A huge chunk of it is because the USA has a huge tax incentive for car manufacturers to make bigger cars. When fuel efficiency standards started coming in, trucks were exempted because farmers needed their trucks for farm work, it’s a loophole that encourages the manufacturers to build bigger vehicles to avoid these taxes. These massive vehicles are unusually cheap in the USA. If these loopholes regarding fuel efficiency were closed out people would be financially incentivised to buy smaller cars. Unfortunately, money talks. People aren’t all selfish, they’re just doing what makes sense for them.
Hydrogen never really made sense for cars, the infrastructure and storage is too expensive. But I wonder if it’d work for trains that haven’t been fully electrified with overhead cables yet. You’d need much less infrastructure at just a few locations.
How do battery operated work? Are they short rage trains? Or do they have like a car full of batteries? And how do recharge times work? Can they recharge just in the stations? If it works for them, great. And it sounds like it is. It just seemed like there were several problems.
Battery locomotives don’t have enough range to be useful solo, but they’re a handy to add on to an existing train to give it regenerative braking and improve it’s efficiency.
You want practically zero emissions train, you build overhead catenary wires. But that’s decades old tech that just works, it’s not sexy futuristic stuff.
I was saying it seems to make sense to use hydrogen as an intermediate step before you can put in all the infrastructure for overhead wires. If Germany is just using electric engines plus diesel engines now, instead of hydrogen engines, then there’s still emitting a whole lot more than they would otherwise. Even if it is cheaper.
There’s no way Hydrogen in Germany would be more green than diesel. It’d just be greenwashing. You’d need to make electricity to make hydrogen, store it and transport it, then turn it back into electricity (that’s how a hydrogen engine works, not by burning it). In the mean time, Germany is increasing it’s production of dirty energy, so the hydrogen production would have to be done with dirty energy. There’s no way that process is more efficient than just using diesel directly.
It might be better somewhere else, but not in Germany.
You don’t need to use the standard grid energy. You can use off peak power rates in areas with a lot of wind, so it’d use the otherwise unusable energy. Or you could disconnect from the grid entirely. But the power source is absolutely a concern.
What would the co2 trade off look like between diesel and hydrogen? Diesel you’d have a constant co2 per mile, whereas hydrogen would have higher kwh efficiency, but high conversion inefficiency, then some percentage of the energy emits co2 at a certain rate. I don’t have time to crunch the numbers now, but I would be surprised if hydrogen was more ghg intensive.
The off peak usage, sure. This though? How would that be green? You could spend the same money to install solar, wind, whatever and take dirty energy off the grid. That’s the point is you need to use energy to make it, when instead that energy could remove dirty energy. It’s greenwashing. It’s not removing demand for dirty energy, its just increasing overall energy demand.
Increasing energy use compared to diesel? If you count the energy in the diesel, I’m pretty sure hydrogen would use less. But I think what matters over all is the total co2 emitted per mile, including generation.
It isn’t. The amount of green hydrogen is a fraction of a fraction a percent of all hydrogen. The rest is all made from natural gas and the CO2 is released into the air. It’s a green washed fossil fuel.
But they’re not. See: this article. They’re not profitable, and if they ever were, it was propped up by greenwashing a byproduct of natural gas production.
The article didn’t link. Also, not profitable compared to what? Because running at a slight loss to decrease ghg emissions would still be worth it. Are there fully electric battery alternatives to use instead?
I’m referring to the article posted in this post. Stations are being shut down because they aren’t profitable. It doesn’t have to be compared to anything. If they can’t make hydrogen cheap enough, they can’t sell enough and they can’t sustain the business mode.
The cheapest way to make hydrogen now is as a byproduct of natural gas production which is not as eco-friendly as anybody would hope.
Hydrogen for consumer use is a boondoggle and waste of time. BEVs are here and work great on existing infrastructure (for L2 charging at least). I drive an EV and exclusively charge it at home. No special station required.
