Assuming anthropogenic climate change is real, what can/should we do about it?

Great Debates
21

Let me get back to the fundamental economic problem I started to describe in the other thread:

The problem stems from these basic facts:

  1. Global warming does not affect everyone equally. Northern climates may actually improve. It’s primarily the coastal and equatorial regions that are going to be damaged. So not everyone has an incentive to do anything about this problem.

  2. Oil is fungible. Stop using it here, and it makes it cheaper to use over there.

  3. The cost of doing something about global warming is not equally shared. Countries have varying degrees of reliance on fossil fuel. Some have infrastructures that are more expensive to deal with than others. This means there is an unequal incentive to control emissions.

Now, where does that leave the hope for a worldwide carbon treaty? What possible incentive does Pooty-Poot in Russia have for intentionally burdening his economy by A) lowering the demand for his most valuable export, and B) putting extra costs on Russian industry? Especially considering that moderate amounts of warming may actually be very beneficial to Russia?

The same question can be asked of the Chinese, and to a lesser extent, India. Both are developing economies with constant shortfalls of power generation. Both are poorer than other 1st world nations, and less able to absorb the cost of CO2 mitigation.

The odds of getting meaningful world-wide reductions in carbon output are virtually nil. Even if the U.S. unilaterally eliminated its dependence on carbon, that would just lower the price of oil and incentivize everyone else to use more of it.

Keep that in mind when you analyze things like the Kyoto treaty, which evolved into exactly what you’d expect the UN to spit out - a treaty that does very little to actually control carbon, but does put huge burdens on the United States while giving a pass to China, India, and other countries. The treaty has all kinds of special exemptions and rules that give various countries credit for the existence of natural carbon sinks - which makes no sense, but was basically done for political expediency. And in the end, the treaty wasn’t ratified, and if it had been it was so watered down as to be almost useless anyway. And yet it would be hellishly expensive to fully implement.

The bottom line is that so long as oil remains an inexpensive source of power, people will burn it for power. If you cap output in the U.S, it will increase elsewhere. Even if you managed to lower worldwide consumption, all that would do is stretch out the time it takes to burn the oil.

But one way or the other, all the carbon currently sequestered in oil, coal, shale, and tar sands is going to wind up in the atmosphere. You’re not going to stop it. Or rather, it will keep going into the atmosphere until it becomes economically non-viable.

So there’s one answer: Make it economically non-viable. How? By coming up with cheaper alternatives. People will stop using oil if you give them a better alternative.

Another solution is to enforce a worldwide carbon quota through hard diplomacy - carbon tariffs, economic punishment, threats, blockades, tying aid and trade to carbon limits, etc. That’s a very dangerous road to go down, but if you think the problem is serious enough it’s an alternative. If the Chinese won’t play ball, you could always tell them that they won’t sell a single automobile in the U.S. until they do. Personally, I think that’s a rotten option, but it should be mentioned.

Another possible thing to do is to look for other low-hanging fruit. CO2 emissions aren’t the only contributor to warming. Bovine flatulence and rice cultivation are both increasing the amount of methane in the atmosphere, and methane is 20X more potent as a greenhouse gas than is CO2. Carbon sequestering may be a reasonable option.

But the global warming ‘establishment’ seems to focus solely on the thing that has the least chance of success - more government, international treaties, and forced reduction in CO2 output as a solution. That’s simply not going to work. China, Russia, India, France, and others will simply play the U.S. like a chump, then go on with business as usual.

If you don’t agree, consider the experience of the EU - France and Germany signed up for all kinds of economic agreements, and pontificated endlessly about how everyone had to follow them - until those agreements ran into the political realities in those countries. Then they dropped them like a hot rock. The last Canadian government was strongly ini favor of Kyoto, and constantly lectured us on the perils of CO2 emissions - while presiding over a large increase in emissions. Same with Europe.

We’d better come up with some better ideas than international agreements to cut back CO2. Because those won’t work. Oh, you might get everyone to sign up if you work hard enough at it, but it won’t matter. They’ll just violate it as soon as its convenient anyway.

