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Why? Because cities are designed and built on the premise that everyone has their own transportation. The designers don’t really give a rat about public transportation; they assume most people own cars. And in a lot of cases the designers can’t do anything worthwhile about the situation. Too many places, you start talking about improving public transport or providing commuter rail service or things like that, the mouth-breathing Neanderthals start screaming about communism and how it’s unAmerican to buy buses for poor people and @$% like that. Too many knuckle-draggers scream about how they don’t want more taxes to provide communist public transport for poor peole because they’re so stupid they think roads are free. And in elections and public referenda they vote their stupidity. Result is that non-car transportation systems are laughably inadequate and inefficient.
Why own a car at all? Because unless you like the idea of needing 5 hours to get to and from KMart to buy a pair of pants, you need a car. Because this isn’t Germany.
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Gritty Bloc is best bloc.
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And today I find exactly what I was looking for when I was writing that post.
Public transport is essential to beating climate change, especially those forms of public transport that can be easily electrified and run on low carbon energy.
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Wow, busses rank way worse than I expected. Only about 30% better than a gas car and 60% worse than an electric car.
That handy chart of joules/meter/person has a lot of assumptions built into it. Each of the modes shown has a wide range of efficiency, depending on number of people in the transporter, how fast they’re going, the hilliness of the terrain, the engine size of the vehicle… “sports car” is especially silly; I think they meant “Maserati”.
it’s rather worthless as written.
Oh, well, if two journalists and five cartoon characters support your argument, I suppose I daren’t disagree then.
How many people need to support it before you will listen? Because that is the core message of Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion and Earth Strike.
And Rojava too, which is attempting to build a federation of communities (nation or state doesn’t fit with our beliefs).
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Individual consumers in large part take their cues on consumption from the wealthy and powerful via marketing and advertising (and from policies that complement those cues that are promulgated by bought-and-paid-for politicians). Getting consumers to constantly purchase stuff they don’t really need (or sometimes don’t really want) , often at prices subsidised by cheap labour, in order to increase corporate profits is at the heart of late-stage capitalism.
The reason is, the wealthy and powerful in late-stage capitalist societies are older people with financial buffers who don’t see global warming as an existential threat to themselves or (wrongheadedly) to their offspring. To extend on your reference, it’s as if Neville Chamberlain had continued on with his appeasement policies well after September of 1939. In other words, even if denialism is no longer possible they’re still not willing to publicly acknowledge the gravity of the situation and call for real change if doing so might have an impact on their quarterly numbers.
Whether we want to overthrow capitalism or save it from itself, we have to stop pretending that there’s nothing to be done in terms of new policies on the basis of the fallacious narrative that individuals are naturally selfish and greedy in the face of disaster. The time is long past for that Libertarian nonsense to be useful to anyone.
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I agree. I see no reason why an electrical bus should need only a third of the energy to accomplish the same work as a gas fueled bus. A bus without batteries (i.e. powered by an overhead line) might have a slight advantage, but otherwise the physics don’t change. The original article makes clear that they didn’t factor in a lot of things. I think they simply compared a very modern electric bus with a rather old diesel operated bus.
I think efficiency is one of the key factors to reduce energy consumption. I don’t think the overall living standard in the US is that much higher than in e.g. Germany or Japan, yet the per capita energy consumption is nearly twice as much (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita).
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In that case, then what is needed is for the wealthy and powerful who desire climate action (and there are many of them) is to set an example of modest consumption for the masses to emulate.
It’s only been 130 years since Theory of the Leisure Class was published
Egads, well if that’s the ticket then we’re truly fucked yeah?
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Feeling the need to live in a 2500+sqf single-family home and to own a new car, per the “American Dream”, doesn’t seem to make them much happier, either. According to the 2019 Happiness Report, the top 10 countries are:
- Finland
- Denmark
- Norway
- Iceland
- The Netherlands
- Switzerland
- Sweden
- New Zealand
- Canada
- Austria
These countries are nearly as wealthy as the U.S. and have civilised amenities like universal single-payer health insurance and subsidised tuition, but the energy-efficient norms there of smaller homes and more public transit and cycling play their part.
The U.S. is currently at position 19, in a declining trend.
More important that the marketing and advertising and media narratives of the corporations they own set this example. As with action on climate change in general, institutional and cultural reforms promoting more modest consumption will be a lot more effective than changes in a small number of individuals’ lifestyles (especially since individual wealthy people who do try to set an example are immediately derided as hypocritical or out-of-touch elitists by American movement conservatism).
If more conservatives and Libertarians were educated enough to know who Veblen was, he’d be as big a boogeyman in their canon as Marx himself.
Fortunately, it’s not. In practise it’s mainly just a convenient way for “free”-market fundies to dismiss the usefulness of larger collective societal efforts to mitigate the worst effects of global warming (but make no mistake, it’s going to be unpleasant no matter what).
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