Absolutely. That’s what I said originally. Consumer use never made sense. But busses or trains might still make sense since they’d have much more centralized infrastructure.
“Green hydrogen”, is also incredibly inefficient in its own right. Approximately a 70 percent loss of energy compared to 15-20 percent for battery storage. It would literally be just as efficient to burn natural gas in a power station (with a 50+ percent efficiency, modern power turbines are very efficient) and use that power to charge a battery. The entire “hydrogen economy” has been a pipe dream by either complete morons or fraudsters (probably both). (Hydrogen aeroplanes might actually work, but that is by combustion and jet engines are already very efficient).
Today, green hydrogen is essentially an expensive, low-efficiency battery.
That could change with future work on making more efficient hydrolysis, but today, the numbers really don’t work out on green hydrogen vs alternatives like lithium ion or overhead wires for busses.
Hydrogen is very light, so the energy per kilogram is quite high.
However, hydrogen is also naturally not very dense. Hydrogen at 1 atmosphere has a tiny fraction of the energy of a similar volume of batteries. Pressurized hydrogen is similarly dense to a battery, and liquid hydrogen is about twice as dense.
So to make hydrogen dense, you need a very thick, heavy tank to hold the pressurized hydrogen. That significantly cuts into your weight advantages.
Add to that, fuel cells are very inefficient at converting hydrogen to usable electricity.
Maybe I’m missing other conversion factors, but hydrogen has a volumetric energy density of 9MJ/L which is about 2.5kWh/L compared to about 1.7kWh/L for the newest Tesla batteries. So hydrogen is more energy dense than batteries even by volume.
Other than ideas like synfuels, it is the only thing that makes sense for cars. People are just falling prey to BEV propaganda. You don't want unsustainable mining and a >400kg battery pack in every car. It is the big act of greenwashing today, and green transportation won't happen until BEVs are abandoned or scaled way back.
Unsustainable from a co2 standpoint, ecological damage, or human rights and damage standpoint? I think we’re probably thinking about different sorts of sustainability.
If you mean the cost of battery mining/production, it's all three. We currently can't even make batteries without vast amounts of fossil fuels. And due to many factors like long-duration energy storage problems, BEVs can't reach net zero without hydrogen anyways.
Sure, just throw tires spikes on the road. Let’s have people buy more tires, and trash the (what used to be good) tires into a landfill. Yeah that’ll show them drivers
Now I’m imagining the city hiring armored trucks with spike-plows and police escort, clearing spikes from the most important lanes after car-haters have scattered huge quantities everywhere.
Exactly. People who advocate for densification are basically advocating for everywhere to be Amsterdam or NYC with continuous human habitation and maybe small concessions in the form of city parks (a joke compared to real natural areas, IMO).
I’m not sure if they’re aware that this will be the logical conclusion of those policies.
No, im good on suburbia, it’s inherently damaging to both our mental health and the natural ecosystems of the planet. You cannot have a sustainable single family suburb.
Ok, well surely you recognize that there are lots of people who agree with me - who feel single family homes are nice and living elbow to elbow with your neighbors in maximum density is not in any way desirable.
Unfortunately, ultra-urbanist zealots are very loud online. I suspect many of them will change their tunes with age.
Edit: what’s damaging to the ecosystems of our planet is PEOPLE! There’s no law of nature that states a suburban density isn’t sustainable, just that it’s unsustainable for 8b people. You’re proposing eco-austerity because human population is out of control
Let the population contract to <<1b as it was for thousands of years of civilization before industrial agriculture caused a very recent explosion in population the past 2 centuries (predominantly the 20th century)
Education? Contraception? It’s not fucking rocket science. Every developed country in the world is at well below replacement rates. The idea needs to be promoted and not derided or conflated with eugenics (which it emphatically isn’t). Blunting the impact of an aging population is the most difficult problem.
