The big reason for this is thermodynamics. A conventional internal combustion engine car has to convert chemical energy to kinetic energy - the absolute best theoretical efficiency of this might be 70%, but in practice it's more like 30%. Electric cars have to pay the same thermodynamic penalty, but they pay it at the power station (In practice, thanks to renewables, not all the electricity used to charge a car will come from hydrocarbons - but let's assume it does for ease of comparison sakes). It's much easier to build highly efficient hydrocarbon power stations - typical efficiencies range from 40-60%.
So when you look at the headline "efficiency" of an electric car, you need to take that thermodynamic penalty into account first.
A modern series hybrid like a Toyota Prius is effectively an electric vehicle and a gas generator (which means it has the same efficiency gains due to regenerative braking). That gets 52 mpg, which is about 493 Wh/km. If you generated the 225 Wh the Tesla needs in even the most efficient combined cycle gas turbine powerplant you'd need 375 Wh. Less - but not nearly as drastic as it first seems.
Renewables change the picture though - once you have significant renewable generation the carbon intensity of electricity starts dropping, which means that remote powerplant vs local powerplant argument falls apart. That is when the real power of electric vehicles kicks in - they can take their energy from anywhere.
It is a sign of the success of the oil industry that this analysis always takes the cost of electricity generation back to the source, but assumes that fuel stations pump from a perfect source of naturally refined/distilled hydrocarbons.
It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil.
The headline figure is maybe to compare 11.4 mill. tonnes CO2e emissions from "Scope 1 + Scope 2" (direct emissions from the company plus indirect emissions because they buy electricity and stuff), versus 243 mill. tonnes CO2e from Scope 3 (emissions from people burning the hydrocarbons sold).
If that figure is correct, you can add 1.6 percent to the car tailpipe emissions figures to account for production and refining etc.
But this is an oil & gas company that tries very hard and is among the best in the world for minimising emissions from production and refining. I would not be surprised if gasoline from US shale oil is more than an order of magnitude worse.
>EROI values for our most important fuels, liquid and gaseous petroleum, tend to be relatively high. World oil and gas has a mean EROI of about 20:1 (n of 36 from 4 publications) (Fig. 2) (see Lambert et al., 2012 and Dale, 2010 for references). The EROI for the production of oil and gas globally by publicly traded companies has declined from 30:1 in 1995 to about 18:1 in 2006 (Gagnon et al., 2009). The EROI for discovering oil and gas in the US has decreased from more than 1000:1 in 1919 to 5:1 in the 2010s, and for production from about 25:1 in the 1970s to approximately 10:1 in 2007 (Guilford et al., 2011). Alternatives to traditional fossil fuels such as tar sands and oil shale (Lambert et al., 2012) deliver a lower EROI, having a mean EROI of 4:1 (n of 4 from 4 publications) and 7:1 (n of 15 from 15 publication)
So the major difference between your numbers and the ones I cited, is that EROI is just "energy in versus energy out" and it does not change favorably if you do carbon capture or use renewables or whatnot.
Whereas if you compare CO2 emissions, you can do these things and in theory get down to zero emissions from production and refining of gasoline.
you are right -- EROI and emissions are different. If you add in things like carbon capture, emissions go down but energy-in goes up. Would it make sense to extract and refine gasoline with net-0 emissions if it took more energy than you get out in gasoline? _maybe_, but I don't think its a clear yes!
> It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil.
Damn, I've never thought about that before. In hindsight that feels like an obvious thing to consider but this is the first time I'm aware of that thought entering my brain. Thank you for provoking the thought.
What would be the equivalent consideration on the other side? Would it be something like inquiring into the energy requirements of creating and maintaining the electrical grid, especially given the increased load of wide-scale vehicle electrification, instead of assuming we get that for free?
Yes, people usually call this "Full lifecycle analysis". It takes about as much electricity (or energy) to refine a tank of gas as to charge an EV, so there isn't necessarily an increase in load on the grid by electrifying transport. However some energy generation used by refineries that isn't electricity from the grid would have to get re-arranged.
