Hacker News Reader

Comment by matteoraso | Hacker News Reader

> It doesn’t work for people farming corn/rice etc

Well duh, that's an edge case. Obviously I don't expect literally every single person to give up driving, but most people who use this website are white collar workers, or at least people who don't need to haul things on a regular basis.

View on HN

White collar workers are typically hauling their kids around on a regular basis. While it's possible to take a small child to a neighborhood school on a bike, we're often going to after-school activities that are too far away for cycling to be practical even with an e-bike. And forget about public transit, it often doesn't go to those places at all or is so slow that it's impossible to arrive on time.

A rather large slice of the global populace was still farming in 1988. It’s that same carbon intensive industrial agriculture which enabled ever more urbanization.

>A rather large slice of the global populace was still farming in 1988.

Okay? Last I checked, it's not 1988 anymore.

Yea, but the argument was we should have cut global CO2 emissions more. Subsistence farming is better for the environment, less so for people.

It’s an inherent tradeoff, where significant emissions was required to lift them out of extreme poverty. It’s one thing to suggest developing economies shouldn’t have industrialized, but it’s unconscionable to accept the suffering that would have resulted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com