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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34980 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.

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.

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.

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