Edit: the most difficult problem is that capitalism demands perpetual growth, and billionaires and heads of state with a vested interest in growth would never allow the population to shrink without extreme resistance, like pervasive propaganda and outlawing abortion.
How about this: housing in places with a shrinking population is relatively cheap and plentiful (math, right?). Developed countries could dial back immigration so that immigration + birth rate is below replacement. That solves overpopulation at the regional level.
Under 1 billion is unrealistic but some contraction will happen. The main factor dictating how many children people will have is infant mortality of the previous one or two generations as well as the existence of pension systems.
…which is the reason why developed countries have birth rates below replacement level and with increased wealth elsewhere it’s also going to happen there, which would mean contraction everywhere. I don’t expect that to keep up forever, however, states will get their shit together and set incentive structures (in particular making having kids affordable) long before we’re contracting to one billion.
Yes. The likely turning point, according to the UN, is around 11bn in 2100, then declining. Plus or minus a billion or two and a couple of decades.
Which is btw nowhere close to the earth’ carrying capacity though that’s highly variable in the first place. It’s probably not a good idea to pine for a population increase past that point and leave some room for other species. And no matter how many we are it’s a good idea to minimise ecological impact. Why do people want fresh strawberries in winter anyway those transportation-stable strains taste like water. If you want strawberries in winter eat jam.
Also note that this overshoot is happening precisely because developing countries are, well, developing: Their fertility rates still stick to the old child mortality rates but the actual rates are lower so you get a population spike. Keep that up a generation or two and they plateau, then fall as people don’t require kids to provide for them in old age and also are barely affording rent with dual income from three jobs each so they definitely can’t afford a kid. Oh wait that was the US in particular. But yes that’s exactly what you want to avoid to halt contraction.
Where “fascism” is defined as whatever you want it to be, regardless of any reasonable definition. Is renewable energy eco fascism? How about fuckcars? How about forcing densified housing?
Do you have an example of a sustainable single family suburb that exists currently, or ways in which to offset the inherent inefficiency present in such structures?
Why is not living in a suburb austerity? Is all of every city and rural population living in austerity?
Do you have to drive to the grocery store? Do you have to commute to work? Do you grow monoculture grass lawns? Are the roads winding instead of straight? Do private lawns create circumstances where to get to the nearest store you have to go multiple times the actual distance to get there? These are all ways in which suburbs are unsustainable.
There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with winding roads. Sincerely, a European.
I’d rather be worried if they’re straight, are built like highways, and have no sidewalks. If they don’t have sidewalks they better be gravel or cobblestone.
Over here there’s tons of small paths that allow you to take much shorter routes on foot or bike. Sometimes official, sometimes the path belongs to a multiple-entries apartment block connected to two streets, or a street and a park, or whatever, in any way you don’t know your surroundings without having explored them.
I lived in one of the most viable biking cities in America for sometime, and the paths around and through everything were my favorite part. You could get anywhere in that town and only have to cross 1 or 2 roads, because everything else ran over or under the roads and through beautiful creek paths and walking paths cut through residential and commercial areas alike. Even there, suburbia represents a sort of dead end to all the trails, and you have to bike through miles long streets of housing to get back to a path. Thankfully, there’s great bus routes through those areas, so you can usually get to within a few blocks of your destination even in suburbia.
That’s ludicrous - I don’t know which hedgerow maze you’re navigating to get to the grocery store. 2500ft is half a mile. You cannot make 0.5 miles into 4-5 miles in any reasonable amount of neighborhood streets, and I have never lived somewhere like that in 6 completely different suburbs in different regions/cities.
In my suburban neighborhood, the straight line, as-the-crow-flies distance is 0.52 miles. The driven distance is 0.7 miles. Everywhere I’ve ever lived it’s proportionally similar, though not always as close. Anyplace with public transit - even good public transit - would require more distance than walking and WAY more time than driving.
Are there just a bunch of people out there living in insaneland (where?!?)? Everywhere I’ve lived is dense city or completely sane suburbia. Are suburbs just an evil caricature of reality in your mind? Is fuckcars just full of people living in some crazy fictional strawman of a suburban hell?
