The UK government is doing the complete opposite in fact. They’ll give you a grant towards the cost of a new EV, a grant for a wall box to be installed at you home, 0% tax on company car benefits if it’s an EV, 0% road tax, etc. They’ve even just moved The ban on new petrol and diesel sales forward to 2030.
Fuel duties help to offset the negative externalities to society of driving, namely CO2 emissions, pollution and congestion. With EVs tou don’t have emissions and pollutions and the health problems they bring so there’s no negatives to offset (ie fuel duty revenue will go down, but so will spending on health and environmental related issues)
There’s still the congestion any vehicle can cause and I think we’ll move to a much different form of vehicle taxation over the next 20 years, perhaps with more toll roads or even surge pricing style taxation for usage of roads.
> The UK government is doing the complete opposite in fact. They’ll give you a grant towards the cost of a new EV, a grant for a wall box to be installed at you home, 0% tax on company car benefits if it’s an EV, 0% road tax, etc.
Taxing will have to change and evolve either way.
Today it makes sense to incentivize the move to EVs. But this says nothing about what will happen when everyone is there and people no longer have the option of buying or using an ICE. Some years from now taxing EVs with some form of "road tax" (today included in the price of fuel) will be the low hanging fruit and the technological means may already be there. Your car will likely be able or even required to log and report the distance driven for taxing purposes.
If truly autonomous vehicles do catch on and incentivize moving away from private ownership, it will also have a huge impact on the way cars are taxed or how the taxes are passed on to the user.
The easiest way to replace petrol tax would be to simply charge with the MOT. Road taxes in general raise about 10p per mile driven (including petrol, VAT on petrol, and VED, but excluding VAT on new cars, which is a significant amount - about £10b a year based on 3 million cars a year at £20k a year)
It would work as "You've done 10,000 miles since your last MOT, you have to pay your £1k tax bill". Travel abroad and you could register the mileage when you leave and when you get back easily enough. Final bill on scrapping or on SORN.
That wouldn't allow the differential road pricing that tracking fans want, and wouldn't work in Ireland, but would work in GB right now.
Of course you have! Emissions from tires and brake pads are very significant. CO2 and pollution from driving is just externalized - where do you think all that electricity for charging EVs is coming from? Also, pollution from manufacturing EVs is still there.
Emissions from brake pads on EVs are almost non existent (regen braking). This is a vast departure from combustion powered vehicles where PM from braking systems, from exhaust catalytic converters etc. etc. contribute a lot of the grime you see at the edge of a motorway. EVs do make this better.
Tire emissions are NOT a factor we need to be concerned with however :-) Tire manufacture, sure. From waste - most definitely. But emissions from driving are not something to worry about even with the billions of miles driven annually on tires.
Last time I looked at PM2.5 I found the source below[1]. Which lists PM2.5 from tire wear at 0.001 gm per miles. Which is less than brake wear at 0.003. Notable that as you said EV's have much less brake wear.
[1] Was a lot harder to find it again because someones running an SEO agitprop campaign to blame PM2.5 on tires instead of diesel exhaust. I had wade through GIS pages of trash websites to find it again.
Yeah that looks about right. Brake pad PM2.5 is 3x that of tires but both pale into insignificance next to exhaust PM2.5 at almost 10x that of brake pad and tire emissions added together.
The nice thing about EVs is those exhaust emissions are moved away from the tailpipe in populated areas to power generation facilities.
The efficiency of electric vehicles is almost 3x that of the gasoline cycle of drilling, transporting, distilling, transporting again, combusting then achieving almost 30% motion from the chemical energy of gas.
So because of this efficiency there’s just less emissions overall even though the emissions are away from population centres.
Then lastly, the emissions are consolidated in one place so capture and cleaning becomes viable.
EVs are not perfect but they are so much better than gasoline powered vehicles that if you can at all accomodate the switch, then it would be great to consider it.
> If everyone went to smart charging infrastructure your vehicle could easily stay topped up during excess generation
...and yet from today's headlines:
British coal plants fired up to meet temporary electricity shortfall. Remaining UK coal plants, including Drax, supply 6% of grid’s electricity to cover power supply drop and colder weather
"renewable electricity was in relatively short supply in western Europe too, meaning the UK would need to keep running its coal plants while exporting power to France and to the Netherlands via cable interconnectors"
Don't forget the UK is FAR ahead of the US when it comes to renewables, which of course is easier when you have a single national grid (and can buy spare French nuclear when you have a dip in capacity)
Fair enough, it exists in some regard... let's change that to pollution caused by the powerplant of the vehicle.
