For example, Netherlands was able to completely revolutionize their cities and optimize them for bike travel. Now biking is the main mode of transportation.

A lot of the changes we want to see individuals do, the system discourages it or makes it hard to do those changes.

Electric cars have dubious benefit for the environment as well, so I don't think using that as a solution is fair.

EVs are just the tiniest inconvenience to Americans over gas and still they won't embrace it. It's much cheaper than the other things we need to do.

If your plan is "US moves the population into apartments and builds mass transit for all" then you have no plan.

If your plan is "Let's make everyone drive EVs" you also did nothing, and fucked over poor countries while doing that.

If we're going to do something, we need to do it right, which means:

1. Listen to climate scientists about what's the best way to mitigate as much as we can.

2. Mobilize every single branch of the government to respond to the realities of climate change.

3. Make the hard decisions and push companies and cities to follow them. We've done this before with the new deal. It's not hard to imagine that level of mobilization.

4. THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE: Plan how you're going to minimize damages that we can't prevent, and minimize damages that are going to be caused by this "move fast" approach. Keep people on your side while making these changes. These changes should come with a quality of life improvement for most Americans.

It's important to remember, climate change was NEVER an individual failing. It was systemic ignorance and failure. Which means the response to it needs to involve as many, or more gears that climate change denial did.

The US is not capable of doing that. There's not the will. Literally 40%+ of voters are completely opposed.

If this is a reference to either party, people who identify with either party all actually are suffering under the status quo, and would be fine with making changes if the changes also take them into account and increase their QoL.

So no, I disagree, the divide is barely there and has been fabricated.

I'm an anarchist, I've had successful conversations with essentially everyone on every side you can imagine. The problems are the same. Just that US has allowed media to drive a "us vs them" mentality.

If you want to make a dent in the problem you need useful mass transit everywhere. Useful is more important than everywhere - useful will get people out of their cars, while everywhere gets people driving by and ignoring it because when they last looked it wasn't useful. (best to assume once every 5 years unless someone else finds it useful and raves about it)

EVs are way better for the environment than gas cars while asking so little from the user. And we still won't make this tiny sacrifice.

But who would pay for this? At the end, the States can only take the money in the pocket of its citizens, present or future.

Once renewables become the most cost effective option, people will switch regardless of their politics or location.

I would argue the huge investments needed to conduct modern fossil fuel exploration and get the remaining (and least accessible) material from the ground may become unjustifiable if demand drops sufficiently.

Only 26% of eligible Americans are unvaccinated, and that number is still shrinking every day. Yes, there is a depressing number of hardcore anti-vaxxers, but it's a much smaller minority than 35% of the population.

According to polls, one-third of the unvaccinated say they would get the shot if they were given time off work to deal with the symptoms. That suggests their "vaccine refusal" is related to their precarious economic circumstances and isn't a political stance. That brings the number of hardcore vaxxers down even further, to around 17%. This is probably still an overestimate, since some proportion of this population are minors and not making their own medical decisions, or may have other non-political reasons.

As far as I know those 35% are still around so it seems like they've successfully saved their own lives.

See, that kind of hyperbole makes me question the whole climate change narrative. There's virtually 0 chance that Covid is going to kill me. I'm vaccinated because I don't like getting sick even if I don't die at the end of it, but Covid is actually very mild. When the same people who treat it like the bubonic plague are always the ones who are telling me that the world is going to end in 10 years unless I vote to pay higher taxes, I'm inclined to discount them.