No, but I have a very strong interest in it. I also built a real estate search platform that put public transit and biking first and it achieved a little bit of success in Ireland (not a place with great transit or biking) before I finally had to stop investing time into it.
They're pointing out that stupid short-sighted reactionary tendencies on the part of the farmers is directly contributing to the problem that will make their livelihood impossible in the future. It's ironic, if nothing else.
no, he's engaging into a classical "tu queque" that adds nothing but noise to the discussion, maybe except some division between classes and pointless finger-pointing
I wish it were the case that class warfare would be sufficient to solve the climate problem. But I don’t really see any alignment between economic class and ecological consciousness where I live. Are all the poor and middle class folks walking and biking in your part of the world? I mean for sure there are some such places but in most parts of the US you’re no less likely to find a pickup in the garage of someone at the median income than a rich person.
Which is why it's a coordination problem that requires a motivated leader like the government instead of throwing our hands up and saying "gee it sure sucks that everyone has revealed they like will buy the products on the shelves".
First we have to convince people that they will be better off if they have to pay a lot more for their toy trucks. That is the step 0 that nobody seems to know how to solve. Hollering about how the oil company CEOs are evil is not going to be the thing. It's already been tried. People will nod right along until you get to, "and that's why your gasoline needs to cost $7/gallon."
Trucks are 3.4% of US GHG (~60m trucks at 3.51 megatons CO2/yr is ~211 megatons CO2/yr out of 6,266 megatons from the US total). If we never started another pickup truck ever again we're still 96.6% away from zero emissions. It's also worth saying those people would probably still drive something and the odds of that car being zero emissions is very low, so this is pretty charitable. Anyway, this kind of finger wagging--bordering on contempt--is exactly why this has become a political issue. These are collective action problems. We're not going to solve them by asking/forcing people to take tremendous individual losses, no matter how repugnant you think their way of life is.
Trucks are just an illustrative point. Substitute for whatever trivial thing it is that people like and would not be willing to give up. {Beef, air travel, fast fashion, 69 degree interiors during the summer, etc.} Each one of these things only contributes a little on their own but if you add them all up it sums to a large fraction of overall US emissions.
Also not sure where you got the 3.7% number, but light duty trucks overall contribute around 10.4%. This includes some fraction of SUVs (those with truck-like drive trains weighing over 6000 pounds GVW) and minivans.
That being said, decarbonization of the truly necessary energy consumption is also a requirement, and that is expensive too. You need to convince people that they should want to pay for it -- no the billionaires cannot pay for the whole thing, for inflation-related reasons that are too complicated to get into right now. (The basic thrust of the argument is that US construction and industrial capacity is already highly utilized, and that allocating more workers to decarbonizing will necessarily drive up the cost of everything else, regardless of who nominally pays for the work.)
69F interiors would be no problem if powered by solar. The government massively subsidizes oil, it could have been subsidizing solar for decades instead but didn't because of how powerful and profitable the oil industry is.
Nobody gives a shit how the factory that made their toy was powered. Top-down approach forcing industrial changes could nearly solve the whole problem without individuals needing to change much of anything.
But entrenched interests will propagandize and say "the hippie whackos think you shouldn't be allowed AC" (like you kinda seem to be doing, frankly) when that isn't and never has been the only option.
The crazy thing is that we have basically everything we need right now.
You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't. If you combine that with a mostly-plant based diet (or at _least_ swapping chicken for most of your beef and lamb) and have 2 kids or fewer you're... basically there.
The main reason most people can't do this is because of political choices, not technological limitations.
Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?
>The crazy thing is that we have basically everything we need right now.
Have you travelled? This doesn't describe most of the world. Most of the world would need to increase carbon emissions to live the way you're describing.
You aren't describing a zero carbon lifestyle, you're describing a lower carbon lifestyle. And we still use carbon in building the things in your scenario: the building, the car, etc.
Lower carbon lifestyles can slow the speed of the increase in global warming, but as long as we're emitting any carbon we're increasing global energy forcing.
By all means choose lower carbon lifestyles, but fundamentally we need nuclear or renewables + battery or all of the above such that we don't face a tradeoff between energy use and getting stuff people want.
The idea of average individuals being the relevant actors in global carbon emissions is pure misdirection. They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs.
