Vegans, electric cars and ostriches. Spot the odd one out?
Discussion
Morning all,
We're always being told that electric cars are the clean, sustainable future of motoring with cat tax still designed to encourage their purchase, all whilst governments and environmental groups put their heads in the sand and ignore not just the CO2 simply transferred to power stations instead, but also the pretty vile ecological and human costs associated with the various chemicals required for EV batteries.
Vegans have long been accusing the rest of us of being genocidal murderers for snaffling the occasional sausage, and now they too have a topical ecological cause du jour to help them attain peak smugness, yet they too keep their noggins firmly ensconced underground when it comes to the huge quantities of wild animals - insects, birds, rodents, rabbits, deer and more - unavoidably killed to protect arable crops being raised for human consumption. The sad irony of that particular set of blinkers is of course that many of these animals make wonderful eating yet frequently end up getting thrown away because nobody wants them, so surely anyone with a genuine concern for animals would be actively encouraging these particular animals to be fed into the human food chain to help reduce the number of intensively reared farm animals?
Ostriches? It turns out they don't and never have stuck their heads in the sand to try and get away from things they don't like!
There are of course other blatant examples of this sort of thing, such as the government promising to drastically reduce net migration when they know that in reality the ageing of our population resulting from 50 years of declining birth rates means they can do no such thing without collapsing the economy and destroying society, but it did get me wondering...
Are there other less well known examples of this sort of phenomenon that impact our daily lives that we're maybe not aware of?
We're always being told that electric cars are the clean, sustainable future of motoring with cat tax still designed to encourage their purchase, all whilst governments and environmental groups put their heads in the sand and ignore not just the CO2 simply transferred to power stations instead, but also the pretty vile ecological and human costs associated with the various chemicals required for EV batteries.
Vegans have long been accusing the rest of us of being genocidal murderers for snaffling the occasional sausage, and now they too have a topical ecological cause du jour to help them attain peak smugness, yet they too keep their noggins firmly ensconced underground when it comes to the huge quantities of wild animals - insects, birds, rodents, rabbits, deer and more - unavoidably killed to protect arable crops being raised for human consumption. The sad irony of that particular set of blinkers is of course that many of these animals make wonderful eating yet frequently end up getting thrown away because nobody wants them, so surely anyone with a genuine concern for animals would be actively encouraging these particular animals to be fed into the human food chain to help reduce the number of intensively reared farm animals?
Ostriches? It turns out they don't and never have stuck their heads in the sand to try and get away from things they don't like!
There are of course other blatant examples of this sort of thing, such as the government promising to drastically reduce net migration when they know that in reality the ageing of our population resulting from 50 years of declining birth rates means they can do no such thing without collapsing the economy and destroying society, but it did get me wondering...
Are there other less well known examples of this sort of phenomenon that impact our daily lives that we're maybe not aware of?
Kermit power said:
We're always being told that electric cars are the clean, sustainable future of motoring with cat tax still designed to encourage their purchase, all whilst governments and environmental groups put their heads in the sand and ignore not just the CO2 simply transferred to power stations instead, but also the pretty vile ecological and human costs associated with the various chemicals required for EV batteries.
The primary points about EVs is that it's easier to control the emissions from a couple of hundred power stations than the exhausts of millions and millions of vehicles and that it reduces the rate at which we're burning through a fossil fuel that is finite. The other issues you mention exist but governments and the manufactures are not blind to these things. Kermit power said:
Vegans have long been accusing the rest of us of being genocidal murderers for snaffling the occasional sausage, and now they too have a topical ecological cause du jour to help them attain peak smugness, yet they too keep their noggins firmly ensconced underground when it comes to the huge quantities of wild animals - insects, birds, rodents, rabbits, deer and more - unavoidably killed to protect arable crops being raised for human consumption. The sad irony of that particular set of blinkers is of course that many of these animals make wonderful eating yet frequently end up getting thrown away because nobody wants them, so surely anyone with a genuine concern for animals would be actively encouraging these particular animals to be fed into the human food chain to help reduce the number of intensively reared farm animals?
