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Comment by ffssffss | Hacker News Reader

I think you're missing the bigger problem here - climate change. We cannot drive in ICE cars forever if we want our environment to remain livable. Your car-based lifestyle might be fine for you, right now, but it's still unsustainable and contributing to a worse world for your kids and their kids. If EVs aren't going to to be a drop in solution, then we really do need to talk about reorganizing society away from cars, so that we can have a society at all in the future.

The only other option is some kind of technological silver bullet for carbon capture that manages to arrive in time.

Personally I'm fairly pessimistic about this problem. I don't see a political path to widespread mass transit in the US, and I don't know how you remove the incentive that developing economies have to pollute. It feels like a prisoners' dilemma.

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I think I am less stressed about this than you are. I remember someone ranting at me in the 90s about peak oil and how our kids will live in the stone ages because we'll run out (their thesis of course was that ppl shouldn't have kids)

Science evolves as does technology, and inevitably both factors will change over the coming decades. To base your life around the worst case predictions of models (where the disaster moment keeps pushing back as time progresses) is not logical.

And then specifically. I work from home as does my wife. Most of my driving (in a hybrid btw) is 2 miles to drop our kid at school or go to the grocery store. Really hard to connect this lifestyle to dooming the plannet honestly.

Ah, if you don't think climate change is going to be an issue, then I think I see where you're coming from. I hope you're right.

> Science evolves as does technology, and inevitably both factors will change over the coming decades. To base your life around the worst case predictions of models (where the disaster moment keeps pushing back as time progresses) is not logical.

Operating on the basis of the most extremist "worst case" scenarios that are very unlikely (like your "peak oil" example) probably doesn't make too much sense, but it's probably not a bad thing to be rather pessimistic about these sort of things when making policy.

We can take no thought for the morrow and trust that future technology will sort it all out. Maybe it will, but what if it doesn't? There are no guarantees and hard constraints on our physical universe and planet. It certainly wouldn't be the first time in history human-made ecological changes caused large problems.

Or we can be more pessimistic today. Maybe it will later turn out that won't have been necessary, but it still would have been the smart thing to do as a matter of risk management, since we couldn't have known in the past how things would work out in the future.

As with all things, you can of course exaggerate, but it's a mistake to throw our the baby with the bathwater because some extremist said something extreme.

I am in favor of a risk-based approach as you're describing. Some certain sacrifice today is worth some unclear reduction in an uncertain future event. The question is - how much?

If you wanted to be extreme in CO2 reduction, I guess your best bet is to kill every living human and animal on the planet (to be clear, not advocating this!) Clearly that's "too high" a price to pay.

On the other hand, you can be very practical and look for CO2 reduction in ways that don't harm people's current lives. Increasing vehicle mileage is an example of this - mileage has doubled and emissions per vehicles halved since 1975.[1] In fact, I suspect this is going to get even better very quickly. My Highlander Hybrid, which is a large vehicle, gets roughly 50% more MPG than in this chart.

So we can say we're already doing a lot (and that's just one thing.) The idea that somehow the line between acceptable and unacceptable just happens to be right between suburban and city living feels a little too convenient for me.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-...

> Increasing vehicle mileage is an example of this - mileage has doubled and emissions per vehicles halved since 1975.

A fantastic point!

Unfortuneately undercut by absolute truth (rather than per vehicle comparisons) that

* the number of vehicles (both in the US and globally) has substantially increased in number since the 1970s,

* many of the older vehicles with the poor performance are still active on roads somewhere,

* the nature of vehicle use in western countries has changed - while the efficiences for both cars and SUVs may have improved, the proprtion of SUV usage (with lesser efficiencies) has significantly increased.

I wouldn't advocate killing all humans and animals, but there's much to be said for halving the number of high consumption humans ...

Careful because inevitably someone would classify you as "high consumption" and try to halve you.

Unlikely - I literally grew up cheek by jowl with traditional hunter gathers in the Kimberleys, on a personal level my consumption is well below the Australian mean, which itself is well below the central north american norm.

I'm comfortable getting by for months on end sans most things - global field geophysics was an extended jolly.

> Increasing vehicle mileage is an example of this - mileage has doubled and emissions per vehicles halved since 1975

That kind of progress has questionable impact on net emissions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Climate Change, even if it's as bad as the aggressive models predict, is an intractable problem.

1) There are trillions of dollars in petroleum reserves in the ground. This is money in the pockets of people, e.g. Putin. They aren't going to let go of that easily.

2) China and India have no realistic pathway to zero carbon and will buy the oil that isn't bought by the G7 sustainable nations. Most of the world's population will follow them.

The only valid response is mitigation. Amsterdam is below sea level. It is far easier to detect and solve real problems than try to predict massive problems in the distant future.

> 2 miles to drop our kid at school

In a bike-friendly country, you'd do that by bike, not by car.

Of course, if your whole world is built around owning and using a car, then doing this by bike becomes dangerous and doing this by car becomes less insane. Then you find our you're dedicating a very large portion of the ground to those machines you use twice a day for 10 minutes - making them unfit for other purposes the remaining 23 hours and 40 minutes.

I really like driving - but I really like the outside to be fit for other things than driving as well. American suburbia falls way too far short of that.

I'm the person you're responding to. I drop my kid off by bike when it's warm. 14 min door to door. And drive other times. Solve my suburb :)

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