The AMOC shutdown isn't merely "possible" and due "this century" either. The math of the dynamics of complex systems shows the current behavior to be signs of a phase transition in the process of happening. The speed of that shutdown isn't "decades" either, it's more likely just years.
The voices of "experts" telling you it was all some incomprehensible conundrum should deeply worry you. They're either not being honest or they're no experts.
> They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs.
You two might agree if we consider that when you say "rich" you might describe the average individual on this website (if we consider all people alive).
I do believe that 90% of the people would not want to actually destroy the planet the way it seems to be happening, but I also believe that 90% of the people can't refrain themselves from bad health habits either. So, to fix the root cause I would discuss more about people's bad emotional/impulse control, otherwise we will just change one issue (climate) to any of the others (violence, unhappiness, etc.)
The impact an individual has on carbon emissions is directly correlated with their wealth. The distribution of which is extremely uneven: as of 2024, the top 1% worldwide possessed as much as the lower 95% combined, 57 trillion US$. That has gotten only worse in the last two years.
It's not about "bad habits", impulse control or whatever, at all.
This ignores that physical things can happen in many different ways, most of which are decided by those who have the money. The choices of the rich aren't preordained, so there's no reason to absolve them of the responsibility for their decisions.
Wealth distribution is an issue, but lots of "wealth" is due to stuff that is owned by some and used by many.
Take a landlord as an example: he might have 100 houses and own 99% of the wealth in a village, but if the houses are inhabited, people still use them. If those people want to use a 300 sq meter houses rather than 50 sq meter studios, they do contribute as well to the climate issue.
This holds for other fields as well. Example: "... private air travel accounted for 6.3% of the ‘total commercial plus private aviation emissions’ in the USA in 2019, and 7.9% in 2021." https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01775-z
I honestly can't say that 92.1% which is from "normal" population is ignorable.
There are no easy solution and everybody is responsible by different degrees. Pointing fingers and wanting "others" to fix it first is not in my view something that ever worked.
Your simplistic take is fundamentally wrong. It would take someone in the bottom 99% of the world's population more than 1,500 years to match the personal lifetime carbon footprint of a billionaire.
People in the top 1% can be attributed with 25% of emissions when you take their investments into account also.
But most importantly, they are the ones who actually "steer the boat". They are responsible for the utter lack of proper action against the pollution.
Your "arguments" are precisely the deflection they employ to steer public attention away from them. Notice the utter absurdity of asking the bottom 99% of humanity to take responsibility for what they have absolutely no control over.
> Notice the utter absurdity of asking the bottom 99% of humanity to take responsibility for what they have absolutely no control over.
I notice the absurdity of you suggesting you have no responsibility.
It is a matter of how you choose the percentage. You choose 99%. If you would have said 50%, than whoops, suddenly you would include yourself in the responsible part. I claim that most rich people (western countries) are in the responsible part and maybe they should start reason like that.
You claim that rich people shouldn't fly. I would be fine with nobody flying. Or, even, with only rich people flying but not more than today (that would be still a 10x reduction in CO2!).
In my opinion too many people think in the terms of "what should the others do" rather in terms of "what should we all do", so that they have an excuse to do nothing.
> I honestly can't say that 92.1% which is from "normal" population is ignorable.
It would be even harder to ignore if the 0.003% of the population causing 7.9% of the emissions were banned from private flight and had to start doing "normal" flight like everyone else :)
It's an even smaller percentage of people that are most responsible. Any multimillionaire is already someone who could have an impact, but mostly it's the 100 million club and up that are causing the most damage. And bug LLCs in general, since those are essentially optimising for profit only.
This isn't true at all. If all of the global rich immediately became carbonless monks....we would cut only a portion of emissions. And continuing to emit increases global warming. Even if you estimate that the top 1% use 70% of our carbon (implausible) that still just pushes threshold back a few decades.
And if industry stopped producing with carbon billions would starve. Industry makes stuff for people. Energy is useful, we aren't just taking oil, coal and gas and burning it in factories for fun.
Them becoming carbonless would already cut 16.5% of emissions. Together with their investments they are responsible for 25% of emissions.
But more importantly, the reason nothing is happening to cut the systemic reasons for the pollution is due to them.
You present a straw man when you point at simplistic nonsense like "energy is useful". There is no dichotomy "either carbon pollution or we sit in caves". You argue from ignorance.