Many suburbs have a single entrance and exit, so if there’s something behind the suburb near your house, your only choice would be to go all the way to the entrance, then around the entire neighborhood to get to what’s behind it.
There’s varying levels of suburban hell, for sure. It seems like more newly built suburbs near me at least think to put walking paths at all angles through the development, which helps mitigate the issues the long, winding roads can cause. I’d prefer not to build more suburbs at all, though.
This is nothing like places I’ve been, most of which are not new suburbs
Edit: you probably hate new build suburbs that are imitating old suburbs because the population grew too much in the last 50 years and everyone wanted a slice of the pie
Where are you getting this absurd, fictitious distance? I’ve lived in MANY different suburbs and cities. The driven distance is only ever slightly more than the straight line distance. The only consistently true fact is that public transit takes 3-4x as long to go the same places as driving (and I mean in dense urban areas with real transit). It really seems like there’s a strawman that fuckcars participants have in their head for just how bad it is to drive places in less dense areas - I promise it’s not. Or you just need to find one that isn’t shitty AZ/TX/FL new build HOA hell that exists only to enrich a scummy RE developer.
That doesn’t sound like good transit, however real it is. I can go from where I am to the capital of my state on a regional bus in 50m, it takes 1h10m by car, not including parking time. Busses have their own lane and speed limit, they go significantly faster than the flow of traffic.
I live right next to one of the most bike friendly cities in the US, and even there the suburbs are hell compared to the wonderful creek paths and trails present through the rest of the city. Going from walking down a shaded creek path to walking down a scorching concrete jungle is quite a shock, as is suddenly having to figure out which suburban streets dead end and which wrap around and which go through.
You’re also missing the point, you shouldn’t have to drive to get to grocery stores, work, or ANY OTHER place that you need to get to regularly, regardless of how shitty or not the drive is.
If you can’t get to the store without using a car or walking miles, it’s an unsustainable development, period.
The ‘under 1 billion’ part implies genocide, because that is literally never gonna happen - in a time frame where we wouldn’t have to rethink housing and nature right now and the next few decades - otherwise without a major worldwide catastrophe. Sure, climate change might take care of it (again, decades away and people need housing now, also, these solutions actually help with climate change) but then we won’t have to worry about silly things like housing ever again.
Or we could promote education, contraception, and contraction of the global population the same way we promote renewable energy - because the ideas are related. Or do you think that there’s no point in trying to fix the problem? Because you clearly don’t seem to hold that opinion about the climate catastrophe, you just refuse to look at population as part of the problem.
No such thing as suburbia doesn’t have the density necessary to allow for public transit (with sane frequencies) or to be walkable. Living in there will always mean taking a car to fetch groceries, to get to school, to get to kindergarten, to go to the doctor, to go to the hair stylist, to go anywhere.
Meanwhile you’re forcing people to live in accommodations which are absurdly large and expensive because batshit zoning codes make building anything that’s not a gigantic house on a humongous plot illegal. I don’t want to fucking upkeep a house.
…and I also don’t want to finance the sky-high per-inhabitant infrastructure costs that suburbs bring with them. They’re the leading cause of municipal bankruptcies in North America.
“forcing”, yes that’s it. These people hate living in the suburbs and we are “forcing” it on them. Did you ever stop to wonder why suburban houses sell for 2-3x or more of the cost of condos? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not because people hate single family homes. The anti-car urban zealots don’t have a clue that there are people out there that live in pleasant green communities, and yes, have to take the car to the grocery store.
I lived in NYC - an ultra-dense city with incredible transit. I had to walk or take transit to get groceries. Now I live in a suburb, the store is the same distance away, and it takes 1/4 the amount of time to get groceries. Someone save me from these awful car-centric troubles.
You know that there’s options besides concrete box in the sky and suburbia, don’t you?
