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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

For those concerned about the potential of climate change to severely harm our society, income inequality, particularly as it relates to housing, should be front-and-center in our list of things to address.

Why? People need to get to work, so they drive. Two hour commutes in carbon-spewing cars happen because people can't afford to live near their work.

In many cities, people have been pushed further and further away from the city core because of high housing costs. This leads to more and more driving. It's not like driving is a choice, either. It's easy to say "stop driving so much, you're destroying the planet!" But, people have bills to pay, mouths to feed. So they drive (long distances) to work.

Housing inequality, income inequality, transit inequality. These things are a major problem directly related to climate change. By addressing these things head on, we can make the world much safer, in terms of climate change, and much better, in terms of actual quality of life for the majority of people living and/or working in cities.

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Just to demonstrate, because I've met people who've never been in this sort of situation, this was my commute for ~2 semesters of college: https://goo.gl/maps/8deDf74vRGDkeovRA

My mom had recently begun using again and I said "enough" and moved in with a relative. ~3 months in I had gotten a job in Hoboken, NJ (https://goo.gl/maps/ruU5Ppz746xv5ZeXA) and would have to drive from my relative's house to my college/job every day and drive back. I couldn't afford the boarding costs for on campus residency especially with the added pain of having to move in/out every semester.

Each day I drove ~80 miles and had to fill up my tank. It was still some how barely cheaper than renting in the area and all I could afford.

This kind of thing really kills you inside. It's truly painful. For me, I would wake up at 5AM each day to drive west to east with the sun in my eyes. Then I would stay at school and work until around midnight where I'd drive back east to west with the sun in my eyes. I was surviving with ~4hr/night of sleep. I wish we lived in a world where no one else had to go through that torture (for lack of a better word).

How was the sun in your eyes during the midnight drive back east to west in NJ? Even during the summer solstice, sunset is around 9pm in NJ.

I get your point though, driving bleary eyed is not only soul sucking, but very dangerous for yourself and others on the road. Not to mention the ecological and time waste issues. Although I would note a 40 mile each way commute is sadly not out of the ordinary for America. Turns out the average commute distance for NJ is 40.9 miles. See stats here: https://www.answerfinancial.com/insurance-center/which-state...

Was probably plus it minus a few hours. Still not fun :)

most likely spearte mwf/t th schedules mixing timings or weekdays weekends. 40 miles each way is rookie numbers here in michigan. Due to the large changing in manufacturing and other job shifts since the 90s many people live in one city then commute to another work in flint, detroit, lansing. detroit<-> flint 60+ miles detroit <-> lansing 80+ miles lansing<-> Flint 50+ miles . Decent factory job pays enough to get a mortgage on a house so many are able to afford a house but 2008 the housing crisis also brought recession and factories closed down. Then 2012 on jobs started coming back and many took first thing available but as recovery wasn't in each city uniformly ended up with a plant in lansing largely being run by people living in flint that couldnt afford to move to lansing

For reference, and to show how much it adds up, that area you commuted in has the longest average commute in the US[1]:

> In the area with the longest average commute (New York-Newark-Jersey City), commuters are spending an average of 13 days, 2 hours, and 26 minutes driving to and from work. That means that 14 vacation days a year are barely covering the time it takes to get to work every day. So in addition to dropping the average wage from $34.71 per hour to $30.15 per hour, in order to get 14 days of hanging with their family on a beach, New York commuters must be willing to spend nearly as much time sitting in a car.

They're using full days in that calculation. The average commute there results in ~40 8-hour work days of driving a year.

[1] https://go.frontier.com/business/commute-calculator

I am sw engineer in the bay area, and I have a 3 hour commute with sun in my eyes, and I am actually paid well! Even getting paid well won't suffice here :). I have thought of moving to a different area, just for avoiding the sun, not the commute, but pandemic threw a wrench in my plans. House prices reached the stratosphere. Few more years I guess

It's often suggested to increase fuel taxes to force people to drive less. I guess you were spending around $400 per month on fuel for this commute. Would you have done anything different if fuel costs were double that? (And let's assume getting a more efficient car wasn't an option)

But this just puts a strain on people in these situations, and they don't need it.

In Paris, there are more and more "anti-car" measures which are currently in effect, but no alternatives. Yes, they're building and extending a bunch of metro lines, which I think is great, but almost none of those are currently operational.

I think that there may be people who will absolutely choose to drive if at all possible, but I believe they are a minority, so maybe let's not concern ourselves with them at first.

But I also believe that most people will take the sensible option, and if transit is cheaper and faster (or at least not terribly slower and inconvenient) they will choose this option.

My point is that all these policies amount to a lot of sticks and no carrots.

If I lived where my parents live, my commute would be close to two hours each way, if (and that's a big if) none of the several trains I'd have to take had any issue. Commuting by car would be around one hour each way. It would cost more because of the taxes on gas, but would allow me both some flexibility on coming and going AND let me get back two hours per day.

And they live in a town with a direct to Paris suburban train stop. Many, many towns in the suburbs don't even have a train stop at all, so you'd have to catch a bus first to then catch a slower train.

Now here's the kicker: most people I know, working in IT, are barely able to afford a livable apartment to raise a one-kid family. Hell, most end up living outside of Paris. So I'm not sure how much you can reasonably expect the wages for low-earners to rise so that they could afford to live in Paris instead of driving there.

My point is that rising gas taxes and, generally, acting directly on the driving itself won't solve the issue, because people driving is itself a consequence of the underlying issue.

I don't know what the solution is, but personally I'd rather look at improving the transit network and incentivizing companies to open offices elsewhere, to ease the density-related problems, such as overcrowded metros. Maybe then people would stop driving around in Paris, because they would have no reason to.

> most people I know, working in IT, are barely able to afford a livable apartment to raise a one-kid family. Hell, most end up living outside of Paris

I really don't see this as a problem. Paris proper has boundaries and is space constrained, making it extremely expensive. Living in the suburbs in the same metropolitan area is perfectly fine. And there are plenty of cities there with good transport links to Paris itself.

> And they live in a town with a direct to Paris suburban train stop. Many, many towns in the suburbs don't even have a train stop at all, so you'd have to catch a bus first to then catch a slower train.

"Many, many" is an exaggeration. Most cities in Ile de France have a train station, and a lot of those that don't and are dense are getting trams, metros lines. Those that do remain affordable, as long as you aren't immediately outside of Paris or westwards.