Everyone has a choice as to what they eat. They may have a point. They may not. It really doesn't matter. Very few vegans actually preach their cause or criticise non vegans. Wild animals killed to preserve agriculture are often used in some way; manufacture of tallow, for example.
Kermit power said:
Are there other less well known examples of this sort of phenomenon that impact our daily lives that we're maybe not aware of?
Very few. You need to keep in mind that there's two realities: that which emerges from popular narrative, shaped by an ignorant media with political agenda that triggers emotions amongst those susceptible to suggestion regardless of the truth. And then there's the real reality. And sometimes, the real reality is a bit daft, people get things wrong, paradoxes exists.... but this is all part of trying stuff out, not some Dr Evil plot to undermine the masses.The trick with these things is not to let the normally uninformed popular narrative spoil your day. If it really bothers you, do some research. Talk to those that know about these things, then form an opinion. And also, ask yourself how your life would be improved if there were no vegans and EVs were not a thing (but the the issues that has led to their rise remain).
StevieBee said:
The primary points about EVs is that it's easier to control the emissions from a couple of hundred power stations than the exhausts of millions and millions of vehicles and that it reduces the rate at which we're burning through a fossil fuel that is finite. The other issues you mention exist but governments and the manufactures are not blind to these things.
The OP could even do some simple calcs.Look up the average current carbon intensity of the UK grid per kWh, look up the average mileage per kWh for EVs and work out the grams/mile.
Then compare that to tailpipe emissions for ICEs and it should be fairly obvious which one is a lot bigger.
All he needs is a working calculator and an ability to not fib.
Oh, and an understanding of the concept of magnitude, where one thing can be bigger or smaller than something else.
He could also do the same for NOx, but to save him the trouble, it's about ten times lower than the real life emissions for a Euro 6 diesel.
GT9 said:
StevieBee said:
The primary points about EVs is that it's easier to control the emissions from a couple of hundred power stations than the exhausts of millions and millions of vehicles and that it reduces the rate at which we're burning through a fossil fuel that is finite. The other issues you mention exist but governments and the manufactures are not blind to these things.
The OP could even do some simple calcs.Look up the average current carbon intensity of the UK grid per kWh, look up the average mileage per kWh for EVs and work out the grams/mile.
Then compare that to tailpipe emissions for ICEs and it should be fairly obvious which one is a lot bigger.
All he needs is a working calculator and an ability to not fib.
Oh, and an understanding of the concept of magnitude, where one thing can be bigger or smaller than something else.
He could also do the same for NOx, but to save him the trouble, it's about ten times lower than the real life emissions for a Euro 6 diesel.
Kermit power said:
Morning all,
We're always being told that electric cars are the clean, sustainable future of motoring with cat tax still designed to encourage their purchase, all whilst governments and environmental groups put their heads in the sand and ignore not just the CO2 simply transferred to power stations instead, but also the pretty vile ecological and human costs associated with the various chemicals required for EV batteries.
Vegans have long been accusing the rest of us of being genocidal murderers for snaffling the occasional sausage, and now they too have a topical ecological cause du jour to help them attain peak smugness, yet they too keep their noggins firmly ensconced underground when it comes to the huge quantities of wild animals - insects, birds, rodents, rabbits, deer and more - unavoidably killed to protect arable crops being raised for human consumption. The sad irony of that particular set of blinkers is of course that many of these animals make wonderful eating yet frequently end up getting thrown away because nobody wants them, so surely anyone with a genuine concern for animals would be actively encouraging these particular animals to be fed into the human food chain to help reduce the number of intensively reared farm animals?
Ostriches? It turns out they don't and never have stuck their heads in the sand to try and get away from things they don't like!
There are of course other blatant examples of this sort of thing, such as the government promising to drastically reduce net migration when they know that in reality the ageing of our population resulting from 50 years of declining birth rates means they can do no such thing without collapsing the economy and destroying society, but it did get me wondering...
Are there other less well known examples of this sort of phenomenon that impact our daily lives that we're maybe not aware of?
