Consumer culture is a pathology. We grow wealth by fueling addiction. It seems to me that majority of harmful discretionary industry is catered to those making at least around US$70k+ and those are the emissions that are essentially not even benefiting us. This consumerism isn’t making people happier - community and stability make people happier. We talk about a future in which we provide everyone with the lifestyles lived in developed countries, but this is just a pipe dream that justifies current inequality - it is physically impossible for everyone to live like a middle class USian (as one example).
But we smoke the hopium like we eat up the greenwashing. We pretend we can keep car culture and convert the whole industry to EV when that is financially and physically impossible. We base our most authoritative climate predictions/analyses (IPCC) on pathways that assume the creation and implementation of a Carbon Capture technology that does not exist yet (except very tiny plants contributing no significant benefit) and would be non-viable to scale even if it did due to power demands. We tell ourselves whatever we need to tell ourselves and completely ignore reality.
Ladies, gentlemen, and gender-queers: We are all fucked. We don’t have the tools in our toolbox to do what we would need to do in order to prevent collapse.
We pretend we can keep car culture and convert the whole industry to EV when that is financially and physically impossible.
It’s certainly possible to convert the whole car industry to EVs. The only trouble is it won’t actually solve our problems because car dependency ruins all sorts of other things in addition to the climate, and for most of those the real issue is the amount of space they take up, so even running them on magic pixie dust wouldn’t help.
It’s certainly possible to convert the whole car industry to EVs.
The mining required is environmentally disastrous, the emissions needed in the process would be catastrophic, and if everyone actually tried to do this then the inputs would become prohibitively expensive.
It’s honestly not realistic to transition while maintaining similar rates of car ownership. More realistically, we’re going to leave poor people in car-dependent areas to suffer even more as the cost of transportation grows further out of reach - it will be a gentrification of private transportation.
Okay, let me rephrase: even if we assume for the purpose of this discussion that it were possible to 100% transition to EVs, it still wouldn’t solve our problems because the worst thing wrong with cars is the sheer amount of space they take up, to the point of forcing us to literally destroy our cities to make room for them. Hell, the damage from mining the concrete for all the parking lots alone dwarfs the damage from mining the lithium for batteries!
That’s the point I was trying to make, not quibbling over EVs.
less than 100 years ago, everyone used horses my part the world, we couldn’t afford Model T’s in 1923. People now whine an electric car is unsuitable for winter, that’s trues, but only true because the horse infrastructure of no more than 20 miles between population centers has disappeared, it’s 50 to 100 now, with a population density per square mile of less then .25
Consumer culture is a pathology. We grow wealth by fueling addiction. It seems to me that majority of harmful discretionary industry is catered to those making at least around US$70k+ and those are the emissions that are essentially not even benefiting us. This consumerism isn’t making people happier - community and stability make people happier. We talk about a future in which we provide everyone with the lifestyles lived in developed countries, but this is just a pipe dream that justifies current inequality - it is physically impossible for everyone to live like a middle class USian (as one example).
But we smoke the hopium like we eat up the greenwashing. We pretend we can keep car culture and convert the whole industry to EV when that is financially and physically impossible. We base our most authoritative climate predictions/analyses (IPCC) on pathways that assume the creation and implementation of a Carbon Capture technology that does not exist yet (except very tiny plants contributing no significant benefit) and would be non-viable to scale even if it did due to power demands. We tell ourselves whatever we need to tell ourselves and completely ignore reality.
Ladies, gentlemen, and gender-queers: We are all fucked. We don’t have the tools in our toolbox to do what we would need to do in order to prevent collapse.
It’s certainly possible to convert the whole car industry to EVs. The only trouble is it won’t actually solve our problems because car dependency ruins all sorts of other things in addition to the climate, and for most of those the real issue is the amount of space they take up, so even running them on magic pixie dust wouldn’t help.
The mining required is environmentally disastrous, the emissions needed in the process would be catastrophic, and if everyone actually tried to do this then the inputs would become prohibitively expensive.
It’s honestly not realistic to transition while maintaining similar rates of car ownership. More realistically, we’re going to leave poor people in car-dependent areas to suffer even more as the cost of transportation grows further out of reach - it will be a gentrification of private transportation.
Okay, let me rephrase: even if we assume for the purpose of this discussion that it were possible to 100% transition to EVs, it still wouldn’t solve our problems because the worst thing wrong with cars is the sheer amount of space they take up, to the point of forcing us to literally destroy our cities to make room for them. Hell, the damage from mining the concrete for all the parking lots alone dwarfs the damage from mining the lithium for batteries!
That’s the point I was trying to make, not quibbling over EVs.
I see, thanks for helping me understand.
less than 100 years ago, everyone used horses my part the world, we couldn’t afford Model T’s in 1923. People now whine an electric car is unsuitable for winter, that’s trues, but only true because the horse infrastructure of no more than 20 miles between population centers has disappeared, it’s 50 to 100 now, with a population density per square mile of less then .25