“State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money,” he said. “Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted.”

    • Isn’t that what they said with hydrogen fuel cells as they grifted away a decade continuing to invest in car infrastructure instead of pedestrian, bike, and rail?

      EVs are the new hydrogen fuel cells. They’re not about saving the environment, they’re about saving the auto industry.

      •  Mike   ( @MDKAOD@lemmy.ml ) 
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        66 months ago

        My understanding is they the problem with hydrogen is the conversion loss factor of air to hydrogen. It at least used to be a net loss of power by a significant margin to generate.

        • It was always completely impossible. Transportation was the biggest impediment, but it was just full of unsolvable problems. At the end of the day, the easiest way to crack hydrogen was from oil anyway. It was never intended to work. It was intended to buy time for the auto and oil industry by selling the people a fake solution.

          The infrastructure investment needed to support EVs, when the electricity would come from natural gas anyway, is pretty transparently the exact same grift.

            • Well that’s great, but we solved the problem of efficiently moving people around 100 years ago and the auto industry destroyed it. EVs do not exist to save the climate, they exist to save the auto industry. That’s always been the game.

              Even if we do manage to actually get the electricity, where will the lithium come from? How will the charging infrastructure actually get built? None of these were ever meant to be solved, because the point of EVs has always been to push off the real changes just a little bit more.

              EVs also make a lot of things worse. They’re deadlier, they produce more tire microplastics, they do more damage to car infrastructure (which, uh, is HUGELY carbon intensive), and they’re also hugely carbon intensive to build and ship. In terms of carbon today you’re better off getting a small older ICE than a new EV.

              They just make rich liberals feel better about themselves without actually needing to change their behaviour.

              Hope isn’t lost at all. A future that’s still full of cars isn’t hopeful. The hopeful thing is that we can solve all this today without any new technology simply by abolishing free parking, ending parking minimums, creating super blocks, and investing in mass transit, bike, and pedestrian Infrastructure instead of car infrastructure.

              The thing that makes it hard to keep that hope going is that there are people who subscribe to /c/climate who think there will be a magic solution to climate change that lets everything go on exactly as it is without changing anything at all.

    • Per the article:

      “State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money,” he said. “Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted.”

      So the money is there, it’s just taking time.

  • Some of us told you Biden’s climate bills were performance and pork and wouldn’t make any difference. Some of us told you the goal was to funnel money to political allies, not save the environment.

    You told us to vote harder and donate more money to Democrats in the midterms and it would work out somehow.

    Yeah. How’s that “most environmentally friendly president in history” talking point working out?

  • Mass Public Transport > Electric Cars.

    Electric car support will take a short while to implement, but fossil fuel reduction will take a long time to show and a long time to be significant.

    But Mass Public Transport takes a long while to implement and savings are quick to show, that would be because less people would require personal cars, which means direct drop in fuel usage per person, even more so in big cities which suffer because high population density requires too much parking space that is never enough.

    Mass Public Transport could undo plenty of harm caused knowingly by the auto industry. funding, or in this case legitimizing the industry will not really help as electricity itself is still generated from fossil fuels.

    The solution should be LESS consumption, not making excuses for the same consumption, or legitimizing more.

    • There are applications for which mass transit just isn’t enough. I expect to see for example some of the disabled using EVs instead of mass transit. Realistically: we need to minimize driving, and electrify what remains.