Anyway maintaining a more robust grid should be much cheaper than maintaining thousands of gas stations and the trucking routes used to keep them filled up.
In 2019, the world seaborne trade volume reached about 11.08 billion tons. Out of this, crude oil, oil products, and gas accounted for approximately 32.5% (3.6 billion tons) of the total volume. Coal made up another 8.4% (935 million tons). In total, energy products represented around 40.9% of the global seaborne trade volume.
It's important to note that these figures are from 2019, and the percentages may have changed since then due to various factors, including evolving global energy markets, fluctuations in demand, and the transition to renewable energy sources. The percentage may also vary depending on how you define "energy products."
This does come up a lot ... for ethanol production. How much fuel is used to produce ethanol is constantly discussed, with some people claiming it is barely break-even or even energy-negative.
But yeah, no one then goes on to give equivalent numbers for petroleum.
Always have to note that ethanol production from corn has dubious energy payoff. Switchgrass is definitely energy positive, but lacks a strong lobbying group to provoke similar investment and development.
It’s not something we often consider because, again, the energy density of carbon fuels _is a couple of order of magnitudes higher_ then batteries. It seems trivial because a fuel hauling truck is an _absolutely immense_ source of energy compared to the energy it consumes to move.
It's a path-dependent calculation, not a state-dependent calculation, so the numbers are all over the map. Take two cases:
(1) Alberta tar sands production, which relies on imports of natural gas to melt and process the tar sand into a crude oil equivalent, called syncrude. If the syncrude is shipped to San Francisco Bay for refining at Chevron's Richmond Refinery, then you have to tag on the shipping fuel used, the gas used in the refinery, and finally the tanker fuel used to move the fuel to a gas station in San Francisco. Finding all these numbers is not easy, it's often proprietary, but you can find that a lot of natural gas is used at refineries (bulk numbers):
(2) Sweet light crude from a pressurized reservoir that's refined a few miles away from the oil field and used in a nearby city.
The end-product, refined gasoline, has the same state property (energy density) regardless of how it was manufactured, but that's irrelevant for getting the energy that it cost to make it. I imagine the spread can be pretty wide indeed, as the above examples show.
My understanding is that a lot of natural gas is used at refineries because, for so long, it was effectively "free" - there was a limited market for it and it was a byproduct of refining the stuff you wanted (light and heavy oils).
The average energy required to extract fossil fuel energy is constantly increasing, as we go after harder and harder to get oil. It used to be easy enough nobody really paid attention to that, but now people talk about "EROI" or energy return on investment, to track the net energy gain of an operation.
Most people still have that simplified view that you just have an oil well and just pump it up. In the US, a significant portion is extracted with fracking, an environmentally pretty terrible method for extraction.
> It is surprisingly difficult to get numbers on how much oil is used to extract, refine and transport oil.
Not to mention the socialized costs of all the wars, military spending and human lives spent to secure stable sources of fossil fuels. If you actually break down the numbers and applied some basic ethics, I doubt fossil fuels have been cost competitive for decades.
It's funny how the USA feels like it has to get militarily involved to guarantee something that the producers are willing and happy to sell. Even moreso when you understand that the USA has plenty of oil itself available.
It's almost as if they want an excuse for running a massive military.
We're already looking at the human cost of some of the components needed for the batteries, like lithium and cobalt. That's what we'll be fighting wars over after we exhaust the supply of oil.
Lithium is considerably more ubiquitous than crude oil, however. And cobalt in batteries is already on the decline, we won't be using it much longer. Heck, most EVs sold today don't use any cobalt at all.
Extracting, transporting, refining oil costs a lot of energy. And that's before we get into the entire military infrastructure that has been built up simply to ensure the safe extraction and transportation of oil around the world.
EV driver here, I live in an apartment complex with no charging stations installed. I and many other neighbors who drive EVs have to go to a charging station to charge.
On the way to the charging station, we probably pass a dozen gas stations.
