I was waiting for the “climate justice” folks to start attacking electric cars, because those don’t require fundamentally restructuring where and how Americans live. You can still have Dallas with electric cars and that’s a problem.
I have heard people who live in the city try to make that argument, poorly. To be fair, car tire dust also causes some environmental damage. But we should also try to reduce the damage without Malthusian lifestyle changes.
I love how you're so far from the point it sounds like you're legitimately arguing for ending legally enforced car dependence if the scare quotes are removed.
I don’t even think it’s just that. Seattle is dense enough and we have an ok public transit system. But it’s just not used that much. There is benefit in privacy and comfort, the ability to move groceries and goods, the ability to get to parts outside your direct transit corridor in a reasonable amount of time, and the fact people enjoy leaving the city for nature regularly. I spent a decade commuting by public transit without a car in Nyc and left to seattle both for work and location but also because I loathed public transit. I know I’m the equivalent of a baby killer, but I hated every moment I spent on public transit with a passion. I just don’t like being in crowds and I hated how long it took to go anywhere not on my subway line, and I barely left the city in my 10 years because there wasn’t public transit (more or less) to the parks.
Yeah the downtown commute part of transit was high use. But the intra/intercity movement was car based for everything else. Obviously with the downtown being a tumbleweed wasteland of hammer crazed people that’s not as much used. My impression of seattle public transit is a lot of double length buses with zero people inside, over provisioned because progressive transit folks thought the issue is not enough seating on the bus and it would go from empty to transit utopia with a doubling of seating capacity. Instead it’s just a bunch of absurdly large vehicles crowding small roads
What a terrible straw man. There are only a handful of tiny places on earth where cars are banned and there is no way to buy property in most of them because noone wants to leave.
Being able to technically survive in 2% of the land if you never leave, pay a great deal more in rent, accept much greater inconvenience, suffer poor air quality from all the people driving, and endure constant abuse and threats to your life that are wholly unnecessary (such as right on red) isn't non-car-dependence.
Spending 20% of the space cars use on dedicated transit right of ways and active transport and having a handful of areas where you might have to park and walk or use a mobility aid for 1km isn't the authoritarian dystopia you're pearl clutching about and will make driving easier for you. It literally helps everyone.
The US had a better system. It was systematically destroyed at great taxpayer expense and done so in a way designed to cause as much economic harm on the people living where the highways went as possible. There are at least eight separate regions smaller than Switzerland with higher population. Even if the rural transit system the US used to have were impossible to build you could at least service those regions as well as the Swiss serve their tiny rural towns.
The “if only there were more public transit” stuff is a weak argument and a waste of breath. I’m not saying folks shouldn’t continue wasting their breath, it’s an important issue to push. But the issue with public transit is we can’t figure out how to build and operate it and once it’s built it often goes unused making it unsustainable. Further not everyone wants to live in a studio apartment in a dense urban core, no matter how much you sneer at them. They just think you’re an asshole and hops in their suburban and drive to Starbucks.
Probably the right solution, and the one being worked on, is to find different battery chemistries. People seem fixated on lithium, but even lithium is a N generation chemistry. (I’m too lazy at 6am to research the value of N, sorry) I know sodium batteries are advancing, iron as well, along with other chemistries that haven’t grabbed headlines yet. With the amount of money at stake, investment and research will happen. Predicting what we are building batteries out of in 20 years seems foolish at this point (note, I think a lot of lithium miners are about to be left holding a bag full of hype)
Public transit works and works well, as proved Q.E.D. in many, many, many cities and countries about the globe.
The problem in central north america is the Nacirema are a weak minded easy fooled people who have fallen for 50+ years of Koch propaganda and for the most part not even noticed as it happened.
I didn’t say it didn’t. But, take high speed rail in the US. Even where political will exists, we fail to execute. In seattle we have rail and bus, but they’re largely empty. I spent a decade taking the subway in Nyc, arguable one of the better transit systems, and a primary reason I left was I found it soul crushing to use it every day. First, I don’t like crowds and hated feeling uncomfortable multiple times a day for a few hours every single day. Second, getting anywhere not in my corridor was a multi hour affair (round trip). Third, getting anywhere was at least 45 minutes one way. Fourth, it was almost impossible to leave the city and visit nature.
