> This sounds like a typical US thing. Suffering from a solvable problem, while creating the maximum public drama and having the society incapable of reform
1) This is a global problem that is not specific to the US (even if the US is a huge contributor). No other country has solved the issue.
2) The comment is implying that this isn't a solvable problem (or at least a solution has never been proposed) since all the green tech/policy isn't having an impact.
Or the other way around, without the US, China and Australia, even if the rest of the world does everything right, global carbon dioxide levels will not only keep increasing, but do so in an accelerating manner.
And before you ask why not China could create credible incentives for the US, the answer is that they do not have the institutions for it, which the US has. At least in theory.
That won't happen because of an economic collapse and no politician would ever get elected with this thinking (at least in the US). Plus, you've now taken away many freedoms that are inherit in democratic societies.
To me green technologies are better than nothing but there's really a consumption problem. And I'm completely guilty of it as well.
https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-rctom/submission/the-parent...
What happens to humans at that level?
It's not that the CO2 level itself would be fatal to humans, it is the cascade from large scale agricultural collapse that would do us in.
Edit: And I am acutely aware that I live somewhere that is likely to suffer the least directly consequences from climate change.
[1] https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media_file/202...
I’m not expecting 40 years at the current rate. Given the way PV deployments have been growing and how long they last, I expect electricity to be mostly green in the first few years of the 2030s, and most other sectors soon after.
Renewable sources are growing exponentially but carbon emitting sources continue to grow exponentially as well, simply somewhat slower.
It seems wildly, unreasonably optimistic to look at that graph and imagine most of that majority at the bottom suddenly vanishing within ten years.
Here’s some graphs for PV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
PV is doubling every 3 to 3.5 years.
3 doublings of PV at that rate gets us to about 9-10 TW peak. I don’t know the actual average global capacity factor, but I do know the current global electricity usage is only about 3 TW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
If you’re going to worry about fertilisers, worry about phosphate and potassium… but even then, the problem and solution is unrelated to greenhouse gases.
This is a solved problem since the invention of the bucket and pointy stick, when “fertiliser” meant “manure”.
> With CO2 being 50% higher that means you'd already have to fertilize 50% more to get the same Nitrogen to CO2 ratio as preindustrial levels.
Why do you want to match the air rather than the plant’s actual growth? Plants are limited by a lot of different factors, so while CO2 helps a bit, doubling it doesn’t double the nitrogen use all by itself.
> a farmer didn't follow the fertilization limits
While this is a real issue, there are many solutions, and worrying about CO2 altering crop yields isn’t one of them.
An unrelated issue. That’s important. I have no reason to expect it to get worse. What runs off the fields is necessarily not used by crops.
> And you can bet farmers are already maxing that out as much as they can on an industrial scale.
I doubt that.
All industries, agriculture included, are incentivised to maximise profits. Optimising profit sure isn’t environmentally friendly, but it also doesn’t mean treating fertiliser as a magic potion.
A productivity optimised farm looks like this: https://farmingaquaponics.com/aeroponics-vs-hydroponics/
That’s pointlessly expensive right now for most crops, so those are fairly limited. Likewise, the economically optimal quantity of fertiliser used by farms is different from the optimal quantity for the health of people living down-river — but that’s just as true regardless of if CO2 is higher or lower than we consider desirable for the general global climate.
CO2 as a heat trap is the problem, not so much CO2 in the atmosphere as an input to plant and animal life.
Replanting and more (and more intense) agriculture is what is making our planet greener. For the moment. But there are pretty clear upper limits to what the planet can deal with temperature wise, at some point it will get so hot that plants will not be able to retain their moisture. Already there are territories that were arable in the recent past that today are not or are subject to extreme droughts almost every summer.
For Europe the estimates are that Portugal (and Spain) are going to be the first to be hit really hard, and in a way that is already underway:
https://portuguese-american-journal.com/wildfires-severe-cli...
Normally when I have to remind people that humans are not plants it’s right after they state (accurately) that plants do better with somewhat more CO2 than is in the natural atmosphere.
Reference?
How long before we start putting adsorption scrubbers on our HVAC systems' intakes?