Indeed I have traveled, and I am in favour of nuclear and renewables and batteries for pretty much the reasons you state. There are other issues (concrete production comes to mind, and it always bugs me that houses in Europe are so dependent on concrete when its a huge emissions source) but when you're running your building equipment and factories and transit networks on zero emissions electricity (so we can include nuclear, which I suppose isn't renewable but is still very low carbon) then the building, the car, etc. have lower embodied carbon as well.
This is at odds with lots of other relevant topics that go beyond just "consumption".
2 or fewer is below the replacement rate of 2.1
This _has_ already happened, but there are a lot of voices voicing a lot of reasons why they believe that that might actually be not the best situation.
You see a whole lot of panic from industrialists over the birth rate drop in the industrialized world. They claim it is an extinction level event for humanity. This is not quite correct. It is an extinction level event for economic models that assume unbounded growth of the consumer base.
Economies can exist in many different ways. At its core it is just a way to describe how we move resources between ourselves and that can be done in many, many ways.
Wrong question if you actually like capitalism or value keeping it going. The question should be how to make the necessary reforms to capitalism to not have people try to attempt "the other ways" you're going to try to debate. The problem, it seems, is that Capitalists can't fathom a world where they might be prevented from doing maximum extraction.
I know what I'd be using those billions for!! To virtue signal like hell that I was the most nature conservationist billionaire in existence. Not "how can I say this is conservation and monetize it", real conservation with true stewardship of the land. But also that thinking is probably why I'm not a billionaire.
Non-capitalist economies don't really have a better record on environmental protection. It's almost like the problem is human nature, not the specific economic system.
It seems it may be 'animal nature'. We maximize our benefit until the environment limits us, and humans have become 'too good' at it, increasing stakes to a global scale.
If you read other things these industrialists say, it’s clear that their actual argument is a xenophobic/white supremacist one. The panic is entirely political, not economic. We have no shortage of viable immigrants to keep the economy going.
An agreeable platitude, but such a people are not born, they’re made as their neighborhoods close off, their favorite restaurants and stores disappear, their children are excluded from playdates with school friends, and they’re rejected from employment in favor of one of the tribe.
Also do consider that you’ve advocated for the elimination of people holding a belief that is far more common in the world in aggregate than in the few high HDI countries
None of this happen because "they are strangers in their own land" (which is just a cowardly way to complain about brown people).
This happen due to economic pressures and incentives. The neighborhoods are closed off because it became too expensive. Stores and restaurants disappear when rents gone up and most people prefer to buy shit on Amazon or use delivery apps for food.
I have no fucking idea what you are talking about children being excluded from playdates.
Rejected employment "in favor of the one of the tribe" is plain bullshit.
Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans, it would be worrying if there were a million, and at least worthy of consideration if there were a hundred million, but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
And if you believe in the fair distribution of the benefits of automation and AI in the population. IMHO, this belief is the more unrealistic one, at least in the short term.
>Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans,
The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left.
Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taught us in school, about the guy whose payment from the king for doing something clever was to have one grain of rice on the first chess square, and 2 on the second, 4 on the third, and so on... and how it bankrupted the king long before the 64th square? That's the same math with fertility rate of 1.0! (The Chinese have a fertility rate of 1.0, famously.) Each generation will be half the size of the previous. But how long before that is effectively zero? Will it be 1 million years, 250,000 years? No, about 300ish. 300 years. But long before you reach that point, your civilization has fallen apart. Those last 4 or 5 generations live life without electricity, anything but muscle power, or metallurgy.
And China's fertility rate isn't even the lowest! South Korea's rate just dropped to around 0.5! That's where each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
The best part of all is that these rates haven't even bottomed out. We will almost certainly see rates right around 0 long before the century ends.
>but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.
At least math illiteracy ought to console you guys towards the end.
This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. Just because you can fit a trend line doesn’t mean the projections will pan out. It could just as easily be the case that once population starts meaningfully decreasing, the opportunity cost of children will also decrease and fertility rates will recover. This happens all the time in nature.
Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years. This can easily just be a reversion to the mean. There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now. In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom. I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging because they believe they are saving the species.
>This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. J
The opposite, actually. Your assumption is that the rates bounce up and down, mostly because you don't want to believe there's a problem.
