jlsoaz
Well-known member
alozzy said:LeftieBiker said:The biggest problem with using PHEVs to get carbon out of the system is that it keeps a very big, booted foot in the door for ICE powertrains. Maybe hydrogen-burning PHEVs will arise to replace the gasoline-fueled ones, but since hydrogen is just a way to store energy (electricity in the best case), it seems more like ethanol - a way to avoid needed progress, rather than a way to implement it.
Couldn't agree more, this is why almost all ICE manufacturers have offered hybrids over recent years.
A revenue neutral carbon tax on gasoline, with revenues going towards solar/wind power projects, would accelerate the reduction of carbon emissions. With respect to EV subsidies, I think those could be reduced/eliminated - particularly for those who can afford an EV. With battery prices continuing to drop and newer, long range EVs with lots of tech, there should be plenty of moderately well off and rich people who will opt for an EV. Tesla has made EVs cool, which definitely helps the overall EV market.
Governments could still offer people an EV credit towards purchasing a new or used EV, but make that EV credit conditional on first scrapping an old ICE (which must be sold off for parts, or crushed). That would give lower income people an incentive to purchase an older LEAF, for instance.
I agree with a decent portion of this thinking. With PHEVs only presently working with available high carbon fuels, and true zero-carbon drop-in replacement affordable widely-distributed fuels not being ready for market, we seem to be headed toward BEV only. IMO things would be best clarified by ending the free ride that the polluters are getting (they do not pay for the damages they cause) and a good way to do this would be some form of tax on the increasingly deadly polluting activity. The "revenue neutral" wording you use, as to combining some taxes with subsidies toward perceived ameliorative (to the pollution damages) technologies and practices, seems like possibly a good way to conceptualize this. But what also needs understanding, IMO, is the impact of such taxes. Ironically, if and as they are instituted, since they would finally provide the price-signals, economy-wide, as to the damages, and since such price signals might send consumers moving in unexpected directions as they finally need to think deeper and act on the clarified evidence of the society-wide pollution problem, the price signals would provide incentive for phase-out of high-ghg-pollution-fuels, but at the same time might open the door more widely not only to ultra-lower-polluting BEVS, but also, perhaps, to ultra-low-polluting net-zero-carbon fuels. If they did open this door, ironically it might help open the door to keeping more ICVs and PHEVs on the table.
I'd talk more about H2 and FCV, especially since H2 can be produced as a net-zero-carbon fuel, and I like FCV conversion efficiencies that are superior to the usual combustion engines, but I have seen virtually no hard-hitting attempt to analyze whether it would be damaging (in some other less-discussed unanticipated way) to split off that many hydrogen atoms and create some unprecedented global hydrogen economy. Maybe it would not be damaging, but until improved precautionary principles are brought into practice, I am wary.