Oh, I agree on this. People were never going to accept, nor IMO should they have, a massive reduction in their living standards. New technology is the way to make people's lives better while also reducing global warming.
I just got back from a off-grid island here in New Zealand - 20 years ago, generators were everywhere and as soon as it got dark you'd hear nothing but the buzzing of running them all around you. Now there is solar everywhere and it's completely silent.
>Oh, I agree on this. People were never going to accept, nor IMO should they have, a massive reduction in their living standards.
I don't even think a massive reduction is necessary, though. Just stop driving, and your carbon footprint shrinks massively. I bike everywhere, and I don't consider it a sacrifice at all. Obviously, there still needs to be commensurate increases in funding for public transit to match the decrease in driving, but most people would still save money by not having to buy gas anymore. Really, I think that living an eco-friendly life would mean improving life, not worsening it.
You not driving requires other people to move everything you need very close to yourself. It doesn’t work for people farming corn/rice etc because that inherently requires lots of land which means everything can’t be close to them.
"People farming" aren't expending fuel for personal use (save that which they are consuming for personal use) they're expending fuel on behalf of some {X} number of people who consume the produce.
We have farmers here (I kid you not) who live in a rural town centre and ride electric bikes to their work place, 4 thousand acre farms, upon which they operate giant machines for turning, seeding, and harvesting (and others for fire control, etc).
Personal fossil fuel usage should be reduced, it's just wasteful and counter productive, production fossil fuel usage needs to be made moe and more efficient an replaced to whatever degree possible (Agbots are a booming field).
I’m wondering how viable you think it is to do that 7 days a week with a farm 60+ miles from the nearest town? Much of the midwestern US is really empty.
It's viable to live on a farm and rarely leave it, many do and many enjoy that lifestyle.
It's viable to have shopping and personal items shipped in with larger supply deliveries and fold that personal usage into the neccessary usage for production.
FWiW I grew up on a cattle station in one of the more remote parts of the planet, no proper roads, TV, shops, etc and somehow still managed to get a good education and write a few million SLOC of mapping, geophysics, and asset managent code in the 80's and 90's.
Look we’ve got larger form factor EV’s, but suggesting electric bikes as a viable alternative when it’s clearly a niche case for rural commuters is pointless.
Yes, it's viable. Are you incapable of reading? Read the comment again and don't strawman. Do you want people to have zero respect for you?
> when it’s clearly a niche case
The entire oh but rural people is your niche case that you bought up.
For more than a decade now countries such as the US, Australia, etc have been more urban than rural. The overwhelming vast bulk of people live within urban areas.
And still some twit will counter a comment suggesting more people should walk, use lighter more efficient vehicles, etc. with a niche but what about farmers type parry.
That's weak.
Efficient solutions for the future should pay attention to distributions of people, trips, resources, etc.
Sad weak counters focus on "but some are different from the many therefore .."
One size doesn't fit all and there will be exceptions.
> Sad weak counters focus on "but some are different from the many therefore .."
> One size doesn't fit all and there will be exceptions.
There’s ”some” and then there’s 1 in 1,000 people, no that’s an edge case not a solution.
Hell, actually living on a farm is even more efficient, which is why it’s what the overwhelming majority of farmers do. You only brought it up because you found it interesting not because it was actually relevant to the discussion.
PS: Also, at least in the US if someone is living in a town that’s considered an urban area. The threshold for town is higher than the qualifications for urban area.
> 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.
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.
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.
> New technology is the way to make people's lives better while also reducing global warming.
It's not working, so it's fairy tale. Is there evidence that it's really an effective plan to save lives and money caused by climate change?
> People were never going to accept, nor IMO should they have, a massive reduction in their living standards.
The first is just a claim - people accept hardship all the time for one purpose or another (such as wars). Also, what is so sacrosanct about their living standards?
Also, the liability of climate change is already on the balance sheet - and the massive reduction is coming, due to climate change. Just think of all the dead people, all the people who lose their property, all the poverty.
It's like saying, 'I won't suffer a massive reduction in my spending in order to pay my mortgage.' You already have the liability; that sentence doesn't mean anything.
The question is, given that reality, what will you do? Make up fairy tales about fairy godparents giving you magic wands to solve you problem?
US CO2 emissions in 2007 peaked at 6,016 million metric tons before consistently falling since down to 4,807 in 2023.
Per capita numbers are even better, but everyone assumes its from imports seemingly ignoring the massive reduction in coal use and vastly improved efficiency of just about everything. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1049662/fossil-us-carbon...