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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34982 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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E.P.A. Is Said to Propose Rules Meant to Drive Up Electric Car Sales Tenfold.

The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much as 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, according to two people familiar with the matter.

That would represent a quantum leap for the United States — where just 5.8 percent of vehicles sold last year were all-electric — and would exceed President Biden’s earlier ambitions to have all-electric cars account for half of those sold in the country by 2030.

...

The proposed rule would not mandate that electric vehicles make up a certain number or percentage of sales. Instead, it would require that automakers make sure the total number of vehicles they sell each year did not exceed a certain emissions limit. That limit would be so strict that it would force carmakers to ensure that two thirds of the vehicles they sold were all-electric by 2032, according to the people familiar with the matter.

To me this looks like they failed to make electric vehicles attractive to consumers compared to gas ones, so they're giving up on that and instead are going to effectively make gas vehicles illegal to manufacture. It's absolutely insane to me that the EPA can just destroy a major industry like this, and have a massive effect on the lives of every American, and they don't have ask anyone. Congress doesn't vote on it, the president doesn't sign it, it just happens because they said so.

I think that's a trend that's common with environmental regulations. Whether it's CFL bulbs, paper straws, gas stoves or low flow toilets, consumers get stuck with an inferior substitute and the alleged crisis never seems to actually get solved. It's always just a prelude for the next demand. And by doing it through the administrative state elected officials never have to take any flack for it. If congress had to pass a bill outlawing incandescent bulbs and the president had to sign it then voters would have someone to get mad at. But when it's a new DOE regulation that just appears, people don't know who to blame. Nobody ever has to argue for it or stake their career on it.

So I don't think things will change. Just like the CDC can declare themselves dictators of all apartment rentals because of the Covid crisis, the EPA can declare itself king of all energy because of the climate crisis. Year after year, more things will be banned, prices will go up and life will get worse. But most people will either not realize the reason or will have entirely forgotten that things used to be different.

These laws are clearly counter-productive and a case of "missing the forest for the trees". The easiest way to reduce demand for petroleum cars, is not to target the petroleum, but to target the cars.

The discussion has to begin with overturning obvious loopholes. The zero cost changes include:

  • Remove the "light truck" exception. All cars smaller than a semi/ RV must meet the same emissions requirements.

  • Allow 'electric subsidies' to be used for all electric vehicles. Including e-bikes & e-scooters.

  • Allow all hybrids of a certain range to be eligible for electric subsidies. (It can be as simple as extra tariffs not applying, or using median-emission numbers to apply tariffs)

  • Universal removal of zoning regulations within walking distance of transit centers

When it comes to things that cost $$, Infrastructure investments are simply more effective than 1 time car subsidies. The electric car subsidies would soon reach the 100s of billions if we keep seeing electric car adoption.

  • Use the billions to build BRT bus lanes instead. Cheap, effective and much much lower energy consumption. It pairs excellently with the universal removal of zoning regulations suggestion above.

Indirect dis-incentivization can also be done through long overdue good-faith mechanisms.

  • Road safety regulations must include safety outcomes for all people involved in a collision. Including pedestrians and the secondary vehicle.

  • Liability coverage should be mandatory nationally, and cover all costs medical or otherwise for those in the car crash.

There is so much that can be done, before draconian 'petrol cars are illegal' laws ever have to be passed.

consumers get stuck with an inferior substitute and the alleged crisis never seems to actually get solved. It's always just a prelude for the next demand

Yes ! It is hard to tell what the true cause of this is. (lobbyists ?) But it is seems to pervade all American society.

I've soured on the concept of ubiquitous electric vehicles very quickly in the past few months.

  • The risks of batteries spontaneously combusting are high enough, and they're hard enough to extinguish, that you probably don't want to store them in close proximity to each other for very long.

https://prospect.org/environment/2023-01-26-firefighter-hell-electric-car-battery-fire/

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/11/1162732820/e-bike-scooter-lithium-ion-battery-fires

Comparatively, internal combustion engines are probably the most well-understood tech on the planet and thus one of the safest.

  • Electrification of bus fleets is probably impractical/impossible because of the scheduling issue: to keep consistent service when individual buses will need HOURS of time to recharge, which means MORE busses to maintain service, which means more space to store them while they recharge, thus more infrastructure investments etc. etc.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221721009140

https://whyy.org/articles/septas-cracking-battery-buses-raise-questions-about-the-future-of-electric-transit/

https://twitter.com/christofspieler/status/1643325106368704514

https://twitter.com/DavidZipper/status/1643261155106799616

Let us not even speak of Semitrailers, Boats, and Jet Airplanes.

  • It poses multiple issues for anyone off-roading or driving far off the grid, all the more so if they haul heavy loads. They also do NOT tolerate water very well. Good luck fording rivers.

https://www.topspeed.com/the-rivian-r1t-is-considered-the-most-off-road-capable-electric-pickup-truck-yet-but-is-it-really/

https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1636023947224555520

They're also heavier because of the battery weight, and consider the aforementioned fire issue. Add in that if your area experiences a blizzard, hurricane or other disaster that takes down the power grid, you're double fucked if your only transportation is an EV.

