Suggesting that we have to mine lithium because the alternative is fossil fuels shows a belief that we should be continuing our current lifestyle and making it a little greener rather than modifying our lifestyle and making it radically greener.

Assume /u/onion2k was referring to the US, many countries successfully push public transport more than the US. So human nature certainly isn't the blocker here, but the current culture of the US.

But within individual cities, or areas like the Northeast Corridor, the density is comparable to areas of Europe with fantastic public transit.

The issue is car-centric policy and culture, not lack of potential demand.

> Because of that scale difference, it is hard for public transportation in the US to appeal to our innate desire for convenience.

I don't really understand what you mean by this. Public transportation is extremely convenient. I love driving (I grew up in California), but find public transportation in Sweden much more convenient than having a car.

Honestly I'm having trouble understanding the core of your argument.

> Most of those other countries are like a small US state, but the US is much, much larger. Even a medium sized US state is larger than most of those countries. There is a massive scale difference that needs to be taken into account.

So I was really kind of giving the benefit of the doubt when considering population density.

That said I understand your point. But that doesn't explain why US _cities_ put so little effort into public transportation. Even ignoring the dispersal across the country, the US seems to not care to handle the problem on the local level where it really has no excuse at all.

As to your comparison with population weighted density, here are comparisons between the US and Sweden:

* "While the overall U.S. density stood at 87 people per square mile, population-weighted density shows that people actually lived at an average of 5,369 people per square mile."

https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...

* "Population-Weighted Density for Sweden was found to be much higher compared to simple density, 2288.8 people per square kilometre instead of 24.0 for 2015."

http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1081...

So it looks like the population weight density of Sweden would be 2288.8 * 1.609 * 1.609 = 5925.4308328 per square mile which is apparently 10% higher than the US.

Now honestly that doesn't really seem to explain the difference to me. Is 10% such a big difference? Besides if it is, Sweden wasn't always at this value. In the past few decades, people have moved into cities so what I really wonder is how far back do you need to go historically before Sweden was lower than the US current number? As in, at what point recently was Sweden in a worse position? Personally I think the best explanation for the US' current position overall is cultural: they really just don't want to give up their cars.

Anyway thanks for the info. Looks like I'd personally need to put more time and research into this than I have available, but I'll try to keep this info in mind going forward.

The absolute size of the land is irrelevant; the only thing that matters is how far people actually travel. If your state is 1000 miles across, but most of the people stay within 5 miles of their home most of the time then public transport is completely viable. People who want to travel further can still own a car, or just rent on when they need to travel a long way.

While good public transport isn't an option everyone will continue to own cars, and while people own cars public transport will be under-utilized and expensive. It's a chicken and egg problem.

Option B) Fundamentally reorganize human society

--

Option B has a poor track record.

What we need as a civilisation is people wanting less of everything, but that's really hard. People take things as given and if you even suggest taking away those things they get irrationally angry and dig down even harder.

Not very hard; there are several spiritual traditions which emphasize detachment from objects, e.g. Buddhism. But unfortunately, Buddhist countries don't generally do well militarily because of the focus on monasticism/pacifism. India was majority Buddhist in 6-7th century and arguably that made them vulnerable to the Arab invasions. Similar case can be made for Tibbet.

But this always gets framed as changing the hearts and minds of regular people. Well my own prime minister was a bit upset that people were consuming less during the height of the pandemic. They wanted people to get back to “supporting small businesses” ASAP.

Economists say people have infinite wants and needs but really, in practice it boils down to a desire to constantly learn new things. The only reason why people may want an infinitely high amount of money ie. infinite wants is because there is no opportunity cost to holding money, humans really love having infinite free things and hate things that cost them something.

What's irrational about it?

Especially in this case. People are being asked to drive less, when driving is currently a necessity in their daily lives. Meanwhile the upper class is flying private jets around.

Being asked to accept less in that situation should make you angry. And it isn't irrational.

American and maybe Canadian society. There is nothing particular to humans that makes them car dependent, urban design, education and other such circumstances make them so. In some countries car dependency is the exception due to good public transit coverage (for commuting or longer distances with high speed rail).

Of course there's no silver bullet that will make everyone abandon their car tomorrow morning, but a lot of car trips can be cut with good urban design (including walkability, cycling, public transit), and for the rest that remain for whatever reason, EVs are a better choice, obviously. However focusing only on EVs and ignoring the rest is only opening another can of worms to replace the current one.