If you spend time outside the US, you'd realize the problems the US deal with are pretty similar to the problems other countries deal with.
But Americans with little knowledge of the world outside the US catastrophize what's going on the in the US - "the Republic is falling!", "it's never been this bad!", "Americans are so ignorant!" and "nobody has ever had this problem, ever!".
However, reasons for my beliefs are not due to a lack of knowledge of the world outside the U.S. Empires die eventually and change happens. The major power and structural problems in the U.S. are not sustainable and will eventually have to change. Whether that change comes peacefully or violently I can’t say.
One thing I wonder is, who steps up? China, for sure, though it's grappling with population decline as an existential crisis. The EU? The EU has never 'stepped up' for anything. The US sat patiently by and tried to let Europe deal with Milosevich. That utterly failed. The EU was also almost ripped apart by the greek debt crisis, so it too is having real issues.
A post US hegimon world is going to be a very different world, and not necessarily a better one.
What do you mean? NATO bombed the shit out of what became Serbia, they withdrew from Kosovo and he was arrested two years later...
Accusations of the US "in decline" were happening back in the 60's and 70's when things were much worse than they are now, like order of magnitude worse.
As I said, navel gazing and lack of perspective tend to dominate news in coverage of the US.
As I said, I can give reasons for my beliefs and those reasons are not due to ignorance.
The only information source about the US is based on comments on social media?
No wonder your view of the US is so pessimistic.
Unsurprisingly, I was a lot more informed and a _lot_ better at arguing than they were, so it was pretty trivial to completely demolish their points quickly enough that it didn't turn into "an argument", with the attendant social friction of disagreements that drag on.
I no longer spend much time around women in their early 20s, so I'm spared these extremes of ignorance, but I still occasionally come across the same tendency occasionally, albeit with a lot more maturity. The US is still something close to a global hegemon, so it's a target for hyperbolic projection by every simpleton in the world that wants to sound educated on geopolitics. Note that this also includes the best-country-in-the-world jingoists that can't recognize America's exceptional positive qualities without violently dismissing its exceptional negative qualities.
I have an uncle who's convinced that literally every conflict in the Middle East is entirely the US's fault, entirely ignoring a region that's been beset by conflict for millennia, as well as the modern borders drawn in crayon by the British on their way out. The best strategy, on HN and in real life, is to nod & smile & understand that these people have no hope of and no interest in understanding reality.
So what do we do when neither side wants to tank the economy by implementing strict, lifestyle-altering controls?
The above assumes that the proposed policy would actually work too. Some climate policies are clearly not going to have a significant positive effect, but we're doing them anyway (eg banning plastic bags in favor of paper bags@). Other policies could be designed just to keep yourself in power (deny the opposition power).
@ this does have a different reason too - to fight plastic pollution, but climate change is also cited as a reason. Paper bags are heavier and require more resources though, which makes it difficult for them to end up as better than plastic bags when it comes to climate change.
Plenty of things in climate-forward policy actually improve everyone's quality of life, even if the "way of life" changes.
Take EVs for example. As we transition to them, local air quality improves, not just for the EV drivers but also for non EV drivers.
Same for heat pumps replacing fossil burning furnaces - they are so efficient that it still results in a CO2 and emissions reduction if we burn natural gas at a power plant to power them.
And for most people and drives EVs are just a better experience (acceleration, vibration, smoothness), and heat from a heat pump feels better than a gas furnace since it doesn't excessively dry the air, and also has no risk of leaking combustion byproducts into your living space.
But sure, if "way of life" means the "principle" of burning fossil fuels directly for day to day propulsion and space heating, then yes climate policy is a threat to that, but being wedded to a technology for its own sake seems backwards.
Believing nothing should be done about climate change does not make one an extremist. Believing animals should not be eaten does not make one an extremist. Adhering to those beliefs by automatically discounting contravening evidence makes one an extremist.
The problem is that this is the religious position, not the other one. If you go investigate this properly you'll find there's tons of scientific dispute about even very basic things like what the temperature actually was 5 years ago in specific places, let alone more complex topics like what the climate would do in response to an immediate doubling of CO2 levels (so called ECS).