I'm not wholly informed here, but just by using common sense, I can only imagine we're talking fractions of a percent for brake pad and tyre pollution, so I wouldn't pick that hill to die on personally.
Correct, the potential CO2 emissions are externalised but the electricity can come from wind, sun, nuclear, or even fossil fuel power stations that run more efficiently and cleanly than an ICE.
Also, I'll take the emissions from tires and brake pads over those from an engine for sure.
Even if the energy source would still be purely fossile-based (which it isn't), it would still be a net win, since large power plants are more efficient than ICE vehicles and are better set up to reduce emissions other than CO2.
1). Every year the percentage of renewable electricity is increasing on the grids worldwide so over time electric cars will pollute less.
2). Looking at the parts of an electric car vehicle compared to petrol/diesel cars electric car production has less pollution.
3) Electric cars have regenerative braking so even the brake pads pollution is less in electric cars
>> With EVs tou don’t have emissions and pollutions
You don't have them at the tailpipe, which I guess is really the key thing because it means a reduction in asthma and deaths due to PM in habited areas.
You do still have emissions, they're just emitted away from where humans live. It's a great improvement but not a complete solution.
Seems like a great solution to streamline your personal online presence. If you don’t have a Twitter you could probably do the same thing with GitHub or Instagram
Amazon are currently more focussed on supplying services to developers through AWS, e.g. Rekognition that do one small, technical part of what we do. That and Amazon Go which is a cool concept that works really well for groceries/convenience stores. We're going after everything else and don't see Amazon making any moves to enter this space in the near future.
We've talked to lots of target stores and are live with a number of clients already. The story we hear most frequently is that they've previously tried a number of things to get this type of data but none have been good enough in terms of precision or depth of insight.
Thanks! We've certainly explored that avenue in the past, working with city centres & BIDs to get street footfall data.
We're also talking with malls, who are trying to get footfall traffic data in myriad of different ways already, at differing levels of quality. They may not want to share their information with 3rd parties, but would be able to do trend analysis for their own purposes.
Interesting questions - we haven't actually come across them before so I'm just going on what I learnt from that blog post, and I may not have the greatest appreciation for their specifics.
- Our strategy is to not start with large grocery retailers for the exact reasons they mention. They're slow to implement new tech and slow to change things in stores. Our primary target is mid to large-size speciality retailers, with low conversion rates, where a small change in conversion rate can have a big effect on sales.
- We've honed our camera integration and have made installation easy and fast with existing cameras. Our clients have even done the install themselves before.
- The post talks about the stores needing to actually make use of the data and our plan for this is to help them do the things they change up semi-regularly anyway (product layouts, visual merchandising, window displays)
- With data transfer, we try not to use the stores WiFi if possible, and use 3G dongles instead. We've managed to use new compression algos so we don't use a huge amount of bandwidth
Meta: I'm fascinated you've gotten as far as launching without anyone at YC mentioning a company doing something so similar three years ago. Seems like a failure on YC's part; maybe they thought there was nothing to learn from the other company but still seems surprising.
guscost correctly describes the limitations of MAC address tracking. In my experience building Aura Vision [1], we've also discovered MAC tracking is no longer GDPR compliant, because an identifier about a person is stored indefinitely. This gives retailers the ability to measure the same identifier returning. The same goes for Bluetooth/BLE tracking.
We are a CCTV/deep learning system that uses existing infrastructure (think old school grainy security cameras), and we're are also able to capture additional information like age and gender of a person. Unlike other invasive/HD CCTV systems, we don't use facial recognition, and we also work over very wide areas, not just over restricted doorways.
It's a pretty rough estimation for sure but I considered how much on average is made by the Fiverr's top quote image content gigs and did a quick analysis of how many packages could be sold on the verticals not covered by the Fiverr's gigs.
1. This is essentially the same as the T Charge which comes into effect in October this year. Diesel taxis are exempt, which is a shame seeing as they are very high polluters, and also drive around all day long.
2. That would be nice, but 2020 is too soon to be realistic. Unless some of the newer busses have options to operate solely under battery with some modifications.