  • They literally won't be able to extract the necessary resources quickly enough to replace the current cars on the road. Maybe that's the plan.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/making-the-entire-u-s-car-fleet-electric-could-cause-lithium-shortages/

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a42417327/lithium-supply-batteries-electric-vehicles/

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qf85EuQKWeQ

And finally:

  • Even if everyone is driving an electric car, it won't do much for emissions if the power sources are still emitting carbon.

In short, it is hard to see the heavy push for full electric vehicles as anything other than a virtue signal (since it is a very visible sign of 'progress' even if it does little to address the alleged problem) and a bit of a punishment for industries that would otherwise probably resist the Cathedral's will.

But nobody I've seen is willing or able to make the compelling case that the goals being set are likely to be achieved on schedule, nor is anyone willing to suffer any consequences if they're not.

So basically for this plan to work it's going to assume some incredible leaps in technology and resource availability in the next 5 or so years. OR for people to accept a major decrease in their standard of living in order to afford new EVs. HMMMMMMMM.

And if EVs are going to be more expensive than internal combustion vehicles (they are) it just slams the poorest with an expense they can't easily handle.

If it proceeds as I expect, then they'll maintain the strict requirements on emissions but just add in various carveouts on the basis of various favored groups 'needing' to keep using ICE or for 'equitable' reasons.

But these are not things that will actually confront the Biden Administration. They won't have to accept responsibility for consequences that are nearly 10 years off, nor will any of their constituents take them to task over this, and for some reason the major auto manufacturers seem to be rolling over and playing along.

So I guess I just plan to keep my little gas powered car working for as long as possible, and assume they won't make gas powered vehicles that are already on the road illegal just yet.

But these are not things that will actually confront the Biden Administration. They won't have to accept responsibility for consequences that are nearly 10 years off, nor will any of their constituents hold them to task over this, and for some reason the major auto manufacturers seem to be rolling over and playing along.

I think auto manufacturers are taking EVs as an opportunity to change what owning a car even means. Which is to say, you don't. Ever. EVs will increasingly have all but the most core functionality, and possibly even that, tied to monthly subscriptions. Which might sound like a lease, except it'll be far, far worse. You'll still need to pony up the $40,000 for the EV, plus the subscriptions that make it a car you'd actually want to drive like you used to own, plus you are still responsible for replacing the $20,000 DRM'ed unrepairable OEM batteries in it after 10 years.

There is plenty in it for auto manufacturers. They aren't rolling over, they are slathering at the mouth to make more money off doing way less, and effectively abolishing meaningful car ownership forever.

I could see them trying to adopt Apple's business model, in that event.

Making cars into something that you EXPECT to replace every 5 years (if that) rather than something you drive until the wheels fall off or that you pass on to your kids so they can drive it until the wheels fall off.

And, like Apple products, make them near impossible to repair on your own or through third-party shops, so you're locked into their environment from the time you first buy, and then eventually 'force' you to upgrade to keep receiving support.

And of course the fact that with electric cars you can make people pay to unlock certain performance capabilities once they already own the car.

Seems like the goal would to dissuade aftermarket modification of any kind.

I actually do expect to see 'kit cars' make a resurgence in the relatively near future.

Charging shouldn’t be much of an issue. The busses just need to be designed so that batteries can be swapped in a few minutes. That kind of quick battery change is common in factories and warehouses that have even a small number of electric forklifts in constant use. Busses would probably be more difficult due to the larger size, but I don’t see any reason to think that’s an insurmountable problem.

The busses just need to be designed so that batteries can be swapped in a few minutes.

This understates the actual challenge given the location, size, and complexity of batteries which hold enough charge for Buses. You're assuming away the hardest part of the process.

https://www.heavydutyslide.com/upload/Admin/images/OREOS-4X-batteries.gif

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ko5z6M_o85U/UQBMK4IhNbI/AAAAAAAAAZA/sqOsGUv53dk/s1600/Laval+electric+bus.jpg

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a668f1080bd5e34d18a7e76/1562049452197-F6CDV67PWQ8TSOMSH5PL/TS_How_Electric_Bus_Works_InfoGraphic_02.jpg?format=1000w

Also see the link about the busses literally cracking due to the increased weight.

And solving for those issues increases the expense of the product. Surmountable does not, in any way, mean practical when there's an obviously superior solution already in use. It's literally a choice between gas pumps, which are, again, one of the simplest and well-understood techs, vs. new battery swap tech, which even in the best case is ADDITIONAL infrastructure that must be maintained.

It's closer, comparatively, to having to swap out the engine on an ICE bus every day. It's laughable to suggest such an option when the existing tech works well.

If Tesla hasn't even got that tech working yet I'm not particularly expecting it to reach adoption for busses anytime soon.

And, I cannot overemphasize the issue of spontaneous fires

So this still falls on the "counting on massive tech innovations in short order" problem.

To me this looks like they failed to make electric vehicles attractive to consumers compared to gas ones

That's sort of the point of gov't intervention in the market to address market failures resulting from externalities. It is no different from requiring cars to have catalytic converters or smokestacks to have scrubbers; in both cases most of the benefits flow to people other than the buyer, so the market will sell "too few" (i.e., the maket fails to maximize utility). This particular intervention might be poor policy or it might be sound policy, but simply saying that consumers are not buying enough of the product is not much of a point, since it is implied.

