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Comment by VoodooJuJu | Hacker News Reader

>people shouldn’t drive a 2-ton vehicle for 40km to buy 200g of Wagyu every other day

Your example describes a fantasy.

The vast majority of people do not travel anywhere close to 40km to buy groceries. Even in a car-centric country like America, the average driver travels just 4km.

If someone has to travel 40km or more to get to a grocery store, it's because they live rural. People who travel that far for groceries do not buy 200g of wagyu at a time. They typically only go once or a few times per month and they stock up.

The population of people who live rural is very small. People who live rural are also quite poor.

The carbon emissions, environmental impact, and fuel consumption of this population of people is so unbelievably small, it's irrelevant.

But, you are targeting this small population of poor people. No wonder you get so much pushback, or "extremism". I guess poor people defending their way of life is extreme.

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Here in the UK, if I had to travel 'just 4km' then I wouldn't take a car. In any case it's the other 50% of journeys that are 4km+ (20% of journeys are 10+ miles) that are the problem:

https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-marc...

The USA is a young country, built from the ground up around the automobile. Undoing that both physically and psychologically is just not possible in my opinion.

The UK is smaller than Oregon. It's really not an ideal comparison.

Doesn't matter how big it is, nobody lives in "Oregon" the same way nobody lives in "The UK".

People live in communities, cities, towns. You can build a human scale town in Oregon just as well as you can in the UK.

That was hyperbole.

But also not entirely unrealistic or uncommon, and I live in an european city with good public transport. If I want to buy something special like a good cut of beef, go to an asian market, I’ll be doing a 30km roundtrip by car.

From what I’ve seen a roundtrip to Walmart in the US for weekly groceries can be in the same ballpark - even in the city, since the larger stores are always on the outskirts.

You can keep raising strawmen, but the extremism is going from a suggestion of reduced car traffic and reduced meat consumption, to accusations of not caring about lives and mass murder.

>That was hyperbole.

>But also not entirely unrealistic

Well which is it? Hyperbole or not, the intent behind it is the same, which seems to focus the climate change problem on some of the weakest sources of fuel consumption who also happen to be some of the poorest, most vulnerable people.

I think it's a kind of subconscious projection, that the example you've brought to the fore is those poor people driving to buy their groceries, not the industrial behemoths doing the real dirty work.

> some of the poorest, most vulnerable people

That is a strawman you introduced into the conversation. Most cities in the west are planned around cars. I’ve been to a few of the largest cities in the US and don’t think those 6-lane highways were clogged with “the poorest most vulnerable people”. You see the same patterns in south america.

This is really about the average car-centric culture, consumption patterns, the system of centralized food distribution through massive supermarket chains. It’s about urban planning, incentives, regulations and public policies, not lords vs servants. Note that I didn’t suggest individuals should stop driving to fight climate change, these changes can only start happening at a much higher level.

The EPA says emissions from transportation are responsible for 29% of all pollution [1]. This is a bigger slice than industrial pollution, and 58% of it coming from light vehicles, 28% from trucks (including the ones that supply these supermarkets, and not accounting for the diesel used to bring our bananas, garlic and olive oil by sea from across the world).

[1] https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate...

No, poor people getting disproportionately harmed by many climate change proposals is not a strawman, it's a very real consequence that needs to be addressed.

Dude, work on your reading comprehension. Hyperbole is a literary device.

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