I don't know anyone that wants to live 25 miles from work. But almost everyone I know cannot afford to live closer and wants to. I'd love to live in the city. Too bad it's completely unaffordable, even at 3x the median income. This particular solution you have provided is also a solution only the upper class can employ, just like the one in the article. Wind turbines and nuclear reactors: now we're finally getting somewhere. And to build those, you need politicians that are willing to propose and fund them. I'm all for wearing sweaters indoors and only buying phones when the planned obsolescence of modern software makes them unusable (3-5 yrs), but that's an insignificant drop in the bucket. You will never get enough people to adopt such actions without legislation.

I disagree that this is an avenue open only to the upper class [1]. Not everyone can do everything, sure (if you're working two jobs, for example, the climate can rightly go fuck itself) but a lot of people can do a lot more.

I also disagree that they are insignificant drops in the bucket. The point I'm trying to make is that "culture" is infuriatingly hand-wavy and difficult to quantify, but it matters. As an example, I live in Geneva. Here, all shops close at 7 PM. This means that there less commercial activity past those hours, fewer people mindlessly roaming around in malls etc. Now, surely there are regulations guiding this too, but any government official wanting to undo this because "muh freedom", will be laughed out of the room because there is a culture here that treats this as deeply important.

[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/04/06/frugal_living_in_m...

Great. Give me a 2bdm/2ba apt in Manhattan for less than $1700 and I'll give up my car completely too. You're just proving my point for me.

That over $1700 price is a negative externality of home-as-investment culture and racist downzoning. There is no natural law that says the 2 bed/2 bath apartment has to be so expensive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/realestate/sure-build-it-...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/upshot/popping-the-housin...

Supply and demand does if the jobs are also mostly in the big cities

What about Brooklyn or somewhere else commutable by PT or cycle? Do you really need two bedrooms - and two bathrooms? What space can you really live in?

none of that have any effect on climate change what so ever. you need to effect the industry to have any impact and thats not going to happen enough to have any effect.

I downvoted this comment. Why? Not because I think you're a bad person or something. Contrary, I think it's fucking awesome that we are on here having this conversation, and I think it's very important. Props on that. That wasn't why I downvoted it. The downvote was a way for me to say "I don't have energy right now to go back and forth like this, maybe if I press this button this person will take a step back and think about their attitude as a whole."

Okay, now I've eaten dinner and had some coffee. So what was my gripe with your comment?

1) It makes a strong, absolute claim with no evidence. Have you studied nonlinear systems? Even informally? We're dealing with hugely non-linear systems. Little things can compound into tumultuous waves. Look at the way viral memes spread. Culture changes in tumultuous waves. One generation might be hopelessly lost, while the next one comes in with unbelievable clarity, saying "that's just obvious."

2) It's implicitly discouraging of other peoples' perspectives and wisdoms. Imagine some great singer had let their irritable aunt or uncle's mean comments get to them when they were little and couldn't quite keep a pitch. We are learning, and there are without a doubt many, many ways to approach and tackle this. If anything, tackling something so ominously looming is going to take some serious imagination, vision and hope. You might not be hateful, but one doesn't need to be hateful or malicious to be discouraging or to play the part of hater.

3) Culture has, can, does, and will affect industry. Maybe not overnight, but they are inevitably interdependent. We have the power to engage with norms and at the very least set examples. We have the power to abstain, to moderate, to make demands, to dream, to actualize, on short and long term scales. In another comment, you pointed out that people are not systems, they are human beings. To me, that's actually a strength. It makes this struggle messier, but to me it's also an asset. It means that we have the ability to undergo rebirth in imagination and culture, which in the long haul makes us resilient and adaptable.

So basically even though you cant back your own claims up with any substantial evidence you decided to downvote me because you dont like what i said. The irony.

thats ok i can take it but what you dont seem to get is that we are humans not systems and thus wont be making the changes any other way than through technology.

you are basically asking humans not to be human which i believe is a common engineering blind spot :)

dont hate the players hate the game.

Yeah, you're right of course. Any solution requiring humans to change at large scales through raw appeals to emotion is itself Dead on Arrival.

This is where I'm really happy that the cult of mustachianism[1] is spreading as virally as it is. More people than anyone could ever have imagined, up and down the economic spectrum and up and down the Cost Of Living spectrum, are banding together to save money, and by extension, reducing their carbon footprint.

It's getting big enough that I get the feeling that the new status signifier is (slowly/glacially) becoming being able to live without excess. This is great because it will slowly shift the goalposts of what people aspire to.

[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/03/07/frugality-the-new-...

i think you are a victim of a little wishful thinking here. with around a billion people getting into the middle class you are going to see one thing only and that is an increase in resource usage. the normal populations usage is not the problem but the industry that support their consumption.

you arent seeing humans change, you are seeing technology allowing for other types of living but any actual effect on climate they wont have.

Maybe you're underestimating how human culture can change in few years, specially when you consider the rising economical impact of climate change...

i dont think i am. humans have mostly changed because technology allowed them to. its those large progresses which gave us new opportunities to change.

Edit: why the down vote? care to qualify rather than going trough all my comments you dont like and downvote them whoever you are?

I did not downvote you, but I can point out that your focus on technology as the single most important factor in human behavior change may be oversimplistic.

Thats a discussion we can have its certainly not domething i am alone of thinking nor does it warrant downvotes.

I know that sometimes I downvote as a way of saying "dude, come on, will you please just look outside yourself for one second!" Or because I'm tired and frustrated about something that means a lot to me, but somebody is approaching it in a polemical or absolute style.

Perhaps you should take a step back and reread what they actually said.

Then we will sooner or later loose. It is true that this time we might avoid disaster (it will be very rough whatever we do from now on) with the help of technology. But that is just luck that there is a technology available to help us. In a slightly different world, solar would never be cheap enough or good enough to provide energy in a sustainable way. And this is true for many other aspects, tragedy of the commons is hundreds of years old.

The fact is we need regulations and incentives to do the right thing.

i am unconvinced regulation will help. i still find it quite telling that the biggest drop in US co2 emission was because of fracking not anything the otherwise very progressive obama adminstartion.

just becuase its luck and we dont lime that doesn't mean regulation will work, thats simply the wrong way to think about this.