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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

They don't make a real difference, and the author is correct about it. If you drive towards a wall and you're accelerating and all you're doing is slowing the rate of acceleration you're still going to run into the wall at terminal velocity.

The author correctly points out that the total increase in car usage, mostly conventional engines is going to offset the small dent that electric cars make, and that cars themselves are only a small fraction of the transportation industry to begin with.

And not to mention that there's global shipping, construction, meat consumption all of which is by itself faster increasing than any environemntal solution in the respective domains which all only marginally change the equation to begin with.

Our ecosystem doesn't care whether we tried really hard and if we were really good citizens or whether we did nothing, all that matters at the end is if our efforts were significant enough to not degrade our environment. And we're off by a magnitude or two and that's not going to change until we make radical changes to how we manage our societies.

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So whats the alternative? Do nothing at all?

If you have $100k left to pay on your mortgage, and somebody offers you $5k towards the mortgage are you going to tell them they're offering you a "false hope because you'd still have $95k left to pay"?

EDIT: This is also known as the "nirvana fallacy": because the solution is not perfect - that means it is worthless.

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

No, the alternative is to figure out how to change the very fundamental levers of the system in a way that enables change on a scale that matters. The individual consumption lens is going to accomplish nothing.

If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect.

Or if we eliminate meat consumption altogether rather than promising people magic lab meat every five years, that would have an effect. Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot.

But buying a tesla or a linen bag at the supermarket or paying 50 cents for a biodegradable cup at starbucks isn't saving the planet, it's the modern version of paying the catholic church for absolution.

And in the long and infamous history of bad references to fallacies, this isn't one either. If you need to go from 100 to 10 and you're spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have.

So, while you sit there waiting for the perfect solution (which is completely unrealistic) people actively working on real solutions.

> spending billions on something that gets you from 100 to 99.9 you're wasting time and energy that you don't have.

Of course those numbers are just made up but they are also very far from reality. Solutions to climate change have actually been ranked in terms of total cost and total amount of CO2 reductions and electric cars come in at the 26th most cost-effective solution to climate change:

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/transport/electric-vehicl...

I really don't know why climate change seems to inspire so many people's inner contrarian where they just want to deride any attempt at preventing it because they haven't solved the whole thing in one go. There is no perfect solution, we are not going to fundamentally transform the world to a car-less society, or eliminate meat consumption.

Its like if you buy an electric car, somebody tells you "BUT you still fly!".

If you stop flying, somebody tells you "BUT you still eat meat!".

If you stop eating meat somebody tells you "BUT you still heat your home with gas!"

If you switch to electric heating based of clean energy sources somebody tells you "BUT you still buy avacados imported from across the world!"

It never ends.

Do you know what the #1, most significant thing any of us can do to reduce climate change? Have one fewer child.

Nothing else even comes close. It’s a simple fact. It’s easy to do. But nobody wants to do that.

It’s far less painful to pretend that we can keep the Titanic from sinking by making sure we sip our boat drinks from metal straws.

The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consumption problem, but predictably, a group of technology people want desperately to believe that if we just make the stuff we’re consuming better — with technology! — we’re helping.

To this end, it’s worth pointing out that the only item on that list that relates to family size is midway down, where it talks about family planning for the third world...something other people can do, so that you don’t have to change your life.

Someone should go through the comments and collect together all the "perfect" solutions.

If we let the "ban cars" and the "ban children" folk fight it out then that frees up time for the "pragmatically improve things along many different dimensions, many of which would be beneficial even if we totally ignored climate change" folk to get on with things.

You can deny it all you like, but it’s true [1] and you’re just illustrating the point: nobody wants to do the things that actually matter, because those things are painful (not incidentally, #2 is “sell your car”).

It’s far easier to mock the people who tell you the truth than it is to make substantial changes.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment...

Or those things will just scare people into doing nothing because it's so overwhelming and hopeless to be so uncompromisingly perfectionist about it.

Whereas making a car or a plane trip or a burger or a child x% more expensive will move us in the right direction and even that will be resisted to a crazy degree.

