I can't find a monetary breakdown of online vs. other, but by total advertising costs, I see 1.5%. So if online is not dominant I agree that they are high but close, maybe within the order of magnitude.
To address the cumulative effect, this is the same as the sun. There is a balance of heat radiant on the earth and then earth radiates to space. The amount coming to earth is set by the distance to the sun and how reflective the earth is. The amount leaving the earth is set by its temperature (blackbody) and how much is trapped by various mechanisms (reflecting back to the earth again). Therefore, one way to think about it is the excess energy on top of the ones accounted for, like the sun.
Using total energy consumption (not just electricity) and redoing the calculation using entire incident solar flux, I get that they are within a factor of 4 of each other. I agree that the sun currently dominates and the co2 capture is the dominant mechanism. It's also interesting that our consumption is so close to the same order of magnitude. It suggests that if we were to heavily invest in e.g. nuclear to solve our carbon issue that the heat alone would be on the same scale of excess energy and heating would continue. It also says that for solar to solve the problem we would need to cover something like 5-10% of the land mass in solar cells!
I believe it is both. The CO2 helps to trap more of what the earth receives from the sun (primarily what is talked about with global warming), but our energy use is also staggering. I can't recall off the top of my head but we currently consume something equivalent to ~0.1% of the total solar radiation incident on the earth (through all means - oil, gas, solar etc). At that scale, the energy use alone is on the scale of other warming effects, wild!
There is already legislation about acceleration, it falls under e.g. 'exhibition of speed' and everyone one of these modern EVs is able to violate it (and do regularly, afaict).
It's not just inconvenient, it's inconvenient enough to almost say you can't do it. I believe there is a firm lockout period of 2 years (so no 'new' cars can be imported). And then if it is not already licensed with various agencies you have to do that yourself, per-car, at a cost of (I heard) $7-15k. Not to mention the shipping, customs, etc.
Apologies for being pedantic: yes, change is coming, but certainly not faster than that brought on by a giant asteroid impact or major eruption. I only mention this as I feel exaggeration harms credibility.
One way or another the company's obligations are down. Company revenue is ~$200B/yr so they will easily take advantage of the full tax exemption, which you could then think of as paying workers or any other business expense (pessimist note: I strongly suspect it will not go towards higher wages or better working conditions).
Highly agree. Their interface is not intuitive. If it were then I (with my decades of computer experience) would be able to use an iphone after having never used one. The few times I've tried, I've walked away annoyed that there were so many hidden tricks needed to get basic things accomplished. And to that point, based on this article, it looks like animation is a key crutch in illuminating them. Of course android is following suit now, so once again new users are alienated.
I think this is more insightful, or at least interesting, than replies are giving credit. Sure, you know your temperature from the thermometer at your house, but how do you measure the world's temperature? What is included and excluded in the calculation? Scientific facts don't exist in isolation - they are created in people processes in a political environment. New and existing metrics can be cited or withheld to support an agenda. Anyhow, given this specific case is from a single source, it seems to be at least self-consistent.
I was surprised, but this calculation checks out. Wild. This really points to the scale of influence that large companies have, especially considering this is < 0.1% of typical household electricity consumption. Consider then that household electricity consumption is not the complete picture - add in cars (both ICE and electric being ~ICE/4), food production, etc, and you see both how much energy we use and how much single entities influence this amount. According to the internet, google data centers are ~1 million households (I saw 15TWh/yr), so 1% efficiency improvements are a small town worth of electricity. At they same time, they claim 3m household savings due to Nest, wow.
My point is the ROI of investments in those systems is much higher than trying to improve car infrastructure. And, necessarily, crashes and costs of cars are reduced along the way.
I think a lot of the answer is 'chaos'. Most nontrivial systems are chaotic (generically, iirc more than 3 unconstrained d.o.f. + non-linearity) and most chaotic systems quickly erase knowledge of the initial conditions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_exponent). That being said, within chaos, there are fractal regions that survive pertubations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov%E2%80%93Arnold%E2%8...) and this is indeed related to why the solar system is more stable and predictable (can read about KAM theorem and Jupiter).
In the bouncing ball example, there are periodic orbits that are created for some balls, in which case you can perfectly predict their past and future. But a lot of measurements we do make about the world tend to be statistical measurements that don't depend on measuring the precise trajectory of individual particles over long periods of time. So these issues tend to not be important unless precise details are needed.
Reproduced your calculation on the 1 million miles, it's surprising but checks out. Then consider how many miles of road we have already made and how much we continue to make to support large vehicles on them. You could designate half of them as car-free and induce alternative transportation if you really wanted to. OTOH, a new electric vehicle costs roughly 250k miles worth of driving to produce, without considering electricity generation.
I believe if you compare the overall efficiency (including food production, transport, storage vs. battery production and electricity), e-bikes are in fact more efficient than traditional bikes. Coupled with the fact that they are also more convenient, I believe they fill a niche that is important if we want to make progress towards minimizing our dependence on cars. I do agree that they cannot be just another consumable item since that destroys the efficiency. But, that is generally how production is oriented these days, so it's hard to make a comparison. For reference, I manually cycle ~8k mi a year and do not own an e-bike, but am thinking about it.