3. Gov. should absolutely invest in infrastructure.
4. Yes, this. It would be seen as favouring the rich, but there should be an exemption for petrol powered performance cars. Some of the finest examples of human engineering are found in supercars and it would be a shame for them to die out. Tesla is obviously a great example of an electric sports car, but there's something to be said for petrol sports cars. Of course, if all the car companies are working electric mass market cars, they'd probably stop working on petrol high end vehicles anyway.
Yeah, the thing to be said about petrol sports cars is that they have poor acceleration.
BTW there are all-electric busses available in the market. Stanford has a fleet of them from BYD, and there's also an American manufacturer, ProTerra. I've been stuck behind one of the BYD busses and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it accelerated.
On this day, it was also featured on Product Hunt and The Next Web leading to around 30k uniques across 2 days. Traffic is now nothing like that unfortunately.
One nice upside is that when I launched, it was picked up by a manager at BT Shop, a fairly large online electronics store in the UK, and I have released a variant of the app which uses their own affiliate scheme and branding. They've integrated this into one of their category pages at https://www.shop.bt.com/category/cables-and-adapters,cables/....
This article makes out like the companies themselves are directly responsible, rather than the customers of these companies, i.e. you and me. We cause these companies to pollute by creating a market demand for their products or services. Not to say there's not things a company can do to improve it's efficiency, but ultimately, a company isn't going to keep their factories firing away if no one is buying their stuff.
The same argument can be applied when people look at China and think they are the problem because of their high use of coal and manufacturing industry. Well, I'd guess that a lot of their output is going to Western consumers, so again, it is they who are responsible.
Ah yes, what's better than trying to shift the blame from the actual people and groups doing this, to individuals, who often don't even know better? No need to address the companies or (dare I say) suggest regulations. It's the consumer who should think about this, he's the center of the market universe - besides 7 billion other centers - and only he - with the coincidental cooperation of all other 7 billion people - can change this. How? Why by consuming... ethically. Then the companies can still go on doing what they so, find market, created deals nobody knows of, destroy the environment and infiltrate governments with their "special interests". All the consumer has to do is spend more money on fancy stuff, and he doesn't have to feel guilty anymore. It's all ok! It might not be easy to ensure that all the people consume "correctly", but it's sure easier than trying to address the companies to produce "correctly". It's just basis economics.
> Ah yes, what's better than trying to shift the blame from the actual people and groups doing this, to individuals, who often don't even know better?
This isn't a situation where you're blaming someone who buys an iPhone for all the pollution Apple creates in making them. Here, the actual person "doing" the pollution is you and me, when we buy a gas-powered car and drive it dozens of miles through suburban gridlock to get to work, or leave the thermostat at 68 on a hot summer day.
And while it might be reasonable to say that an iPhone consumer has no idea what toxic crap is involved in making that seemingly innocuous product, that's absolutely not reasonable when it comes to the products made by Exxon, etc. Everyone "knows better."
People generally don't buy Exxon's products because they're hydrocarbon aficionados— they buy them because they need to get to work and their kids need to get to school.
And they need cars and gasoline to do those things because American cities and suburbs are usually built around cars as opposed to walking, cycling, and mass transit. While that's not exclusively due to oil and car companies— desires to maintain segregation played a huge part too— they certainly played a huge part in ensuring American society was built in a way that ensured demand for their products.
The poster I was replying to didn't say these companies merely "had an affect in some places." He suggested that they were the dominant reason for and "played a huge part" in how American cities were designed. Then handful of examples you point to do not suggest that these companies even moved the needle in how cities were designed.
> the actual person "doing" the pollution is you and me, when we buy a gas-powered car and drive it dozens of miles through suburban gridlock to get to work, or leave the thermostat at 68 on a hot summer day
These examples demonstrate what lies in the power of the consumer and what doesn't pretty well though. Leaving the thermostat at 68 could be argued to be wasteful for the mere convenience of having it 'nice and cool'. However, I think it's in the hands of politicians to see that the energy powering the A/C unit, comes from more environmentally-friendly sources. Such a solution would certainly be a lot more reliable and sustainable than requiring every citizen to just live with the heat even though everybody knows the cool air of the A/C is just one button press away.
Similarly for your other example of driving through the suburban gridlock. I guess nobody wishes for traffic jams and long commutes through concrete deserts. However, people just use the existing infrastructure. What would be the alternative? Live closer to the city center, which probably results in much higher cost of living. Or not going to the city center every day, which would require having a (compared to most) very flexible job.
