The Electric Car.

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https://youtu.be/S1E8SQde5rk

I have heard in the past that the figures he shows do promote the side of the electric car as certain facts are ommitted such as over 80% of the emmissions of an average convential piston engined vehicle come from its manufacture and not from its actual being driven around, and that electric cars are averaging ten times this rate in polution to manufacture so his charts are out, but I do like the horse analogy and the explinations to what he is trying to show.

A further minor point to make is that windmills may actually overall be good for the enviroment BUT locally they cause "Sound wave" issues where some local people find they cant live near them and they cant sell their houses in these locations either, and economically wind generation costs about the same as they give back so they are not economical to set up without grants to do so. Their blades are also said to be a big landfill problem when they are replaced.
Solar panels are similar to the same issue that electric cars have in that they are extremely polluting to make, so if we take this polution in their manufacturing stage and offset it by the potential pollution that they save, they are actually far more polluting per power output than using coal fired power stations if all considerations have been made.

Electric cars are however useful in that they are excellent for city use as they remove their pollution from the cities and into the areas that they are both manufactured and the power is generated..... If via solar panels the pollution is also moved to another point as explained in the paragraph above.

The problem with climate change is it is very hard to measure because if one quotes hot summers or things like that and go back in time, we can see that the worlds climate now has far less heat than it has had in the past, and if one thinks we can offset climate change by simply planting more trees then think again, because one has not understood the lifecycle of trees. Trees and plants absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen in the daytime but at night the whole process is reversed so on average plants and trees are at best carbon neutral.

And some final thoughts. I do not personally believe that any current global warming is directly associated with Co2 levels because we are basically monitering just one single element and not looking at the whole picture so we have a very warped view of what is actually happening and why. It is like saying "We will force everyone to have electric cars as a solution when in reality we will have shifted all the polution to the two main places on the earth that contain sufficient volumes of littium to make such vehicles, the largest being te Ukrane (Strange how both the EU, the UK, the USA and Russia signed committments to convert to E.V.'s by certain dates and now there is a race to "Claim" the Ukranian mines for themselves (Whoever overpowers whom to get their hands on this lithium in this "Lithium race" and yet the people are told this Ukranium conflict is directly between the Ukrane and Russia... Meanwhile the west encourages this conflict so they can take advantage of the "Spoil" when the conflict is all over... Something I morally hold the west in discust!

But to answer the big carbon footprint debate, he interestly mentions hybrid cars as being efficient but they only are efficient when driven in the "Perfect" enviroment. I live in a relitively hilly area and both I and a friend live on top of one of these hills. I have a small diesel car (Mitsubishi Colt) and my friend on his similar hill has a Toyota Prius. My little car is averaging around 55mpg as on loger trips it exceeds 60mpg but on short local shopping trips it only gets 50mpg. His Toyota is averaging 35mpg with its petrolium engine to charge its batteries, and this is because living in this hilly area it is not at all efficient. If we all lived in a perfectly flat warm climate as a location the hybrid would come close to matching the diesel cars mpg figures (Though my diesel would get far closer to its 75mpg figures the car is claimed to achieve), and the actual carbon emmisions of the hybrid will only then match or reduce its carbon footpring compared to the little diesel car that I have. Reality and theoretical figures rarely ever match when considering the real life world that we live in. In my hilly enviroment, the small but torquey diesel engine beats anything else in efficiency hands down while hill climbing and I include electric cars here because when climbing steep hills their batteries really take a hit, and if both vehicles as a comparisson have to take heavy loads such as four or five adult people or tow a caravan up the hill you can forget the electric car being a contender, as that thing will lose so much of its charge that its not going to get even half its possible theoretical distance on a charge even if the batteries in the car is new!

But anyway. Like the gentleman said, we have yet to exhaust the piston engines potential in a carbon friendly way and we still have a long way to go before electric vehicles can be seen as really being carbon friendly.
However, I still believe that to explain everything in carbon terms is a bit like a child learning their 1+1's when it comes to maths. It is only a very small little bit of a whole big subject to explore which is not just about carbon. There is a whole lot more to consider in both that the Earth has a natural way to clean up its pollution by design, and that carbon is only a very small piece of the equasion.

They want us to buy newer stuff so now they say fuel cars are the worst. 20 years ago it was gasoline, nowadays diesel is much worse. All in the name of making sure money keep ruling. I don't like electric cars, yes the electric engine is better full stop, but the batteries are a problem. Up until better batteries, that don't rely on rare metals, aren't explosive and are actually reciclable, I think the best bet is either hydrogen and syntetic fuels.

Trees make wood from carbon which they take from the atmosphere, which is then no longer in the atmosphere.
The claim that trees are "at best carbon neutral" is simply not tenable.