22

Well, this is kind of an exaggeration. For one thing, most northern areas consist partly of coastal regions. And globalization has increased the reliance of northern countries on southern ones for cheap labor and goods. It might be more accurate to say that not everyone has an equal incentive to do anything about this problem, but I don’t think anybody’s in a position to remain totally unaffected by it or experience only positive effects from it.

Um, you mean “wasn’t ratified in the US”, right? The Kyoto Protocol was in fact ratified by enough countries to meet the minimum requirement for enacting it. It came into force on 16 February 2005.

If we could stretch out that time enough, though, that could be a big help. Remember, the big problem seems to be not just that we’re putting stored fossil-fuel carbon back into the atmosphere, but that we’re doing it so rapidly that we’re apparently overwhelming the climate systems’ natural carbon sequestration mechanisms, and thus driving up the atmospheric carbon concentration. Even if we couldn’t slow down our carbon-pumping enough to be truly sustainable in the long term (and we probably couldn’t), slowing it down to a lesser extent could still be useful, in terms of buying us more time to find and implement those alternatives you’re hoping for.

Sounds great! But who is going to develop those alternatives, and what is their incentive for doing so? If you’re ruling out the idea of making fossil-fuel use more expensive by marketizing greenhouse-gas emissions or by regulatory means, who is going to make the massive investment required to find and develop a “better alternative” on a scale to replace oil use worldwide? And how soon will they accomplish this?

23

Beats me. But the odds of it are better than the odds of getting the world to agree to restrict CO2 emissions by any significant amount - and having them live up to their agreements.

The argument is that reducing our CO2 output by the dramatic amounts really needed if the problem is as bad as we think it is would cost so much money that it would lower economic growth on the planet. That in turn would make us less able to create the tools needed to solve the problem in other ways, and reduces the amount of wealth available to spend on mitigation.

It’s not clear to me exactly what the right balance is to draw. Certainly we might be able to make some significant cuts in CO2 emissions for purely economic reasons. Cars are getting more fuel efficient, with some major gains just around the corner with plug-in hybrids. Nuclear may be regaining some credibility in the U.S. Compact flourescent bulbs are going to make a huge dent in the bulb market next year. I might even favor the right kind of carbon tax to make alternatives more competitive, especially since I think that it would actually be correcting for an externality and would make the energy market more efficient.

I’m skeptical of big international treaties like Kyoto. My observation is that countries follow the treaties for exactly as long as it’s in their interest to do so, then they break them. You know that when Putin is negotiating that treaty, he’s not thinking about Mother Earth. He’s thinking, “How can I use this to my advantage?” That’s why he tied hiis support for Kyoto to all kinds of other political concessions. And why he’ll break his word anyway when he needs to.

Perhaps the best approach is to take the hundreds of billions that Kyoto would cost and take the world lead in alternate energy research and warming mitigation. Or maybe it would be even better spent by sending massive aid to Africa and other places to prepare them for the changes. Work on new anti-malarial drugs, seeing as the tropical disease zone will get bigger and nastier.

These are all open questions that can be debated rationally.

24

Considering the fact that Americans still drive more and for larger distances than anyone in the developed world, raising the gas tax by a significant amount would be the single most effective thing that could be done. It would stem the growth of inefficient exurbs, increase use of public transport, and over time encourage development that is denser and therefore less dependent on the car. If this leads to more multi-family dwellings, that would save significant amounts of energy too.
Meantime, everyone can slow down and stop driving like a maniac, but use the a/c as much as they want.

25

That’s exactly what I mean about pushing an agenda. You don’t just want to curb carbon use, you want to get rid of the suburbs, push everyone into cities, and make them all use mass transit.

That’s a whole lot of social engineering that you’ve thrown into the bag with the global warming.

I don’t want to live downtown. I like having my nice yard that the dog and child can play in. I like having two cars. I pretty much like my life. Most people in the suburbs feel the same way. Perhaps we’d rather solve the problem by buying big honkin’ electric SUVs and building big-ass nuclear power plants to power them. We won’t be spewing carbon into the atmosphere at all. But I’m guessing that’s not the kind of solution you had in mind.

