[lhorie]

> That really depends on location

True. Where I grew up, the closest beach was an hour and a half drive away. Closest ski station was in a different country. Wasn't exactly safe to step out of the house to begin with though, being close to slums and all. I consider myself lucky to be able to share different kinds of experiences with my kids now even though the public transport system in north america doesn't help me.

> the sort of attitude your grand-children will rightly judge you for considering the horrible impact your vacuous consumerism you're calling 'breadth' of experiences is having on this world

You're right, I should just throw my car in the sea. If I also throw out my computer, my grandchildren will be proud that I tried to help bankrupt the ecology-destroying companies that mine rare metals for these gadgets you and I use to waste time online. OR I could just be honest with myself and acknowledge that I'm selfish despite knowing that merely existing is a huge burden on the planet.

> So, if we're not proudly rolling coal we are instagramming metrosexuals

I dunno what you do or didn't do with your life, or why you're acting defensive, and frankly I don't care. I literally said I could do that lifestyle, stereotypical as it may be, but that it would eventually feel somewhat monotonous to me now that I've had different experiences.

I say this as someone who was extremely anti-car-ownership and changed minds once I had kids. Maybe you had it easy with safe ubiquitous public transportation and you're just trying to pull the tired europe-is-superior thing on me, but I've no allegiances in that game and I'm just talking about my experience with what I can pragmatically do for my kids with a car vs without. You do you.

[lmm]

> You're right, I should just throw my car in the sea. If I also throw out my computer, my grandchildren will be proud that I tried to help bankrupt the ecology-destroying companies that mine rare metals for these gadgets you and I use to waste time online. OR I could just be honest with myself and acknowledge that I'm selfish despite knowing that merely existing is a huge burden on the planet.

You can have a sense of proportion about the fun:ecological impact ratio of the activities you do, and make choices in the light of that. My instinct is that "driving three towns over to ride in a carousel ... just for the heck of it" is in the same category as "tossed all our rubbish in a nearby field": the cost to other people is all out of whack with the benefit to you. I don't know whether that's actually true or not, but going on a long drive for something frivolous triggers the same skin-crawling reaction in me that tossing litter out of a window would.

(My preferred solution would be carbon cap-and-trade (and land value taxes that would translate into road use fees and parking charges) so that car users bore the full costs of the externalities they were imposing, and then if you want to spend your discretionary income on frivolous car journeys that's up to you. But in the current regime I'd say there's a moral duty to minimize car travel or offset it somehow, because by taking a car journey you're imposing a cost on others, much more than just using a rare metal for a time)

[lhorie]

> you can have sense of proportion

Driving three towns over isn't actually that long of a drive, compared to, say, driving downtown from uptown. The sense of proportion comes from the length of the drive. Sure the carousel was nice, but going to the library or the swimming pool is muuuch more appealing on any given weekend.

In any case, how far does one take the fun-vs-impact dilemma? Is using a couple of dollars worth of gas worse than killing a 7 yr old top-of-food-chain wild predator so we can have a fresh tuna sushi roll? Does it make sense to keep thousands of buses running at 10% capacity 7 days a week when we could all just stay home watching youtube and eating delivered food? One can draw an arbitrary line anywhere but unless they're either an ecological saint or admittedly selfish, there's going to be some amount of hypocrisy in that line.

Wrt taxes, taxing suburb living costs seems totally arbitrary. Even the current income/sales tax system makes more sense imho: spend less == less ecological impact

[lmm]

> In any case, how far does one take the fun-vs-impact dilemma? Is using a couple of dollars worth of gas worse than killing a 7 yr old top-of-food-chain wild predator so we can have a fresh tuna sushi roll? Does it make sense to keep thousands of buses running at 10% capacity 7 days a week when we could all just stay home watching youtube and eating delivered food? One can draw an arbitrary line anywhere but unless they're either an ecological saint or admittedly selfish, there's going to be some amount of hypocrisy in that line.

