Nicotine is a helluva drug.
I don’t get it. Like, how is it okay that a rent-a-cop (or even worse, a real cop) drags a woman off her seat for smoking a cigarette? Yes, she was (probably) breaking the law but if the security service can’t even handle one woman peacefully? What’s wrong with your society?
She refuses to stop smoking. So you write her a ticket. $150 dollars at first. She refuses to comply. You write her another ticket, $500 dollars. She refuses to comply, you call in backup How long do you think she’d have kept it up? Instead, no. Let’s just drag her off her seat. Let’s escalate that bitch.
Seriously, what is wrong with your society?
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Let’s not forget the embodied carbon in a new car, largely proportional to mass. It’s a significant proportion of its total emissions (roughly half for a large car). Electric cars are comparably worse because the batteries are much more carbon dense.
Better is to use a much smaller vehicle. Better still is to take a well use public transport system. Best is to move under your own power (bike or walk). Each of those options require societal change and that’s what we should be working towards.
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Playing devil’s advocate here:
Your way ends up with some woman receiving a $500 (or is it $650?) fine and then being dragged out of the stadium by several police officers.
How is that better for anyone than her being dragged out of the stadium by one officer?
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Seen any windmills lately?
(sorry, couldn’t resist 
)
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Oh, so now cigarette smokers are guilty of “assault” when smoking outdoors??!? Talk about hyperbole!
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Because it gives her two really good, points of non-physical escalation to think about what she should do. Sometimes people can’t extrapolate what’s going to happen next unless you give them a few more data points.
If they already have two tickets, it’s pretty easy to see what’s going to happen next. As the officer acted, there is no way anybody would have thought that not immediately complying with officer’s demands would lead immediately to his actions.
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It’s not just the second-hand smoke. It’s the risk of fire in a packed stadium:
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Yes, yes, yes, and yes. All good points well said!
Not a real issue. The total carbon footprint of an electric car over its lifetime is far, far lower than that of a petroleum burner. The industry-funded studies that claimed otherwise were using a whole raft of skewed data - for example, they did not account for the power used to refine the metal for the gas car’s engine block, but did count the energy used to refine the metal for the batteries in the electric car. Those studies have been extensively debunked at this point.
Except the two non-physical escalations leave the lady with $500 or $650 of fines to pay - which may be significantly more damaging to her than being removed from the stadium.
I don’t like her being hauled out but I certainly don’t like the idea of handing out fines at a police officer’s whim. Especially in country where I understand you can be imprisoned for non-payment of fines.
Plus I really don’t see why more police should then be called to the situation when one officer is evidently able to deal with it.
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How was he out of line? She could have just stood up instead of that little kid noodle-leg BS… What exactly should he have done?
It might be more damaging (arguably not) , but that is (IMHO) an expected consequence. I don’t think that the way my (our?) country handles fines and financial penalties is great either, but that’s really a separate point. Sometimes police do have to wrestle a subject to the ground, or even fire weapons at a suspect. But they don’t do it when somebody jaywalks or rolls through a stop sign.
FTFY
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Though i fully accept that electric vehicles could be made carbon neutral far more easily the ICE cars, most electricity is still generated by burning hydrocarbons. The best combined-cycle gas turbines approach 60% efficiency, so let’s say 50% total efficiency. Comparing this to a not-unreasonable 25% efficiency for an ICE, gives a rough half the emissions.
Of course it gets better if regenerative braking is used, but that only suits a few driving situations well.
If we say the embedded energy is roughly the same as the life time energy usage, which is pretty close for large cars, and is the same for both drive types (which it isn’t) then the savings for electric cars are lower, but not “far far lower”.
What does make it far far lower is having a far far smaller vehicle. This saves both embodied energy and running energy and both significantly so.
The energy type is a red herring when the net result still involves pissing away huge amounts of energy on parading a mobile status symbol.
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Not that I agree with the cops behavior but I’ve seen this backup argument numerous times in this thread and I don’t get it.
