ABG: U.S. carbon emissions spike in 2018 after years of falling

iPlug said:

Oilpan4 said:

In the United States we have seen registrations for electric vehicles grow every year. But as of 2017 the national average has only reached 1.5 out of 1,000 being full electric.
That means soon we hit market saturation for people who really want electric vehicles at some point...Eventually electric adoption will need to break out of the group of super fans.

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How could we say "soon"? Plug-in vehicles sales almost doubled in the last year and most of that was due to Model 3 production spin-up. The Model 3 may have canabalized other non-Tesla potential sales. But even without it, the plug-in marked still grew above single digit territory. Would be hard to support a stall in growth soon.

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Um, no, we're still in single digits, about 2.1% by my count. In round numbers, 360k / 17.2M. Individual states like CA do better, but even here we're still in single digits last I saw. Once source from Nov. quoted 11.2% for EVs YTD, but that was including HEVs which made up 4.1%: https://www.cncda.org/news/california-new-vehicle-sales-remain-at-elevated-levels-for-2018/

There was also this topic I posted:

GCC: DOE: California had the most plug-in vehicle registrations per 1,000 people in 2017

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where we were at 8.64/1,000, but that's a different measure.

Oilpan4 said:

Making fossil fuel users pay for pretend environmental damage isn't going to fly here. The only chance the dems had to pull it off was 10 years ago and they blew it.

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'Pretend' environmental damage? So auto smog controls, power plant limits on SO2 or mercury emissions, bans on CFCs etc. are paying for 'pretend' environmental damage? It's entirely possible to criticize the specifics of say the Energiewende (or monetizing the costs of pollution generally) without going off the deep end.

Oilpan4 said:

Making fossil fuel users pay for pretend environmental damage isn't going to fly here.

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What is being pretended in your opinion ?

GRA said:

iPlug said:

Oilpan4 said:

In the United States we have seen registrations for electric vehicles grow every year. But as of 2017 the national average has only reached 1.5 out of 1,000 being full electric.
That means soon we hit market saturation for people who really want electric vehicles at some point...Eventually electric adoption will need to break out of the group of super fans.

Click to expand...

How could we say "soon"? Plug-in vehicles sales almost doubled in the last year and most of that was due to Model 3 production spin-up. The Model 3 may have canabalized other non-Tesla potential sales. But even without it, the plug-in marked still grew above single digit territory. Would be hard to support a stall in growth soon.

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Um, no, we're still in single digits, about 2.1% by my count. In round numbers, 360k / 17.2M. Individual states like CA do better, but even here we're still in single digits last I saw. Once source from Nov. quoted 11.2% for EVs YTD, but that was including HEVs which made up 4.1%: https://www.cncda.org/news/california-new-vehicle-sales-remain-at-elevated-levels-for-2018/

There was also this topic I posted:

GCC: DOE: California had the most plug-in vehicle registrations per 1,000 people in 2017

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where we were at 8.64/1,000, but that's a different measure.

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No, the rate grew above single digit territory from 2017 to 2018, about 11% excluding the model 3; 81% with the model 3 included. Was not referring to the total percent of auto sale penetration in the U.S.. Oilpan4 was saying we would hit market saturation soon. That seems very unlikely with the double digit rates of growth.

iPlug said:

No, the rate grew above single digit territory from 2017 to 2018, about 11% excluding the model 3; 81% with the model 3 included. Was not referring to the total percent of auto sale penetration in the U.S..

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Gotcha - after I posted that I reread your post and wondered if that was your meaning.

Hopefully electric vehicles continue to grow in popularity. But how often is double digit growth sustainable?

Pretend environmental damage is anything that appears to have a political agenda behind it.

It's not going to happen so why bother about it?

California already punishes their fossil fuel energy users with the highest gasoline, diesel and electricity prices in the nation. According to the American Heart and lung association California cities occupy the top 8 spots for worst air quality in the country for 2018 in a USA today news article I was reading.
In 2016 they had the top 6, so not really doing that great.
Right there is a perfect example of how taxation and penalties on fossil fules dont do that much to clean up the environment.
If taxation and penalties worked then they should have just about the cleanest air in the world.
So what, you tax the heck out of everything fossil fuel, now people run their home air conditioning a little less, you sell more electrics and small cars, fewer SUVs, get people to drive a little bit less but the root problem still exists.
Congratulations you put a bandaid on a gusher.

