Comment by frabbit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frabbit | Hacker News Reader

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25 minutes walking? Get a bike.

And as to the more general argument you can get away with it as long as you have been voting for every proposal to increase taxes to pay for public transport and prevent centralization of services and stores.

I'm afraid I do not buy it. I have lived in what are supposed to be the most car-bound US environments and also in the countryside and it is all a matter of choice: not just personal choice (which I will agree can be a displacement from central planning), but most especially of people choosing low taxation over public services every time.

I can't see how you can possibly continue to live as you have done with your 2000Kg of metal. In fact it's looking very probable that you will be accelerating a decline in many aspects of your life.

Sure. I lived in SoCal without a car for a few years in my youth, so it's possible. Until the first child. At a mature age, I'll take up biking just after I get that knee replacement I've been postponing for a while and learn to bike with a kid on my shoulder. Throw a couple more hours in a day and I'm game.

Joke aside, even if we were to stop driving a car and flying a plane in US (the biggest pop-enviro boogeymen) it will cut 25% of USA greenhouses emissions. US greenhouse emissions is 15% of the world. Completely eliminating the automobile and the plane from US will only cut global emissions by less than 4%. The world energy usage is growing at 1% per year, so all that was accomplished was to push the inevitable about 4 years into the future.

Lets up the ante and ban the automobile & plane globally. (Or wipe US economy off the map). That would only save 15% of global emissions, i.e. push the inevitable 15 years into the future.

Here's a challenge: go find a city of non-trivial size that is living a sustainable life according to Paris accord energy targets. Bikes, Passivhaus, local agriculture, solar rooftops, windmills, the works. You won't find any, other than perhaps 3rd world slums. The only known lifestyle that fits the Paris accord energy envelope is subsistence agriculture. And we can't go back to subsistence agriculture, there is too many of us.

(Obviously) Malthus was right.

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