80 new EV models from VW by 2025 !

The excess deaths per year quoted for air pollution are not what they seem. It does not indicate a number of people who actually die. It's the total number of days the average person's life is shortened by multiplied out by the population size and life expectancy. So if breathing traffic fumes causes or worsens a range of conditions that remove 4 years from the average person's life, that increases the average death rate in the population. It does not mean thousands of otherwise healthy people drop dead each year because they got too close to an exhaust pipe.

One thing it does neglect though is reduced quality of health and life. While something may not kill someone, it's still not great if it increases the incidence asthma or non-fatal cancer.

I read the results of a study a few months ago that (for some reason) looked at tiny iron particles discovered in the brains of corpses. The source of the particles were identifiable based on their shape/form. Naturally occurring ones (representing the normal background amount) were outnumbered by something a hundred times the amount of ones that come from ICE engines. It's unknown what is the medical/health effects of having your brain riddled with iron particles, but it's unlikely to be good.

It's just another aspect of local air pollution whose real effect will probably only become known in the coming decades. NoX, hydrocarbons, SoX, micro-particulates (these are also from brakes and tyres).
 
Burning things you dig up obviously comes to and end, either when you run out things to burn or the shared lifesupport system fails before that.

Either way, no path forward, just a massive scale destructive fleeting distraction from a working path forward at its best, and self-extinction and/or loss of earth's atmosphere at its worst.

Ethical high ground or low ground doesn't matter much if the shared air we all breathe stops supporting life as we know it, and each tank of fossil fuels you buy votes with your dollar to keep paying people to extract more and keep the hourly tragedy of death and ecosystem collapse on the fast track.
 
Punx0r said:
.......
I read the results of a study a few months ago that (for some reason) looked at tiny iron particles discovered in the brains of corpses. The source of the particles were identifiable based on their shape/form. Naturally occurring ones (representing the normal background amount) were outnumbered by something a hundred times the amount of ones that come from ICE engines. It's unknown what is the medical/health effects of having your brain riddled with iron particles, but it's unlikely to be good.......
.
??? So what you have said is.:--the source was identifiable.....but those particles did not come from ICEs , ?
 
No, it was something like 1% naturally occurring and 99% from ICE, which were identifiable because they bore the signs of having been through a combustion process.

It was an article in New Scientist and I can't recall the study it was summarising now (sloppy, I know).
 
this one?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2104654-air-pollution-is-sending-tiny-magnetic-particles-into-your-brain/

Or one of the others
https://www.google.com/search?num=100&newwindow=1&q=new+scientist+iron+particle+study
 
Yup. Totally cynical PR. The problem is that car companies make the most money on the cheapest to produce, most polluting vehicles. And buyers benefit from lower prices, while telling themselves it must be OK, or the government would force them to buy cleaner vehicles. We get the planet we deserve.
 
Warren said:
Yup. Totally cynical PR. The problem is that car companies make the most money on the cheapest to produce, most polluting vehicles.
Actually they typically make the most on their most expensive vehicles, since they can mark them up more.

To your larger point, standards like CAFE require them to meet certain average fuel economy standards. Since they don't want to impact the profitability on their larger high-margin vehicles, they tend to concentrate their fuel economy work on their lower end models - because they sell better, and a small improvement in fuel economy on a top-selling car changes the fleet fuel economy much more than a large improvement on a less popular (but far more expensive) car.

To put it another way, the Toyota Versa's fuel economy allows Toyota to sell more Land Cruisers.
 
liveforphysics said:
Burning things you dig up obviously comes to and end, either when you run out things to burn or the shared lifesupport system fails before that.

Either way, no path forward, just a massive scale destructive fleeting distraction from a working path forward at its best, and self-extinction and/or loss of earth's atmosphere at its worst.

Ethical high ground or low ground doesn't matter much if the shared air we all breathe stops supporting life as we know it, and each tank of fossil fuels you buy votes with your dollar to keep paying people to extract more and keep the hourly tragedy of death and ecosystem collapse on the fast track.

I am not exactly digging up wood, have small orchard and I can get enough wood to burn during winter. Ofcourse it isnt enough to keep the house warm at all times, but I get enough to fire up the fireplace from time to time to set the mood. And thats sustainable. Its same with forests, you can cut them and re-plant in sustainable way. Surerly there is same logic behind oil.

Ey, I am in no way propenent of ICE engines over electric, but just thinking ICE isnt the devil here, but rather collective mindset that we can keep using up resources, in this case oil is great example, where people as long as they buy it, dont care left or right where it comes from or how it works.

Just changing our total earth car fleet to electric isnt going to do much, therr has to be education about it in schools, teach kids how much energy they are using how it works etc. That Joe that will buy Tesla, it wont make him more intune with Earth, but rather disinfrenchize him further with all the complicated and to Joe new technology that he has no idea how it works.


Funniest thing to me is people asking me about my bike, if it can recharge batteries, I say sure I can pedal and recharge the battery, but then am not moving anywhere. And most are baffled why.
 
Would keeping a certain temperature in your home seem worth the heat if you didn't have the smoke leave your home through the chimney?

What if your home was bigger so you couldn't easily see all the walls at once?
 
marvak said:
And thats sustainable. Its same with forests, you can cut them and re-plant in sustainable way. Surerly there is same logic behind oil.

Sure, just use oil at the same rate it's being used. Considering it takes millions of tens of millions of years to create fossil fuels, that rate will be miniscule.

