
Electric scooters aren't as green as you may think - clairity
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-08-02/are-e-scooters-good-for-the-environment
======
melling
There’s always someone who’s going to tell you how something is not as green
as you may think.

Maybe we should just forget about global warming for a little bit and try to
remember how dirty the air is from gas vehicles.

[https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/09/21/las-dirty-air-
vio...](https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/09/21/las-dirty-air-violated-
federal-smog-standards-for-almost-3-months/)

~~~
clairity
ownership is one way to bypass half the emissions issue (of cars having to
pick up and drop off rental scooters) as well as the associated shortened-life
issue.

i own one of the xiaomi scooters initially deployed by bird and mentioned in
the article, and for little round-trip errands, it's hard to beat the
convenience. you can ride literally door-to-door, without even looking for
parking, since you can bring it right into most businesses (even bikes don't
have that convenience in most cases).

~~~
zeckalpha
Curiously, that’s the opposite of what they say about cars

------
netjiro
> biking (8 g) or walking (0 g) [per mile]

This is simply wrong. It doesn't take into account the CO2 footprint of the
person doing the biking or walking. Biking is more efficient than walking per
km. Since anyone biking, running, walking would be eating more to cover the
exercise this can have a significant footprint based on what their diet looks
like. A running beef eater vs a running vegan looks very different.

I used to bike 65km/d round trip to work. Wonderful for my mind and body, but
I had to eat at least one extra meal every day for the periods I was active,
around 200-300g total.

Normally I would replenish with fried eggs and potatoes at a guesstimated 4x
(CO2 equivalent mass ratio), which is (meh) reasonable? Giving around 13g/km
footprint for biking (just from my food).

Assuming I would be eating lamb or beef at somewhere around 30x impact, that
extra meal would give a biking footprint around 92g/km just from my food!

Correct my numbers or methods if you disagree.

[edit]: Comparison to my (tiny) car at the time burning 4.5l/100km, (2.3kg CO2
/ litre petrol), the car would be around 103g/km, which is not much higher
than me on a bicycle if I kept a shitty diet !!

~~~
mytailorisrich
> _It doesn 't take into account the CO2 footprint of the person doing the
> biking or walking._

This is carbon neutral because all the CO2 we exhale comes from atmospheric
CO2 captured by plants (and then through the food chain up to us).

Now, of course food production has a carbon footprint because of harvesting,
transport, processing, etc. but it quickly gets hugely complex to measure.

In any case, for the purpose of comparison they obviously restricted to the
impact of the mean of transport. Your food or your carbon footprint in general
does not change anything about that.

~~~
probablypower
That is an absurd argument. The modern food chain is not carbon neutral [0].

If I start running to work, I have to consume more food. If I have a vegan
diet I am eating the direct result of photosynthesis. That is, we could
imagine the embodied carbon of my apple resulted directly from my previous
exhalation of CO2. I do not dispute that some part of the 'life cycle of food'
is a closed loop in this regard.

Yet I can't just 'eat an apple'. I also require someone to grow the apple
(with fertilizer and its GHG emitting production chain), protect it (likely
with pesticides), clean and package, transport, store and sell the apple. By
the time I chew into the apple I have already contributed to the demand of GHG
emitting processes.

So if you want to rigorously compare scooters with walking, running or riding
a horse (all which affect quantity of food consumed), you need to take into
account the carbon footprint of food. Just as when you look at GHG emissions
of fuel, you don't just look at its combustion - you look at the supply chain.

If you only look at where carbon is added (e.g. fossil fuel combustion) or
removed (e.g. carbon forest sinks) from the cycle, you miss out on learning
about how individual actions or choices affect the rate at which addition or
subtraction occurs.

[0] -
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Henk_Westhoek/publicati...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Henk_Westhoek/publication/257160858_The_price_of_protein_Review_of_land_use_and_carbon_footprints_from_life_cycle_assessments_of_animal_food_products_and_their_substitutes/links/59e329bc458515393d5b49dc/The-
price-of-protein-Review-of-land-use-and-carbon-footprints-from-life-cycle-
assessments-of-animal-food-products-and-their-substitutes.pdf)

~~~
DanBC
> I have to consume more food.

Most people probably don't, and many people could afford to both run to work
and eat less.

