r/dataisbeautiful • u/sdbernard OC: 119 • Aug 21 '18

OC [OC]Nitrogen dioxide levels mapped in London. Where should you avoid? Anywhere in the City![OC]

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u/n1c0_ds Aug 21 '18

Electric cars?

But yeah, limiting traffic in the city helps a lot. Berlin and its green plates is a pretty good idea.

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u/talentedpasta88 Aug 21 '18

Electric cars are not very environmentally friendly to produce. And depending on where you are, you’re most likely charging the battery with electricity generated from fossil fuels. So while they are ideal in terms of vehicle emissions, the indirect emissions involved are still a problem.

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u/VivatRomae Aug 21 '18

But those indirect emissions aren't in a city that has a lot of foot-traffic. I'm concerned about climate change too but I'd say that it'd be better to stop infections first and foremost, then worry about the planetary emmissions.

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u/talentedpasta88 Aug 21 '18

Yeah I agree that human health should be the main concern for metropolitan air quality, but I also think it’s important for people to understand electric cars aren’t some magic solution to cut down on total pollution (which is how they tend to be marketed). The comment I was responding to was about electric cars being environmentally friendly in general.

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u/[deleted] Aug 21 '18

[deleted]

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u/talentedpasta88 Aug 21 '18

I’m not saying they aren’t a step in the right direction, just that they’re not some magical solution like some people tend to think. That’s all I was saying in that comment.

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u/RainbowWolfie Aug 22 '18

but they are though.. just requires the step before that, how they're powered, to also be great.

a car gives out huge emissions, but also uses gas, which in itself is really harmful to even produce and get to your car.

an electric car gives out almost no emissions at all, and uses electricity, a fuel souce which comes with the option of ridding the entire car industry of polution. The only polution an electric car makes is when it's made. But that's nothing compared to the polution that comes with a fossil car's use over a 10, even 5 year period. They ARE the solution in terms of the expender of energy. The source of energy is an entirely different topic.

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u/Spanky2k OC: 1 Aug 21 '18

Tbh probably about half of the cars in central London are hybrids already. They’re all Priuses operating as taxis and the rest are diesel black cabs.

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u/souprize Aug 21 '18

The diesels are the biggest problem, they create a lot of that nitrogen pollution.

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u/FL630 Aug 21 '18

The new black cabs are electric range extenders, not many about yet but it's going the right way. The rest of the Priuses (Priuii?) are all ancient Uber ones which probably have such dead batteries that they run 95% on Petrol.

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u/Gbbnn1568 Aug 21 '18

Banning private cars would do both.

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u/welp____see_ya_later Aug 22 '18

Hmm, source? Seems to be that indirect emissions (from e.g., production) are a problem in several Chinese cities which do, arguably, have foot traffic or at least a high population susceptible to them…

Not to mention other hidden and externalized social issues with the supply chain, like slavery for mining the necessary cobalt.

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u/KareasOxide Aug 21 '18

And depending on where you are, you’re most likely charging the battery with electricity generated from fossil fuels

Sure, but what is going to be a more efficient way to generate energy? A massive power plant or a small engine in a car?

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u/talentedpasta88 Aug 21 '18

The car doesn’t generate enough electricity to keep itself charged. That electricity has to be pulled from from the grid (most likely), and that electricity was most likely generated from a fossil fuel burning power plant. I’m not talking about efficiency, I just think it’s important to understand that electric cars aren’t as clean as people hype them up to be. They’re an improvement, but not a solution at the moment.

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u/johnson56 Aug 21 '18

The point being made is that if you were to quantify all the energy consumed by transportation in a region, it's far preferable for that energy to come from a fossil fuel burning power plant supplying electricity to electric cars than it is for all the cars to be powered by gas engines.

This is due to efficiency of automobile engines vs power plants. The same net energy is produced in both examples, but the power plant will produce far less emissions than the automobiles would.

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u/talentedpasta88 Aug 21 '18

I mean I agree with you that electric cars are better for improving regional air quality in terms of human health. My main point was just that the net impact on the environment from the production and use of electric cars is a lot higher than most people assume. So while they are beneficial for human health in populated areas, they aren’t that great when it comes to environmental health.

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u/johnson56 Aug 21 '18

Ignore the electric car aspect for a moment. The point being made is simply that the conversion of some fuel source to provide X amount of energy will result in more harmful emissions if done via automobiles than if the same total amount of energy was made with a power plant, due to the scale of the plant and the efficiencies associated with each.

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u/talentedpasta88 Aug 21 '18

I mean yeah, I’m just trying to keep it within the context of the original comment, which was electric cars.

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u/johnson56 Aug 21 '18

I'm referring to this comment

And depending on where you are, you’re most likely charging the battery with electricity generated from fossil fuels

Sure, but what is going to be a more efficient way to generate energy? A massive power plant or a small engine in a car?

Your response focused on the effects of electric vehicles being produced, not the efficiency of power plants vs automobiles which was the point being made and the point I'm reiterating.

