Item — HN Reader

If you don’t like data and facts, I’m not for you. If you believe it’s propaganda, that’s firmly a you problem. My condolences. The data and facts stand regardless of your belief in them, like gravity. Comment as long as mods let you, doesn’t bother me in the sleightest. With all due respect, your thoughts and belief system are irrelevant to me. They are not data and facts, nor peer reviewed.

Facts: Climate change is real. Combustion vehicles contribute to climate change through their emissions. EV sales keep going up globally, combustion vehicle sales keep going down. This will continue. Comments here change nothing about these systems or trajectories, nor their rate of change.

2 comments

Fossil fuels contribute to climate change. Methanol is likely to power global shipping in the coming decades, and there's zero reason it can't also run cars. The reality is that hybrid vehicles have all of the same advantages that BEVs have, but they can also be refueled quickly without heavy reliance on centralized infrastructure. Aside from being the reason that we're all driving ICEVs in the first place, it's a compelling enough advantage that such vehicles will continue to be with us for a long time.

If you would like bet how many methanol vs battery electric cars will be on the road in 2030, 2035, and 2040, I am happy to take the battery electric side of a Long Bet [1], with $10k to the winner's choice of 501c3 charity. Let me know. If battery electric vehicles are already 1/4th of global annual light vehicle sales, and there is ~20M-30M of battery electric vehicle manufacturing capacity globally, with no methanol vehicles on the road today, what does the future look like?

BYD intends to be the largest automaker in the world in five years, and makes EVs exclusively [2]. They have already surpassed Ford in international vehicle sales. Their flash charge charging system can charge the vehicle's battery from a 10% to 70% state of charge in five minutes, and from 10% to 97% in nine minutes. Fossil fuels for light vehicle use cases are dead, and the state of the art for EVs and charging will only continue to improve.

> Aside from being the reason that we're all driving ICEVs in the first place, it's a compelling enough advantage that such vehicles will continue to be with us for a long time.

Take a look how many refineries are left in the world. No new ones will be built, and the existing ones will only get enough investment to keep them operating. How quickly they are taken offline is how fast ICE vehicles are phased out, because you're not running your ICE vehicles without refined petroleum products [3] [4]. They are the weak link in the chain.

[1] https://longbets.org/

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/byd-wa...

[3] https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/global-refinery-closure...

[4] https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/One-in-Five-Refin...

> WoodMackenzie: A total of 101 out of 410 refineries around the world are at risk of getting shut down over the next decade. This number represented 21% of global refining capacity. Inflated operating costs of refineries are an especially important risk factor for future profitability as well as their investments in decarbonization.

I must be hallucinating all of those hybrid BYDs I keep seeing on the roads, then. You say 'EV', but the distinction that matters is battery electric versus high voltage hybrid, and low voltage hybrid. And hybrids, which are uncontroversially ICEs, will be with us for decades. Yes, even the non-plugin kind.

The world is not running out of fuels any time soon. If petrol goes away, I'll convert my cars to LPG. If that goes away, I'll convert them to ethanol or methanol. The whole reason ICEVs became a thing in the first place is because they don't require centralized infrastructure to be useful. Incidentally, this is the same thing holding BEVs back: until you solve the street parking situation the way China has, the market will be reluctant to switch.

As for your bet, I'll make you a promise instead: I'll put a few extra miles on my car today just for you. And who knows? If this becomes a social movement, maybe we could see new refineries open to meet the demand.

Being partially (direction of trend vs magnitude) right doesn't make you not a flagrant propagandist. This sort of cherry picking links to support any position, no matter how obviously asinine (though this one doesn't really move the needle), has been your MO a loooooong time. It's a classic rhetorical trick of trolls. Gets people distracted arguing about sources (Louis Rossman has a good quote about this).

Thankfully AI renders it fairly obsolete. I'd be happy to come up with some competing facts if you'd like. Then I can look down my nose and say vaguely insulting things too.