What catastrophe? Did you miss the California fires 2 weeks ago? Improvement in farming also clearly came from improvement in agriculture, you seem to imply that the rise in climate temperature is the only explanation.
And no, there is no evidence that temperature has ever increased that fast.
And even if you keep denying the impact of climate change, think alone of the change in AIR QUALITY in a place with so many cars like Los Angeles. The increase in air quality alone in big urban centers is worth it on its own. It's already been improved quite a bit in recent years (at least in the west) and this can only get better. I live next to a big road here in my city and I just can't wait to have less emission vehicles on the road.
Tell that to the people facing 5-digit battery replacement bills at mileages that are far short of what a good ICE car or truck can deliver. (I know several people here in Texas with old pickups that have 300-400K miles on them. One has only changed the oil and replaced accessories like alternators and pumps.)
They salt the roads where I am and the winters tend to bounce between frigid and just cold - so there's often consistent freeze/thaw cycles from December to March. The amount of wear that puts on exhausts and piston rings would blow your mind.
It's also conducive to EVs - my Leaf is pushing 70k and hasn't lost more than 2% of battery capacity (and possibly less - it's capacity loss is a rounding error) in the time that I've had it. It's active cooling is just how blooming cold it is here for a lot of the year.
The other issue is that here diesels are much more popular than petrol/gasoline. And diesels are just an unreliable nightmare of sunk costs. The amount that can and does fail on a modern diesel and costs four figures to get fixed is scandalous (and that's not even counting DPFs and flywheels).
The most that's ever gone wrong with this car is a bulb going out. I fully expect to get 100k out of the car while I have it, and I'd be astonished if it doesn't do 200k or more in it's lifespan.
> a bad electric car is outright better than almost any ICE car.
You are right, and I want to add more perspective that in your proposal there are now 2 cars on the road. Your electric and your used ICE car. The better situation is to drive your ICE car to its end, and only then replace it.
Our over consumption is a part of the problem as well.
This doesn't really make sense... the person who bought the used car wasn't just going to not drive if it weren't for sale, they'd just buy a different one. Now, there is one ICE car and one electric car on the road instead of two ICE cars.
If half of the world immediately upgraded to electric cars, sure there would be a temporary surplus of vehicles, but it would only last until the old ones broke down.
> If half of the world immediately upgraded to electric cars, sure there would be a temporary surplus of vehicles, but it would only last until the old ones broke down.
Exactly. There'd be a temporary surplus of (newer, better-condition) ICE vehicles. And people who are otherwise faced with a $1500 bill to repair their old one "kinda needs repairs, burns some oil but a quart a week isnt too bad", will instead buy a more efficient ICE. Most new BEV will get an old shitty ICE off the road.
It takes someone young to be this ignorant. The emissions of modern car engines are truly negligible. And air quality used to be really horrible.
Modern electronic engine controls have slashed emissions so effectively that the exhaust of a modern car running there is actually be cleaner than the ambient air of that time - Yes, a modern car running in LA in that era would actually be cleaning the air!
If you want to clean up the air, go after all those Chinese container ships burning bunker oil that is literally one step up from tar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_fuel_oil
Fixing these filthy ships would make orders of magnitude more difference than eliminating all fossil-fueled cars from the road.
You’ve missed the point completely, and very little of what you’ve said is relevant to the OPs statement.
Famines didn’t suddenly stop because of global warming.
Quality of life and length of life have increased depending on which metrics you use, but in any case wealth inequality has never been greater, and length of life has increased due to medical technology, not increased atmospheric carbon.
What constitutes a “marginal”difference in temperature? Keeping the rise below 1.5c is still far too much and too much to ask (apparently).
Famines drastically reduced because of modern agriculture, which is dependent on fossil fuels at all stages of food production.
Quality and length of life increased, again, primarily because of modern agriculture, with vaccination and obstetrics as a second and third factor.
Wealth inequality is up because of the unimaginably vast amount of wealth available, which has disproportionately accumulated at the very top. Poverty, as measured in simple material terms, has never been lower, except in the absolute sense that, again due to modern agriculture, we're able to sustain such a vastly greater population.
How to solve the climate crisis, without a massive dieoff and collapse to a pre-industrial standard of living, must always be the question. Remember that it's always an option, and that cure would be worse than the disease.
I didn't say modern agriculture requires fossil fuels, I said modern agriculture is dependent upon fossil fuels.
We can imagine a world with electric tractors, made with steel coked with biocarbon in solar-thermal furnaces, where the Haber process is run with hydrogen derived from clean electrolysis. But we don't inhabit that world at the moment.
That's a distinction that makes no difference. Agriculture uses only about 1% of our energy, so if we can move industrial society off fossil fuels, we can easily move farming off fossil fuels. Alluding to the specter of famine is just scaremongering.
That we have made progress 'over here' doesn't discount the risk 'over there'.
Also, the advantages of 'farming tech' may not be of the same scale as 'climate change'.
Specifically 'forest fires' are a pop culture issue, we're not ever going to be threatened by them.
Regular temperature increases will likely yield 'systematic problems' that go far, far beyond 'possibly more fires' but the issues is different because of the 'risk profile' and the 'existential' nature of climate change. It's not like 'a chemical in some food products' we can get rid of. It's an issue that affects 'everything' with potential catastrophic outcomes at the riskier end of the scale.
All of that said I would much more prefer 'Mr. Face' Governor to be investing more heavily in solutions rather than just happy legislation.
Newsom+California bureaucracy is an inefficient, bloated mess, Cali could save itself 2x more quickly if they did their jobs well.