I may be weak minded and easily fooled, but my direct experiences made my weak mind want to own a car and gtfo of a public transit first urban core. I don’t hate the environment, I don’t think everyone should drive Suburbans. But I also think there’s a saddle point, and technology for batteries isn’t done yet.
I also suspect the “everyone who disagrees with my world view is a weak minded easily fooled idiot who can’t form their own opinions are are indoctrinated by a dark conspiracy” line isn’t endearing the public transit first folks to anyone but their echo chamber.
Take my comment as the helicopter view of someone outside the USofA who has travelled in and out since the 1980s.
Don't take the "easily lead weak minded" description as a personal slur directed at you, more as a summation of the 50 years since the Koch brothers went aggressively full anti climate change pro fossil fuel after the 1970s recognition of there being a problem.
My only goal here is for more people to be aware of a constant pattern in the recent history of US social infrastructure debate; towns, cities, communities move toward public transport as an idea (or wish to spend to improve what they have), poll for opinions, find support in excess of %50, often in the 60 and 70th percentiles, and then ...
... various Koch think tanks start spending millions to change open, to push the "public transport == socialism == communism" notion, to pump up the fantasy ideal of car == individual freedom == american flag, etc.
They've covered the spectrum, funded oposition politicians, started community action groups for freedom, amplified crime related to public transport fgures, fostered notions of poor trash take the bus, all the tricks.
They've turned opinion, killed public transport development, and all to the end of selling more gas to a large individual mass rather than less to more efficient means of moving people in bulk.
I have no intention nor desire to endear myself to you, and it's your country so make the decisions you do, but at least be aware of your own history and the means by which you've been lead by the nose - it's a plain fact that's clear to all with perspective from outside.
Somewhat tangential to the main point of the article, but wasn't there some big news somewhat recently about sodium-ion batteries reaching "close-enough" parity with lithium-ion batteries for EVs? Did I get hopeful based on false pretenses?
I am so disappointed in the 3 top level responses to this that I made an account to respond.
Everyone here would agree that our addiction to burning oil is unhealthy for the planet. What surprises me is the fact that we can't also see how our addiction to cars is also unhealthy for the planet.
It's not a case of wanting to live a student life forever, or the fact that all guardian journos live in a metro area, it's that they (or this one, in particular) understand that electric cars aren't a drop in solution. I think these dismissals are incredibly childish, and something I would expect from a culture war type on Fox News or GB News. I expected better from HN.
If I remember correctly, for the entire world to live the same quality of life as Americans, it would require four earths. We obviously can't do that, it's going to require us changing our patterns of consumption, please think about that, and don't get offended when people question your lifestyle.
> A false dilemma, also referred to as false dichotomy or false binary, is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false premise. This premise has the form of a disjunctive claim: it asserts that one among a number of alternatives must be true. This disjunction is problematic because it oversimplifies the choice by excluding viable alternatives, presenting the viewer with only two absolute choices when in fact, there could be many.
> A false equivalence or false equivalency is an informal fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed or false reasoning. This fallacy is categorized as a fallacy of inconsistency. Colloquially, a false equivalence is often called "comparing apples and oranges."
ICE cars cause damage and lithium causes damage so the damage from lithium must also be significant. Mining the non lithium components of EV’s cause more environmental damage than mining the lithium does.
Large infrastructure changes take time. You can of course also improve infrastructure, in road charging largely eliminates the need for giant EV batteries, but waiting is losing. If people want huge big batteries in EV’s then build them, you can always recycle lithium in a few decades it doesn’t get consumed.
Buying EV’s is a huge improvement over not buying EV’s because they last for ~25 years. The size of their batteries is basically irrelevant in comparison.
Sure, after we have electrified highways and improved cities they become more viable and could hopefully be the norm. But, in the short term the biggest impact of small batteries is convincing people EV’s suck. Especially when they don’t last for the full lifetime of a car.