I love my EV but let's not pretend it's always more convenient. If you have the opportunity to charge at home/work then yes it's great, but you're still reliant on public charging infrastructure if you decide to drive outside your normal range, and it takes a lot longer to charge than it takes to fill up a tank of gas, even considering the speed of Tesla Superchargers.
I mean, it's like, 50 yards out of the way? You stop at whatever gas station you're driving past. I don't know anybody who makes a specific trip to go fuel their car.
The existence and popularity of sites like gasbuddy.com suggests that some number of people are willing to go out of their way to find the lowest price. I personally know people who will make a run to Costco for gas, even if they're not going to go in for groceries, because the price is good. There are at least a half dozen gas stations on the way to Costco.
Half the people driving out of their way to get gas are bad at math. The other half simply don't assign a dollar value to their time.
If your car gets 30 mpg, has a 16 gallon tank (that you refill at 1/4 tank, so you're buying 12 gallons), and you drive an extra 5 miles to pay $3.93/gallon instead of $4.00/gallon, how much did you really save?
I'll give you a hint: It's less than a nickel.
Meanwhile, you've probably driven at least 10 minutes that you didn't need to drive. 10 minutes to save a few pennies.
The math only gets worse as the gas prices go up and your fuel economy goes down. You need a greater delta to make the drive worth it.
This is exactly what gets me every time some German "institute" publishes a study how electric cars pollute more than gas cars. They count everything that goes into producing electricity, but never what goes into extracting, refining and transporting gasoline.
> It is a sign of the success of the oil industry that this analysis always takes the cost of electricity generation back to the source, but assumes that fuel stations pump from a perfect source of naturally refined/distilled hydrocarbons.
It's not like renewable energy doesn't take resources/energy to produce as well. It's just borderline impossible to get real numbers because you'd pretty much need perfect information on the supply chains.
Not saying that renewables don't still win in such a comparison.
Most power generation facilities are natural gas fired, using large aero derivitive gas turbine engines (essentially the same engine that is in the 747 - LM6000 vs CF6 for example) with a combined cycle steam turbine to capture the energy from excess heat. This arrangement has a thermodynamic efficiency of 60%. Even with electrical transmission losses, the efficiency is still far better (1.7X) than having the power plant located under the hood of the car.
Not to mention, policing one large facility for compliance with emissions is much easier than trying to monitor every single one of millions of cars on the road.
Even with a car, you aren’t necessarily regulating millions of individuals - primarily just manufacturers. I suppose there is the odd case where “old joe” removed his catalytic converter and is polluting more than others but that is probably rare.
I don’t get your point on centralization however - more efficient but less robust (just like in software).
For necessarily centralized industries like car manufacturing the regulations are written to protect the wealthy incumbents competition more than to protect consumers.
It's a different metric but it is generally accepted that F1 cars have reached an overall thermal efficiency of 50%, which is cool. This is taking into account energy recovery from kinetic (regenerative braking) and thermal sources (from the turbo).
note that this is true for spark ignition engines, but not all ICE, diesel engines can reach higher efficiency and there are even real diesel engines with almost 50% efficiency[1], obviously not in cars though.
> the absolute best theoretical efficiency of this might be 70%
While ICE are heat engines with a theoretical limit of 70%, they’re more specialised subsets described by the Otto (gas) and Diesel (… diesel) cycles, which have a much lower theoretical maximum.
Generation can be from clean sources and is already happening in some jurisdictions.
Even if a clean source is not available, the pollution can best be controlled at the source. In this period of history, hundreds of millions of people make billions of polluting trips every day in their communities.
Although owning any car is the poorest choice of all for the environment, there are two ecological benefits to driving a BEV or a PHEV.
* better efficiency than ICE
* zero emissions in the case of BEV, zero emissions *for most trips* in the case of PHEV
The Prius' efficiency comes from much much more than regenerative braking. Part is a focus on good aero and low weight, like many electric cars. But most is from leveraging the electric motors to allow the engine to run at max thermal efficiency (probably a touch above your 30% figure) at nearly all times.
