The argument always goes that people want to feel good while doing very little. But what I hear mostly are people who want to do nothing but still complain.
It’s the 30 mile commutes, single person occupied SUVs, flying for vacations, and living driving distance to everything in suburbs and exurbs causing exponentially greater than necessary usage of fuel to move mass that is the vast majority of our problem.
The only solution to the issue is to increase the cost of fuel. If we don’t accomplish that, all the other efforts are a waste of time and energy. If we do accomplish raising the cost of fuel, then everything else will fall in line, including costs of disposable plastic goods which will go up and cause people to consume less.
Except, of course, this is politically untenable because of all the investment assumptions requiring 10% ROI to meet debt obligations.
The noise of the streets, neighbors, an even other residents in the same apartment (if sharing, because there's not enough single / studio places at good value) invade. The smells from neighbors and others invade. The shared garbage chute, elevator or stairwell where you interface with the lingering smoking, pet, or messes invades personal space as well.
The building code (at least in the US) in the cities isn't high enough to provide actual solitude and escape from being so close to everyone else.
Inside cities the rent seeking keeps rents there too high.
Outside of cities, rent seeking helps to prevent new home ownership (rather than temporary rental), while the lack of regulations and taxation for infrastructure (like transport of goods and people) undervalues and under-taxes the opportunity cost.
Much like many of the other social ills in the US the problems require a national framework and local solutions; but the balance and distribution of planning is out of scale and stuck decades if not a hundred years or more in the past when the speed of transportation provided pressures that made local management good enough.
Source: Sustainable energy, without the hot air. This book dives into the bigs that need to be tackled before the smalls.
Plus, penalizing fuel hurts the poor more than the rich. The poor are the ones driving long distances from cheap housing to city centres for work. They are the personal support workers, caregivers and Uber drivers. The rich can afford to live within 10 mins walking distance of work, and can also afford to move when changing jobs to maintain walkability.
I don’t think sustainable fuel (non fossil fuel) is realistic on the timescale that humans need it to be. Fossil fuel is just so convenient with its portability and ease of use, that it will remain preferred for many uses.
There is no plastic without fossil fuels. All goods are dependent on plastic in some form or another; many goods are made entirely of plastic. Eliminating plastic requires anywhere from minor to major redesign of a given good and a correspondingly increased bill of materials, both for the cost of redesign and cost of sourcing the alternative, and these costs will be passed directly onto the customer, thereby raising the prices of everything. Put those two together, it will become apparent that living in a modern western society with the abundance we are used to becomes quickly unsustainable for everyone except the very wealthy. You may think you can bear the cost on an SV salary but most people in America cannot. You are asking people in America to accept a non-trivial downgrade in their standard of living and they will fight you tooth and nail to preserve it, at the ballot box and elsewhere. That’s just how human beings are wired. In terms of other countries, they are all looking to attain the same standard of life available in the west and will happily consume more fossil fuels to get there. Any lack of demand on the west’s side results in cheaper prices, spurring increased consumption in emerging markets.
Furthermore, lets say you do succeed in increased fuel costs, thus reducing our collective standard of living. It will probably backfire when that happens, as your SV salary depends on their high standard of living. If the avg person’s purchasing power plummets, their demand for tech goods also plummets. After all, the overwhelming majority of tech goods satisfy wants, not needs, and discretionary purchases of new phones, Alexas and Sonos speakers are the first things to go out the window when survival is at stake. There goes that large salary and vested stocks. Now you’re stuck fighting for survival too. It’s a race to the bottom.
There are only two real solutions: A source of energy more dense or portable than gasoline, or some form of population control. The first is difficult, the second is currently unthinkable for most people.
Reducing consumption by increased taxes (worldwide), and/or by reduced population, and finding an alternate source of fuel are the only solutions. But I doubt an alternative to fossil fuels with equivalent properties can be discovered in sufficient time.
Hell, I think that in an ideal world something similar would happen to traffic and parking tickets. More people parking illegally or speeding? More money goes to buses and trains.