoods better, but good neighborhoods amazing; once there's a rail connection you can charge $3400 for a two-bedroom apartment in this neighborhood instead of $1800.

Urban planners wanted to build an inner beltway called 695 in Boston that would've sliced through and cut up by eminent domain a number of the kind of classy old neighborhoods hipsters like to pay a premium to live in these days, and also extend I-95 right up to the city center through the same kind of 'hoods, instead of terminating it in the 128 beltway about 20 miles south of the city center as does now.

And it would've happened if there hadn't been a massive outcry about it at the time to knock it off. The people got a compromised highway system but it was more in a bottom-up kind of screaming at government & corporate interests to stop kind of way, than any kind of top-down sense of planning for the common good.

That is to say in the US companies and governments tend do what "the people" want if you define "the people" as "the people with the most money."

Reply to
bitrex

Much of that depends on the exposure the individual is given to "alternative ideas" as well as their inherent personality; some folks don't *like* re-examining their "beliefs" (and, for those folks, this often persists through adulthood to death)

Being *in* an environment where you are exposed to alternatives goes a long way, even if that exposure isn't via "structured learning".

But, again, if your mind is closed to other possibilities, you'll find a way of dismissing even those alternatives.

Reply to
Don Y

You can encourage "free thought" without inviting outright challenges to (ahem) "dogma".

Even activities like "choosing a science fair project" require some initiative on the part of the student; what do you want to do and what do you expect to show, etc.

And, "know-better" legislators want to lay a heavy hand on WHAT they can be exposed to and, by extension, be able to "think for themselves" about.

Imagine a whole class of people terrified of certain *books* (likely because you can't SHOOT a book!) or *concepts*...

Gotta pity the poor children so constrained in their thoughts. Wonder what life will be like when they are LATER, exposed to people (in positions of power/influence) who espouse DIFFERENT "beliefs"?

Reply to
Don Y

San Francisco is a nightmare. In some neighborhoods the streers follow the contours of the hills. Some places are brutally rectangular, topography be damned. Some streets just change name for no reason, some look like dotted lines, come and go at random.

This is fun, St Mary's Park.

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It's amazing that all the houses were built on hillsides, streets with

30% grades, using horses and people to haul wood and bricks.
300 million people have the most money.
Reply to
John Larkin

Yes, it's much more important to save oil and gas so we can make the shrink wrap for all the things we buy in Costco!

Reply to
Ricky

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