Comment box Scope: summary, information, analysis, opinions Tone: a veil of neutrality, behind which lies propaganda from "Big Walk," "Big Breathe," and other lobbyists for human health Opinion:...
Exemplary
Comment box
Scope: summary, information, analysis, opinions
Tone: a veil of neutrality, behind which lies propaganda from "Big Walk," "Big Breathe," and other lobbyists for human health
Opinion: several mixed in with information
Sarcasm/humor: some dry remarks
The US state of California represents an outsized portion of the American population and economic activity. It is the most populous state by about 9 million.
While cities in California historically had extremely robust streetcar networks (public transportation), most of them like Los Angeles tore up most of those tracks in the 20th century and have since been dealing with externalities of the overuse of automobiles in every part of the state. The infrastructure from having so many cars is environmentally destructive by itself. Just as importantly, most of those cars emit toxic, polluting chemicals into the air that simultaneously give your children asthma and lung cancer, and contribute to the greenhouse gas effect, causing global warming and climate change. This has negative economic consequences for everyone in the entire world.
Reducing car dependency and overall automobile use is important to making the world cleaner and nicer to live in, but a big part of the problem can be solved by regulating the toxic chemicals emitted by car engines.
Since the Environmental Protection Agency was founded in 1970, it has regulated emissions of toxic pollutants for health and climate protection reasons. However, as a federal agency, the EPA is not always an aggressive regulator; some presidential administrations do not care about public health or the environment and choose to limit the additional regulations the agency produces.
For decades, California has requested waivers from the federal government to enact stricter emissions regulations than the EPA (CA is the only state allowed to do this proactively). For decades, the federal government has agreed to this. In fact, a number of states are constitutionally tied to California's extra-strict emissions regulations ("Section 177" states), rather than the EPA's not-strict-enough regulations, which is a funny way around the limitation. When the California Air Resources Board (CARB) enacts a new rule limiting the toxic pollutants that automobiles are allowed to emit, manufacturers across the nation have to agree to the new standards. California plus all those other states are huge markets: they represent about 187 million people, or ~56% of the US population.
Some politicians who want your children to get lung cancer recently appealed to the Supreme Court to stop California from enacting these health regulations. Thankfully, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case and upheld California's ability to regulate emissions more strictly than the EPA.
Today (Wednesday), the EPA just granted California two new waivers to ban the sale of all gasoline-powered cars by the year 2035. This is possible only because the Clean Air Act allows California to set its own stricter emissions standards, and because the Supreme Court upheld the state's ability to do this.
The Biden administration on Wednesday approved California’s trailblazing rules that would set stricter-than-federal emissions standards, in a bid to ban gas car sales by 2035.
In doing so, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted two requests from the California Air Resources Board for waivers that would allow for the implementation of two rules: the Advanced Clean Cars II regulations for light-duty vehicles and a low-nitrogen oxide regulation for heavy-duty highway and off-road vehicles and engines.
Nonetheless, the Advanced Clean Cars II rule as approved on Wednesday will allow California to require that 35 percent of cars sold in the state in 2026 to be zero-emissions, 68 percent in 2030 and 100 percent in 2035.
The nitrogen oxide rule, also known as the “Omnibus regulation,” will cut heavy-duty nitrogen oxide emissions by 90 percent, revamp engine testing procedures and further extend engine warranties.
The goal of these regulations is to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles. All electric vehicles on the market have lower lifetime emissions than all gas-powered vehicles, including manufacturing and end-of-life pollution. Electric-powered vehicles do not produce emissions themselves since they use electric motors with no exhaust. Even if a portion (<100%) of that electricity is generated using fossil fuels, it is necessarily cleaner than if it were 100% fossil fuels!
The incoming Trump administration has promised to stop the transition to EVs by any means necessary. However, I doubt they will actually revoke any such waivers once granted:
The Trump administration managed to revoke a waiver in 2019 that it had granted to the EPA in 2013, but this was restored in 2022 because the revocation was completely meritless.
Even if they dislike regulation, automobile manufacturers hate it when legislation flip-flops between administrations and have gone on record multiple times stating their preference to stick with existing plans to decarbonize the transportation sector. Auto manufacturers have already invested billions into electric vehicles, and the nation has constructed hundreds of thousands of EV charging ports nationwide (the network is growing at an astonishing rate of ~20% per year). In fact, Gavin Newsom announced that California had negotiated privately with automakers so that they would voluntarily follow CA's emissions regulations, even if the EPA rescinds them.
Elon Musk (future official or maybe unofficial cabinet member) literally owns an electric car company whose biggest market is California. He benefits a lot from CA's clean air laws and will definitely lobby the president not to rescind these waivers. Even if the waivers are rescinded, it is likely that manufacturers will voluntarily adopt many of the emissions standards in them, expecting that future administrations will re-enact the waivers.
Legally, the Clean Air Act doesn't specify any way to rescind waivers to California. The EPA believes that "it may only reconsider a previously granted waiver to address a clerical or factual error or mistake, or where information shows that factual circumstances or conditions related to the waiver criteria evaluated when the waiver was granted have changed so significantly that the propriety of the waiver grant is called into doubt." As far as the EPA is concerned, if the president wants to revoke a valid waiver, he should convince Congress to write a new law.
The oil industry is suing the Biden administration for allowing California to make the air safer to breathe. To be clear, oil executives literally want to give your children lung cancer. Every day, oil executives wake up, rub their hands together gleefully (imagine a fly rubbing its hands together: they actually learned this behavior from fly populations), and mutter to themselves, "I am so excited to make money off of innocent children choking to death on diesel exhaust." Then they go to board meetings and scheme to influence the government to rescind safety regulations, and also scheme to convince you via marketing that you should vote in ways that allow your children to get lung cancer "for the greater good." If the oil executives get their way, they would completely remove all health regulations in the industry so that, eventually, EVERYONE gets lung cancer. This is because oil executives believe that causing people to die prematurely is good for society.
Personally, I disagree with oil executives. I think it is better for people to live long, healthy lives. I do not want your children to get asthma or lung cancer. Therefore, I believe that California's clean air regulations are completely reasonable. These regulations will save money for the country in healthcare and climate costs immediately. I support the transition from diesel and gasoline-powered vehicles to electric vehicles. Personally I would rather see fewer vehicles and machines altogether too, but that is a different topic.
Can we... not do this? Nobody is saying that. Nobody thinks that. It's clear that they're prioritizing profits over health, but that is very different from thinking health is actively bad. This...
Exemplary
To be clear, oil executives literally want to give your children lung cancer. Every day, oil executives wake up, rub their hands together gleefully (imagine a fly rubbing its hands together: they actually learned this behavior from fly populations), and mutter to themselves, "I am so excited to make money off of innocent children choking to death on diesel exhaust."
Can we... not do this?
Nobody is saying that. Nobody thinks that. It's clear that they're prioritizing profits over health, but that is very different from thinking health is actively bad. This sort of absurd exaggeration helps nobody and makes many people less willing to listen to what you say.
Fastest way to completely undermine your argument and one of the biggest signs, in my eyes, that someone doesn't actually understand how to convince or communicate issues in a productive way and...
Fastest way to completely undermine your argument and one of the biggest signs, in my eyes, that someone doesn't actually understand how to convince or communicate issues in a productive way and instead just wants to rant about them.
If you want to vent, fine. If you actually want to achieve stopping what you obviously see as extreme evil, then find a better way to message because shit like this not only won't work, but will actively harm your cause.
Comment box Scope: comment response Tone: maybe this reads as defensive, but it's not that deep Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none That's a fine opinion, but most of the activism I do is in the real...
Comment box
Scope: comment response
Tone: maybe this reads as defensive, but it's not that deep
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
If you want to vent, fine. If you actually want to achieve stopping what you obviously see as extreme evil, then find a better way to message because shit like this not only won't work, but will actively harm your cause.
That's a fine opinion, but most of the activism I do is in the real world and has pretty much the exact opposite tone, so I give myself leeway to vent on the internet as I see fit.
I work with nonprofits to:
Reduce car dependency
Improve access to transit, walking, and cycling
Promote transit-oriented development patterns on a local level
Lobby municipal governments to adopt environmentally beneficial and pro-health regulation
etc
The tone we employ in community outreach for that kind of thing is unlike the material you may see on the internet. In general it is more positive (less negative), constructive, and focused on listening more than preaching. Typically it is also grounded in specific actions rather than theoretical ideas, and the examples we might use while canvassing tend to be things that are "close to home."
Respectfully you do not have to lecture me about tone or "damage done," especially on a website whose entire audience is people who already agree with climate regulation! When I read Eichmann in Jerusalem it changed some of my opinions about the "banality of evil." In my opinion if someone is more concerned with the way I have uncharitably but nonviolently expressed my distaste for the oil industry's harmful actions than the harmful actions themselves, they are missing the point.
It seems to me that activism on Tildes is unlikely to achieve any significant effect. (Tildes is not that popular.) If making extreme statements is bad, it’s because it annoys other people on...
It seems to me that activism on Tildes is unlikely to achieve any significant effect. (Tildes is not that popular.) If making extreme statements is bad, it’s because it annoys other people on Tildes, and we should write for the people who are here. That’s a good enough reason to avoid it and there are no higher stakes.
Activism on any given social media will not have any real effect. It may have some short-term effect temporarily like changing some wording or other banal thing, but real activism happens in the...
Activism on any given social media will not have any real effect. It may have some short-term effect temporarily like changing some wording or other banal thing, but real activism happens in the real world. It turns out that it’s really hard to motivate people to do things if you’re not in the room with them.
Comment box Scope: comment response, personal perspective Tone: neutral Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none I think this is mostly true, but the nonprofits I work with always use social media heavily...
Exemplary
Comment box
Scope: comment response, personal perspective
Tone: neutral
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
I think this is mostly true, but the nonprofits I work with always use social media heavily in order to encourage real-world/physical action. They spend a lot of time and energy on crafting good Instagram posts, newsletters, op-eds, etc. Each of those have a different tone because they have a different audience, but they all support the mission.
It is worth emphasizing that non every person on the internet/social media is the same, and not every platform is the same. Most people do not care about most problems, including big problems. However, there are some people who are "super-spreaders" of information, in a good or bad way, or are "super-affectors" of the world. For example, a website full of the following people:
Career activists
Academics and professionals
Students and other volunteer bases
Charitable donors
If an activist makes a statement on such a website, that is like going to a conference. It has a different, greater, and more meaningful second-order impact because everyone listening is more likely than average to reiterate it, or the part of it they like, in some way. Since this is a second-order effect, the original message is necessarily translated through the initial audience and molded to their preferences when it is reiterated, but the original message can still come through in some capacity.
I happen to think that Tildes is full of a mild variety of "super-affector," though mostly academics/professionals (and some donors) and only a handful of career activists. Demographically this is evident by the fact that most people here are more educated than average, wealthier than average, whiter than average, more secular than average, and otherwise have qualities that correlate with political agency and influence. I also suspect, though I have no proof, that a couple popular-ish YouTubers who make environmental content are either secretly on this website, or are one (close) degree of separation from it. I can think of various other platforms where this is true.
Believe it or not I usually try not to be excessively antagonistic on here, because I am through my real-world advocacy intimately familiar with the proclivities of the white professional class in America (claiming progressivism while often enabling structural inaction), and I know that people here don't respond very well to emotional arguments. This thread is an example of that. People on this website mostly do not believe that emotion/lived experience is an equally or more valid rhetoric than logic/reason/perfectly cool and collected argumentation with well-formatted citations, including in humor (and, ironically, are mostly unwilling to accept that this is subjective). That's an epistemology consistent with this site's demographics - the same thing comes through when we analyze political coalitions.
On the note of response (or lack thereof) to emotional arguments, I think that much of it has to do with burnout. In the past decade and change, social media has vastly increased overall awareness...
On the note of response (or lack thereof) to emotional arguments, I think that much of it has to do with burnout.
In the past decade and change, social media has vastly increased overall awareness of many woes. This is great in some ways, but it’s also been a bit of a double-edged sword. With advocates for more issues than can possibly be counted all vying for time in the spotlight, appeals to emotion (which have proven by far to be the most effective method) have spiraled out of control, resulting in a situation in which even mildly conscientious individuals find themselves overwhelmed. There’s simply too many woes in the world to be highly emotionally engaged with all of them.
And yet, emotionally charged messages continue to intensify and multiply in number on social media. This has understandably led to mass burnout.
So with that in mind, it would make perfect sense that the type of individual that might seek out a site like Tildes would be cognizant of that burnout, to have sought out alternatives because of it, and to have developed a kneejerk reaction to impassioned arguments even for issues where those are more than called for.
Of course, there’s a certain level of privilege that even having the option to try to opt out of emotional exhaustion requires that must be acknowledged, but that doesn’t mean that people in such a situation won’t try to seek relief anyway… that’s only natural.
My first moment of recognizing the ramping up of the emotional arms race was exactly a decade ago, during 2014’s charitable giving sweeps month. It seemed that every TV was displaying even more...
My first moment of recognizing the ramping up of the emotional arms race was exactly a decade ago, during 2014’s charitable giving sweeps week month. It seemed that every TV was displaying even more starving puppies and sad children than usual for December. Perhaps I would have remained ignorant of the pattern for longer for longer if I were not in a long-distance relationship with my ex during that time, thus spending more time in hotel lobbies, bars, and other places with TV news channels on.
I was not the only person who noticed the uptick. The analysis consensus settled on a narrative that blamed that summer’s ice bucket challenge. People dunking ice water on their head and being inspired to donate to ALS research blew their annual charitable giving budget by the end of July. Come the end of the year, multiple charities were well short of their fundraising goals to fund their 2015 operations, thus the escalated emotional begging. As it turns out, the public views charity as charity and viral donation drives redirect the money that’s typically donated to the “usual” causes at the end of the year when it’s time to do the right thing and cut them a check.
Just wanted to add that I greatly appreciate your comments, and they're a breath of fresh air. If I remember correctly, you're a minister, or something similar? I've had a lot of bad experiences...
Just wanted to add that I greatly appreciate your comments, and they're a breath of fresh air. If I remember correctly, you're a minister, or something similar? I've had a lot of bad experiences with religion growing up, but I've met some people that seemed similarly "educated" about it (for lack of a better word), and I've always respected them and their viewpoints, especially when they actually get out there and try to help people and generally act in a Christ-like manner.
I think what you said about the white professional class demographic is spot on, though. Despite being one myself now, I've found myself unable to articulate just what it is beyond being generally unempathetic, so thank you. Tildes can get a little homogenous and frustrating because of the dominance of the white professional worldview, and it's been making me less likely to use the site in general. It's great to have someone with a different perspective, but who can also talk on that level.