Driving in Paris is unsustainable. Driving daily 2h because you live in a house in a village of 1k people is unsustainable.

I have colleagues living in small villages that take their car to a train station, and take the train to Paris. It's a decent tradeoff for the people who live in the middle of nowhere.

Discouraging it to the maximum possible

I would have probably either:

1. dropped out and not gotten a job

2. Stayed in an abusive and unsafe environment and ended up on the streets in a few months when my mom was evicted

My first "apartment" was 600/month (1 room in someone else's apartment) and if took me months to save up for to be able to do it with a buffer if I lost my job mainly because how much I was spending on college and gas and misc life stuff.

I have photos because I was so excited to get my "own" place I showed my boss. I should dig them up sometime.

My Dad recently needed a place to live. No matter how far I drew the circle on Zillow in our part of the state, there were no rent houses, for any price. I texted my realtor about it and asked if it was the Airbnb effect. She said “Yes, probably.”

Infuriating.

Does that just mean landlords aren’t putting houses on Zillow? Unless you are suggesting there are literally no houses for rent in your city?

Usually I found Craigslist had a lot more inventory when I was looking for a house to rent.

Regarding home sales, Zillow generally pulls from local MLS databases, so unless it's for-sale-by-owner they tend to have all available homes. For home rentals, it'll be more fragmented.

> Regarding home sales, Zillow generally pulls from local MLS databases, so unless it's for-sale-by-owner they tend to have all available homes. For home rentals, it'll be more fragmented.

Can they even do that? My understanding is the local MLS databases are the closely guarded pet of "Realtors™". I was told that Realtors will always list on the MLS, and may or may not list on Zillow as a separate process, depending on if they think it's necessary.

Either Zillow is scraping data or there’s a data sharing agreement in place with the MLS; my family realtor has never had to individually list on Zillow when listing on Georgia MLS or FMLS.

You can just talk to the airbnb owners. I've been pretty successful in finding housing inventory that way.

Or maybe Zillow just doesn't anything listed.

I would say a much bigger problem is the lack of building, and the lack of new houses.

The population grows about 2% per year. We have not been building nearly enough to keep up. Even if Airbnb is taking 5% of the units in a huge metro area (how?), then that is still just a few years of building that have been missed.

The root of the problem is that we let people hoard land by severely limiting what can be done with a plot of land. By doing this globally over metro areas, we cause a huge shortage of land which drives up land "rents" (rent in the economic sense, not as much in the apartment leasing sense).

I'm pro-YIMBY, but building more will only solve part of the problem. The problem it won't solve is that our winner-take-all economy is winner-take-all for cities, too. Everyone is pouring into the top n metro areas and even the most ambitious building program won't do more than put a small dent in all that demand. A small dent will make a real difference for a lot of people, but it also won't make much of a difference for a lot more.

If we can't figure out a way to get people to live in Cleveland and St. Louis again, we're spitting into the wind.

Obviously, we should just build more world-class metro areas.

Of course, top-down planning a city (as would be needed to "stamp" one out whole) has never worked; but how about we copy-and-paste the zoning plans from cities we already know are functional, and then incentivize all the same major companies that have headquarters in City The First to build secondary HQs in City The Second?

(I'm not sure if I'm joking.)

I'd look at subsidising 'desirable' small businesses for towns. Take a normal country town and prop up a little wine bar, grocery, couple of non-chain restaurants. Attract younger, remote workers and then eventually there'd be enough going on that the small businesses would survive on their own, and more would be naturally created.

Even a coordinated national program like this: https://renewadelaide.com.au/grow/

> Attract younger, remote workers and then eventually there'd be enough going on

I think there may be something to this.

The other day I was riding around the French Pyrenees, and some (bigger) villages had signs along the lines of "fibered village", as in "with optic fiber". Along those were other signs about selling lots, mostly by the town hall.

I was thinking that maybe this could attract remote workers. The environment is beautiful (if you're into mountains), they have clean air, etc. It could be great for a remote worker.

But then it hit me. Say you'd go to one of those villages, with a girlfriend / wife, or you found one there, and wanted to have kids. They'd be able to go to elementary school. But probably starting in junior high, and certainly in high school, they'd have to take the school bus to the "local big town". Which is, basically, a commute.

So I got a feeling of "unfairness": people moving there to escape commutes, but then subjecting their young kinds to the same...

I disagree completely, the big cities are not even trying to build, and they could.

We need to tax land hoarders and use the proceeds to build public housing.

This will be sooooo much easier than trying to do business development in smaller cities. Those cities have already been doing their best to expand the job situation, but top down planning of jobs rarely works. Our top down planning to induce housing shortages is far easier to fix.

This is the main reason, but AirBnB isn't helping. Even when more housing is built, developers build housing that's meant primarily for short term rentals. The margins are high enough, and the obligations low enough, that running an illegal hotel can be much more profitable than finding long term tenants.

I was curious so I checked. US population grows about .5% per year and in the trailing 12 months to date new residential housing stock has increased around 1%.

I'll second the recommendation for Craigslist. Zillow is probably the last place I would look for a house to rent.

Short term rentals may end up being more profitable, but are also seriously more work, and a lot of the smaller landlords don't want that.

Then again, with the eviction moratorium and other regulations that make dealing with problem tenants becoming heavy handed, I dont think I would ever want to have long term renters either, so... good, long term renters get the worst end of the deal, I guess.

I also really like PadMapper

A rental would only be on Zillow if it's listed with a real estate agent on the MLS. Which is pretty rare for most rentals in my experience. They are also usually more expensive.

Well that sounds a little weird - you're saying people aren't renting out houses on platform X because they rent them out on platform Y?

It depends on where you live of course but my wife and I recently house shopped and inventory was super-tight because (a) fewer people were willing to have people in to see the place due to COVID (b) fewer people were moving out of houses and into apartments due to WFH and (c) many people were looking to move from apartments into houses.

There was also a big move out of cities - you could easily rent/buy in NYC but good luck finding something in the suburbs.

All of these factors would affect rental tightness/availability where you are. I'd look into that more, rather than accepting a vague "yes, probably" as an explanation.

> Well that sounds a little weird - you're saying people aren't renting out houses on platform X because they rent them out on platform Y?

No, they are saying they don't rent them out in the long-term residential rental market because renting them out in the short-term vacation/travel rental market yields more income.

