Showing posts with label environmentalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environmentalism. Show all posts

Sunday 3 October 2021

Environmental Marketing: the shell-game of hybrid electric vehicles

Out for a ride the other day, I had a hybrid car driver go off unprovoked about how un-environmental motorcycles are.  My son and I were two-up on my 2010 Kawasaki Concours 14 when we pulled in to a stop and got unsolicited advice from the ignorant.

There are lighter bikes with smaller motors that get significantly higher gas mileage, but the Connie does a fine job of moving two people through the world using amazingly little in terms of natural resources.  It also has a virtuous manufacturing history compared to many other vehicles, especially ones that move on lithium power.

This proud-Prius driver got his back up when I suggested that my bike gets better mileage than his dual-engined hybrid (it does - his AWD Prius gets 52/48mpg on its city/highway cycles, my C14 is currently averaging 4.5 litres/100kms mostly two up, which works out to just over 52mpg).  That Toyota, like my Kawasaki, is made in Japan by unionized workers who are paid a living wage to build world-class machines.  Being Japanese, they also both lean heavily on locally manufactured parts.  More and more vehicles are being built in developing countries, which can be a good thing but can also be an excuse to force labour on people who could never afford what they're building.  Globalism doesn't like to show the off-shore slavery that makes it run.

Where I think our two vehicles diverge are in the inherent compromises in the design of that Toyota.  Lugging around two seperate drivetrains is incredibly inefficient.  It's impressive that the hybrid drive has evolved to the point where it can post the mileage numbers it does, but it's still having to lug around a gas tank and gasoline powered motor in addition to batteries and electric motors.  Other than the much-vaunted fuel efficiency, the cost of maintenance must be miserable.  By comparison, the efficient shaft-drive and motor on the Kwak are designed to do hundreds of thousands of high-efficiency (or fast if you prefer) miles without any of that overhead.

The most onerous (and hidden) part of that mechanical overhead are the lithium batteries in that hybrid.  I teach computer engineering as my day job and I'm well up on our medieval battery power development.  We are stuck with poor performing, environmentally bankrupt, chemical battery technology from somewhere in the late 19th Century.  Instead of addressing the immanent climate emergency by producing smaller, more efficient vehicles, we're using electric and hybrid electric as an excuse to produce slightly more efficient behemoths.

Lithium batteries are a nightmare.  From a safety standpoint they are a potentially explosive disaster and from a power to weight ratio they are next to useless, but they're the best we have.  The nightmare gets worse though when you look at how we're managing lithium production in a world that desperately needs more of it.  As you'd expect, transnational companies with no real oversight are abusing developing countries (as they have since colonial times) with aggressive economic tactics in order to strip local peoples of the natural resources beneath their feet.  International mining concerns ferment government instability in order to ensure cheap access to in-demand resources.  Money likes to condense where it already exists and the electric car battery market has all the hallmarks of blood diamonds in terms of the distribution of wealth involved.

There are a lot of advantages to electric vehicles and I hope to get into them sooner than later, but these early adopter vehicles are being driven by and for the privileged wealthy and are mined and manufactured by environmentally and socially bankrupt transnational companies chasing dollar signs (as it has always been).

If you're all about leveraging your privilege in order to wander around with your chest out bragging about how much you care about the planet, do a bit of research first.  There is a darkside to rushing electric vehicle sales before we've worked out the tech that amplifies rather than resolves our resource shortages.  The immanent climate disaster needs solutions, not a shell-game where old white guys get to tell everyone about how much they care by driving overweight, compromised designs based more on marketing than actually solving the coming crisis.

That same day we filled up before riding home.  I put $28 of premium in to fill up the bike.  The guy next to me pulled up in a new hybrid F150 pickup truck that looked bigger than a house.  He proceeded to put nearly $200 of gas into it.  I asked him how far that'd get him and he told me about how the hybrid electric was so efficient that he'd get about a thousand kilometers to the tank.  I get just shy of 500 to a tank on the bike, so for what he put in I could cover 2000kms.  I know this is apples to oranges as that pickup could do things the bike can't, like carry loads, except this one with its never used bed and chrome wheels wasn't carrying much of anything, and therein lies the real issue with this hybrid fad; instead of directing us to use less (which would actually help us deal with the climate emergency), hybrid technology is being used by car companies to justify an unsustainable habit of ever larger and improbable vehicles.  If we could all do more with less we might just make it out of this mess.