Comment box Scope: comment response, personal perspective Tone: neutral Opinion: none Sarcasm/humor: none Well, I'm glad that you've gained something from my comments! I'm not a minister but I am...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, personal perspective
Tone: neutral
Opinion: none
Sarcasm/humor: none
Well, I'm glad that you've gained something from my comments!
I'm not a minister but I am sincerely religious. I go to church every week and if I'm making a decision without a clear answer, I will pray for guidance from God. That might be a surprise to people on this website because I spend all my time citing research articles and government datasets, and talking about technology.
There are a few theists on this website (Pretty sure one or more ministers... but I can't remember who!) Rarely, but occasionally, a nice discussion about spiritual worldviews pops up in ~life/religion. Usually when people discuss religion here it is in a negative context. I guess I can't blame anyone for that, but I think people are missing out on something meaningful by restricting their knowledge to that which is scientifically empirical.
I'm not a conservative person, but I do feel some kind of resentment or distrust if I am too open about my religion in a very secular/liberal/technological group of people. No one is ever aggressive. But it's like I am "reduced" in their eyes, somehow foolish for 'believing in' God - I'm not sure what they think exactly. I am not ashamed of my religion but I dont bring it up too much because people just don't get it.
I wanted to share that I have the same experience. I'm sure there are half a dozen of us!
I'm not a conservative person, but I do feel some kind of resentment or distrust if I am too open about my religion in a very secular/liberal/technological group of people. No one is ever aggressive. But it's like I am "reduced" in their eyes, somehow foolish for 'believing in' God - I'm not sure what they think exactly. I am not ashamed of my religion but I dont bring it up too much because people just don't get it.
I wanted to share that I have the same experience. I'm sure there are half a dozen of us!
Or just maybe I'd actually like to see real discussion of an issue that's vitally important to life on this planet rather than mud slinging nonsense that distracts and divides, but sure label me...
Or just maybe I'd actually like to see real discussion of an issue that's vitally important to life on this planet rather than mud slinging nonsense that distracts and divides, but sure label me as someone apparently defending them.
The irony here is that you're not having that discussion. Ignoring that bit and discussing the post or making this point a smaller point within a larger comment about the actual topic would have...
The irony here is that you're not having that discussion. Ignoring that bit and discussing the post or making this point a smaller point within a larger comment about the actual topic would have derailed the conversation less.
But then, you did engage just about one thing. Which for the record you're free to do. I don't agree with your interpretation that the person who actively works in this area IRL and who made a...
But then, you did engage just about one thing.
Which for the record you're free to do. I don't agree with your interpretation that the person who actively works in this area IRL and who made a snarky comment in the middle of a dense post is "not engaging in good faith" but again, you're free to do so.
No i did not. I engaged with someone else who responded and agreed with them because they also find this kind of hyperbolic rhetoric to be pointless. The end of it is to try and stop people from...
But then, you did engage just about one thing.
No i did not. I engaged with someone else who responded and agreed with them because they also find this kind of hyperbolic rhetoric to be pointless.
The end of it is to try and stop people from sounding like trump supporters talking about the woke left or every other pointlessly hyperbolic rabble rousing statement.
Fair, I lost track of who said what in this thread. On that topic, I'm up for continuing our conversation in the other thread, I couldn't find the data we were discussing in what you linked. I...
Fair, I lost track of who said what in this thread.
On that topic, I'm up for continuing our conversation in the other thread, I couldn't find the data we were discussing in what you linked.
I think the characterization of scroll_lock is incorrect.
Not engaging in good faith? If you were an oil executive and @scroll_lock said that to your face you could maybe make that claim, but I don't think you are, and their comment had plenty of...
Not engaging in good faith? If you were an oil executive and @scroll_lock said that to your face you could maybe make that claim, but I don't think you are, and their comment had plenty of verifiable information worth engaging with and zero indication that they wouldn't be willing to have a back-and-forth with you. Including insults against people who immense power and are also not present is hardly the bar for bad faith.
It's very clearly sardonic/sarcastic, and @scroll_lock includes their signature "comment box" in all of their comments that explicitly states/warns about that ahead of time. I'm gonna go out on a...
Exemplary
It's very clearly sardonic/sarcastic, and @scroll_lock includes their signature "comment box" in all of their comments that explicitly states/warns about that ahead of time.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you didn't read the comment box first? Maybe for humorous and sarcastic comments like that one, it would be better to make the comment box open by-default, @scroll_lock?
In case you don't know, you can make a details box be open automatically by starting it with <details open> instead of just <details>. Example:
This is a comment box that is closed by-default
"A tremendous loneliness comes over you. Everybody in the world is doing something without you."
This is a comment box that is open by-default
"Your mangled brain would like you to know there is a boxer called Contact Mike."
Anyways, I think @scroll_lock's comment is funny, and they couldn't do much more to make the reader aware of the tone and content before reading. I welcome this sort of occasional unhinged humor. It's very disco.
Comment box Scope: comment response, personal feelings Tone: neutral, a little confounded or uncertain Opinion: yes? Sarcasm/humor: none I didn't know/forgot you could do that, but sure I will use...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, personal feelings
Tone: neutral, a little confounded or uncertain
Opinion: yes?
Sarcasm/humor: none
I didn't know/forgot you could do that, but sure I will use an open comment box for future edgy comments.
To be honest I thought that comment was so obviously absurd that no one would be offended by it, and I thought my comment box would have removed any doubt. I occasionally make similar remarks on here and I assumed I post often enough, and am weird enough, that it is not a shocking kind of message. I mean what I said, in the sense that I don't approve of oil execs' decisions and I think they are knowingly making bad and even evil decisions (I'm sure they've read Eichmann in Jerusalem too; they all went to college, they simply do not care), but it was not supposed to be an antagonistic or attention-seeking remark per se because I thought everyone here was on the same page and okay with having a stupid laugh about something that is normally depressing and not funny. So I was surprised, but also not surprised, that the first and almost only response to the thread was a remark about that one paragraph and not the rest of it which I spent 30 minutes writing. Perhaps this is typical of liberal spaces: people, especially academics, have a specific way they like to communicate and aren't willing to look past violations of that structure.
I did play Disco Elysium years ago and enjoyed it. I have never played a video game that weird/cool, before or since. What a strange and unbelievable experience.
Comment box Scope: comment response Tone: neutral, a little miffed Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none The quoted statement is sardonic. As a courtesy, I include "comment boxes" in my comments to...
Comment box
Scope: comment response
Tone: neutral, a little miffed
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
The quoted statement is sardonic. As a courtesy, I include "comment boxes" in my comments to indicate unseriousness.
Tone: a veil of neutrality, behind which lies propaganda from "Big Walk," "Big Breathe," and other lobbyists for human health
Sarcasm/humor: some dry remarks
I believe humorous sarcasm has a place in discourse because it can jolt people out of the blindness toward societal problems they are otherwise insulated from.
Personally I think that people in positions of authority have a significant ethical imperative to act consciously. Educated people in positions of authority should be aware that the decisions they make are not arbitrary and genuinely affect human life. I intentionally used the grouping "oil executives" because the group of people making those decisions have read all the actuarial tables showing how many people will die from pollution and how much it will cost their companies. They know perfectly well what they are doing and they are totally fine with it.
Aside from the satirical hyperbole as others addressed, I reject the notion that nobody is doing this. While they might not be literally saying these things, the facts about the harms of fossil...
Aside from the satirical hyperbole as others addressed, I reject the notion that nobody is doing this.
While they might not be literally saying these things, the facts about the harms of fossil fuels are undisputed by anybody who is not a liar.
So by continuing to push for expansion of these industries rather than working to shut them down and minimize their impact, they are saying it with their actions. People just don't like to be reminded of realities and prefer to speak in euphemisms about bad things. For example, my workplace recently referred to the Virginia Tech shooting as "the Virginia Tech incident."
It's much like how the facts are in about trickle down economics are in...they don't trickle down. Yet people who monetarily benefit are saying "my wealth and power is more important than your wellbeing," even if they never make a press release to say so.
That's different, though! It's not people being evil just because they really want you to have lung cancer. They're being evil because they value being rich more than they value you not having...
That's different, though! It's not people being evil just because they really want you to have lung cancer. They're being evil because they value being rich more than they value you not having lung cancer. It's people prioritizing things differently than we would like them to. In a world without economic incentives for giving people lung cancer, we would likely have a lot less lung cancer.
That is a critically important distinction because it gives us, as a society, more knobs to adjust (reduce or eliminate the incentives for doing the bad thing, or add greater incentives for doing good things instead) which are likely to be much more effective at actually fixing the problem than repeatedly calling people evil is.
The thing is, they do want "you" [the general you, more people within the population being spoken about, not "you" specifically] to have lung cancer, because the lung cancer is directly tied to...
The thing is, they do want "you" [the general you, more people within the population being spoken about, not "you" specifically] to have lung cancer, because the lung cancer is directly tied to them making more profits. Yes, sure, if they could put in the same amount of effort and receive the same amount of profits without you getting lung cancer, they'd probably be fine with that, but that's not one of the options, so they're choosing the one where you get lung cancer and they are happy to do it. Willingly, knowingly causing harm because it brings you profit is not materially different to the people receiving the harm than doing it because you like the harm.
Obfuscating this informed and completely voluntary decision to do harm white-washes and normalizes the acts and makes people complacent in the face of it. I don't agree that it gives us more opportunity to adjust incentives. How do you make not giving people cancer more profitable than giving people cancer? You need regulations. At that point, why not just regulate against giving people cancer? The answer is people the same people profiting from the cancer lobby and donate money to prevent those regulations from happening, either the ones that make giving people cancer less profitable, or the ones that ban it. If you have a realistic counter-example that could apply to this situation and would be harmed by the sort of rhetoric present in @scroll_lock's comment, I'd be interested to hear it, and I am open to changing my mind. As it sits, though, we need public sentiment to turn against the wealthy who are killing people every single day more than we need to humanize them and try to figure out how to placate them into not killing us anymore.
So there's this sort of disconnected reading mode I can enter, where I'm still taking the words in, but barely processing them. I do this when I still want to finish reading the text for some...
If you have a realistic counter-example that could apply to this situation and would be harmed by the sort of rhetoric present in @scroll_lock's comment, I'd be interested to hear it, and I am open to changing my mind.
So there's this sort of disconnected reading mode I can enter, where I'm still taking the words in, but barely processing them. I do this when I still want to finish reading the text for some reason, but I have decided the author is full of shit and if I try to really grok everything they're saying I'm just going to get mad about it and my day will be worse. I usually only reserve this mode for particularly absurd bigoted right-wing rhetoric. Other people probably just stop reading when they hit similar conditions. Either way, it's a defense mechanism against psychic damage that means I'm not taking anywhere near the full force of your rhetoric.
And I slipped into that mode here, and had to go back and reread it a second time, because I noticed it was happening and that this was the first time it had ever happened on text where I agreed with the message. That was such a weird feeling that it led me to post my comment.
As it sits, though, we need public sentiment to turn against the wealthy who are killing people every single day more than we need to humanize them and try to figure out how to placate them into not killing us anymore.
Willingly, knowingly causing harm because it brings you profit is not materially different to the people receiving the harm than doing it because you like the harm.
Is the goal to actually fix problems, or just to get mad about them? If you actually want things to get better, you need to look at causes, not effects, and then deal with those. There are lots of groups of illnesses with similar symptoms, but that doesn't mean doctors should just say "you are in severe pain, but good news, the various sorts of pain are not materially different to each other! You should just not be in severe pain no matter what! We must turn the sentiment of your immune system against the pointy object extending from your torso!"
Or, put another way, what is public sentiment going to actually do? (If you're about to point to the recent CEO shooting, how many people's lives have been materially improved by that?)
That answer is simple. Complacent people don't want to fix the problem because they don't see the system as broken. Remember that article from a few days ago, where the main problem with adopting...
Is the goal to actually fix problems, or just to get mad about them?
That answer is simple. Complacent people don't want to fix the problem because they don't see the system as broken. Remember that article from a few days ago, where the main problem with adopting Medicare for All is that most people are satisfied with their health insurance? Particularly how they were satisfied if they never had to use it.
So, you need to stoke some degree of understanding the problem. Anger at injustice is pretty foundational to that.
Remember how approximately 0 police reform happened before the George Floyd protests. Then as anger rates were through the roof, there was talk of them.... even a few actions taken. Now that the immediate anger has subsided, we're back to approximately 0 police reform.
So public sentiment being glad that a health insurance CEO is dead? Well, it's a bit early to talk about full impact, but we can say with some confidence that it killed Blue Cross's plan to time-cap payments to anesthesiologists, which would mean either cutting off anesthetics, rushing surgeries, or charging patients extra. From a pure utilitarian standpoint, that one CEO death prevented hundreds, perhaps thousands, from suffering immense agony or death.
Notice they were also one of the health insurers that removed their leadership page from their website in the wake of the shooting, so they were obviously in damage-control mode.
Honestly? Too soon to tell. My hopes have been up and down about it, but there is undeniably a new fervor in the discussion about the American healthcare system, and more importantly, it's...
how many people's lives have been materially improved by that?
Honestly? Too soon to tell. My hopes have been up and down about it, but there is undeniably a new fervor in the discussion about the American healthcare system, and more importantly, it's crossing the polticial divide. Right-wing working class people are actually on their own side for once. That could actually get things done! Will it, before the fervor dissipates? Doubtful, but it could actually happen. An increase in class solidarity could come from that shooting.
I started with my answer to that question, because it's important to the rest. Am I advocating that we shoot more CEOs? No. But we can absolutely have the kind of conversations about them that we're having about Brian Thompson while they're alive. Taking the feelings of alienation and helplessness that so much of America is feeling and directing them at the people who are actually causing the problems could absolutely get things done. So you ask "Is the goal to actually fix problems, or just to get mad about them?" and I say we have to do the latter to do the former.
I contend that whether they want to cause harm or just don't care that they're causing harm doesn't matter in terms of solutions. I've already addressed that and gotten no rebuttal. Doing things in a sustainable way is harder and therefore less profitable. You can't make it cheaper without regulations. You can't regulate without a government willing to regulate, which means you either need money, or a strong mandate from the people. The oil manufacturers already have an unapproachable head start on the money.
I'm not really sure if you're calling me or @scroll_lock full of shit, but I'll choose not to take offense. I'd still be very interested to hear about a way to make real change that's harmed by a comment like the original one, which I did not write but did find edifying.
And that's exactly it: We don't want more people to die. But if people die, it's worth doing a societal postmortem to address why it happened. And the important part: Actually implement the...
