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> In france the yellow vests protest was caused by a planned carbon tax increase on gas. Car dependent citizens rioted.

It's reductive. The protest was not just on the carbon tax, but that the carbon tax was used to finance the cancellation of the wealth tax (aka ISF for "Impot sur la Fortune"). Source: https://wikileaks.org/macron-emails/emailid/50207

I'm French and I've had my tax rate almost cut in half since Macron has become President... because I gained millions on the stock markets. The more I earn from capital gains, the less I'm taxed (relative to my wealth). Each extra € is taxed at 30% (all included), which is less than my far-less-rich coworkers (who only earn salaries, which can be taxed at 45%... 1.5x my tax rate!). And this is wihout even talking about the ISF!

This is soooo unfair and the Gilets Jaunes are simply aware of that, even if they don't know all the little details, and despite the media not describing what's really going on.

> Only 12% of ROAD TRANSPORT emits co2. So to be clear, electric cars are nice, but they're solving almost nothing.

I just want to add, that so many people buy in to the idea that the solution to gas powered cars is electric cars. But I feel like the significantly climate friendlier solution is bicycles and trains. The latter requires us to really go outside of our comfort zones (in the USA anyway) and we just don't want to do that. Which is too bad because I would find a bicycle friendly city to be much more livable. I lived in silicon valley for 15 years and it was remarkable how hostile it felt to bicycles for how flat it all is.

But I wonder what are the other problems like this. Where we think the solution is an electric car (and lithium mining, and working long hours to pay off the price tag, and emissions when manufacturing it) when a better solution would be adapting to a bicycle-focused world. I think plastic pollution is one area where we think bioplastics or recycling are the solution, but a better one would be standardized glass bottles with municipal washing systems. And zero waste grocery stores. We really need those. I have collected so many jars to reuse and its amazing what we keep buying and throwing away with every container of food.

> I just want to add, that so many people buy in to the idea that the solution to gas powered cars is electric cars. But I feel like the significantly climate friendlier solution is bicycles and trains.

And I want to say: yes. Everyone knows that. I don't get why this point has to be raised every time the topic of EVs and climate intersect.

EVs aren't competing with bicycles and trains, they're competing with ICE cars. Both for market and attention. If bicycles could work instead of EVs where people want to introduce EVs, they would've already replaced ICEs in that role.

To use a software analogy, bringing up bikes and trains here reads like, "You all talk about replacing this legacy component with an API-compatible alternative that's an order of magnitude faster -- but you know what would be even better? Rewriting the whole codebase so that we don't need that component anymore."

> EVs aren't competing with bicycles and trains, they're competing with ICE cars. Both for market and attention. If bicycles could work instead of EVs where people want to introduce EVs, they would've already replaced ICEs in that role.

This feels like a free market fallacy. “No one is buying it therefore it is not useful.” Well actually we have to plan our cities as we build, expand, and improve upon them. So we could decide to make them more bike friendly and then bikes would be a viable alternative to cars. But since the US doesn’t have a lot of bike friendly cities, that hasn’t happened.

But it is our choice whether or not to build those cities. We have to exercise foresight to find the best solution. Otherwise we’re just making incremental changes which may not be best in the broader picture.

Bicycle and trains are an "ideal solution" that works for abandoning this Save File and starting a New Game. Since we're building on top of already existing society, in the U.S. it's not tenable. We'd need to rebuild 98% of what's already been built around cars, in order to support populations living in walkable cities getting around by train. And obviously, re-building that much infrastructure would require counterproductive amounts of energy.

> Only 12% of ROAD TRANSPORT emits co2.

Road transportation accounts for ca. 12% of global emissions. Nearly 100% of road transportation emits CO2.

Also "only 12%" as if that's nothing. If other things are both easier to tackle and make up >50% then there might be a point ignoring this eight of the problem for now, but it's not.

A recent strategy is to add a carbon tax on imports in the form of tariffs. I don't think the yellow vests protest will go up in arms over it, especially since the second effect of tariffs is to encourage national production. It will effect french farmers that rely on exports, but since those tariffs are import taxes that reside in other countries there is not much point to protesting to the french government.

What the yellow vests protest demonstrated is that carbon taxes need to be designed so that individual voters are less impacted directly. Add a carbon tax on power plants and energy prices might go up, but if you already have 50% wind or nuclear, the effect will be quite damped. If energy prices is already quite unstable with huge spike and dips, the effect might not even be noticed in the noise, and the critical application of blame can be directed to the weather when the price do go up.

> Road transport is only 12% of co2 emissions.

This is flawed reasoning. The figure only applies to the _continuous_ CO2 emissions of road traffic. It's ignoring the CO2 emissions caused by building the vehicles, building and maintaining infrastructure and the consequences of car-centric urban planning (urban sprawl, unliveable city centres, wasted space for parking, lots of sealed ground, traffic problems, poor air quality, etc.).

This kind of reasoning also is the cause that nothing will change in the near future, because no one has the courage to price goods and services according to their true impact. A car on the road is more than just a CO2 emitter - it has to be built, scrapped, requires roads, causes traffic problems, reduces air quality, causes health issues from noise and pollutants, generates micro-particles (from tyres), seals ground (parking spaces), reduces the efficiency and liveability of cities and so on.

Debates about climate and environment need to stop focussing on CO2 emissions and start taking into account the broader impact. That's why EVs are nothing but greenwashing. That's why car traffic as a whole has to be reduced dramatically. Emissions only tell a very small part of the story (here: 12%).

There’s several other pullutants removed by moving to electric transportation, not only co2.

In densely populated areas we’re seeing severe effects on our health thanks to all the other crap being emitted by burning fossil fuels.

I believe in a 100 years people will be like: “…and they burned this crap in the middle of where they lived?! Crazy stuff”.

But yeah, otherwise I agree - it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t type situation.