What is so “scary” here? It’s literally the easiest thing you can possibly do. It’s the default option.

“You know how you were gonna have a second kid? Here’s a thought: consider using the time and money you’d spend on that to do something else. Like retire early.”

If we can’t convince people not to do an expensive, time-consuming, painful thing in order to help stop global warming, we really do have problems.

You know what would be EVEN more effective at fighting climate change than not having children? Committing suicide.

But people don't want to listen to the harsh truths. They would rather consume their way out of the problem with electric cars, education for third world countries, reforestation, solar power and other false hopes.

> You know what would be EVEN more effective at fighting climate change than not having children? Committing suicide.

I'm sorry but I think this crosses the line. I don't want to impose my morality on you but in my opinion me saying "most people should not have children" is not the same as basically telling people to kill themselves.

I understand that I am in the minority when I say this I think not conceiving children is not the same as telling people to kill themselves. I think people do not have a fundamental right to reproduction at the same level as they have the right to be left alive (which I think comes higher).

I'd much rather see most people not have children rather than they kill themselves.

Exactly. This harsh reaction to what should be an obvious statement of fact underscores the ridiculousness of the conversation, and the point of the original post.

It’s not surprising at all (as I said, people don’t want to actually change their lives), but it does become a self-satire.

I'm not equating killing yourself with not having children. Of course they are not the same. I'm simply reflecting irq11's logic back at him: if the only measure by which you judge a solution is how much CO2 emissions are reduced then killing yourself is the best solution.

irq11 does not consider the costs of implementing a world-wide child reduction policy. A combination of solutions including education, birth control, electric cars, reducing flying, solar energy etc. is FAR more realistic than the "no kids, no cars" approach. He complains about harsh reactions but he is the one who started this off from a very antagonistic perspective that everybody is just a mindless consumer while he is the arbiter of harsh truths that people are too weak-minded to admit to.

Well that's technically what will happen when the forcing function of Earth's climate reaches a limit. I suppose it will be Earth killing us rather than us killing ourselves at that point though. We'll see if we get there with our current methods or not, hope electric cars work!

In that case you can thank the educated women of the world who are forgoing having children in all the countries where the fertility rate is already below replacement.

They've probably done more to combat global warming than most "ban cars/meat/flying" fanatics.

> To this end, it’s worth pointing out that the only item on that list that relates to family size is midway down, where it talks about family planning for the third world

"Educating Girls" and "Family Planning" are ranked 6th and 7th on the list (out of 80). So I don't know why you are saying that its midway down the list?

>Do you know what the #1, most significant thing any of us can do to reduce climate change? Have one fewer child. Nothing else even comes close. But nobody wants to do that.

What the heck are you talking about? Every industrialized nation now has negative population growth if you ignore immigration. People are having fewer children, and frequently, none.

It's not just the industrialized nations. It takes about two generations for a country to drop from a high birth rate to a birth rate of less than two (replacement, more or less). All but a handful of impoverished, war-torn countries in Africa and the Middle East are deep into this cycle or through it already.

So? I’m not talking about “industrialized nations”. I’m talking about you, personally.

If you elect to have one fewer child, you can drive a car everywhere and fly first class for vacation and eat a big steak every week of your life, and you’ll still be greener than your neighbor with the solar panels and the Tesla. Doesn’t matter what birth rates are in the industrialized world.

Another way of saying it is that you believe by not having kids, you can ethically consume the energy that your offspring (and their offspring) would have consumed.

No, not at all. I don’t believe that; the point is that the magnitude of the impact is so dramatically greater that all of this other stuff is rounding error.

Drive a Tesla and put solar panels on your house and eat vegan and shop local at the co-op. Knock yourself out. But the single guy next door with no kids who drives a muscle car and eats big red steaks every day is still doing more for global warming than you are. It’s not even a question.

Wrong.

The primary cause of population growth now isn't the birth rate, but rather life expectancy. People are living 20+ years longer than before.

