EVs are lowering Bay Area's carbon footprint
EVs are lowering Bay Area's carbon footprint
A UC Berkeley monitoring network recorded a small yearly decrease in CO2 emissions that they ascribe to the adoption of electric vehicles.
these of course come with their own tradeoffs, but you take what you can get
Better bike infrastructure would reduce it even more.
23Bikes, unfortunately, won't help many people with their commutes. The drive alone can be over and hour, often several hours. I'm sure some people could bike that, but most people would rather not do that twice a day.
Better public transportation as a whole could be helpful though. BART has been improving over time, but it's hard to say that it's enough (or that it ever will be at this rate).
8There are no solutions that involve personal car ownership. Appealing to entitlment just makes it worse, will it be inconvenient? Yes, but the only other option is the collapse of civilisation.
Here's the IPCC https://mass.streetsblog.org/2022/04/22/international-climate-report-demands-systemic-changes-to-transportation-and-urban-planning/
but also makes clear that simply replacing gasoline with batteries won't be enough: cities must also dramatically curtail the use of automobiles and avoid "locking in" future emissions with more car-dependent infrastructure.
"I see no way out of revolutionary changes to how we live today .... it is too late for non-radical futures" - Professor Kevin Anderson
https://social.rebellion.global/@ScientistRebellion/110235597189756736
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But how much of that is simply shifted outside? Manufacturing batteries, generating electricity etc.
12Even in areas that use coal you use less overall emissions within the lifetime of the vehicle
23Most of it is pure reduction rather than replacement. The region is pretty good at using wind and hydro for evening power but more to the point, it is hard to get across just how much that 4.6tons of co2 an average car puts out in a year.
It’s also worth noting that 4.6 tons is just tailpipe, and that it is in addition to the emissions from delivering that fuel to the pump or in manufacturing the car itself, and that thouse additional emissions alone are more than the entire lifetime emissions of an EV fed on the US grid, most of which are from generation.
Put all that together with the SF grid being less carbon intensive, and i’d guess that anywhere from 75% to 90% of those emissions are just outright gone period.
It would be even better if it was even more a move to bikes and mass transit of course, but in this case it actually is a notable drop in emissions and not just greenwashing.
20Most car pollution is via use, not production. EVs are cleaner, much cleaner - regardless of grid production.
To be precise, more than 85% of a gas-powered vehicle's lifetime emissions come from using the car, not from building the car. That's according to researchers at Argonne National Laboratory. And that means the new EV, despite its manufacturing costs, will be cleaner over time. - Source
It makes sense if you think about it, what's more likely to be more efficient (and hence cleaner), burning fossil fuels in a large facility, or in a bunch of your tiny engines? As we shift to a cleaner grid, that inefficiency gets larger.
Obviously, if we can shift to more public transit, we can get even cleaner, but any replacement is helping.
12One of those requires much more energy than the other
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I'd be curious to know whether urban air quality in general is improving also?
5https://www.aqmd.gov/home/air-quality/historical-air-quality-data/historical-data-by-year
Comparing 2021 and 2022 it looks like there are marginal gains in quality, so I wouldn't be surprised if this trend continued (if I'm reading it correctly of course)
3Those charts seem to be from SoCal. This might be a better reference for Bay Area: https://www.baaqmd.gov/about-air-quality/current-air-quality/air-monitoring-data/#/
Worth adding that Bay Area has manufacturing and refining. Not sure how much that affects air quality relative to cars.
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The researchers in the article seem to be interested in that as well. They see their research as a pilot forhow to get useful measurements in many urban centers. I hope they receive more funding.
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It seems that the most significant part of this news is the enhancement in detecting atmospheric CO2 concentration in a large urban area. Being able to measure more accurately and precisely will allow better evaluation of mitigation strategies.
4How much does it increase in coal usage?
3Not much since California uses hardly any coal.
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