26

I sympathize with your desire to keep the kind of lifestyle you prefer, but I’m not sure that what you call the “social engineering” part can really be separated out from the “carbon use curbing” part as neatly as you suggest. The thing is, many emissions-reduction advocates support encouraging higher population densities and more mass-transit use and so forth precisely because it spews less carbon than low-density sprawl.

This isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Even if you did somehow manage to achieve a fleet of carbon-free “big honking SUVs” powered by nuclear-generated electric, you couldn’t get around the fact that big sprawly things are inherently more resource-intensive and less efficient than small compact things. More spread-out suburbs require more roads and infrastructure and more decentralized access to things like stores and supermarkets, which means more fuel use and more emissions. Bigger cars, and bigger houses, take more materials and more energy to build than smaller ones. And so on.

Sure, people should be able to live a spacious and even somewhat wasteful lifestyle, if they’re willing to pay for it. I have to agree with pantom that if we really want to curb fossil-fuel use and emissions, the simple, efficient, market-friendly way to do it (even if it’s politically unlikely) is simply to price fossil fuels at a level that better reflects their true costs to our society.

Then consumers can cope with that higher price in whatever way they personally prefer. Some will choose to keep their less-efficient lifestyles and just pay more for them, while some will save money and cut carbon use by switching to smaller, more efficient housing and transportation. And in the meanwhile, innovators will have a fat new incentive to develop those carbon-free electric SUVs and cost-effective nuclear power plants and other emissions-reducing alternatives, because they would no longer be competing with the artificial cheapness of fossil fuels.

Actually, Sam, I’m a bit surprised to see you on the other side of this issue. I would have thought that a market advocate like you would strongly prefer to see more market-based solutions of the sort that would naturally arise in this way from higher gas taxes. Instead, you seem to be thinking that the most productive approach might be to have the federal government “take the hundreds of billions that Kyoto would cost and take the world lead in alternate energy research and warming mitigation” or “[send] massive aid to Africa and other places”. You’re proposing big-government-intervention solutions and I’m proposing market-based ones? Whoa! Is today Opposite Day or something? :wink:

27

The problem here is twofold: many people don’t want to live in an urban sprawl, and mass transit doesn’t give you the liberty that personal transport does.

I disagree. Look at the relative wealths of the UK vs the US to see the downside of taxing the means of producing wealth (we pay approx US$ 1.65 per litre), which transport is. Give breaks to newer, less polluting technologies instead. Promote rather than punish. The breaks can be phased out later.

28

  1. Nitpick: The term “sprawl” is typically (and reasonably) associated with suburban environments, not urban.

  2. In countries where people rely mostly on public transportation, as in much of Europe, they don’t seem to lack freedom of movement. Partly because everything is built to a more compact scale.

29

Nuclear power plants don’t produce CO2. If I get all my electrical power from nuclear, I’m not contributing to global warming. So why do you care if I use the power I pay for to enable a lavish, high-energy lifestyle?

So what? I thought the problem was global warming, not ‘efficiency’. Eating meat is an extremely inefficient way to absorb calories, too. Should I stop doing that? Who gets to decide what is efficient enough, and what has to be eliminated?

Again, so what? So long as I’m paying for what I use, why do you care? I’m perfectly willing to trade some of my money for less efficiency, or I’d live in a much smaller house and drive a smaller car with a less powerful engine.

Be careful. It’s one thing to correct for real externalities, and it’s another to come up with ‘costs to society’ that are based more on personal bias than anything else. Don’t forget that our transportation infrastructure also has positive externalities. And for that matter, so does suburban sprawl. Crime is lower in the 'burbs. Decentralized populations are more resistant to disease spread and terrorist attacks. Emergency evaculations are easier. Decentralized food distribution makes system failures less threatening. We saw what happens in New Orleans when civil order breaks down and a city has a major emergency. Sometimes it’s just better to spread yourselves out.