And that's exactly it: We don't want more people to die. But if people die, it's worth doing a societal postmortem to address why it happened. And the important part: Actually implement the changes that need to be made. Like, at work, if a service goes down, and the postmortem reveals it's because we had insufficient monitoring of something, we fix it.... or it ends up happening again. Right now, in America, it seems that maybe we do a bit of navelgazing, but mostly the "actually fix it" gets deferred when the rage dies out.
I think the reason people are somewhat gleeful is because it's giving us the opportunity to do a postmortem that is long overdue because nobody bothers to implement the fixes.
This might sound strange, but celebrating the shooter might prevent deaths, because the powers at be will be much more terrified of it happening again instead of saying "oh that's tragic" then moving on with their day.
It helps that the victim in this case was someone profiting from and inducing additional suffering via their business choices. Opposed to children who died because a gunman was denied mental health meds.
Who is “they”? The specific ownership structures matter. Is it the politicians, the shareholders of hospital groups, the car companies, the oil companies, the pension funds who are major...
Who is “they”? The specific ownership structures matter. Is it the politicians, the shareholders of hospital groups, the car companies, the oil companies, the pension funds who are major shareholders in all of the above, or someone else?
Not all these groups profit when people get lung cancer.
It is ridiculous that out of all the very good points about very bad policies that scroll-lock makes in this long long comment the top, highly-upvoted reply excerpts one small part to complain...
It is ridiculous that out of all the very good points about very bad policies that scroll-lock makes in this long long comment the top, highly-upvoted reply excerpts one small part to complain about rhetorical framing. Your priorities are absurd. God forbid that anyone get emotional about an important topic or, worse, decide to use it to be convincing!
The problem is that it’s not convincing, and the absurdity of the claims that “oil executives want everyone to get lung cancer” or “want people to die prematurely”, distracts from the actual...
The problem is that it’s not convincing, and the absurdity of the claims that “oil executives want everyone to get lung cancer” or “want people to die prematurely”, distracts from the actual situation which is arguably worse.
The truth is that they are largely not cartoonish villains scheming about how to get people sick and kill them, but rather they are so removed from the human costs of their decisions that for them, the calculus is solely about numbers on a spreadsheet. The mundanity of it is the part that is scary, because it means that they aren’t different from other people and nearly anyone could make similarly awful choices provided the right circumstances - and likely not recognize what they’re doing as terrible at the time.
Well, let's look at somebody else: The tobacco industry. Can you say with a straight face that tobacco execs don't want people to get cancer? Yes, you can waffle about and say "well, they don't...
Well, let's look at somebody else: The tobacco industry.
Can you say with a straight face that tobacco execs don't want people to get cancer?
Yes, you can waffle about and say "well, they don't actually scheme to give people cancer," but that is objectively not true.
They sell products that give people cancer.
They know beyond a shadow of a doubt their products cause cancer.
They want more people to buy their products.
They lobby against any regulations that would prevent people from buying their products or making them safer.
Therefore, any actions they take which furthers their agenda is them scheming to give people cancer. It's just shrouded in the language of sales numbers and profit margins.
Remember, "welfare queens" is just conservative code for black women.
By similar reasoning, people who smoke, though they're well aware of the risks, also "want" to get lung cancer. It's a likely consequence, so how could they not want it? This doesn't seem to be...
By similar reasoning, people who smoke, though they're well aware of the risks, also "want" to get lung cancer. It's a likely consequence, so how could they not want it?
This doesn't seem to be how risk-taking works, emotionally? People want to do risky stuff despite the risks, and there are markets catering to them.
Somehow we don't use similar reasoning for makers of alcoholic drinks, tanning equipment, ski equipment, hang gliders, mountain bikes, and so on.
Speaking as a former smoker of 20 years, risk management is not a huge part of the decisionmaking process. It's peer pressure, marketing, and a risk profile of "sure there is an intangible risk at...
Speaking as a former smoker of 20 years, risk management is not a huge part of the decisionmaking process. It's peer pressure, marketing, and a risk profile of "sure there is an intangible risk at some indetermined point in the future."
Which is somewhat fine when that is a choice they are making for themselves. It's another when somebody's entire livelihood depends on convincing other people to make that choice. We don't generally think of drug dealers as providing a valuable service to the community, despite them fulfilling a market demand. FWIW I do consider alcohol and other drugs to be equally bad in this vein, which is why their marketing power should be the first on the chopping block. Tobacco companies in particular specifically design their products to be more addictive.
The broader YOLO market you define, shouldn't be able to lobby against regulations, or make people sign bullshit "you can't sue us" waivers....which is what a lot of these companies do and it is scummy. That said, the risks with those is a lot more determinate of the skill level and risk taking of the user, more than being an almost-certain outcome with prolonged use.
To circle back around to the evilness of oil companies (and health insurers).
They know the downstream risks/consequences of their actions. Importantly, they know their customers do not properly judge those risks and consequences themselves. It's an expolititive relationship, an inherently immoral one.
When they are faced with a regulation requiring sacrificing some or all of their business (with the will of the people via elected officials), the moral choice would be to comply and figure out a new path which reduces harm. Not to dig in their heels to try to stop the regulation.
There's a huge difference between making that decision for yourself and making it for someone else. I don't have any particular love for moguls of any kind, but all of these items can be uaed...
There's a huge difference between making that decision for yourself and making it for someone else.
Somehow we don't use similar reasoning for makers of alcoholic drinks, tanning equipment, ski equipment, hang gliders, mountain bikes, and so on.
I don't have any particular love for moguls of any kind, but all of these items can be uaed without significant harm, which is definitely what the manufacturers want because they want to keep selling these items to those customers for as long as possible. ICE cars cannot be used without contributing to pollution and climate change, and the problems they're causing don't create the same problem for oil executives that a dead skier does for Ski Boots R Us because they take too long to manifest.
I'm not sure "making a decision for someone else" adequately describes how the tobacco industry works. Growers and manufacturers make a decision to sell a product. Distributors and retailers make...
I'm not sure "making a decision for someone else" adequately describes how the tobacco industry works. Growers and manufacturers make a decision to sell a product. Distributors and retailers make decisions to buy and sell things. Consumers make decisions about what to buy. This is a cooperative effort.
All the people involved are responsible for participating. Although, some people might find it easier to quit this game than others. Vapes work for some.
You know the tobacco companies spend tons of money on marketing right? 8 billion just on cigarettes. Another billion on vapes. And that they're selling an addictive product whose average first age...
You know the tobacco companies spend tons of money on marketing right? 8 billion just on cigarettes. Another billion on vapes.
And that they're selling an addictive product whose average first age of use is 13, that's more addictive the younger you are and whose addictive nature is so well know they must warn you about it when you buy it?
Most smokers didn't make a reasoned choice to start smoking. And the addiction means making a reasoned choice to quit is incredibly difficult to start and maintain.
It is not just happenstance that people make a product and other people buy it.
Yes, tobacco companies are bad, and I’m sure that most decisions to start smoking aren’t reasoned choices. (Most choices are not reasoned choices.) It’s still not someone else making the decision...
Yes, tobacco companies are bad, and I’m sure that most decisions to start smoking aren’t reasoned choices. (Most choices are not reasoned choices.)
It’s still not someone else making the decision for you when a kid makes bad choices, even if they had bad influences.
Also, quitting smoking is hard, but it seems like switching from smoking to vapes isn’t all that hard? Even if we consider it falling into a trap, remaining trapped for decades is a choice when there’s a well-known way out.
That answer was for people who smoke, not tobacco manufacturers. I'm very comfortable saying that tobacco manufacturers want people to have lung cancer. I'm delighted when regulation curtails...
That answer was for people who smoke, not tobacco manufacturers. I'm very comfortable saying that tobacco manufacturers want people to have lung cancer. I'm delighted when regulation curtails their ability to influence people into getting lung cancer, and upset when the restrictions on them are relaxed.
If they are delightedly slamming the button that says "Make millions of dollars and kill thousands of people" I don't really care that the font on the latter part of the sentence is a little smaller.
If they are delightedly slamming the button that says "Make millions of dollars and kill thousands of people" I don't really care that the font on the latter part of the sentence is a little smaller.
The distinction between “oil executives want everyone to get lung cancer” and “oil executives want [things to happen that will cause] everyone to get lung cancer” or “ they want people to die...
The distinction between “oil executives want everyone to get lung cancer” and “oil executives want [things to happen that will cause] everyone to get lung cancer” or “ they want people to die prematurely” and “they want [things to happen which will cause] people to die prematurely” is getting far too much ink and energy. What flavor of evil lurks in their hearts isn't nearly as important as their actions and the subsequent outcomes.
What’s being argued is that it was counterproductive to being convincing. Perhaps it’s rhetoric that plays well on a political ad, but it didn’t win a consensus with the Tildes community.
What’s being argued is that it was counterproductive to being convincing. Perhaps it’s rhetoric that plays well on a political ad, but it didn’t win a consensus with the Tildes community.
And this is before also factoring in the glaring efficiency losses from the internal combustion engine. Something that is expected to get hot enough to boil water during use is bound to lose more...
Even if a portion (<100%) of that electricity is generated using fossil fuels, it is necessarily cleaner than if it were 100% fossil fuels!
And this is before also factoring in the glaring efficiency losses from the internal combustion engine. Something that is expected to get hot enough to boil water during use is bound to lose more energy on the way to “energy gets converted into moving forward.”
Context: I live in CA, own an ICE vehicle, and frequently use personal vehicles to self transport when responding to missing persons incidents as part of a mountain rescue team. I realize I have a...
Context: I live in CA, own an ICE vehicle, and frequently use personal vehicles to self transport when responding to missing persons incidents as part of a mountain rescue team.
I realize I have a fairly niche use case, but the switch to electric vehicles will create some interesting logistical challenges. I typically end up driving 3+ hours split between highway and straight uphill, which is basically worst-case for EVs. Even if I kept a vehicle fully charged at all times, I'd probably need to stop along the way. On a personal trip a partial charge might be good considering the return trip would be downhill. But until charging networks expand in the mountains I'd be reluctant for SAR to go with less range than I could have.
I doubt the ICE ban would make an exception for personal vehicles like mine. But assuming there is an exception for government vehicles, I could drive an hour + out of my way to pick up a Sheriff's vehicle, but IDK how refueling those will work long-term.
All that said, the further I have to go, the lower the urgency. So possibly it will simply mean that I wake up earlier to account for increased travel time.
Personal logistics aside; it seems odd that parties worried about big government want to use federal regulation to limit state regulation. I generally prefer laws and regulations to be more localized and incoming administrations clawing back these waivers is obviously political or at best the federal government trying to take the economic steering wheel.
CA is incredibly diverse, so it'll be a bumpy ride. But if we get it all figured out then there won't be many places in the country that can say 'oh that works for them, but it won't work for us' (unless we end up socializing the hell out of it, but that's not going to happen).
Comment box Scope: comment response, information, personal take Tone: neutral Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none This is a pretty niche case for the overall population (most people live in a place...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, information, personal take
Tone: neutral
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
I typically end up driving 3+ hours split between highway and straight uphill, which is basically worst-case for EVs. Even if I kept a vehicle fully charged at all times, I'd probably need to stop along the way.
This is a pretty niche case for the overall population (most people live in a place that is fairly flat and rarely leave flat-ish places), but maybe that is not niche for people in your local community.
In theory a DC charger can get you charged in 15 minutes, or 10 minutes with upcoming technology. That's not substantially different than stopping for gas. An L2 charger could take like an hour maybe (@vord would know).
Modern EVs have 300+ mile ranges (on flat ground). I'm not sure how much an uphill drive would reduce range, but if we say 1/3 (IDK), then you would be looking at a 200-mile range. It is not usually that cold in CA so there shouldn't be big range reductions otherwise.
Looking at a map, I can't see a place in California where you would get anywhere near close to out of range between L2 chargers. If you are going from, like, Redding to Reno via 44/Susanville, you would probably have to stop at least once, but you could do it even on just DC chargers. But you'd probably stop once or twice anyway? So no problem?
I doubt the ICE ban would make an exception for personal vehicles like mine. But assuming there is an exception for government vehicles, I could drive an hour + out of my way to pick up a Sheriff's vehicle, but IDK how refueling those will work long-term.
The "ban" will apply to new cars sold and not existing cars, AFAIK. They are not going to just ban ICEs. It's more of a phase-out; the planned regulations are actually pretty reasonable.
I don't think they would exempt newly produced municipal vehicles, except for really specific cases like wilderness park rangers or search and rescue operators. I think anyone who is driving a regular car on regular roads would have to abide by the new regulations.
Be aware that 2035 is 11 years from now. The EV charging network is growing at a rate of 20% per year, which is astonishing. There are already almost no places in the US where you are more than like 50 miles from an L2 charger on the new J3400 standard. There are much bigger gaps in the DC network, but closing rapidly, especially along highway routes.
There are about 210,000 EV charging ports in the US right now at more than 8,000 locations (as of Q2 2024, so actually it's probably more like 230,000). If that were to continue to grow at a rate of 20% annually, which is actually pretty reasonable given the many billions of dollars recently invested by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act into the EV charging network (plus much private investment), that would put us at a ridiculous 1.4 million EV charging ports in 10 years. For reference, this is more than the number of charging ports that the Alternative Fuels Data Center believes is necessary to support a ~100% electric automobile fleet nationwide (they suggest a need for 1,067,000 L2 chargers and 182,000 DC fast chargers). There is a lot of money going into making this happen, and it has 10 years to materialize. If it becomes truly obvious that it is impossible, then the regulations will be rescinded. The California legislature is ambitious, not stupid.
Personal logistics aside; it seems odd that parties worried about big government want to use federal regulation to limit state regulation.
It's ideological/economic for the party that is trying to rescind these waivers. They hate California (right now) because the state doesn't vote for them. They aren't targeting Texas (right now) because Texas does vote for them. Politicians are pragmatic so they would immediately change course if it were the other way around.
I think it is a personal vendetta for Donald Trump though. Gavin Newsom's ex-wife is currently married to Donald Trump Jr. Newsom has been super vocal about California doing whatever it wants in Trump's previous term, which Trump didn't like. I think there is two-way enmity. Elon Musk also has some business beef with the state of California and he probably has some personal reason to hate Newsom too, and he currently has the ear of the president.
So to speak to numbers: Fast DC charging can take between 15 minutes and a few hours, depending on speed of the station and the vehicle in question. This situation is much murkier for non-Tesla...
So to speak to numbers:
Fast DC charging can take between 15 minutes and a few hours, depending on speed of the station and the vehicle in question. This situation is much murkier for non-Tesla vehicles. It especially sucks because most Tesla stations do not support other vehicles...this is looking up going forward but is a bad pain point now.
L2 charges somewhere along the lines of 20-50 miles per hour. So getting from 20% to 80% can still take on the order of 8 hours.