Exactly. I did this — we bought a house that we intended to live in, but a work change made it impractical and financially infeasible to offload.

Short term rental was way more profitable than leasing the whole house. Rents are capped by low interest rates and the type of people who want to rent a four bedroom house are people more likely to be a problem in some way.

I did it for 4 years, from July to September. I would rent the furniture for a few months, have a cleaning service paid for the tenants and essentially rent the house for a week for the equivalent of 2-6 months rent.

> the type of people who want to rent a four bedroom house are people more likely to be a problem in some way.

Can you elaborate what you mean here? I am hoping to rent a larger home soon and am curious.

You can rent monthly on Airbnb. If I can get a house for 1200/month on Airbnb vs what used to be available on Craigslist for 800 or 600 a month, is that Airbnb’s fault, or is it just the market rate now and it happens that Airbnb is the platform de jour ?

To be honest, there's no way that using AirBnb can be cheaper than renting the same place directly with the landlord.

AirBnb charges fees of 14% to guests. Those fees are added to the rent.

That is indeed "AirBnb's fault" that they have their own 14% fees on your rent if you're planning to stay there long term.

My conjecture wasn't that AirBnB is cheaper, but that the price of housing is what the market will bear.

Maybe the fact that a landlord that would usually have to find a new tenant though word of mouth or classified ads can now advertise to a much wider audience has the result of making the landlord more money and making housing more expensive.

Housing inequality, income inequality, transit inequality are major problems that have deep effects on our societies and our future as nations.

> For those concerned about the potential of climate change to severely harm our society

IMHO they should heavily focus on the most impacting forces to climate change, which are industrial emissions. Or really, we could try to think of any huge impact environmental crisis, and come to the conclusion we should do something about industrial accountability as they represent more than 90% of the volume in most cases.

Can you cite your source for this?

Transportation, in 2019, was the leading source of emissions, with industry ranked third, behind electricity.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

I wonder what the breakdown is between personal and commercial vehicles.

The link above spells it out. 58% of transportation emissions were from "light duty vehicles", and 24% were from trucks.

Light duty vehicles doesn't necessarily mean that they're personal vehicles.

Aren't all these statistics able to be infinitely nitpicked since nobody can agree on which bucket to sort the emissions into?

Example: a car is produced, does the responsibility for the emissions go to the manufacturer or the consumer who buys the vehicle? Now do this for every single part and bucketful of metal ore down the chain of suppliers, manufacturers, shippers etc.

Drawing a line seems difficult and how do you even know whether you double counted at any point.

The vast majority of industrial production, world-wide, goes to middle and upper class consumption, across the board. From cars to cell phones to pharmaceuticals to beef to central heating.

We either get more efficient at making it or consume less.

Not hard.

Manufacturer emissions from production. (Costs just passed on to consumer but that means lower sales and smaller tam until they make lower emission vehicles)

Consumer emissions from use

Just going one step above: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Agriculture and Industry represent 33%, more than the 29% of the total for transportation.

Even drilling down transportation, personal vehicles are a small portion (about a fifth ?) of the total compared to trucking and other business vehicles https://depts.washington.edu/trac/bulkdisk/pdf/VVD_CLASS.pdf

And I'd expect their emissions to be way lower than trucks and heavy duty vehicles.

We could drill down the other categories (electricity, commercial and residential -- btw it's so absurd to merge these two in one block), what we individually consume/burn as private citizen is usually the tip of the iceberg.

Consuming less or different can have an impact, but only if the industries behind also follow through (image for instance you stop eating meat to reduce the agricultural impact, only for the soybean producer to go on a production rampage and destroy soils and areas in ways we wouldn't have predicted). Or from another perspective, we could have significant impact from the producers improving their practices, with little to no consumer behavior change.

Basically nothing will happen without the production side making a significant effort. If what we're looking for is "doing something", pushing harder on producers should be the way to go.

I think the “they” is different when looking at different aspects of the problem.

It has much less to do with inequality, and much more with zoning patterns in North America (and few other countries). I am not so sure about that, but it may actually be reverse - the richer people may choose to live far away, and drive, in most cities.

If inequality had anything to do with it, you would expect more unequal (or more expensive) cities to be more sprawling - as people are "pushed out" further by higher prices; but that is not the case. Why? Probably because people actually want to live far away, or don't care either way if they can trade off for e.g. more space, so they do (disclaimer: not me until 2020).

Similarly, you would expect more unequal cities around the world to be sprawling, with more driving. Yet, many cities where the central area is unaffordable to locals do quite well with transit. Related to the above, many do have a ton of people who drive, and they may make up in low speed/inefficiency what harm they fail to produce because they don't drive as far. Again, because people, apparently, want to drive as soon as they can afford it (disclaimer: not me).

Many on HN seem to forget that not everyone lives near the city or works in a city, where “city” is defined by an area with enough commercial, residential, and industrial within walking distance of each other to support a car-less lifestyle.

But in fact, only a portion (of the US, at least — 31% [1]) live in urban areas that would allow them to go car-less, even if you take the housing issues out of the equation.

If the rest (69%) even lived right next to work (which many couldn’t, since in many areas, there isn’t housing close to their workplace), they’d still have to commute everywhere else.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demogra...

The term “commute” is typically used for the daily drive to work. You seem to be using it for something else.

No, it’s that commuting is only part of why most people need cars. But a) this only addresses commuting, and b) many people have no housing options that would allow them to eliminate commuting.

My point is that I’ve seen many highly upvoted comments on HN lately (this one included) that seem to think living near work would put a dent in the climate change problem, when the data suggests this isn’t the case.

Many people on HN either live — or if they could afford it, would live — near work allowing them to go car-less, and therefore assume most of the world is like that, when, in fact, most of the world could not go car-less in their current job/residence.

> The term “commute” is typically used for the daily drive to work. You seem to be using it for something else.

Maybe in the US where driving is prevalent, but in many other places your "commute" is simply your trip to work. In Toronto, Canada, many people commute via transit (TTC). We have a commuter rail system for the region (GO).

You are of course correct. I was distinguishing it from all the other trips one might take other than the daily trip to work.

You won't get rid of individual transportation. This just won't happen, even if you triple or quadruple investments in infrastructure. Getting into a city core is actually readily available in most places.

The solution has to be to make individual traffic CO2 neutral.

True, but can we cut it 50%? Can we convert 20% to bicycles, or 10% to walking, or 5% to scooters, or all of the above?