If you take your argument to its logical conclusion, the #1 most significant thing you can do to reduce climate change is suicide. And the most significant thing a nation can do is genocide.

> Nothing else even comes close.

According to this logic the real number one thing you could do is to kill yourself, but it fails for exactly the same reason.

You're just measuring the impact and not the cost. Doing one thing with a large impact and an even larger cost is worse than doing three things whose total impact is more and total cost is less than that of the one thing. Especially since in this context they stack -- if you buy an electric car and switch to electric heat and install solar panels on your roof, but so too do your spouse and three kids, that's going to have more impact than having two kids while you're all driving ICE cars and getting heat from fuel oil and electricity from coal, since the impact of each measure is multiplied by each of the five people in your family.

On top of that, you're not considering the economic and political implications. If there are fewer children then there will be fewer working people per retiree. That means a resource crunch, which is exactly the sort of thing that will prevent people from being able to afford sustainable alternatives that may cost a little bit more, and then you've doomed us all.

Only if you equate “having fewer children” to “killing yourself”, which is transparently incorrect, not to mention tasteless.

However, the responses to this simple fact continue to be enlightening: people would rather commit all sorts of tortured fallacies of reasoning than change their lifestyles in any meaningful way.

> Only if you equate “having fewer children” to “killing yourself”, which is transparently incorrect, not to mention tasteless.

It's the same result. You're just choosing it for yourself instead of your parents having chosen for you, which only seems fair -- I know I'd rather be the one to choose for myself. But the point is that the choice, in either case, is not worth the cost when there are better alternatives.

If we were at the point that population reduction was the only possible solution then we would be soliciting volunteers, but it's not.

> However, the responses to this simple fact continue to be enlightening: people would rather commit all sorts of tortured fallacies of reasoning than change their lifestyles in any meaningful way.

Why would anybody want to do that when it isn't necessary? You can't just buy an electric car and call it done, but it's one among a collection of things you can do that sum together to an actual solution that doesn't require people to abandon their standard of living.

Killing a living, breathing person is nowhere near choosing to not make a new one, morally, practically, legally or in any other sense.

Edit: choosing not to have children (and I don't think that's a reasonable way to expect people to try and address climate change) is not population reduction. It's population control, if you like. You are making sure that the population doesn't keep increasing. Killing people on the other hand is population reduction. They're really not the same thing at all.

> Killing a living, breathing person is nowhere near choosing to not make a new one, morally, practically, legally or in any other sense.

I don't think anybody wants to have the abortion debate right now, so let's not.

> choosing not to have children (and I don't think that's a reasonable way to expect people to try and address climate change) is not population reduction. It's population control, if you like.

The fertility rate is already below the population replacement rate in developed countries, so having fewer children than the current baseline is a (further) population reduction.

> Have one fewer child. (is the best way to reduce climate change) But nobody wants to do that.

I mean, a small-but-growing number of young adults are already doing exactly that.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/some-millennials-climat...

https://qz.com/1590642/these-millennials-are-going-on-birth-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-americans-worry-...

> The point of the post is that we’re trying to consume our way out of a consumption problem,

I don't think that's true. People are trying to find better ways to solve the minimum amount of consumption they need to continue to exist. That's not the same thing as what you've described, that's not "consuming our way out".

People aren't buying EVs because they want to vacation all the time and/or take fun extra road trips 24/7. It's mainly about "I have to be able to get to Work/School/Home in a quick and safe manner, because capitalism demands it for my survival. How can I emit as little CO2 into the air as possible, while still meeting the requirements a capitalist nation demands of me. Which of these solutions can I afford?"

> it talks about family planning for the third world...something other people can do, so that you don’t have to change your life.

Because many "first world" nation birthrates are already abstaining pretty significantly. In the US specifically, birthrates have fallen to all-time record lows - https://money.cnn.com/2013/09/06/news/economy/birth-rate-low...

> So, while you sit there waiting for the perfect solution (which is completely unrealistic) people actively working on real solutions.