ICEs are most efficient under medium-low RPMs and high load. The electric motors can sustain low speed cruising, letting the engine shut off entirely if it wouldn't be well utilized, and also fill in for high torque demand to keep engine power output lower.
> A modern series hybrid like a Toyota Prius is effectively an electric vehicle and a gas generator (which means it has the same efficiency gains due to regenerative braking). That gets 52 mpg, which is about 493 Wh/km.
Wait, does a new prius or something like a hyundai ioniq (also 52-53 mpg) not have the internal combustion engine mechanically coupled to the transmission and drive wheels anymore?
I've got Civic e:hev, which has kind of similar setup. ICE does drive wheels in some situations (high speed, much power required), but mostly is just EV. It does not even have a gearbox, so there is only direct coupling from ICE to the wheels that can be engaged or disengaged (this is done automatically, you have no manual control over this).
I really like this setup, because it gives economy, but also a range and I don't need to worry about where to charge the car.
Isn't Honda the dark horse of hybrids? I remember riding in one and the owner explained that apparently Honda chose a hybrid architecture that was different that everyone else. The car's transition from electric to ICE was quite noticeable.
Honda has had two systems, the earlier “IMA” system which is a mild parallel hybrid. And the current “E-drive” system which is primarily a series hybrid. Series hybrids are actually pretty old tech — it’s how diesel locomotives works. The Chevy Volt also works just about the same way.
Also how azipods work on some very large ships, the diesel locomotive concept scaled up even more, sometimes with big gas turbine for power generation.
I don't know how it was, but on the current setup you literally (in the literal sense of the word) feel nothing. The only differentiator is "EV" indicator on the dash.
Nope, still parallel hybrids. The closest we've gotten to a true series hybrid was the Chevy Volt, but even then, it was technically a parallel hybrid.
I also take issue with anyone calling a hybrid 'effectively an electric vehicle.' That is only true for PHEVs. A regular hybrid still gets exactly 100% of it's energy from gasoline.
They do, but also don’t, the Prius and the Ioniq are series-parallel hybrid so the ICE plugs into a power splitter which can feed into both the mechanical transmission and a generator.
Some do, some don't. As an example the Nissan Qashqai is available as a conventional hybrid, with mechanical transmission, and an "e-power" version, where the engine only drives a generator:
Though that makes me think that hybrids have a real future. Or hydrogen fuel cells.
Anything that doesn't require charging directly from the grid all the time, because although parts of the USA and Norway are ready for that, it's very tricky to get right globally.
Maybe hybrids like the Prius get to be so efficient that such cars will have a truly negligible impact on global warming.
We are on a path where EVs can be used as backup generators. It's fairly easy to imagine that in the near future you'll be able to use plugged in EVs to avoid brown outs or general outages.
I’ve stayed in places of the grid before in Asia. No gas stations for miles around, but they would have solar panels or a water wheel out back for electricity, if not very reliable. I imagine EVs would be even better for such places, just charge them via some local renewable, the battery deals with the unreliability of the source.
Hydrogen fuel cells in mass produced vehicles do not have a future since hydrogen does not actually like to react - you need a catalyst. And the best ones we have are based on platinum, which is very rare a expensive. If we produced any decent quantities of "hydrogen" cars, we would have such a shortage of platinum we would not be able to complete them. Of course there are claim this has been solved but to the best of my knowledge no such catalyst actually ships in commercial quantities. [0]
The second reason is that hydrogen is 1/10th the density of diesel even when liquid (which is as dense as it gets). Maintaining hydrogen in its liquid form is energy intensive. Hydrogen tends to leak through the smallest cracks and also because the atoms are so small tends to leak even through solid metal. To sustain the high pressures and degradation by hydrogen you need a very expensive tanks. You also need to handle the case, when the car crashes/ catches fire releasing all of the hydrogen somewhat safely. This tends to be a 6 MW flame upward of the car. Too bad if it crashed under a bridge or garage. This is much worse than a burning ICE/ BEV car.