I don't think we'll get rid of all personal transportation, or even all car usage, but it's highly variable from city to city, and I suspect we could convert some of the "worst" cities to be more like the "best".

We should also decarbonize private cars, but we should be pursuing battery of solutions.

> People need to get to work, so they drive.

This is not an immediate conclusion. There exist multiple alternatives to driving, but it's also up to cities to provide them.

The only thing that should be front and center for climate change is the large scale adoption of nuclear energy across the globe. And then, carbon recapture.

Everything else, is a pet project riding on the coat tails of a larger crisis.

Can't say I disagree!

If you spend a small amount of time investigating nuclear and the recent failures in construction across the globe, and compare it to the successs of renewables and storage, I think you'd change yourself mind fairly quickly.

Nuclear was a technology that was overhyped in the 20th century but never delivered on its promise. We have far better, cheaper, and more flexible tech now to replace it.

We do not have power storage facilities to run the globe off renewables, theoretically yes we could, but it is sort of depending on the tech improving in certain areas or large scale reservoir projects which themselves will take a decade or likely more to put into operation. Nuclear power is something we could have been running off right now, and something we know is feasible to build within or sooner than the same time spans that full renewable rollout will take.

Not to mention it would allow us to shut down all these ancient ass reactors we got going now which is the equivalent of driving around in a Model-T because we can't be assed to get a newer car.

I love renewables, but we still have a long ways to go in scaling renewables to not only provide global power demands, and we also need to be using ass tons of additional clean power just trying to stabilize the environment and sequester CO2.

> Nuclear power is something we could have been running off right now, and something we know is feasible to build within or sooner than the same time spans that full renewable rollout will take.

If we had built it in the 1980s, maybe we could be running off nuclear now, but the reactors would be reaching end of life.

What we know about nuclear today is that it is not feasible to construct. This is the crucial road block to nuclear. There are lots of places begging for nuclear to be built, but it never works out, and causes tremendous disaster for all involved in construction. The two "success" stories are China and Russia's Rosatom, but it's unlikely that we could have them construct reactors in the US and succeed. For a while it was hoped that South Korea could build for the rest of the world, but it has become clear in recent years that there was corruption at the root of their inspection process.

As for storage, it is getting deployed all the time, mostly in conjunction with new wind and solar installs (called "hybrid" in the field). It is unlikely that we could scale any sort of nuclear construction to catch the coattails of storage now, we are rolling out dozens of GW per year currently, and that will go up by a factor of 10 by 2026, and another factor of 10 by 2031, with an expected 10-30TWh of storage production annually. Nuclear can't scale like that.

> If we had built it in the 1980s, maybe we could be running off nuclear now, but the reactors would be reaching end of life.

And how much less CO2 would have been put into the atmosphere over that time period? Also, if we had scaled up to produce that many nuclear reactors, don't you think we'd be invested in new and better ones coming online? Or at least until solar and wind can solve their storage and transmission issues.

We'd have extended our carbon budget quite a bit. However we must act now with our current best abilities. We do not have time to wait for the the nuclear construction industry to improve productivity to meet our current needs. And for that matter the construction industry has been stagnant in their productivity as a whole since the 1980s, not just the nuclear sector.

> What we know about nuclear today is that it is not feasible to construct.

It's definitely feasible to construct and run, it's just that folks are scared to run nuclear power. France has a _lot_ of nuclear power but only started dialing back after Fukushima scared them.

No, it is not feasible to construct in the modern world. France has been trying, and failing miserably.

I'm begging that anybody who believes that nuclear is possible to construct today, to look at any of the many places where it has been attempted: any of the French EPR or the AP1000s in the US. It has been abandoned by all, except for a few startups working on small modular reactors. These had been avoided in the past because it was thought they could never be as economical as the large reactors that we can't construct today.

And even before that, nuclear was abandoned in the US not because of TMI or Chernobyl, but because it had been a financial and managerial disaster:

https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-...

Further, if France was such a success, what are the costs of their build? And why did they stop at only about a third of the planned number of reactors?

> https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-...

The link you post talks about the project mismanagement and bad incentives that tanked nuclear prices. This isn't anything new. The US has been failing to build new infrastructure on time and under budget for decades now and it's a much larger problem than just nuclear plants.

> Further, if France was such a success, what are the costs of their build? And why did they stop at only about a third of the planned number of reactors?

I mean, I don't think there's definitive proof that cost is the reason here. Whataboutism isn't enough to sow doubt, we need a more clear line of reasoning.

I'm glad that you agree that the US has a systemic inability to build all types of infrastructure like nuclear.

But it's a bit unfair to call my questions about the supposed success of France when you are the one who brought up the topic. I have searched for cost numbers on the Mesmer plan a few times and came up dry. Yet I still hear it as evidence that nuclear was cost effective and a good idea, without any numbers or data attached to it. So if it was cost effective, where are the numbers? And why did they stop at a fraction of what they had planned? These are earnest questions, directly on topic, directly about the feasibility of constructing nuclear. But I'm not surprised that nobody has the details, as I've never met a nuclear advocate that has investigated it as much as I have and could provide me with a single new fact. I am very interested in all potential solutions to climate change, but I don't see how nuclear could be one after three history I have learned and the recent track record with construction. Nuclear as climate solution does not have enough basis in fact for me to be able to support it.

The US builds a 700MW reactor every 4 years[1][2], and a 200MW reactor every 2 years[3][4]. The Navy has operated these designs (or very similar ones) for decades without incident, and considering the per-unit cost of the complete ships that feature them, they seem substantially cheaper than most of the civilian construction projects. My last boss had previously worked with some of the Navy's high-level nuclear administration people, and said their program was extremely well-run, partially due to a conservative, risk-adverse, albeit cliquish approach to reactor safety: "Don't ever come to us trying to change anything, we've already paid the blood tax to figure this stuff out, our processes clearly work very well, and we're almost certainly smarter than you and have already considered anything you want to suggest anyway."