An average of 134 posts a month, are they all as inane as this?We're always being told that electric cars are the clean, sustainable future of motoring with cat tax still designed to encourage their purchase, all whilst governments and environmental groups put their heads in the sand and ignore not just the CO2 simply transferred to power stations instead, but also the pretty vile ecological and human costs associated with the various chemicals required for EV batteries.
Vegans have long been accusing the rest of us of being genocidal murderers for snaffling the occasional sausage, and now they too have a topical ecological cause du jour to help them attain peak smugness, yet they too keep their noggins firmly ensconced underground when it comes to the huge quantities of wild animals - insects, birds, rodents, rabbits, deer and more - unavoidably killed to protect arable crops being raised for human consumption. The sad irony of that particular set of blinkers is of course that many of these animals make wonderful eating yet frequently end up getting thrown away because nobody wants them, so surely anyone with a genuine concern for animals would be actively encouraging these particular animals to be fed into the human food chain to help reduce the number of intensively reared farm animals?
Ostriches? It turns out they don't and never have stuck their heads in the sand to try and get away from things they don't like!
There are of course other blatant examples of this sort of thing, such as the government promising to drastically reduce net migration when they know that in reality the ageing of our population resulting from 50 years of declining birth rates means they can do no such thing without collapsing the economy and destroying society, but it did get me wondering...
Are there other less well known examples of this sort of phenomenon that impact our daily lives that we're maybe not aware of?
cowbit said:
Kermit power said:
Morning all,
We're always being told that electric cars are the clean, sustainable future of motoring with cat tax still designed to encourage their purchase, all whilst governments and environmental groups put their heads in the sand and ignore not just the CO2 simply transferred to power stations instead, but also the pretty vile ecological and human costs associated with the various chemicals required for EV batteries.
Vegans have long been accusing the rest of us of being genocidal murderers for snaffling the occasional sausage, and now they too have a topical ecological cause du jour to help them attain peak smugness, yet they too keep their noggins firmly ensconced underground when it comes to the huge quantities of wild animals - insects, birds, rodents, rabbits, deer and more - unavoidably killed to protect arable crops being raised for human consumption. The sad irony of that particular set of blinkers is of course that many of these animals make wonderful eating yet frequently end up getting thrown away because nobody wants them, so surely anyone with a genuine concern for animals would be actively encouraging these particular animals to be fed into the human food chain to help reduce the number of intensively reared farm animals?
Ostriches? It turns out they don't and never have stuck their heads in the sand to try and get away from things they don't like!
There are of course other blatant examples of this sort of thing, such as the government promising to drastically reduce net migration when they know that in reality the ageing of our population resulting from 50 years of declining birth rates means they can do no such thing without collapsing the economy and destroying society, but it did get me wondering...
Are there other less well known examples of this sort of phenomenon that impact our daily lives that we're maybe not aware of?
An average of 134 posts a month, are they all as inane as this?We're always being told that electric cars are the clean, sustainable future of motoring with cat tax still designed to encourage their purchase, all whilst governments and environmental groups put their heads in the sand and ignore not just the CO2 simply transferred to power stations instead, but also the pretty vile ecological and human costs associated with the various chemicals required for EV batteries.
Vegans have long been accusing the rest of us of being genocidal murderers for snaffling the occasional sausage, and now they too have a topical ecological cause du jour to help them attain peak smugness, yet they too keep their noggins firmly ensconced underground when it comes to the huge quantities of wild animals - insects, birds, rodents, rabbits, deer and more - unavoidably killed to protect arable crops being raised for human consumption. The sad irony of that particular set of blinkers is of course that many of these animals make wonderful eating yet frequently end up getting thrown away because nobody wants them, so surely anyone with a genuine concern for animals would be actively encouraging these particular animals to be fed into the human food chain to help reduce the number of intensively reared farm animals?
Ostriches? It turns out they don't and never have stuck their heads in the sand to try and get away from things they don't like!
There are of course other blatant examples of this sort of thing, such as the government promising to drastically reduce net migration when they know that in reality the ageing of our population resulting from 50 years of declining birth rates means they can do no such thing without collapsing the economy and destroying society, but it did get me wondering...
