I know this is paranoid and I am not fully serious but these days whenever Trump does something ghastly I ask myself “how does this benefit his boss Putin?” This map shows a possible scenario how. The United States becomes a weak power not a superpower because it is devastated by climate change, Russia meanwhile is mainly untouched or grows in power…
Paranoid and silly I know but there is a leeetle bit of me that thinks… what if…?
I don’t think climate change even enters his head. The benefits of Trump to Russia are manifest: Russia wants to weaken or destroy the Western institutions that in the eyes of the West contain Russia but to Russian eyes threaten Russia. Trump (and Brexit) are an attack on NATO and the EU. The downstream benefit is that Russia can return as an imperial power, either directly absorbing its neighbors or exerting so much influence over them so as to make absorbing them unnecessary.
It might seem like long odds of success, but it costs them nothing to advance Trump, so why not try it?
Oh for sure! And of course the obvious answer to why trump wants to destroy the environment is he is just an idiot. But it does oddly have the potential to benefit Russia. But as you say, we dont need a conspiracy theory to explain trump, he is just a cretin.
At this point, infrastructure and range feel like the biggest issues for electric cars. I would have loved to go electric with my last car but the lack of charging stations out and around town (combined with a woefully wired apartment) made it non-viable. Surprisingly Walmart of all companies seems to be doing well in this area, adding a handful of charging stations to their parking lots in the area.
No, the average number of miles driven per day in the US is about 29. That’s well within the range of even the cheapest electric cars, and you can easily recharge the car overnight on household electricity.
Infrastructure is necessary to solve the non-average problem, but an awful lot of cars could be replaced with electric with no need for more infrastructure.
https://newsroom.aaa.com/2015/04/new-study-reveals-much-motorists-drive/
The mean average is probably not a helpful number, at least without the standard deviation. All you need is one regular destination that is outside the cars range to completely invalidate the electric car as an option.
I work from home, so it looks like an electric car would be great, except my office is 100 miles away, so if I need to come in for a few days, it’s of no use. Also, I won’t be able to charge it at work, so I have no clue how to get home again.
Edit:. I really hate how people post statistics, but won’t actually post their sources, or the full information. 29.2 miles, but nothing about the sample size, the standard deviation or other measures of average (such as mode or median) is just poor work.
Building on that, it’s not only the actual destinations outside of range, but perceived destinations. If I’m buying a car and marketing has told me about all these awesome adventures that car will let me have, throwing a big asterisk of “as long as it’s within x miles or has a charging station handy” really shatters that illusion. Now, if you want to argue that people are dumb and should be more rational and data-driven in their purchases, that’ll get no argument from me.
For electric to be at a state I’d consider “viable” it needs to provide a near-comparable experience or offer minimal setbacks vs. gas, because on the whole we’ve got loads of data showing that people won’t make that sacrifice; most of them will be dead before it matters.
More than half of US families have more than one car. That means more than 2/3rds of privately owned cars are in the hands of those families, or someting like 170 million cars. There’s plenty of opportunity to replace one of the two or more cars with an electric. That’s a big deal, and it could be done with no infrastructure investment at all.
Is that directed at me? I posted a link to the source, and the source posts links to the methodology and survey results.
It doesn’t matter all that much what electric car limitations are now, because as soon as self-driving cars become available, virtually no one will really need to own a car anyway.
There will always be an autocab or whatever you want to call it cruising nearby, and without the need to pay a human driver, the cost will be acceptable for people who would otherwise own a gasoline car today. If you really have to make a long car trip out of electric range, you can just switch vehicles when you’re approaching the end of the range. Admittedly this will be a bit of an annoyance, and it points to the higher efficiency of bus and rail transit, but it will still be way cheaper than owning and maintaining a gas vehicle for the occasional 500-mile drive. Only people who routinely make long-haul drives will have to own or lease their own vehicles.
We have two cars, one of which is a family car. That car is off limits, because without it, we can’t take the kids anywhere. So both vehicles have to be dependable and able to travel long distances.
Further, the cost of produces more efficient cars exceeds the cost of just maintaining and driving cars for longer periods of time. Its better for the environment NOT to replace your car. Just don’t do it. If your car gets totalled, buy an electric, but environmental impact of making a brand new electric car exceeds any benefit you get from driving it compared to keeping your old car running.
Finally, that report sucked balls! The report didn’t provide sample size or standard deviation.
Also, they made claims that they can’t support. Was their a significant change from last 2009? They say so, but we’re are the basically statistically tests to support that argument. The same for men versus women. A simple Z test would have shown if there was a significant difference. This was a poor paper, and should be considered a fluff piece, nothing more.
On page 22: For the annual report we screened 4,286 households to identify eligible drivers; we completed 3,319 trip interviews.
From page 22:
Yeah, I had to reread it catch that. Still, they don’t show any of the other information I would expect from a scientific journal.
As my first Statistics professor used to say (he was an adjunct that worked in the industry), always make the stats fit what the customer wants.
In that case, you’re right. No family anywhere could replace any substantial number of cars — not the 150 million families or the 250 million cars — that currently exist in the US, so there’s absolute nothing to be gained, and we’re all going to die. But thanks for playing!
No, that isn’t the case, but replacing current cars with electric cars is more harmful for the environment. People need to stop buying news cars!
Why does AAA want to ‘prove’ that people drive an average of 29 miles a day? ‘Want to’ to such an extent that they’d fake a survey and the data, but not so much that they’d fail to add the standard deviation to fool Really Clever People like you? I mean, FFS, what are you claiming? It’s one thing to say that lots of people aren’t average cases, sure. But lots of people are and I don’t think the survey is unusable for the purposes of discussing the problem. Do you?
Now, this is some serious fantasizing right there. Self-driving cars will not solve the mass transportation problem, no matter how many times google or Uber or Elon Musk say they will. It ain’t going to happen.
If I were feeling pissy, I’d say something like
It may be the case that it’s environmentally better to keep driving your clunker (and thus keep producing 28% of all the greenhouse gas emissions that we produce in the US) but it isn’t obvious that it’s better. I’d say you have some work to do to show that.
First, whenever you make a claim, you should have the statistics to back it up. Remember, in statistics, you aren’t proving that one average is larger or smaller than the other, you are saying that in the majority of cases, person from group A will be bigger that person from group B (or smaller or different).
Standard deviation gives you a lot of that information, 68% percent of people fall within 1 standard deviation of the mean on a normal curve. (95% of people fall within 2 standard deviations, and 98% fall within 3)
If the standard deviation is pretty high, the weaker the average is, because it means more people are far away from that average. You can see, with driving how having a low standard deviation would be great for your argument, but having a high standard deviation would mean that driving distance vary widely and might mean mean the average is less helpful.
When these numbers are omitted, you have to ask yourself why?
Also, it’s a survey, and self reporting is very poor way to get information.
But face it, we all want a solution, but promoting the idea that everyone should go out and buy a new car is terrible. It would be better if the government gave out tax credits to buy a used car, and slowed down the production of cars.
Yes, the AAA survey is irrelevant to the conversation, and that video totally settles the argument! I mean, come on.
Yes, yes it does. Finally, we are all on the same page