The author acknowledges electric cars are a modest improvement.

And who is working on the better solution?

Better question is who can work on the better solution?

The article claims it is a problem of consumption, but yet also it's a systemic problem. You can't fix systemic problems from consumption choices, and blaming individual consumers for systemic problems misses the point entirely of: a) who is to blame, and b) who could fix it.

> So, while you sit there waiting for the perfect solution (which is completely unrealistic) people actively working on real solutions.

This isn't true. No one is arguing we should sit around and wait for a perfect solution, and that's a really dishonest framing of this article.

The argument is that electric cars are over-weighted as a solution, and it's one I see all the time. Not only that, but it directly conflicts with other goals. In the US, cities and states are still investing in expanding highway and car-based infrastructure at a time when we desperately need to be moving away from car-centric cities. Infrastructure is expensive and time-consuming to build, so putting resources into car-centric infrastructure means that a) we will be stuck with car-centric cities for a long time, and b) there will be less money for non-car infrastructure. If instead, we stopped building new car infrastructure and poured our efforts into non-car infrastructure, we'd be much better off.

First, A lot of people buy Teslas because of looks and performance, or a linen bag because of ocean pollution. It may not reflect a desire to address climate change.

Second, we can do both moonshots and paper straws. Why not encourage people finally pulling their head out of the sand?

Because, as indicated, it 'buys absolution' for the individual. That means they don't have to do anything else to feel they are contributing. Which shoots the moonshot in the foot.

You're assuming that they're indeed not doing anything else. I strongly doubt that's an accurate assumption.

And I'm completely sure its exactly what's happening. In 99% of the people.

Based on what?

Same thing yellowapple based their baseless assumption on.

So you're basing it on nothing?

Which was exactly my point. Neither of us have any way to know beyond anecdotal evidence. Your claim is exactly as baseless as mine.

That's a lazy, cynical argument. The core of conservatism is "People are awful". What if people aren't awful?

No they just have to be emotionally insecure, and busy. It isn't 'awful' to ignore 99% of the issue-of-the-day demands on our caring. Its practical.

Surely we need all of the above, we need to encourage public transport and EVs. Vegetarianism and lab meat. Carbon capture and carbon reduction.

People are different, your idea of the best tradeoff and how to spend your carbon budget is likely to be different to mine, neither budget is more right or wrong so why not allow both.

>If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit

While these are the “right” solutions, they occur over decades. Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Even bus lines. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work.

You can buy a Tesla or a Leaf or an e-Golf and have significant personal emission reductions today.

>Planning for any rail line, then constructing, takes over a decade. Even in the environmentalist San Francisco Bay Area. Try a google of “Van Ness BRT” to get a sense for how slow infrastructure projects work.

That's a uniquely American problem. Maybe America should fix itself so it doesn't take so long to build infrastructure.

Well unfortunately, fixing America will take far more time and effort than even outright abolishing ICEs and transitioning every automobile-driving American to electric vehicles (let alone let the market do its thing, given that the advantages of ICE relative to electric are rapidly evaporating).

So, you know, why not push for the latter in the meantime while we work toward the former?

I'm not even talking about abolishing ICEs or anything like that. I'm just talking about fixing whatever political problems cause America to take literally decades to build a single bridge or other infrastructure, when other industrialized nations get it done in a small fraction of the time and cost.

That's not a 'uniquely American problem' at all. e.g. Berlin's Brandenburg airport, UK's HS2, third Heathrow runway, etc. Infrasturcture projects lag in almost all developed countries for various political reasons.

You're cherry-picking counter-examples. No developed country, overall, has the infrastructural problems that America has. America just canceled its high-speed rail in California, yet Japan is already working on a maglev train scheduled for completion in 2027, and China already has one between Beijing and Shanghai. Japan's Shinkansen has been operating since the 1960s, has had zero accidents in all that time, and has an average delay of less than a minute. Germany and France also have very impressive high-speed train systems. Meanwhile, all the US has is the Acela, which is a joke.