The rates are transmissible, older generations to the younger. No one growing up in a world where people have few or just one child will say to themselves "hey, you know what, I want 10 kids when I'm an adult!"... but that's what would have to happen. You and everyone else on HN whines "the reason people aren't having kids is the economy is awful and we can't afford them"... but in a world with a shrinking, aging population the economy just gets worse.
You're the one making the very stupid assumption, and you can't even say why. I can, it's because you haven't thought about it. Perhaps it's uncomfortable to think that you're driving your species to extinction.
>Our population absolutely exploded over the last 100 years.
More nonsense. Our population isn't exploding, it's just big. And it will shrink rapidly. I already laid out the math... how long before 8 billion becomes 1000 when you're splitting it in half every generation (a generation is commonly held to be 20-25 years)? Can you do that math puzzle for us? There are only about 5 generations living on Earth at any given time. Just do the math already. None of this is pretty.
>There really is no reason to be worrying about human extinction right now.
Yes, there is. People are only generally capable of reproduction from the ages of 16 to 36... just 20 years. Every moment you waste "not worrying about it now" is the problem compounding with interest. You've already waited too long to worry about it.
>In fact, the ‘extinction’ rhetoric is harmful and dangerous since so many ‘solutions’ to fertility rates are less education and less freedom.
Well at least when our species dies out, the last few people will have masters degrees. That's the important part, right?
>I have no trouble believing a handmaids tail like faction emerging
It'd be because you and those like you forced the issue. Go ahead, stick your head in the sand some more. We all know that willful obliviousness to reality can change the rules of the universe themselves, right? Wish it all away!
> The rates are transmissible, older generations to the younger. No one growing up in a world where people have few or just one child will say to themselves "hey, you know what, I want 10 kids when I'm an adult!"... but that's what would have to happen.
And yet this exact thing happened, in reverse, everywhere in the world as certain social conditions were met. So it's not just not impossible, it's by far the likeliest scenario.
> Our population isn't exploding, it's just big. And it will shrink rapidly.
The whole population of the world slowly rose from some 10-50 million before 1 CE to some 100 million by 1000 CE, to maybe some 2-300 million by 1700 CE. And then it suddenly reached 1B in 1800, 2B in 1920, 4B in 1974, 8B in 2022. This is a massive population explosion, with the doubling rate increasing rapidly, especially before the 2000s.
> People are only generally capable of reproduction from the ages of 16 to 36... just 20 years.
This is wildly wrong. Children of 16 years should NEVER reproduce, it's an awful thing that this happened for so long of human history, a shameful reality that will hopefully never happen again. And as health has increased, women have become able to reproduce (with some medical aid) well into their 40s (note that the record is currently 74), while men can and often do reproduce well into their 60s+.
Now, is it better if people who want to have children have them when they're younger, probably in their late 20s? Absolutely - mostly to keep generational gaps manageable, to benefit from grandparents' help, etc. But it's not in any way a strict biological necessity, and as fertility science advances, we have every reason to believe this will continue to improve.
> Well at least when our species dies out, the last few people will have masters degrees. That's the important part, right?
This is absurd hyperbole for the exact reasons above.
>And yet this exact thing happened, in reverse, everywhere in the world as certain social conditions were met.
No. It's never happened in the history of the human species. It's unprecedented. When human population dropped, it recovered... but only because the fertility rate was still high. Fertility rate isn't population... a sub-replacement fertility rate is literally and exactly "this population no longer grows at all".
You're gibbering nonsense right now, and somehow it sounds intelligent to you.
>This is wildly wrong. Children of 16 years should NEVER reproduce, it's an awful thing that this happened for so long of human history
It's non-ideal. Awful? Dunno. But they can, it's documented fact, and a mere 20 years after that it becomes functionally impossible at scale. That's the window of reproduction, but I guess it's easy to try to change the subject because if people start thinking about icky teenage pregnancies then they can stop thinking about their looming extinction.
>a shameful reality that will hopefully never happen again
I can promise that it will soon never happen again, because your entire species will become extinct in just a couple centuries. Your perfect utopia is coming, and more quickly than you might have hoped.