I agree 100%. So long as we’re really correcting for honest externalities and not just dumping taxes on people who’s lifestyles we don’t like.

I’m not disagreeing with you. I’ve got no problem with correcting for externalities - it’s consistent with the notion of free markets. If you’re imposing a cost of your transactions on a 3rd party, you’re coercing them. And if costs of a transaction are not internalized by the transacting parties, you skew the market and make it inefficient. By all means, let’s correct for that.

However, that’s a far cry from saying we need to abandon the suburbs, pack everyone into apartments, and make them all ride buses and trains. That’s social engineering. I want the market to reflect the true costs of choices, and then let the chips fall where they may. As I said, if I’m willing to pay for my electricity and use it to power a big electro-SUV, that’s my business, so long as the price I’m paying truly reflects the cost of my choice.

But many on the left aren’t happy with that solution. They see Global Warming as their hammer to bludgeon the rest of us with left wing ideas. In the name of Global warming we must cut back, conserve, build more mass transit, get rid of heavy industry, etc. They see the issue as a way to punish people who have lifestyles they don’t approve of. People like that have done a grave disservice to the environmental movement because they’ve made a lot of people like me wary of their agenda. And their constant fear-mongering makes us skeptical when a real threat like global warming comes along.

Me, I just want to make sure that everyone pays the true cost for their lifestyle, and then leave everyone alone to pursue happiness however they want.

30

Restructure the entire taxation system to carbon charging. Touch nothing else.

31

The appeal to shift American lifestyles to an urbanized, European-style is somewhat misguided. Europe has traditionally had large urban centers and small agrarian populations, which was amplified by industrialization well before the turn of the century. This, added to the fact that much of the real estate has been held by relatively few landholders makes urbanization is a natural consequence. The environmentally friendly services that support and are supported by high population densities evolved pretty naturally without undue need for market incentivization or social engineering. It’s true that public transit, even in Europe, is government subsidized, but this is also a very traditional attitude.

In the expansive and largely traditionally agrarian North America, however, mass urbanization is a relatively recent activity; prior to the turn of the century, there were only a handful of municipalities that could legitimately be called cities, and those clustered on ocean or Great Lake ports. Most immigrants chose to move inland and work the land (which was not only dirt cheap but actually available), spreading out. By the time industrialization became predominant enough to encourage people to move into cities we were already well into the 20th Century, and in the post-WWII baby boom, combined with a middle class affleunce unmatched in history and easy access (both financially and logistically) to suburban housing, the population moved outward in rings surrounding the increasingly blighted cities. The new, non-industrial cities that sprang up, like Los Angeles, Houston, and (later) Phoenix, were giant sprawls with relatively little city center or an ability to erect an effective mass transit system on anything like a paying basis. The availability of cheap cars and cheaper gasoline certainly had something to do with exacerbating sprawl but in fact there’s no way to make any extant public transit system work for the majority of the population.

As an example of this, let’s take Los Angeles. The Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area is huge, the size of a Swiss Canton or a select few New England states. Los Angeles has a noted traffic problem, and it would be beneficial to use an effective mass transit system, particularly for those to commute from the Inland Empire, the San Fernando Valley, and Orange County into Los Angeles County. There is, in fact, an emcompassing transit system, the MTA Metro Rail and Metrolink; however, because businesses and homes are not concentrated within walking distance at either the central terminus nor the depots, the system is underutilized. I’d personally welcome the opportunity to use the Metrolink; however, despite the fact that a line runs from Union Station directly to the city I work in, the actual transit time would be somewhere around 2 hours one way and would still leave me 3-4 miles away from my actual work with no ready way to get there. There’s no conceivable way I could make that work (beyond the inconvenience of not having a car) and burdening me with additional taxes would accomplish nothing but depriving me, and thus the market, of money I would fruitfully spend elsewhere. Give me a better alternative and I’ll take it, but I don’t see anything workable, even dismissing profitability as a requirement.

