The corollary to this argument is that most environmental issues routinely blamed on individual behavior pale in comparison to the externalities from industry and commerce

People talk shutting off the faucet while brushing one's teeth but ~70% of global freshwater usage comes from agriculture and ~20% from industry, with municipalities accounting for only 10%

> The corollary to this argument is that most environmental issues routinely blamed on individual behavior pale in comparison to the externalities from industry and commerce

I agree with internalizing externalities, but let's not pretend that isn't part of individual behavior (consumer demand drives industry), or that individuals don't benefit from them in some way.

The fact that people benefit from something is not enough to assign any blame to them. Even if alternatives exist (they often don't), if they require a significant trade-off, blame is minimal.

Even when it comes to buying products it's a tough sell - I know my phone battery is made with slave labor, but it's not like I can choose to buy the one that isn't. So when it comes to industry, we share exactly 0% of the blame - not just as individuals, but consumers as a group[]. The problem is two-fold: industry leaders are greedy and politicians aren't working in our best interests. If either of those went away, the problem would be solved. Unless you're in one if those two groups, none of it is your fault.

[] In democratic countries, it can be argued that the voter base is at fault for electing these corrupt politicians. I largely agree with this, but it's a pretty complex topic.

> In democratic countries, it can be argued that the voter base is at fault for electing these corrupt politicians.

Like the batteries, it's not like I can choose the ones that aren't corrupt. The alternatives don't exist. In the rare event that they do, they get blocked out by the parties or rendered ineffective by their colleagues. At least it's that way here in the US -- which may or may not fit your definition of democracy. The major job requirement for an American politician is how well you can fundraise. And that's just to get a foot in the door of one of the entrenched parties -- they can still just decide to back someone else.

> I know my phone battery is made with slave labor, but it's not like I can choose to buy the one that isn't.

But you can choose to go without the phone that requires the battery. Now I know the canned response is “it’s not practical these days to not have a smart phone”, but going without one will not kill you. If the only phone available killed one person for every phone sold would you still demand to have one?

Ok, so let's say I don't have a phone. But computers contain thousands of components, many of which contain minerals mined by slaves. So no computer either. Without access to the internet, there's almost no way to get a job. Nevertheless, I go to the employment center and say that my only condition is that the job does not require me to interact with any computers or other devices that contain minerals mined by slaves. None exist, so I go home unemployed (to an apartment building built by an oil tycoon in the 80s). Now I'm hungry, so I walk barefoot and naked (clothing is often is made by child labourers and with no regard for environmental impact) to the shop. Good thing I don't live in North America so I can actually go places without driving a (planet-killing) car! At the store, I want to buy some bread and vegetables, but discover that a rainforest was cut down to build the field where the wheat was grown and dangerous pesticides were used on the vegetables, leaking into the soil and poisoning the groundwater for the locals. Back home, I close the main central heating valve - it's powered by a coal plant after all. It's winter. It's now a race to see what kills me first - hypothermia, starvation or the random infection I got last week from a small cut that I refused antibiotics for because they were developed with animal testing.

So who is the criminal here? Me, right now, using my 6 year old phone on the bus? Or is it the capitalists who pushed hypothetical me to the brink of death for trying to live "sin"-free and the politicians who oppose any attempt to keep them accountable?

And more importantly, what's the solution? Because going full Amish isn't nearly as scalable as you might think.

Why is going full Amish not scalable? How come I see many cultures living off of the land yet somehow you can’t? Where I grew up there were no stores or jobs, just a small population of farmers.

All you’ve pointed out here is there’s a limit to what you’re willing to do for your beliefs, and that at some point you’ll accept someone performing slave labor to keep your fancy, but still not required, electronics.

Just wanted to say this was incredibly satisfying to read. Well said.

> consumer demand drives industry

And industry lobby drives government policy and regulation.

Industry apologism will not help us move towards mitigating climate crisis effects.

Industry has externalized most of their environmental costs, this needs to change ASAP.

What is your solution for bulk transport, last mile, etc?

You are asking the wrong question. _Total_ Road transport emissions is 11.9% of CO2 emissions. It is still a lot but it will probably be the hardest to get rid of due to the whole car-centric infrastructure.

- Energy use in buildings is 17.5% of CO2 emissions

- Energy use in Industry is 24.4% of CO2 Emissions, The steel industry alone accounts for 7% of global emissions of CO2

The _number_one_priority_ is to force out Coal and Methane Gas from the Energy production sector and heating. That alone would cut global emissions by more than 40%.

This is a gigantic step because it solely depends on government energy policy, Infrastructure investiment, and also requires us to advance against an extremely embedded lobby of both Coal and Oil&Gas.

And individual behavior is just the result of the culture and the systems that surround us. We can campaign for individual change all day long, and they'll have less effect than what legislation could bring.

