Emissions Dropped 1.8% Every Year in California's Bay Area. Researchers Credit EVs (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0173527228
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/04/14/2336236/emissions-dropped-18-every-year-in-californias-bay-area-researchers-credit-evs
- Source link: https://uk.style.yahoo.com/sensor-network-shows-evs-reducing-172404254.html
> A network of air monitors installed in Northern California has provided scientists with some of the first measurable evidence quantifying how much electric vehicles are shrinking the carbon footprint of a large urban area. Researchers from UC Berkeley set up [2]dozens of sensors across the Bay Area to monitor planet-warming carbon dioxide, the super-abundant greenhouse gas produced when fossil fuels are burned. Between 2018 and 2022, the region's carbon emissions fell by 1.8% each year, which the Berkeley researchers concluded was almost exclusively owed to drivers switching to electric vehicles, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology .
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> In that time, Californians purchased about 719,500 zero-emission or plug-in hybrid vehicles, more than triple the amount compared to the previous five years, [3]according to the California Department of Energy. The Bay Area also had a higher rate of electric vehicle adoption than the state as a whole.
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> While the findings confirm the state's [4]transition to zero-emission vehicles is substantially lowering carbon emissions, it also reveals these reductions are still not on pace to meet the [5]state's ambitious climate goals . Emissions need to be cut by around 3.7% annually, or nearly twice the rate observed by the monitors, according to Ronald Cohen, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry. Although cars and trucks are the state's largest source of carbon emissions, it underscores the need to deploy zero-emission technology inside homes and for the [6]power grid .
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> "I think what we see right now is evidence of strong success in the transportation sector," Cohen said. "We're going to need equally strong success in home and commercial heating, and in the [industrial] sources. We don't yet see significant movement in those, but policy pushing on those is not as far ahead as policy on electric vehicles." Although cities only cover roughly 3% of global surface area, they produce about 70% of carbon emissions.
[1] https://uk.style.yahoo.com/sensor-network-shows-evs-reducing-172404254.html
[2] https://beacon.berkeley.edu/about/
[3] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/zero-emission-vehicle-and-infrastructure-statistics/light-duty-vehicle
[4] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-08-25/california-ban-gasoline-mandate-zero-emission-2035
[5] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-03-16/california-behind-on-goals-for-reducing-greenhouse-gases
[6] https://www.latimes.com/projects/repowering-the-west/#nt=0000018a-c976-dcc4-a1ca-fd7f38aa0000-showMedia-PromoFullWidthLeadOverlay-1col
Shame they didn’t cover NOx, SOx, etc as wel (Score:3)
Cleaner buildings, roads and lungs where it really matters - where people live and work — is a more immediately obvious benefit of EVs cf CO2.
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I’d ask for them to up the dose, if I were you. It probably won’t help, but in your position, anything’s worth a shot
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Actually vehicle traffic is only a small percentage of any countries emissions.
Re: Shame they didn’t cover NOx, SOx, etc as (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. Car emissions in the US account for 22% of GHG, making them the #1 source.
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This is an article about the Bay Area. You live in rural Canada. I’d have thought it would have been self-evident that it makes no sense to assume that because something doesn’t fit your needs in rural Canada, that therefore itcannot also fit the needs of people living in a US metropolis. I mean, you’re clearly wrong, aren’t you? If you were right, then no one would have bought an EV ever, and yet, millions of people have. So they definitely do work for millions of people, even if yo
Re: Shame they didn’t cover NOx, SOx, etc a (Score:2)
22% is a considerable amount that could meaningfully make a difference for climate if it could be reduced.
If you are not ready for a BEV, at least consider a PHEV. We have both. It's the best of both worlds, IMO. We use the PHEV for road trips so we don't have to worry about charging. But the overwhelming majority of miles are on battery. The CA grid is fairly clean, overall. We charge at night, but our solar PV more than offsets the EV consumption (and home).
If your household has only one car, I agree that
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I won't buy a PHEV until I know how pricey maintenance and new batteries get into the 15 year old range. It concerns me that PHEVs have more complicated inner workers. And there is still a battery to replace eventually, even if it is smaller and cheaper.
Re: Shame they didn’t cover NOx, SOx, etc a (Score:2)
I have a 9 year old PHEV. 2015 Volt. It is a great car. It has suffered zero battery degradation. The battery is still under warranty until 10 years/150000 miles. I have only 70k miles on it so far. Chevy has a battery capacity warranty. It is 70% for PHEV. I found out that Toyota doesn't guarantee capacity at all on its Prius prime. Very surprising.