Mind you, I’d like to see greater utilization of mass transit, but the costs and eminent domain issues (ever try digging a rail tunnel under the Wilshire/Beverly Hills area? Suddenly a bunch of expert witnesses come out of the woodwork warning about the dangers of “gas pockets” and “seismic instability”) are prohibitive in many cases. A city like Portland, Oregon, sounds very nice (anybody need a mechanical/aerospace engineering and cluster computer babysitter there?) but given that most available family housing and inexpensive land to build houses is out in the sprawl, it’s unlikely that you’re going to get people to move en masse into cities short of marching them at gunpoint and effecting a scorched earth policy regarding tract housing. Sam Stone has it right; the way to make environmental initiatives effective is to make them popular and competitive with existing alternaties.

Stranger

32

James Howard Kunstler offers a set of specific suggestions. (Click the “Clusterfuck Nation” link at the top and scroll to the 2/7/07 entry, “The Agenda Restated,” currently at the top of the page.) N.B.: This is not a set of proposals for curtailing/dealing with GW. It is a set of proposals for adapting as comfortably as possible to the world we’ll be living in when cheap oil runs out. This scenario is predicated on Kunstler’s assumption that no “hydrogen economy” or other technological innovations will enable us to go on living as we live now. You might disagree with that assumption. But the article is tangentially relevant to this discussion, and provides some perspective.

33

I don’t. Didn’t you read the part where I said “Sure, people should be able to live a spacious and even somewhat wasteful lifestyle, if they’re willing to pay for it”?

At present, though, inefficiency is strongly correlated with wasteful carbon use. Sure, if we suddenly had available a large-scale versatile energy source that was carbon-free, those aspects would be decoupled to some extent. But for now, and at least for the near future, “more efficient” is largely synonymous with “less emissive”.

But to quote your own words, “So what? I thought the problem was global warming”. We’re not comparing the overall pros and cons of sprawl/big/decentralized over compact/small/urban: we’re just comparing their effectiveness as a means of avoiding or minimizing the impacts of anthropogenic climate change.

I think you’re overlooking the extent of the damage Katrina did to rural communities too. “Spreading themselves out” didn’t protect the hundreds of rural residents who were killed in the hurricane and its aftermath. (And AFAICT, the “breakdown” crisis for urban residents wasn’t due to living in a city per se; it was due to living in a city (and a state, and a country) that did a piss-poor job of providing emergency services.)

And it’s not something that anybody here is advocating, AFAICT. pantom simply pointed out that pricing fossil fuels higher to reflect more of their environmental costs will increase the use of mass transit, more compact communities, and smaller homes. That’s not at all the same thing as saying that we need to “make” “everybody” take that route. I don’t know who the people are that you’re claiming are trying to use emissions-reduction issues as “a way to punish people who have lifestyles they don’t approve of”, but AFAICT there aren’t any of them in this thread.

Then I think we’re pretty much on the same page. But if that “true cost” does indeed include the effects of carbon-driven anthropogenic climate change, as it currently seems to, then I think that paying that true cost is going to have to involve some kind of carbon tax.

34

Interesting reply there, Sam.
From the Statistical Abstract of the US for 2007 (Energy expenditures section ):