In fact I don't think individuals have much choice. They can inconvenience, or hinder themselves, in what effectively amount to a race amongst each other, or they can participate as fully as they can, thereby also dealing as much damage as the system or culture lets them. Circling back to cars and car culture as a prime example, the popular Not Just Bikes channel also talks about this. In their example of a city in the Netherlands, it's not that people love to bike and therefore bike a lot. It's that the environment is optimized to getting around in not just cars, but for pedestrian, and cycling traffic. Therefore people, who just want to get around, choose these two more often. As long as there's a game, they'll be players, so in order to minimize damage by the players, we need to change the game. Not the player.

As someone who lives in the Netherlands it's certainly true that our country is well-optimized for bicycles, and I personally do everything either by bicycle or by public transport as I do not even have a driving license, but it's also true that the Netherlands is easy mode for building the necessary infrastructure - extremely flat, densely populated, and wealthy.

This isn't meant to disagree with you or the people who bring the Netherlands up as a positive example.

It isn't well-optimized. It's certainly more optimized, but anything outside a major city is optimized for cars first and foremost. Anything below the size of Eindhoven included.

The stats reflect this (car usage is still going up / barely going down, car size increasing) and it is easily explained given how far people are expected to live away from work without paying a small fortune in rent. On top of that, infrastructure outside cities is getting worse for car-free enthusiasts. Public transit is getting actively worse and more expensive, roads are still optimized around cars first and foremost, and WFH is still barely pushed.

The Netherlands is a great example of how difficult it is, and how easy it is for a government to stop trying beyond the lowest of lowhanging fruit (carfree city centers). A few Americans gasping at the infrastructure of Utrecht not being atrocious doesn't change the 1 hour commute from a popular driveby town 25km away from a medium-sized city.

> It isn't well-optimized. It's certainly more optimized, but anything outside a major city is optimized for cars first and foremost. Anything below the size of Eindhoven included.

I have to disagree. I have lived in Drenthe all my life and what you are saying is just not true where I live. Maybe it's different in the south.

Also hard disagree on WFH, NL has an old and well-established WFH culture and the highest rate of working from home in Europe according to some quick searching. [0]

I agree that public transport is too expensive though - I'm still technically a student so I benefit from freedom public transport, but it would be a serious expense if I had to pay for it.

[0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/europeans-work-home-c...

> and it is easily explained given how far people are expected to live away from work without paying a small fortune in rent.

My country (Poland) has been de-urbanizing since the turn of the century for this exact reason.

People can't afford housing in city centres, so they buy properties in the suburbs and opt to drive everywhere instead.

The first generation that did this is currently nearing retirement and they'll soon have to decide on how to proceed. Fuel is expensive, driving skills wane with age and in an aging society finding a buyer for a house that appreciated in value but has scheduled maintenance of key components is going to be difficult.

Unfortunately, that generation is going out with a bang. Car size and driving are correlated with wealth, which explains the average age of new car buyers, specifically the luxurious ones.

What people fail to realize is just how much alternatives have to win out on cars to make a dent. Being marginally less expensive isn't enough when opportunity costs are far higher.

Those alternatives can be much better. That's the real story hidden within The Netherlands: you can't make a half-hearted attempt and expect it to solve itself after because the world believes Utrecht, an already small city by global standards, is the status quo of the entire country. If it doesn't cut deep into car ownership nationwide, it's not the success people claim it is.

As an American who grew up in the country and gets anxiety in bit cities, this seems insane to me. You’re essentially forcing people to cram together in city centers and think this is a good thing?

Kind of weird that the simpler, cheaper, healthier option is easy mode for a rich country.

Sam Vime's "Bike" theory of socioeconimc unfairness?

Politics is downstream from culture though. Mr Money Mustache and those like him are doing a huge amount for politics as well, just by making nonconsumerism sexy on an individual scale.

There's always this chicken-and-egg problem where legislation is talked about as though it could make us want different things, when in fact, the electorate wanting what it wants now, such legislation would be a losing horse for any politician. Making the moral choice seem attractive to one's neighbours is what I'd call true aikido.

>Making the moral choice seem attractive to one's neighbours is what I'd call true aikido.

I agree especially with this, but with the rest of your comment as well. Culture, politics, economy go hand-in-hand, with no clean initiator among them. I currently think that everyone should try their best, and that those with more influence have more responsibility as well.

Why fight against the current? We aren’t going to convince billions of people, most of whom are struggling for survival, to make dramatic sacrifices. Moreover, in the overwhelming majority of cases consumers can’t tell which item is more environmentally friendly (the state of the art is “does the packaging have a faux burlap aesthetic?” which lends itself to pervasive greenwashing).