I've definitely seen it argued frequently that electric cars were straight upgrades to gasoline cars and that it was inevitable that almost everyone would voluntarily switch to electric cars over time. The federal subsidies for electric cars were somewhat based on this idea, that once you got production ramped up and economies of scale kicked in that people would want to switch. That's a very different type of government intervention from straight up banning the competition. And even if it wasn't a different type of government intervention it's certainly on a different scale. Gas cars are so common that banning them (or 60% of them) is just completely unprecedented in my lifetime at least.

That said I think that requiring catalytic converters on cars or scrubbers on powerplants are also massive government interventions that should have been mandated by acts of congress and not unelected department head.

They should just tax emissions, but it's very important to Democrats that a) they be seen by their base as sticking it to corporations, and b) the increase in the cost of owning and operating a vehicle be seen by the base as caused by corporations raising prices, rather than by Democrats raising taxes.

Do you have a gas tax in the US? If so, what’s the difference?

There are gas taxes, but they're mostly to fund roads, so they may cover the cost of roads (though I'm not 100% sure of even that), but they don't also cover the social cost of carbon emissions. There also aren't generally taxes on other uses of fossil fuels.

I’m not sure I understand the difference. What matter does it make if the tax is used for one purpose or another?

It's not about what the revenues are used for. It's about internalizing the externalities. When you use roads, that imposes a certain cost on society, because it costs money to build and maintain the roads, and only so many people can use them at the same time. When you burn fuel, you impose a certain cost on society by contributing to global warming, and also emitting other pollutants.

US gas taxes might be high enough to cover one of these, but are probably not high enough to cover both of them. So maybe burning a gallon of gas has a total social cost (including the cost of extracting the gas, road upkeep, and pollution) of $3.50, but you only have to pay $2.75. Or whatever. This means that if you get $3 of value out of burning a gallon of gas, you'll do it, even though it does $3.50 worth of damage. That's a bad outcome. We want an incentive structure in which you only do $3.50 of damage if you get at least $3.50 in value from it.

True, if they made electric cars more attractive, that would only be via some kind of subsidy which still costs money. Either way it comes out of people's pockets. And there will probably be many unintended consequences.

In Australia there were and still are subsidies for solar power. So we get a glut of power around midday and wholesale power prices actually go negative fairly often. This is not good for producers who can't easily increase or decrease their power production, which is just about everyone except gas. Peak energy consumption comes later in the afternoon and evening, when solar diminishes. Prices rise then and consumers suffer. Overall electricity prices have been rising nearly continuously since 2007.

Price variability generally is not good for anyone, since it effectively means periods of wasted production and scarcity.

There's talk of getting massive, expensive, batteries to store this energy. I'd always known batteries were expensive but couldn't put a number to it until now. A Tesla Powerwall costs over $10,000 and stores about $3 worth of power, in AUD. As more coal power plants are decommissioned without replacement, the situation will deteriorate further.

This is the key problem with solar. Electricity is hard to store. If someone (eg Tesla) solves the storage use problem solar plants overnight become super affordable and useful. If they don’t, solar plants are terrible.

I remember talk about just using the excess power to pump water up hill during the day and running it through turbines coming down at night.

Did anything ever come of that?

The physical conditions necessary to make hydro storage practical aren't common.

A Tesla Powerwall costs over $10,000 and stores about $3 worth of power, in AUD.

How is this possible? Surely a Tesla car can’t go O(100) miles on $3 of electricity… can it? How can the Powerwall (apparently) be so inefficient compared to the batteries in Tesla cars?

According to wikipedia, the range of a Tesla Model 3 is 491 km. It costs $43,490 USD. Its usable battery capacity is 57.5 kilowatts.

Electricity in Australia (NSW specifically) costs 28.7 cents per kilowatt hour AUD, or 19.15 cents USD. So a Tesla stores 11 USD worth of electricity at the cost of $43,490 USD. There might be a bit of complication in that the battery transformation of stored energy to output electricity isn't perfectly efficient but it'll do for my purposes. 1$ of power needs $4000 of Tesla to store it, which is roughly the same as the battery.

Teslas have economies of scale on their side vs powerwalls (which also have to be installed and hooked up to solar which is different in each house) but with a Tesla you get a whole car as well.

Whatever holes there are in my maths, I conclude that batteries are very expensive relative to the power that they store. I think I'm going to put 'Just build nuclear plants' in my flair.

It's true. The powerwall has about 13 kWh of capacity. At $0.15 per kWh that comes out to around $2 in my electricity to charge. It would also last maybe 90-120 minutes running my household with the AC and Oven on. It wouldn't scratch the surface of my needs. My solar array when it's really humming along in the spring, summer and fall generates over 60 kWh a day, at a peak of 11.4 kW, most of which gets dumped back to the grid. I'd probably need at least 40 kWh of battery capacity to bank enough power to get me through cold nights, or just not waste it, if I didn't have net metering with my power company. It would cost almost as much as the entire rest of my solar array and inverter. Probably around $30k-40k.