Cars slow down charging tremendously after 80% charge. As well as taking more damage to battery after 80%, which is why they slow down. For all intents and purposes, you need to take 20% off the sticker range when talking daily-driver scenarios. My car is rated at 240, but that means that I need to top to 100% to do so, which makes my daily driving range more like 200.
Extreme temps, especially cold weather, do a number on driving range because need for HVAC. In the fall, I was easily getting 4.1 mi/kwh on flat surface. Now I'm lucky if I get around 3.5 mi/kwh.
At least around Philly, the charging situation is still a bit of a crapshoot.
I just had my first bad charger experience. Planned a family trip to IKEA Conshohoken, on the order of 80 miles away. Car was topped off at 80%. Saw there was a Charging America fast charger nearby at Plymouth Meeting mall, and figured we'd hit it on the way out while we eat dinner if we needed to. When we got there, we definitely needed to....the cold weather ate into our range something awful, we were around 35%. And we knew it would be worse with return trip with the added weight and being colder.
Unfortunately, 2/4 stations were nonfunctional. The other two showed in use, but we figured we'd swing by since that's wrong half the time anyway, and it was the fastest charger around by a country mile. Turns out the 1 station was in use by a guy who couldn't get it unhooked and was on tech support for his car. And there was a line of 4 cars deep at this point. Some quick math showed that, best case, I'd have to wait an hour for this charging station to be available. I dropped the 2 kids and wife at the mall while I sorted this out.
Went to a nearby (1 mile) L2, which charged at about 20 miles per hour. Would take me about 3 hours to get charged enough to get home. So I pulled up the assortment of charging maps to find a new charger. Three fast-charge options close by, the fastest 10 miles away, an hour long round-trip. Farthest option was out. The two slower options (total of 4 other spots) were also showing used, but they were only 10 minutes away so I could see if the lines were better there. Luckily, the first charger I went to had both in use, but the one guy was almost done charging and I only had to wait 10 minutes. It then took about an hour to charge from 30% to 85%, because this station was at half the capacity.
This whole problem would have been almost completely mitigated if IKEA had anything other than Tesla chargers in the lot. Even the slow L2 would have gotten us enough of a charge while we were in the IKEA to be able to get home, or close enough so we could pass through to the first fast charger we came across.
If we want to fix charging infrastructure, we need a simple rule:
Every gas station must install at least 2 fast charging CCS stations rated at at least 100kw. They must be kept in good working order or be subject to fines.
All of this to say: The situation is looking up, but for people doing huge drives constantly it would make sense to have an exception (and also this is where hydrogen vehicles would shine, and why I personally think that hydrogen fuel cells are the long-term answer).
Thanks for that context and info, you and @scroll_lock. I didn't know the best case had gotten as good as 15 minutes to charge (even if that is for a sedan or some similar best case. a full truck...
Thanks for that context and info, you and @scroll_lock. I didn't know the best case had gotten as good as 15 minutes to charge (even if that is for a sedan or some similar best case. a full truck would obviously be double or so, our current truck is an F350 and the Sheriff's are some mid/full size SUV).
2035 is indeed pretty far away, and it does seem like the charging station situation will be figured out by then and situations like yours become and early-adopter pain of the past. I'm less sure about the grid to back those charging stations, but I don't really know much about it aside from some back-of-the-napkin math that says "whoa what's a lot of power".
Speaking of the grid, that's another concern I have both generally and for emergency response. EVs run on a best-case scenario (the power is on). CA likes to catch on fire and when it does PG&E tends to turn the power off. Probably it's prudent for everyone to ensure their vehicle is fully charged when at home and maybe also to have some fossil fuel backup generator to start/continue charging vehicles when power is lost in case of evacuation order. Solar and residential batteries hopefully mitigate this a bit as well.
Last note! Winters in CA are pretty mild (in the mountains 25F +- 20F) so that's not a crazy impact on batteries. I think the bigger thing would be the heat in the summer. Driving through the solar oven of the central valley pretty much requires full AC and I imagine that would wreck the range pretty good.
This is the problem. EV technology sucks. They want to force everyone to use an EV, and that's going to be the death of the economy. You think working class people can afford these outrageous...
This is the problem. EV technology sucks. They want to force everyone to use an EV, and that's going to be the death of the economy. You think working class people can afford these outrageous vehicle prices? Many who already have to commute hours one way just to get to work? I guarantee the apartment they live in doesn't have EV chargers. Work most likely doesn't either.
What about shipping? As far as I know they aren't making EV semi trucks. How are any goods going to get transported where they need to go? There's no way you could have an EV truck with the same distance a diesel truck has.
If they ever want EV only to work they have to somehow convince everyone to install EV chargers everywhere. I mean every parking spot. At the grocery store, every street parking spot, every parking garage, every dinky apartment parking lot. And the technology would have to be better to go distances similar to that of gas vehicles on a single tank.
Until EV technology achieves all of these things it isn't going to work and there's going to try to force a round peg into a square hole and then they'll cry when the economy crashes cause no one can get to work or get their goods where it needs to go.
Comment box Scope: comment response, information Tone: neutral Opinion: a little bit, but this is mostly factual Sarcasm/humor: none Yes, this is already happening. I recommend you read the...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, information
Tone: neutral
Opinion: a little bit, but this is mostly factual
Sarcasm/humor: none
If they ever want EV only to work they have to somehow convince everyone to install EV chargers everywhere.
Yes, this is already happening. I recommend you read the Alternative Fuels Data Center reports on EV charging infrastructure trends. I know I often share dry and boring material on here, but it is shocking how quickly the charging network is being built out. The AFDC publishes reports quarterly showing growth of about 5% per quarter (often more). It has been a rate of about 20% growth year-over-year for about 5 years and shows only signs of sticking to that, or accelerating.
At the grocery store, every street parking spot, every parking garage, every dinky apartment parking lot.
It is not necessary to install EV chargers in literally every parking spot because most people live in single-family homes and would have access to home charging, but you are correct that some EV chargers will be needed in many places. Luckily we already have electrical infrastructure everywhere you would put a building. This is because all commercial buildings in the US have existing electricity demand. While the charging station costs money to install, it can pay for itself over time (leasing to a charging company, or requiring a small fee to charge).
FYI, many people in cities do not drive cars and therefore do not need charging to begin with.
Private apartment charging is one of the economically harder problems to solve. However, it is also not technically necessary for every parking spot in a garage to have an EV charger. 93% of car trips are under 30 miles, so it's actually totally fine to just park your car and drive it like 1 mile to a charging station. I mean, you don't have a gas station in your parking garage. Why is EV charging fundamentally different?
The easy thing about charging amenities in multi-family housing structures is that landlords and condominium associations respond to market demands very flexibly. If you go on Zillow.com you can search "charger" or "ev" in the filters and find many apartments with EV charging in the garages. These are just the ones that have bothered to specify it in the online listing. Pretty soon I'm sure apartment searching sites will have dedicated filters for that sort of thing, just like they currently have filters for number of parking spots for a house, etc. The Alternative Fuels Data Center Reports also talk a bit about private charging. They show some but not a whole lot of private garage/apartment chargers in the dataset, but they're probably severely undercounting them (they explain this). Since an EV charger increases home value noticeably, it will become quite typical to see more of them in the future.
What about shipping? As far as I know they aren't making EV semi trucks. How are any goods going to get transported where they need to go? There's no way you could have an EV truck with the same distance a diesel truck has.
Let's take a step back - we have shipped goods by rail since 1825 (199 years in England... or 197 years in the US) and waterway and road for millennia. The US freight rail network is the most robust in the world by a great margin. People shit on the passenger rail network here, but the freight network is often described as "the envy of the world." I am not joking. Ask a European freight rail company what they think of the American network, and they will pretty much only have positive things to say. Railroads go straight from mines to factories to warehouses, even in major cities, and railroads are everywhere in the US (zoom in to see the branch lines...). People just don't notice rail infrastructure because they don't look. Also, major waterways like the Mississippi, Great Lakes, and others continue to be extremely important to the shipping industry; shipping by rail is much more energy-efficient than truck, and water even more so. Not everything is shipped by semi truck, not even close, it's not economical for raw materials or even some finished products.
But truck shipping is important too. Since semis are large/heavy and just tend to drive for longer distances than passenger cars, they have not been electrified as quickly. I am not an expert on this industry but I do follow material production and battery trends fairly closely. I can say with a high degree of confidence that the rate of improvement of battery energy density is fast enough that I can totally see a 100% electric freight fleet 10 years from now.
I just shared an article about how the US recently announced $10 billion in loans for new EV charging and battery production. In this case $9 billion of that was for the batteries (on top of another $10 billion that had been financed privately). This has been par for the course for the past few years, with the Joe Biden admin's "Inflation Reduction Act" and "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law" galvanizing the industry. It has been a great contributor to economic growth and has shown how fast things can develop. We have every indication that investment into batteries will continue: they are very useful for many industries, so that is having a compounding effect on technology improvement.
Some other battery-related technology articles I have personally shared on this website recently:
Honestly there are so many news articles about batteries that I ignore most of them. There is a ridiculous amount of research and commercialization happening in the field right now. You might want to check out the YouTube channels Undecided with Matt Ferrell and Just Have a Think; they often talk about this tech in a digestible way.
There are many electric trucks deployed already. Since electric heavy-duty trucking is a harder technological problem to solve than passenger vehicles, volume production for electric semis is still ramping up. Currently the Freightliner eCascadia is in production. You wouldn't necessarily notice that it's electric because it looks identical to a regular semi truck. There are others already too.
An important one is the Tesla Semi (500 mile range), which have been on the road since 2022. The Tesla Semi will be entering mass production in 2026.
You can read this fact sheet from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute for more info about electric semi trucks that currently exist and will exist in the future.
And the technology would have to be better to go distances similar to that of gas vehicles on a single tank.
There are EVs on the market with ranges of apparently 516 miles. This is a frankly ridiculous amount of mileage, but there you go: it exists. A Rav4 might be able to get 35mpg if you're super lucky, so on a full tank that's about 500 miles. But realistically it's much less because real driving is full of traffic and other slowdowns that reduce efficiency. And most people these days are buying quite heavy trucks which get like 18-20mpg.
Since EV batteries are improving so rapidly, you will only continue to see EV range increase.
You think working class people can afford these outrageous vehicle prices?
EVs are currently too expensive, but that's mostly because they're being designed for a luxury market. We've seen EV costs drop quite a lot. If the US didn't have ridiculous import fees for European or Asian EVs, you could buy pretty cheap ones already. There is a 27.5% tariff on EVs from China, plus other costs from importing. But they have new EVs over there that you could buy for $10,000. Domestic EV production is increasing, but it takes some time to build those factories.
Recently, Mr. Lawrence said, customers have been snapping up used Teslas for a little over $20,000, after applying a $4,000 federal tax credit.
“We’re seeing younger people,” Mr. Lawrence said. “We are seeing more blue-collar and entry-level white-collar people. The purchase price of the car has suddenly become in reach.”
Car dealers are seeing younger and more working-class people buying EVs because there is now a used market for them. Working class people are mainly buying used cars. That market just hasn't existed because EVs have mostly been a really new technology until recently.
The reason EVs are more expensive than ICEs is just the cost of the battery. But as stated previously, that cost has been dropping consistently over time, and there is no reason to assume we have hit a limit yet. There are all sorts of new chemistries being tested and deployed at scale to reduce costs.
Ultimately, an EV engine has fewer moving parts than an ICE (gas/diesel engine). You don't need a complicated multi-speed transmission in an EV. Because the engine is so much simpler, it's less expensive to manufacture. Because it has fewer parts, it has much cheaper maintenance. It is actually a good piece of technology from a purely financial perspective for this reason.
In another 10 years, we will certainly be seeing quite affordable EVs.
Many who already have to commute hours one way just to get to work?
In an ideal world you would never need to drive that far to get to work, or really not need to drive at all. One of the reasons the US is so car-dependent is because of its terrible zoning practices. I often advocate for transit-oriented development and the elimination of pointless restrictions on housing construction. This would make it much more affordable to live near work. Local governments just have to get their act together and stop being NIMBYs.
I mean...it's all new vehicles sold in 2035. Many people don't buy new cars, so in reality there will be a long tail here. And yes, EV semi-trucks are in production and in use. Here is an article...
I mean...it's all new vehicles sold in 2035. Many people don't buy new cars, so in reality there will be a long tail here. And yes, EV semi-trucks are in production and in use. Here is an article from April talking about Tesla's slow production of their own truck, but it also talks about Daimler's eCascadia and just gives a good snapshot of where the industry was more than half a year ago.
I'm not really "hip" to the whole EV industry and I am very skeptical that this rule survives the next 4 years. But I also don't think that CA is going to suffer a recession for it-- if it looks like the target won't be met, they'll just adjust it as we do with all things related to climate. On the plus side, it gives all manufacturers a common target rather than waiting to see if anyone else changes their lineups first.
The regulation applies to automakers (not dealers) and covers only new vehicle sales. It does not impact existing vehicles on the road today, which will still be legal to own and drive.
You might be surprised looking into these issues you're speculating on. Many appartment complexes are being built with EV chargers. I'm seeing EV chargers popping up in grocery store parking lots,...
You might be surprised looking into these issues you're speculating on. Many appartment complexes are being built with EV chargers. I'm seeing EV chargers popping up in grocery store parking lots, business lots, and even at gas stations. The availability to charge while doing other activities is extremely convenient. As an EV owner, I really don't think about charging most weeks despite not being able to charge at home, because I can charge once or twice a week at work. It would absolutely be more convenient to have a garage to charge in at home, but it's not really any more inconvenient than it was needing to remember to get gas. For people who do have an outlet at home they can charge with, they basically start every day with a "full tank of gas" so to speak. And that's just from slow charging off a house outlet.
As for EV semis, yes there are several companies working on developing these and there are several on market. It's not just a research thing. It's not a big market yet and from what I've seen the current ones are targeted for doing city deliveries rather than long haul (though I know work is being done here as well).
Current EV tech doesn't address every transportation need and there's still innovation to do. However, current tech covers a LOT of traveling needs and has gotten really good. The idea that EV tech isn't good just straight doesn't hold water.
Until EV technology achieves all of these things it isn't going to work and there's going to try to force a round peg into a square hole and then they'll cry when the economy crashes cause no one can get to work or get their goods where it needs to go.
You're setting an outrageously high bar that doesn't make any sense. Something doesn't have to be perfect to be a good solution. This comes across pretty emotionally charged and not rooted in how anything really happens. Technological progress is incremental and made up of lots of small improvements. No problem is ever fully fixed in the first iteration and it's naive to think that's how we should approach fixing things.
I don't know about their availability in California, but one of the largest employers in my town is a Volvo plant where they produce (among other things) EV semi-trucks, so they definitely exist.
