I upvoted you, but IMO:

- private cars and their usage are too cheap

- air travel is too cheap

- producing garbage is to cheap

- politics is top centered around providing infinte fuel for "growth" instead of distributing resources rationally

Yes, this is a political opinion.

The stunt many people do is pretending that climate denialism and politics centered on fueling growth are not a political opinion but "rational" and sustainable.

Agreed, both on the whole and in the details. But if I'm forced into the "either/or" mindset of the OP of a hypothetical choice to shrink GDP by 1% by stopping all vacation car travel or deficit spend 1% GDP as a "Manhattan Project" to get lab grown beef commercially viable, I'm voting for the latter.

The latter sounds like fantasy though, and it's not the lab-grown meat per se I'm talking about.

Also I wasn't talking about car usage exclusively during vacations, I was explicitly talking about private car usage.

People literally get governmental subsidies for building homes in the suburbs, then commute by car and pollute the planet in order to avoid car traffic.

Anyone who fails to see the absurdity of this has drank too much Kool-aid for my taste.

If your issue is global warming you should be campaigning for electric cars rather than against private cars. But I suspect you actually dislike cars in and of themselves, even if they could be grown on trees and powered by banana skins.

I like driving cars or being a passenger in them. Cars are not a subject but an object, a tool to me. But since you ask:

Yes, I hate cars when being outside them, because they are a major obstruction and source of pollution, noise and overshooting environmental damage. I hate their abundance.

I'm not sure what you are talking about with the hypothetical banana car and why you care about my feelings.

Seems like an ideological argument to me.

Do EVs grow on trees?

I agree that global warming is only the tip of the iceberg of the damage we do.

Europe doesn't have food insecurity. Health is pretty good and there's a safety net. Even China scores pretty well on those points. Yet their per capita emissions are much lower than the US.

Europe has tons of cars and air travel that is cheaper and more plentiful than that of US.

Europe may have many cars, but they are smaller and drive shorter distance.

Perhaps air travel is cheaper. But wages are lower meaning people need to work more hours before they can take a flight.

Yes, that was golden when US mandated larger, more powerful cars with the cover up of green regulations. Do not disagree here.

What? Europe has tons of mass transit and walkable cities.

Despite this, they also have a huge length of high speed highways with cars going back and forth. The topology is not much different than in the US. Difference is there, but it's quantitative and will not in any way prevent climate change, especially as it also relies on infrastructure that US does not have and will take a huge carbon footprint to build.

They also have huge lengths of high speed and regional rail. The difference shows up in the energy per capita numbers.

Nothing prevents climate change unless we get more intentional and scaled investments in renewable energy and circular green economies.

That rail would be nice to have, but it will not yield a decisive difference on the global warming time frame (~20 years).

You could go the Soviet route (had 30 cars per 1,000 people, a lot of train, bus and subway), but do you really want that? Of course, you would want to improve it because Soviet economy was hugely wasteful despite all this. Plus, all the apartment blocks are not going to build themselves, and certainly not without carbon emissions.

This is just a misleading thought framework of discounting any single item as a “decisive” silver bullet. Of course none of them are being talked about as being a silver bullet.

We need a 1000s of bullets fired at changes to avoid even higher costs of climate change on our current path.

There is much poverty in China outside of major cities and near nonexistent safety net in all regards. This is a country where a sizable chunk of population lives on less than 6 USD per day (not enough to bribe the doctor to get "universal" healthcare in case of something serious) and where the gov has recently made posting videos of poor people on social media punishable as "against national interest".

You also should be aware about the amount of coal power plants it runs and keeps building (https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-takes-the-brakes-off-coal...).

It is a good time to ask ourselves which country contributes the most to emissions and crucial to avoid any mental gymnastics while at that. But unfortunately yes if you dramatically reduce coal usage in China people will die.

In China, the life expectancy already exceeded that of the US. They don't need to spend more on healthcare!

First, why are you bringing up US? Many would agree that US healthcare is shit.

But it's still probably better than China where many people are simply not counted in stats (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990197/ etc). These are also people with least or no access to healthcare and education btw

It also completely ignores the fact that developing countries move exactly to what the Western world does.

Why do so many people eat insects or are pure vegetarian in India? Because many are simply too poor to afford meat. You know what's one of the first major things Indians change when their wealth increases? Adding more meat to their diets.

> Can't believe this comment is top rated.

Same. I think it's just helplessness, they feel something bad is coming, and they can't do anything about it, so they try to propose radical solutions that will not fix anything but just make things worse.

More like they don't understand the true cost of their "solution"

Before we can talk about food insecurity, (we have that too in the USA), we need to talk about the insane amount of food waste here. You can downshift the economy and IMPROVE food security if we take that as a priority. It's all about political capital.