> Buying EV’s is a huge improvement over not buying EV’s because they last for ~25 years.
Not buying a personal vehicle is infinitely better than forcing people to live in car centric societies, buying an EV will just perpetuate the issues we're already facing
btw it takes 130k km in Germany to make en EV pollute less than an ICE, with the average of 19km driven per day/per car, I'll let you do the maths.
Electric cars aren't here to save the planet, they're here to save car manufacturers
First that 130k km number is wrong, but even ignoring that the average German vehicle is driven twice that.
If you want to cut the average in half, it’s going to take longer than the breakeven point. Meanwhile in 2006 62% of electricity in Germany was produced by fossil fuels, that dropped to 40.9% in 2021.
So even ignoring inaccuracies in the study your thinking of, the breakeven point just keeps falling as both producing and using EV’s keeps releasing less CO2.
If you'd read the article you'd see they're arguing for decreasing car dependence whilst simultaneoisly making all new cars BEV.
How you can manage to construe that as a bad thing is baffling.
To use your analogy it's like attacking someone who wants to stop the arsonist while the firefighters do their job instead of building a new water reservoir.
There are many many reasons to reduce our dependence on cars such as reducing particle emissions from tire and break wear, lithium mining is again hardly worth discussing.
Lithium mining is ~4 orders of magnitude less harmful than ICE engines. Perhaps someone could have improved the situation by rearranging deck chars on the titanic into a more aesthetic pattern, but it’s not the kind of thing that deserved their attention.
Consuming less is still by far the best approach, better city layouts and greater public transport, etc.
As for the Lithium production figures:
> Let us consider, for example, electric cars. To give an idea of this effect, producing a battery weighing 1,100 pounds emits over 70% more carbon dioxide than producing a conventional car in Germany, according to research by the automotive consultancy Berylls Strategy Advisors.
which to be sure isn't a full life cycle comparison .. but let's be very clear, the full G20 country demand for an electric future creates an unreasonably high demand on copper and rare earth mining and directly impacts all manner of marhinalised people - the US has a $64 billion copper reserve in Arizona on sites considered sacred by Native American tribes.
> better city layouts and greater public transport
Those are useful for other things, if you want smaller batteries add in road charging. Just don’t wait for perfection when you can dramatically improve things today.
> 70% more carbon dioxide than producing a conventional car in Germany
Only today. Manufacturing currently produces carbon dioxide due to things like a fossil fueled electric grid not as an inherent part of the process. Fixing the grid is also required.
There's no need to 'wait for perfection' to stop legislating bigger cars and higher car modeshare. We can push for sane streets and phase out ICEs at the same time.
You're doing that thing where you pretend one person needing something somewhere invalidates improving anything for anyone anywhere else.
The reality is the only thing stopping most trips from being made in a light vehicle is the unchecked externalities from the large ones. And only one long range vehicle is 'needed' per household
Most households don’t always take long trips to the same places especially when you’re talking long trips in terms of small EV batteries.
I am all for improving cities, but just as a baseline not everyone lives in cities. Any long term plan needs to consider everyone not just people who live in dense enough areas public transportation is a clear win. Sure, ban cars in the center of cities, just don’t expect that to change how large most people want their car’s battery to be.
This article and discussion is doing the thing where you exaggerate a small problem to promote something that’s almost but not quite entirely unrelated to it. If you want people to use small batteries in EV’s electrify roads so people can travel on them without using a battery. If you want to reduce the need for cars do that, but don’t pretend lithium mining somehow requires changing cities. Because arguing from a false premise weakens your argument when people see through it.
You're doing that thing where you pretend one person needing something somewhere invalidates improving anything for anyone anywhere else. Dense rural environments served by transit exist, and the cause of a lot of travel is getting past all the car infrastructure.
Driving is the singularly most destructive and dangerous thing that humans have invented and CO2 is just the worst of its many downsides, the resources and space that go into them and the infrastructure is probably about third on the list after the millions it kills, lithium is just one aspect of that.