With a couple of row houses, multiplexes and small apartment buildings – think three, maximally five storeys suburbia could be densed up to support public transit. It could support supermarkets in walkable distance, schools, the whole shebang.
And guess what? The rare places in the US that have that style of mixed development, places that pre-date the suburbia zoning codes, are the ones with the absolutely highest home prices. Because they’re legitimately nice places to live, not because they’d be expensive to build, they’re actually very economical.
I’ve lived in multiplexes and small apartment buildings. For decades at this point. I fucking hate it and I know this is not an uncommon viewpoint. If people hated suburban homes, they would be selling at a discount, which is clearly not the case. You have to pay a premium to live in a less densely populated place and the lack of density is what makes those places expensive and desirable
They’d be even more expensive if not cross-financed by inner city taxes.
But that’s not really the point I want to make: You might hate living in a multiplex and really want your detached home. There’s nothing wrong with that. Noone’s stopping you. Maybe you want space for a shed so you can set up a hobby machine shop or whatever, you do you. What people are pissed about is that it’s either that, or the box in the sky. And now be honest: Would you NIMBY a couple of multiplexes three-story apartment complex flanked by some commercial space and a tram stop in your suburb? A plaza, cafes, restaurants, bars, doctors, no car parking, it’s serving your suburb, you can bike there, there’s ample of bike parking. Would you support repealing laws that make such developments illegal.
From what I heard from the states such places are very popular – modulo the no car parking thing. They’re called open air malls, you have to drive to them and walk through an asphalt desert of a gigantic parking lot and can’t, if you so choose, live in an apartment above a store because that’s illegal… why?
And now be honest: Would you NIMBY a couple of multiplexes three-story apartment complex flanked by some commercial space and a tram stop in your suburb? A plaza, cafes, restaurants, bars, doctors, no car parking, it’s serving your suburb, you can bike there, there’s ample of bike parking. Would you support repealing laws that make such developments illegal.
I should really give up on collecting downvotes by arguing with people who are incapable of considering my arguments, but it’s worth making this point: “NIMBY” as a term has been overused and misused to the point of meaninglessness. Let me give an example:
There are people in cities and suburbs across the US right now trying to shut down small airports. Ostensibly they want the airport converted into “low cost housing” or a park, but the real underlying reason always seems to be that they hate airplane noise and the value of their house would increase if the airport were to disappear. The wrinkle is these airports existence predates ownership of their house, predates the construction of their house, predates their housing development, and in the majority of cases the airports are older than 99% of people in the area. Nevertheless, they are succeeding in shutting down these airports, which arguably have more right to be there than they do. They knew there was an airport there when they moved in. The developer knew there was an airport there when they built the house. In many cases, the airport was actually busier in the past than it is in the present.
These people could accurately be called NIMBYs, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the term NIMBY is most often wielded as a pejorative for anyone who opposes anything you don’t like. It has lost its descriptive power because people who want to conserve the status quo are NIMBYs, and people who want to change the status quo are equally NIMBYs.
Do you oppose development? NIMBY!
Do you support development? NIMBY!
Do you have any opinion about anything in your community? Believe it or not, also a NIMBY.
I think it’s bullshit. I think opposing change to preserve the status quo happens to be more valid in most cases. I’m sick of democracy being used as a weapon where an influx of outsiders can move into an area, become a majority, and vote to change its character. There are rural areas across the US that are being invaded by people from wealthier, populous states - namely CA and TX - as a result of remote work. The effect this has is that people who have lived there for generations are priced out, and then the local character is forced to change by these newcomers who now outnumber the original locals. If being opposed to that change is being a “NIMBY”, I think the NIMBYs are morally in the right - and I think the term being used as an insult is nonsense.
That was a lot of text to complain about the term NIMBY while I could’ve just as well said “oppose” without any change in meaning.
I think opposing change to preserve the status quo happens to be more valid in most cases.