When my solar installer was trying to sell me on the batteries, he had me come out to another site he was working on. That homeowner had a battery system which was already failing inside of 2 years, and the manufacturer was fighting him tooth and nail on the warrantee. I was unimpressed.

According to random web sources, it takes 34kWh to go 100 miles in a Tesla, which would cost about AUD9.18 at retail in 2021. Wholesale electricity costs seem to vary considerably.

To me this looks like they failed to make electric vehicles attractive to consumers compared to gas ones, so they're giving up on that and instead are going to effectively make gas vehicles illegal to manufacture. It's absolutely insane to me that the EPA can just destroy a major industry like this, and have a massive effect on the lives of every American, and they don't have ask anyone. Congress doesn't vote on it, the president doesn't sign it, it just happens because they said so.

Good, shows consumers are still relatively smart.

I want to like electric vehicles. But they're expensive, and their batteries predestine them for become e-waste in about 10 years. I know, I know, the claims are that most EV batteries last "10-20" years. Even so, I wouldn't want to roll the dice on needing a $20,000+, planned obsolescence repair within what I consider the usable lifespan of the vehicle. I drive my cars into the ground. I drove my 2007 Honda Civic until a tornado/down burst (meteorologist couldn't make up their mind) dropped a tree on, totaling it. I got a solid 15 years of use out of it, with only standard maintenance. I never had to spend more than $1000 in a single year on it.

Then you have cases where manufacturers decide, fuck it, we don't want to support the batteries for that vehicle anymore. I saw that happened to one particular model a while ago, although now I can't seem to find a reference.

To add insult to injury, batteries are one of the hottest battlegrounds for right to repair right now. A lot of them are aggressively locked down with DRM, so they cannot have dead cells swapped out, or be worked on at all. You must buy the $20,000+ OEM replacement.

Add in all the nonsense a lot of EVs are doing, turning even cars you ostensibly own into a subscription service, and it's a convergence of lots of terrible things I hate, utterly ruining a technology I would want to be enthusiastic about.

Agreed. I've noticed there's a lot of politically-motivated fudging of costs when it comes to gas-powered vehicles.

Gas-powered vehicles are incredibly cheap to own and operate if that is what you want. People can and do drive old, reliable vehicles and it costs very little to do so. My first car cost $6000 (in 2001) and I drove it for 10 years with essentially no maintenance getting nearly 40 miles to the gallon. I'm currently on year eight of my current car, and have put almost no money into it other than the cost to purchase.

"But the average car costs $XXX per year. Look at the data." says the chorus.

That's because cars serve multiple purposes, mainly transportation and status symbol. A person who buys a $120,000 G-Wagon is not purchasing transportation. Yes the cost of expensive new vehicles is counted as "transportation cost" and used to argue that gas-powered cars are expensive. They are not.

Agreed on all points.

If we had sci-fi battery technology, then electric vehicles would be ideal. Electric motors are in every way vastly superior to gas motors. A tiny motor that is ultra-low-maintenance, ultra-high-torque-starting-at-0-RPM, etc.

But the batteries are in every way horrible. Very heavy, expensive, wear out with use, require rare minerals to make, take a long time to charge, etc.

Even if we had the magic battery, we'd need the upgraded electric grid. Which the same environmentalists who want to ban gas cars want to prevent from happening.

I think honestly electric cars wouldn’t do just fine if there was enough infrastructure to support them. If you get away from urban areas, you simply cannot find a charger. There’s one or two on the route between Memphis and St. Louis (my brother drives his electric on that route), and a lot fewer in rural areas away from highways. It’s just not possible without a major push to build the infrastructure in rural areas. Maybe they’ll revert to horses?

Interesting. My friend drove a Tesla, or rather had the Tesla drive him, from California to Vermont. But yeah I'm pretty sure he stayed on interstate 80 for most of that.

Boring! There are so many awesome intermediate routes, with enough gas stations.

I'd expect the WaPo's liberal bias to cause it to overrate the likelihood of these regulations actually working. Pledging dramatic action on climate change at some point in the future is very popular with left leaning institutions. Promising to dramatically cut emissions in the future and then constantly pushing back the date is how this stuff works.

Also the Supreme Court overturned the CDC's eviction ban and the EPA's attempt to regulate carbon dioxide.

LED's are great and Home Depot still stocks Incandescent lights. You can still get a gas stove. I got plastic straws even on my trip to California last week. I guess low flush toilets were tyrannically imposed on us but I'm having trouble remembering the last time I had to use a plunger so I think they're fine. I get the principle of not interfering with consumer choices but the whole 'life keeps getting worse' seems like an overstatement.

The banning of Juul, an e-cigarette, was an eye-opener. No legal pretext, no bans of similar/identical products, just one company that was chosen to be crushed by an unaccountable bureaucracy. It’s really not that different from the common conception of the CCP’s level of market interference; all American companies and products exist at the will of bureaucrats.

gas stoves

There was a minor media circus about them, but they haven't actually been banned, have they?