And the impact of global warming itself isn't at all obvious. All the effects so far are so small you can't directly detect them with your own senses, you have to use sensitive monitoring equipment and/or accept a lot of conjecture about chance and probability. In turn that requires you to have absolute confidence in the people doing the measurements and processing the data, but plenty of people don't have that confidence for various legitimate reasons (e.g. the Climategate emails). So it's pretty much by definition not obvious.
"Believing nothing should be done about climate change does not make one an extremist"
Doing nothing is the default position in any debate so arguing for it by definition makes one not an extremist. You can't be a "nothing extremist", that's a contradiction.
Extremism takes the form of positing extreme scenarios like the end of the world, and demanding extreme solutions like massive changes to everyone's ways of life. The people who say "let's not do that" are the ones pushing back on extremism.
This is at the root of a lot of the fighting over climate change: it creates enormous cognitive dissonance in people. Those who decide they want to fight it want to see themselves as rational devotees of science, but find themselves being the guy in the sandwich board yelling "The End Is Nigh" and demanding extreme policies. And just like sandwich board guy they struggle to explain the details of how the world is meant to end. Very few people who have tied their identity to climate extremism can actually handle a debate about the details which is why they instantly retreat into screaming that it's all "settled science" (which is a lie).
In particular, most people recognize the possibility (at least theoretically) that someone can be both an extremist and also correct. Whereas by your definition that's impossible.
Are nuclear power plants being shut down for climate policy reasons?
These are very, very different psyches of people. The subtleties show up in all elements of the current prevailing culture, and what is truly happening right now is the war between those that remember how bad it was and can be, and those who experienced life with a completely new set of pains outside the horrors of the bottom of hierarchy of needs.
To tie this back to the climate and culture of the US, having gone through two major hurricanes in the gulf region, I can tell you the mindset of everyone is 'so what.' You lose your house, all possessions, and have $500 in your bank account with 4 kids -- but you are not alone, every single person around you, rich or poor is going through some chaos. Every single person is reaching out to help you clear your road, cook food for you, keep the kids together -- (first hand account).
So in these communities, a big scary 'climate change' event is already happening, and they are pulling through just fine. They live in unconscious safety because they have direct evidence that their community has their back - and life continues on happily until someone comes with a shaking finger to say, 'you really need to stop everything you're doing and fight climate change.'
The only real risk around here is tornadoes (and we did have one touch down within 5 miles of us just last year, damaged a couple hundred homes, uprooted some trees, and rendered 20 homes unlivable). From a recent article, some of the people with damaged homes are still dealing with it six months later, and some homes just have tarps where a couple of their walls were, still (it was already hard to hire people even before the tornado struck, also they had issues getting insurance to approve things).
I wouldn't want to willingly move to even more likelihood of problems, like near a beach in the Gulf Coast or Arizona (which is about to have severe water problems soon as Lake Mead upstream is drying up fast).
Yep, exactly the point! And look at the adaptive community response to Hurricane Katrina and recent flooding events: the Cajun Navy.
All I'm saying is telling this type of voter to ignore their lives and change their lifestyle, when they adapt in pretty incredible ways - is going to be a hard sell.
The climate emergency will devastate crops all over the world, render parts of it simply unlivable, but you believe that Americans, with their "very, very different psyches" and the "culture of the US", will simply band together, "rich or poor", and "live in safety"?
If it weren't the case that people with the same false-to-the-fact beliefs were setting policy through America, your beliefs could simply be ignored by the polite, but as it is, it's simply tragic and rather horrifying.
Making a change requires acknowledging and accepting that many of the US populace will not respond well to the incredulity of their direct lives.
Looking at the maps it seems much more likely that the obvious thing is true, this is an issue driven almost entirely by political identity with a side helping of how badly you might actually feel the effects.
I get that a grand narrative of people pulling together feels nice, but if it isn't true its just a waste of time.
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...
Of course not, but anecdotal evidence contradicting empirical evidence without a convincing explanation is usually a pretty good sign.
Willing to wager something meaningful on that? ;D!