~~~
thinkingemote
My environmental studies prof did an experiment cycling and getting the bus to
university on both the amounnt of money spent and energy consumed. He found
that he would spend more if cycling than the bus fare on food to keep the same
energy input equal.

People also generally cannot sustain eating less continually but obviously
there's a health benefit from some changes.

The ecosystem approach to food energy and carbon brings some surprising
convulsions too. For example wrapping and selling fruit in plastic bags is
better than buying them loose. This doesn't make sense unless you think about
the whole picture.

I suspect that the recent HN craze for indiscriminate feel good tree planting
is also ecologically and sustainably suspect if looked at holistically.

------
esotericn
Eh. We're currently at a stage in which we sort of have the tools to go
carbon-neutral but aren't fully there yet.

For example, producing an EV currently involves releasing a bunch of CO2.

I can't name all of the reasons why but I imagine it'll be stuff like mining
equipment being fossil powered, the trucks that transport the cars, the power
that goes into refining stuff, etc.

Eventually all of that can be made carbon neutral; the only processes I can
see potentially being an issue would be if like, actually digging the soil
released CO2.

It would be literally impossible for the first EV to be made using only
renewable energy by definition because it's the first.

Location matters too.

Sweden's electrical grid averages ~10-20g of CO2 per kWh because it's mostly
nuclear/hydro.

The UK is at about 300g.

Trucks, vans, trains, etc should all be electrified as soon as possible. A
last final burst of CO2 in order to create all of that, then we stop, perhaps
sequester some, and off we go.

One can hope.

~~~
ant6n
One can hope that we can free ourselves from the individual car driver
paradigm. We have the tools to go car-free, but aren't fully there yt.

~~~
VBprogrammer
Do you have children? The idea of going car free when you need to take 50kg of
stuff with you everywhere is terrifying.

~~~
hdfbdtbcdg
What are you taking everywhere?

~~~
VBprogrammer
The car seat and isofix base together must be the best part of 20kg. Then
there's prams, nappy changing bag. If we're staying overnight, travel cot and
chair etc.

~~~
dTal
I don't mean this in a rude way, but the fact that you just tried to justify
cars primarily by the _need to transport car seats_ may be a hint that your
thinking might be a little too set in the car paradigm. A lot of the problems
solved by cars, are also caused by cars.

~~~
VBprogrammer
My partners parents live, according to Google, 38 miles or 53 minutes away by
car

Alternatively, 3 hours, 2 trains and a bus away.

It's completely impractical with a small child.

~~~
dTal
Okay, that's a reasonable complaint, but travel time is a distinct and
separate issue from the point we were discussing, which was the need to
transport paraphernalia of which nearly half was car-related in the first
place.

Nevertheless, it's another example of cars creating the problems that they
solve - this kind of disparity can only be caused by a terrible public
transport infrastructure, which in turn is caused by inadequate funding, which
is caused by lack of demand due to cars (and lobbying of course). In most
places in Europe, bus+train is much faster than driving for long journeys,
especially intercity. Trains can go at speeds than would be unsafe on roads,
and don't have to worry about traffic jams, while buses are frequent and often
get dedicated lanes in cities.

------
kyruzic
A bunch of brand new junk whether it's teslas, electric scooters/bikes, or
anything else that's new and green is obviously bad for the environment.
What's bad for the environment is excess consumption of anything. All these
new green products only offer marginal improvements over their "non" green
counterparts and never address making the manufactuering process green, which
counts for the vast majority of the emissions of almost all goods.

If you care about the environment cut back your consumption of new shit. Go
fix that bike in your garage and ride that to work.

~~~
vkou
> All these new green products only offer marginal improvements over their
> "non" green counterparts and never address making the manufactuering process
> green, which counts for the vast majority of the emissions of almost all
> goods.