As far as I know they aren't making EV semi trucks
I don't know about their availability in California, but one of the largest employers in my town is a Volvo plant where they produce (among other things) EV semi-trucks, so they definitely exist.
If everyone could collectively pull their heads out of their asses and focus on cars a bit less, electric trains have infinite range and are cheaper to run than trucks. And it's insane that...
What about shipping? As far as I know they aren't making EV semi trucks. How are any goods going to get transported where they need to go? There's no way you could have an EV truck with the same distance a diesel truck has.
If everyone could collectively pull their heads out of their asses and focus on cars a bit less, electric trains have infinite range and are cheaper to run than trucks.
And it's insane that everyone is commuting daily into LA via car, consistent routes in high-traffic areas is where trains excel. Seriously, the cost of trains is less than a tenth of cars, so if we're really worried about cost of living then they are the obvious choice.
Unless the shortcomings of EVs (price, charger availability, time to charge, range in some cases) are resolved within the next decade, I can see one of two things happening. Either this deadline...
Unless the shortcomings of EVs (price, charger availability, time to charge, range in some cases) are resolved within the next decade, I can see one of two things happening. Either this deadline will get extended a bunch of times much like the Real ID requirement to fly has (almost 20 years), or Californians will just buy cars from out of state. As someone who is about the buy an ICE vehicle because EV does not meet my needs and being a realist about how long it takes to build out national infrastructure for something as ubiquitous as driving, I have almost no confidence that ICE vehicles will actually stop being sold in the US in 10 years.
Comment box Scope: comment response, personal analysis Tone: neutral Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none My confidence intervals that the metrics you mention will be achieved by 2035: Price:...
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Scope: comment response, personal analysis
Tone: neutral
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
My confidence intervals that the metrics you mention will be achieved by 2035:
Price: low/medium confidence. I think cars as a whole will get more expensive due to (necessary) safety regulation and consumers wanting additional luxury features (treating more luxuries than before as the norm). However, I also see battery technology decreasing in cost substantially. There are so many different valid solutions to battery prices, and unlike nuclear fusion they are easy to commercialize. I think this is by far the biggest problem EVs have to overcome... but it is possible to build EVs cheaply. You can get them from China for $10,000.
Charger availability: extremely high confidence/near certainty. See AFDC Trends: if the ~20% annual growth rate continues, there will be about 1.4 million public L2 or DC charging ports nationwide in 10 years, which according to their estimates would more than satisfy requirements for a 100% electric fleet. I am very confident that this growth rate will continue due to the billions of dollars being invested in the charging network by the federal government and private companies.
Time to charge: high confidence. New technology coming to production in 2025 could lower DC fast charging times to 10 minutes. Several billion dollars are being invested into expanding the DC charging network. I slightly doubt we will actually see 10-minute 20% to 80% DC charge times, or they will be expensive, but I'm essentially certain based on AFDC datasets that the DC fast charging network will expand considerably.
Range: medium/high confidence. There are already EVs on the road with ranges of more than 500 miles (theoretically). I think that in 10 years we will have "on-paper" ranges closer to 600-650 miles and "real" ranges of about 500 miles. This is on par with gasoline-powered cars. With an expanded charging network (which I think is near-certain), this should be fine. I think that consumers have ridiculous expectations for range considering 93% of trips are under 30 miles, and it's possible that consumer expectations will increase further. But I see them being generally met.
This has an inverse correlation with my confidence interval for price. The more range consumers expect, the higher the price of the vehicle. But I think there will eventually be a point where manufacturers start differentiating more clearly between short-range, mid-range, and long-range EVs and where consumers will have no problem with that.
Metrics you didn't mention:
Charging software consolidation: high confidence. Manufacturers are pushing for "universal plug and charge" nationally/globally in 2025 and beyond. This reduces a minor friction point for EV users.
Off-grid charging: medium confidence. Drivers may be stranded from chargers if they are irresponsible or doing something really niche. It seems like some companies are releasing tech to address this, such as a solar-powered roof rack that could be used for emergency charge, and perovskite solar automotive paint for the same purpose.
Charging station amenities: medium confidence. I think that EV charging stations will start to become more like gas station rest stops, with protection from the elements and nearby convenience stores or restaurants. However, I think this will be limited to large rest stops, mostly, which could continue to be a mild inconvenience.
Cultural acceptance: low/medium confidence. There may continue to be some sort of culture war about electric cars, especially from people who identify with "country lifestyles" (even if they live in the city). I doubt that 100% of people will be happy about the mandates, even if they are unhappy for tribal reasons rather than real ones. But I also think it won't matter because these people don't represent enough of the market to stop the transition.
being a realist about how long it takes to build out national infrastructure for something as ubiquitous as driving,
Good to be realistic but I think you have reason to be optimistic here. Because most people in the US drive, there is much demand for making that a high-quality experience. As more people adopt EVs, that pressure mounts. An interesting article from Ben James on this subject: Actually, we can deploy energy infrastructure very quickly
I do hope that you and @vord are right about this. There's a lot to like about EV's, I accept that they are the future, and I'm unfortunately in a badly-timed spot where my current vehicle has...
I do hope that you and @vord are right about this. There's a lot to like about EV's, I accept that they are the future, and I'm unfortunately in a badly-timed spot where my current vehicle has issues where it will be necessary to purchase a replacement vehicle well before these issues are ironed out to the point where it makes practical sense for me to go that route. I'm not saying that these changes are impossible to reach in 10 years. I'm more predicting that between the incoming government leadership for at least the next 4 years, combined with the overall lukewarm reception of EVs across the average person (outside of the bubble of the progressive populous of Tildes and Reddit) to push their leaders to make the required changes, I am highly skeptical that things will move as quickly as they could/need to in order to meet a 10 year deadline. I can see things like incentives to build chargers, changes in vehicle regulations, and some of the more idealistic (and unlikely be accepted by most local governments) idea like mandating that business provide free charging either stall out or just not happen under the incoming administration.
I agree that 2035 is likely a realistic target from a technological standpoint. The rate of progress in EV tech is astounding and shows no sign of slowing down. It would not surprise me in the...
I agree that 2035 is likely a realistic target from a technological standpoint. The rate of progress in EV tech is astounding and shows no sign of slowing down. It would not surprise me in the least if even by 2030 the average EV makes current models look like dinosaurs.
The biggest hurdle by far is culture. ICE vehicles have been very comfortably nestled in popular culture for the better part of a century by this point and oil/car companies have spared no expense in spreading EV FUD far and wide.
Comment box Scope: comment response, personal perspective Tone: neutral Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none My hope is that cultural preferences for ICEs will be overridden by future EVs that are...
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Scope: comment response, personal perspective
Tone: neutral
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
My hope is that cultural preferences for ICEs will be overridden by future EVs that are ultimately cheaper to buy and maintain than ICEs. While ICEs are indeed nestled into American culture, I think really... cars (any cars) are nestled into American culture.
Also, EVs are quieter, smoother to drive, and don't smell bad. These are small things, but they give the cars a more modern feel, even to people who don't care about the environment. Anyone who genuinely likes loud, bumpy, and smelly cars cannot be convinced - but I don't think there are a lot of people who will really die on this hill.
10 years is both a very short time and a very long time. The one thing about culture worth mentioning - lots of people who might be sentimentally attached to gas cars are (let's be honest) rural and therefore less wealthy than average, and therefore more likely to buy a used car. This regulation only targets new sales. So if we're talking about whether this regulation will "survive," really the people who need to be convinced ASAP are the people buying new cars - they're setting the tone for the market that automakers and legislators are responding to.
I'm confident that all the so-called "coastal elites" can be fully convinced to go full-electric within 10 years and probably sooner, in a practical sense, as well as a large portion of upper-middle class people just about anywhere in the country. If it takes the rest of the country another 5-10 years for ICEs to lose their luster and start to feel antiquated, that's probably okay.
People used to love muscle cars from the 1960s. Some people still drive them (because they are cool). But most people don't care, and aren't voting for a politician who wants to "bring back muscle cars." Like, it just doesn't matter.
The interstate highway system was started in 1956, and was mostly built before 1970. Most anything can easily be accomplished in a decade if we actually try. In the case of building a charging...
being a realist about how long it takes to build out national infrastructure for something as ubiquitous as driving
The interstate highway system was started in 1956, and was mostly built before 1970. Most anything can easily be accomplished in a decade if we actually try. In the case of building a charging network, it means incentivizing green energy production and mandating charger installs in parking areas.
You know what's not cheap and easy? Installing and maintaining gas tanks and pumps. Most gas stations sell fuel at-cost and the real money comes from the snacks.
Installing Level 2 chargers is easy. Need a 240V with 50A double-throw breaker, some 8 gauge wire and conduit, and a < $1,000 piece of machinery. About the same level of difficulty as installing an electric dryer. Costs maybe $5k for a pair to be installed, even without incentives.
It could be even easier and cheaper if we dispense with the notion that companies should be able to charge for L2. Instead of installing chargers, just install 240V outlets, and everyone will throw one of these in their trunk. Then we're talking on the order of $2k or less to install.
Assuming $0.25/kwh, each spot costs about $2.40 per hour of use. So for the cost of one minimum wage employee in NJ ($15.49), a business could have 5 free chargers going during business hours. Walmart would probably make more money as bored people browsed the shelves instead of sitting in their car.
Added bonus: Mandating free charging in parking lots gives a lot of incentive to charge per-hour for parking in the lot, which @scroll_lock explained quite well here why that would be a good thing. (Aside to @scroll_lock: I wish I had thought of this wording in that thread).
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The US state of California represents an outsized portion of the American population and economic activity. It is the most populous state by about 9 million.
While cities in California historically had extremely robust streetcar networks (public transportation), most of them like Los Angeles tore up most of those tracks in the 20th century and have since been dealing with externalities of the overuse of automobiles in every part of the state. The infrastructure from having so many cars is environmentally destructive by itself. Just as importantly, most of those cars emit toxic, polluting chemicals into the air that simultaneously give your children asthma and lung cancer, and contribute to the greenhouse gas effect, causing global warming and climate change. This has negative economic consequences for everyone in the entire world.
Reducing car dependency and overall automobile use is important to making the world cleaner and nicer to live in, but a big part of the problem can be solved by regulating the toxic chemicals emitted by car engines.
Since the Environmental Protection Agency was founded in 1970, it has regulated emissions of toxic pollutants for health and climate protection reasons. However, as a federal agency, the EPA is not always an aggressive regulator; some presidential administrations do not care about public health or the environment and choose to limit the additional regulations the agency produces.
For decades, California has requested waivers from the federal government to enact stricter emissions regulations than the EPA (CA is the only state allowed to do this proactively). For decades, the federal government has agreed to this. In fact, a number of states are constitutionally tied to California's extra-strict emissions regulations ("Section 177" states), rather than the EPA's not-strict-enough regulations, which is a funny way around the limitation. When the California Air Resources Board (CARB) enacts a new rule limiting the toxic pollutants that automobiles are allowed to emit, manufacturers across the nation have to agree to the new standards. California plus all those other states are huge markets: they represent about 187 million people, or ~56% of the US population.
Some politicians who want your children to get lung cancer recently appealed to the Supreme Court to stop California from enacting these health regulations. Thankfully, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case and upheld California's ability to regulate emissions more strictly than the EPA.
Today (Wednesday), the EPA just granted California two new waivers to ban the sale of all gasoline-powered cars by the year 2035. This is possible only because the Clean Air Act allows California to set its own stricter emissions standards, and because the Supreme Court upheld the state's ability to do this.
The goal of these regulations is to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles. All electric vehicles on the market have lower lifetime emissions than all gas-powered vehicles, including manufacturing and end-of-life pollution. Electric-powered vehicles do not produce emissions themselves since they use electric motors with no exhaust. Even if a portion (<100%) of that electricity is generated using fossil fuels, it is necessarily cleaner than if it were 100% fossil fuels!
The incoming Trump administration has promised to stop the transition to EVs by any means necessary. However, I doubt they will actually revoke any such waivers once granted:
The oil industry is suing the Biden administration for allowing California to make the air safer to breathe. To be clear, oil executives literally want to give your children lung cancer. Every day, oil executives wake up, rub their hands together gleefully (imagine a fly rubbing its hands together: they actually learned this behavior from fly populations), and mutter to themselves, "I am so excited to make money off of innocent children choking to death on diesel exhaust." Then they go to board meetings and scheme to influence the government to rescind safety regulations, and also scheme to convince you via marketing that you should vote in ways that allow your children to get lung cancer "for the greater good." If the oil executives get their way, they would completely remove all health regulations in the industry so that, eventually, EVERYONE gets lung cancer. This is because oil executives believe that causing people to die prematurely is good for society.
Personally, I disagree with oil executives. I think it is better for people to live long, healthy lives. I do not want your children to get asthma or lung cancer. Therefore, I believe that California's clean air regulations are completely reasonable. These regulations will save money for the country in healthcare and climate costs immediately. I support the transition from diesel and gasoline-powered vehicles to electric vehicles. Personally I would rather see fewer vehicles and machines altogether too, but that is a different topic.
Can we... not do this?
Nobody is saying that. Nobody thinks that. It's clear that they're prioritizing profits over health, but that is very different from thinking health is actively bad. This sort of absurd exaggeration helps nobody and makes many people less willing to listen to what you say.
Fastest way to completely undermine your argument and one of the biggest signs, in my eyes, that someone doesn't actually understand how to convince or communicate issues in a productive way and instead just wants to rant about them.
If you want to vent, fine. If you actually want to achieve stopping what you obviously see as extreme evil, then find a better way to message because shit like this not only won't work, but will actively harm your cause.
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That's a fine opinion, but most of the activism I do is in the real world and has pretty much the exact opposite tone, so I give myself leeway to vent on the internet as I see fit.
I work with nonprofits to:
The tone we employ in community outreach for that kind of thing is unlike the material you may see on the internet. In general it is more positive (less negative), constructive, and focused on listening more than preaching. Typically it is also grounded in specific actions rather than theoretical ideas, and the examples we might use while canvassing tend to be things that are "close to home."
Respectfully you do not have to lecture me about tone or "damage done," especially on a website whose entire audience is people who already agree with climate regulation! When I read Eichmann in Jerusalem it changed some of my opinions about the "banality of evil." In my opinion if someone is more concerned with the way I have uncharitably but nonviolently expressed my distaste for the oil industry's harmful actions than the harmful actions themselves, they are missing the point.
It seems to me that activism on Tildes is unlikely to achieve any significant effect. (Tildes is not that popular.) If making extreme statements is bad, it’s because it annoys other people on Tildes, and we should write for the people who are here. That’s a good enough reason to avoid it and there are no higher stakes.
