I’ll note that their definition of harms includes a lot of things besides just greenhouse gas emissions and climate impact. Full paper here

Basically makes the case that as a society, we’re better off with smaller cars.

  • spidermanchild@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    “The harms imposed by the Rivian are three times the harms imposed by the Prius, in terms of air pollution and death from accidents,” said Hunt Allcott, a co-author and professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University. “But we are subsidizing the Rivian and not the Prius.”

    EV fans have some reckoning to do. There’s an argument that the carbon matters “more” than the other effects, but good luck not sounding like a psychopath saying the children gunned down by 8000lb pickup trucks with 0-60 times under 3 seconds and zero visibility are worth it for slightly lower carbon.

    Meanwhile I’ll keep riding my unsubsidized bicycle and not killing people. We should all have safe paths and trails to ride and communities designed for humans - that’s where I’d like to see hundreds of billions go. We should absolutely also do a carbon fee and dividend (since this polls better than a “tax”).

  • Bartsbigbugbag
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    1 month ago

    Yeah, tax incentives only work for those making enough money to have taxes to pay that they can get a break on. The rest of us have no way to afford an EV, so they’re relegated to luxury vehicles for virtue signaling upper middle class people. Then they double down and block the cheap EVs from being here, so now that there’s finally hope of having affordable EV transition for the masses, it’s purposefully kept out of reach for us in order to protect the margins of domestic greedy OEMs.