This is just further proof that we need to tax the negative externalities of fossil fuel. You just pointed out the two record-setting forest fire seasons in California, the cause of the metrics you reported. These are in significant part because of the negative externalities of fossil fuels.

Prior to the recent record-setting wildfires, air pollution in California has been improving drastically over the last few decades.

Oilpan4 said:

Hopefully electric vehicles continue to grow in popularity. But how often is double digit growth sustainable?

Pretend environmental damage is anything that appears to have a political agenda behind it.

It's not going to happen so why bother about it?

California already punishes their fossil fuel energy users with the highest gasoline, diesel and electricity prices in the nation. According to the American Heart and lung association California cities occupy the top 8 spots for worst air quality in the country for 2018 in a USA today news article I was reading.
In 2016 they had the top 6, so not really doing that great.
Right there is a perfect example of how taxation and penalties on fossil fules dont do that much to clean up the environment.
If taxation and penalties worked then they should have just about the cleanest air in the world.
So what, you tax the heck out of everything fossil fuel, now people run their home air conditioning a little less, you sell more electrics and small cars, fewer SUVs, get people to drive a little bit less but the root problem still exists.
Congratulations you put a bandaid on a gusher.

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Having lived in California all my life, I can assure you that our air and water quality is far better than it used to be (and infinitely better than it would be if we hadn't taken action, despite our population increasing by more than 150% in that time) precisely because of all the environmental regs we've been implementing since the 1960s, is generally getting cleaner all the time, and so far at least we're willing to pay for it. As it happens, the wildfires the past couple of years emitted more carbon than we've saved, which shows that we have to do a lot more, and our elected officials are committed to doing just that. So what if environmental regs have a political agenda - that's what societal movements for change are.

iPlug said:

This is just further proof that we need to tax the negative externalities of fossil fuel. You just pointed out the two record-setting forest fire seasons in California, the cause of the metrics you reported. These are in significant part because of the negative externalities of fossil fuels.

Prior to the recent record-setting wildfires, air pollution in California has been improving drastically over the last few decades.

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That's why I put the 2016 stats on there too.
I don't think there were many wild fires in 2016 and California still had the top 5 spots.
2017 they owned the top 6 or 7.

You know that wild fire thing can be fixed.
Leaving nature alone in its pristine untouched state hasn't worked that well.
Maybe let some loggers and forestry people in there to try and fix it.
Because what they are doing now clearly isn't working.
Or continue to burn every few years, it really doesn't matter to me as I'm in new Mexico.

GRA said:

Oilpan4 said:

Hopefully electric vehicles continue to grow in popularity. But how often is double digit growth sustainable?

Pretend environmental damage is anything that appears to have a political agenda behind it.

It's not going to happen so why bother about it?

California already punishes their fossil fuel energy users with the highest gasoline, diesel and electricity prices in the nation. According to the American Heart and lung association California cities occupy the top 8 spots for worst air quality in the country for 2018 in a USA today news article I was reading.
In 2016 they had the top 6, so not really doing that great.
Right there is a perfect example of how taxation and penalties on fossil fules dont do that much to clean up the environment.
If taxation and penalties worked then they should have just about the cleanest air in the world.
So what, you tax the heck out of everything fossil fuel, now people run their home air conditioning a little less, you sell more electrics and small cars, fewer SUVs, get people to drive a little bit less but the root problem still exists.
Congratulations you put a bandaid on a gusher.

Click to expand...

Having lived in California all my life, I can assure you that our air and water quality is far better than it used to be (and infinitely better than it would be if we hadn't taken acted, despite our population increasing by more than 150% in that time) precisely because of all the environmental regs we've been implementing since the 1960s, is generally getting cleaner all the time, and so far at least we're willing to pay for it. As it happens, the wildfires the past couple of years emitted more carbon than we've saved, which shows that we have to do a lot more, and our elected officials are committed to doing just that. So what if environmental regs have a political agenda - that's what societal movements for change are.

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Yeah its gotten better but still worst in the nation.
The idea behind not being the worst is to improve faster than some one else and let them be the worst.
Because that's not the list you want to be in the top 5 to 8 spots on.

iPlug said:

This is just further proof that we need to tax the negative externalities of fossil fuel. You just pointed out the two record-setting forest fire seasons in California, the cause of the metrics you reported. These are in significant part because of the negative externalities of fossil fuels.