>And as health has increased, women have become able to reproduce (with some medical aid) well into their 40s
No. They've become able to in exceptional circumstances. This isn't the same thing as "able to reproduce". For it to matter, it would have to be every woman capable of this, every time. This problem won't go away because 1 in 60 affluent women will have a geriatric pregnancy.
>This is absurd hyperbole for the exact reasons above.
It's not hyperbolic. Not even a little. One of us is, but it's not me. And it's bizarre that you think it is... I live among lunatics. Go back and read your horseshit... you're talking about how there's nothing wrong and everything's just fine because some women can carry babies to term at age 74.
It recovers when having 1.1 kids per person on average does not mean making substantial sacrifices in quality of life over your entire life. Since many people will still not have kids, that sounds like 3 kids per couple being affordable in a comfortable, enjoyable, not stressful manner.
Right now you can guess that for many couples, 2 kids becomes close to unaffordable, and 3 becomes nearly unmanageable. Individually, you will see couples choose to do it and even to do it in ways that others both envy and chastise; but overall, it's not happening.
It requires many things to change not just in economy, but in society as a whole. It's not going to happen in a society devoted to growth, that's for sure.
> When civilization falls to the point that nobody can make birth control pills, if not before.
This won't save us. By the time civilization can't make birth control pills, it also means we've lost advanced medical care and now maternal/infant mortality kicks in. Nearly every baby born now survives into adulthood, barring rare misfortunes. But the idea that obstetrics will still be cruising along while we can't crank out simple pharmaceuticals is nonsense.
The trend is accelerating. We'll see 0.1 fertility rates in our lifetimes, you and me, and I'm old. We'll see central Africa hit sub-replacement fertility rates in 25 years. And even then we'll still have to listen to retarded jackasses tell us how it's no big deal, population will bounce back once things clear out. Buried deep in the human psyche is some truly superhuman level of obliviousness and denial of reality, and no logic or long term observation or plain facts are a match for it.
I'd take that bet. Except... the term of the bet is "in our lifetimes", which means that it ends when one of us dies, which means that collecting is going to be a problem.
For the record, I'm 64. "In my lifetime" is somewhere between 1 day and 40 years.
I'm 53. Even if you told me that you have a history of heart disease in your family I'd take the bet. It's grim. I figure we see sub-0.2 in South Korea by 2047, but it'd be cheating to round down until it's like 0.14... that'd only take a few more years, 3-5 maybe. Japan's non-immigrant population will hit that in roughly the same time frame, but I don't have a clear read on the politics there. China will be hitting 0.5ish about that time unless the regime panics and tries to implement forced breeding. The Uighur thing might even now be experiments in that direction. Europe's only about 20 years behind east Asia.
We'll still be getting the cycle of "politicians are trying tax incentives" and "someone needs to fix the economy so people feel safe having children" headlines in North America, which is apparently enough to lull everyone into thinking it's not a problem.
No, this should absolutely not terrify anyone, at all. The only reason it is a concern is that our economic system is built on infinite growth, which is going to fail one way or the other eventually. It's better it fail by people voluntarily having fewer kids than any of the other possible fail states.
The solution is to fix the economic system, not to worry that teenagers aren't getting accidentally pregnant so much anymore.
Productivity is increasing all the time, and we're very likely on the verge of another huge productivity increase with LLMs and robotics. The idea that we need to constantly increase the number of humans to maintain our current economic system is absolutely asinine.
>The only reason it is a concern is that our economic system is built on infinite growth,
This is plainly, factually wrong. A sub-replacement fertility level isn't "the growth has stopped". It's "rapid shrinking has started, shrinking of the sort that causes even more shrinking". That's the concern.
> It's better it fail by people voluntarily having fewer kids
If they have fewer than 2.1 on average, that's not better. It's literally "you should die out and become extinct". That's what you're telling them.
>The solution is to fix the economic system
What you're pushing doesn't fix the economy, it makes it worse. When there aren't enough workers to maintain infrastructure, there will be rolling brownouts. It's food rationing because there aren't enough workers to keep agriculture going. It's "there are no more consumer goods because the factories were hollowed out"... which leads to "there is no retail and no retail jobs".
A shrinking, aging population wrecks an economy.
>Productivity is increasing all the time, and we're very likely on the verge of another huge productivity increase with LLMs and robotics.
"Robots will save us!" is juvenile fantasy. You're deluded.