Anyway, induction is amazing and I hope both gas and conventional electric stoves get banned.

  • -23

There was a minor media circus about them, but they haven't actually been banned, have they?

The CPSC dropped their plans, but they switched to the Department of Energy, which isn't going to ban them but just limit the amount of gas they are allowed to use so they will be crappy enough that people won't buy them.

Not sure how true it is, but it's said that induction stoves screw with pacemakers. If true, that would make them unfit for universally mandated use.

Apart from the policy being misguided in the first place. What's the justification?

OK, pacemakers are the only good argument against the ban I've seen so far. The only research paper that I can find is this one from 2006:

Conclusion: Patients are at risk if the implant is unipolar and left-sided, if they stand as close as possible to the induction cooktop, and if the pot is not concentric with the induction coil. Unipolar pacing systems can sense interference generated by leakage currents if the patient touches the pot for a long period of time. The most likely response to interference is switching to an asynchronous interference mode. Patients with unipolar pacemakers are at risk only if they are not pacemaker-dependent.

I don't know what that means TBH.

Having exhausted the scientific literature, I tried the next best thing: Reddit. There are anecdotal reports from people with pacemakers cooking with induction and people with pacemakers who were told by their doctors not to cook with induction. No reports from people with pacemakers who tried cooking with induction and died.

Edit: And what about people who have embedded metal fragments that can't be removed? I guess my ban isn't a very good idea after all.

An induction stove can affect some pacemakers if someone is COMPLETELY up against the stove and the pot is not covering the pad completely. Touching the pot creates a circuit (a long touch), and the pace maker will switch modes.

Interesting share.

No reports from people with pacemakers who tried cooking with induction and died.

A very literal example of survivorship bias.

OK, pacemakers are the only good argument against the ban I've seen so far.

No, that's not how this works. It's a free country. I don't need to make any argument against banning gas or electric stoves, whomever wishes to ban them needs to make an argument for it. And the bar is very high. Frankly, no supposed harm of stoves is likely to convince me that adults shouldn't be able to choose what they do or don't want to cook with.

See my other comment for why gas and conventional electric are bad.

Frankly, no supposed harm of stoves is likely to convince me that adults shouldn't be able to choose what they do or don't want to cook with.

What about the children who live in the same household? Indeed, children are the ones most affected by pollution from gas stoves.

If it's not clear, I was actually mostly joking when I suggested banning gas and conventional electric stoves. Did anyone take my claim that using conventional electric stoves is "basically a human rights violation" seriously? I was slightly in favour but I didn't really care. A complete ban is well beyond the Overton window anyway. I have now changed my mind and am slightly against it unless it can be demonstrated that they are 100% safe for people with pacemakers (and metal fragments!). Presumably this question will come up if a ban becomes remotely plausible. If it is a real danger, politicians will want to avoid being responsible for cooking someone's grandpa.

  • -16

my other comment

You have to be joking about that pollution thing right? Gas stoves burn almost completely efficiently meaning they produce CO2 and water almost exclusively. The char on your steak generates hundreds of more times indoor pollution in 2 minutes than just letting the stove burn all day would.

What about the children who live in the same household? Indeed, children are the ones most affected by pollution from gas stoves.

What about the possible bad ideas the parents could instills in their children? Activists can do information campaigns, individuals can shame people but at some point we're just going to have to let people parent and not try to get the state to it for them.

I agree induction is great. I had an induction stove and loved it. My wife is an immigrant and induction doesn't work with the kinds of pans she likes. We bought a new stove.

Please don't ban things without a compelling reason. Your and my personal preference are not valid reasons.

What kinds of pans? What's wrong with ferromagnetic pans?

See my other comment for why gas and conventional electric are bad.

  • -12

What's wrong with ferromagnetic pans?

Nothing, other than they don't sell them at the Asian market. We have a large collection of pans from Asian markets and all of them are coated aluminum.

If I had my way I'd have an induction stove. But I have a wife.

Anyway, induction is amazing and I hope both gas and conventional electric stoves get banned.

"I like X, not X should be banned", without elaboration or reasoning, is childrens cartoon villain logic.

I thought the downsides of gas and conventional electric stoves were well-known.

Gas stoves cause indoor air pollution (I believe this is what the aforementioned media circus was about) and require gas, which is a fossil fuel – do I need to explain why fossil fuels are bad? And they require either a network of gas pipelines, which are an additional bit of infrastructure that needs to be built and maintained (and they tend to explode), or distribution in individual tanks, which is very wasteful. Induction just needs the existing electrical grid.

Conventional electric stoves are extremely inefficient, so they waste a lot of energy. And they are horrible to work with, it's basically a human rights violation. If conventional electric stoves are Americans' perceived alternative to gas, then I can understand the overreaction to the mere suggestion that gas stoves might be banned. In fact, in that light, it was probably an underreaction.

  • -18

do I need to explain why fossil fuels are bad?

I think you do. And if your explanation is "because they'd be out someday" you'd have to do better than that because "someday" is doing a real lot of work here and it's not practical worrying what would happen in 3000 years - in 3000 years the people might be all living in the Matrix anyway.

and they tend to explode

If they are properly maintained, they don't. If they are maintained by PG&E, then well, that's a whole different business.

require gas, which is a fossil fuel – do I need to explain why fossil fuels are bad?

