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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • I got curious and will attempt some math and duckduckgoing.

    A forest can remove between 4.5 and 40.7 tons of Carbon Dioxide per year per hectare during the first 20 years of tree growth. Sauce

    Humanity is currently generating around 40 billion tons of CO2 per year. Sauce

    So now some simple math: it would take between 1 billion and 10 billion hectares of forests, depending on their maturity, to keep up. 100 hectare = 1 km2 sauce, so this means 10 to 100 million km2 of forests.

    Earth’s total surface area is 510 million km2. sauce.

    Of that, here’s a quick breakdown:

    Sauce

    So 10ish percent of the 510 million km2 of land on earth, or around 5.1 million km2 is a good candidate for tree planting. That’s not enough if we want to sequester all the carbon produced by humanity. Without getting to net zero global warming will continue. The best we can do is slow it down. More disconcertingly, our appetite for energy is only increasing. The good news is that we’re really starting to see large scale wind and farm operations ramping up, but there are still a lot of power plants scheduled to come online in the next two decades.







  • Not sure how up to date this is, but synthetic fibers are the #1 source of micro plastics, followed by car tires and city dust. Car tires are absolutely a contributor and we should cut our reliance on personal transportation for more reasons than just micro plastics. In addition, we need to move away from polyester, nylon and a slew of other materials.

    Most household furnishings used to be made of natural fibers. These days carpets, couch covers and filling, curtains, clothing, etc are often derived from a petrochemical. I suspect oil companies will continue to pivot into these areas to continue as we very slowly ween ourselves of gasoline.



  • Ah, I see. It’s very true that a lot of plants have… older software setups that likely require a bit more of a human touch than should be necessary. I don’t work in a plant, but that’s basically been my career arc - “the poor humans have to hop between how many disconnected systems to accomplish what now? Let’s write some better software to address that.”

    Using AI as a replacement to human glue seems reasonable if you have decent data to traverse. The “data” at my employer is often bespoke to each system, which results in a lot of gray matter mapping names and attributes across systems. Our IT org is working on rolling out glean, but so far it’s basically a better internal search than offering real insights.





  • The amount of traceability in auto plants regarding what was put onto a vehicle would surprise a lot of folks. The capability to do this greatly predates AI and I’m not really sure what AI would add in the example you cited. Nearly any OE part with a barcode can be tied back to the vehicle it was originally installed on, what shift installed it, which other vehicles have a similar lot of parts, etc. Correlating this information with other basic record keeping, like which station installs the part and who was working at that time, makes it very easy to unearth trends. Plants have quality incentives, so there’s a strong motivation to identify areas for improvement.

    In addition to quality, it turns out the small additional cost of all this data capture and storage quickly pays for itself in the case of a spill. Being able to say “this specific set of vehicles” can save a ton of money. That’s part of the reason why very small and targeted recalls have been becoming more common.






  • The cost per kwh to manufacture a BEV battery has been drastically falling due to mechanical design changes, chemistry changes, etc. Very little of this drop was due to the raw materials themselves getting cheaper. In 2010 a Nissan leaf’s pack was 25 kwh, which meant the pack alone likely cost more than what Nissan charged for the car. Even if it didn’t it likely made up the highest $$ in the BOM by a very wide margin.

    These falling prices are part of the reason so many EVs, are on the market, why ranges have been growing, etc.

    From a capabilities perspective, current BEV is fine in my eyes. But if cost falls and/or range increases with more incremental changes I won’t complain.