Activism on any given social media will not have any real effect. It may have some short-term effect temporarily like changing some wording or other banal thing, but real activism happens in the real world. It turns out that it’s really hard to motivate people to do things if you’re not in the room with them.
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I think this is mostly true, but the nonprofits I work with always use social media heavily in order to encourage real-world/physical action. They spend a lot of time and energy on crafting good Instagram posts, newsletters, op-eds, etc. Each of those have a different tone because they have a different audience, but they all support the mission.
It is worth emphasizing that non every person on the internet/social media is the same, and not every platform is the same. Most people do not care about most problems, including big problems. However, there are some people who are "super-spreaders" of information, in a good or bad way, or are "super-affectors" of the world. For example, a website full of the following people:
If an activist makes a statement on such a website, that is like going to a conference. It has a different, greater, and more meaningful second-order impact because everyone listening is more likely than average to reiterate it, or the part of it they like, in some way. Since this is a second-order effect, the original message is necessarily translated through the initial audience and molded to their preferences when it is reiterated, but the original message can still come through in some capacity.
I happen to think that Tildes is full of a mild variety of "super-affector," though mostly academics/professionals (and some donors) and only a handful of career activists. Demographically this is evident by the fact that most people here are more educated than average, wealthier than average, whiter than average, more secular than average, and otherwise have qualities that correlate with political agency and influence. I also suspect, though I have no proof, that a couple popular-ish YouTubers who make environmental content are either secretly on this website, or are one (close) degree of separation from it. I can think of various other platforms where this is true.
Believe it or not I usually try not to be excessively antagonistic on here, because I am through my real-world advocacy intimately familiar with the proclivities of the white professional class in America (claiming progressivism while often enabling structural inaction), and I know that people here don't respond very well to emotional arguments. This thread is an example of that. People on this website mostly do not believe that emotion/lived experience is an equally or more valid rhetoric than logic/reason/perfectly cool and collected argumentation with well-formatted citations, including in humor (and, ironically, are mostly unwilling to accept that this is subjective). That's an epistemology consistent with this site's demographics - the same thing comes through when we analyze political coalitions.
On the note of response (or lack thereof) to emotional arguments, I think that much of it has to do with burnout.
In the past decade and change, social media has vastly increased overall awareness of many woes. This is great in some ways, but it’s also been a bit of a double-edged sword. With advocates for more issues than can possibly be counted all vying for time in the spotlight, appeals to emotion (which have proven by far to be the most effective method) have spiraled out of control, resulting in a situation in which even mildly conscientious individuals find themselves overwhelmed. There’s simply too many woes in the world to be highly emotionally engaged with all of them.
And yet, emotionally charged messages continue to intensify and multiply in number on social media. This has understandably led to mass burnout.
So with that in mind, it would make perfect sense that the type of individual that might seek out a site like Tildes would be cognizant of that burnout, to have sought out alternatives because of it, and to have developed a kneejerk reaction to impassioned arguments even for issues where those are more than called for.
Of course, there’s a certain level of privilege that even having the option to try to opt out of emotional exhaustion requires that must be acknowledged, but that doesn’t mean that people in such a situation won’t try to seek relief anyway… that’s only natural.
My first moment of recognizing the ramping up of the emotional arms race was exactly a decade ago, during 2014’s charitable giving sweeps
weekmonth. It seemed that every TV was displaying even more starving puppies and sad children than usual for December. Perhaps I would have remained ignorant of the pattern for longer for longer if I were not in a long-distance relationship with my ex during that time, thus spending more time in hotel lobbies, bars, and other places with TV news channels on.I was not the only person who noticed the uptick. The analysis consensus settled on a narrative that blamed that summer’s ice bucket challenge. People dunking ice water on their head and being inspired to donate to ALS research blew their annual charitable giving budget by the end of July. Come the end of the year, multiple charities were well short of their fundraising goals to fund their 2015 operations, thus the escalated emotional begging. As it turns out, the public views charity as charity and viral donation drives redirect the money that’s typically donated to the “usual” causes at the end of the year when it’s time to do the right thing and cut them a check.
Just wanted to add that I greatly appreciate your comments, and they're a breath of fresh air. If I remember correctly, you're a minister, or something similar? I've had a lot of bad experiences with religion growing up, but I've met some people that seemed similarly "educated" about it (for lack of a better word), and I've always respected them and their viewpoints, especially when they actually get out there and try to help people and generally act in a Christ-like manner.
I think what you said about the white professional class demographic is spot on, though. Despite being one myself now, I've found myself unable to articulate just what it is beyond being generally unempathetic, so thank you. Tildes can get a little homogenous and frustrating because of the dominance of the white professional worldview, and it's been making me less likely to use the site in general. It's great to have someone with a different perspective, but who can also talk on that level.
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Well, I'm glad that you've gained something from my comments!
I'm not a minister but I am sincerely religious. I go to church every week and if I'm making a decision without a clear answer, I will pray for guidance from God. That might be a surprise to people on this website because I spend all my time citing research articles and government datasets, and talking about technology.
There are a few theists on this website (Pretty sure one or more ministers... but I can't remember who!) Rarely, but occasionally, a nice discussion about spiritual worldviews pops up in ~life/religion. Usually when people discuss religion here it is in a negative context. I guess I can't blame anyone for that, but I think people are missing out on something meaningful by restricting their knowledge to that which is scientifically empirical.
I'm not a conservative person, but I do feel some kind of resentment or distrust if I am too open about my religion in a very secular/liberal/technological group of people. No one is ever aggressive. But it's like I am "reduced" in their eyes, somehow foolish for 'believing in' God - I'm not sure what they think exactly. I am not ashamed of my religion but I dont bring it up too much because people just don't get it.
I wanted to share that I have the same experience. I'm sure there are half a dozen of us!
Oil executives everywhere are rejoicing that y'all were here to defend them from scroll_lock's painfully obvious hyperbole.
Or just maybe I'd actually like to see real discussion of an issue that's vitally important to life on this planet rather than mud slinging nonsense that distracts and divides, but sure label me as someone apparently defending them.
The irony here is that you're not having that discussion. Ignoring that bit and discussing the post or making this point a smaller point within a larger comment about the actual topic would have derailed the conversation less.
I do not waste my time attempting to engage with people who clearly aren't engaging in good faith to begin
But then, you did engage just about one thing.
Which for the record you're free to do. I don't agree with your interpretation that the person who actively works in this area IRL and who made a snarky comment in the middle of a dense post is "not engaging in good faith" but again, you're free to do so.
But to what end is all of this then?
No i did not. I engaged with someone else who responded and agreed with them because they also find this kind of hyperbolic rhetoric to be pointless.
The end of it is to try and stop people from sounding like trump supporters talking about the woke left or every other pointlessly hyperbolic rabble rousing statement.
Fair, I lost track of who said what in this thread.
On that topic, I'm up for continuing our conversation in the other thread, I couldn't find the data we were discussing in what you linked.
I think the characterization of scroll_lock is incorrect.
Not engaging in good faith? If you were an oil executive and @scroll_lock said that to your face you could maybe make that claim, but I don't think you are, and their comment had plenty of verifiable information worth engaging with and zero indication that they wouldn't be willing to have a back-and-forth with you. Including insults against people who immense power and are also not present is hardly the bar for bad faith.
80% of their comment was exactly what you asked for, and yet you chose to not engage with any of it.
It's very clearly sardonic/sarcastic, and @scroll_lock includes their signature "comment box" in all of their comments that explicitly states/warns about that ahead of time.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you didn't read the comment box first? Maybe for humorous and sarcastic comments like that one, it would be better to make the comment box open by-default, @scroll_lock?
In case you don't know, you can make a
detailsbox be open automatically by starting it with<details open>instead of just<details>. Example:This is a comment box that is closed by-default
"A tremendous loneliness comes over you. Everybody in the world is doing something without you."
This is a comment box that is open by-default
"Your mangled brain would like you to know there is a boxer called Contact Mike."
Anyways, I think @scroll_lock's comment is funny, and they couldn't do much more to make the reader aware of the tone and content before reading. I welcome this sort of occasional unhinged humor. It's very disco.
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I didn't know/forgot you could do that, but sure I will use an open comment box for future edgy comments.
To be honest I thought that comment was so obviously absurd that no one would be offended by it, and I thought my comment box would have removed any doubt. I occasionally make similar remarks on here and I assumed I post often enough, and am weird enough, that it is not a shocking kind of message. I mean what I said, in the sense that I don't approve of oil execs' decisions and I think they are knowingly making bad and even evil decisions (I'm sure they've read Eichmann in Jerusalem too; they all went to college, they simply do not care), but it was not supposed to be an antagonistic or attention-seeking remark per se because I thought everyone here was on the same page and okay with having a stupid laugh about something that is normally depressing and not funny. So I was surprised, but also not surprised, that the first and almost only response to the thread was a remark about that one paragraph and not the rest of it which I spent 30 minutes writing. Perhaps this is typical of liberal spaces: people, especially academics, have a specific way they like to communicate and aren't willing to look past violations of that structure.
I did play Disco Elysium years ago and enjoyed it. I have never played a video game that weird/cool, before or since. What a strange and unbelievable experience.
fwiw, on the Three Cheers app both of those comment boxes appear the same (they start closed)
CC @talklittle
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The quoted statement is sardonic. As a courtesy, I include "comment boxes" in my comments to indicate unseriousness.
I believe humorous sarcasm has a place in discourse because it can jolt people out of the blindness toward societal problems they are otherwise insulated from.
Personally I think that people in positions of authority have a significant ethical imperative to act consciously. Educated people in positions of authority should be aware that the decisions they make are not arbitrary and genuinely affect human life. I intentionally used the grouping "oil executives" because the group of people making those decisions have read all the actuarial tables showing how many people will die from pollution and how much it will cost their companies. They know perfectly well what they are doing and they are totally fine with it.
I don't have any problem with being textually aggressive about the harm caused by industry executives who have intentionally and knowingly spread misinformation about climate change, causing millions of premature deaths and trillions of dollars of unnecessary costs to society.
Aside from the satirical hyperbole as others addressed, I reject the notion that nobody is doing this.
While they might not be literally saying these things, the facts about the harms of fossil fuels are undisputed by anybody who is not a liar.
So by continuing to push for expansion of these industries rather than working to shut them down and minimize their impact, they are saying it with their actions. People just don't like to be reminded of realities and prefer to speak in euphemisms about bad things. For example, my workplace recently referred to the Virginia Tech shooting as "the Virginia Tech incident."
It's much like how the facts are in about trickle down economics are in...they don't trickle down. Yet people who monetarily benefit are saying "my wealth and power is more important than your wellbeing," even if they never make a press release to say so.
That's different, though! It's not people being evil just because they really want you to have lung cancer. They're being evil because they value being rich more than they value you not having lung cancer. It's people prioritizing things differently than we would like them to. In a world without economic incentives for giving people lung cancer, we would likely have a lot less lung cancer.
That is a critically important distinction because it gives us, as a society, more knobs to adjust (reduce or eliminate the incentives for doing the bad thing, or add greater incentives for doing good things instead) which are likely to be much more effective at actually fixing the problem than repeatedly calling people evil is.
The thing is, they do want "you" [the general you, more people within the population being spoken about, not "you" specifically] to have lung cancer, because the lung cancer is directly tied to them making more profits. Yes, sure, if they could put in the same amount of effort and receive the same amount of profits without you getting lung cancer, they'd probably be fine with that, but that's not one of the options, so they're choosing the one where you get lung cancer and they are happy to do it. Willingly, knowingly causing harm because it brings you profit is not materially different to the people receiving the harm than doing it because you like the harm.
Obfuscating this informed and completely voluntary decision to do harm white-washes and normalizes the acts and makes people complacent in the face of it. I don't agree that it gives us more opportunity to adjust incentives. How do you make not giving people cancer more profitable than giving people cancer? You need regulations. At that point, why not just regulate against giving people cancer? The answer is people the same people profiting from the cancer lobby and donate money to prevent those regulations from happening, either the ones that make giving people cancer less profitable, or the ones that ban it. If you have a realistic counter-example that could apply to this situation and would be harmed by the sort of rhetoric present in @scroll_lock's comment, I'd be interested to hear it, and I am open to changing my mind. As it sits, though, we need public sentiment to turn against the wealthy who are killing people every single day more than we need to humanize them and try to figure out how to placate them into not killing us anymore.
So there's this sort of disconnected reading mode I can enter, where I'm still taking the words in, but barely processing them. I do this when I still want to finish reading the text for some reason, but I have decided the author is full of shit and if I try to really grok everything they're saying I'm just going to get mad about it and my day will be worse. I usually only reserve this mode for particularly absurd bigoted right-wing rhetoric. Other people probably just stop reading when they hit similar conditions. Either way, it's a defense mechanism against psychic damage that means I'm not taking anywhere near the full force of your rhetoric.
And I slipped into that mode here, and had to go back and reread it a second time, because I noticed it was happening and that this was the first time it had ever happened on text where I agreed with the message. That was such a weird feeling that it led me to post my comment.
Is the goal to actually fix problems, or just to get mad about them? If you actually want things to get better, you need to look at causes, not effects, and then deal with those. There are lots of groups of illnesses with similar symptoms, but that doesn't mean doctors should just say "you are in severe pain, but good news, the various sorts of pain are not materially different to each other! You should just not be in severe pain no matter what! We must turn the sentiment of your immune system against the pointy object extending from your torso!"
Or, put another way, what is public sentiment going to actually do? (If you're about to point to the recent CEO shooting, how many people's lives have been materially improved by that?)
That answer is simple. Complacent people don't want to fix the problem because they don't see the system as broken. Remember that article from a few days ago, where the main problem with adopting Medicare for All is that most people are satisfied with their health insurance? Particularly how they were satisfied if they never had to use it.
So, you need to stoke some degree of understanding the problem. Anger at injustice is pretty foundational to that.
Remember how approximately 0 police reform happened before the George Floyd protests. Then as anger rates were through the roof, there was talk of them.... even a few actions taken. Now that the immediate anger has subsided, we're back to approximately 0 police reform.
So public sentiment being glad that a health insurance CEO is dead? Well, it's a bit early to talk about full impact, but we can say with some confidence that it killed Blue Cross's plan to time-cap payments to anesthesiologists, which would mean either cutting off anesthetics, rushing surgeries, or charging patients extra. From a pure utilitarian standpoint, that one CEO death prevented hundreds, perhaps thousands, from suffering immense agony or death.
Notice they were also one of the health insurers that removed their leadership page from their website in the wake of the shooting, so they were obviously in damage-control mode.
Honestly? Too soon to tell. My hopes have been up and down about it, but there is undeniably a new fervor in the discussion about the American healthcare system, and more importantly, it's crossing the polticial divide. Right-wing working class people are actually on their own side for once. That could actually get things done! Will it, before the fervor dissipates? Doubtful, but it could actually happen. An increase in class solidarity could come from that shooting.