Next medical emergency picture staying at home without driving or taking an ambulance for prompt medical care. That’s the world without cars for the vast majority of humanity. Cars have literally saved hundreds of millions of lives.
You may pretend I am talking about one person, yet I am describing the vast majority of humanity when I say the car has been one of the greatest inventions of all time. Greatly surpassing computers, telephones, and just about everything else you depend on daily.
> Dense rural environments served by transit exist
There are no dense rural environments, you may be confused at what this term means but towns are not rural. The term is referring to a lack of density.
Rural just means a low average density and low town population. You could have a single building with 2499 people every 4km with a train stop on the ground floor and it would count as rural.
<20% of the US population lives in rural areas, and <20% of those are more than 10 miles from their third nearest food shop.
If a region can service three food shops and a hospital it can support regional transit.
Personally not wanting to doesn't make it impossible to travel 10 miles by bike or LEV.
You're pulling out the straw man where stopping the sreets being choked with parked cars and traffic somehow means ambulances can't move through them.
> There are no dense rural environments, you may be confused at what this term means but towns are not rural. The term is referring to a lack of density.
You can have a region with low density where the services are all concentrated.
Your straw man about making it so people can do something OTHER than use a car somehow meaning all cars vanish is also extremely tiresome.
> No, I am saying without the invention of cars there are no ambulances or trips to the hospital in the.
Which is not a privately owned car with associated infrastructure. Ie. The thing that does the harm.
> We call such things towns.
Google the words 'rural town'. You're attempting to overload the word 'rural' to include those people but simultaneously claim they could not possibly live within 5km of transport and therefore must he forced to use a car. Edge cases on edge cases don't justify removing the freedom of 99% of the population to live comfortably without one.
The goalposts are still at "let people exist safely and comfortably outside a car and stop paying for your car use". Your repeated attempts to characterise this as something else don't change it.
> Again you’re pretending the vast majority of people are somehow in areas where public transportation is viable. This is 100% absolutely false.
Citation needed. Also "At least one safe sustainable transport option" isn't "transit only".
Also it's amazing how quickly you went from "there's a bunch of reasons to reduce car dependence but you should dismiss this one" to a gish gallop of reactionary nonsense. Almost like it was a bad faith rhetorical technique to dismiss it.
Australia has long been the major supplier of raw lithium concentrate [1] - sending it on to either China or Malaysia [2].
Soon we'll be shipping concentrate to Texas [3] [4] [5] so that the filthy dirty toxic work of heavy rare earths separation can take place as close to the greedy end consumers as possible.
I am not sure if you are opposed to the idea of localized damage. That is the best thing you can do as then one can control it far easier. It is much easier to test for emissions from on coal plant powering all the EVs on the road for example than the other scenario of testing each ICE vehicle.
As to externalities, no one said that there shouldn’t be taxes or rules in place that make sure that the consumers of lithium don’t internalize the cost.
The US could completely source all it’s lithium needs internally and still be vastly better off. It’s got the 5th largest proven reserve of any country, but that’s understating things as lithium is surprisingly abundant we just haven’t had much use for the stuff before lithium ion batteries.
In terms of total harm, even people working lithium mines are better off if that eliminates ICE engines.
I think it's important to note what the authors left out: although they dubbed it "white gold" in the article, on Earth lithium is 5000 times more prevalent than gold by ppm.
That's a bad analogy too, because "black gold" is burned for energy and the process of using it is identical to carbon emission. Both real gold and "white gold" stick around even after we use them, and aren't greenhouse gases themselves.
Iron's another 2000 times more abundant than lithium, but geologically earth is basically a ball of silicon, iron, and magnesium oxides with some other trace elements along for the ride.
The Guardian's journalists just want to see cars gone.
The majority of them live and work in extremely dense city centres. Not only that, their families do too.
They fundamentally don't understand the fact that people have friends, families, jobs, hobbies, etc that exist outside of the metro network.
The idea that people might actually enjoy driving is not only something they don't understand but actively detest.
