But another thing that gets attention around here in Europe, I had learned this weekend, are 1 liter per 100 km delivery cars. Those have at most 40PS and are very well suited for the city. Why do new fancy cars need a parking assistance when the same producer could built cars that last 20 years and use only a liter and cost only 10k€? The Japanese show it: The first doing this will win.

At any rate, have you any notion how much electricity demand would need to increase in time to meet your ideal EV transition? (Noting also how much is currently generated by coal?)

If you have some helpful, consistent way to think these things through, it’d be great to hear it! Whenever I try and think about it, the goalposts seem to shift in my head. I guess the best we can do is to pick a few scenarios and think them through in detail. But anyway: I worry that there is simply no way the kind of electricity capacity can be built – certainly not green electricity. Hopefully, I’m wrong…

The other interesting aspect to this: while we all try and ‘decouple’ transport demand growth from economic growth, shifting transport to electricity will couple it to demand from other residential/commercial/industrial sectors. Their prices will change accordingly. Currently, transport’s reliance on the black stuff keeps those markets quite separate. Another damn fiddly elasticity problem.

Yikes! Thanks for catching that.

The video is here, and I’ll add a link to the post itself.

Well, not exactly. Previously we’d had solar hot water for near enough to 25 years. We’re not used to paying for heating water _at all_, because we had the backup heating turned off for most of the year. So now we’ve got a much smaller house, with solar power, but we’re still paying for more power than we expected. And all because we’re now paying for something we’re used to having for free – didn’t work that out too well, did we.

“Governments are falling badly behind on low-carbon energy, putting carbon reduction targets out of reach and pushing the world to the brink of catastrophic climate change, the world’s leading independent energy authority will warn on Wednesday.”

I didn’t see that IEA thing. Ouch. I’ll look it up, though.

Paul:

I don’t know what to think about the leadership issue. Right now, the public sentiment is so mean in the US that I’m not at all optimistic it would help. We’ve replaced normal civil society with a cross between capitalism and gladiator games, with the unstated motto, “I’ve got mine, screw everyone else”, where “everyone else” often includes someone’s own kids and grand kids. If that’s a fundamental characteristic of American society — we can take cooperative actions in our own best interest only during good (or at least not really bad) economic times — we’re in even more trouble than I thought. Peak oil + climate change will result in more than a little economic disruption, implying we’ll spend endlessly on adaptation and short-term fixes that we have to address, with even less money and… what? compassion? generosity? humanity? left over for mitigation.