Carbon neutral and CO2 emissions, etc

ucbalumnus
Wed, 08 Sep 2021 16:47:33 +0000

bennty:

– and here’s the policy level: twice an hour a bus goes past my house, with night and Saturday service, and in a month or so it’ll be an electric bus, fully ADA compliant and with a double bike rack on the front.

Of course, that electric bus probably has batteries that you said that you dislike in the first post of this thread. But then is mining the materials for the batteries worse than mining the petroleum or natural gas that would be needed to fuel that bus otherwise?

Of course, the electricity has to come from somewhere. But it can make a big difference depending on whether your electricity is generated from mining tons of coal (and sending pollution up the stacks), fracking volumes of gas (and polluting ground water in the process), mining small amounts of uranium (and disposing of the used fuel), or collecting solar and wind energy (storing in those batteries you do not like, so that it is available at night to recharge the bus).