Zero impact ?
Well I guess you missed the extremer weather over the last years ?
The extended Forrest fires
The extreme droughts of the last years
Huge portions of Antarctica and North Pole breaking off
Sea level rising ( which is a REAL problem where I live)
Again, you do you, I'll do me, but don't deny the undeniable
TLDR;
The problem is people forget the past. The next generations seem to think the world started when they finally left the land of "Puff the magic dragon". They treat the globe as if it was a static never changing entity. They assume that there has never been dramatic changes in climate on the earth in the past. Yet we KNOW based on an abundance of anthropological and archeological evidence that there have been wild swings of climate on our planet over the myriad centuries. Yet we seem to have this belief that the last 200 years "man" has somehow begun "destroying the planet" and if we don't do something now we are going to cook.
There is evidence that massive forest fires raged periodically across North America long before the Europeans deigned to settle here. I'm not sure how "extreme" the droughts have been over the last years, in distant years past people just moved or died off during droughts. Antarctica is a continent, and I am unaware of any large land-masses having broken away from it. On the Sea-Level front, this is one of the most bogus arguments. "Water World" is only 5 years away or something, here we come. Just a thought here, but I might suggest that if you need waders to get in your house, you might thing about moving inland a bit. I can assure you that even if all the ice on planet earth melted, there would be plenty of land for the human population to live on.
I for one am not anxious to have the great lakes area freeze back over. You cannot easily grow food in ice. In general CO2 is good for growing plants. What happened here is we have gone from the ridiculous to the sublime. As a child visiting the grotesquely polluted Potomac river, and watching the Great Lakes literally burning from the pollution, I've seen seriously dramatic improvements in our stewardship of our available resources. The problem is all the people pushing to fix these travesties needed a "next environmental cause", and frankly the pickin's were slim, so the planet is going to melt created a sweeping cause that has been over-hyped to an extreme. With all the stunning success we have had, perhaps we should slow down a bit on the environmental travesty hype.
Which brings us back to getting electricity for EV's. Personally I think EV's are amazing, I love mine, and some excellent points about mixing Solar and other energy sources abound above. We have plenty of time to migrate our energy supply, to lower impact sources and I also think electricity in general is the simplest and least impactful
at the point of use and it's going to happen, but we need to have a little less hysterics and allow technology to gradually shift the burden of electrical production to more efficient means such as solar. The current ICE vehicle creates a literal small fraction of the pollution it did just 50-60 years ago. This was accomplished by improving the technology which also dramatically increased the efficiency. I think EV / battery technology is on the verge of some dramatic breakthroughs. At this point I think we need to see a doubling of storage energy density to make EV's truly viable at a larger scale. I think we will, and gradually we should, make use of these technologies which will feed a continual increase in the percentage of energy coming from non-volitile sources.
I think at some point energy production is likely to become much more decentralized as the battery tech improves. The long term (long after I'm gone) wildcard is the current trending worldwide population decline. I don't see this as bad/good one way or the other, but I do see that every time "we" try to force outcomes it seems there are unexpected results, thus I think a much lighter touch on energy policy is warranted. It is stupid to force people to pay 5 times as much for the energy to meet their daily needs. OTOH if it makes sense, small increases that promote new technologies and make them viable are often good investments long term. At this point in my life I'm just going to watch.