Not dependent in the practical sense, but I think we are somewhat genetically wired for something related to long distance travel and/or the means to do so, or at least to move at higher speeds than we can on foot. There's the love for horses in (mostly female) humans, and the way car purchases are made is not at all driven by practical considerations only.

Transformation can make us less dependent on cars and reduce their use. It won't remove the desire to own and fully control means of transportation.

Lithium for e-bikes, golf-carts, trams and busses, taxis, ferries etc. are needed for the non-car-based city vision too, and the reduction in ICE pollution actually makes cities a nicer place to live.

They both have.

billions of light polluters today is much worse than a couple of heavy polluters 100 years ago.

Now I don't think any of this will be enough to avoid a major catastrophe due to AGW. But it's also clear from experience that, between tech advances and social self-control, the former is far more likely to happen at scale, and thus have any meaningful effect.

We'll also probably get a lot more of small EV (especially in cities) than we got small ICE cars.

I really wish people in favor of non car transit would spend less than 100% of their time criticizing people owning/looking for an EV and never say a word on fossil cars that people continue buying.

Their time would be much better spent on promoting mass transit (with electric bus/whatever), walkable and cyclist friendly development and telling people about health, atmospheric pollution and noise issues around fossil cars.

To fight climate change we need both EV and more mass transit/walking/cycling, and less ICE car and buses.

And timing is critical so all at the same time.

The fuel that powers ICEs can be converted from electricity as well. This is an inefficient process, but it would put surplus renewable energy to some use.

This isn't why.

Batteries stabilise grids. If every car was an EV, the batteries in the vehicles would be sufficient to stabilise a completely wind/solar grid. Heck, put PV on car bodies and you get 80-90% of their average demand, and that's one of the worst places to put PV.

Also, geothermal is not at all volatile, tidal is regular enough for a smaller storage requirement, hydro doubles as storage, and even with PV and wind larger grids are always less volatile and yes you can go global on paper.

No, the reason why grids aren't already renewable is that it takes time to build new infrastructure, combined with renewables only getting cheap enough to seriously consider that anywhere in the last two decades, and in most places in the last one decade.

People want their vehicles predictably usable, which is why any idea dependent on using car batteries as actual power smoothing will fail.

Also, as batteries can be charged wherever and whenever there is electricity, we can simply install PV enough for the daylight hours to produce the energy desired for both daylight and twilight/nighttime and then just charge daytime and discharge nighttime even though it's probably the other way around wherever you are because currently demand is generally lower relative to supply at night and therefore the electricity is generally cheaper at night.

And the same batteries can easily be given a second life, after degrading too much for car use and before refurbishment/recycling to make them suitable for car use again, as fixed batteries.

And again, this is just presuming only PV, not wind which reduces the variance in supply, and not any of the other things I listed which don't get affected by weather at all.

This is the thing people tend to forget. Even if a battery is "useless" for an EV, meaning that it has degraded to 60-70%, it still has 25-50kWh of usable capacity as-is.

And that's enough to run a house for 12-48 hours depending on how power-hungry your appliances are.

There is only one power source for ICE cars: dead dinosaurs. The source will run out eventually. All ICEs pollute the same amount during their lifetime, usually more the older they get because of wear and tear and lack of maintenance.

The reason we just pump it out of the ground is it's cheaper.

Unless someone makes huge leaps in the process, that's really not an option.

Synthetic fuels were used in WW2 by the Germans.

Power-to-gas is a thing that is deployed already. CNG cars, as well.

Unfortunately it's at best a half measure.

In california maybe ? In many areas the energy you get form the sun during the year is spotty at best.

As even the best places in Europe are worse for PV than almost everywhere in CA, and yet PV is working adequately even in bits of Europe as rubbish as the UK (which is more like southern Alaska), the meme that PV is “just for California” needs to go the way of the dodo: https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world

Joules out per unit of currency in? Joules of electricity out per joules of sunlight in? PV is great at those even in the dark moist British Isles, which are about as bad as southern Alaska.

Nuclear however, is really expensive. Situationally useful, but really expensive — So expensive in fact that it's about the same as using dedicated batteries (rather than hydroelectric or hydrogen or refurbished batteries) to support PV when it's too dark.

They don't?!