Gas stoves are burning gas to produce heat. This is dramatically more efficient than burning gas to turn a turbine to produce electricity to send over the electric grid before turning into heat. (Even the couple percent of gas lost to leaks is less than the 6% loss on sending electricity over the grid.) It's not like an electric car where power plants are much more efficient than a portable gasoline engine (plus regenerative braking) so electric cars end up being more efficient. Making heat is inherently very efficient because you're not fighting thermodynamics, making electricity isn't. As a result, under the electricity-generation mix currently typical in the U.S., induction stoves cause more CO2 emissions than gas stoves.

https://home.howstuffworks.com/gas-vs-electric-stoves.htm

The clear winner in the energy efficiency battle between gas and electric is gas. It takes about three times as much energy to produce and deliver electricity to your stove. According to the California Energy Commission, a gas stove will cost you less than half as much to operate (provided that you have an electronic ignition--not a pilot light).

Now, maybe the higher CO2 emissions to power induction stoves is worthwhile for whatever indoor air quality benefits there are. And maybe power-generation will change so that generating marginal electricity rarely involves spinning up a gas turbine. But remember stoves don't last forever, if this change doesn't happen for a while then the induction stove will emit more CO2 over its lifespan regardless. I get the sense that a lot of people are vaguely anti-gas-stove because they assume it causes more CO2 emissions due to directly burning a fossil fuel, even though this is the opposite of the case.

Regarding the indoor air quality aspect, it would be nice if there was a decent literature review of the issue, like Scott's "Much more than you wanted to know" series. As a matter of common-sense, it seems like gas stoves must be at least marginally worse. But from what I've read this doesn't seem dramatic enough to show up in aggregate health outcomes for more rigorous studies. The main difference is only in terms of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, not the particulate matter you might expect. Most particulate matter comes from the food, so it's plausible that consistently using a range hood that vents to the outside is actually much more important than gas vs. induction. But it's hard to synthesize the available information into a general sense of how much of an issue it is.

Curious if this increases gas prices in the short run.

Also I wonder if there is a major questions doctrine challenge here.

It would seem to cause gas price increases. If you are an Oil & Gas producer in the U.S., your best play here is to stop all capital investment immediately.

Yes my thought as well. Only question is how much capex impacts gas production in the relative short run.

I think that's a trend that's common with environmental regulations. Whether it's CFL bulbs, paper straws, gas stoves or low flow toilets, consumers get stuck with an inferior substitute and the alleged crisis never seems to actually get solved.

Lest someone conclude that environmental regulation never works and only serves to make people's lives worse without addressing the actual problem:

  • CFC refrigerants are banned, the ozone layer is recovering, and modern fridges are perfectly fine.

  • Leaded petrol is banned, lead is no longer being constantly spewed in people's faces, and modern petrol cars are perfectly fine.

  • SO2 and NOx emissions are restricted, acid rain has been greatly reduced, and modern vehicles are perfectly fine.

  • DDT is banned, bird populations have recovered, and food production is perfectly fine.

These aren't just random examples – these four were some of the biggest environmental problems of the 20th century, and they have all been solved with minimal harm to consumers. (The others were nuclear energy (which wasn't a problem at all, the only problem with nuclear powerplants is that we don't build enough of them) and anthropogenic climate change (which hasn't been solved because no laws that would actually solve it have been enacted).)

Regulators were overeager to promote CFLs which ended up not being very good, but in time LED technology was developed and incandescent lightbulbs have now been completely phased out in favour of much more efficient lighting, so the original goal has in fact been achieved. LED lighting is still not a perfect substitute due to colour problems, but this is a technical problem that will be solved eventually.

It's good to point this out, but I'd also say that the existence of sensible environmental regulation doesn't make batshit insane regulation any less awful.

This proposal, if enacted, would involve a significant decline in the American standard of living.

DDT is banned, bird populations have recovered, and food production is perfectly fine.

Isn't the primary use of this for killing carriers of malaria? And malaria is controlled in America... from extensive past use of DDT? Isn't this still a huge active problem in Africa? A cursory search suggests that it is, with articles as recent as last year about the ongoing conflict.

That's the only thing it's used for today. Back in the old days they sprayed that shit on everything.

LED lights should still go in the 'against' column, as their significant advantages could have easily lead to adoption even without regulation. And unlike your positive examples, the primary cost of incandescents wasn't external.

Not to mention these guys and these guys and smog in Los Angeles

CFC refrigerants are banned, the ozone layer is recovering, and modern fridges are perfectly fine.

As a professional in the relevant fields, the replacement refrigerants lead to significantly more mechanical failures and for hydrocarbon refrigerants an added safety hazard. Also, letting the cat out of the bag just leads to more refrigerants getting phased out seemingly to generate market demand through planned obsolescence- r-134a and r-410a are themselves replacements for older refrigerants phased out for environmental reasons which have phaseout dates set, themselves for environmental reasons.

