No. of Recommendations: 4
To this old engineer, the fastest way to reduce pollution from light ICE cars is to replace them with hybrids. Less gasoline, less CO2 emissions. Less new infrastructure needs re. expanding electricity supplies and charging stations. Far less needs for huge new battery materials - and the mines and extraction needed to produce them. These all consume fossile energy and generate CO2. Use what is installed and working today. Toyota sees this - why can't we?
I agree about the advantages of hybrids, but I don't think there's really any conflict in promoting both hybrids and pure electrics. There is no real constraint on the amount of raw materials available for making both, and the analyses I've seen indicate that pure electrics do make back their initial energy investment over time, so we don't have to limit ourselves to hybrids.
Many governments are proposing that internal combusion engines be completely phased out, often by 2035 or 2040, and this seems to me to be unrealistically rapid. It would be better to say that all cars should have a minimum of X kilometres of plug-in electric function, X = about 30-40 km for instance, or pay a financial penalty, $5000 for instance, while removing all subsidies for electric cars. This would be a way of quickly getting most cars to have hybrid functioning at a small cost to the consumer and no cost to the government, which will not be able to sustain subsidies for all electric vehicles anyways. And it could start almost immediately, quickly achieving massive reductions in fuel use. It would be of some benefit to car owners who can't charge their car at home (via regenerative charging), but it would obviously put enormous pressure on apartment buildings, employers, even mall owners and municipalities to install charging facilities so car owners could take full advantage of their vehicle's capacities.
I didn't understand your reference to unexpected effects of removing sulphur from fuels. What do you mean by "temperatures rose because those emissions adsorbed solar radiation and reduced temperatures"?
dtb