Not for cars, not by a long shot. The vast majority of carbon emissions of a
car are after it rolls off the assembly line.

~~~
kyruzic
Factually incorrect.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-
blog/20...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-
blog/2010/sep/23/carbon-footprint-new-car)

~~~
viraptor
This is very much an estimate... and I can't just take things like this:

> If we do this, and then divide by the total emissions of the auto industry
> by the total amount of money spent on new cars, we reach a footprint of
> 720kg CO2e per £1000 spent.

as true by default. They don't show why would that relation be true either.
For example, you can find options that cost you many thousands more and amount
to a few extra chips and different software.

~~~
kyruzic
It is an estimate but a close enough estimate to counter the claim that the
vast majority of emissions are after production of the car.

------
robbrown451
Most of the concerns are potentially lessened as they mature.

The vandalism they refer to will certainly be reduced as people come to accept
them. There can be charging stations around the city where riders can plug
them into to get a discount or credits, reducing the need to collect them with
a truck and drive them around. I imagine there are ways to mitigate people
abusing them, such as making them easier to replace damaged parts or making
them better able to detect when users are throwing them around and such.

------
stewbrew
Are there really people out there who believe that these things are "green"?
It was well known before that the life expectancy those scooters is measured
in months. It is also well known that electric vehicles with lithium batteries
are "green" only if you use them for a very long time. IIRC for electric cars
that would be something like four years of daily use -- mostly due to the
pollution caused by the fabrication of the batteries. But of course, it isn't
your city that gets polluted but some distant area where these things a built.

If you want to be green, use a bike or some non-motorized scooter.

~~~
notatoad
the xiaomi scooters that most companies started out with have a 280Wh battery.
Teslas have an 60-80kWh battery.

if you are saying it takes 4 years of daily use the make the manufacture of a
60kWh battery greener than driving, then it only takes ~80 days of use for a
scooter battery.

~~~
hdfbdtbcdg
And the average scooter survives less than 80 days.

Meanwhile most of the journeys on scooters where I live are replacing walking
or cycling...

~~~
notatoad
Source? For either of those two claims

------
nesadi
I'd say one important point is that, in many places, public transportation is
inadequate, completely overfilled, or both. If people are expected to move
from cars to public transportation, many places just don't have the
infrastructure to accomodate that transition. I live in Cologne. While we do
have public transportation that allows you to reach most places, it's already
at a point where the city wouldn't be able to cope with eliminating cars. Car-
sharing, escooters, etc., these could be considered necessary extensions to
public transport and enable car-users to transition, even if these options
aren't entirely as green as using trains or buses would be.

------
agumonkey
Feels like Moving goal posts.

Of course lithium batteries aren't CO neutral.

Escooters are a great transitional device.

------
rabeener
_That actual trip somebody’s taking on the scooter — that’s pretty green,”
said Juan Matute, the deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation
Studies who was not involved with the study. “What’s not green is everything
you don’t see.”_

This title is misleading and a perfect example of the backlash any new tech
that challenges the status quo faces.

A more accurate headline would be “Dockless e-scooters...” but instead the
author has lumped together owner driven e-scooters, which have very little
carbon impact, with rentable scooters, which by themselves don’t have a large
carbon impact but the ecosystem around them does.

------
exabrial
I feel like the number of diesel powered ambulances I've seen dispatched to
scooter induced accidents alone offsets their carbon footprint

------
vivanchuk
Walk.

------
algaeontoast
Exactly - I love how people think these scooters are “clean” when piles of
them are ferried around in gas guzzling cars every night (farther distances
than the scooter should themselves cover “under electric propulsion”).

I have an electric unicycle I absolutely love and recommend the use of
personal electric transport to everyone. But scooter sharing is dumb and makes
cities look trashy.

~~~
ben_w
If they’re only rounded up once a night by a petrol car, but in the daytime
they did four trips each, then they are still saving most of the energy cost
of the short trips even before you account for the collection trip by the car
being one trip for many vehicles.

Also, they’re not always collected by cars. I was in Vienna recently, and saw
someone collecting electric scooters by piling them onto another electric
scooter.

~~~
kyruzic
The scooters are not replacing what a car would have been used for in the
majority of cases. They're replacing walking or cycling.

So no they are not saving energy.

~~~
ben_w
All the people I’ve asked who have used them or considered using them were
replacing taxis. If they have a bike, or if the destination is close enough to
walk, there’s no need to use something “that expensive”.

~~~
kyruzic
Cool anecdote.

~~~
IshKebab
Right but the article also says that ⅓ of people who used then would have
otherwise used a car. And I'd expect the actual number to be a bit higher
because people like to appear healthy and green.

So they _are_ displacing cars.