Until last month, my Volt hadn't had a single repair. Nothing but tires, oil changes and filters. The repair was $3k but spread over 9 years, that is not a mean
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> But the disadvantages of EVs just don't outweigh the advantages
Thing is, it's not that clear cut. They have different advantages.
For my use case, EV advantages outweigh the disadvantages:
-I can reliably plug in overnight as needed, which means I never go to the gas station.
-When I plug in at home, it's less than a third cost per mile driven in terms of fuel/energy
-I don't have oil changes to worry about, or air filter, or a lot of the gaskets and hoses that are frequently problematic
-My work provides free EV charging, and currently I can reliably get one of those spo
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Yes, we are a single car family. The car is used to go into town around once a week and do long trips. So you are willing to pay out another $10K eventually for a battery just so that you can plug in at home? Don't you analyze your range every time you fill it up in order to determine whether that time is coming or not? I would. And when considering the fact that public charging is starting to cost almost as much as gas in certain parts of the world. One must ascertain that you are one of three groups
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> So you are willing to pay out another $10K eventually for a battery just so that you can plug in at home?
As mentioned, I've racked up $10k in various gas engine vehicle repairs by about the same time where an EV battery might likely need repair. Colleague recently had to replace his Volt battery after 300k miles for about $6k, and that was a battery that would be a full charge cycle in just 30 miles. So if the battery repairs are going to screw me, so too would owning a gas car.
> Don't you analyze your range every time you fill it up in order to determine whether that time is coming or not?
No, it gets boring after years of the range being roughly the same, more to do with driving characteristics and weather and if there'
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> Actually vehicle traffic is only a small percentage of any countries emissions.
Firstly vehicle traffic is about 1/4 of any country's emissions, more so in places with high population densities.
Secondly the OP specifically spoke about cities where people live and work. Emissions from power plants don't affect me anywhere nearly as directly as emissions from idling cars 3m away from where I'm walking. I'd be all for abolishing ICE vehicles even if global warming wasn't a thing, smelly fucking things they are.
Re: Shame they didn’t cover NOx, SOx, etc as (Score:3)
Hybrid ICE, like my first cat, a 2001 Prius, do not have emissions while idling typically, unless you turn the heater on. I hate the smell of fumes as much as you do. Diesel fumes are by far the worst, though.
Re: Shame they didn’t cover NOx, SOx, etc a (Score:3)
I mean first car, not cat. Lol. My cats' emissions are something else.
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At any rate... Majority of it not my fault, industry can go first.
Re: Shame they didn’t cover NOx, SOx, etc as (Score:2)
Ok but the drive to reduce emissions has nothing to do with the air next to you, but rather the global effect.
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It's both. Where I am, during the summer there are still air advisories occasionally, inversions trapping NOx in the valley. Electric cars help reduce the NOx locally and the CO2 globally.
But not practical everywhere (Score:4, Interesting)
I live in rural America, and an EV charging infrastructure is largely non-existent. In concept, EVs have their merits, but in execution, they are not usable everywhere. And frankly, I can't afford to replace 2 ICE vehicles and a farm vehicle with EVs and the supporting charging infrastructure. And besides, when the power goes out, all of my vehicles can still run.
Re: But not practical everywhere (Score:3)
I think if city dwellers and commercial fleets switched to EVs, that you wouldn't really need to worry about it much right now. Demand for oil might go down a bit and make gas cheaper for you in the short term. But long term your fuel costs are going to get pretty serious. Hopefully BEVs are better by then.
Re: But not practical everywhere (Score:2)
Oil consumption per capita is already on the decline. National consumption is not on a clear decline path. I don't expect gas prices will drop anytime soon. Oil producers can limit their production to avoid that. Some might go out of business. I would expect gas at the pump to get more expensive, once gas stations start disappearing. We are not there yet. Could be 1-2 decades away. We have been driving plug-ins since 2012, though. Currently one EV and one PHEV. Most of the miles on the PHEV have been electr
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Liquid fuels will remain the best way to solve the remote and detached agricultural field problems in the near and intermediate terms. In the very short term, your farm vehicles using diesel might be retrofitted to use bio-diesel (basically plant oil mixed with diesel to improve emissions). Eventually long running distributed renewable energy powered hydrogen production and conversion into syngas (easier but at the cost of different kinds of emissions), and hydrogen for binding with with liquid organic carr
Re:But not practical everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
I have family in rural america, and EV charging is better than city. Because no one gives a damn if your car parks right next to your house, right next to your breaker box. Adding a hardwired L2 charger to any house with 200A service is a few hundred dollars, because all you need is the EVSE, one breaker, and a trivial amount of wire. Go more city and *maybe* you can have a car nearby, but only streetside, and maybe you are allowed to install electrical gear, at some significant expense, but maybe not. The things that make home EV charging challenging for some urban people just don't apply in the country.