We simply cannot solve the problem by asking consumers to care more about the planet than feeding their kids, particularly when “caring about the planet” in this way is basically guesswork.

Climate change and other environmental problems are systemic, and thus we need systemic solutions—in the case of climate change, the ideal and gold standard is carbon pricing (with border adjustments).

What is freshwater usage?

My water comes out of a Great Lake and substantially ends up back in it, about as clean as it came out. It's not used up. Some energy is consumed making it potable and pumping it around, and then treating it.

Farms in the Midwest happen to catch a lot of rain, are they using freshwater in a different way than an almond orchard in California, or is it the same (my expectation is that the almond orchard is considered a user and the Midwest farm is often not).

Completely different scenarios, right? The rainy parts of the Midwest aren’t in a drought which makes water consumption important to track. California is.

Anyways, they do use in freshwater differently. Where I grew up in NW Ohio, there is practically no irrigation. It rains enough there’s no need. Freshwater use is passive, in other words. Out west, farms have to actively pump water to irrigate since there’s not enough rain. They can control how much freshwater they take out of the water source in a way the Midwest farmer can’t.

> Where I grew up in NW Ohio, there is practically no irrigation. It rains enough there’s no need. Freshwater use is passive, in other words. Out west, farms have to actively pump water to irrigate since there’s not enough rain.

Interestingly, the natural state of much of California was a swamp. We put in a lot of effort converting the swamp to desert.

If we reestablished the swamps, California would be a much less pleasant place to live, but it might be a better place to grow stuff like rice.

Isn’t the rice mostly grown in Northern California, which is definitely not a desert and AFAIK was not a swamp?

Is there some reason that would continue to be true if Southern California[1] was replaced with swamps?

[1] You're using "Northern California" and "Southern California" differently from everyone else; in normal use, Northern California is the Bay Area, not the north of the state.

> You're using "Northern California" and "Southern California" differently from everyone else; in normal use, Northern California is the Bay Area, not the north of the state.

No, norcal is north of LA, not just the bay area. I’ve never heard of anybody referring to the bay area as norcal, it’s always “bay area”

I mean, I assume there's a vaguely-defined line between San Francisco and Los Angeles that notionally separates the north from the south. It doesn't make any more sense to say Southern California is nothing but LA than it does to say Northern California is nothing but the Bay Area.

But my point is that the region to the north of, say, Berkeley, is not part of "Northern California". It's too far north for that.

I’m from Sierra County, is that north enough for you?

We consider ourselves part of Northern California and have since at least the 70s. For many up there, the Bay Area is only nominally part of Northern California, in fact as a kid I didn’t think it was. But having gone on to live in San Francisco for a long time, I came to realize that the the Bay Area, for better or for worse, has more in common with Redding then it does with Manhattan Beach.

But I can’t figure out what you think the too-northern Northern Californians should call themselves if they let you lop off the Bay Area (and most would thank you for it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_California

They are both consuming some of the natural growth/agricultural capacity of the planet.

But that capacity is localised.

Me preserving water here in rainy Singapore doesn't help anyone in Spain, nor vice versa.

I would not underestimate the hypothesis that a lake can be screwed up too, consider what happened to the aral sea.

Near my home town a big volcanic lake has been used to get water during droughts and it got to a dangerous low level in recent years.

The Aral Sea was used for irrigation. Huge volumes of water were pumped out over millions of acres to evaporate. The water pumped out of the great lakes is far less and it is largely returned to the lakes (closed loop).

Don't make the mistake and rely on current rain. It's not funny how quickly moist regions can turn arid as a result of climate change.

We have currently seen major droughts in Europe and it severely affects the ongoing energy crisis. A lot of power plants, nuclear and others, are in direct danger of not being able to be cooled anymore because you need RIVERS for that. And they need to be cool.

Germany is currently experiencing issues with low water levels in some of its major waterways, such as the Rhine. When they dry up to low levels periodically, and they evidently do nowadays, then you have to shut down the plants accordingly.

In France, rivers are too warm to cool plants [1]. There needs to be water AND it needs to be cool. There is no nuclear power without water cooling.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/warming-rivers-threa...

>In France, rivers are too warm to cool plants. There needs to be water AND it needs to be cool. There is no nuclear power without water cooling.

Just for clarity for others, the reason the water needs to be cool is so that after being used for cooling it doesn't come out too hot and kill wildlife. French plants have applied to temporarily lift these restrictions[1] (which also is not great).

If this becomes a problem longer-term, it might be possible to build larger cooling reservoirs for the water prior to being released back into the river.

1: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/frances-asn-nuclear-reg...

> There needs to be water AND it needs to be cool. There is no nuclear power without water cooling.

