> 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.
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.