On the power outage scenario, you car's battery doesn't suddenly empty, no more than your gas tanks drain. In fact, if you felt fed up with power outages, then a solar array would mean you could replenish your cars range. With plenty of land to do the panels however you feel like (much cheaper and more effective to pole mount in the country, suburban has to settle for roof mounted solar only). Of course you likely have a generator or two, that's likely a PITA because you don't run it enough and infrequently used engines have some pain points.
In terms of replacing perfectly working vehicles, that's a bad idea to replace them if they are fine. Whether ICE or EV, best thing is to "drive it into the ground", because the difference in emissions is far less than the impact of frequently manufacturing cars. *However* when the time does come for an ICE vehicle to be put out to pasture because it's just not worth fixing anymore, an EV is actually a decent choice for rural living as a selection for the replacement.
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There are plenty of missing niches for EVs. For instance our 2 cars are dying and I'm thinking about EV. BUT we are on a co-property with a small common parking lot (7 cars max). It would seem obvious to put a charging station there, and yet there's no technical solution available. Either we ask one of the commercial charging stations to build one there, but then they'll charge us through the nose each time we use it. Or one of us builds a private connector. But there's not (that I know) a simple solution w
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> commercial charging stations
Yes
> a simple solution with a switch to select which person pays
See above. You just buy commercial charging equipment and slap on a card reader. Use a bypass code for yourself. Pay for all the electric or put it on its own meter and power bill.
According to ChargePoint, there's actually rebates, grants, and incentives available for multi-family properties. Not sure if any would apply to a co-owned property. The big downside is the 10s of thousands you'd be spending on commercial equipment where you'd never recoup the cost. But at least it would probably last 20+
Re: But not practical everywhere (Score:2)
I'm in a large metro area but make a 500 mile trip (1 way) every 3-4 months. The states I must drive through have almost no charging capacity. My Accord hybrid works great for that trip as I can go door to door on a single tank. The EV works for great for every local trip my wife or I make. I think we're at least a decade away from even entertaining the idea of 2 EVs but we love the hybrid.
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> I can't afford to replace 2 ICE vehicles and a farm vehicle with EVs
At this point, where you are, it makes sense at most to have one EV and one ICE. Get all the advantages on the short commutes, and use the other vehicle for the longer stuff. Depending on the amount of driving the EV does, a standard 110V outlet might be plenty. Slow charging is better for the battery anyway. When the power goes out, the batteries stay charged. Multi-day power outages sound like a bigger problem than your car choice.
Farm vehicles have so little competition it doesn't really matter what
factories closed (Score:2)
The Owens Corning factory near the airport used to make my throat hurt when I worked in Santa Clara, that's closed now. A lot of industrial sites have closed up in the last 10 years to make way for more office buildings, and the air quality has noticably improved in the South Bay.
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Yeah, I'd rather breathe car emissions than fiberglass fragments. Ouch.
Sounds sketchy to me (Score:2)
First off, there was Covid - in most urban areas traffic decreased as a result. Do variations in the reading correlate with that?
Second, did they monitor and account for any population changes in the area? TFA - if it can be called an article , which I question - doesn't mention that. Third, did they analyze Bay-area car registrations to see if there was an uptick in replacing older ICE vehicles with new ones? That alone could account for a non-trivial decrease in emissions.
It's great that emissions dropped
Not exactly 1.8% (Score:2)
From [1]the paper [acs.org]:
> We find a decreasing emissions trend of 1.8 ± 0.3%/year over the region from 2018 to 2022.
[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c09642
How many lives is this? (Score:2)
How many people were born?
Normally when pollution goes up, I hear how many people will die. So now that it's lower will we see an increase from all these magical human years that just got poofed into the world?
Re: How many lives is this? (Score:2)
Clean air has nothing to do with increasing births. It increases average life expectancy. California cares more about the health of their living population than the number of unborn fetuses. Unlike some other states...
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>> Researchers from UC Berkeley set up dozens of sensors across the Bay Area to monitor planet-warming carbon dioxide, the super-abundant greenhouse gas produced when fossil fuels are burned.
> The gas which most contributes to warming is H2O, not CO2. By a huge margin.