The water doesn't really need to be cool, it can also be used in cooling towers, which means you don't have to put it back into the stream, and therefore you don't care about water temperature. The issue with river water is that we currently don't have enough to divert it for all our needs, be it for a nuclear plant, for irrigation or for drinking.

This winter and spring have been exceptionally dry in France, with slightly more than half the rain we usually get.

Not only power plants - river barges have to reduce their loads because of the low water levels, which leads to shortages and price increases.

It’s mostly a question of sustainability. In the midwest, the water isn’t diverted from rivers, lakes, or reservoirs.

It’s a convenient distraction for people in industries that depend on externalized costs, and it indulges those prone to self-righteousness and judgment (e.g., people who moralize their transportation and diet). Heavy industry and pseudo-environmentalists are unusual bedfellows.

I distinctly remember when Teslas became popular, the reaction from environmental types was often frustration because apparently environmentalism is supposed to be about sacrifice and yet Tesla is allowing the unwashed masses to help save the planet. Similarly, when debating climate policy, some of the strongest opposition to carbon pricing would come from self-professed environmentalists who were repulsed by the idea of aligned incentives—environmentalism is a bout rejecting one’s own interests; if the cheap thing and the environmental thing are the same, how will the True Believer distinguish himself from the unwashed masses? There is a deep attachment to pennywise and pound foolish “personal responsibility” solutions.

> I distinctly remember when Teslas became popular, the reaction from environmental types was often frustration because apparently environmentalism is supposed to be about sacrifice and yet Tesla is allowing the unwashed masses to help save the planet.

Honesty this is hard to believe, do you have any source/example to back it up?

Yeah, I'm thinking that such people, if they exist at all, are heavily outnumbered by the people saying

* Not actually physically possible

* Its just coal powered

* It's worse for the environment because batteries die after 3 years

* Rare earths!!

* Subsidized foolishness

* Toys for rich people

* Communism

And weirdly those people all get paid to write op-eds in right wing tabloids.

What are you even saying here?

> And weirdly those people all get paid to write op-eds in right wing tabloids.

Oh, spreading hate. Got it.

Yes, let's pretend that there wasn't an organised campaign to discredit EVs, even though basic science made it clear they would be superior, even if you ignored climate change.

And why would you ignore climate change? Possibly because of the organised campaign to discredit the idea even though basic science made it clear it was a problem.

But now, they'll deny that crime against humanity even happened. "No one actually denied climate change they were just worried about government overreach" while demial is still being done by the same people.

It was all published in newspapers, we have it on record. We have academic studies of how many times certain newspapers admitted that climate change was caused by humans in their op-eds.

We have databases that track their lies over decades:

https://www.partnershipforresponsiblegrowth.org/research-1/c...

But no, now the people who let themselves be convinced by those lies bizarrely blame "Greens" or "environmentalists" for complaiming that EVs were too easy. Which despite being obvious lies doesn't seem to be considered "hate", but pointing out the well documented truth is?

Well, the freshwater argument could be extended to individual behavior simply by saying: eat less meat.

We produce most of our food for cattle, and cattle needs tons of freshwater (both consumed directly and indirectly).

In many places freshwater isn’t a bottleneck. I live in the midwest—the cattle here drink rainwater and they eat food grown with rainwater. It’s not like foregoing meat here is going to leave more freshwater for people in Africa (we can’t feasibly transport this freshwater across the Atlantic).

The corporates bank on the idea that if they tell you that you're an oppressor too for using drinking straws, you'll see them as the good guys who can be trusted to keep the world safe (from you, and from the 8 billion poors just like you) and therefore not, say, overthrow them using force.

You bought a latte last February? Well, then, you're also a buyer of human labor. You're a capitalist, too. The only difference between you and Elon Musk is that he's smarter. If capitalism is a problem, then you're part of the problem, because you do after all buy things. If you really believed in your anti-capitalist rhetoric, you'd grow the beans hydroponically in your basement (capabilities that, if you were serious, you would surely possess even if you weren't born into the tiny minority who actually benefit from the widespread and rigid enforcement of asymmetric state services called "property rights").

Meanwhile, the world is on track to be J. G. Ballard's Drowned World by the end of the century due to the persistence of a moribund socioeconomic system with no exit strategy or real means of improvement.

> The corollary to this argument is that most environmental issues routinely blamed on individual behavior pale in comparison to the externalities from industry and commerce

That is the result of a decades old campaign strategy by BP and others [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...

As an example of this, most trash on the side of roads comes from stuff falling off commercial trucks, sanitation trucks, work trucks. Not from people chunking junk out the window of their car. Yet all the guilt is placed on individuals.

I once got community service for reasons, and will have to disagree with this. Sanitation trucks are usually covered, commercial trucks are sealed and work trucks tend to not want their tools to fall off. Most of the trash we picked up were soda cups, cans, cigarette butts and empty cigarette packs (and in one case weed stashed in an empty cigarette pack). What gives you the idea that most of the trash is not from people throwing crap out of their cars?