>The idea that we need to constantly increase the number of humans
No one was talking about "increase the number of humans". Maybe you're just really bad at math. We're talking about "keep the number of humans steady, because shrinking locks us into a never-recovering vicious spiral of shrinking til we hit 0". Which is where we are now.
> It's literally "you should die out and become extinct". That's what you're telling them.
This is both dumb and dishonest. It's dumb because you're not making an actual argument, just pointing at a potential long-term outcome, which isn't even an obviously bad outcome; if there are no more humans, there are also no humans to fret about their own lack of existence, so who exactly is being harmed here?
It's dishonest to claim that a temporarily shrinking population (which is a good thing given our current population level) will automatically lead to extinction. It will absolutely not.
You sound like somebody with some kind of religious conviction, which is fine for you, but leave the rest of us out of it.
Ok. I suppose that I can play along and pretend (literal) human extinction isn't a "bad outcome". Is that the point of contention? You think it's ok or even preferable, while I dislike that outcome? Is that the source of our conflict? If so, this is the closest to honesty I've ever heard from someone like yourself.
But for me, this makes you my enemy. People who truly believe as you do are beyond redemption. No courtesy, kindness, or obligation is owed to you. You can be allowed no influence, no one should hear your voice.
>It's dishonest to claim that a temporarily shrinking population
It's never temporary. We've jumped out of the plane without a parachute, there's not much time left, but you're still arguing "sometimes things move upward".
Shrinking populations by their very nature cause more shrinking. There are dozens of well-understood and empirically confirmed mechanisms that make this so.
It's actually pretty deserving that the people like yourself should be wiped out. I would just rather you didn't take the rest of us with you.
> You think it's ok or even preferable, while I dislike that outcome?
Explain to me how you are harmed by the eventual extinction of humanity (which will come at some point in the future, as all things end).
> It's never temporary.
Everything is temporary.
> But for me, this makes you my enemy. People who truly believe as you do are beyond redemption. No courtesy, kindness, or obligation is owed to you. You can be allowed no influence, no one should hear your voice. It's actually pretty deserving that the people like yourself should be wiped out.
If you read what you just wrote, then read what I said to you that caused this outburst, and think about how warranted your reaction was, I'm sure you can reach an objective conclusion about which of us is genuinely more likely to be beyond redemption. I've used HN for as long as it's existed, and this is the first time I've wished I could block someone, because your behavior is not acceptable.
> You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't. If you combine that with a mostly-plant based diet (or at _least_ swapping chicken for most of your beef and lamb) and have 2 kids or fewer you're... basically there.
'political' is true but it covers so many different problems.
For example, while there is a grocery store very accessible to me, you have to plot the route carefully due to the road design.
Then there's the problem of the condo I currently live in not having the infrastructure for charging. (My compromise in that case is a hybrid. Kinda want a plug-in hybrid for my next car, they've gotten to where it very well could handle 80% of my driving.)
> Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?
I've never gotten this lifestyle either... I'm not afraid to do a long road trip once a year or so, but yes in most cases too many costs have been externalized for too long.
Yeah, it's absurd that you can be 500 feet from a grocery story and still have to drive because otherwise you're risking death to get there.
As far as charging - I favour car-share, personally (I use mywheels.nl). Usually if you don't need a car every day (so you don't commute somewhere inaccessible via transit or bike) it makes more sense economically.
Even where I live, in a place some people describe as a bicycle Eden, there's plenty of complaining about not having "enough" car parking.
> You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't.
For this to be the most effective it really needs to be deployed somewhere like India. How are they coming along with that?
They have tons of people using small vehicles, bicycles and public transport. Unfortunately they aren't following China in mass rollout of solar photovoltaic; 90% of their energy consumption is fossil fuels:
Because they are likely not living like that by choice. So, when they have the resources to consume more (which will certainly happen), energy-efficient choices need to be available.
Energy-efficient choices will make the same impact no matter where they're deployed. Arguably they'll have more impact in Western countries since they already emit more carbon.
"India (or China) has to do <something>" is bullshit. Everyone has to do go lower carbon right now. Richer countries can afford more expensive technologies today so they should go first. By doing so they'll drive down the cost for everyone else.
