I suppose you also take no part in any activity that has any negative impact?
There is an indirect negative impact of ANY modern lifestyle. The really expensive impact comes from of industrialization and technological advancement.
Clearly you have a device to write this message, as well as power and internet connection. You might use AC or heating, you might rely on supply chains for food. Own any index funds? You own minuscule pieces of companies that produce cars, tobacco, or frack for oil. Your very existence is expensive for the earth and for society. Same applies for your kids if you have any.
Most drivers cannot practically manage walking/biking or public transit as their sole means of travel. Frankly that idea comes from a privileged and niche bubble perspective.
The four most impactful lifestyle choices you can make to reduce your effect on climate [1] are:
* have fewer children
* live car-free
* become vegetarian
* avoid transatlantic air travel
I now live car-free and vegan. I've no kids, yet (maybe never). I live in California but I'm from Ireland - I'll probably take a flight home soon.
So no, I don't totally avoid everything that can cause harm, but at least I try.
What is ludicrous is using a car for journeys under ten miles.
It is abhorrently selfish to do so knowing that your pollution contributes to sickness in people.
People should maybe take a pay cut, or live in a smaller home, closer to where they work. But instead they trade the health of others for their own standard of living. ("some of you may die, but that's a price I'm willing to pay")
> Most drivers cannot practically manage walking/biking or public transit as their sole means of travel.
In a large part because of cars. Cars beget cars. Car companies conspired to shut down public transit. Now people in those areas need a car. Then it's held as a example of why we need cars.
Urban sprawl was enabled by cars. Now people need cars to get to those areas.
It's very difficult to find a problem that cars solve that wasn't itself caused by cars.
What is ludicrous is to call how I actually live ludicrous. I enjoy a high standard of living. Without a car.
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
Disclosure: my spouse is a migrant and we both fly to visit.
In the end, it is your choice with what you want to do. Things you're doing to contribute less like being car-free etc. are good, but I really find this extreme stance of "not having children for climate change" short-sighted.
Edit: typo
IMO this is short term thinking. What happens to the planet when you are gone? If all the like minded individuals who cared about the climate opt to not have kids, then those who inherit the earth will keep polluting.
Yeah those impoverished parents sure are pieces of shit for driving thier kids to school and commuting between multiple underpaid jobs. They should just take a pay cut and quadruple their commute time for the earth!
Let me paint it another way:
A vegan, car free, childless, software engineer in a big city has the carbon output of 100 Ugandan farmers.
Why do you get to use electronics, power, internet, and take occasional trips to Iceland while everyone else is morally bankrupt for having a vehicle?
The fact of the matter is: car use kills people through pollution. Minimizing car use kills fewer people. To use your car less is OFTEN an available choice.
Morally bankrupt would be someone arguing against reducing car use.
Only to wealthy privileged people who can discuss their first-world problems on forums like this. As folks get poorer on the scale the more a car becomes an unavoidable necessity for many.
I applaud to your personal choices and sacrifices, but please don't make it sound like everybody can and should make the same/similar ones.
Most of us here have/want kids. I say something very opposite to what you say - folks here, please have kids! Not many, but take your time and raise them properly. It basically means sacrificing large portion of your life to them, without a guarantee they will even appreciate it. Which is fine, that shouldn't be the motivation for it anyway.
You who are reading this, are a part of smart elite in this world, whenever you are, and can raise next generation of elite with disproportionally large amount of decisive powers in their hands.
Why, you may ask? Raise them well so they are balanced happy individual with clear drive to help make this world a better place, and they may very well become next leaders, business captains, politicians, or just good citizens helping those around them, environment, mankind.
Now imagine what kind of world would that kind of attitude bring. Don't just minimize your 'bad' footprint on this existence, try creating more of the positive one.
My neighbor has five to seven cars on their driveway. To let others out they start them all and play musical cars. Two of them drive to jobs less than two miles away. They use them for practically every trip over 200 metres. Their extended family visit every weekend, in separate cars and all live within five miles.
