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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, there’s one ethical way to live for those with the privilege to make the choice. It’s small, dense, multi-family housing in an urban area with minimal automobile reliance.

Climate change is very real and contributing to sprawl and car culture is an extremely selfish decision.

I understand many people want to live in houses with yards, but think about the world 250 years from now. People are going to have a lot fewer choices about how they live and it’s due in part to the decisions we make today.

And I understand this is a radical view and I’m not going to change anyone’s mind, but it’s the way I choose to live.

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I don’t find issues with your views but I think it’s completely untenable to make this happen politically and will either result in global war or the collapse of our civilization. Kind of saying the same thing twice I suppose.

If the people that say they support sustainable living actually understood what is meant by that phrase almost none of them would support it. It’s not just billionaires giving up their jets as is the popular notion, but as you point out, basically giving up everything Americans consider staples of middle class life.

I think we’ve got a better chance inventing a giant machine that removes greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than we do of convincing people to follow your way of life. And climate change is just the tip of the ice berg.

> but I think it’s completely untenable to make this happen politically and will either result in global war or the collapse of our civilization

:eyeroll:

Yeah, no need to explain the details of how encouraging people to live in cities would result in global war.

There's a difference between saying hey, it'd be cool if you move to cities and intentionally increasing the prices of raw materials people use (like gas prices in california) and preventing the development of projects which make those things cheaper. Implementing policies that say hey fuck you and the way that you're living and pretending its the only way forward generally doesn't win people over.

When the prices of basic necessities increase people affected by the price increases don't usually think to themselves, well gee! I'll just move to those wonderful cities I've heard so much about full of those people who I have nothing in common with culturally. It's not like there's mutual distrust and is totally gonna be such a great time!

I was trying to decide which part of your comment to quote so I could agree with it, but I agree with the whole thing. Perhaps it is a nihilistic view, but I do think society’s options are giant magic machine or global war/collapse of civilization as we know it.

I even go a bit further than what I talked about. I don’t eat meat, have never driven a car (fortunately healthy enough to bicycle/walk everywhere), and don’t fly in airplanes. It’s funny when I talk about how I live and people say, “Wow how do you do it?I just have to _________.” I don’t have the heart to tell them that their great great grandchildren may not have that choice.

In that sense, I do feel like it doesn’t matter what we do today. The cards have been shuffled, dealt, and the hand has been played. All that’s left is to turn them face up.

but do you grow your own food or do you buy food that is trucked in and industrially produced?

Buying food from farms that get economies of scale would probably be less carbon intensive per unit than individuals tending their own plots. Those farms could also ensure they minimize/offset their own carbon footprints.

is the manual labor of tending a garden a high carbon intensity activity?

I don’t know tbh, but I think having lots of small individual plots you probably lose economies of scale. Especially if you’re growing in dense urban areas there’s probably more efficient use for the land. Although vertical farming could maybe offset this.

Mostly talking out of my ass. I’m sure there’s someone on here with the answers you seek.

Probably not, but spacing out housing enough so that every housing unit has land for its own garden to tend probably adds a lot of high carbon intensity transportation.

It is not a radical view and I heard it more than once from different perspectives. Anything else but cities is not sustainable, scalable or maintainable for the long run.

It's not just cars, think of infrastructure like water, electricity or roads. Think about supplying to those people in remote shops or thinks about the land they use and climate change they produce locally and globally just by that

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