I'm not sure why we don't fork the reactor designs with some minor changes for powering urban grid infrastructure....Hmmm, maybe a sneaky rollout would be to establish a bunch of "test reactors" physically on naval bases, but with grid connections to the local cities.....essentially subsidizing the national power grid with US Navy nuclear assets.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford-class_aircraft_... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S9G_reactor [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine

These reactors always eventually come up in discussion, but I think that nobody seems willing to use these sorts of designs due to proliferation concerns. The builders refuse to make any changes, and society refuses to let these reactors out of military hands. I have a feeling that there would need to be very big changes for terrestrial operation, as well. Heat rejection is already a big part of nuclear reactor design and something that is getting harder as the climate changes.

renewables are better, cheaper, and more flexible tech; but they also take longer to develop so cannot replace current demand in time to stop GW, and have geological constraints such that they cannot be adopted by all.

There are very very very few nations that could not serve their needs with renewable electricity. The UK was thought to be one of the more challenging countries, but recent offshore wind developments will make cheap power abundant soon.

Japan may have a difficult time, which is why they have been so fond of hydrogen, but I have a feeling that they may find some other solutions. Deep-sea floating turbines are falling in price all the time.

> Japan may have a difficult time, which is why they have been so fond of hydrogen, but I have a feeling that they may find some other solutions. Deep-sea floating turbines are falling in price all the time.

I think we need a bit more than feelings and faith to solve climate change. Nuclear buys us time to work out the issues with renewable energy, as long as it takes. And in certain cases, it just might not. That's the nature of renewable energy, much like oil deposits or rare-earth deposits aren't available everywhere in the world.

If you want to go on more than feelings, then look at the data. Floating wind is falling cost all the time. Nuclear's cost is going up all the time.

"Feelings" are the only reason people think nuclear is possible. Those that have been trying it in the past decade have shown it to not be competitive.

Usually HN is good at thinking like engineers, but for some reason nuclear seems to get very little critical thought, and renewables get very little consideration for their actual reality.

There is not a carbon-free grid model out there that uses nuclear except as a tiny tiny fraction of grid power. Literally none!! Yet somehow comments about needing to build lots of nuclear get treated as serious statements that could hold some water. Nuclear will not be the backbone of any future grid for at least 50 years, and most likely never again in human history.

If you want critical thought, you respond to the point that renewables take longer to develop (the infra not the tech), and that nuclear "buys us time".

> There is not a carbon-free grid model out there that uses nuclear

and in what timescale can these carbon-free models be developed? We probably need a carbon-negative model to reverse existing CO2 damage.

> Nuclear will not be the backbone of any future grid for at least 50 years

France has declared it will wants to cut nuclear to 50% of the grid by 2035, it's current share is 70%. So what does this statement mean?

> Floating wind is falling cost all the time. Nuclear's cost is going up all the time.

The cost of energy production, or the total cost of infra?

Part of the reason nuclear is growing is lack of funding. Turns out, you need to keep building nuclear power stations for people to think a degree in nuclear engineering is a good idea. And you need to keep building them to keep power-plant-building corps in business and innovating/improving efficiency.

I agree nuclear could be part of the solution, but nuclear is a dead horse and we can't just continue to beat it. It won't be revived as long as people don't feel secure about it. Beside the obvious reasons for it's rejection (catastrophic failure modes, WMD proliferation, costs overruns, building delays, waste management, vulnerability to social instability, rising sea levels and freshwater shortage), we have to think about what it means to go full-on nuclear and enable the same kind of consumption growth that put us in this position in the first place. We're just going to create another environmental crisis down the road (which may or may not be related to all those reactors).

We need to find how we can continue to improve our quality of life while reducing our consumption.

> We're just going to create another environmental crisis down the road (which may or may not be related to all those reactors

How? What other environmental crisis do you see happening if we embrace nuclear?

> We need to find how we can continue to improve our quality of life while reducing our consumption.

It seems short-sighted to focus _all_ of our efforts on holding quality of life the same as reduce consumption. I certainly agree that this will be a part of the solution, but by constraining the problem thusly we make it much harder to solve. A robust mix of nuclear, renewables, and efficient consumption is much more likely to work than any of these three options alone.

Of course I'm not saying it should be our one and only focus, but it should be our primary objective.

I don't see into the future better than anyone else, but my guess? The sheer amount of resources we need and the waste we create is drastically reducing biodiversity around the globe, and keystone plant and animal species are on the verge of becoming extinct. This will cause a cascading ecological collapse, including our own food chain.

> The sheer amount of resources we need and the waste we create is drastically reducing biodiversity around the globe, and keystone plant and animal species are on the verge of becoming extinct.

But why? I'm not arguing that our current lifestyle in heavily developed countries is sustainable, but what makes you certain that we can't form sustainable habits? As long as humans have existed on the planet, we've become better at using available resources (though many of us have certainly died trying, as evidenced by the decline/collapse of many pre-Industrial civilizations through environmental damage). What about this moment in time marks the end of our ability to become more efficient?

It’s kinda funny that people are so afraid of burying a small amount of radioactive material, but are perfectly happy with dumping all the waste from fossil fuels in the air we breathe and the atmosphere we depend on to survive.

Did the Covid era of lockdowns and Zoom day-to-day make a dent?

Agree with most of the observations but... what does climate change have to do with metropolitan inequality?

All other factors being equal, high city populations relative to the countryside should be more resource efficient.

The point is that moving people to far-flung low-density suburbs with >1-hour car commutes (and a need to make all other trips by car) is also very polluting and resource inefficient, compared to locating people where they can commute quickly on foot, bicycle, or public transit.

Better is to build a serious transit network with regular fast access to the city center, with dense neighborhoods near transit stations (3–6 story apartment buildings for at least a couple blocks surrounding each station). Look to Japan for an example of how to do zoning and urban planning at a national scale.

> Look to Japan for an example of how to do zoning and urban planning at a national scale.

Doesn’t Japan have basically everyone live in Tokyo and ignore everywhere else?

Huh? There are several big cities in Japan like Oosaka, Kyouto, and Fukuoka, and they're all zoned similarly to Tokyo.

Also look at NZ how they solved covid, look at thailand how they solved drugs, look at arabs how they solved alcoholism, look at africa how they solved obesity, look at north korea how they solved dissent.

Maybe compare life satisfaction and some other outcomes when looking at places like Japan. I'd never want to live in 10 sq meter apartment and be jammed each morning into train like a sardine...

That's not to say places don't need to solve public transport and bike infra.

You could drop the sarcastic/cynical first half of your comment without losing anything.