Water shortage isn't a real environmental issue. It's a result of people building enough water production capacity for most of their needs but not too much excess for peaks. We can simply buy more fresh water if we want more. And of course it's renewable so there's no long term value in trying to reduce usage.

Huh? water usage is a huge environmental issue. Only people far upstream really can say it’s not. We are amazing at not only diverting freshwater from streams and rivers, we’re also really good at pumping it out of the ground and diverting aquifer water from reaching downstream as well. While fresh water is largely renewable, it’s not like it’s an infinite resource and it’s very hard to see the long term effects of changes we’re making to our water shed. To say there’s no long term value in trying to reduce water usage is just wrong in much of the world. Worse, is drying up rivers and swamps can have an exascerbating effect. Dry soil doesn’t hold water nearly as well as wet soil, and results in greater risks of flooding from what would otherwise be typical rain patterns in an area.

Damaging the environment by producing water in an environmentally damaging way is optional. You can always get it some other way using money or energy. It's tempting to just take the cheapest option when it's available though.

Water usage isn't an environmental issue. There's as much water now as there ever was, barring a few hundred litres aboard the ISS.

The issue is that you want to live in a desert but with a lifestyle like you're not in a desert.

The hard conversation you need to have is that California is not habitable. There's no water and there's nowhere to grow food. If you want to make it habitable you'll need to turn all those golf courses into farms, raise cows on them, plant more trees, and try to expand those green areas as much as you can.

If you want to live in a green city, move to Glasgow, where there's loads of water and because it never gets above about 25°C or below about 5°C it's t-shirt weather all year round and you don't need to refrigerate your house.

In my opinion, much of the farming in Southern California needs to end. Or at least we should revisit the now 100-year-old agreement on how the Colorado River water is used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact

California is habitable, but they need to import food from the midwest and elsewhere rather than insisting on growing it in the desert with borrowed water.

If you think Glasgow is t-short weather all year round, you are quite inured to the cold and wet.

Glasgow is drier than Rome, and on average about 5° cooler at any given time of year.

Glasgow average rainfall (https://www.holiday-weather.com/glasgow/averages/):

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

mm 130 90 120 50 60 70 70 60 80 110 100

Rome average rainfall (https://www.holiday-weather.com/rome/averages/):

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

mm 25 20 19 18 33 6 7 0 42 38 49 96 120

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "drier" ?

For people that don’t know the math behind this, it is astounding.

>when you double the weight per axle, you increase the road damage by 16 times

>For example, while a truck axle carrying 18,000 pounds is only 9 times heavier than a 2,000-pound automobile axle, it does 5,000 times more damage.

This is why arguments that road-maintenance taxes should be applied to BEVs and bicycles are horseshit. Everything lighter than 4,000 pounds is essentially a rounding error as far as damage to road surface goes.

Wouldn't this in effect add a regressive tax to staple products like bread and flour, which are transported by trucks and would require raised prices to be passed on? I'd be interested in seeing the numbers and what price rise if any would be expected.

Are trucks an unavoidable reality of transportation? I don't think so. If there are ways to transport those staples aside from using trucks, it seems like an effective tax on using trucks would just be an optimization that encourages alternatives that don't spread as much damage onto general infrastructure.

For the last miles, delivering parcels to people and pallets to commerce, they are for sure. Rail just won't work well at that level of granularity. Between cities is probably another story where rail makes more sense but I'd guess it's much easier to schedule a truck at the last minute and you're not beholden to whoever operates the rail network(s).

I assumed we were talking about the high-tonnage 18-wheeler semis in context, not last-mile delivery.

What are you going to replace those with?

If only the last mile is done by truck, road maintenance taxes will have virtually zero impact on price.

In Europe, a truck may transport about 250000 packs of yoghurt. (Assuming 100ml packs.)

If the truck pays 3 Euro road maintenance tax per 30-mile trip from and to the railway cargo hub, that comes out at 0.0001 Euros per can of yoghurt, a hundredth of a cent.

3 euros seems low, or maybe the road use tax here is just too high.

One EV road use tax in Australia (Victoria) is 2.5c per km, I'll assume that's fair for now (I doubt it is, but anyway). A prior post said a truck does 5,000 times more damage than a car, which means the truck should pay $125 per km if it's fair. So a 30 mile trip would be roughly $6000. About 2.5c per yoghurt.

Not a lot. But it's on each item and will add up. Not sure how often trucks run empty to and fro either, someone has to pay for that. Petrol excise here was halved to 22c/L and my car uses about 8L/100km so that 2.5c does not seem too unreasonable.

What kind of distance are you talking about in real terms for "the last mile"?