You only mentioned airports in your examples. America can't even build rail lines that go to airports!

I did mention UK's HS2, so not all airports.

Speaking of cherry picking, I think that referring to high-speed passenger train alone is an example thereof, especially as it ignores the large and successful American fright train infrastructure. California made the mistake of being too ambitious, a more modest plan from the start would have worked.

Freight trains are useless for passengers, and worse, Amtrak actually leases tracks from the freight companies and their trains are lower priority than the freight trains, which is why Amtrak schedules are so bad. Only a really screwed-up country would have a system like that.

As for California, it's just CA, it's the whole country. Where's the high-speed rail in the northeast, where they have the highest density of people who would use such a system? It doesn't exist (and again, no, the Acela doesn't count). What about between Seattle and Portland? Why isn't the federal government involved, since this should be an interstate issue? This whole country is just a fucking disaster when it comes to public infrastructure.

Yes, you are in agreement with the author — do both.

Anyone who has been to Tokyo knows that you can survive without a car.

I think that misses the overall point: OP is saying the personal emission reductions themselves don't matter AND providing this as absolution kills off the available attention spans that should go towards real solutions.

It is akin to saying 'I recycle my meagre household waste, I am doing my best!' while that's addressing probably 1% of the actual problem (most recycling ends up in garbage and corporations are bigger polluters than individual consumers).

If I am to put words into OPs mouth, we should be pushing for real changes at a society level. This would mean a bigger and more intrusive governance which will come in the form of things like no meat, 2 children per family, all electric cars, no 2 day shipping and so on. I am sure there one in there that will hurt everyone, which is where people should be willing to put their energy into.

FWIW at a macro level, I do see the point. I can put money on the fact that people won't elect or push for societal changes that actually affects them though. These are the reasons why giant systems pretty much never completely overhaul themselves: They might course correct a little, but unless aliens invade or a giant conflict happens - we are kinda set. (Do you see my cynical side yet :)

OK, you changed my mind. I still think buying an electric car is better than doing nothing, but I also see the emphasis on individual consumer decisions as a serious distraction.

Sure, electric cars and other consumer decisions could maybe make a 10% contribution in solving the problem, but these individualist approaches are getting the bulk of the attention.

I feel there should be a name for this phenomenon: When the solution that has a ~10% effect gets ~99% of the attention, whereas solutions that solve ~90% of the problem get ~1% of the attention.

It's like a Pareto law of inversion of contribution versus attention.

It should go without saying that this effect is everywhere in technology, especially software development. You're going to encounter it today at work.

If I understand the incremental benifit presented in the article correctly, upgrading to an ev before the useful life of your fuel vehicle is over could increase emissions, as would be buying a a ev as a secondary vehicle just used for commuting

> If you could move an entire country from being car dependent to being largely car free, by pushing rapid urbanisation and transit and you put 20 car drivers onto a train or a bus, then we're starting to talk about measures that actually have some effect.

This isn't necessarily true. Depending on how you put "20 drivers onto a bus" in a dense rapid urbanization, you are often generating more CO2 than the drivers were previously. Building an entire nations worth of new train lines generates a lot of extra CO2. "Rapidly urbanizing" everyone generates a ton of extra CO2 (and will instantly price out nearly all of the residents you want to 'urbanize', something EVs never do)

In the US, most EV drivers with a renewable energy source are already emitting less CO2 per trip than the equivalent bus ride would emit (even after factoring in per-rider numbers for the bus). Depending on your area, the "largely car free" option is semi-regularly worse for the environment once an EV is factored in.

> Or if we put some significant money into a manhattan project for carbon capture, that at least gives us a statistical shot.

We already are? https://carbonengineering.com/ and https://www.climeworks.com/

That doesn't discount the work people are doing on EVs. Its still usually better to prevent emissions than to attempt to recapture them later.

And companies like Tesla not only don't accomplish anything to reduce car dependency, they (or at least their principals) are actively working to maintain or possibly even extend car dependency (cf. the Boring Company with its mission to direct even more transportation funding to individual transportation).