Oh, and as with burning anything, even if it's net-zero CO2, you still have local pollution issues from particulates and various toxic or carcinogenic compounds.
 
Cant argue your logic, just saying I get enough wood from my propery sustainably to do something with it. There can only be that many wooden spoons you know, so I choose to burn it to keep myself warm. For example, there are bugs that attack old timber laying around in forests that has to be taken out, and burning it is possibly the only solution to this problem. Here in Slovenia there was big natural disaster with huge frosts couple of years ago, many trees fell under the weight of the frost, and all that wood had to be taken out of the forest and burned to prevent the infestion with the bug. Thats ofcourse is totaly different story then cutting down trees to get fireplace wood but still, my example of having extra branches on my orchard that need to be cut down, burning them makes complete sense to me.

Besides I was more trying to make the point, that having all electric fleet, wont solve the problem of people being reckless with the given resources. People are still going to abuse the batteries, abuse the cars, etc. Specially if cars become ever more transportatiom device that somebody alse has to take care of you. Back in yugoslavia there was saying that once you owned Yugo car for couple of years it was worth more then when you bought it, because you fixed yourself all that was wrong with it. Thats where am going with this, average Joe has absolutely no idea how his tesla works, it just something he bought, and somebody alse will have to do all the maintance work on it. For me thats the biggest problem with todays cars, you absolutely cant fix anything yourself. So you become slave to your own transportation
 
I fix and modify anything, new or old Tesla or whatever.

You're free to place arbitrary limitations on yourself to the limits of your own creativity, but you don't need to imagine then assigned to others.

I do see your perspective though.
 
marvak said:
For example, there are bugs that attack old timber laying around in forests that has to be taken out, and burning it is possibly the only solution to this problem. Here in Slovenia there was big natural disaster with huge frosts couple of years ago, many trees fell under the weight of the frost, and all that wood had to be taken out of the forest and burned to prevent the infestion with the bug.

The "bugs" are there to recycle the wood back into compounds the forest uses to grow new trees.

If you always remove the old wood, then eventually there is nothing for the new wood to grow from.

Unfortunately lots of people don't like bugs, so they kill them off or remove their food sources, but the bugs are there to recycle those food sources back into food sources for other things (usually the plants themselves).
 
This is what wikipedia has to say

"Bark beetles play an important role in forest ecology, for example by creating complex early successional forest.[2] In undisturbed forests, bark beetles serve the purpose of hastening the recycling and decomposition of dead and dying wood and renewing the forest. A few species are aggressive and can develop large populations that invade and kill healthy trees and are therefore known as pests."

I am not an expert on this topic, just remember lumberers saying back then, that once all those trees feel under the frost, they had to take em all out to prevent this bugs overpopulation and subsequent attacks on healthy trees
 
If a forest is being managed and wood has to be removed and it is not suitable for construction then yes, I think it's reasonable to burn it for heating or biomass power generation. Especially where the alternative would be to burn a fossil fuel.
 
rojitor said:
I wish all the damn oil of the world to vanish once and for all. The global warming is real. We are so close to the point of no return that I can't believe the human stupidity.

Problem is that a Tesla S with a 100kWh battery and 2 tonnes of weight is also not an energy and ressource efficient transport vehicle to make your daily commute to work.

It may be better than a 2 tonne gasoline power vehivle, but it is far away from "good enough to solve our ressource, energy and congestion problems of the modern car age".

An average lifetime and usage time of 1 Million km would help (and should be doanble with an EV drivetrain), but to drove 1 Million km in 15-20 years most People would Need to share a vehivle not own it and have it Standing around idle for 95% of its time.

High quality and long Lasting electric bikes weighting 30kg are much, much better options than electric cars if you want to transport one person for some km.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a strong beleiver that the e-mobility is one of few technologies for a liveable future of humanity. Burning gasoline into the air you breath is just plain stupid.
But I doubt that a world with 3 or 4 billion large electric cars like Tesla S or X is a desirebale future either.

The amount of cars or car ownership has to shrink at least in developed countries and cities and better sooner than later they need a concept for 100% real recycling. (and stuff you lose during the lifetime like tire rubber has to be biodegradable)
 
Yah, we can even go step further and say that electric bikes alone, wont solve those transportation problems.

My father rode his normal bike to work his whole life, anyway he also has a gas moped that he rode instead on nice sunny days.

Once I got interested in electric bikes, trying to promote them to him, he was very hesitant, saying that atleast here in Slovenia, with many rainy, foggy, cold days, people still wont ride their ebike to work.

I kinda have to agree with him, there arent many people ready to ride the bike electric or not on bad weather days.

But then again, if people begin to ride ebikes on sunny days, and electric cars on rainy etc, its still a huge leap forward, so its kinda nonsense arguing against it, even if they cant solve all of our problems. Baby steps. Evolution over revolution.

Also there are cultures (dutch, danes etc) where people commute on bikes in any weather, so there obviously is hope
 
in Berlin on May 3, Diess told investors his company has signed orders for $48 billion worth of batteries, according to a report from Fortune. That’s double the amount touted just a few weeks ago.

Coincidentally, $48 billion happens to equal to the market capitalization of Tesla. Volkswagen says it expects to be producing 3 million electric cars a year by 2025. “By 2020 we will offer our customers more than 25 new electric models and more than 20 plug-in hybrids,”
 
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