You're missing the vast interconnected network of stuff that's required to sustain that home. From your home battery to cancer treatments that you might need to sewer that runs to your home, all of this needs to be made and sometimes replaced. Most of those things are still unavailable to most humans; in many places we still haven't built roads, much less sewers and water distribution systems.
Household electricity self-sufficiency obscures the vast requirements to support it and extend this self-sufficiency to billions of other people.
You’re right about that. I do think that access to more and cheaper energy has the downstream effect of making all those other things cheaper too and more available too. Energy is the foundation of it all.
All of the Western nations are at 2 kids or fewer but also so are China and India. Most of the 2+ children come from the ME and subsaharan Africa and areas in Oceania/SEAsia, Maybe some parts of South America. One could slow consumption by not importing people from low carbon footprint into high carbon footprint countries -though many countries, except Japan, aren't comfortable adjusting to lower populations.
Western nations reducing will DO nothing - it is too small a fraction of greenhouse emissions. The large fraction is coming form india and china. And they do not have electric everything. they don't even have running water in most places.
Your view is outdated. China is building renewable power generation at an extremely high rate, and also exporting cheap solar panels worldwide. China has a higher share of electric vehicles in cities than most of Europe and America does. It appears their emissions are now starting to go down as a result, although the economy keeps growing.
India still has a long way to go, but China is doing the right things. Same can't be said about USA under current administration.
Most individual and collective consumption driving polluting production is overwhelmingly traditional western/first-world economies, though China is catching up.
Switzerland does have roads choked full of cars. It also has pretty mediocre bike infrastructure.
But this is kind of besides the point - even in the Netherlands I also would use a car if I were taking camping and skiing gear with the kids, and that's fine. But I can also take them in the bakfiets to the grocery store when I want, and that's also fine. Cars have their purpose, but you shouldn't _have_ to use one for basic trips.
Well, here is where we differ - what is basic trip for you may not be basic trip for me or next Joe. Maybe they don't even have walking path to their house. Maybe closest grocery store is 5km away on roads which are incompatible with safe cycling (many parents don't give a fck and just ride, throwing a tiny little dice with every truck passing centimeters from them and their young kids at high speed). Maybe XYZ.
Don't judge others in some complex situation just because in your case there is some simple straightforward solution. Yes Netherland has top notch cycling infra but thats nowhere else to be seen and won't be seen for quite some time. And don't force your solution unto everybody regardless on fit, that doesn't work long term (aka EU approach to things or why much of eastern part hates it).
Yes, people who live in the countryside need cars. But just because that's the case doesn't mean that the auto industry has nothing to do with the development of transit and cycling infrastructure in cities. I too am from Switzerland, but I lived near a train station (I now live in the US). When I'm there, I would much rather take the train than the car for most trips. It was an eight-minute walk to the station and the train is usually faster or the same duration as driving and I don't need to drive (which sucks; I'd rather read a book or look out the window than stare at the car in front of me). In the past, I owned an Urban arrow bakfiets which would fit my child and wife and me all at the same time with our groceries.
So yeah, you live in the countryside; you're in the minority, but you're trying to make global claims about the car industry based on your experience. For most humans, getting in the car involves bumper to bumper traffic to get somewhere, then 10-30 minutes of searching for a parking spot, and not having the infrastructure to make that a choice rather than a requirement in densely populated places is unacceptable.
And it's well documented in the US that the oil industry knee-capped public transit and train systems.
The auto lobby invented the word jaywalking to shift the liability for dead pedestrians from the people doing the killing to the people doing the walking.
Even in Amsterdam the original "stop the child murder" protests only barely succeeded, and it took a massive oil crisis and a population that could still (if only just) remember what life was like before cars took over their city to get there.
Uses change and laws need to keep up. Lobby or not, jaywalking is a reasonable thing to be illegal because when cars became common enough, walkers in their way caused an overall loss for everyone. People also used to be allowed to walk on the train tracks freely when trains were slower and more obvious - did the train lobby invent the word "foamer"? Should we make rail corridors train-free? Computer hacking became illegal during my lifetime to shift liability for faulty software and incompetence from the operators to the users. Before that, it didn't really matter because nobody was using the internet for anything important. Friends used to hack each other for fun. Bitcoin used to be a wild west where people would openly steal from or fool each other for sport - I don't think people really saw it as money or property when you could just generate it with your computer.
I shared its optimism and naivete :-(
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