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Comment by mrkeen | Hacker News Reader

https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...

Progress in which direction?

Article subtitle: The rapid rise of renewables and EVs has already put us on a safer path.

Very few people on Earth have a Tesla. I can't begin to imagine the fuckening of the planet that has to happen in order to get the rest of the world up to our level of consumption & gridlock.

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Electric Cars aren't the answer, active and public transport through making our towns and city's more distributed and decentralized

The more decentralized a place is the harder it is to offer good transit service. Some of the most famous and used american systems like chicago or nyc are hub and spoke centralized systems.

Most people live in cities. Even better, only a few countries vastly over consume per capita. The solution is straightforward technically, but not politically. Westerners (and especially Americans) will balk at public reducing consumption in line with the rest of the world.

Well people really seem to like the suburban model, in which case we need lower density mixed use commercial where we can have small grocers, cafes pubs, low rise offices intertwined with the suburbs, rather than the current euclidean zoning model

Honestly thats not all that different than what exists in euclidian suburbs. You just have the offices/pubs/grocers on the arterial while housing is on residential blocks just off the arterial. I’ve always been able to walk to this sort of stuff even in lower density suburbs. Maybe I haven’t lived in the worst cases of them though.

Preach.

Electric cars are not “the solution,” just a cleaner version of the old system. And this is a system that, even before climate became an awareness before it was a concern, was well on its way to creating the sixth mass extinction.

We need balance with nature and natural systems and not just reduction in global warming potential. Though obviously global warming will accelerate these trends, the fellow life that keeps us all alive on this planet like honeybees and plankton is in serious trouble.

So let’s keep that big picture in mind. We need higher density cities, massive changes to transportation systems to support them (beyond the personal car) in order to come back into balance with nature and the future of life on earth. Clean cars are a bridge technology to a future not an answer to what that future needs to look like.

Have you ever ridden a bus? You can't decentralize public transit.

Also, do you know the impact of tearing up old cement and putting new cement somewhere else?

People are cray, man... we have to make do with what we have 9 times out of 10 rather than tear it up and replace it. "Strong Towns" and the like are full of it.

What on earth do you mean full of it? Improving our communities? Places are not static and unchanging, they are living and breathing that can and must change to better reflect society and ecology

Do you think concrete is recyclable?

EVs are an important move but they seem to get too much airtime: Worldwide EVs can remove at most 1/6th of the CO2. EVs definitely change our manufacturing base to be more electricity friendly, and they seem to be making consumers more concientious towards reducing CO2 usage.

Worldwide in 2020 (Gt = billion ton of CO2:

  Electricity and heat 15.09Gt
  Transport 8.08Gt
  Manufacturing and construction 6.17Gt
  Agriculture 5.70Gt
  Fugitive emissions 3.25Gt
  Buildings 3.00Gt
  Industry 2.79Gt
  Waste 1.56Gt
  Land-use change and forestry 1.40Gt
  Aviation and shipping 1.24Gt
  Other fuel combustion 0.637Gt

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