Is it better if she gets dragged away by multiple cops instead of just one?
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Well, yes. Couldn’t agree more. But if the choice is pissing away gasoline in a giant SUV or burning more fracked gas (or even coal) in a power plant that has vastly more efficient pollution controls to move a similarly oversized status symbol, I know which one is better.
This applies to urban commuters, and to my family as well. I drive a plug-in Prius and the spouse drives a Leaf for our daily commutes. However, my friend Pedro the Cruel is self-employed and requires a work truck able to reliably transport half a ton of supplies and equipment four or five times a week. He wants an electric, and he’s eventually going to get one, once it becomes economically possible.
Regen can be very significant, btw, I monitor it closely in the two vehicles with modern instrumentation, and use it as much as I can in the old tractor. In my morning and evening 12 mile commutes, I travel roughly 2 miles on energy I regenned.
Check this table out! US energy mix, 2008 vs 2014:
Notice how renewables more than doubled, and coal got displaced by natgas? This is one of the cool things about buying an EV… it gets cleaner and more efficient every year, assuming we don’t vote for politicians who will reverse that process. If we buy the minimum vehicle for our needs, as both you and I espouse, everybody wins.
Here’s another great chart, a recent analysis of total carbon output for different places in europe, comparing the most efficient diesels to some of the filthiest and most obsolete methods of power generation possible (looking at you, Poland) running an electric car:
Anyway, I don’t want to overshadow your point about only buying what you need, and certainly in the current economic climate most people can’t afford electrics so buying smaller and driving less is a meaningful act, but I thought you’d like these charts.
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There are a few reasons for the calling of backup.
- It allows the subject (and the cop) to decompress while both are waiting for somebody else to arrive. Sometimes all it takes for somebody to admit that they’re wrong is time.
- If the focus of the conflict has become personal (i.e. “this cop is a jerk”, not “cops are jerks”), it allows the second authority to be the “good cop,” giving the subject the opportunity to be compliant without touching off their “BUT I’M RIGHT!” reflex. We all have it.
- If the subject is still refusing to move, it’s far, far less harsh to be dragged away by two people than one. Try it if you don’t believe me; have a friend drag you by the arm (again, not even as rough as the wrist like this officer did), and then have two friends drag you off by two arms. All this is assuming you are just being completely passive too, if the person is actively resisting you’d want as many people as possible.
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Your point #3 was what i had in mind. Simply from a kinematics point-of-view, having more support of a possibly uncooperative person that you have to move from somewhere is better. I hadn’t even considered your other points.
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Interesting - I always wondered about those “but the batteries” statements, they sounded like a playbook example from “merchants of doubt”. Can you direct me to some sources where a fair and full life-cycle comparison is made?
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That’s surprisingly difficult. The studies that exist are all being done by people who have conclusions, and are looking for ways to shape the data to support them. This is true not only of the entrenched brown energy producers that largely control both the political and economic systems of the USA, but also of their green opposition (both sides hate on me hard for saying things like this, but it’s still true).
So unfortunately you kind of have to read a lot of them, and compare what they are saying, to get to the final objective truth that the data shows.
With that caveat, here’s a possibly good jumping off place if you are a fan of hard data. If you don’t like number dumps, maybe not so good.
I am in the somewhat unique position of having independent real world results I can use for validating claims. My absurdly esoteric background includes a lot of science and engineering, I own conventional, plug-in hybrid, and full electric vehicles which I am capable of maintaining myself, and for decades I owned both a 1973 gasoline garden tractor and a more powerful 1973 electric garden tractor. Both tractors are still in heavy use, although the gasser is now owned by one of my friends (who is not technical, so I still direct its maintenance and repairs). I can confidently say that EVs are simpler and more robust than internal combustion cars, which makes them last longer and cost less to own, but the cost of EVs is heavily front-loaded, so that they are currently not economically viable for the people that would benefit most from their lower ongoing and full lifecycle costs. This seems like an obvious place for government intervention, but don’t count on that happening :).
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