this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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EVs won over US early adopters, but mainstream buyers aren't along for the ride yet (www.npr.org)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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[โ€“] echodot@feddit.uk 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've seen a few swappable battery concepts but realistically I think a much better direction is just faster charging batteries. Swapping the batteries around seems to be just by side stepping the problem rather than actually solving it

[โ€“] Fosheze@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

You can only charge a regular chemical battery so fast. There are other ways to store power that you can "charge" faster but that's basically just fuel cell tech and you can "recharge" faster by just refueling. Those also have their own issues.

Not to mention there is only so fast you can charge something via electricity and still have a regular person be able to safely do it. Megawatt charging stations are being developed but nobody in their right mind is going to let joe schmoe the office window licker handle a megawatt charging cable. And you can only make the electric drive train so efficient (still many times more efficient than an ICE). So for EVs with any decent range there will be a cap on how quickly they can be charged with an electric cable simply because there are practical limits on how much power a safe charger can output and how small a vehicle battery can be.

That's not to say EVs are a bad idea. We will just need to adapt to the new refueling characteristics. I imagine in the comming years we will start to see trickle chargers poping up basically anywhere people park their cars weather that be curbside or in parking lots/ramps. There will be more opportunities to keep the batteries topped up rather than recharging the whole thing in one sitting like we are currently used to with refueling ICE vehicles.