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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

I assume people not consuming as much as the people in the EU and USA have a goal of consuming as much as the people in the EU and USA.

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Prices show that people in the US have a goal of living lower-footprint lifestyles in walkable urban areas.

We can't always get what we want. But which goals are attainable depends on policy choices.

They very much show the opposite over the past couple of years, ever since the pandemic.

Housing prices in suburban and rural areas have exploded across North America. People seem to want their own slice of land distant from others.

On the margins, sure, there suburbs are gaining a little relative to the city. On the whole, though, cities are vastly more in demand than suburbs.

Disagree strongly. Just look at suburb housing prices in the Bay Area versus within SF itself.

People want to be close to cities, but if it means giving up a single family home they’ll gladly live in the suburbs.

Where are you seeing this? San Francisco condos run $1077/sqft, more than the most expensive county for single family homes, San Mateo, at $1022/sqft.

Correspondingly the price per square foot in Manhattan is about $1300, while Queens and Staten Island run not even half that.

People may choose to put the savings from less desirable environments into larger homes. But there’s no reason condos shouldn’t be as large as houses. Urban environments are just so scarce that the only way even pretty rich people can get them is to compromise on space.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234783/average-sales-pr...

Also, the most popular vehicles are pick up trucks.

You're definitely in a filter bubble.

I recognize it's a filter bubble that talks about these things a lot on the internet, but $1000+/sqft for NY and SF condos aren't lying. People want these things, badly.

I suspect many of the people who want those $1k/sq ft condos in NYC and SF would not appreciate a fossil fuel tax sufficiently high to curb air travel such that even annual vacations to tropical destinations are not possible.

The point of a carbon tax isn't to ban things, but to redirect spending to more efficient uses, even people who like foreign holidays come out ahead as the greater efficiency is a net gain.

Travel habits seem much easier to change than the built environment.

What’s the percent of population living in those condos? 99% of Americans don’t live there.

Judging by the prices, they would like to, and they would if you made enough of them.

Isn't SF out of room? This is just supply demand curves that can't be met with more supply.

They very much do, but now they have to pay "carbon tax" invented by people who were responsible for most of the pollution until China

But they also have access to solar, wind, and nuclear technology that were far less developed when the countries you are blaming were industrializing.

Carbon Tax money is not thrown out of the window. It will mostly stay in the same country, and it will create jobs and wealth for people who are part of the solution, not part of the problem.

History isn't fair but this resentment is going to destroy humanity.

I think it's the "Screw you, I got mine" race-to-the-bottom attitude will destroy us faster. Pointing out this ongoing problem is not resentment - no one wants to talk about per-capita carbon footprint, or have binding targets, because everyone is selfish.

Well, no, it wouldn’t be the resentment destroying humanity, it would be the people who caused all the emissions destroying humanity.

History might say humanity was destroyed because it didn’t attempt geo-engineering fast enough.

Also responsible for basically all technological innovation which makes it even possible to have viable "green energy".

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