Hydrogen gas stations have all of the problems with the tanks as well. That makes them very expensive. Battery charging stations are somewhat easier - everywhere you have higher voltage you can build a decent charging station. Big parking lots can have solar roofs fulfilling a part of the charging demand and keeping the cars colder in the summer.
At the same time you don't have any of the advantages of batteries - such as that you can charge them almost everywhere or when breaking. Hydrogen cars would need to be hybrids basically to improve on these, in this regard they are more similar to classical ICE cars.
Finally, making hydrogen ecologically and economically is not that easy in big quantities. In the end, you realize it is means to a longer operation of the infrastructure of classical fossil fuel companies. Unrelated to cars, you can put some hydrogen (up to about 8% it seems) into natural gas without noticeable change in properties when used for heating. But you can probably slap a green or at least "blue" stamp on the solution. In the end, all of this is just as damaging as the production/ burning of bio diesel/ gasoline spiked with ethanol. Putting hydrogen into cars would just make support this fossil fuel agenda without actually helping the environment much and quite possibly enable decades of even more damage to the environment and public health with profits mostly for just a few already filthy rich people.
Hybrids that emit carbon will still have a huge effect on global warming, simply because there are so many cars. There isn't a huge amount of headroom for efficiency increases, so you're only going to get anywhere near "net zero" by charging from a renewable grid nearly all the time.
According to this chart, road transport sector is responsible for 11.9 % of greenhouse emissions wordlwide.^1 Could you please expand upon how you define the huge effect it will have on global warming? Don't you think it's better to focus on other parts of that pie, where it's easier to implement widespread savings and change?
We are already moving our electric grid to renewables. Wind and solar are both cheap sources of power, and have a lot of potential to account for more of the electric load. Putting electric on renewables, plus switching cars to EVs (charged by renewables) should eliminate 50% of that chart - and this is something we can pull off in less than 20 years. Some of the other 50% is also easy to switch to battery powered, but they are all small niches that each need to be worked on separately. (If you are in one of those niches please think about this!)
> Don't you think it's better to focus on other parts of that pie, where it's easier to implement widespread savings and change?
I looked at the link and to me transportation does indeed seem one of the larger sources of emissions. Everything else seems either very fragmented (lots of entries with around 2%) or similarly if not more complex - like energy use in buildings for all of the appliances.
What am I missing here, what would be easier to address than the abundance and types of cars and possibly the lack of proper public transportation?
I don't think that one can even make the argument that we should look for easy wins when change is necessary everywhere, unless we want climate catastrophe - because of people working against improvements due to their personal interests, inefficiencies in regulation and enforcement, as well as any number of other factors.
11.9% is a pretty huge percentage. If it were like 0.1%, I might agree with you.
Imagine you were tight on money and then think about your grocery store bill. Wouldn't you try to save in all categories, even though, say meat, was "only" 11.9% of your total bill?
Carbon reductions need to be made in every sector.
Hybrids almost never emit carbon though. Because they're almost always running from the battery that you charged up from the wall before leaving home for your daily commute. And the daily commute is less, or maybe a little over the battery range. If it isn't then you have bought the wrong car, if you goal is carbon neutrality.
You can use a smaller battery, which means using less rare materials that are very expensive. There are a lot of indirect emissions with electric vehicles, and it's important to look at the big picture.
That's only true of plug-in hybrids. "Hybrid" just means a car with an electric and ICE drive train. Most hybrids aren't plug-in hybrids. They have no ability to charge their battery except from the engine.
I could not be more bored by people who go off on the indirect emissions tangent. Because it always mysteriously winds up at "so anyway, buy a vehicle/house/plane/whatever which directly burns fuel and will thus never be green".
It's an argument pushed by fossil fuel company's because it pretends the world is static and unchanging, as though the energy mix of the electrical grid can't vary, or that changes in fuel source and process for mining operations to be cleaner wouldn't drastically effect downstream users overall emissions profile.