Further on, climate science is very much concerned with other molecules in the atmosphere, and while co2 has been proven time and time again to be the major contributor to global heating, it's by far not the worst. That's why things like methane levels are also monitored, as is cloud formation and so on.
It's not the eighties anymore. By now, the science of global heating is very well established, the effects of global heating were predicted, and they have started to become visible with the naked eye.

Warm summers may not be enough, but every summer being warm, everywhere, and every winter being warm, and droughts and changing weather patterns, as well as increasing extreme weather events are. That's what we were told global heating will look like in the beginning, and that's what we're observing.

Warmer air is more able to carry more water vapor. A warmer climate will result, overall, in more rain, not less.

In specific cases, shifts in weather patterns might reduce rain in some areas, but in other areas, it can increase rain. During the Holocene Climatic Optimum with temperatures somewhat higher than now, it is found that the Sahara Desert was green, the Gobi Desert was forested, and northern Mexico was wetter than now.

On the other hand, during the period known as "The Little Ice Age", droughts were far more common. It is very possible that the Anasazi people were driven out of their homes because of long-term droughts induced by cooling.

One real problem is the amount of carbon that is being made unavailable to be released into the atmosphere. In processes over the last several million years, CO2 levels have been generally declining. During the peak glaciation of the last 100,000 years, CO2 levels are said to have fallen to about 180 ppm. If it had fallen to 150 ppm, we would supposedly have seen plants dying off on such a large scale that it could have driven homo sapiens into extinction.

The problem is not more CO2 in the atmosphere -- it is too little CO2 in the atmosphere.

The Global Warming alarmists of today are nothing more than than the Flat Earth people of a few hundred years ago.

A compact thorium reactor or a thorium laser is more my game. Otherwise I do like electric propulsion, I drive a gas+electric combo right now.

So I've heard that statistic about production of piston vs electric cars before. My main issue with that argument is the bulk of carbon production comes from the electric grid burning coal. So to me its a little like, "see we are using our polluting industry as an argument against reducing pollution." I'd like to see those numbers compared without electric power production. I can almost guarantee that its the electric grid and not the electric car production.

I drive all piston cars but would love to drive an electric car if it were feasible. My main arguments for getting off of oil as much as possible are geopolitical. I'd love to see the day when oil is useless and Saudi Arabia is broke.

If you factored into the cost of the wars for oil into the price of gas, it would be a different picture. I won't count the deaths on either side to give a "conservative" estimate, but it looks like we spent around 4-5 Trillion and counting on Gulf War 1, Gulf War 2, and Afghanistan (remember, 9/11 happened b/c bin Laden was mad US soldiers set foot in Saudi Arabia). Thats not counting the interest costs since we didn't raise taxes, we just borrowed the money.

Because oil wars gave us 9/11, it also gave us things like the Patriot Act which expanded government surveillance. Electric cars wouldn't require us to worry about the middle east.

That alone is enough to convince me that it is a strategic interest of the West to get off of oil.

As for the environmental stuff, you have to consider local air quality as well. Enough piston engines in an area will degrade air quality locally even if its not going to cause global warming.

There were many resolutions, and having just electric cars, is unrealistic, even if it were possible.
Batteries are expensive, and made from material that is limited in supply.

Windmills, are manufactured in China from composite materials, so they are creating smog in China that goes into our atmosphere, then we build the windmills here in Europe and act like the manufacturing of windmills does not exist or impact our planet. Then people say "OH look" how environmental friendly we are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmy0tXcNTPs

This is arguing that because China burns coal in the power production using in the manufacture of wind turbines, that ergo wind turbine production causes extra pollution.

I think there should also be an emphasis on public transport. I don't want to force people to stop driving but I believe that if public transport is improved to the point where it becomes more convenient then a lot more people will want to use it.

Obviously public transport isn't suitable for every place and every one but if we can get a few million people communicating by public transport and only using their cars for recreational trips that would be even better for the environment than driving electric.

By environment I also mean the urban environment. Driving will be more pleasant if less people drive.

If nothing changes then nothing changes

I am enjoying watching the engineering mature and the limitations and advantages being teased out.

Thinking back nearly forty years when I started my training in Electrical Engineering, a vehicle battery was either a heavy lump of lead and sulphuric acid ( no chance of high performance) or an experimental combination of sodium and sulphur and high temperature, so a battery technology which powers the number 43 double decker bus from Manchester City Centre to Manchester airport and back all day is something I still can't quite believe.

But to make the big difference needs the combination of battery technologies, recycling/ re-manufacturing facilities and a power grid drawing on many more sources than just burning coal and gas or producing stuff which flows in the dark and the promise of returning the facility to brownfield by 2323.

Which is why I have a good feeling each day my favourite porn site https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=eds/main shows a good proportion of wind energy at grid level, or the demand curve shows a big dip during the day as the considerable solar PV capacity takes up the load in place of more centralised gas, nuclear and coal generation.