zlacker

>>Brajes+(OP)
I'm starting to wonder whether the conventional wisdom of reducing carbon emissions in favour of more electricalisation is really solving the actual problem. As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier than their fossil fueled alternatives, and generate other pollution along the way. Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment, without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment or what impact the mines themselves will have.

With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?

Naively, it feels like we understand C, O and H, better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing in the name of climate change.

>>alexch+Ei
It is much, much too late for "maybe some other process will save us". Electric card are the solution that is already working. If we had all electric cars then transportation would no longer be the biggest problem.

We will not have spare renewables for a long time. They are all devoted to residential and industrial.

If fossil fuel companies wanted to fund solar to hydrocarbon, the time was three decades ago. Now they need to realize that electric cars are technologically simpler than the vast complexity of internal combustion, and they cannot reclaim that with "but wait..." any longer.