If development is going to happen for the high proportion of the world that aren’t developed and wish they were, stuff will need to be built.
Indeed, I personally would much prefer low residential density, many people would also, and that requires some degree of personal transport.
What makes that a desireable outcome? is that what people want or need?
But they can be built in a style that favours the tram, not the car,
And that’s something that needs to be actively worked against, if we hope to have a livable planet 100 years from now.
Cities are more efficient than suburbs, and eating up the countryside for sprawl is what’s undesirable.
If what people want and actually need are fundamentally in conflict, which should they get?
The built environment is a given, unless you’re going to bulldoze the 'burbs.
Sure, what’s going to be built in the future isn’t a given, but there are already >130 million housing units out there. They aren’t going away. So:
It very much limits the proportion of our population that would benefit from even a very thorough program of increasing urban density, unless you think it’ll result in a future of suburban neighborhoods with lots of abandoned homes because everyone’s moving back to the city.
I believe in substantially increasing urban density, because people ought to be able to have affordable options for living in the cities where the jobs are, rather than out in the exurbs. The lack of such options is what keeps pushing the exurbs further out all the time.
But what’s built is built, and people are going to keep living in those homes, and being dependent on cars. So we need cars that aren’t a threat to the climate.
You say this like it’s not something we can do.
By the same token, we also need houses that are less of a threat to the climate. And just like it’s a gain to shift from a hundred million individual internal combustion engines powering our automobiles, to a comparative handful of power plants doing the same, it would be a gain to have the same thing happening with respect to the heating and cooling of our homes. What I’d propose is that from here on out, when your central heat and air system needs replacing, it gets replaced by a heat pump system, so that the power to heat and cool your home is being generated somewhere else. And of course, require that for new homes.
You’re correct, I am saying it like that. Let the Dems propose it, and see how long it is before they win another election.
Sure, we have the technical capacity to do it, but the very proposing of it would end the possibility of us doing anything meaningful about addressing global warming while it can still be limited.
not everyone wants to live in high density areas
High-density living is not the only option.
They are also less pleasant to live in for many people but of course “cities or sprawl” leaves a massive excluded middle.
a choice?
I’m pretty sure they’ll have a slightly easier time of making a case for it after the first US climate megadeaths.
You mean, a decade ago?
What they want is irrelevant.
What’s the middle case?
Not when their choices massively negatively everyone else. Your fist, my nose, you know the rest.
That’s a breathtakingly arrogant thing to say. It sounds like you know what’s good for them.
Well designed rural housing, the sort that millions of people already live in and prefer. Small villages and towns, small farming communities, low impact, low density, low sprawl and expansion. Using improving technologies to minimise environmental damage.
How does a small moorland village farming community that swaps to EV transport negatively effect everyone else? Are you going to be forcing them into a city where they can farm the land via zoom? Lambing season is going to be carnage.
Yes, really.
Large apartment complexes may be able to offer charging station for electric vehicles but for smaller apartment building owners, those renting duplex or single homes, the cost is an additional onus that, and of course nobody is going to offer charging for curbside parking. There is also the liability issues; several electric vehicle manufactures have recommended not charging unattended vehicles (as if you are going to stand there watching your vehicle charge?) because of a spate of battery fires, and the property owner may not want the liability to their property and that of tenants due to hazard. This was, in fact, the response given to me by my landlord when I inquired about just getting a hookup to a charger that I would purchase; they didn’t want to deal with the cost of adding a junction box and the additional insurance for onsite charging.
The “2 billion parking spaces for 250 million cars” is a non-sequitur unless you are suggesting that a significant fraction of those spaces are going to be equipped with chargers at someone else’s expense, notwithstanding that the majority of those spaces are business, retail, and office parking. Most people will naturally want to charge vehicles at night when they are not using them and when power rates are reduced (although from the basis of utilizing peak PV solar output it would make sense to charge during the day, provided you are at a latitude and climate that is favorable for solar).
From a maintenance standpoint all-electric vehicles, and especially those that are battery powered, are clearly advantageous but battery replacement is a substantial lump cost that on a vehicle which has already depreciated may not be worth it. Talking about recycling lithium from worn out batteries is all well and good but it is actually very difficult because the material used in constructing new batteries has to be extremely pure. Even if highly purified lithium can be recovered it may well be that both the fiscal cost and environmental impact makes it not worth doing. The pop-sci/tech press is always full of some promising new battery technology but it took over 25 years for lithium-ion to go from demonstrating technical feasibility to widespread adoption, so it isn’t as if there is a major innovation in energy storage technology just around the corner that fixes those issues, notwithstanding of the massive capital and design investment in LIon and LiPo battery. Although aluminum-air has gotten a lot of publicity of late, the fundamental technology (and generally that of metal-air electrochemical cells) has some serious limitations in terms of cycle life, anode corrosion, incomplete discharge leading to electrolyte breakdown, and the fact that if a metallic-air battery catches fire it would make the dramatic combustion seen wht LIon batteries look like a hobo stove in comparison.