My other neighbors have three cars for two people, including a pickup truck. Again, they drive literally everywhere. Even walking distance.
Many of the young people here drive terrible modded cars up and down all day for no actual purpose than vanity.
If you tried to have to have a conversation with these people about their car use, they would claim it's their right and that they "pay for it". Yet what they pay is < 10% of the damage they cause.
Obviously, if you are remote, or have a disability or need to carry a heavy load you should probably use a car.
But many people think it's literally their God given right to drive a dangerous metal box, badly, burning irreplaceable oil, spraying pollution, noise pollution and brake dust literally straight into your home.
Every single car journal under 10 miles should be excessively taxed, with extreme taxes for trips under three miles. You should literally be forced to think twice, then twice again.
All of these people are literally saying: "Fuck other people's health, their sanity, their happiness, their time, their environment, the environment as a whole. Me drive metal box"
The entitlement of drivers is literally staggering.
If you tax three mile trips extremely enough, you turn a 4 mile roundtrip into around 15 miles of driving in a lot of cases. Need to go A to B to A which are 2 miles apart? Drive A to C (3.5 miles) to B (4 miles) to C (4 miles) to A (3.5 miles). Does that policy make sense in light of the obvious workaround?
Tax the fuel and you align the incentives much more closely and much more difficult to workaround in ways that work against your intention.
I'm living on countryside in Eastern Europe and by no metrics I'm anywhere near to being wealthly
You don't have to be wealthly to have privilege of not having to own car, it's often about job.
Majority of people I know needs their cars due to their jobs. Of course part of people I know actually enjoys driving and stuff.
WFH helps with it significantly, but even before I've been commuting by train due to it being cheap and allowing me to e.g read a book, sleep and generally have time for me
For things that are within e.g 10km radius like shops, services, then I tend to use bike (unless its winter ofc)
but I think it's hard to do it pernamently, at some point I think I may need to get one just in case.
In cities it may be easier cuz you can always call Uber/Taxi
______________
> As folks get poorer on the scale the more a car becomes an unavoidable necessity for many.
Sometimes I believe that car is what actually keeps people poor
When I look at friends they spend significant amount of their salary on car - insurance, fuel, maintenance - it ranges between like 3k PLN to 10k PLN where minimal wage is around 2K
So if you have to pay 4K per year for your car when your year salary is 24K
then shit's no cheap and I think we're optimistic here, but often it allows you to have job, so it's terrible situation.
The purpose here is probably not to be a “better person” but to inflate their ego while belittling others.
What does it accomplish to shame drivers while simultaneously using AC and running water in the California desert?
If it were conversation about activism, I can talk about my engagement with the city council and contributions to relevant charities.
If this were a conversation about energy use in California I could talk about the premium I pay on my electricity so it is from renewable sources.
https://www.smud.org/en/Going-Green/Get-Green-Energy/Residen...
Reducing car usage is, in that journal article I referenced, the number 2 thing you can do to reduce your climate impact.
I have not misrepresented anything.
You’re right about the water. That’s something I’m still learning about.
Most car journeys are under 5 miles. Imagine the benefit if the majority of these journeys were made by bicycle instead! Public health from less air pollution and more exercise. Less stress, less traffic, less potential for vehicle accidents. Governments might even decide to improve pedestrian/cycling/public transit infrastructure and turn car parks into people parks with green spaces (which would reduce absorption of solar radiation and cool your city and clean its air).
It's a really simple proposal with many obvious benefits and no clear downside whatsoever. And just because it isn't a silver bullet you are all up in arms against it? Tell us more how BrianHenryIE is the actual source of the problem here and how you should still drive everywhere because of his equivalence to 100 farmers...
OP isn’t just suggesting that people drive less. According to him, drivers are “abhorrently selfish” and are directly responsible for death, disease, and need to take pay cuts and live in smaller homes so they can more easily fit into his little box that defines a good person.
I’m not up in arms about the idea of biking. I’m up in arms about people with extremely carbon expensive lifestyles claiming that everyone else is reprehensible for engaging in $specific_activity.