A few hundred miles or so?

Trains

So you have to build railway lines everywhere. What's the ecological impact of all that? Where's all the concrete for all the bridges going to come from?

Everything has an impact. Rail has a lesser environmental impact than roads and cars.

What percentage of the cost of a loaf of bread is last mile delivery?

What are the alternatives? Back every store up to a rail line?

That's pretty much how it was done before trucks became mainstream.

Lots of smaller trucks.

Localize manufacturing for one.

manufacturing out of thin air? if you aren't transporting the finished product, then you're transporting the ingredients.

unless you picture raising wheat in urban environment, in which case I'll just leave you to it.

Grow wheat in fields close to town. Use smaller trucks (than gigantic semis) for transportation.

This ain't rocket science.

Transportation is quite cheap per loaf of bread. You can make it substantially more expensive without affecting the retail price by more than a cent or two.

Why regressive?

Are you arguing that making people pay for bread at all is 'regressive'?

Regressive because the new "tax" on the bread is a flat value, independent of the buyer's income and means. That's what the word means when it comes to taxes and fees.

And yes, eating to survive is kind of regressive in that sense, but it's not what I'm talking about. If we generally assume society is unfair but still balanced around current expenditures, adding more may upset that balance.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter whether any one particular fee or tax is progressive or flat or regressive.

It's the overall tax burden (or net payment, for poor people) of the whole system that's important for these kinds of fairness considerations.

The design of individual taxes should be more concerned with efficiency and deadweight losses.

That seems reasonable, a rise on prices of stable commodities can easily be counterbalanced by reducing taxes elsewhere.

I agree with that. But there has to be minimal delay between any expense and refund if you are making the up front cost higher for the lower income brackets. Waiting until the end of the year for a rebate won't be good enough.

I wasn't suggesting to give people a rebate for bread. Just the opposite.

Bread should cost whatever it fetches on the market (and that will include pigovian taxes, if any).

The amount and frequency of welfare transfers to poor people should be independent of how much bread they buy and when.

To give a concrete example: you get your welfare check at the start of the month, and the government doesn't whether you buy bread with it or noodles, and shouldn't give you a refund either way.

Sure, but you can make it as progressive as you want by redistributing the tax income back to people.

The tax income in this scenario is already devoted to paying for road improvements. There’s nothing left to be redistributed back. You can raise another tax for redistribution if you’re so inclined, but you can’t spend the money for road repair on redistribution (or else the road doesn’t get repaired, defeating the purpose).

The logistics and shipping are all part of the price of the food and whatever other items you buy. If it was solely up to the trucking companies to pay for the road wear, the increase in costs will then of course be added to the price of the food and everything else that gets shipped. So the people will end up paying for it either way, but through food (etc.) costs.

I suppose it might be cheaper for drivers that way, but groceries and other items will all be more expensive, even for those who do not drive.

Exactly. Here in Ohio I have the "privilege" of paying an extra $200 a year on my registration because I have an electric car that doesn't give Ohio revenue from the state tax on gasoline.

Is the argument that they are responsible for road damage, or is the argument that they are likely to pay the tax and keep the road maintained?

It's not horseshit, it's socialising the costs while privatising the profits to be more precise.

Mind throwing a resource that I could review about this? I'd love to share it with my friends, as well.

Looks like here https://www.gao.gov/products/ced-79-94

"Excessive Truck Weight: An Expensive Burden We Can No Longer Support" from GAO

Even more so, sharing with the general public through available media channels. Anything that is extremely detrimental to the public health, or the public lands and property should be the loudest thing mentioned. It should become so ingrained in the publics opinion that the only course of action is "How to fix this? Or how to prevent it from continuing?"

The gao report is good and here is discussion of the equation.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

I don't find trucks and commercial vehicles getting a pass all that strange, they are far more essential than passenger vehicles.

I consider most roads and basically all highways as meant for them, passenger vehicles are the luxury.

The interstate highway system was not built for commercial trucking.

> In the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938, Congress asked the BPR for a report on "the feasibility of building, and cost of, superhighways... including the feasibility of a toll system on such roads." The BPR based its report on data collected from extensive highway planning surveys that had been conducted around the country beginning in 1935. The origin-and-destination surveys showed that transcontinental traffic was limited, with traffic heaviest around cities and in interregional movements. Given the low income of most motorists, toll roads would have a traffic-repelling character. As a result, most routes would not carry enough traffic to generate sufficient revenue to pay off bonds needed to finance their construction.

Instead, the BPR recommended construction of a network of toll-free express highways. The BPR's description of "A Master Plan for Free Highway Development" was its first description of what would become the Interstate System. Based on the survey data, the BPR explained that the primary justification for the network was passenger traffic, particularly congested city traffic, not interstate trucking. In fact, the report made little reference to trucks. [0]

Commercial trucking would not start to take foothold over rail until the 1960s, primarily under President Johnson.