Electric vehicle technology will certainly advance and will displace internal combustion engines in most applications, especially as fuel prices rise and availability becomes more unreliable, but the idea that it is going to be a rapid transition sufficient to have an impact upon global climate change or put a hard stop to fossil fuel extraction just doesn’t seem likely, even aside from having to deploy a reliable infrastructure for vehicle charging and maturing energy storage technology such that it is not the bottleneck for production. From a global perspective, it also makes sense to actually reduce the total amount of vehicles built and operated because even if electric vehicles have a much lower operating resource footprint, they take an incredible amount of resources to manufacture and distribute.
Stranger
Electric cars are a good thing and will be enormously helpful.
The thing that bothers me is that I know capitalism is going to screw it up by turning these vehicles into buggy, glitchy, iPad-driven monstrosities that won’t let you check your wiper fluid without a login, password, and a visit to the app store.
Consider the case of this guy who accidentally swiped the wrong control button on his Tesla and spent $14,000 for “full self-driving” (a feature which is said to be not-fully-baked). I don’t want my driving control panel to be full of a bunch of ads and flashing geegaws trying to sell me shit when I’m just trying to drive safely. It seems like companies see electric cars as an opening to do this kind of stuff.
Yes to electrically powered cars. No to electronically enhanced multimedia network-connected microtransaction-oriented driving experiences.
The auto manufacturers are also going to be pushing subscription and per-use charges, although they will also be offered on ICE vehicles. So perhaps the GPS only covers your home state, but if you need maps for another state during a road trip, you can pay a fee for limited time access to that. Or your car doesn’t come with collision avoidance technology but you can opt to add that later by paying a monthly fee.
The Jalopnik site has written about this, such as here.
Consider that electric vehicles will be a huge catalyst that will pull non-transport applications along for the ride. Better distribution networks, better storage, new technologies, and greater efficiencies will make electric more attractive to industrial and agricultural processes that currently aren’t a great fit. Electric transport is the foot in the door for those sorts of things.
No, what I know is what’s bad for all of us.
…and you think that scales up to billions?
Are they connected to the rest of the world by magic portal? No, they still require the infrastructure of highways and charging stations and electricity pylons… But in any case, actual farmers aren’t the problem, they’re necessary - it’s the other people living in the country, that would be better living in the city, that are unnecessary. The ones I like thinking of as country cospleyers.
Rural farmers aren’t car culture, I don’t have a problem with the necessary workers living in the countryside… But I would not call that a middle ground between sprawl and city, it’s a different category of living altogether.
No, you don’t. Or at least I wouldn’t trust your judgement on that based on your thoughts so far.
It doesn’t have to. Neither does it require squeezing down to neglible amounts. That excluded middle yet again.
Really? Unecessary people?
Having come from a rural community I have to inform you that farmers too need food, libraries, pubs, clothes, telecommunications, garages, pharmacies, doctors, schools, police etc. and all the ancilliary services that support them. Are they unecessary?
When the farmers and those support community members retire do they become even more unnecessary? are they unworthy of being allowed to remain in the place they love and the place they call home?
I’m not sure how many farmers you know. I’ll let others chime in on their experiences with farmers and car culture.
People in rural communities are dependent on personal transport.
That is certainly far from the impression you give. I also get the feeling that you think you are well placed to decide who falls into the category of “necessary” and that’s pretty chilling.
It is rural life, something I’m very familiar with and indeed a way of life that is every bit as valid as city living and not something that demands either larger cities or additional urban sprawl. They are not people necessarily attracted by cities and for whom cars and personal transport are massively important.
Yes, it does. Or else it’s just a bucolic sideshow to the actual masses of people…
Unnecessarily living where they are. But since you’re clearly going for some kind of ridiculous accusation of me calling for mass rural killings, I’m going to just stop replying to you in this thread,
I’m sure rural communities will be thrilled by you referring to them as a sideshow. Substantial proportions of populations live in exactly the communities I refer to, tens of millions in the UK alone.
That clarification doesn’t make your position any better.
That enough of that. I never said any such thing nor accused you of anything remotely like that. I’m astonished enough that you’d want to force people into cities when they clearly would not want to be there.
Then it doesn’t fucking matter, does it?
You’re saying it’s too late to limit global warming, but you want to do this shit anyway. Well it’s nice that you want to rearrange the deck chairs on what you claim is the Titanic, but why should you care which way they’re arranged as it goes down?
Of course it matters. We can’t limit the coming climate change, but we can decide how we live with it.
I’m not concerned with the deck chairs, I’m concerned with all these auger holes everyone keeps drilling in the lifeboats.
You misspelled ‘die.’
The fundamental problem of unlimited global warming is that, as the world continues to heat up, the carrying capacity of this planet in terms of being able to feed its human inhabitants will ultimately crash. But at least if we’re all herded into cities, we will all go together when we go.
Gonna smell pretty damned awful, though.