It doesn’t seem to me that the claim that Japan has a worse quality of life than the USA is supportable by data: surveys of self-reported satisfaction are notoriously incomparable across cultures. But there are also many differences between these countries besides urban planning and zoning laws (e.g. the USA is much less densely populated, is younger, has more immigrants, has more natural resources, uses much more energy per capita, has much higher GPD per capita, has a shorter life expectancy, has a far larger number of drug addicts, has dramatically more violence, ...).

A cheap 10–15 minute standing rush-hour subway commute is much less objectionable than a 1.5-hour highway traffic-jam commute. I haven’t been to Japan, but the subways in China and various European countries are clean, orderly, quiet/smooth, and have trains every few minutes. They put even the best US subway systems like NYC and Boston to shame.

I know multiple groups of people in San Francisco who live with ~4 unrelated adults in a 1-story 2-bedroom single-family house, either sharing bedrooms or using every room in the house as a makeshift bedroom, and still pay out the nose for the privilege (the only other choice they could afford was living 1+ hours away in a suburban wasteland) who would much prefer to have their own separate 600–800 square foot apartments instead. The Bay Area housing market is such that people get locked into their current place and cannot afford to move if their needs change (e.g. get married, get divorced, have kids, have their kids move out of the house, get a higher-paying job, get a lower-paying job, ...). People who work full time for decades still can’t dream of scraping together a down payment unless a wealthy relative dies and they land a sizable inheritance. Building a couple hundred thousand additional small apartments throughout the Bay Area would relieve a ton of market pressure and drive down the price of housing of all shapes and sizes, including larger condos and houses.

Higher density indeed tends to be more resource efficient. The problem is much of what is called a "big city" in the US is a sprawl of low-density suburbs that, due to their city planning, require more driving to get to anything than, say, if you lived in a small town.

Because some people believe that a major part of solving climate change is having people live in dense cities.

The solution is quite simple too. Make fuel $10/gallon. If that is not sufficient, then $20, or $30. And so on.

This is a good solution, but it needs to come with some significant cash transfers for people most immediately harmed (e.g. via universal basic income), and with a significant public commitment to build affordable walkable neighborhoods with world-class public transit.

Not a "commitment." They need to actually exist, at something like 10,000x the scale they currently have.

So your solution to include poor people in cities is to have the poor pay more money for gasoline?

Wouldn't the more immediate effect be that the poor stop coming into cities?

It works better for the "poor" people if these taxes/incomes go towards immediate public transit. And work closer to homes (it raises the visible costs of restrictive zoning).

The cost of owning, operating, and insuring a vehicle is a pretty high tax.

Funny thing about public transit too, if you build transit to businesses in walkable communities you don't just help the poor.

If you live in a city you do not need to drive.

Maybe for some occupations in some cities. No way I could carry all the tools I need with me on a bus that rarely takes me within walking distance to the job site in the cities I live near, if I still lived in one of them.

Sure, for some jobs you will need a car and in that case you bump your prices to match. Since everyone doing this job is hit with the same fee, no one is disadvantaged. While if you work an office job or similar, you can get ahead by not driving and eventually everyone capable of not driving will not drive.

The actual price of fuel does not matter much, only the price you are paying relative to others with the same job title.

It would be nice if I could afford one of those new and expensive electric trucks, though.

This is, sadly, not true for far too many people.

I wish it were so. I desperately wish this were entirely true.

great way to make the poors poorer and make poors pay for a problem that richer folks tend to create. This would effectively create a tax on the poor, as poors are the ones that live further away the pockets of work.

Income/wealth disparities are a separate issue from the problem of excess fossil fuel usage. That problem can be addressed via wealth transfers.

You’re missing the point. Fossil fuel usages is largely paid for by the poor. Gas to go to work, gas to transport food and cheap plastic goods to Walmart, etc. Poor people don’t have a choice in how they shop or how far away they live from their job, yet they are the ones paying the fuel tax whether it be by buying gas directly or by paying higher prices at Walmart.

Raising fuel prices just fucks over the poor, and transfers wealth to the owners of the businesses they shop at who keep the same margin of a bigger pie.

There are two separate problems.

One is excess fossil fuel consumption, causing people to be able to live further away then they should be if the goal is to reduce carbon emissions. It does not matter how rich the person consuming them is, total consumption needs to go down.

A separate problem is a rich person being able to consume far more fossil fuels than a poor person. This is solved by taking from the rich person and giving to the poor person.

There is no “fucking over”. Based on the amount that fossil fuel consumption needs to be reduced, everyone will need to feel pain while cities are rezoned, people’s expectations of how much space they have are changed, and hence, politically, there will never be a solution to fossil fuel usage without the advent of technology that replaces it.

All this does is siphon money from people, and increase people's desperation.

It's not like you can just choose to not work anymore. If your job is a long commute away that's money you have to spend no matter what on transport.

There often aren't other options. Most transit in North America sucks inside cities and doesn't serve outlying areas very well at all.

Long commutes are an effect of companies centralizing in big urban areas. They don't care how long it takes their workers to get to the office as long as they don't have to pay for it.

Maybe make companies responsible for their employees gas, insurance, and commute times, you might see satellite offices spring up all over the place in more rural areas so their workforce has smaller commute times.

>Most transit in North America sucks inside cities and doesn't serve outlying areas very well at all.

I've done transit in most of the major cities in Canada to/from work & school, or airports, and most are pretty decent.

I don't know that transit should really serve outlying areas?

If a goal of transit is to reduce emissions from single occupancy vehicles commuting to and from work, then it seems to me that it should service outlying areas because those people are commuting too, and further

But of course it's not really practical.

Yes, imposing costs increases trhe costs of some activities. Unfortunately, there isn't a solution that involves no change in anyone's behavior.

If employees have to pay more on a commute, it will change companies' behavior.

> If employees have to pay more on a commute, it will change companies' behavior.

I don't see why it would, why do you think that?

They need workers, so either they pay workers more to make it worth commuting, or move location to be nearer to workers. Or go remote. People are not going to lose money to go to work.

This assumes that people have a choice in their daily commutes. Unfortunately the majority do not, if gas went to 30 dollars a gallon many would be forced to sleep in cars/tents closer to the office.

Starbucks won’t cover 400 dollar daily commutes for baristas in downtown SF.

I wonder if there is anything we can do to affect those who do have a choice. I know a lot of people who drive and are perfectly able to take public transport or live closer but they chose to live a far way away and drive because they can afford it.

I don't think that's the right approach. Removing choice is a great way to motivate people to resist your mandates.

Why do so many people want to play dictator these days?