Are there other less well known examples of this sort of phenomenon that impact our daily lives that we're maybe not aware of?
Kermit power said:
But once again, you're making it all about CO2 emissions whilst ignoring what goes in to making the batteries, which is rather my point.
Lol, you started it. 
If you mean the battery's production carbon footprint, well, that and the upstream production footprint for liquid fossil fuels work out about the same per mile.
Upstream production for fossil-fuel-produced electricity is wrapped up in the carbon intensity value for the grid.
The only way you can get the life-time CO2 footprint close to being on a par is to use the values per mile for the EV and directly compare them per km for the ICE.
That's been done a few times on here!
The same comparison in 25 years doubles (again) in favour of the EV, once the grid is more green.
So there is a significant aspect of trajectory here that is often ignored.
Now, if you meant the minerals required to produce the batteries, then , yes, these 98%-recyclable materials do need extraction, but once in circulation, are available forevermore.
Once in circulation, the same minerals can be used to produce future batteries with up to 70% less carbon footprint than newly-extracted materials, including recycling.
Anyone throwing EV batteries in a landfill will be short of a few sandwiches in their picnic, so that line doesn't really hold water.
EVs are not perfect by any means but there simply isn't another option for cars that gets anywhere close to them in terms of offering a long-term sustainable means of moving billions of people.
The strongest argument against them is grrr...China.
GT9 said:
Lol, you started it.
If you mean the battery's production carbon footprint, well, that and the upstream production footprint for liquid fossil fuels work out about the same per mile.
Upstream production for fossil-fuel-produced electricity is wrapped up in the carbon intensity value for the grid.
The only way you can get the life-time CO2 footprint close to being on a par is to use the values per mile for the EV and directly compare them per km for the ICE.
That's been done a few times on here!
The same comparison in 25 years doubles (again) in favour of the EV, once the grid is more green.
So there is a significant aspect of trajectory here that is often ignored.
Now, if you meant the minerals required to produce the batteries, then , yes, these 98%-recyclable materials do need extraction, but once in circulation, are available forevermore.
Once in circulation, the same minerals can be used to produce future batteries with up to 70% less carbon footprint than newly-extracted materials, including recycling.
Anyone throwing EV batteries in a landfill will be short of a few sandwiches in their picnic, so that line doesn't really hold water.
EVs are not perfect by any means but there simply isn't another option for cars that gets anywhere close to them in terms of offering a long-term sustainable means of moving billions of people.
The strongest argument against them is grrr...China.
The acquisition of the raw battery materials from other countries into the UK as we transition the car fleet over to EV over the next couple of decades will give us an ever-increasing urban mine of these valuable resources. That, combined with our very promising increase in offshore wind will put us in a very good economic position as the world transitions away from fossil fuels as per the COP28 agreement.If you mean the battery's production carbon footprint, well, that and the upstream production footprint for liquid fossil fuels work out about the same per mile.
Upstream production for fossil-fuel-produced electricity is wrapped up in the carbon intensity value for the grid.
The only way you can get the life-time CO2 footprint close to being on a par is to use the values per mile for the EV and directly compare them per km for the ICE.
That's been done a few times on here!
The same comparison in 25 years doubles (again) in favour of the EV, once the grid is more green.
So there is a significant aspect of trajectory here that is often ignored.
Now, if you meant the minerals required to produce the batteries, then , yes, these 98%-recyclable materials do need extraction, but once in circulation, are available forevermore.
Once in circulation, the same minerals can be used to produce future batteries with up to 70% less carbon footprint than newly-extracted materials, including recycling.
Anyone throwing EV batteries in a landfill will be short of a few sandwiches in their picnic, so that line doesn't really hold water.
EVs are not perfect by any means but there simply isn't another option for cars that gets anywhere close to them in terms of offering a long-term sustainable means of moving billions of people.