>> Or if we eliminate meat consumption altogether rather than promising people magic lab meat every five years, that would have an effect.

With this I don't agree. People need meat for a healthy diet. Completely eliminating meat is just as fantastical as magical lab meat and indeed requires some magical unicorn technological solution (like giving everyone B12 supplements or whatnot).

Reducing meat consumption, of course is another matter. However, we are going to have to live with at least some greenhous gas emissions and the ones from the animals we farm for their meat are the ones we will be forced to keep until last.

Because, ultimately, we need to eat meat, but we don't need to drive cars, fly in planes, have each our personal communications device, etc etc.

That’s not what the original author of the article is claiming from how I read it.

He’s claiming that sure, take the 5k, but don’t let that fool you into believing you’re done. You still have to plan on finding the other 95k.

Sure but who is denying that you don't need to pay the other 95k? The article is arguing against a straw man. Nobody is saying that electric cars will be the end-all solution to climate change. Literally no one.

I'm seeing a few comments in this thread that come very close to saying just that.

He’s claiming that sure, take the 5k, but don’t let that fool you into believing you’re done. You still have to plan on finding the other 95k.

Specifically, from reading through the rest of the site, the author seems to be arguing that we need to give up technology and go back to farming with our neighbors. Oh and no entertainment either, just working on sustaining your existence.

Edit: Someone downvoted me, but in another article one of the things the author states we must do is quit any job where you are paid and start working locally to help your community directly. Which means just about anyone reading Hacker News needs to leave their job right this moment.

> So whats the alternative? Do nothing at all?

Change marketing in a way that muscle cars are uncool much the way smoking is uncool these days.

This would pave the way for SEVs which are the best solution to start the change but are comparativelly weak in power.

The real problem, as the author tangentially points out, is our over-reliance on cars to move us around. That’s due to the intentional choices that we have all made. If you look at the structure of suburban areas of cities in the US, you’ll immediately see that they are entirely designed the assumption of the existence of a personal car for YOU. You simply cannot get around without one.

A choice that I’m grappling with personally (as someone who lives in the suburbs in the US and owns two Teslas) is that I should really move somewhere more sustainable, i.e., more density so that I can get rid of my cars. That’s more difficult given family needs etc. If I didn’t have to factor others’ needs, I would have done this already.

This is the point that I think the author is trying to make. Changes at the margin aren’t addressing the real problem - they’re treating the symptom, not the disease.

>A choice that I’m grappling with personally (as someone who lives in the suburbs in the US and owns two Teslas) is that I should really move somewhere more sustainable, i.e., more density so that I can get rid of my cars. That’s more difficult given family needs etc. If I didn’t have to factor others’ needs, I would have done this already.

This is exactly what I'm planning to do. However, for most Americans, it isn't a realistic choice, because it means you have to emigrate from America. There's almost no place in this country where you can live without a car.

I haven’t ruled out emigrating from America either. I follow modacitylife[1] on Twitter, and love the cycling centric culture in that small city just outside of The Hague.

I like the design of that city more than, say Manhattan, which is another candidate.

[1] https://twitter.com/modacitylife

> There's almost no place in this country where you can live without a car.

There's almost no place in this country -that is affordable- where you can live without a car.

That's the real problem. Sure - there's NY or SF, which for the most part have the infrastructure to support most people's non-car needs. But only the very few can afford to live in either place. I know I couldn't afford it, unless I somehow could land a FAANG job (not likely at my age and education level). I can't even afford to live in the downtown area of the city I currently live "in" (Phoenix) - prices there have skyrocketed, mainly due to certain infrastructure transportation improvements and other things making downtown "the cool place" to live at (and conversely pushing out the artists and such who can't afford to live there any longer). Expensive loft apartments, existing urban housing in the historic parts (pricing gone thru the roof on those). It's crazy. So - out in the "suburbs" I stay (which isn't really the real suburbs any longer, since I'm in an older area that used to be "the edge" but no longer).