Because driving is unsustainable and destroying the planet. It can not be allowed to continue in its current form so the easiest option would be to push people away from it when they are able to.

Less pushing, more enticing please. If you give people a better option, they will take it.

Better options need money, unfortunately. And barring a complete change in how the US works [1], that money isn’t there at a federal level. That leaves cities with no other option than to pay for a better option on their own — by raising taxes (e.g. congestion pricing, gas taxes, tolled roads), which also has the side effect of disincentivizing driving

[1] the infrastructure bill that’s looking to pass, while it gives much needed funding to public transit, still centers car-centric planning, and nothing paradigm-shifting (e.g. a comprehensive regional high speed rail network, a dedicated bus line on every street, a protected bike lane on every arterial) will likely come from it.

Agreed. The issue was that in the thread so far it seemed to have a "punish the unbelievers who drive" feel to it.

Happy to tax one option to support a better option.

In a social practice sense I'd prefer transparency to see the tax money actually making a better future. But this is often lost or not communicated.

These are both the same thing.

If I say "I will give you $20 to not drive" or "I will take $20 from you if you drive", the only thing that really matters is that there is a $20 price differential between two actions so you will be at a $20 disadvantage to do the current thing regardless of how you word it.

Money and wealth is relative so the actual final amount doesn't matter as much as how much you have compared to the average person.

And if we were all emotionless machines, you'd be right. But we're not, so you're not right.

7.5% or so of total greenhouse gases isn't destroying the planet, but it's not helping either. EV's going to take this to about 1% this in about 10 years.

7.5% is significant. And this doesn't even touch the particulate pollution which ruins health, or the ground poisoning which combustion engines cause.

A tax/higher prices on fuel would push people to more efficient methods faster and will put more money in to investments on new technology.

I'd argue installing more solar panels is way more important than EV's. It's way cheaper, offers way better ROI (EV TCO are just barely cheaper than gas, especially without gov incentives) and helps with main problem - power generation. Sure it's boring af, regulated, politicised (Uighur solar) and inconvenienced in every possible matter...

I think both are needed. Nothing on its own will work and we need to be doing everything that we can at the same time right now. The current models are showing if we make every improvement we can right now we are only just barely scraping by. There is no time to do everything sequentially.

Is that 7.5% including all the knock on effects of non dense living? Does it include the effects of flying to Tahiti or Maldives for honeymoons?

The average vehicle on the road is 12 years old. It's going to take a lot longer than 10 years to shift most of the fleet to EVs.

The US has ~280 million cars on the road.

The number of electric cars sold in 2020 was ~250k.

The average age of a car in the US is 12 years.

If electric car sales quadruple each year until they reach the total number of cars sold in the US (around 16 million cars per year), it will take at least 18 years to replace all the combustion engine cars on the road.

And this is wildly optimistic, electric cars are too few and too expensive, even as second hard cars, for the general population. I estimate that they'll reach a sort of break-even point with combustion engine cars around 2025 or so. So you can probably add 3-4 more years to those 18 I counted. So at least 20 years to have a mass replacement of existing cars on the road.

And in the rest of the world it's even worse. The rest of the world is poorer, has lower disposable income, cars are around for longer, and electric car sales are ramping up even slower.

You've obviously never trained a dog. You use treats, not threats and violence.

The only solution IMO is urban planning. If cities and towns are designed for cars, then people will drive. If they are designed for feet or bikes they will use those. If you look at the layout of popular North American towns built prior to the 1800s you'll see very few cars even venturing into town.

Cars are also one of the few greenhouse emissions sources which we have a plausible market driven path to eliminate over the next 2 decades via battery electric vehicles.

The problem is people who have the ability to move closer to work or who have a working PT system still choose to drive because they can afford to because they value not sitting next to a stranger above protecting the environment.

We need good planning but then we also need to factor in the environmental costs of driving to eliminate it.

I own a car, but live on an inner city rail line. I drove 9000 miles in 2 years, which was exclusively done for nature trips on weekends.

In my case driving would increase my commute time by about 20 minutes due to traffic. My city has no appetite for improving driving options or reducing congestion through the addition of new roads.

This is a fantasy and completely regressive. How do you plan on dealing with the ensuing riots? Housing supply doesn't appear overnight, especially in the US where building, worker safety and environmental standards slow the process down to a crawl. Most of the new urban housing is 4 story wood construction because of the above reason, not nearly the density needed to eliminate cars without massive mixed rezoning efforts that are politically unfeasible or massive mass transit infrastructure investments that would also suffer the same issues as higher density housing developments listed above, also throw into the mix that there is a cultural aversion to mass transit in the US that won't likely get resolved in time to fight climate change effectively.

You will be displacing 10s if not 100s of millions of people with such a policy, you need a place for them to go if you don't want severe civil unrest.

I would implement it with a cash rebate to everyone in America for the average number of gallons used by an American in a year * $10 and call it the "green rebate" or something like that and make it clear that it paid for by a gas/car emissions tax.

The average American would be paying $0.

Australia tried something similar with a carbon tax a few years ago - not for fuel, but for carbon emissions generally. The policy was very well designed and ensured that lower income earners were compensated for any increase in costs to the extent that they had a net benefit, and in the short time it was operating, was successful at reducing emissions.

Unfortunately for us (and the world) this was too complicated for many Australians to understand and the political right exploited that to tell a scary story about a 'new tax', leading to their election and the removal of the scheme.

While economists (and rational thinkers) generally love carbon pricing schemes, they have been pretty unsuccessful politically because people are generally too stupid to understand them and cynical politicians in bed with the fossil fuel industry are happy to play to that.

When would I get the rebate?

Edit: For clarification, if it's the type of rebate typical in the US, that means I get it later and I can't afford the fuel now. If it's a rebate that's done at the time of purchase, then it wouldn't seem to make much difference, on average.

Let's say it's annual (or if they have the capacity, monthly) and paid at the start of the passage of the law, so you get the money first before the gas price increase.

It's not done at time of purchase because it is not a gas subsidy.

As long as the housing stock is what it is, most people need to drive in order to live.

We can and should transition towards walkable and transit-connected apartments, but the problem there isn't a lack of demand.

The housing stock is what it is because of low fossil fuel prices. Most families prefer detached single family homes with two car driveways and quarter acre lots, away from all the homeless and in the most exclusive school districts they can afford.