I think these are derivative factors. The primary factor is material, as it almost invariably is. There are massive organizations and affiliated organizations with a material stake in having things be this way, and they have almost zero interest in “societal net benefit” action, or concern for “societal net deficit” harm, so long as “private net benefit” is maintained.
There is no shadowy cabal, but as with other aspects of the system, lack of explicit coordination is why it works so well (think of it as a perverse version of Milton Friedman’s “pencil”).
This is clearly false. It may feel like a personal attack on your freedom but:
1. It's not personal, this is a systemic problem and no one is trying to punish or harm you. The aim is ultimately to prevent harm, not just to you but to your whole community.
2. It's not an attack. The goal is not to cause you harm, again it's to prevent harm.
3. I'm not even sure what "freedom" means in this context. Do you feel that your freedom has been infringed upon when you have to stop at a cross walk for a pedestrian? Does not taking a shit in a public pool infringe upon this "freedom"? Freedom, for social organism, cannot mean complete and unrestricted action. The only people who have this view are actual toddlers, and part of them growing up to be elementary school kids is to learn about their role in society and the limits of their own rights in the face of others.
BUT, 1) it is personal, 2) it is an attack and 3) it is a limitation on personal freedoms.
If we wish to make actual changes to save the planet rather than just preach, we need to recognize these truths. Telling people that their feelings are wrong just makes them dig in their heels all the more. IMO, a better approach is to recognize these sort of objections and think creatively about how to deal with them or mitigate the impact. Remember, the objective isn't to win arguments, it's to heal the Earth.
The poor always suffer most. What do you use your money for, if not to avoid suffering? Immediate, short term, and long term, that's probably how you spend most of your money, plus spending to avoid your children and family suffering.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way: since the environmental improvements of the mid-20th century, urban environments have been the clear winners for living affordably, to say nothing of the accessibility of public services. Poor people may not be able to live in the most expensive zip code of NYC, LA, SF, etc., but then they were hardly going to be living on 100-acre estates when they're living in rural or suburban settings. Car-dominated infrastructure poses enormous personal costs for every single person and miserable additional costs to ferry around non-driver children.
So, enough of your government-subsidized 'freedom'. I want the freedom to safely cross the street to church without a police officers (and half the other cars) accelerating into me in the crosswalk. I want the freedom to bike to work safely. I want the freedom for my children to bike to parks, schools, and libraries, like I could growing up. I want the federal and state governments to stop dumping money on my town to build roads as wide as runways to facilitate firetrucks doing 3 point turns and police flying through neighborhoods like action-movie jackasses.
Revenue-neutral carbon tax is pretty much equivalent to giving everyone carbon credits and allowing trading them (just with less overhead). If some rich people pay more tax to pollute more, then more money would be distributed back to everybody.
Is there only one poor person?
Harming a class of people is not a personal attack.
This is the most tone deaf statement. If green policies make it harder for me to provide for my family, live our life as we see fit, or force me to do things I don't want to it is _very_ personal, like incredibly personal. There is no reason for you or anyone else to have any power over my life as a voter or a king, period.
Unless you have your own private air that never touches anyone else's air, we all have a right to control your actions that change our collective air. If you don't agree, go find your own planet and live there.
Yes, it's terrible. Were it not for that accursed law thar robs us of our liberty, I would murder you on the spot for such an asinine comment.
Understand now partially what a society is about?
You are simply a product of an environment you had no say in creating.
It is if the justification you provide for having this right is that it is "God-given" or a consequence of "natural law" or something like that. Because what that boils down to is that you are claiming the right to ignore the economic externalities of your actions because you are somehow special, despite being unable to provide any evidence for your specialness beyond your own personal beliefs. That is the defining characteristic of extremism. Extremism does not have to be extreme, it just has to be unassailable.
Definition 3 is:
"any political theory favoring immoderate uncompromising policies"
I think that "I have this right because I say so" qualifies even if the right you claim doesn't seem "extreme" at first glance. (And I qualify it in this way because "the right to drive" doesn't seem extreme at first glance, but could in fact result in the destruction of technological civilization if enough people claim it, so whether or not driving is "extreme" depends on your perspective.)
'I think that "I have this right because I say so" qualifies even if the right you claim doesn't seem "extreme" at first glance.'