> The real problem, as the author tangentially points out, is our over-reliance on cars to move us around.

And the author fails to explain why (in the context of climate change) that's actually a problem. Suburban areas have a disproportionate carbon footprint specifically because of ICE-powered cars being required to go anywhere; if those ICE cars become electric cars, and that electricity comes from solar/wind/nuclear/hydro/geothermal/etc., then... where, exactly, is the carbon footprint?

Hell, at that point the suburban areas could actually be net carbon sinks, given there's more room for big carbon-devouring trees in between single-family/duplex/quadruplex homes than there typically is between skyscrapers packed as tightly as possible (as is the norm in even small cities, let alone large ones).

> And the author fails to explain why (in the context of climate change) that's actually a problem ... if those ICE cars become electric cars, and that electricity comes from solar/wind/nuclear/hydro/geothermal/etc., then... where, exactly, is the carbon footprint?

The author very specifically points that out:

> ...our cars primarily exist to connect things, things that require immense extraction and fossil fuel energy to build, run and maintain: roads buildings factories shopping centres suburbs cities airports and so on. It is not just the car itself that is unsustainable; it is our entire way of life and the system that underpins it.

Okay, and those things don't go away - nor do we stop building them - if we use buses or trains or planes or boats or teleportation pads instead. What about cars, specifically, contributes to this where other modes of transportation do not?

I can almost understand this for roads (but buses still need those, too!). Literally everything else is entirely orthogonal to cars or the lack thereof; abolishing cars entirely v. switching to electric-only would have zero impact there.

Another aspect of suburban living that I don't like at all is how it isolates people from each other. I've made the mistake of living in a subdivision with lot sizes > 0.5 acres. Because of the low density, my kids can't have spontaneous interactions with friends that I enjoyed while younger, i.e., walk / cycle to their houses to hang out. Everything becomes scheduled and everything requires a car to shuttle the kids around to their activities.

I've become convinced that density really is the answer to building a more humane way of living.

> I've become convinced that density really is the answer to building a more humane way of living.

Counterpoint?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

Having grown up in a rural area, the openness and freedom/room to play outdoors was - IMO - well worth the inconvenience of things being more spread out (not that this was ever that big of a problem; the main pain point was more the lack of sidewalks and bike lanes, but that's relatively easy to fix).

This was in an area where (IIRC) the mandated minimum lot size was 1 acre, and the vast majority of properties were 5+ (I lived on 8).

> Hell, at that point the suburban areas could actually be net carbon sinks, given there's more room for big carbon-devouring trees in between single-family/duplex/quadruplex homes than there typically is between skyscrapers packed as tightly as possible (as is the norm in even small cities, let alone large ones).

This is absurd. If people move away from the suburbs, the trees will still be there, and more if we get into reforestation. Building a suburb generally involves cutting down trees. Humans living in a smaller area of the planet leaves more room for trees.

> Building a suburb generally involves cutting down trees.

Only for cities/suburbs that exist in forested areas. This would exclude most desert and prairie ecosystems (for example).

> Humans living in a smaller area of the planet leaves more room for trees.

Sure, mathematically-speaking, and planet-wide. On a more local scale, though, this is not necessarily the case.

There's also the consideration for relative density of CO₂ sources v. sinks. I don't have any actual data here, so feel free to ignore this, but my hypothesis is that urban areas would have significantly higher CO₂ densities than suburban areas (which would in turn have significantly higher densities than rural areas, and in turn wilderness areas), and this high-density CO₂ would not readily/easily/immediately disperse / would be more difficult for surrounding carbon-sink areas (like wilderness and - I'd argue - potentially suburban areas) to even receive, let alone absorb. You thus end up with big lingering blobs of CO₂, continuously fueled by human occupation, and unable to disperse. Spreading out humans would better spread that CO₂ sequestration load, thus allowing better efficiencies.

There is an alternative. Lobby your city to relax zoning. Let someone replace one of the homes in your subdivision with a coffee shop/convenience store/pizza parlor. Things like that.