I started with my answer to that question, because it's important to the rest. Am I advocating that we shoot more CEOs? No. But we can absolutely have the kind of conversations about them that we're having about Brian Thompson while they're alive. Taking the feelings of alienation and helplessness that so much of America is feeling and directing them at the people who are actually causing the problems could absolutely get things done. So you ask "Is the goal to actually fix problems, or just to get mad about them?" and I say we have to do the latter to do the former.
I contend that whether they want to cause harm or just don't care that they're causing harm doesn't matter in terms of solutions. I've already addressed that and gotten no rebuttal. Doing things in a sustainable way is harder and therefore less profitable. You can't make it cheaper without regulations. You can't regulate without a government willing to regulate, which means you either need money, or a strong mandate from the people. The oil manufacturers already have an unapproachable head start on the money.
I'm not really sure if you're calling me or @scroll_lock full of shit, but I'll choose not to take offense. I'd still be very interested to hear about a way to make real change that's harmed by a comment like the original one, which I did not write but did find edifying.
And that's exactly it: We don't want more people to die. But if people die, it's worth doing a societal postmortem to address why it happened. And the important part: Actually implement the changes that need to be made. Like, at work, if a service goes down, and the postmortem reveals it's because we had insufficient monitoring of something, we fix it.... or it ends up happening again. Right now, in America, it seems that maybe we do a bit of navelgazing, but mostly the "actually fix it" gets deferred when the rage dies out.
I think the reason people are somewhat gleeful is because it's giving us the opportunity to do a postmortem that is long overdue because nobody bothers to implement the fixes.
This might sound strange, but celebrating the shooter might prevent deaths, because the powers at be will be much more terrified of it happening again instead of saying "oh that's tragic" then moving on with their day.
It helps that the victim in this case was someone profiting from and inducing additional suffering via their business choices. Opposed to children who died because a gunman was denied mental health meds.
Who is “they”? The specific ownership structures matter. Is it the politicians, the shareholders of hospital groups, the car companies, the oil companies, the pension funds who are major shareholders in all of the above, or someone else?
Not all these groups profit when people get lung cancer.
The oil companies, specifically the people within them with decision making power, and some politicians who have been bought by them.
It is ridiculous that out of all the very good points about very bad policies that scroll-lock makes in this long long comment the top, highly-upvoted reply excerpts one small part to complain about rhetorical framing. Your priorities are absurd. God forbid that anyone get emotional about an important topic or, worse, decide to use it to be convincing!
The problem is that it’s not convincing, and the absurdity of the claims that “oil executives want everyone to get lung cancer” or “want people to die prematurely”, distracts from the actual situation which is arguably worse.
The truth is that they are largely not cartoonish villains scheming about how to get people sick and kill them, but rather they are so removed from the human costs of their decisions that for them, the calculus is solely about numbers on a spreadsheet. The mundanity of it is the part that is scary, because it means that they aren’t different from other people and nearly anyone could make similarly awful choices provided the right circumstances - and likely not recognize what they’re doing as terrible at the time.
Well, let's look at somebody else: The tobacco industry.
Can you say with a straight face that tobacco execs don't want people to get cancer?
Yes, you can waffle about and say "well, they don't actually scheme to give people cancer," but that is objectively not true.
Therefore, any actions they take which furthers their agenda is them scheming to give people cancer. It's just shrouded in the language of sales numbers and profit margins.
Remember, "welfare queens" is just conservative code for black women.
By similar reasoning, people who smoke, though they're well aware of the risks, also "want" to get lung cancer. It's a likely consequence, so how could they not want it?
This doesn't seem to be how risk-taking works, emotionally? People want to do risky stuff despite the risks, and there are markets catering to them.
Somehow we don't use similar reasoning for makers of alcoholic drinks, tanning equipment, ski equipment, hang gliders, mountain bikes, and so on.
You could think of it as the YOLO market.
Speaking as a former smoker of 20 years, risk management is not a huge part of the decisionmaking process. It's peer pressure, marketing, and a risk profile of "sure there is an intangible risk at some indetermined point in the future."
Which is somewhat fine when that is a choice they are making for themselves. It's another when somebody's entire livelihood depends on convincing other people to make that choice. We don't generally think of drug dealers as providing a valuable service to the community, despite them fulfilling a market demand. FWIW I do consider alcohol and other drugs to be equally bad in this vein, which is why their marketing power should be the first on the chopping block. Tobacco companies in particular specifically design their products to be more addictive.
The broader YOLO market you define, shouldn't be able to lobby against regulations, or make people sign bullshit "you can't sue us" waivers....which is what a lot of these companies do and it is scummy. That said, the risks with those is a lot more determinate of the skill level and risk taking of the user, more than being an almost-certain outcome with prolonged use.
To circle back around to the evilness of oil companies (and health insurers).
They know the downstream risks/consequences of their actions. Importantly, they know their customers do not properly judge those risks and consequences themselves. It's an expolititive relationship, an inherently immoral one.
When they are faced with a regulation requiring sacrificing some or all of their business (with the will of the people via elected officials), the moral choice would be to comply and figure out a new path which reduces harm. Not to dig in their heels to try to stop the regulation.
There's a huge difference between making that decision for yourself and making it for someone else.
I don't have any particular love for moguls of any kind, but all of these items can be uaed without significant harm, which is definitely what the manufacturers want because they want to keep selling these items to those customers for as long as possible. ICE cars cannot be used without contributing to pollution and climate change, and the problems they're causing don't create the same problem for oil executives that a dead skier does for Ski Boots R Us because they take too long to manifest.
I'm not sure "making a decision for someone else" adequately describes how the tobacco industry works. Growers and manufacturers make a decision to sell a product. Distributors and retailers make decisions to buy and sell things. Consumers make decisions about what to buy. This is a cooperative effort.
All the people involved are responsible for participating. Although, some people might find it easier to quit this game than others. Vapes work for some.
You know the tobacco companies spend tons of money on marketing right? 8 billion just on cigarettes. Another billion on vapes.
And that they're selling an addictive product whose average first age of use is 13, that's more addictive the younger you are and whose addictive nature is so well know they must warn you about it when you buy it?
Most smokers didn't make a reasoned choice to start smoking. And the addiction means making a reasoned choice to quit is incredibly difficult to start and maintain.
It is not just happenstance that people make a product and other people buy it.
Yes, tobacco companies are bad, and I’m sure that most decisions to start smoking aren’t reasoned choices. (Most choices are not reasoned choices.)
It’s still not someone else making the decision for you when a kid makes bad choices, even if they had bad influences.
Also, quitting smoking is hard, but it seems like switching from smoking to vapes isn’t all that hard? Even if we consider it falling into a trap, remaining trapped for decades is a choice when there’s a well-known way out.
That answer was for people who smoke, not tobacco manufacturers. I'm very comfortable saying that tobacco manufacturers want people to have lung cancer. I'm delighted when regulation curtails their ability to influence people into getting lung cancer, and upset when the restrictions on them are relaxed.
If they are delightedly slamming the button that says "Make millions of dollars and kill thousands of people" I don't really care that the font on the latter part of the sentence is a little smaller.
The distinction between “oil executives want everyone to get lung cancer” and “oil executives want [things to happen that will cause] everyone to get lung cancer” or “ they want people to die prematurely” and “they want [things to happen which will cause] people to die prematurely” is getting far too much ink and energy. What flavor of evil lurks in their hearts isn't nearly as important as their actions and the subsequent outcomes.
What’s being argued is that it was counterproductive to being convincing. Perhaps it’s rhetoric that plays well on a political ad, but it didn’t win a consensus with the Tildes community.
And this is before also factoring in the glaring efficiency losses from the internal combustion engine. Something that is expected to get hot enough to boil water during use is bound to lose more energy on the way to “energy gets converted into moving forward.”
Context: I live in CA, own an ICE vehicle, and frequently use personal vehicles to self transport when responding to missing persons incidents as part of a mountain rescue team.
I realize I have a fairly niche use case, but the switch to electric vehicles will create some interesting logistical challenges. I typically end up driving 3+ hours split between highway and straight uphill, which is basically worst-case for EVs. Even if I kept a vehicle fully charged at all times, I'd probably need to stop along the way. On a personal trip a partial charge might be good considering the return trip would be downhill. But until charging networks expand in the mountains I'd be reluctant for SAR to go with less range than I could have.
I doubt the ICE ban would make an exception for personal vehicles like mine. But assuming there is an exception for government vehicles, I could drive an hour + out of my way to pick up a Sheriff's vehicle, but IDK how refueling those will work long-term.
All that said, the further I have to go, the lower the urgency. So possibly it will simply mean that I wake up earlier to account for increased travel time.
Personal logistics aside; it seems odd that parties worried about big government want to use federal regulation to limit state regulation. I generally prefer laws and regulations to be more localized and incoming administrations clawing back these waivers is obviously political or at best the federal government trying to take the economic steering wheel.
CA is incredibly diverse, so it'll be a bumpy ride. But if we get it all figured out then there won't be many places in the country that can say 'oh that works for them, but it won't work for us' (unless we end up socializing the hell out of it, but that's not going to happen).
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This is a pretty niche case for the overall population (most people live in a place that is fairly flat and rarely leave flat-ish places), but maybe that is not niche for people in your local community.
In theory a DC charger can get you charged in 15 minutes, or 10 minutes with upcoming technology. That's not substantially different than stopping for gas. An L2 charger could take like an hour maybe (@vord would know).
Modern EVs have 300+ mile ranges (on flat ground). I'm not sure how much an uphill drive would reduce range, but if we say 1/3 (IDK), then you would be looking at a 200-mile range. It is not usually that cold in CA so there shouldn't be big range reductions otherwise.
Looking at a map, I can't see a place in California where you would get anywhere near close to out of range between L2 chargers. If you are going from, like, Redding to Reno via 44/Susanville, you would probably have to stop at least once, but you could do it even on just DC chargers. But you'd probably stop once or twice anyway? So no problem?
The "ban" will apply to new cars sold and not existing cars, AFAIK. They are not going to just ban ICEs. It's more of a phase-out; the planned regulations are actually pretty reasonable.
I don't think they would exempt newly produced municipal vehicles, except for really specific cases like wilderness park rangers or search and rescue operators. I think anyone who is driving a regular car on regular roads would have to abide by the new regulations.
Be aware that 2035 is 11 years from now. The EV charging network is growing at a rate of 20% per year, which is astonishing. There are already almost no places in the US where you are more than like 50 miles from an L2 charger on the new J3400 standard. There are much bigger gaps in the DC network, but closing rapidly, especially along highway routes.
There are about 210,000 EV charging ports in the US right now at more than 8,000 locations (as of Q2 2024, so actually it's probably more like 230,000). If that were to continue to grow at a rate of 20% annually, which is actually pretty reasonable given the many billions of dollars recently invested by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act into the EV charging network (plus much private investment), that would put us at a ridiculous 1.4 million EV charging ports in 10 years. For reference, this is more than the number of charging ports that the Alternative Fuels Data Center believes is necessary to support a ~100% electric automobile fleet nationwide (they suggest a need for 1,067,000 L2 chargers and 182,000 DC fast chargers). There is a lot of money going into making this happen, and it has 10 years to materialize. If it becomes truly obvious that it is impossible, then the regulations will be rescinded. The California legislature is ambitious, not stupid.
It's ideological/economic for the party that is trying to rescind these waivers. They hate California (right now) because the state doesn't vote for them. They aren't targeting Texas (right now) because Texas does vote for them. Politicians are pragmatic so they would immediately change course if it were the other way around.
I think it is a personal vendetta for Donald Trump though. Gavin Newsom's ex-wife is currently married to Donald Trump Jr. Newsom has been super vocal about California doing whatever it wants in Trump's previous term, which Trump didn't like. I think there is two-way enmity. Elon Musk also has some business beef with the state of California and he probably has some personal reason to hate Newsom too, and he currently has the ear of the president.
So to speak to numbers:
I just had my first bad charger experience. Planned a family trip to IKEA Conshohoken, on the order of 80 miles away. Car was topped off at 80%. Saw there was a Charging America fast charger nearby at Plymouth Meeting mall, and figured we'd hit it on the way out while we eat dinner if we needed to. When we got there, we definitely needed to....the cold weather ate into our range something awful, we were around 35%. And we knew it would be worse with return trip with the added weight and being colder.
Unfortunately, 2/4 stations were nonfunctional. The other two showed in use, but we figured we'd swing by since that's wrong half the time anyway, and it was the fastest charger around by a country mile. Turns out the 1 station was in use by a guy who couldn't get it unhooked and was on tech support for his car. And there was a line of 4 cars deep at this point. Some quick math showed that, best case, I'd have to wait an hour for this charging station to be available. I dropped the 2 kids and wife at the mall while I sorted this out.
Went to a nearby (1 mile) L2, which charged at about 20 miles per hour. Would take me about 3 hours to get charged enough to get home. So I pulled up the assortment of charging maps to find a new charger. Three fast-charge options close by, the fastest 10 miles away, an hour long round-trip. Farthest option was out. The two slower options (total of 4 other spots) were also showing used, but they were only 10 minutes away so I could see if the lines were better there. Luckily, the first charger I went to had both in use, but the one guy was almost done charging and I only had to wait 10 minutes. It then took about an hour to charge from 30% to 85%, because this station was at half the capacity.
This whole problem would have been almost completely mitigated if IKEA had anything other than Tesla chargers in the lot. Even the slow L2 would have gotten us enough of a charge while we were in the IKEA to be able to get home, or close enough so we could pass through to the first fast charger we came across.
If we want to fix charging infrastructure, we need a simple rule:
Every gas station must install at least 2 fast charging CCS stations rated at at least 100kw. They must be kept in good working order or be subject to fines.
All of this to say: The situation is looking up, but for people doing huge drives constantly it would make sense to have an exception (and also this is where hydrogen vehicles would shine, and why I personally think that hydrogen fuel cells are the long-term answer).
Thanks for that context and info, you and @scroll_lock. I didn't know the best case had gotten as good as 15 minutes to charge (even if that is for a sedan or some similar best case. a full truck would obviously be double or so, our current truck is an F350 and the Sheriff's are some mid/full size SUV).
2035 is indeed pretty far away, and it does seem like the charging station situation will be figured out by then and situations like yours become and early-adopter pain of the past. I'm less sure about the grid to back those charging stations, but I don't really know much about it aside from some back-of-the-napkin math that says "whoa what's a lot of power".
Speaking of the grid, that's another concern I have both generally and for emergency response. EVs run on a best-case scenario (the power is on). CA likes to catch on fire and when it does PG&E tends to turn the power off. Probably it's prudent for everyone to ensure their vehicle is fully charged when at home and maybe also to have some fossil fuel backup generator to start/continue charging vehicles when power is lost in case of evacuation order. Solar and residential batteries hopefully mitigate this a bit as well.