These are issues that need to be solved on a political level and not by simply expecting everyone to 'do the right thing' (in this case meaning, to behave more environmentally friendly), while at the same time knowing that this often comes with a financial or quality-of-life cost that most people are not willing to bear.
> Similarly for your other example of driving through the suburban gridlock. I guess nobody wishes for traffic jams and long commutes through concrete deserts. However, people just use the existing infrastructure.
People aren't just using the existing infrastructure. This is what they're choosing to build. In the late 1980s, Loudon County VA (the county next door to where I grew up) was mostly rural. Over the last 30 years I've watched it develop, and guess what? People developed it into a car-dependent sprawl, on purpose, and from scratch. People want their McMansion on an acre of lawn they never use, where they have to drive 15-20 minutes to the nearest grocery store. People want it so much, they get on municipal zoning boards and outlaw building anything else.
You're straw-manning here. A lot of rhetoric about pollution implicitly or explicitly paints a picture of evil corporations polluting for fun and profit, but any successful scheme to reduce pollution has to acknowledge that corporations are just one part (even if they are a very large part) of a broader human system. We can't move forward by simply pinning everything on corporations; that's a good strategy for making ourselves feel righteous but not a good strategy for effecting actual change.
I don't think it is a straw-man to point at a real problem and demand answers. A straw-man argument is creating something that doesn't exist then attacking that. He didn't call them evil, you are accusing him of doing that (You are closer to constructing a straw-man than he is).
These companies really do pollute, really are the largest American CO@ emitters and as Americans we have a right to answers and solutions.
> I don't think it is a straw-man to point at a real problem and demand answers. A straw-man argument is creating something that doesn't exist then attacking that.
"You are shifting the blame" is a straw man because the GP didn't do that. Rather, it pointed out a nuance in the issue that the previous comment didn't acknowledge.
(And a nit: a straw man attacks an argument that was not made, not a thing that doesn't exist.)
> He didn't call them evil, you are accusing him of doing that (You are closer to constructing a straw-man than he is).
Read my comment again. I said "a lot of rhetoric does X," which is vastly different from "you are doing X."
Throwing the responsibility onto individuals is DUMB because it decentralizes responsibility. Responsibility requires accountability in order to work. And as much as we'd all love to implement the anti-scale properties of "the long tail", the FACT of the matter is that efficient & effective management of the problem of pollution DEMANDS that it be centered and focused on the companies that produce it.
Phew, sounds like a lot of work! If only we could muster up some congregation of people that speak for many other people, so that they could speak on our behalf and tell these companies to cut the crap...
If Alice pays Bob to kill Cathy, I think we can all agree that Alice and Bob are both felons.
If Alice pays Bob to procure a tuna sandwich for her, and Bob chooses a means of procural that kills Cathy as a byproduct, common sense dictates that Bob is again a felon, while the amount of responsibility born by Alice depends on the extent to which she was aware of what Bob was going to do.
> If Alice pays Bob to procure a tuna sandwich for her, and Bob chooses a means of procural that kills Cathy as a byproduct, common sense dictates that Bob is again a felon, while the amount of responsibility born by Alice depends on the extent to which she was aware of what Bob was going to do.
Right. (In this case), Alice is now aware, they are both felons for future transactions.
However, Alice is dependent on tuna sandwiches to maintain her and is desperately hoping for Dick to change the rules, so she can finally go eat some mac'n'cheese.
>We cause these companies to pollute by creating a market demand for their products or services.
Utterly wrong under multiple criteria.
1. If you read the article you'll see a number of these companies exist in polities that are in no way representative democracies without even the genuine goal (let alone a somewhat decent implementation) of a full market system, making them insulated from even general population pressure let alone market pressure.
2. For the ones that exist in the 1st World under reasonably market-based economies, you are still wrong, because the entire point of a market economy is that the price represents that all costs, ie., no externalities. Consumers can of course factor in non-cost factors at their option, but when it comes to something like pollution everything associated should be built in and it is absolutely not the end consumers fault if some company is committing fraud by failing to deal with externalities.