[0]: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/freight.cfm

It was also built to allow the U.S. Army to rapidly move convoys of trucks, tanks, & materiel around the U.S.[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...

And also built to allow rapid evacuation of large cities in case of nuclear attack. I think it's lost on a lot of people today just how many things we did in the 50s, 60s, and 70s because we were scared of being bombed.

Freight is far easier to transport using rail. However, the massive subsidies that road freight receives over other means of transport (i.e. the use of the road infrastructure basically for free, as they don't pay for maintance according to the damage they cause) makes rail financially unattractive in many cases.

I don't get where "easier to transport via rail" comes from. The instant you have a post office, you do want some sort of roads, and the number of rails and switching you would need to get to even some of the distribution centers spread across various supermarkets is a big ask!

That doesn't mean every single last meter needs to happen via truck (lots of deliveries in urban areas can happen via foot or scooter) but ... at one point you need to get the 200 cartons of milk to the supermarket.

No one is saying “replace roads with rails”, they’re saying ship more things by rail up to the last mile (e.g., trucks take goods from rail depot to local markets). Today, much freight is shipped on highways.

No, not at all. There's just no need whatsoever for trucks.

We could simply use rail.

The idea that folks on bicycles should be subject to gigantic, badly designed commercial vehicles while going about their business is absurd and a product of decades upon decades of lobbying.

You don't have (and IMHO can't have) rail directly to all the businesses and retail warehouses that currently receive deliveries in semis, so that's adding a significant expensive extra loading/unloading step for large trucks which you still need between a rail station and a distribution center before the 'last mile'.

The one thing trucks have that rail doesn't: flexibility. You need to lay a lot of track - and have lots of small trains, often only pulling a single container, to get to even approach the same flexibility trucks have, in speed, in location, and in routing.

Sure, Just In Time is partly to blame for this. But if your stock intake deliveries now become a monthly event, you need to build a warehouse that holds about six weeks worth of raw material. That's cost.

And unless these folks on bicycles delved for and forged the metal for the bikes themselves, assembled the self-made parts and walked all the way to the Caribbean to get the tree juice for rubber tyres, chances are, a truck brought the bikes to them.

The trucks that endanger cyclists aren’t going anywhere. They’re absolutely necessary to get goods from rail depots to markets so (among others) our dear cyclists can purchase them.

It's possible to restrict vehicle size in urban centres, plenty of cities do. You can move things with smaller safer trucks and vans for the last mile. In some cases, this is even done with cargo bikes.

I guess my point was “the trucks doing the last mile delivery aren’t going anywhere”, contrary to the parent’s claim that trucks are unnecessary and that rail will handle the last mile. I fully expect trucks will get smaller if only because no one is going to use an 18-wheeler to transport goods between a rail depot and a supermarket a mile or so down the street.

I don’t think rail will handle the last mile in all cases, but I also don’t think the last mile requires trucks. It’s the last mile. There are so many options besides semi trucks.

It’s worth looking at Switzerland where they have many electric spur lines that do handle the last mile.

You can repackage stuff and move that to urban centers ... but that comes with cost again. Cost that will be high enough so that urban centers don't make sense to deliver to anymore.

That only works if you've got rail.

Trucks suck. Even with the US' road-friendly policies, transporting goods via truck is twelve times as expensive as by rail.

I'm not sure we are comparing apples to apples here. How much it cost to transfer let's say one container worth of stuff per week to place that doesn't yet have rail?

On scale rai is cheaper, but less you use the infra and less you transport at one time more expensive it will get.

Why do (some) profit seeking companies use trucks then?

because the massive subsidies on trucking can make them sometimes convenient enough to be worth it.

Oh, so what kind of expense are you talking about? Which costs do you want to include?

Obviously you are not talking about the market price?

Presumably the cost of road maintenance and the healthcare costs of the additional pollution - that's what I've seen brought up elsewhere when this subject was discussed at least.

The answer as always is TRAINS! MORE TRAINS! For the love of the Earth and all that is sacred we need more trains! Trams, commuter rail, low gauge freight, high speed rail, street cars, metros and parks with little trains to ride on! Not rubber or plastic, steel on steel!

Cars should be something that only a few people really need. Unfortunately auto makers and oil companies have had a huge influence on our government and society since World War II. The result is this stupid nonsense where you can't even go to a GROCERY STORE without some form of car. Where our train tracks are rotting and rail lines are slowly disappearing. Where you can't even go out your back door without seeing a monstrously loud big rig turning acres of asphalt into rutted gravel.

Build more trains, and then make smaller trucks that are locally bound.

That's already what's happening.