The strongest argument against them is grrr...China.
plfrench said:
The acquisition of the raw battery materials from other countries into the UK as we transition the car fleet over to EV over the next couple of decades will give us an ever-increasing urban mine of these valuable resources. That, combined with our very promising increase in offshore wind will put us in a very good economic position as the world transitions away from fossil fuels as per the COP28 agreement.
Extraction of minerals is a valid argument, but anyone doing so whilst simply ignoring that extracting fossil fuels also has a massive human and environmental cost is not a good look.It's really odd, maybe it's because we are so dependent on oil and gas that our collective psyche looks for ways to shift blame.
I guess it's like a drug habit, and as the junkies, we will find every excuse under the sun to avoid facing up to it.
Which one is worse, mineral extraction or fossil-fuel extraction?
Hard to quantify.
Fossil-fuels also require minerals for processing, so let's not ignore that either.
What I do know is that a single extraction of a mineral that can be put to use for thousands of years has got to be a better option than a continual extraction and burn of a finite resource.
Maybe Kermit can provide some insight here?
Richyboy said:
What’s veganism got to do with EV and alternative fuels?
Absolutely nothing! You'll have to ask the Mods why they decided to move a thread in which EVs were just one thing mentioned amongst four into the EV thread, thereby completely and utterly changing the entire meaning of it in one go! 
Kermit power said:
Morning all,
We're always being told that electric cars are the clean, sustainable future of motoring with cat tax still designed to encourage their purchase, all whilst governments and environmental groups put their heads in the sand and ignore not just the CO2 simply transferred to power stations instead, but also the pretty vile ecological and human costs associated with the various chemicals required for EV batteries.
Vegans have long been accusing the rest of us of being genocidal murderers for snaffling the occasional sausage, and now they too have a topical ecological cause du jour to help them attain peak smugness, yet they too keep their noggins firmly ensconced underground when it comes to the huge quantities of wild animals - insects, birds, rodents, rabbits, deer and more - unavoidably killed to protect arable crops being raised for human consumption. The sad irony of that particular set of blinkers is of course that many of these animals make wonderful eating yet frequently end up getting thrown away because nobody wants them, so surely anyone with a genuine concern for animals would be actively encouraging these particular animals to be fed into the human food chain to help reduce the number of intensively reared farm animals?
Ostriches? It turns out they don't and never have stuck their heads in the sand to try and get away from things they don't like!
There are of course other blatant examples of this sort of thing, such as the government promising to drastically reduce net migration when they know that in reality the ageing of our population resulting from 50 years of declining birth rates means they can do no such thing without collapsing the economy and destroying society, but it did get me wondering...
Are there other less well known examples of this sort of phenomenon that impact our daily lives that we're maybe not aware of?
I would quite like to do run this through text to speech and play at half speed for the full effect.We're always being told that electric cars are the clean, sustainable future of motoring with cat tax still designed to encourage their purchase, all whilst governments and environmental groups put their heads in the sand and ignore not just the CO2 simply transferred to power stations instead, but also the pretty vile ecological and human costs associated with the various chemicals required for EV batteries.
Vegans have long been accusing the rest of us of being genocidal murderers for snaffling the occasional sausage, and now they too have a topical ecological cause du jour to help them attain peak smugness, yet they too keep their noggins firmly ensconced underground when it comes to the huge quantities of wild animals - insects, birds, rodents, rabbits, deer and more - unavoidably killed to protect arable crops being raised for human consumption. The sad irony of that particular set of blinkers is of course that many of these animals make wonderful eating yet frequently end up getting thrown away because nobody wants them, so surely anyone with a genuine concern for animals would be actively encouraging these particular animals to be fed into the human food chain to help reduce the number of intensively reared farm animals?
Ostriches? It turns out they don't and never have stuck their heads in the sand to try and get away from things they don't like!
There are of course other blatant examples of this sort of thing, such as the government promising to drastically reduce net migration when they know that in reality the ageing of our population resulting from 50 years of declining birth rates means they can do no such thing without collapsing the economy and destroying society, but it did get me wondering...
Are there other less well known examples of this sort of phenomenon that impact our daily lives that we're maybe not aware of?
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