That sentence doesn't contradict in any way the quoted sentence which precedes it.
> There are only trace amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere.
And yet it requires only those "trace amounts" of CO2 to effect global warming.
> CO2 is emitted from many sources, not just when fossil fuels are burned.
That is irrelevant to the point being made.
> CO2 is sequestered, too. It is sequestered in plant growth. It is sequestered by deposition in the ocean. It is sequestered in ice.
When it comes to plant growth, CO2 is primarily fixed by two kinds of plants. Mature trees, which fix more CO2 than young trees because all growth occurs in the cambium which is larger in mature trees, and all CO2 which enters the plant does so through the leaves which a mature tree has more of; And by ocea
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CO2 is less dense than water. Water stays in the water cycle and comes down as rain again. Evaporation in CA is really important for the snow cap on the Rockies, and eventually CA's own water supply as it comes back down the Colorado river.
CO2 stays in the upper atmosphere for a long time - hundreds to thousands of years.
Doesn't matter with all the Chinese coal plants (Score:2)
[1]being brought on line daily. [npr.org]
They do this while gaslighting (pun intended) the ignorant in to thinking they're amazingly progressive on green energy initiatives as well.
I will give them credit for excellent disinformation campaigns which open societies are more vulnerable to than ones with entirely state run media.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin
Population loss? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hasn't the bay area had a lot of population loss in the past few years?
[1]https://www.kron4.com/news/bay... [kron4.com]
San Fran alone lost 8.6%.
[1] https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/heres-where-san-francisco-ranks-in-terms-of-population-loss-in-the-past-5-years/
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That was my first thought as well, not just gross population but the abandonment of the downtown area for business since COVID.
Re:Population loss? (Score:5, Insightful)
How do they know it wasn't just simply because people didn't drive to work in the pandemic and many continue to stay home? The link for this technology says a lot about how they detect greenhouse gases but not whether they count the number of cars in order to determine a baseline of traffic density. That's a pretty important factor.
Re:Population loss? (Score:5, Informative)
Changing population and miles driven per person don't matter to their calculations because they are based on vehicle miles traveled:
> Traffic flow data were obtained from the Caltrans Performance Measurement System (PeMS). (44) Data for 693 PeMS observation sites within the BEACO2N region of influence as of 2018 were included in our assessments. We calculated vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as the product of the vehicle count at each PeMS site and the segment length to the next PeMS site...
> For fVMT, the PEMS data set was used as a proxy for vehicle miles traveled in the region. (44) Preprocessing of the two data sets is described in Section 2.7. We conduct a simple multiple linear regression (MLR) to derive the coefficients m1, m2, m3, and c, using the posterior derived hourly anthropogenic emissions as emsanthro. The value of m1 was 2.3, which means about half of the observed seasonal trend is explained by the PG&E reported natural gas consumption. The constant emissions (c = econstant) were 156 tC/h. The term m2t + m3 can be factored out, and the rate at which this value changes over the 5-year study period is a reasonable proxy for the rate of change of overall vehicle fleet efficiency ( average CO2 emissions per vehicle mile traveled ).
[1]https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.10... [acs.org]
[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c09642
Re: Population loss? (Score:3)
The bay area as a whole did not lose 8.6% over the 2018-2022 relevant period. Many SF residents don't drive in the first place, also, whether gas guzzlers or EVs. Emissions also don't proportionally diminish linearly with population. Unless buildings go vacant - which happened with offices - they continue to produce emissions. While office workers stopped coming to offices during the pandemic, most didn't leave the bay area.
Re: Population loss? (Score:4, Informative)
They didn't lose 8.6% (maybe), but they did lose at least 5% over that time period.
San Francisco lost 7.5% between 2020 and 2022, for example. The Bay Area overall lost about 3.2% over just those years.
Not due to population loss? (Score:2)
> Hasn't the bay area had a lot of population loss in the past few years?
> [1]https://www.kron4.com/news/bay... [kron4.com] San Fran alone lost 8.6%.
The data was: "Between 2018 and 2022, the region's carbon emissions fell by 1.8% each year."
Over that period of time, the bay area population was nearly constant (declined by 1.1%, to be accurate). That is not enough to account for a 1.8 percent decrease in emissions per year compounded over four years.
[2]https://usafacts.org/data/topi... [usafacts.org]
[1] https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/heres-where-san-francisco-ranks-in-terms-of-population-loss-in-the-past-5-years/
[2] https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/our-changing-population/state/california/county/san-francisco-county/