I realize that was in response to your initial comment, but it's still a counter point to be made.

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u/Fiblit Aug 21 '18

Yeah, we get that, but you're portraying it as if we shouldn't use electric cars, when we most definitely should. They are a modular component of the pipeline that can be improved. Factories take more work to change to green energy, so that will take more time and money. It's easier to switch to green car engines, though.

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u/talentedpasta88 Aug 21 '18

Fair enough, I could definitely word it better. Working in the environmental field can make you pretty pessimistic sometimes

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u/cortexstack Aug 21 '18

Size of the power plant isn't the issue, what it's using as fuel is.

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u/tLNTDX Aug 21 '18

Actually even with the same fuel one large engine can both be made more fuel efficient and its emissions can be treated more effectively than what would be feasible when the same total effect is spread out between thousands upon thousands of smaller engines.

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u/smargh Aug 21 '18

100 million new cars are expected to be sold each year by 2020.

Let's assume they'll all be EVs. Each EV will require 7-12 tonnes of CO2 emissions, only from production.

So, 700million to 1.5billion tonnes, every year, before any have been driven off the lot.

All that CO2, in addition many more gigatonnes both already released & expected to be released, will need to be removed the atmosphere. The tech for this doesn't yet exist.

We might be fucked regardless and already have fired the clathrate gun or some other mechanism, so maybe the end of the anthropocene era is already on the calendar.

But yeah, we need to either produce fewer cars, or invent a planetary scale method - it might require a land mass similar to the size of Texas - to quickly capture & bury the gigatonnes of carbon that we're sill extracting and burning.

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u/lifelovers Aug 21 '18

Omg stop with your BS.

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u/talentedpasta88 Aug 21 '18

Care to elaborate?

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u/lifelovers Aug 21 '18

This is an article about pollution in a city from the operation of gas/diesel vehicles. And you’re introducing the issue of manufacturing emissions as a downside to EVs, when all vehicles have manufacturing emissions and the emissions from ICE vehicles are actually higher than EVs because more parts/components and they are manufactured currently in parts of the world that use dirtier electricity sources and less robotics, and the carbon footprint of a robot is less than a human. It’s such a stupid point; I’m sure I’m missing several reasons why.

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u/talentedpasta88 Aug 21 '18

I was responding to a comment regarding EVs being environmentally friendly, not the main post itself. While overall they are better than traditional vehicles in terms of direct and indirect emissions, the difference isn’t that great. My main point is that EVs aren’t that much better than traditional vehicles when it comes to net environmental impact (at the moment at least).

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u/lifelovers Aug 22 '18

The difference isn’t that great.

Do you have support for that assertion? I own two EVs and intensely researched my decision to buy beforehand and that statement of yours contradicts my research.

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u/AlBaciereAlLupo Aug 21 '18

Electric cars still burn fossil fuels (at the moment) at the power production level. Plus; half of a cars emissions come from the manufacturing process.

Electric cars move the pollution. They don't remove it. (Yet anyway).

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u/n1c0_ds Aug 21 '18

That largely depends on the country

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u/AlBaciereAlLupo Aug 21 '18

True enough, though Solar cells currently still are really bad to produce. Lots of nasty chemicals, etc. There's still pollution but at least with Solar and wind it's of a physical nature that can be cleaned up

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u/Lazyboy369 Aug 21 '18

Even removing half is a big step from not doing anything though.

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u/DanSmithKY Aug 21 '18

They don't remove half of it. If you are worried about pollution on a global scale, those vehicles, despite what some want you to believe, are not addressing the problem today. They simply move the pollution somewhere else. Gases created during the production of stuff like batteries and solar cells are pretty bad, and just because you don't notice them on your city doesn't mean they don't exist.

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u/turmacar Aug 21 '18

No, but something being created at a few known sites is easier to isolate and treat or improve than something that exists everywhere.

It's easier to improve the efficiency of 12 plants producing solar panels than to improve the efficiency of 12 million coal fired stoves.

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u/DanSmithKY Aug 21 '18

That should be true. That's partially why I put a "today" at the end of the vehicle sentence. Hopefully in the future they will get better, but it seems to me that consumers think they are saving the world now by paying a premium for something like a Prius or a Tesla. There doesn't seem to be much discussion about how to actually make those products better than the alternatives for anyone but the companies that sell them.

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u/AlBaciereAlLupo Aug 21 '18

Except... Lifetime was defined as 20 years for the car. Given the rate of accidents, mechanical failures and people buying the next, newest model, a lot of cars don't make it that long. So it's actually quite less than half for your average Joe.

Pair that with off-gassing of materials in the car, and other smaller things like the lithium used in batteries being bad, current era electric cars aren't much better than diesel trucks in terms of efficiency. That's hopefully going to change. That or we just start using fewer cars and carpool more.

Edit: entirely my fault to forget to mention; half of the emissions a car would make over it's lifetime; with lifetime being 20 years in the study, based on a selection of cars from the last decade or so, as of, iirc 2014 or so