It's always been my hope that my state (Kentucky) would get on board with EV's. A really smart marketer could court the powerful coal interests in the state and start selling EV's on the premise that they are powered by coal here. Eventually the power mix would change to be more sustainable
As to whether those hybrids have a 'huge effect' on 'global warming' depends on many factors but assuming the narrative around climate change - the term 'global warming' has been swapped for the latter since the average global temperature has gone down for a number of years after an earlier steady rise - in relation to the CO₂ hypothesis holds truth the main factor of importance is the source of the carbon used in the fuel. Fossil fuels add carbon to the atmosphere while synthetic fuels made from 'renewable' sources - biomass and direct carbon capture being the most likely ones - do not. Especially the latter - captured atmospheric carbon in combination with hydrogen from ocean-based wind and solar sources - would be a clearly carbon-neutral synthetic fuel source. If such a process could be made economically viable it could also solve the problem with storing hydrogen produced by those ocean-based sources:
CO₂ -> C + O₂
2 H₂O -> 2 H₂ + O₂
C + 2 H₂ -> CH₄ (methane)
Theoretically it is simple. Building an economically viable installation, not so. With the amount of attention the 'climate crisis' gets this should not be a barrier given that untold billions of euros are being spent. Take some of that money which currently goes to nonsensical political vanity projects and redirect it into a Manhattan-project style research and development project with the aim of not just finding some theoretical process but actually creating working systems which can be installed and used. The advantage of creating methane is clear since it enables existing infrastructure to be used for transport and power production - including ICE-equipped vehicles. Either create heavier liquid hydrocarbons using the Fisher-Tropsch [1] process or convert diesel engines to use methane.
> the term 'global warming' has been swapped for the latter since the average global temperature has gone down for a number of years after an earlier steady rise
You're just going to throw that out there? You'll cite the Fischer-Tropsch process, but not "actually global temperatures are declining"?
Here[1]. The temperature hasn't gone down. The narrative hasn't changed from global warming because of this (the term was in fact dropped because people are idiots and trying to explain what global temperature is measuring in terms of energy dynamics in the climate system doesn't work...). 2022 was the 6th warmest year on record, and based on all data the overall trend is up.
You are pointing at a single year, I am pointing at a trend [1,2]. The trend had been for the average global temperature to rise up to 2012 to 2016 - depending on which measurements you look at. After that period the average global temperature has declined by 0.06°C per year up to 2022. This change in the trend made the "global warming" moniker easily attacked "because the temperature are clearly going down". This is why "climate change" became the more common term [3].
May I suggest a less belligerent/dogmatic attitude when discussing this subject? If the narrative holds it won't change the conclusion. If new data shows the narrative to be false or misleading - e.g. ice core records show the atmospheric CO₂ concentration to lag behind temperature changes, not lead them, climate sensitivity wrt. CO₂ concentration is low, feedback mechanisms are unclear, there are far too many fudge factors in the climate models to make them reliable sources - it will be much easier to adapt to the new situation. We're not talking religious dogma after all but scientific theory, that which can and should be discussed lest it turns into the former.
Wow didn't even wait before busting out "what if CO2 doesn't cause global warming" and very obviously didn't read your own links.
Running the denialist playbook as usual: slip in a insinuation that the issue has stopped without evidence, then drop a bunch of articles which don't support it while continuing to say "what if all the data supported me?" And then started alluding to a conspiracy with language choices like "dogma". Throw in some upfront tone policing because heaven forbid you have to defend your position vigorously and the recipe is complete.
Go on: hit me with "climate cycles are natural" and then lean into how the media just don't talk about the controversy.
Please refrain from using terms like denialist, it does nothing to help the discourse. Also, that 'bunch of articles' I sent does support what I said, this being a break in the rising temperature trend. You seem to want to hear much more in what was said, why is that?
As to the 'conspiracy with language choices' I think you realise that this is no conspiracy but a simple fact - what used to be called 'global warming' is now called 'climate change'.
As to 'tone policing' I'd suggest reading your posts I replied to.
> denialist, it does nothing to help the discourse
When one party wins by default, they benefit from stalemate-seeking tactics. "Just Asking Questions" unfortunately works very well for this purpose. Dogma poisons the discourse, yes, but so does accidentally extending good faith to a bottomless well of bad faith questions, which has been the conservative playbook on climate change since forever. The counter-strategy is dogma.
