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The Millenium Development Goals, agreed to by every member country of the United Nations in 2000, call for the worldwide eradication of poverty and hunger, universal education, gender equality and huge improvements in health by 2015: two years ago!!
Can we do this without making the planet warmer?
Let's think big and imagine how we can confront the climate crisis in a way that is realistic about the other major problems that we face as a planet and as a species on it.
Clean Development >
Cars and Transportation
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I've definitely seen it mentioned in this forum, but electric cars are currently a great option for reducing one's personal carbon footprint. However, currently, there are very few electric vehicle chargers that exist throughout cities. The ones that do exist are usually concentrated in more affluent neighborhoods, meaning that their ease of access is very low for the average person. In the future, we need developments that will promote sustainable lifestyles, such as more electric vehicle chargers sprinkled throughout a city so that people can feel motivated to buy an electric vehicle without the thought nagging in the back of their mind about the annoyances that come along with a sustainable car.
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I agree, electric cars are better for the environment and I'm glad to see it making a bigger change on earth. But, it is very unaccessable to the average person. I feel like companies should focus more on electric cars and making them cheaper for the average person to invest in
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I agree I feel like Teslas are the most popular electric vehicle and it's what most people think of when you hear electric car and since they are so expensive many people think the idea of an electric car is out of the question. And that goes along with what Sylvan said about placement of EV chargers, you see chargers in neighborhoods where people can afford electric cars which is part of the problem. There are other companies that make electric vehicles for cheaper but they are still most common in bigger cities where more chargers are available. If electric vehicles were more accessible they would have a bigger impact on the environment.
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The main problem I see with a Tesla is the charging port. This isn't only a drawback of Teslas but electric cars and manufacturers in general. What we need to do is have a common charger that every car uses, kind of similar to iPhone vs Android. The network would be much denser if we only had one type of charger. That being said adapters do exist and I am aware that Teslas come with a J1772 adapter which is the most common charging port in electric vehicles. It would just be nice if we didn't have to horse around with adapters and could just pull up anywhere and charge without even having that thought.
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In the short term, electric cars might seem like the option to go, but overall, the manufacturing process and materials required are much less enviromentally friendly. Most electric cars use a Lithium Ion battery, which is made by taking away water from ponds, rivers, having it to evaporate in the sun, to concentrate the necessary material's in the soil to create the battery. Meaning that creating the batteries essentially destroys natural animal's habitats. In addition, because of the complexity of an electric car, the Union of Concerned Scientist (USC) have found that the carbon footprint of producing an electric car is around 15-68% higher than producing a normal car. In addition, an electric car must be specially recycled to prevent harm to the enviroment, so as the popularity of electric cars increases, I believe recycling and disposing of cars will become a problem in the future. Finally, the average electric car has an average of 3 miles per kWh. Around 60% of electricity is created by fossil fuels, this mean that a electric car actually consumes more fossil fuels than a normal petro engine car. The concepts of an electric car is really smart and theoretically a lot more enviromentally friendly, but we still have a long way to go before this can happen, we definetly need to put more resources in research better ways to create and sustain electrically vechicals.