It’s also annoying and leads to more consumer downtime to have 10+ kinds of refrigerants floating around- I have had to leave customers with non-working equipment because their unit used an oddball refrigerant for environmental reasons.

How big is the harm overall? From an outside perspective, things seem to be working fine. Is there a possibility the field will converge on a smaller number of standard refrigerants?

It seems the replacement refrigerants are being replaced because they contribute to global warming. I would expect that once ozone depletion and global warming are dealt with, there won't be any reason to introduce new refrigerants any more.

Edit: Is the danger from hydrocarbons theoretical or are they actually regularly exploding or catching fire?

Edit: Is the danger from hydrocarbons theoretical or are they actually regularly exploding or catching fire?

Not hydrocarbons, but ammonia leaks in big plants (like hockey rinks) kill workers with some regularity.

The issue is that every time the industry reaches a consensus on a smaller number of standard refrigerants, they get replaced for ostensibly environmental reasons. Some of these refrigerants are strictly speaking inferior to their predecessors(eg R-410a is a much worse refrigerant than R-22 because higher operating pressures cause more leaks and also prevent temporary repairs from holding), and for others the difference is merely arbitrary. Commercial refrigeration tends to feel it worse than HVAC or domestic applications because technical reasons plus a wider variety of manufacturers(due to factories for many different types of equipment buying and selling each other for decades), so walk in product loss and outside ice purchases- which can both be near-ruinous for a small business- are at higher than normal levels with equipment new enough that the actual repair is covered by warranty.

Edit: Is the danger from hydrocarbons theoretical or are they actually regularly exploding or catching fire?

In operation? No. While being worked on? Yes, they are significantly more dangerous to open the system.

I offer no particular judgement as to whether all of the above stuff is worth it or not- omelets and eggs and all that- but this particular example of successful environmental regulations does not happen to be frictionless.

So I don't think things will change.

Courts around the western world have been remarkably deferential to this nonsense. And the US courts are (uncharacteristically) more timid and deferential than those in other common-law countries. This is driven in part by a progressive belief in an activist, technocratic state and in part by conservative distrust of judicial activism.

Conservative jurists seem to be slowly coming to their senses. And ithelps good if there is a broader groundswell to support them. I'm glad to see your post -- it's part of that groundswell. But don't be too disheartened - there's incremental progress to be made, and you are helping.

Don't you think that the USA actually has the most aggressive judicial review and interventionist courts of common law countries?

Yes, it does.

But the US judiciary also has explicit doctrines (the most famous is Chevron) that give enormous deference agencies administering statues. That's what makes it uncharacteristically submissive against the administrative state while being pretty robust against actual legislation.

Other countries also allow parliaments to delegate a lot of their power to agencies, and courts are pretty timid about the delegation itself. But they do a more serious job of reviewing the agency decisions in the light of their enabling legislation. This is not some extraordinary activism, it's just common sense. It is America that has a weirdly deferential doctrine.

I'm not sure I agree with that sentiment. The student loan forgiveness plan for example which relies on an overly broad (but textual maybe) definition of what debt relief and emergency mean is likely going to be struck down by the courts. In other countries that plan likely goes through without interference from the courts.

In other countries that plan likely goes through without interference from the courts.

I'd be surprised. But it's more likely that governments would just pass legislation, since Parliaments are less independent of the executive. It's not 100% -- e.g. in Australia minor parties tend to have the balance of power in the Senate. But in general you don't see executive orders being used as an end-run around Parliament.

What you do see is ministers being granted enormously broad powers by existing legislation. These powers are broad enough that they don't need help from the judiciary to get away with acting arbitrarily. Although when they but up against the constitution, the courts might conveniently forget that the constitution exists.

I blame Woodrow Wilson for the administrative state, as I do for most other woes of the 20th Century.

It depends. It all goes back to that blasted footnote in carolene products (ie economic rights receive effectively no protections; political rights absurd amounts of protection)

I can’t go into detail on how I know this, but 2 years ago I saw a major auto mgf’s long term plan and by 2030 (I forget exactly) ICE was estimated to be 30% of sales.

I have no doubt that the majors have known this was coming down the pipe.

It’s happening.

On the one hand, this is horrible.

On the other hand, I'm glad that we Euros are no longer alone with this kind of horrible policy.

Misery loves company.

They're nowhere near as screwed as us yet. The EPA is part of the executive branch. The next president can simply order them to change it back.

As for the EU, decision making has been moved pretty much entirely out of the remit of anyone who is elected, and the only legal, democratic way to put a halt to it at this point is if everyone all at once were to vote to install national governments that leave the EU.

The next president can change it back but I'm not sure how much good it would do. You can't invest billions of dollars in R&D and building a factory if the next election turns it into a hole in the ground. Once you shut down the factories and all of the people with ICE experience move on to different careers that's not all just going to come back 4 years later when a Republican comes into office, with the knowledge that you'll probably just get shut down again after the next election.

They're nowhere near as screwed as us yet. The EPA is part of the executive branch. The next president can simply order them to change it back.

Nope, there's "anti-backsliding" provisions in the law; the regulations can only become stricter, not less strict.

The EPA is making law an elected body can’t overturn? Where and under what authority?