I've encountered this sentiment many times here. It's a bit baffling to me, to be honest. Yes, we all know that personal actions are small compared to massive structural changes. But why exactly do you think that it's one or the other? I'd wager that the majority of politically active people trying to change things at a high level are also changing smaller things in their day-to-day life, because it's an issue that they are passionate about.
In my opinion, the attitude that you promote ("why do the little actions when only the big ones matter") is more likely to cause inaction, and the people I've met who espouse that viewpoint say a lot and do nothing at all.
Sure people should make those lifestyle changes where possible! I’m not against small change.
I get frustrated when I see people generalize the rest of the population as “abhorrently selfish”. Especially when their own lifestyle comes from a position of excess and privilege.
To clarify my position:
If you wanna make lifestyle changes for the environment, more power to you! I’ve got no beef with that. Just don’t use those tiny aspects of your modern life to paint the rest of the world as immoral.
citation needed
seriously, it's got to be more like 1000 or 10,000 farmers.
Of course, there are many individual life circumstances that mean a car is an absolute necessity, but for many people it's a choice, whether they acknowledge they've made that choice or not. This is especially true for people who are more affluent.
Complaining about that (and in that tone) helps nobody.
We can disagree about climate change and the rest of it, but the results of a sedentary lifestyle can't be ignored. There's also no room for indignation at an imagined holier-than-thou position when you take this approach.
I've found this simple, obvious observation about obesity especially interesting in regards to the current public health scare and the rise of the bio-security state.
edit: \/ didn't know thanks, did a quick search - https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129809_tire-dust-is-po... is something like this available? Also it won't help as I am a person that needs a truck. I transport shit all the time. I'm constantly trucking stuff - I'm not one of those show-offs that own a truck just because.
Just nobody is putting money into it.
A good chunk of wear can be eliminated by ensuring tyres never skid by having per wheel torque control, which future 4-motor EV's will have 'for free'.
Criticizing cars is fine, but "state-subsidized" is just superfluous there. This is not somehow unique to cars.
This is by choice and can be changed.
But the fact remains that America has many low-density areas that will never be affordably served by transit. That's not just in this country, Europe has areas that aren't well served by transit, even Japan has areas that aren't well served by transit.
I really don't think we're up to the challenge of really stopping (or significantly slowing) climate change (if it's possible at all now) and will end up spending much more money (and discomfort) mitigating the more severe effects of climate change than if we'd just started making changes a decade or more ago.
"'London throat': Toxic brake dust could cause condition, scientists say" [1]
"Pollution from car tires is killing off salmon on US west coast, study finds" [2]
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-51049326
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/03/coho-sal...
Then secondary problems such as sedentary lifestyles and children unable to play on their street because of the dominance of cars (car numbers increased almost 3x in Ireland since 1990, when I was a kid).
There are more reasons cars are bad for society and bad for the individual – loss of communities dues to freeways [3]; loss of sense of community due to people not walking around and meeting their neighbours [4]; a ticket price to society when a car is deemed a requirement just to work and shop [5]; the 1.35 million people who die in road traffic accidents each year [6].
[3] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jul/16/cars-are-fue...
[5] https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2021/03/21/fl...
Vastly reducing the amount of brake dust that is given off the vehicle in comparison to combustion vehicles. The same way in which riding a bicycle produced brake dust but not in the same volumes are combustion cars.
Car tires I completely agree however almost anything that rolls uses rubber and as such if we introduced more bicycles instead of cars we would also be polluting the streets with rubber. You could argue however that this is offset by the health benefits this would provide people rather than being sedentary in a car.
With regards to communities I would argue that nothing is stopping people from walking around and meeting their neighbours. However, people can visit other communities or extend their community boundary using cars and railways etc. Therefore our sense of community isn't just those immediately, but those across town as well.
I've been curious about this topic for a while: what contributes more pollution per mile traveled -- an internal combustion engine or a Tesla charged with power from a coal/gas/wind/nuclear plant. If anyone encountered an analysis like that, please link!