Last note! Winters in CA are pretty mild (in the mountains 25F +- 20F) so that's not a crazy impact on batteries. I think the bigger thing would be the heat in the summer. Driving through the solar oven of the central valley pretty much requires full AC and I imagine that would wreck the range pretty good.
This is the problem. EV technology sucks. They want to force everyone to use an EV, and that's going to be the death of the economy. You think working class people can afford these outrageous vehicle prices? Many who already have to commute hours one way just to get to work? I guarantee the apartment they live in doesn't have EV chargers. Work most likely doesn't either.
What about shipping? As far as I know they aren't making EV semi trucks. How are any goods going to get transported where they need to go? There's no way you could have an EV truck with the same distance a diesel truck has.
If they ever want EV only to work they have to somehow convince everyone to install EV chargers everywhere. I mean every parking spot. At the grocery store, every street parking spot, every parking garage, every dinky apartment parking lot. And the technology would have to be better to go distances similar to that of gas vehicles on a single tank.
Until EV technology achieves all of these things it isn't going to work and there's going to try to force a round peg into a square hole and then they'll cry when the economy crashes cause no one can get to work or get their goods where it needs to go.
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Yes, this is already happening. I recommend you read the Alternative Fuels Data Center reports on EV charging infrastructure trends. I know I often share dry and boring material on here, but it is shocking how quickly the charging network is being built out. The AFDC publishes reports quarterly showing growth of about 5% per quarter (often more). It has been a rate of about 20% growth year-over-year for about 5 years and shows only signs of sticking to that, or accelerating.
Here's a good article from Ben James: Actually, we can deploy energy infrastructure very quickly.
It is not necessary to install EV chargers in literally every parking spot because most people live in single-family homes and would have access to home charging, but you are correct that some EV chargers will be needed in many places. Luckily we already have electrical infrastructure everywhere you would put a building. This is because all commercial buildings in the US have existing electricity demand. While the charging station costs money to install, it can pay for itself over time (leasing to a charging company, or requiring a small fee to charge).
FYI, many people in cities do not drive cars and therefore do not need charging to begin with.
Private apartment charging is one of the economically harder problems to solve. However, it is also not technically necessary for every parking spot in a garage to have an EV charger. 93% of car trips are under 30 miles, so it's actually totally fine to just park your car and drive it like 1 mile to a charging station. I mean, you don't have a gas station in your parking garage. Why is EV charging fundamentally different?
The easy thing about charging amenities in multi-family housing structures is that landlords and condominium associations respond to market demands very flexibly. If you go on Zillow.com you can search "charger" or "ev" in the filters and find many apartments with EV charging in the garages. These are just the ones that have bothered to specify it in the online listing. Pretty soon I'm sure apartment searching sites will have dedicated filters for that sort of thing, just like they currently have filters for number of parking spots for a house, etc. The Alternative Fuels Data Center Reports also talk a bit about private charging. They show some but not a whole lot of private garage/apartment chargers in the dataset, but they're probably severely undercounting them (they explain this). Since an EV charger increases home value noticeably, it will become quite typical to see more of them in the future.
Let's take a step back - we have shipped goods by rail since 1825 (199 years in England... or 197 years in the US) and waterway and road for millennia. The US freight rail network is the most robust in the world by a great margin. People shit on the passenger rail network here, but the freight network is often described as "the envy of the world." I am not joking. Ask a European freight rail company what they think of the American network, and they will pretty much only have positive things to say. Railroads go straight from mines to factories to warehouses, even in major cities, and railroads are everywhere in the US (zoom in to see the branch lines...). People just don't notice rail infrastructure because they don't look. Also, major waterways like the Mississippi, Great Lakes, and others continue to be extremely important to the shipping industry; shipping by rail is much more energy-efficient than truck, and water even more so. Not everything is shipped by semi truck, not even close, it's not economical for raw materials or even some finished products.
But truck shipping is important too. Since semis are large/heavy and just tend to drive for longer distances than passenger cars, they have not been electrified as quickly. I am not an expert on this industry but I do follow material production and battery trends fairly closely. I can say with a high degree of confidence that the rate of improvement of battery energy density is fast enough that I can totally see a 100% electric freight fleet 10 years from now.
I just shared an article about how the US recently announced $10 billion in loans for new EV charging and battery production. In this case $9 billion of that was for the batteries (on top of another $10 billion that had been financed privately). This has been par for the course for the past few years, with the Joe Biden admin's "Inflation Reduction Act" and "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law" galvanizing the industry. It has been a great contributor to economic growth and has shown how fast things can develop. We have every indication that investment into batteries will continue: they are very useful for many industries, so that is having a compounding effect on technology improvement.
Some other battery-related technology articles I have personally shared on this website recently:
Honestly there are so many news articles about batteries that I ignore most of them. There is a ridiculous amount of research and commercialization happening in the field right now. You might want to check out the YouTube channels Undecided with Matt Ferrell and Just Have a Think; they often talk about this tech in a digestible way.
There are many electric trucks deployed already. Since electric heavy-duty trucking is a harder technological problem to solve than passenger vehicles, volume production for electric semis is still ramping up. Currently the Freightliner eCascadia is in production. You wouldn't necessarily notice that it's electric because it looks identical to a regular semi truck. There are others already too.
An important one is the Tesla Semi (500 mile range), which have been on the road since 2022. The Tesla Semi will be entering mass production in 2026.
You can read this fact sheet from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute for more info about electric semi trucks that currently exist and will exist in the future.
There are EVs on the market with ranges of apparently 516 miles. This is a frankly ridiculous amount of mileage, but there you go: it exists. A Rav4 might be able to get 35mpg if you're super lucky, so on a full tank that's about 500 miles. But realistically it's much less because real driving is full of traffic and other slowdowns that reduce efficiency. And most people these days are buying quite heavy trucks which get like 18-20mpg.
Since EV batteries are improving so rapidly, you will only continue to see EV range increase.
EVs are currently too expensive, but that's mostly because they're being designed for a luxury market. We've seen EV costs drop quite a lot. If the US didn't have ridiculous import fees for European or Asian EVs, you could buy pretty cheap ones already. There is a 27.5% tariff on EVs from China, plus other costs from importing. But they have new EVs over there that you could buy for $10,000. Domestic EV production is increasing, but it takes some time to build those factories.
I read an interesting article recently: Electric cars are suddenly becoming affordable. A quote that stood out to me was:
Car dealers are seeing younger and more working-class people buying EVs because there is now a used market for them. Working class people are mainly buying used cars. That market just hasn't existed because EVs have mostly been a really new technology until recently.
The reason EVs are more expensive than ICEs is just the cost of the battery. But as stated previously, that cost has been dropping consistently over time, and there is no reason to assume we have hit a limit yet. There are all sorts of new chemistries being tested and deployed at scale to reduce costs.
Ultimately, an EV engine has fewer moving parts than an ICE (gas/diesel engine). You don't need a complicated multi-speed transmission in an EV. Because the engine is so much simpler, it's less expensive to manufacture. Because it has fewer parts, it has much cheaper maintenance. It is actually a good piece of technology from a purely financial perspective for this reason.
In another 10 years, we will certainly be seeing quite affordable EVs.
In an ideal world you would never need to drive that far to get to work, or really not need to drive at all. One of the reasons the US is so car-dependent is because of its terrible zoning practices. I often advocate for transit-oriented development and the elimination of pointless restrictions on housing construction. This would make it much more affordable to live near work. Local governments just have to get their act together and stop being NIMBYs.
I mean...it's all new vehicles sold in 2035. Many people don't buy new cars, so in reality there will be a long tail here. And yes, EV semi-trucks are in production and in use. Here is an article from April talking about Tesla's slow production of their own truck, but it also talks about Daimler's eCascadia and just gives a good snapshot of where the industry was more than half a year ago.
I'm not really "hip" to the whole EV industry and I am very skeptical that this rule survives the next 4 years. But I also don't think that CA is going to suffer a recession for it-- if it looks like the target won't be met, they'll just adjust it as we do with all things related to climate. On the plus side, it gives all manufacturers a common target rather than waiting to see if anyone else changes their lineups first.
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You might be surprised looking into these issues you're speculating on. Many appartment complexes are being built with EV chargers. I'm seeing EV chargers popping up in grocery store parking lots, business lots, and even at gas stations. The availability to charge while doing other activities is extremely convenient. As an EV owner, I really don't think about charging most weeks despite not being able to charge at home, because I can charge once or twice a week at work. It would absolutely be more convenient to have a garage to charge in at home, but it's not really any more inconvenient than it was needing to remember to get gas. For people who do have an outlet at home they can charge with, they basically start every day with a "full tank of gas" so to speak. And that's just from slow charging off a house outlet.
As for EV semis, yes there are several companies working on developing these and there are several on market. It's not just a research thing. It's not a big market yet and from what I've seen the current ones are targeted for doing city deliveries rather than long haul (though I know work is being done here as well).
Current EV tech doesn't address every transportation need and there's still innovation to do. However, current tech covers a LOT of traveling needs and has gotten really good. The idea that EV tech isn't good just straight doesn't hold water.
You're setting an outrageously high bar that doesn't make any sense. Something doesn't have to be perfect to be a good solution. This comes across pretty emotionally charged and not rooted in how anything really happens. Technological progress is incremental and made up of lots of small improvements. No problem is ever fully fixed in the first iteration and it's naive to think that's how we should approach fixing things.
I don't know about their availability in California, but one of the largest employers in my town is a Volvo plant where they produce (among other things) EV semi-trucks, so they definitely exist.
If everyone could collectively pull their heads out of their asses and focus on cars a bit less, electric trains have infinite range and are cheaper to run than trucks.
And it's insane that everyone is commuting daily into LA via car, consistent routes in high-traffic areas is where trains excel. Seriously, the cost of trains is less than a tenth of cars, so if we're really worried about cost of living then they are the obvious choice.
Unless the shortcomings of EVs (price, charger availability, time to charge, range in some cases) are resolved within the next decade, I can see one of two things happening. Either this deadline will get extended a bunch of times much like the Real ID requirement to fly has (almost 20 years), or Californians will just buy cars from out of state. As someone who is about the buy an ICE vehicle because EV does not meet my needs and being a realist about how long it takes to build out national infrastructure for something as ubiquitous as driving, I have almost no confidence that ICE vehicles will actually stop being sold in the US in 10 years.
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My confidence intervals that the metrics you mention will be achieved by 2035:
Metrics you didn't mention:
Good to be realistic but I think you have reason to be optimistic here. Because most people in the US drive, there is much demand for making that a high-quality experience. As more people adopt EVs, that pressure mounts. An interesting article from Ben James on this subject: Actually, we can deploy energy infrastructure very quickly
I do hope that you and @vord are right about this. There's a lot to like about EV's, I accept that they are the future, and I'm unfortunately in a badly-timed spot where my current vehicle has issues where it will be necessary to purchase a replacement vehicle well before these issues are ironed out to the point where it makes practical sense for me to go that route. I'm not saying that these changes are impossible to reach in 10 years. I'm more predicting that between the incoming government leadership for at least the next 4 years, combined with the overall lukewarm reception of EVs across the average person (outside of the bubble of the progressive populous of Tildes and Reddit) to push their leaders to make the required changes, I am highly skeptical that things will move as quickly as they could/need to in order to meet a 10 year deadline. I can see things like incentives to build chargers, changes in vehicle regulations, and some of the more idealistic (and unlikely be accepted by most local governments) idea like mandating that business provide free charging either stall out or just not happen under the incoming administration.
I agree that 2035 is likely a realistic target from a technological standpoint. The rate of progress in EV tech is astounding and shows no sign of slowing down. It would not surprise me in the least if even by 2030 the average EV makes current models look like dinosaurs.
The biggest hurdle by far is culture. ICE vehicles have been very comfortably nestled in popular culture for the better part of a century by this point and oil/car companies have spared no expense in spreading EV FUD far and wide.
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My hope is that cultural preferences for ICEs will be overridden by future EVs that are ultimately cheaper to buy and maintain than ICEs. While ICEs are indeed nestled into American culture, I think really... cars (any cars) are nestled into American culture.
Also, EVs are quieter, smoother to drive, and don't smell bad. These are small things, but they give the cars a more modern feel, even to people who don't care about the environment. Anyone who genuinely likes loud, bumpy, and smelly cars cannot be convinced - but I don't think there are a lot of people who will really die on this hill.
10 years is both a very short time and a very long time. The one thing about culture worth mentioning - lots of people who might be sentimentally attached to gas cars are (let's be honest) rural and therefore less wealthy than average, and therefore more likely to buy a used car. This regulation only targets new sales. So if we're talking about whether this regulation will "survive," really the people who need to be convinced ASAP are the people buying new cars - they're setting the tone for the market that automakers and legislators are responding to.
I'm confident that all the so-called "coastal elites" can be fully convinced to go full-electric within 10 years and probably sooner, in a practical sense, as well as a large portion of upper-middle class people just about anywhere in the country. If it takes the rest of the country another 5-10 years for ICEs to lose their luster and start to feel antiquated, that's probably okay.
People used to love muscle cars from the 1960s. Some people still drive them (because they are cool). But most people don't care, and aren't voting for a politician who wants to "bring back muscle cars." Like, it just doesn't matter.
The interstate highway system was started in 1956, and was mostly built before 1970. Most anything can easily be accomplished in a decade if we actually try. In the case of building a charging network, it means incentivizing green energy production and mandating charger installs in parking areas.
You know what's not cheap and easy? Installing and maintaining gas tanks and pumps. Most gas stations sell fuel at-cost and the real money comes from the snacks.
Installing Level 2 chargers is easy. Need a 240V with 50A double-throw breaker, some 8 gauge wire and conduit, and a < $1,000 piece of machinery. About the same level of difficulty as installing an electric dryer. Costs maybe $5k for a pair to be installed, even without incentives.
It could be even easier and cheaper if we dispense with the notion that companies should be able to charge for L2. Instead of installing chargers, just install 240V outlets, and everyone will throw one of these in their trunk. Then we're talking on the order of $2k or less to install.
Assuming $0.25/kwh, each spot costs about $2.40 per hour of use. So for the cost of one minimum wage employee in NJ ($15.49), a business could have 5 free chargers going during business hours. Walmart would probably make more money as bored people browsed the shelves instead of sitting in their car.
Added bonus: Mandating free charging in parking lots gives a lot of incentive to charge per-hour for parking in the lot, which @scroll_lock explained quite well here why that would be a good thing. (Aside to @scroll_lock: I wish I had thought of this wording in that thread).