The evidence is pretty clear that the denser the development, the more efficiently it uses energy.
I have nothing against using nuclear, as you well know. I also have nothing against single-family homes; I live in one quite happily, thank you. I also own a gas-guzzling wagon that might get ten gallons to the mile on a good day. But that post was not about how you or I live, or any other particular person, except for the part about how to drive your car to get the greatest fuel efficiency out of it. It
was about what solutions would get the society as a whole to use far less energy.
Point being, the US has in place a massive program of subsidization for single-family homes, from Fannie and Freddie Mac to the mortgage interest and property tax Federal deductions. The reason is simple: realtors contribute more to political campaigns than any other group. The most reliable proof: Hillary Clinton, who can always be counted on to know where the butter is, is siding with realtors over bankers.
I have nothing against SUV’s, single-family homes, or nuclear plants. I do have something against any of those being disproportionately favored by government in the context of this global-warming problem. SUV’s, here in the US, get the benefit of a gas tax that is among the lowest in the industrialized world. Single-family homes get all the advantages I listed above.
Neither of these as government policy make any sense at all. Both are explicable by politics, not good policy or economics (especially economics: a higher gas tax would both shave energy use and knock a few bucks off the current account deficit) or some naive notion of free choice.
Also, when it comes to oil use in particular, you can see just how inefficient our use of energy is, worldwide. The Commodities Research Bureau index of all commodities rises at a long-term trend rate of 2.19%. The price for West Texas Intermediate rises at a long-term trend of 5.77%, though, which is ahead even of the rate of inflation, long-term, which if you use the CPI-U, and run a regression on that (using logs as if you were looking for the historical volatility, btw), yields a long-term trend of 4.36%, meaning that oil actually has a real return over the long-term, which is extremely unusual for a commodity. To me, it’s an expression of our worldwide overuse of oil, in contrast to other, normal commodities.
Figures for these are available at either the St Louis Fed’s Fred database, or the CRB itself. Don’t have the URL’s handy, but I can get them if your Google mojo isn’t working.

35

No one’s disputing that. It would also be more efficient if we all lived in much smaller homes, turned down our thermostats, left fewer lights on at night, ate less meat, rode mass transit, and all sorts of other things. We are very, very far from living minimum energy lifestyles. Because people don’t WANT to live that way. Are you going to force them to?

It would take a lot more than a carbon tax to force me to pack up my family and move into the city. Gasoline is actually one of my smaller monthly expenses. Triple the price of gas, and all you might convince me to do is trade my car in for a more efficient one.

The notion that we’re going to reconfigure our cities, abandon our cars, and destroy trillions of dollars worth of suburban real-estate and rebuild nice, efficient, tightly packed cities is a utopian fantasy (or dystopia, from my perspective). It’s not going to happen, and if you keep insisting on it, you’ll simply alienate people who are on the fence on environmental matters and weaken your cause.

Here in Canada we don’t have many of those incentives, including the interest deduction. And our suburbs are sprawling as much as anyone’s. I agree with you that if you subsidize home ownership you’ll tend to get more of it. But all those loans and perks you mentioned would apply equally to an inner-city condo as a suburban bungalow. So that’s not driving the sprawl. If anything, decent real-estate in the city is more expensive, so you would think things like the interest deduction would make them more affordable for people and drive them INTO the city. But frankly, I think it’s a rather small effect. The interest deduction is an incentive, but it’s dwarfed by the incentive of being able to live in a 2000 sq ft home with a big yard and an attached garage for the same price as a three bedroom condo downtown. Or the incentive of moving out of the concrete and steel city with its busy traffic, crime, and lack of space, and moving into a quiet neighborhood filled with people like you, with lots of green space for kids, safe yards, and a little slice of serenity in a hectic lifestyle.

You’re going to need a big gun to take that away from people. Or if you want to let the market do its thing, you will need to punish the suburban lifestyle choice so severely that you would damage the entire economy. All for the sake of a little more efficiency. And not really all THAT much more, either. We’re not talking about reducing our energy consumption by 90% or anything - we’ll still need power for all our stuff, and heavy industry to build the things we need. You want to uproot half the country and force them into choices they’d not voluntarily choose, all for a few more percentage points of efficiency. No thanks.

Of course, SUVs were one of those unintended consequences of CAFE rules - SUVs came to prominence because they could skirt the CAFE standard for cars and use the standard for light trucks. The primary effect of CAFE standards has been to kill the family station wagon and push people into SUVs. But now that we have better wagons and crossovers, people are shifting back.

And inner city lifestyles are also heavily subsidized. Mass transit is subsidized pretty much everywhere. Governments spend huge sums on inner-city revitalization projects. Because real estate is often very expensive in the city, it’s often subsidized. So we don’t exactly have a level playing field here.