The Corvette owners club rocked up at the gas station then.  The new Vette goes 0-60 almost a fast as my decade old Connie while using twice the fuel.  With only two seats it makes a more direct comparison with the bike in terms of functionality and usefulness.  The plethora of old white guys who hopped out of their new Vettes all spent 12 to 15 times what I did to buy their toys, the difference is that my gasoline powered recreational decisions aren't burning a hole in the world.

If you really want to help out, get smaller and use less - riding a bike is a great place to start.  Your other option is to keep playing into the enviro-marketing games until we're all watching the world burn to the ground around us.  I won't go into how charging all these electric vehicles on our already overloaded and vulnerable electrical infrastructure is going to poke holes in other aspects of life.  We need people to change their minds about what green is, and the first step isn't to throw new technology at our massive vehicle infatuations in order to make them seem green, it's to do more with less.


Some Research on Battery Powered Vehicles  (in case you can't be bothered to do it yourself)

https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/20401

Starving arid regions of their drinking water to feed the world's insatiable appetite for lithium?  If you know where the technology comes from, it gets difficult to stay on that high horse.

“The ethics of electric vehicles is far more complicated than the expensive car adverts and glowing newspaper headlines would have us believe.”

https://www.thoughtco.com/lithium-production-2340123

Lithium production is a messy business.

https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201208/backpage.cfm

Lithium development has stalled and initial optimism is fading.  You're not going to be replacing your worn out lithium batteries with something better in your EV any time soon - but you will be replacing them with yet more lithium.

https://www.ford.ca/trucks/f150/f150-lightning/2022//?gnav=header-trucks-vhp

Instead of immanent climate disaster modifying our driving habits and producing smaller vehicles that use less of everything, we're leveraging hybrid electric vehicles to keep churning out excess.  When people plug in behemoths like this we'll end up having to turn on coal powered hydro plants just to keep the lights on.

With Ontario spending hundreds of millions to cancel carbon neutral electricity production, we all appear more than happy to simply hide our carbon output rather than actually reduce it.

https://www.energyvoice.com/renewables-energy-transition/158058/bmw-i3-ad-pulled-due-misleading-electric-vehicle-claims/

Car companies are selling environmentalism hard, even when what they're selling isn't.


Friday 19 August 2016

Emissions & Where We Hide Them

Ah, the wisdom of the internet...
This article on how motorcycles might be less green than you think was shared by Zero motorcycles online.  A number of people underneath the article posted responses that had little to do with the article and more to do with a general hatred of motorcycles.  The loud pipe crowd seems to raised the ire of the general public quiet effectively.  Thanks for that.

I'd heard about the Mythbuster motorcycle pollution test mentioned in the article previously, and had seen annoyed responses pointing out how unfair it was.  I felt obliged to put something up that wasn't just angry motorcycle ranting.

"The Mythbusters they refer to compared a 1990s family sedan to a 1990s Honda super bike. A fairer comparison would have been an 90's Corvette vs. the Honda super bike (vehicles with similar performance and intent), but then it wouldn't have been close. The other comparisons were equally unfair.  It seemed to be the result of what they had handy, and one of the mythbusters was a sports bike guy, so that's what they used.


If you think hybrids are the magic bullet you should look into how current battery technology is created and retired, it isn't pretty.  An accurate accounting of the e-waste from hybrid production and operation overshadows their minimal pollution output - you're basically showing a green face to what is a very polluting industrial process. That hybrid vehicles are utterly tedious and heavy because they carry redundant power trains is yet another problem; heavy things are never efficient.

The idea that some bike owners remove pollution gear for performance is no less true for four wheelers - except when the idiot on my street straight pipes his massive Dodge pickup you can actually see the hole he's making in the sky.  Meanwhile I'll keep getting 50+mpg out of my Triumph Tiger."

After that I started poking around to try and get a feel for just how magically ecological electric vehicles are.  It turns out lithium based batteries are nasty, both to create and to recycle:

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2012/03/30/why-hybrids-and-evs-dont-help-solve-the-energy-conundrum/
http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/hold-smugness-tesla-might-just-worse-environment-know/

http://transweb.sjsu.edu/project/1137.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lithium-ion-batteries-hybrid-electric-vehicle-recycling/
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/10/what-happens-to-electric-car-batteries-when-the-car-is-retired/index.htm
https://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/graphics/2015-04-28-carbon-emissions-from-electricity-generation-for-the-top-ten-producer.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214993714000037
http://www.mai.org.my/ver1/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1934:recycling-the-hybrid-battery-packs&catid=42:global-auto-news&Itemid=165

"A Prius battery begins life in a dirty nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario. This mine has caused enough damage to the surrounding area to be called a “dead zone.” There is no natural life of any sort for miles around. NASA used that area to test its Moon rovers because the area resembles its craggy surface. Acid rain from the toxins of the mine killed all the plant life in the area and washed away the hillsides. All of this sounds positively wonderful, but don’t worry, it gets better. These battery components are then shipped to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. After that, they make their way to China to be turned into nickel foam of sorts. Finally, the batteries make their way to Japan to be put into the cars, which are then shipped all around the world to happy Prius buyers who are anxious to drive their new hybrid."