Just because someone claims an improper reason, doesn't mean their conclusion is wrong (you could have false premises and a true conclusion - that makes a bad argument but the conclusion can still correct). Often times the people claiming natural rights (or really any of their rights) just don't know the proper reasoning and instead resort to claiming something gave them that right - nature, God, government, etc.
It would be hard to fully explore any argument without getting to the point of someone's subjective reasoning that something is good or bad as perspective can come into play (good for me vs bad for you, why is society more important than individuals, etc).
I don't dispute that, but 1) you used the word "privilege" rather than "right" which really changes the tenor of the claim. "Driving is a privilege, not a right" implies that the "privilege" can be revoked while the (putative) right could not. And 2) my claim was about the justification that people offer for their claimed rights, not the rights themselves.
> Just because someone claims an improper reason, doesn't mean their conclusion is wrong
I didn't say it was. Just because someone is an extremist doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong. The problem with extremism is not that it always leads to wrong conclusions or even to bad outcomes. The problem is that it makes it a lot harder to correct errors.
This is particularly relevant in the case of climate change. When the Taliban chops people's heads off it produces an immediate visceral reaction in most people, which helps motivate them to act. Our collective decisions to keep driving today don't have the same effect on our psyches, even if a lot more people are going to end up dead in the future as a result.
"2) my claim was about the justification that people offer for their claimed rights, not the rights themselves."
The definition that you provided says nothing about justification being a part of something being extreme.
"Our collective decisions to keep driving today don't have the same effect on our psyches"
That's because driving is not extreme. It's considered a moderate position and people accept compromises on it. Even the people that say it's a right accept some level of restrictions such as traffic laws, at least from a standpoint of not wanting to be punished.
Simply wanting the freedom to move about by driving is not an extreme position.
There is a compromise position - accepting that driving a car is right, but also accepting that everyone must pay for its externalities, w.r.t. CO_2 by uniform revenue-neutral carbon tax, like any other fossil CO_2 emission.
Revenue-neutral carbon tax is an approach proposed by many economists, but governments are hesitant to use that and instead go with selective bans and subsidies.
Sure, but what most people mean when they say they have a "right" to something is that they are entitled to that thing without strings attached.
Also, there are factual disagreements about what the externalities of driving actually are. For example, should you have to pay for the people who suffer respiratory illnesses because of vehicle emissions? The cost of accidents? By what mechanism should these costs be assessed and payment made? How should the costs be distributed? If I drive 5000 miles a year should I pay the same as someone who drives 10,000? And how exactly do you assess the cost of moving the needle on an existential threat by a teeny tiny bit?
And just look at people's reaction to the recent increases in the cost of gas! They are indignant, outraged, because they think that they are entitled to cheap gas. It's their right.
"Pay for the externalities" is a fine principle, but very hard to put into practice.
>I think that "I have this right because I say so" qualifies
I (and pretty sure a sizeable portion of HN) want precisely zero on-device CSAM scanning and encryption backdoors. I'm not willing to compromise on this (eg. "okay we'll backdoor encryption but only for terrorists"). Does that make me an extremist? Based on your definition it certainly sounds like it.
That depends on the justification that you offer. If your justification is (say) that you have a God-given right to sexually exploit children with impunity, then yes, I'd say that qualifies you as an extremist. If your justification is that CSAM scanning does more harm than good, and you can back that up with actual facts, then no.
It's easy to call pedophiles "extremists", but what if my argument is
"I have a God-given right to not have my on-device data searched"?
Justification isn't really part of the position, it's how you arrived at it.
It's a really interesting comment which I wish we could explore deeper.
I get the same feelings but about different things. So I know you are sincere. But also, it's cultural and quite superficial. In psychology it's called "identification". An attack on a thing you identify with feels like an attack on you personally.
So for example, for me, attacks on free software, or my "right" to program in a language I choose, or to run a server, feel like actual attacks on my fundamental "freedom" as you say.