Your current built environment isn't perfect for perfectly sustainable living, but allowing it to grow organically in that direction is far more sustainable than abandoning it and building new cities.

I agree. Although I wasn't advocating building a new city; rather just moving to a city that already has the infrastructure in place.

I struggle with this as moving is most definitely giving up on my current "community" and lobbying would most definitely push me out of my comfort zone. But perhaps that's a good thing :)

> If you drive towards a wall and you're accelerating and all you're doing is slowing the rate of acceleration you're still going to run into the wall at terminal velocity.

To complete your metaphor and make it more accurate: we don't know exactly how far away the wall is. Reducing acceleration (emissions) is good unambiguously. If we reduce them fast enough, maybe our seatbelt and airbags will make the crash survivable.

> Our ecosystem doesn't care whether we tried really hard and if we were really good citizens or whether we did nothing

Yes, it absolutely does "care". It's not a black and white issue. Each fractional degree more of temperature increase causes dramatically more serious change to the environment. Every possible reduction is valuable.

"If you drive towards a wall and you're accelerating and all you're doing is slowing the rate of acceleration"

I don't like your metaphor. Individually this may be enough to slow down for that tight hair pin. As a society each additional electric car is someone putting the brakes on some massive train, others may still be mashing the accelerator, but eventually the balance will tip.

Yes. Plus we're talking an entire society all changing everything they do all at once. Think about how that's going to be achieved when even a single individual can't change their life all at once.

Think about how long has it taken to get people to stop smoking. True, even now new young people continue to start up smoking. But overall, it is a massive improvement over the situation as it was 50 years ago. One person at a time, but coordinated from the top. This I think is how climate change will be solved. Very slowly, and it will never be completely eradicated.

> The author correctly points out that the total increase in car usage, mostly conventional engines is going to offset the small dent that electric cars make,

That (almost-certainly-incorrectly) assumes that conventional engines will continue to grow in use forever despite electric vehicles continuing to decrease in price and increase in performance/versatility/diversity. At some point we'll see an inflection point, especially as charging stations continue to proliferate.

That is: just because electric cars ain't dominant marketshare-wise now doesn't mean they'll never be.

I can't imagine the ICE ever going completely away, simply because there are certain uses of it, especially in 1st world developed countries, where electric probably won't ever be able to substitute for it.

It basically comes down to energy density. Right now, fossil fuels are the most energy dense for their weight. They are portable enough, along with the engine, to make for machines which are very powerful, yet still small enough for practical purposes.

For instance, you'll likely not ever see - barring some extremely major advance in battery technology - something like a Bobcat Skid-steer loader using an all-electric drive system. The problem isn't the motors - it's the battery; you can't make one small enough with the same energy density as the diesel or gasoline those machines currently use.

That's merely one example, I can think of more, but I won't. The only way around any of this would be to change (fairly radically) how certain tasks are accomplished; For instance, if instead of such a machine with a single operator, you instead had a ton of smaller robotic machines digging or whatnot, all in some kind of conga line or bucket-brigade type system - and let it work overnight or be slower in some other manner - the same amount of work could potentially be done and stay all-electric. But - somebody will be losing a job in such a scenario...

> For instance, you'll likely not ever see - barring some extremely major advance in battery technology - something like a Bobcat Skid-steer loader using an all-electric drive system.

These do exist, though, albeit in smaller form factors: http://www.sherpaminiloaders.com/eng/models/sherpa-100-eco/

Industrial applications like this tend to be more amenable to electric-only vehicles (even if those vehicles ultimately get their power from ICE generators on the job site) thanks to there being far less of a need to drive long distances on a single charge (and thus never having to be very far from a charger). Electric forklifts are pretty common, on that note.

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But yes, I fully expect ICE vehicles will continue to exist for various specialized applications (and also because there are a lot of them driving around right now). They just don't need to be anywhere near the majority of vehicles in operation.

Cars are around half of oil consumption. They are a huge part of the transportation industry in terms of CO2 emitted. They are also the most rapidly growing part.

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