Fair enough, you’re a conservative. Others err in the other direction and want change for change’s sake. Some people like to preserve, some like to innovate. In both scenarios, we should add the word “good” to make it a sensible position.
And there’s a very specific developmental scenario I painted, and that is to put a tram line into the suburb together with some medium-density development so the station and line has enough people living there to actually see use, see at least a tram each direction every 20 minutes during the day, every 60 or so in the night.
One other alternative? Let me paint a nightmare scenario for you (or rather your wallet): New federal regulations forbid subsidising low density zones with the land taxes from high density zones, from now on you’ll have to pay for your own sewage system, streets, electricity lines, etc, the inner city isn’t footing the bill any more. Your land tax is suddenly 3-5x higher, if renting, no the landlord isn’t going to cover it for you. Tons and tons of people get priced out. Alternatively, your infrastructure rots until it is gone.
Which of those scenarios is a good one, which a bad one? All are changes from the status quo, which, as I said, is suburbia getting subsidised – a bad scenario, at least in my book, especially given that suburbanites don’t exactly tend to be poor.
Last, but not least: Mixed medium-density development is the conservative option. It’s how cities have been built for millennia. Suburbia is an invention of post-war North America, driven by car manufactures and redlining. The most expensive places in North America are places old enough to still have that mixed medium-density structure (google “streetcar suburb”), which is the norm everywhere else in the world.
Man so true. I live in Dallas Tx home of suburban sprawl. I just spent a month in North Carolina and I had no idea what I was missing. The unspoiled nature in the Appalachians just blew me away. Hard to come back to miles of concrete.
I agree that if we could build a few wall label buildings, and leave the rest untouched that would be the best way. But I’ve seen how hard it is to stop development once money starts being thrown around.
Nah mate, there should be laws to how much people can live in some area. It’s inhumane to compress so many people in one place. I don’t want every city to be Hong Kong.
I think people are just confused on how that would actually work, it’s like boomers staring at a roundabout thinking it’s making traffic worse. People are so used to congested streets with cars that looking at the example probably gives them anxiety thinking about navigating it.
A sticker attached to a pole with a QR code in the top right corner. Down the left side are the letters A to G on coloured tags with arrow-angled right ends, and under G a black coloured tag with HELL written on it, in the style of the European Union’s energy efficiency labels found on appliances. Each tag ranges in colour from dark green to red and increases in size the further down it goes. Each arrow end indicates a different silhouette.
The A tag is dark green and very short, the arrow end points towards the silhouette of a walking stick figure.
The B tag is a slightly lighter green than A and slightly longer, the arrow end points towards the silhouette of a bicycle.
The C tag is light green and slightly longer than B, the arrow end points towards the silhouette of an moped.
The D tag is yellow and slightly longer than C, the arrow end points towards the silhouette of a subway train.
The E tag is orange and slightly longer than D, the arrow end points towards the silhouette of a car.
The F tag is orange-red and slightly longer than E, the arrow end points towards the silhouette of a yacht.
The G tag is red and the length increase from F is almost triple that of previous length increases, the arrow end points towards the silhouette of an airplane.
The HELL tag is black and longer than G, the arrow end points towards the silhouette of a tank.
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
The only subtle detailed you missed, which is not surprise, is that Sweden and Norway (not sure which if the other skandies, maybe this is a EU thing, hm) use those letters, with those colors, and those arrows to indicate energy efficiency rating. So, it could be a nudge at the relationship between reducing emissions or suffer consequences of global warming, which will eventually lead to famine and war.
No, spikes aren’t permanent enough, drivers can just move them tot he side or cover them to pass over them. We should plant Czech Hedgehogs and Dragon’s teeth on out roads!
Most mobile browsers show alt text when you long press the image, sometimes you have to tap on the alt text if it’s longer than a few words (same as mentioned by the Firefox comment)
Also, in sync for lemmy the xkcd comics load as an image but the overflow menu contains extra details including alt text.
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