In reality though, if the world took those things away, within a couple of months or years I'd have forgotten and moved along with the flow. I know this from the experience of being half a century old :)
Now, if I took away your car, I can promise you'd feel the same in no time at all. Why? I don't own a car, and haven't for about 30 years. I git rid of my car when I moved to London, because private cars are a liability there. One or twice it's been a minor inconvenience. But apart from that I feel as free as ever - I go where I like, when I like, with who I like.... just rarely by car.
Even though I'm a fairly conservative person in some ways, I think we must recognise that many things we cling to as "essential freedoms" are actually just in our minds.
Are you arguing that all it takes is the saturation of public transportation for the entire US? Or are you arguing that people should just all move to mega-cities? I'm genuinely confused about what you're trying to explain to OP.
"You'll adapt just like I did" is not very convincing for the majority of people.
That's not my assertion, nor the point of my comment. The point is that identification (and misplaced sense of ownership) makes us very reluctant to be convinced [1]. A point which you agreeing with.
Nonetheless, people adapt when change comes. Another example, only just in my living memory was "decimalisation" (and for other Europeans when the currency switched to Euro). My grandmother swore blind the world would end if they brought in decimal currency. Within weeks she was the strongest supporter.
In 1752 people in England rioted because the calendars changed from Julian to Gregorian. People thought they were being robbed of 11 days. When the day arrived everybody awoke, got on with their lives as usual and in no time completely forgot it ever happened.
EDIT:
[1] In fact people can be so challenged by identification they'll downvote the most polite and reasoned of comments to feel better rather than respond intelligently.
ALCOHOL FUEL! (Forgive me for shouting.)
If they are that spread out, they almost certainly have room to grow some sugar beets or sugar cane or potatoes or something like that, then they can ferment and distill alcohol fuel. This was pretty common for a long time.
> Before the American Civil War many farmers in the United States had an alcohol still to turn crop waste into free lamp oil and stove fuel for the farmers' family use.
> In 1826, Samuel Morey uses alcohol in the first American internal combustion engine prototype.
> By the 1890s, alcohol-fueled engines are starting to be used in farm machinery in Europe, making countries more fuel independent.
> By 1896, horseless carriages (cars) were showing up on roads in Europe and the United States. Because gasoline is so cheap and abundant, and also because ethanol is taxed at a high level, early US automobiles are adapted to gasoline from the beginning. Racing cars, on the other hand, usually used ethanol (and other alcohols) because more power could be developed in a smaller, lighter engine.
> In 1902, the Paris alcohol fuel exposition exhibited alcohol powered cars, farm machinery, lamps, stoves, heaters, laundry irons, hair curlers, coffee roasters, and every conceivable household appliance and agricultural engine powered by alcohol.
&c.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_alcohol_fuel
Alcohol is clean-burning, non-toxic, carbon-neutral, much higher energy density than any battery, cheap and easy to make, feed stocks are everywhere (I knew a guy who had a deal with a donut shop to collect and use their old scrap dough!), and the leftovers are a nutritious and valuable animal feed (yeast are protein.)
I honestly don't think I have any suggestions. Not technical ones. I am neither an expert on transportation nor planning. My comment is about psychology, and to some extent about history.
As you say, given enough time maybe new solutions would make changes possible. But also, maybe not. Given enough time it may be that people living in rural areas accept that the world has changed, and travel far less. Given time, maybe the societal pressures to travel will ease. It may be that in time the main attraction of rural life returns to being its pace and relative isolation. These are not necessarily good or bad things, progressions or regressions, just change.
To the extent that change involves loss as well as gain I do think that change is like the stages of grief. The early stages, before acceptance, involve various mental tricks to try carrying on as before.
Not accurate.
Isaac Asimov pointed out that people only got paid for 19 days' work, but had to pay a full month's rent, so they were perfectly reasonable to demonstrate.
That people adapt. That deeply held beliefs about the importance of some things turn out to be skin-deep.
Yes, and if you hadn't moved to London then you would indeed have a car and consider it being part of your transportation "must haves"
In most of North America, and now Latin America and bits of Asia, car dependancy is a serious problem, cities being built, such as in China which are wholly car depending, and designed to punish non-car moving people, it is a bad, bad, bad state of affairs
Hopefully eventually most cities will move to a scheme closer to London's, but if anything, things might be moving the other way
I've since moved out of London, and still have no car.