It's unfortunate modern conservatives in particular have done a full 180 and grown to hate the Free Market and refuse to implement emissions pricing, but that isn't up to individuals in their role as consumers (though in a democracy it is their fault in their role as citizens if they're supporting anti-market politicians). If the price of emitting a ton of CO2 or CH4 was simply set at the price of industrially removing (within a year) a ton, then things would be sorted out from there. The vast majority of humanity needs to be involved with externally produced products and/or services to survive in the modern world, that's not some option or crime. The sticker price should be reflecting all costs so they can make appropriate comparisons and choices.
>We cause these companies to pollute by creating a market demand for their products or services.
We do. But, what is your point there? Are you saying that individuals have the ability to group up and stop it by not buying? Because that would be true. But, there's always that problem of realism that gets in the way. In theory, yes, we could pretty much solve or do anything as humans. Does that mean its realistically possible? No. Corporations have grown up with capitalistic countries, and are ingrained in its culture and work.
Sure, I'll stop shopping at Walmart. Until I see my grocery bills go up, and my savings dipped into to pay bills. Its the same story for many, many others.
People don't know any better, and even if they did, and we all grouped together, these conglomerates have such a gargantuan amount of money stored away that they can bet it won't last. They'll win that bet. Employees go on strike, get new ones. Employees try to form a union, close the store, re-open a month later.
When you consider the absolutetely massive size of the money and assets here, the very notion that its 'our' fault, is true, but its reasonings misleading.
My point was just addressing the main theme of the article which is trying to make out that if we just got rid of these companies, we'd cut emissions by 71%. Well yeh sure, but then the world wouldn't continue to function as normal.
As individuals, we have the same methods as we always have. Don't drive when you can walk, use renewable energy, get an electric car, shop local, etc.
And of course, regulating both "ourselves", such that demand goes away. E.g. banning sales of diesel cars. And regulating businesses so that they aren't polluting unduly on our behalf e.g. carbon capture in power stations.
>the main theme of the article which is trying to make out that if we just got rid of these companies
That's the second time you've said that. What article are you reading?
The one I'm reading from this thread says:
“Our purpose is not to name and shame firms, our purpose is to provide transparency and call attention to the quite extraordinary fact that just 100 companies played a crucial role in the problem,” said Pedro Faria, technical director of the Carbon Majors Database, which collected the information for the report. “It’s obvious they have a share of responsibility in the solution.”
I think that last sentence is key. These 100 companies are profiting off of creating the majority of the problem, some even maliciously. Does levying responsibility upon these companies necessitate their destruction?
>Are they trying to say that those companies pollute directly, or that they sell to people who then pollute?
The companies are selling polluting materials, every single one of them is a producer of fossil fuels. Can you really sell a customer a gallon of gas and then blame them for the pollution when burning it?
I agree with your argument that since consumers are the ones who demand the product, they are the reason such companies exist.
However, customers typically have little information on how many greenhouse gases are produced for a given product they buy, and especially not when it counts -- that is, in a store before a purchase -- so they cannot be reasonably expected to vote with their wallet.
One solution might be a combination of:
1) Labeling all products with the emissions that took to create them, so customers can easily vote with their wallet. Perhaps display them next to prices, perhaps with a label like Nutritional Facts on food products, or like a warning when some emissions threshold is exceeded, like smoking risks on cigarette cartons. Customers should not have to watch documentaries or do research on which companies are environmentally friendly and which aren't, but rather have that information given at purchase time.
One or both of:
2a) Subsidizing environmentally-friendly ways of production (perhaps even just for a time) so that these companies can survive against their coal-burning competitors. This way, customers voting with their wallet don't have to pay extreme prices for alternatives just because they think reducing greenhouse gases is good for the world -- with subsidies or tariffs, we could make alternatives somewhat price-competitive.
2b) Taxing goods made with too many greenhouse gases (i.e. the reverse of 2a).
It's very hard to find out how many GHGs were produced for a particular product. Manufactures have massive supply chains. Tracing a product back to the ores from which it comes is a daunting task.
Fuel duties help to offset the negative externalities to society of driving, namely CO2 emissions, pollution and congestion. With EVs tou don’t have emissions and pollutions and the health problems they bring so there’s no negatives to offset (ie fuel duty revenue will go down, but so will spending on health and environmental related issues)
There’s still the congestion any vehicle can cause and I think we’ll move to a much different form of vehicle taxation over the next 20 years, perhaps with more toll roads or even surge pricing style taxation for usage of roads.