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According to this crowd the alternative is probably to pretend bikes and trains can supply all transit needs and ignore the existence of rural and suburban areas.

Everyone just has to move into transit accessible cities. Of course that would require building massive amounts of urban housing that these same people would protest because it would “destroy the character of the neighborhood.”

There’s a certain mentality that thinks everything is wrong and horrible and any proposed solution is suspect unless it demands onerous sacrifice or doesn’t work. On the left it’s the degrowth people. On the right it’s the trads. God help us when those two groups figure out they’re actually on the same side.

(PS I think trains are great and we should build more of them. Same with urban housing. But trains can’t solve the entire problem. EVs are absolutely required to decarbonize as not everyone wants or is able to live in a dense city.)

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"This crowd" usually suggests revisiting the US cultural default of living in car-dependent suburbs and relying on cars for everything.

That’s fine. We could cut probably 30-50% off our car use that way provided we could completely overrule NIMBYs and force massive urban development.

That would leave the other 50-70% of the country.

I feel like that was covered by the "Everyone just has to move into transit accessible cities" statement.

Before that, we had horses or donkeys to get around, as far as I can tell owning a household or personal beast of burden was about as common as personal or household car ownership is now.

People act like cars created a new paradigm, and they didn't - they extended and improved an old one.

In rural areas, yes, if you had the money. In cities walking, trains, and omnibuses were just as common. Suburbs didn't exist yet - they were specifically a coinvention of cars in the same way that you can't have smartphones without the cloud.

The earliest suburbs were along rail lines but they really exploded with cars.

Proto Suburbs did exist, sorta, but the nascent middle class was so small as to be meaningless

The specific case in point is holiday travel, though. You can't fix that with urban planning.

> these same people would protest because it would “destroy the character of the neighborhood.”

It's not the same people. The bikes-and-trains people understand and accept that America's suburbs are not fit for purpose and would require radical redevelopment to be even remotely green[0]. They want to vaporize the zoning code to allow this to happen. The NIMBYs who are shouting about neighborhood character specifically want to keep their cars and lawns, and think all the environmental problems America has are someone else's fault.

People are suspect of quick-fix solutions because we've had decades of being sold quick-fix solutions (plastic recycling, clean coal, electric vehicles) when climate change and environmental damage are complicated, multivariate problems.

TBH I have been skeptical of degrowth's left-wing credentials. I'm not entirely sure how we retain democracy without unbounded economic growth when...

a) Human society has an unlimited capacity for elite propagation[1]

b) Elites will absolutely cannibalize the rest of us if further growth is not possible

[0] No, having a green lawn does not make your house green.

[1] Gestures vaguely at The Tyranny of Structurelessness

> The NIMBYs who are shouting about neighborhood character specifically want to keep their cars and lawns, and think all the environmental problems America has are someone else's fault.

Oh The Urbanity! has a good (7m) video, 'The Problem of “Neighborhood Character”':

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bkC8YlBxoM

Rationally speaking the NIMBYs and pro-transit urbanists should not be the same people but people often hold absurdly contradictory views. I recall meeting people in California who were anti-development and wanted California to be a “sanctuary state” for immigrants and LGBTQ people who feel unwelcome elsewhere. So where will they live? Usually a complicated answer that boiled down to “not next to me.”

The suburbs probably can’t be as efficient as dense cities but they can be improved. The gap is also not as huge as you might think. A lot of a person’s footprint is in the food they eat and the stuff they buy not their house. People in cities still eat and buy things.

I agree that degrowth won’t work out well in any currently understood political system for numerous reasons. The “continued growth is impossible” argument is built on the fallacy that growth must equal increased resource use when in advanced economies these have been decoupling for a while.

The real limits to growth probably relate to the physical limits on the information density of mass-energy. How much value can exist per unit of “stuff?” Then there are things like space flight but I’m not even sure you have to go there.

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