> transportation "must haves"
There are no "must haves" in this world.
> car dependency is a serious problem, cities being built, such as in China which are wholly car depending, and designed to punish non-car moving people, it is a bad, bad, bad state of affairs
Yes, that's tragic. And I don't think those places have a long-term future as they are. Fortunately urban areas can undergo radical redesign. I think the post-pandemic is going to force that on us anyway.
Yes in the core of a few other cities (New York is most obvious) you can reasonably live without a car. Most people don't live close enough to the core though.
The bad transit options is the first thing that needs to change. However nobody actually cares about that. Democrats are more interested in union jobs even though it drives costs up to the point where it isn't cost effective. Republicans don't even realize that it would be possible to have useful transit and so they fight throwing good money after bad.
Because you live in one of the densest, oldest and most public transit-packed urban areas in Europe, you think that your easy shift to not having a car is worth a damn to hundreds of millions of people who don't live in London, or another big, dense, highly developed city like it? A Texas farmer or Louisiana fisherman isn't just being a selfish, green-hating ass when he or she says that they NEED their truck or car. They really do, to live, and almost every day. What kinds of mental bubbles do some of the privileged people who comment on this site live in?
And people will adapt to it, because that's what we've been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. That's not ugly, it's beautiful. It's beautiful that humans are adaptable, resilient and inventive.
Well most of us anyway.
That aside, it really is absurd to dismiss the needs and complaints of hundreds of millions of diverse vehicle-owning non-urban dwellers based on how smugly easy you think it was to not own a car in London of all places. There's nothing psychologically obtuse about pointing out the closed mindedness of your notion. Yet you speak of identification and its effects.
Well, you've said it yourself. There's nothing a reasonable person can add to that, or hope to gain by doing so. So, have a lovely day. :)
What most "anti-car" people are advocating for amounts to the option to not drive. As it is now, driving is practically a requirement for full participation in society.
1. Is the climate being changed by human activity and rapidly so?
2. What should one do with this knowledge if the answer to 1 is yes?
Perhaps you don’t want to do anything about it. That is fine for you to decide this. But one should not answer ‘no’ to question 1 because doing something about it feels personal to you. The answer to 1 should have nothing to do with 2.
If you properly price an externality, the free market will help you deal with it.
It can be in the form of direct support of various activities of the petroleum industry, such as drilling, refinement and pipelines in the name of creating new jobs, but also in giant infrastructure projects reserved for cars, and legal requirements of square meter prices for car parking many orders of magnitude below market cost.
It was the way post-war society was built up and will take a very long time to change. It's so entrenched that once you start seeing it, it is really everywhere.
Yes, it is, and it is important to grow up and realize that actions have got consequences, heating meats is also unsustainable, flying planes is also unsustainable, the general levels of developed countries consumption rates are also unsustainable
As that rather famous "debater" says, "reality doesn't care about your feelings"
Liberties go partnered with duties and responsibilities, it is widespread commonplace at least in US related discourse to behave in a wholly entitled manner and simply ignore the most important parts of these social system (responsible freedom)
250 years ago, it would have been completely unfathomable to imagine feeding 8 billion people with the technologies of the time. I'm not just talking about it being unsustainable but temporarily doable, it would have simply not happened without maybe two thirds of the world rapidly dying of hunger. Yet, here we are today, with the lowest relative proportion of the world in recorded history in danger of famine.
This of course slowly isn't sustainable WITH present technologies being widely used. If those technologies change however, it could indeed become sustainable, just like what we have now is far beyond the capacities of previous centuries. Instead of default leaps to new prohibitions in environmental and climate change discussions, more focus should be made on promoting new developments that let us both live well and in large numbers while harming the world less.
And yes, maybe that restricts a car owner's "freedom", but should those car-based externalities be free?
I think you're talking about cognitive dissonance [0].
Btw, biggest contributor to climate change is meat & dairy eating [1][2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Reduction
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10464793/Tot...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Meat-eati...
Additional sources here:
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/02/01/new-model-explores-link... https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-po... https://www.hsi.org/issues/climate-change/