Anthropomorphic global climate change is absolutely a real problem and we should do more to reduce carbon emissions. But reliable, high-speed personal mobility has brought about a tremendous improvement in quality of life. There's no way I'll agree to give up owning personal cars.
Nah. I used to hope that moving propulsion to the electric grid would allow us to use renewables to drive transport and so do it all for almost nothing. And I also thought that it was vital to sell a solution, to come up with replacements that people would not just accept but actively choose. And that these could lead to a sustainable world.
But it's not true. It's wishful thinking, the dreamer's position, it's the ideological one. The scientific position is that none of this is remotely enough, for reasons like those discussed in the article above. Cars will be got rid of, one way or another - we don't have the resources to sustain them except at the cost of, well, us. The question is just whether we can find a way to sell that idea to ourselves and reorganise ourselves before it happens for us.
As I said, it's dreary and it feels extreme and I don't like it, but I don't see what alternative there is. The brilliant and engaging ideas just don't add up.
Why wouldn't we?
I understand the concerns about everything being logged digitally, but it is just so much more convenient than carrying a bulky wallet with a coin pouch, and messing around with coins at the till holding everyone up for ages. For some reason people think it's a binary choice between privacy or convenience, but it doesn't have to be that way.
I have started going out without my wallet recently, one less thing to lose, and just paying with my phone everywhere.
Meanwhile when you loose your physical wallet, it takes day or weeks, plus trips and legal paperwork to issue new cards, IDs, driver's license, etc. It's a complete nightmare.
In this thread where the assumption is cashless & wallet-less, I have to ask: buying a new phone with what?
Seems like you'd need a friend to spot you a few hundred until you got your access back…
Your bank still issues you physical debit and credit cards, bedside your digital ones, no? Cards which you can leave at home as backup, no?
At least that's the case for me and everyone I know in Europe.
In Germany I paid cash for every casual snack-grade transaction, and some bigger ones like restaurant meals. It seemed totally normal and I was happy with that.
In Denmark I never saw the currency at all and I have no idea what it looks like. I never used it and I never saw anyone else use it. Contactless everywhere.
I much prefer cash and regret its disappearance from use in my own country - we are about half-way between the German and Danish experiences above, perhaps closer to the Danish end. A holiday in Germany felt more like a holiday because of this detail. What it feels like when you actually live there is another question.
But this stuff about cash is something of a distraction from the question of metal use - it's increasingly apparent that although electric cars may be an improvement on oil-driven ones, they are not in any useful way the solution. Being rid of cars and basically all powered individual transport may be both dreary and extreme, but what alternative is there?