Prior to the recent record-setting wildfires, air pollution in California has been improving drastically over the last few decades.

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So what a your plan to tax china's CO2. They make way more than we do and they don't care at all what negative impact it might have.

Oilpan4 said:

If taxation and penalties worked then they should have just about the cleanest air in the world.

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B.S.

Wyoming will almost always have cleaner air, with or without any regulation. Few people, no coastal temperature inversion and usually windy. But mostly fewer people.

California in 1970 and California today I've personally experienced. LA air was sliceable and stackable in 1970. Breathing LA air in 1970 was painful. Like Beijing air recently. LA recently... isn't good. But is a whole lot better, and there are a whole lot more people (and cars and ....) in the LA area today than there were in 1970.

Scale matters.

If you have a few of people per square mile, like the area around Tie Siding, Wy, it really doesn't matter how dirty or clear your car is. If you have 7,544 people per square mile, like LA does, things that didn't matter in Tie Siding start to matter. A lot. 18 million people make a lot of air pollution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tie_Siding,_Wyoming

It is worse because of the geography of the area. Tie Siding is a windy place. A car polluting downtown Tie Siding will have it's exhaust blown away with the typical 30 mph breeze. A car polluting downtown LA will have the exhaust staying right there. Perhaps for weeks. Along with 10 million or so other car's exhausts.

Oilpan4 said:

So what a your plan to tax china's CO2. They make way more than we do and they don't care at all what negative impact it might have.

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Actually, China does care. More than the USA does.

Why do you think more than half of the electric cars in the world are in China?

Why do you think almost half of the solar power installs are in China?

Climate change will not hit every country of the world the same. Russia might have a net gain, as Siberia becomes more habitable. China gets hit harder than any other large country with the possible exception of India.

China loves electric cars because they have all that land and don't really have the oil reserves you would think a gigantic country would have. China limits foreign influence by not letting in free market levels of foreign oil.
What china does have is lots of coal and they don't have any problem building dozens of very dirty coal fired plants every year to power their growing economy and electric car fleet.
If they cared so much about the environment then why do they burn all that coal and eclipse the US in CO2 production?

China has hardly any environmental regulations and very cheap almost free labor so of course they produce solar panels cheaper than anyone.
If the solar panels are the answer to everything then why do they build coal fired power plants to power solar panel factory, then export most of the panels they make?

California still has the worst air quality in the country. Didn't say that the air quality hasn't gotten better, it's just everyone else with an air quality problem did a better job of cleaning it up than California.
Enjoy your high taxes and while breathing dirtiest air in the nation.

Oilpan4, proven wrong point-after-point, just keeps moving on to new fictional tangents.

So that means you can't explain all those dirty 1970s style coal fired power plants the chinese have been building?
Or why California can't clean up their air as fast as the rest of the country seems to have been able to?

There was no mention of anything about China on my part so have nothing to defend there.

You continue to post false claims. You have most recently claimed that the rest of the country has cleaned up air faster than California but you provided no proof. Post your data. Most of us here are familiar with these facts and you’ve walked into a group of people who have a greater knowledge of such things than yourself. You have not come prepared as with all of your unsubstantiated statements.

Oilpan4 said:

California still has the worst air quality in the country.

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California has the highest population density in the country. And bad geography, causing thermal inversions. And a booming economy, unlike Tie Siding, Wyoming.

So California will likely ALWAYS have the worst average air quality in the country.

I've never lived there. I live near Seattle, where the air quality is usually some of the best in the country.

iPlug said:

you’ve walked into a group of people who have a greater knowledge of such things than yourself. You have not come prepared as with all of your unsubstantiated statements.

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If not outright outrageous information errors and ridiculous conversion mistakes. Here is a leading sample with one of each.

According to the IEA the US generated 1.2 Terra watt hours in 2017 with coal.
That would require about 240 Terra watts of installed PV capacity (to replace.)

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How far off ?
1000x in coal use
480,000x off in calculating the conversion replacement

I'm not sure why he does it to himself, but perhaps this is his way of learning ? One can hope. In the meantime his conclusions follow from his misunderstanding.

Waiting to see if/what he posts about the CA trends of particulate matter, Ozone, NOx, and VOCs. The data tells a very different story than his unsubstantiated claims, but we can wait for him to read up on that.