In order to have a scientific discussion rather than a political discussion, we need to know your intentions, and that's extremely difficult on a pseudoanonymous internet forum. It sucks, but this is probably how it has to be.
> In order to have a scientific discussion rather than a political discussion, we need to know your intentions
The truth, freed from ideology. This will be hard to achieve given the enormous amounts of money involved on all sides - from "green new deals" via trillions of € in subsidies to even larger amounts of money on the fossil-fuel-status-quo side. With politicians who have made their careers on either portraying themselves as apostles of Gaia or ensuring the continuous flow of oil, gas and coal - and thus the continuation of an industry which more or less defined whole US states and several countries.
Just because it is hard - and probably impossible - to get the actual truth does not mean I want or need to cave and just follow one of the narratives. Given enough people looking for the actual truth it may become possible to reach it and act upon it but it better be sooner rather than later.
What is your purpose in asking such leading questions by the way? Do you agree that an actual scientific discussion - as opposed to one directed by The Science™ - is the better course? Also, who are the we who would like to know? I speak for myself, not for others. Who do you speak for?
Yes, read them. The scientific reports that is, not the condensed version presented in the media. If you read them well you'll find they do not support the climate doomsday prophecies which are being bandied around. The only way to use those reports to support those is to use the long-discredited - by the IPCC itself, mind you - worst-case scenarios yet it is those which the media and politicians use to support their doom cries.
When you're done reading at least the abstracts in the IPCC reports - but it is worth the time to read the actual reports themselves - you can also read a few other sources, e.g. Schellenberger's Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Björn Lomborg's False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet and Steve Koonin's Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters. These give a far better view over what climate change entails and how it can be dealt with than the breathless fear-mongering as seen in the media and as spouted by politicians.
It's a much longer trend than 2012-2016. I remember 2011, the last time conservatives were playing the "global warming has paused" game, but then oops! It returned to trend. No Ls were acknowledged, of course.
What do the radiative flux measurements say this time around? They measure the derivative directly and are upstream of the most chaotic mixing process. Last time they said "sorry, heat is still piling up, globe's still warming." They were correct. What do they say this time?
2012-2016 is not the period of warming, it is the period from which the warming trend changed into a cooling trend. Seen over the last century the warming trend is far longer, the most recent one starting somewhere in the beginning of the 70's until the mentioned 2012-2016 frame. After that a slight cooling period followed, taking down the temperature by 0.06°C/yr until 2022. 2022 was another warm year so if 2023 will be warm as well the cooling trend is most likely broken. These sort-time variations are not significant when discussing 'climate' - roughly defined as 'the weather trends over at least a 30 yr stretch' - but they do control what makes the news.
One question: why do you state is is ´conservatives' who claim that the warming trend was broken? You don't know whether those people were conservatives nor do I. It does not make sense - and is extremely counterproductive - to equate a person's stance on single issues like 'climate change' with their political affiliation since these issues should not in any way be connected to political ideology. If they are connected they are by definition suspect since ideology trumps objective reasoning. Either the climate changes - and it does, no question there - or it does not, independent on whether you or I vote for whatever party we choose. Allowing ideology to taint the discussion just turns off a large part of the populace no matter which ideology it happens to be. It is just plain stupid for climate change to be a 'progressive' cause, crime reduction to be a 'conservative' cause, etc. These issues should be pulled out of the ideological realm so that they can be discussed by everyone without accusations of -isms by 'either' side.
The long-winded way is to use your OS's character map tool: find the glyph you want there and copy+paste. Under Windows 10+ there is the emoji keyboard (hit [win]+;) which also gives access to much more including super-/sub- script characters, which is a little more convenient than character map. Presumably other OSs have similar available too.