Do you think this is politically viable, particularly in the US, which has a lot of open space and long commutes? Are you going to apply this tax to rural communities and farmers as well?

Of course not. Reducing carbon emissions and avoiding climate change has never been viable, because it lowers people’s quality of life now for the benefit of people not alive now (or in decades past).

The only viable solution within the timeframe humans had was to reduce fossil fuel consumption in total, from some combination of reducing per capita consumption and reducing population itself.

However, it is a prisoner’s dilemma, and there was never going to be unity in reducing everyone’s consumption and hence quality of life, especially not from the 80% of up and coming people around the world who are looking forward to enjoying life like the upper 20% have been.

What solution is politically viable in the US though? There is serious resistance to almost anything.

That would have a particularly large impact on food prices. Increasing the portion of food cost attributable to fuel by between 3x and 10x would hit poorer people particularly hard. It would raise the price of pretty much everything else too, all of which hits people harder the lower they are on the economic ladder.

Maximizing the speed of implementing renewable energy that can power EV's, and scaling EV production to more affordable levels are much less likely to stomp on the poor. And unlike trying to raise gas prices to $30 it's actually realistic from a social/political standpoint, especially since we're already on that path, just not as fast as we could be.

This is not a simple problem, and it's exceedingly rare that a complex problem has such a simple solution as this. Even the renewable/EV combo has inumerable variables behind it that have taken decades to get us to the point we're at now.

It would return food to local grown again. Making it no longer the cheapest option to ship food from the other side of the planet rather than growing in the same state.

Local isn't available everywhere in the quantities needed to feed large local (city) populations. That might change over a long enough period of time, but waiting for market forces to adjust the food supply to to closest locations available would leave a lot more poor and hungry people in the meantime.

If we're going to tinker with things in that way, it's better to do it on the side of pushing renewables and EV's as fast as possible. Until then, things like raising a gas tax are regressive, falling significantly harder on people least able to bear the extra burden.

Then we shall continue on the road we have been on, consuming enough fossil fuels to affect climate change. Hence the conclusion one comes to is to live it up while we can.

That's a false dichotomy. It's not "raise fuel prices 5x to 10x or fail". We should be working on a constellation of initiatives that move things forward but without leaving significant chunks of people behind.

If the bottom 25% of the economic ladder get stomped on and pushed into poverty (when not already there) how does that help? It will set things back: Because the people getting stomped, going hungry, working 2 jobs and 60hours a week-- they're not going to sit back and suffer in silence as things get worse. The backlash would be enormous and political pressure insurmountable.

We need solutions that account for the people impacted by them or we'll get nowhere. Throwing your hands up and saying Fine, "live is up while we can" because a simple solution doesn't solve a complex problem is defeatist. And stops you-- likely a very smart person-- from contributing to the dialog of how to solve an extraordinarily complex problem and implementing some of those countless big and little things we can do to keep moving forward.

> That would have a particularly large impact on food prices. Increasing the portion of food cost attributable to fuel by between 3x and 10x would hit poorer people particularly hard. It would raise the price of pretty much everything else too, all of which hits people harder the lower they are on the economic ladder.

In the short term, but it may incentivize more local production chains in the future. A large part of the reason food is grown in such large, factory farm setting is because transport is a fraction of the cost of the food itself. As you say it's a complex problem and there aren't any simple solutions.

Yes, the purpose would be to reduce consumption of basically all things, since cheap fossil fuels are the basis of manufacturing and transporting almost all things. Hitting people hard would be a necessary effect of reducing carbon emissions, although wealth transfers from the rich to poor via taxation can modulate how much the poor are hit relative to the rich.

The market didn't find an efficient solution to this problem, so you want to use non-market forces to influence the market and then double down on relying on the market to find an efficient solution again?

How much do we have to sacrifice to the market before we'll admit that maybe we should consider other solutions?

"The market" only cares about things that are factored in to prices. External costs like the environment are currently not factored in so the market will never optimize for them.

If you simply set a carbon tax, overnight the whole market puts a huge effort in to lowering their environmental damage because now that damage has a number next to it and can be optimized for.

Well, it would actually be a good start and maybe push Americans to smaller and more efficient cars. The average price of gasoline is ~$7 in Europe, in poorer countries, and people seem to make do.

But I doubt the average American will give up the quality of life of owning a car that probably weighs have half a ton more than the average European car.

> Why? People need to get to work, so they drive. Two hour commutes in carbon-spewing cars happen because people can't afford to live near their work.

The emissions of all consumer cars together is a drop in the bucket compared to other CO2 sources.

Source?

"Light Duty Vehicles", which are presumably cars, make up over half the "transportation" emissions in the US, and transportation is the leading source of emissions.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

By your own link all light duty vehicles make up a mere 17% of emissions.

Also if you track down the original report that pie chart is drawn from, you’ll find that is only considering direct fossil fuel combustion. Consider all sources and it drops down to 12%.

ALL consumer cars everywhere, for every purpose, amounts to 12% of emissions. Commuting is a smaller fraction of that. I stand by my claim.

> Consider all sources and it drops down to 12%.

What does this mean? All sources?

How is 17% emissions a small amount? It's as much as our agricultural and commercial emissions combined and 1% more than our residential and commercial emissions combined. It's more than the the emissions of all airline travel. Only industrial and electricity related emissions are more. What other category would you pick to lean up on?

There are other ways CO2 or other greenhouse gasses are emitted besides burning fossil fuels. Examples include outgassing from construction (e.g. concrete), metal refineries, and livestock.

According to [1], the US had net Greenhouse Gas emissions of 6558.3 MMT CO2 Eq, of which transportation CO2 energy emissions took 1817.2 MMT CO2 Eq, of which 58% was due to light-duty vehicles. That means 16% of total emissions are due to light-duty vehicles, not 12% as you say, and only 1% off the 17% listed above.

[1]: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-04/documents/us..., Section 2-3 Trends, Pg 94.

Page ES-7 gives a total amount for transportation, of which light duty vehicles is a percentage given in the pie chart. Multiply out and you get 12%.

I’m on mobile now I’m not interested in delving further because 12% vs 16% doesn’t matter. The vast majority of emissions are not from cars.

So then I pose the question again, which set of emissions would you cut? The only other categories that pollute more is industry or electric generation. Which would you cut and why would you rather cut that than the emissions from cars?

Industry and electric generation. Switch to hydrogen rather than carbon-based industrial processes, and nuclear power.

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