The US has some of the best railways in the world. It's just that for various institutional reasons the Americans suck at passenger rail, so people totally ignore that their freight rail works really, really well.

Guess which part of the industry is in government hands, and which part is privatised and deregulated?

Of course, this ignores that the tracks are mostly privately owned and the private operators prioritize their own freight traffic over the passenger traffic despite the latter being less time sensitive.

The one part where the passenger rail does work well is where the government passenger rail company also owns the network...

Well, the whole system (or systems) used to be various private hands when they were first built. The government takeover came later.

And it was taken over by the government because those private companies were going bankrupt, so it's still not a good promotion for the private market

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SurfaceFreightTransporta... and https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/u-s-government-t... suggest there's more to the story:

> The U.S. entry into the war in April 1917 coincided with a downturn in the fortunes of the nation’s railroads: rising taxes and operations costs, combined with prices that were fixed by law, had pushed many railroad companies into receivership as early as late 1915. A year later, in a last-minute bill passed through Congress, Wilson had forced the railroad management to accept union demands for an eight-hour work day.

Government fixed prices, and made one of their factors of production (labour) more expensive.

> If tire wear is proportional to road wear

It's not though, rendering the point moot. They are two vastly different materials with different models of wear.

A quick thought experiment would make this very apparent: Do trucks need to replace tires at magnitudes less distance travelled than cars? Do cars tires last 100x longer than motorbike tires?

Your thought experiment incorrectly assumes trucks, cars, and motorbikes have the same number and size of tires. Trucks have more, larger tires to allow for more wear between replacements.

Is it the magnitudes more though rather than 8x or 2x?

I've seen it often said that a fully loaded truck is equivalent to 1,000 cars wrt road wear.

Even accounting for tyre numbers and thickness/sizes, it doesn't add up.

> Considering that the truck has eight axles and the sedan has two, the relative damage caused by the entire semitruck would be 625 x (8/2) -- 2,500 times that of the sedan.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

It seems like you’re agreeing that it’s orders of magnitude, which supports my point. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. :)

That's a whataboutism. Many countries cannot survive without long haul trucking.

Many individuals can survive without a car given the right municipal commitment.

Isn’t that flawed logic? If you’re proposing that one of these issues can be fixed with more infrastructure, then couldn’t either? Rail is nice.

Sure! Rail is nice, when the volume permits it.

How would we supply the supermarket, though? A rail line would be unfeasible.

Rail construction and maintenance is super low cost compared to highway and interstates.

The expensive part is buying new rightaways, a private company responsible for liabilities like trespassing, security, and runoff (all of which the highways get subsidized by the public)

If the US spent a small percent of what it does on highways it could reactivate tracks that have shutdown since the 50s, rail towns would rise again and be the central b rural hub for groceries again.

If the US replaced 1 lane of every 6+ lane interstate highway, as due for maintenance..., every major metro would have world class transit in less than a decade (you need 2 lines if you don't use modern safe switchingb at stations)

I imagine interstate highways have slopes and curves that are too extreme for train. Specifically for high-speed rail.

If we wanted to redesign all our infrastructure to minimize auto and truck miles, we’d probably try to replace long-haul trucking routes with routes that pick up from local rail depots.

Everyone would live near a train station (or in larger urban areas, light rail that connects to the train stations). There would be a mostly-separate freight network with depots near every population center. Trucks could be used to get goods from the depot to the store. Some long-haul routes would be needed to serve remote rural communities, and some high-priority stuff like mail delivery.

What body has the final say over "we", and where do the funds come from? (More specific than "taxpayers")

I haven’t run numbers, but fewer trucks on highways means dramatically less maintenance—savings could be diverted to pay for rail buildout.

You're getting closer. Suburban supermarkets might be unfeasible without long-haul trucking. That's just another example of the public subsidizing the suburban lifestyle, which is unsustainable without fossil fuels and public subsidies. Rail can very well transport goods from port to population centers, where box trucks can handle the last mile to stores.

Lol you came so close! Suburban supermarkets would get their goods just like your urban supermarket: smaller box trucks transporting goods from rail depot to supermarket.

I doubt it would be viable to stock suburban walmart via box trucks.

I don’t see why not, but in any case you wouldn’t need long-haul trucking to get goods from a local rail depot.

That’s in the law books. In the Netherlands it’s part of the zoning to have a freight line for loading/off loading. It actually takes up much less space compared to truck loading docks. Parking take sup a lot of land.

You don’t need long-haul trucking to get goods to the supermarket, you use rail and then smaller trucks from rail depot to supermarket.

I dont see why it couldnt, if you think about it.. Trams are a thing.

We survived without long haul trucking for the majority of the industrial age.

Yes, Algeria, which is like 90% desert. Not the US though. Instead, US individuals can't survive without a car due to how your cities are built.