"EVs that depend on coal for their electricity are actually 17 percent to 27 percent worse than diesel or gas engines. That is especially bad for the United States, because we derive close to 45 percent of our electricity from coal. In states like Texas, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, that number is much closer to 100 percent."

"The initial production of the vehicle and the batteries together make up something like 40 percent of the total carbon footprint of an EV – nearly double that of an equivalent gasoline-powered vehicle."


We live in a time of compromise, but thinking that you've somehow solved the entire vehicular pollution thing by leaping into a hybrid or EV sourced from parts delivered by oil driven transport from all over the world and powered by whichever lowest hydro bidder your miserly government is supporting this week is a bit much.  The harder choice in the short term is to live with less, which no one is willing to do (that's probably what's driving hybrid/battery e-vehicle evangelism - a chance to bypass that choice).


I suspect that hydrogen fuel cells driving electrical motors are where we'll go next in personal transportation (though why that's only happening as a college project in motorcycling is a bit vexing).  Fortunately, Honda is doing something on the four wheeled front.  A super light weight hydrogen celled electrical vehicle bypasses the battery production nightmare, but then we aren't moving toward light weight, minimalist vehicles.  Would you want to drive a thousand pound hydrogen vehicle next to a massive SUV?  That would be as dangerous as riding a motorcycle!

While that's happening, advancements in nuclear engineering will hopefully drive us out into the solar system.  The outer planets are a virtually unlimited store of non carbon based fusion energy, we just have to get there and collect the fuel (which is rare on Earth).  If we took half of what we spend on military budgets world wide each year, we'd have an unlimited source of clean energy on tap within my lifetime.  Instead we just keep doing what we've always done, stumbling forward in ignorance driven by greed instead of driving for real global advances in sustainable energy production.

Of course, none of that matters to personal transportation if we can't find a better way to store electricity locally.  Chemical batteries are an eighteenth Century solution to a twenty-first century problem.  We really need to start advancing hydrogen fuel cells, kinetic storage and other non-chemical battery technologies.  A near perfect scenario would be using d-He3 fusion to produce hydrogen with no carbon footprint.  The hydrogen then works as an electrical generator in a fuel cell as it fuses with oxygen producing pure water.


A truly zero emissions vehicle with an abundant and
powerful fuel supply?  I'm dreaming of that future.
I have no doubt that the internal combustion engine's days are numbered and that the future is electrical.  Companies like Zero Motorcycles and even EVs like the Nissan Leaf are doing their part to improve electrical engine efficiency, but depending on globally sourced, polluting chemical battery technologies isn't the future.  One day I'll hop on my hydrogen fuel celled Zero Tsunami (because it produces only water, get it?) and zip off down the road knowing that I'm riding a vehicle that is truly sustainable.

Arguing between gasoline power and hybrid/EVs that depend on extremely polluting chemical battery technologies and fossil fuel driven electricity generation is like arguing whether your coal fed steam powered train is less polluting than my wood burning steam powered train - neither solve the problem, and one seems more about hiding it than fixing it.

***
Originally shared by Zero Motorcycles
Are motorcycles greener than cars? They are if you ride a Zero! Interesting discussion. Your thoughts?

Arguing on the internet, I should know better...
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1105626_why-motorcycles-may-not-be-greener-than-cars-missing-emission-gear#comment-2845856393





I'm beginning to think that a few years ago a very smart MBA type walked into auto manufacturers and said the whole environmental thing can be resolved by moving the burning of fossil fuels out of sight of the general public.

The issue with climate change is that it's obvious to consumers that they are responsible! Every time they put gas in the car they're burning it. Simply move the carbon production out of sight and everything is good again, and you get a brave new legion of e-vehicle evangelists who will fight tooth and nail to ignore any evidence of this shift.

That your intermediate step is itself very environmentally damaging is easy to ignore. State that the batteries used in electric vehicles are very recyclable and everyone (especially your believers) will happily state that this is what is happening. Don't demand laws that require recycling, don't have any oversight over what happens to batteries when they're done.

With carbon emissions and the pollution from the new systems that hide it happily out of sight, the general public can get their pride on riding around in hybrid and electric vehicles and never once see the damage they are doing first hand. Problem solved!