Better is to have support for a compose key sequence. Usually build in to Linux & similar, you just might have to find the setting to turn it on and configure what your compose key is. Under Windows I use http://wincompose.info/ and there are a couple of similar tools out there. In any case it is useful for more than super- and sub-scripts: accented characters & similar (áàäæçffñ), some fractions (¼,½,¾), other symbols (°∞™®↑↓←→‽¡¿⸘♥⋘»‱), and configurable too so you can make what you use most easiest to access (and if you are really sad like me you can do something https://xkcd.com/2583/ to type hallelujah too!).
On mobile devices a fair few “special” characters are usually available (though it depends what keyboard you have installed) via long-press on the right keys of the virtual keyboard.
One of the big sources of electricity generation here is hydroelectric, so I've been joking with my kids for a while that we have a water powered car. The first time I brought it up sparked a fun conversation as they wanted to understand how water makes electricity, and then started rabbit-holing on how magnets are involved in everything.
> Renewables change the picture though - once you have significant renewable generation the carbon intensity of electricity starts dropping, which means that remote powerplant vs local powerplant argument falls apart. That is when the real power of electric vehicles kicks in - they can take their energy from anywhere.
How close/far would you say we are as a society on "having significant renewable generation"?
They're still pretty close to each other right now. Renewables are at 21%, coal 20%, nuclear 19%. However, nuclear is flat and coal is declining. Renewables are still growing rapidly and will widen their lead significantly in a few more years. See the first embedded chart in the article, showing output trends since 2010. Also see the short term forecast at the end of the article:
"In our March Short-Term Energy Outlook, we forecast the wind share of the U.S. generation mix will increase from 11% last year to 12% this year. We forecast that the solar share will grow to 5% in 2023, up from 4% last year. The natural gas share of generation is forecast to remain unchanged from last year (39%); the coal share of generation is forecast to decline from 20% last year to 17% in 2023."
> A conventional internal combustion engine car has to convert chemical energy to kinetic energy - the absolute best theoretical efficiency of this might be 70%
You mean thermal energy?
Both cars are converting chemical energy to kinetic. The theoretical maximum for this is 100%. But one uses a thermal intermediate step, that reduces that maximum.
Lord I hope not. It helps with efficiency, but is no more renewable than carrying a rock upstairs and throwing it out a window onto some kind of generator.
This is a much more efficient process: somewhere between 75 and 95% efficiency, depending on the motor and the exact speed and torque (and of course they try to optimise for the best efficiency around the common operating points)
Ah. My point was more that there are losses assocated with these conversions and you can't move all of it to the upstream power plant. ICE vehicles burn fuel and create rotational mechanical energy which other than gear reductions doesn't require conversion. Electric does chemical -> electrical and then electrical -> mechanical with losses at each step here right?
Efficiency is important, but I'd bet the diesel electric design was mostly about simplification of the drivetrain and performance. An electric motor develops maximum torque at zero RPM and is very easy to modulate the amount of torque applied. A reciprocating engine has a minimum speed, so getting an extremely heavy train moving from a dead stop is tricky. Remember how old steam locomotives tend to spin the wheels regularly as they get up to speed.
Not entirely true, most transmissions have a system of torque converters and clutches. The torque converters convert rotational energy into fluid pressure to gain a kind of mechanical advantage. The clutches slip and make heat, usually to allow other parts of the transmission to interact without destroying gears.
Once you get to cruising speed the transmission usually engages something called a "lockup" that bypass all that to get as close to the 100% number for energy transfer as possible.
So when you look at the headline "efficiency" of an electric car, you need to take that thermodynamic penalty into account first.
A modern series hybrid like a Toyota Prius is effectively an electric vehicle and a gas generator (which means it has the same efficiency gains due to regenerative braking). That gets 52 mpg, which is about 493 Wh/km. If you generated the 225 Wh the Tesla needs in even the most efficient combined cycle gas turbine powerplant you'd need 375 Wh. Less - but not nearly as drastic as it first seems.
Renewables change the picture though - once you have significant renewable generation the carbon intensity of electricity starts dropping, which means that remote powerplant vs local powerplant argument falls apart. That is when the real power of electric vehicles kicks in - they can take their energy from anywhere.