Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "CNBC" channel.

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  7. These eco-idiotic arguments about electric cars show, just how much they don't understand cars and how urban-centric they are. 1) a tank of a car wil never change, while battery of an EV degrades over time. And no, cheating with spare capacity doesn't change that fact. Most people can't afford a new car, especially in poorer countries, meaning they'll never buy an EV, however, they still need a car to get places, most importantly work! Your energy efficiency is NOT important factor, when buying and operating a car. That is, what allows you to work, do business, get your loved ones to a hospital, when they feel pain (you don't call an ambulance, cause the tooth needs to go out, but damn, you're not going to sit around a watch your kid in pain), meaning you'll pay whatever is necessary to maintain that car and use it at all times, while maintaining minimal impact on your budget. This translates to not spending large amounts of money upfront, which is precisely, what buying an EV is, when compared to similar petrol car with a reasonable 2 liter engine. That petrol car will be there for such emergencies, because it will not be discharged by the grid (something some ecos proposed to offset the need for energy storage due to abundance of wind and solar outside of consumption hours and nil generation in peak consumption hours, to use batteries of privately owned cars), because it has it's own fuel tank, which doesn't shrink every year or two, meaning a petrol car will largely have the same range throughout its lifespan. Furthermore, going EV doesn't address the underlying problem, the need to regularly commute because 2) Not everyone can work remotely, given the nature of their job, and not all employers are open to the idea of 100% remote. Better solution, than going for a costly energy transition in transportation industry, specifically with private transportation, would have been to reduce demand for commuting, by encouraging work from home, where possible, en bulk shopping and researching machinery to reduce the amount of man hours needed to work in jobs, which have to be done in person and retraining people towards remote friendly fields. This way, you've turned a daily driver into weekly+leisure driver, which would more than half the amount of CO2 and other emissions produced by privately owned automobiles and it wouldn't cause a slew of other environmental and geopolitical problems along the way (most of the necessary minerals are found in Russia, most of material refining is done in China in this field, precisely because it would not be feasible in the West due to environmental protections and emmission limits). That Lithium, that Cobalt, that Copper all have to be mined and refined! (well, not so much for copper, but can't recycle all that much) Which have their own environmental impacts. EVs are more metal intensive than normal petrol cars, that is undisputable fact. Funny how no environementalists are talking about this side of EVs. Energy storage and utilization systems simply need to work in concert with each other. Until a battery can be invented, that will not degrade over time (which is impossible thanks to laws of physics), cheif problem for an EV will remain. That is why I strongly believe in hybrid cars and synthetic and fossil fuels. Hybrid cars offer a solution to a problem, that cities have, which is air pollution. You can outlaw use of internal combustion engines in large cities under normal circumstances (ex exception when towing something, fine being forgiven, if driver presents repair bill from a shop, which shows battery swap or other repair, which removed problem rendering full electric unusable etc.). This would remove at very least half of all emmissions from private transport in big cities and it wouldn't force us down a technological path, that is simply inferior with no way back, all the while contributing to improving air quality in the cities. Solving an actual, solvable problem, while maintaining the key characteristics of the car, not to mention, that a hybrid is less resource intense than an EV.
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