An elected body can overturn it, but that elected body is Congress. Basically some previous Congress passed a law saying "The EPA can turn up the heat on the frog, but can't turn it down". And now the EPA can start boiling the frog under a Democrat and the next Republican can't stop it without having a clear majority Congress also.

What is that law?

As for the EU, decision making has been moved pretty much entirely out of the remit of anyone who is elected,

I am not familiar with the full gamut of EU legislation, but in the area I am most familiar with professionally (bank capital adequacy), this is the opposite of the truth. In the EU, the bits of technical detail of bank capital regulation which are not expected to change a lot are included in the primary legislation (the Capital Requirements Regulation). You can see the key financial regulations on the European Banking Authority's Single Rulebook - "Regulations" and "Directives" are two types of EU primary legislation. The ratio of primary legislation to EBA rules implementing it is such that it makes sense to display the implementing rules as footnotes to the primary legislation.

EU regulations and directives are made by the European Parliament, which is elected, and by the Council of Ministers, which consists of the relevant minsters of the elected governments of the Member States (finance ministers in the case of banking regulation). It is a trope of anti-EU ranting that this is a smokescreen and that legislation is actually written by the Commission (effectively the EU executive). This is simply false. The Commission does have the exclusive power to produce the first draft of legislation, but the Parliament and Council have an unlimited right to amend it, and do so extensively. They are no more cut out of the process than the US Senate is cut out of the budget process by the Constitutional requirement that money bills originate in the House.

Regardless of the de jure situation, if the Commission had a de facto power to write banking regulations, the banks would spend more time lobbying it. I have spent many happy hours lobbying the European Banking Authority in person. I have worked on Powerpoint decks that were used by professional lobbyists to lobby the Parliament and Council. I am not aware of any serious attempt by my employer to lobby the Commission.

In most other jurisdictions, very much including the UK and the US, the basic structure is that the primary legislation effectively says "The regulators have the power to make bank capital adequacy regulations. They are required to take the following aims into account when doing so...", and then the entire bank capital rules are in agency regulations. When we lobby the UK authorities, we only talk to the PRA. The Treasury have to come and talk to us (which a particular gunner civil servant is keen to do) - since the Tory government cut free coffee in government offices, it is no longer worth our while to take the tube three stops to talk to them.

What controversial environmental decisions has the EU made? What Mr Kraut is probably complaining about is the increased cost of electricity in his country, which is entirely caused by his government's moronic decision to shut down perfectly safe nuclear powerplants before their intended shutdown date out of an irrational fear of nuclear energy. (Is that right, @Southkraut?) Last I heard, the EU was actually considering classifying nuclear energy as "green".

One EU policy I do object to is the promotion of "organic" agriculture, including occult agriculture, but I have literally never seen anyone else complain about this.

Edit: And this bullshit is also largely due to Germany, just look up a map of "biodynamic" agriculture by country. Beware Germans bearing ambitious plans to reshape the world.

Zero emission vehicles: first ‘Fit for 55' deal will end the sale of new CO2 emitting cars in Europe by 2035

As to your edit and general blame assigned to Germany: Yes.

Looking up newer information on this, it seems it hasn't actually been adopted yet. Apparently, it is being stalled by the transport ministers of Germany and a few other countries.

The person I was replying to was claiming these sorts of regulations are imposed unilaterally by unelected Eurocrats. This is clearly not true given that EU legislation requires approval by a qualified majority of the European Council, consisting of ministers from the member states. As demonstrated in this case, they can in fact block legislation from being passed.

@theory

Ministers are unelected bureaucrats, though.

Does that include the prime minister? Really then, who isn't an unelected bureaucrat?

To me at least, "bureaucrats" are usually non-political career civil servants, people who you rarely hear about in the news except in extraordinary situations, e.g. Fauci. Ministers are politicians, appointed directly by the parliament. They feature in the news regularly, their names are well known, and they get voted out regularly, albeit by the parliament and not by some kind of recall referendum.

Does that include the prime minister?

That one depends on the country.

Ministers are politicians, appointed directly by the parliament.

This is also not true depending on the country.

And appointments are not elections.

The thing is European democracies have a pretty diverse range of democratic control and procedures to form governments, so where say an Italian government might be mostly made of career politicians and MPs, a French one could be made almost entirely of party men and administrators who do not hold elected office.

I understand the point you're trying to make is that of the classical opposition between the civil service and elected politicians which is so prominently displayed in Yes, Minister. But I question the relevance of it these days and specifically in the context of an organ so removed from democratic checks.

Some of the people who sit on this Council could not be removed by any vote, and formally none of them sit on it by election. Calling it any sort of democratic body seems silly to me.

Someone else here mentioned one or two roundup threads ago that Germany has been pushing back on the plan because they were all for the ICE ban before Russia invaded Ukraine and cheap Russian gas was now no longer on the table.

I would think @SouthKraut is talking about "EU ministers pass 2035 car engine ban law", which is basically the same policy, rather than more distantly related one of energy in general.

Which has been scrapped?

Germany recently negotiated an exception for "synthetic fuels" which can mean practically anything.

Exactly, yes.

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