It's not good enough to them that all of the roads around me are deliberately rate limited or blocked off so that I can't travel around my own neighbourhood.
They can't stand the idea that I could transport myself and my family securely across the country.
It has to be trains. I need to share with others. I need to take my bloody jacket to the bathroom with me. I need to lock everything down in case some scrote steals it whilst I'm distracted. Oh yeah, I also have to pay 50% more for that privilege.
Nothing is good enough for them. The entire origin of the "you'll eat bugs and be happy" meme comes from that idea that for some people it's not about the climate or ecology, it's about just being happy with a student lifestyle forever. They literally run articles like "we're going childless to save the planet". It's like hanging yourself now to avoid dying of old age.
But there's the other side isn't there? the one where you have no choice but to have a car, where every road is 4 lanes, where's there's no pedestrian crossings, no pavements?
I haven't had a car in over a decade, I don't want to have to pay a mandatory car tax that will cost me far more per year than public transport, parking, petrol, insurance, space, I don't miss sitting in traffic that will grow the more roads are added.
Just having public transport that can get you everywhere would reduce a tremendous amount of burden, instead of sacrificing every bit of road to cars, make room for public transport and pedestrians, plan for it.
No doubt we will always need cars, but they shouldn't be mandatory and we should have public spaces that aren't cut through with car parks and roads and endless, endless traffic
The same goes for public transit. That's the central argument, don't force other people to live the way you live. Everyone should have a choice in how they conduct their lives.
That's a teenager's point of view, you can't live in a dense community and say "I can do what I want because I'm free", every single of your action have consequences, on you, and on the community.
Of course other people can force you to live a certain way, that's like the whole basis of living in societies, we come up with rules and follow them, these rules change all the time
But haven't you read these well-upvoted opinions? It's the right of the adult to do whatever they want; the student-lifestyle of public transit is the position of the grubby, naive, cooperative youngster. Once you have the resources, you seal yourself away in your bubble -- preferentially ICE-based, of course -- and Become Traffic. It's the culturally superior option, as everybody's known since the 50s, and we here on HN are superior. Our paychecks tell us so. The public transit option, ill-funded as it is, will never be popular, because as sarcastic as I might seem here, I'm also simply describing reality.
Not everyone does, 99% of the world exists outside of cities. You can't apply urban reasoning to the majority of the world. Sure, all actions have consequences but that doesn't mean you need a policeman to supervise every step you take. The only reason societies function is because individuals decide for themselves that they will abide by societal norms. The laws enacted by societies are a tiny fraction of the rules we use to govern our behaviour and none of it would be any use if people simply decided to ignore those rules, hence why crime still exists, sometimes people just DGAF and do what they want for their own reasons.
It's pretty funny being accused of having an immature viewpoint when you are literally appealing to authority to solve all of your problems. Adults need to solve their own.
There are viable alternatives to public transit in dense cities, that don't require a car centric lifestyle. Scooters, electric mopeds, or even low speed vehicles that give you the same privacy and comfort as a car. It just doesn't make sense to use the exact same vehicle in a dense urban neighborhood as you'd use for a cross country road trip.
That's be fine except it's public transport that doesn't get the love car culture does and people get mightily upset that we should even think of improving it.
> don't force other people to live the way you live
ok but you are forcing the consequences of your way of living onto others. I have to pay for all your ridicoulous infrastracture, i face the risk of being killed by your 2 ton monster..
I generally agree with you, and I think the biggest tell has been response to remote work. I live in a suburb, largely for cost reasons, and commuting into work involved driving 15 miles one way. The round trip, 5 days a week, meant I was driving 150+ miles per week. I’ve been 100% remote since the beginning of the pandemic, and now I drive less than 5 miles per week, for groceries and all other trips combined. While I understand this situation won’t be universally applicable, the same holds true for a large chunk of the population, including many of my family, friends, and coworkers. This should be seen as an unmitigated climate success, and we should be pushing remote work wherever possible from a climate perspective. But many of the same news publications and individuals supposedly so concerned about the climate have lamented how remote work will cause the decline and eventual death of our large cities. Nevermind that many smaller to medium cities could potentially thrive in more self-sustaining ways. Because it’s ultimately about a particular lifestyle they prefer, and anything reasoning regarding the climate, the economy, culture, politics, or society at large that can be twisted to support their preferred lifestyle will, and will be jettisoned as soon as it doesn’t.
