You live in a place designed around cars, that’s the problem. Society worked fine without cars for a good long while. We could have adopted trains, bikes, and buses without the car and things would be going swimmingly. The idea is to fix our bad town planning so that it’s reasonable to get to any destination using any mode if transportation.
I was in a national park this past weekend. Beautiful scenery, gorgeous vistas, and the clearest air anyone could ask for.
Until some jerkass decided it was the perfect time to light up on the trail and then flick his cigarette into the woods. During fire season. Fucking asshole.
Your mistake comes in assuming christians have coherent beliefs. They largely believe what everyone else around them believes. In the US this means they are mostly captured by the grifters of society which are coincidentally the capitalists. Funny how that works.
I am well-aware that Christianity isn’t self-consistent. This was luckily part of my religious education in school and my edition of the Bible even points out contradictions.
To be honest, the title is only there to feign a discussion, since I didn’t want to be too overtly anti-religious.
Then I’ll try another attempt at my answer. “Religious education”, as I use the term, is the class you take from primary school all the way through to your graduation in High School, if your denomination is covered by the school you attend. It’s the default for baptized children in the German state I went to school in. If your denomination is not covered (or you just don’t want R.E.), you can attend a class called “Ethics.” You must attend either your Religious Education class or Ethics.
But they’re a whole lot better for the planet than gas cars. And cars won’t go away till we make alternatives. Which we should do as quickly as possible, but will still take a while.
The problem is that the real way to cut down on emissions would be to accept that not every good can be available at any time and that’s a bitter pill to swallow.
We have tuna caught in South America, hauled to Thailand for canning and hauled back to the US to be sold. Turns more profit than local catches because the megacorporations can save a couple bucks on worker salaries. And that is just an example, it’s not just the food industry, hauling shit to hell and back and back to hell and back is common practice.
Doesn’t even have to be unavailable at times. They could can it in north America if they wanted to. Outsourcing jobs (read: exploiting foreign countries and their workers) should be heavily taxed if not banned in most industries
I’m entertained by the fact that everyone gets hung up on how EVs are still not totally green because the electricity comes from coal fired plants or that there’s still manufacturing emissions and stuff…
It’s like, yeah, but compared to an ICE car, which has all the same problems (environmental cost of manufacturing the vehicle, mining and refining the fuel, transporting it, etc) but EVs don’t actively pollute nearly as much during use, and they speak as if these are of equal environmental cost, and they’re not. Additionally, ICE vehicles need a lot more oil to operate that needs to be changed and disposed of every few thousand miles.
It’s like doing less harm isn’t valuable to the people arguing against it, but then again, those are probably the same people who drive their V8 truck to get groceries.
I tell people yes do get an EV for your next car. But also use this chance to really think about if you need the car at all. Or does every adult in the household need a car each. Our city is trash for everyone having to own a car.
Best is to run your car to the ground. Then get an EV if you must own a car.
I live a short bike ride away from the shops. I have some side bags for the ebike I built so lugging groceries isn’t too much of an issue.
The biggest shift is learning you wouldn’t shop the same way you do with a car. With a car you go to a big supermarket and load up a trolley. Spend over a hundred for a week’s worth and drive home. With a bike you kinda just buy as needed for the next couple days. You do more trips throughout the week which is kinda nice too. Forces you to get out of the house more. Benefit I realised when doing this was vegetables were less likely to just die out in the fridge since I bought as needed. Which meant I spent a little less overall.
Most of the criticisms that come from the right are solvable problems, such as lack of chargers, electricity coming from dirty sources, or lithium mining. We pretty much know how to solve all those at this point. Just a matter of doing it.
Criticisms that come from the left tend to be more fundamental. Things like car-based cities being too spread out, infrastructure costs spiraling out of control, or having the average person operate a 2 ton vehicle at speeds over 60mph and expecting this to be safe. None of those are specific to EVs, and are only solvable by looking at different transportation options.
If only employers cared. It has been nice, now my employer is rolling out a arbitrary but mandatory 4 days return to office policy. In like 8 years of employment I never needed to be there that much. Whatever, 100% remote job market looks decent for me, hopefully find a better place soon.
People don’t want to change the status quo or inconvenience themselves slightly in any way for the greater good. People want a magic drop in replacement that magically “fixes/solves” the environmental crisis and allows life to continue on as is. (So they don’t have to take “yucky” public transit)
What really needs to be known though is life has to somewhat drastically change so we can make the world a healthier place for generations to come in the future.
So what’s the solution for people like me that live 10 miles from the closest shop, 15 miles from the kids schools and 10 miles to the closest train station and we have no bus services that serve the village?
On bike those distance are fine. Ebikes exist also. Either way I’d rather life and society adjusted itself to a slower commute than the danger and depression of car based transportation infrastructure. I used to ride my hike one hour to get groceries and an hour back. Those who are disabled can ride the bus and train. A lot of changes need to be made. Infrastructure and people need to change. I’d rather have a car free safe road for walking and riding my bike. We will all live longer to just from exercise and safer travel in general.
I’m convinced a lot of the fuck car people are people in their 20s with no kids who live in the city where they can heavily rely on good public transport and not have a need to travel too far.
I totally get the sentiment but it’s just not practical for a lot of us. To get people away from cars the local authority would need to practically fill the roads with small extremely regular buses that go all over the place. You’d never wait more than a couple of minutes outside your house for a bus to arrive to go somewhere.
Well either you could move to a different location if you want to, convince your community and local politicians to build better infrastructure, or realize that you are a minority, an edge case that usually is not adressed in these talks because a few people in remote locations using a car doesn’t hurt if we could get rid of car dependency in densely populated areas where the vast majority of humans live.
You’re being downvoted because you’re right. I’ve had people argue that EVs still aren’t a good alternative because they may require a bit more effort every once in a while. Like, charging for 30 minutes at a charger on a long road trip vs just gassing up. Other than that they are pretty much a drop in alternative and people still balk at them.
Then trying to get them to use public transit instead? Doesn’t even matter if it’s more convenient, they’re stuck in their ways and will refuse to change ever.
Get out of your ruts people. Just because “this is the way things are” doesn’t mean it’s the best way. Ffs the amount of midwesterners who come to my city to visit and think we’re being “unsafe” by using the train, just get out of your mindsets.
In some cities, e.g. Vienna, public transport already beats cars. For playing your own music I have some mid/low-range noise cancelling and can watch movies
Socrates said books were dumbing down humanity because, since people could just look things up in books they wouldn’t have to memorise information anymore, and that made their brains soft.
Ever since society began, some people have been convinced the next generation’s technology was going to be society’s downfall, whether it was Socrates’ books, the telegraph in the 1800s, radio, the (land line) telephone, dishwashers (women will become lazy and unsuitable wives and mothers), screened windows (society will collapse because you won’t hear your neighbours and pedestrians on the street, we’ll all become hermits and die holed up in our homes), comic books would rot the brains of the youth, then music, then video games… it goes on and on.
So far, those predictions have never been true. Every older generation freaks out when the ones after come of age. It’s like societal growing pains.
I think this is one step further, that technology has become so abstract and complex that people who focus on different crafts and careers are using magical black boxes. It blows my mind how my neighbour goes through life without any concept of what a phone app is. He just uses functionality and memorized the associated logo. I’m an engineering wizard to him.
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