I don’t think our positions are that far apart. I could be convinced to add a carbon tax to the cost of gasoline. I understand the environmental and economic rationale for it. But I would demand equivalent cuts in other taxes so that it was revenue neutral, or at the very least the funds would have to be earmarked to research and development in solving the problems the gasoline is creating. None of this putting the tax into general revenues nonsense.

If you could come up with a workable worldwide scheme, for example, which enumerated the damage that warming was doing, and then we collected carbon taxes and used it to pay for that damage (or prevent it), that would make a lot of sense. It would wind up being a wealth transfer from the rich northern democracies to poorer countries nearer the equator. I’d be even happier if we could use the money to directly correct the problem. For example, if we came up with a workable technology for carbon sequestering, I could see charging a carbon tax, the proceeds of which went directly to building and maintaining the sequestration infrastructure.

My fear, once again, is that ‘Global Warming’ is going to become a political football and a catch-all phrase used to justify all sorts of government expansion. Once politicians have a politically palatable new tax, they’ll use it to their own ends. They tend to do that. Every time some new development starts, it will be protested in the name of ‘global warming’. You just watch. Now that the public is on board with acceptance that global warming is a problem, you’re going to see very creative invocations of it to justify all kinds of intrusions into our lives.

That doesn’t really surprise me. I think that just means that oil is being overused as you say, because demand is inelastic. We haven’t got good alternatives right now, which means it’s very hard to lower consumption in the short term when the price goes up.

To me, this isn’t necessarily bad news. I hope the price of oil does go up. I hope the market starts getting signals that we’re running out of oil. Because then you’ll see massive investment in alternative fuels. The price of oil will rise to the point where it’s non-competitive, and there will be huge profits to be had in other energy sources.

36

Your view of Europe is vastly mistaken. Cars are everywhere. There are 33 million vehicles in the UK, including 26 milliion cars. See also this article about Prague, and this one about Europe as a whole. One car per two inhabitants.

Public transportation really only works inside major metropolises, and even then it’s subsidised: Paris Metro (pdf), Santo Domingo (yes, I know it’s not in Europe), London Underground.

37

Well, I’m not talking about uprooting anyone. I am trying to see our way clear to influencing the decisions that people take about where to live and how to build in the future.
Things have gotten to the point of absurdity by now. Christopher Caldwell, in a post State of the Union column in the Financial Times, wrote the following:

Is the above, utterly absurd model of living even viable today? Not really:

But that’s just because of what’s happening now; in a few years, the cycle will turn, and people will be heading out to live at crazy distances from the center city again.
Where I live, it’s possible to walk to the town’s business center if you’re in good shape; it’s a bit less than a mile away. We’ve done it on nice days to get ice cream and stroll around. I take the bus to and from work; some days, I’ll get off and go to the convenience store to buy some wine and then walk home. Point being, that because of the way where I live was built, there are still sidewalks and you can still walk to run small errands if you want to. But mine is an old suburb; the newer ones are far more car dependent. They’re built that way because the old modes of public transport are no longer even thought of any more.
Mine was built around the railroad station, which is no longer used, but may soon be revived again. But the result of that original raison d’etre is that the streets are cleverly laid out so that about 50 - 60% of the town is within walking distance of the center, even though you can walk a block and a half away and not know that you were so close to the center, in some places. Multi- and single-family dwellings are all mixed in near to the center, which makes for a lively little street scene in the town center on nice spring and fall evenings.
When we originally moved here, we had a house with a beauty of a yard where you could look out the kitchen window and think you were in the middle of a forest (new homeowners seem to think that knocking down every tree on a property is cool, even if the builder - as many more do these days - deliberately leaves a bunch standing, but that’s probably a rant for the BBQ Pit); but we were surrounded by houses, and the business center was two blocks away. No one builds like this anymore, though, because this kind of careful thought is no longer put into how to lay out a town.
Simply applying this kind of thought would save all kinds of energy, and still allow people to live as they wish. But the economics needs to be there first, because until the cost makes it necessary to think like this again, it’s not going to happen.