The same holds true, in my personal experience, with many of those claiming to go child-free for the sake of the climate. Most of my acquaintances who fall into my basket have clearly been uninterested in having children for a long time and have only recently latched onto the idea that they are doing it for the good of society. The reverse seems to hold true as well: I’ve noticed what seems to be an increase in the number of people claiming our moral obligation to have children for the sake of society stability and growth.
Let me be clear, I don’t believe that living in or out of a city, or having or not having children are “better”. I am just alarmed by how many seem completely unwilling to accept others may make different life choices than them. People are not content to live their life as they please. They must actually be martyrs and better than you for doing so. I can’t tell if this is an artifact of the age we live in, or it’s always been this way and I’m only become more aware of it as I’ve grown older.
> The majority of them live and work in extremely dense city centres. Not only that, their families do too.
Then remove cars from city centers, they're an aberration in every single way
> They fundamentally don't understand the fact that people have friends, families, jobs, hobbies, etc that exist outside of the metro network.
Cool, most cars are parked 95% of their lives, taking useful space for no good reason
> The idea that people might actually enjoy driving is not only something they don't understand but actively detest.
Some people actually enjoy meth too
> It's not good enough to them that all of the roads around me are deliberately rate limited or blocked off so that I can't travel around my own neighbourhood.
It's already the case in any dense city center, I commute faster by bike or pubtrans than by car for anything shorter than 10km
> It has to be trains. I need to share with others. I need to take my bloody jacket to the bathroom with me. I need to lock everything down in case some scrote steals it whilst I'm distracted. Oh yeah, I also have to pay 50% more for that privilege.
If we start making up arguments like these we can play all day. I've recently crossed germany for 17 euros, nothing was stolen even though I slept a good 4 hours with multiple toilet trips.
> being happy with a student lifestyle forever.
Wow look at Mr. big adult manly man with his own personal vehicle. I bet they even eat veggies, what are they ? 6 ?
You want the same thing as everyone else, going from A to B efficiently and cheaply, and in many case a personal car isn't the most efficient nor cheap tool for that. The problem is that in a car centric city everything is designed to be hostile to anyone but cars, couple that with the auto industry propaganda and we get people like you
Just run the maths, 1.4B personal vehicles on earth (it's not going anywhere but up btw), fully electric or running on pure lignite you end up facing the same issues. So yeah we get it, you like moving 3 tonnes of metal to go to walmart and see your friends, that's fine, but you have to understand it's not efficient or clean or sustainable
You give them too much credit: they exist to scare the "worried well". This isn't some conspiracy of urbanites. It's just the environmentalist equivalent of Fox news: shocking lies sell more ad space than boring truths.
I live less than 5 miles from Central London and use the tube almost every day.
The rest of the world exists outside of it.
I have no interest in spending my entire life within the constraints of the train network. As a result of living in a big city, I know a lot of people who are happy with those constraints and they're almost universally boring, preachy jobsworths.
Like the entire staff of The Guardian. I'm surprised that they even bothered to found an American subsidiary. There are only about three US cities they could even exist in without having a heart attack.
Do you think sneering condescension will convince anyone to live in a studio apartment with their 4 kids in a dangerous part of town to appease your aesthetic hatred?
For whatever reason, you're not responding in this way to the root comment -- perhaps HN's rules of civility are only for some topics. If I'm the only one who can't read journalists' minds, this is an embarrassing way to find out!
Of course it's usually not just one commenter contributing to these downslides, and the GP arguably started it, but your comment was noticeably more flamey than the GP. That is exactly the wrong direction to respond. Instead, what you should do in response to a provocatively wrong comment (or one that you feel is wrong) is either (1) correct it respectfully and patiently; or (2) chalk it up to the internet being wrong and just not respond.