There are degrees of selfishness; "everyone's somewhat selfish therefore being arbitrarily selfish is fine" is a fallacy. How much ecological impact you consider acceptable is a matter of personal conscience just like how much money you consider it acceptable to spend on personal amusement rather than worthwhile causes, and in the same way there's no clear bright line; rather there's a spectrum from saintdom to niceness to decency to nastiness to evil.

> Wrt taxes, taxing suburb living costs seems totally arbitrary. Even the current income/sales tax system makes more sense imho: spend less == less ecological impact

Pigovian taxes on pollution are mainstream economics orthodoxy. That Georgist land value taxes are optimal and would therefore be better for the economy than income/sales taxes is only slightly less so. It's not about suburbs specifically and it's far from arbitrary.

[lhorie]

> There are degrees of selfishness

I don't think anyone's disputing that. I just find it weird that someone would call out another person's lifestyle as "vacuous consumerism" or whatever when they have their own nowhere-near-ideal-but-somehow-arbitrarily-kosher footprint. You might, for example, recycle but I'm not going to be giving anyone crap if they aren't as meticulous about it as the japanese are.

I keep hearing "well here in europe you don't need a car as much" as if that's some sort of sound argument. I mean, that's great for them, but I don't speak french, dutch and certainly not norwegian, so what, I'm supposed to spend $10k+ to move my whole family there so I can lug around a stroller or a bag full of books on the train for the sake of the planet? Sorry, not gonna happen.

It's easy to be single and tell other people "look, I spend so little, I'm such a model earth dweller". I've been there. Now try doing that while enriching your kids lives, while having a public transit system that doesn't span much further than downtown core, and while having considerations about proximity to family, etc. It's a totally different ball game. And that's my whole point: different people have different lifestyles for various reasons. One's single european lifestyle is not necessarily going to work for someone else living somewhere else with a family. If anything, the "you have car, you bad" attitude is self-absorbed and short-sighted.

[lmm]

> I keep hearing "well here in europe you don't need a car as much" as if that's some sort of sound argument. I mean, that's great for them, but I don't speak french, dutch and certainly not norwegian, so what, I'm supposed to spend $10k+ to move my whole family there so I can lug around a stroller or a bag full of books on the train for the sake of the planet? Sorry, not gonna happen.

A lot of Americans talk as though needing a car is a law of nature, which just isn't the case. From a European perspective a lot of this is Americans shooting themselves in the foot and then saying they can't help bleeding everywhere. The American situation is one that's been created by American political decisions - zoning, parking minimums, minimum lot sizes, car-first city designs - and can be reversed by politics as well, but for Americans to make those changes they have to believe that the results are possible. Of course you can choose to keep operating on everyone-owns-a-car politics, but recognise that you do have a choice in the matter; recognise that approaches like the currently-under-discussion California SB 827 could create an America that's less car-dependent.

> And that's my whole point: different people have different lifestyles for various reasons. One's single european lifestyle is not necessarily going to work for someone else living somewhere else with a family.

But non-car does work for a lot of people across many different lifestyles, including Americans, including people with families. You're painting it as if the only people who could possibly disagree with you are this tiny box of single European instagramming metrosexuals, and actually it's you that's the small box. Most of the world's households do not own a car.

> If anything, the "you have car, you bad" attitude is self-absorbed and short-sighted.

Global warming is already going to kill millions of people in the best case, if we do everything we can - but what we do can make the difference between how many millions die. The current American level of car use is simply not sustainable; maybe avoiding it is going to mean worse lives for your kids or less chance to see your family, but ultimately if it comes down to a choice between those things and killing 80% of humanity there can only be one answer.

But really I don't believe it's that hard. For decades incandescent light bulb manufacturers claimed they couldn't possibly make a light bulb that was more efficient - but then when we actually legally mandated certain levels of efficiency, somehow they found a way. A good life without a car is possible, and when cars become a non-option people will surprise themselves with how easy it is to adapt to their absence, and wonder what it was they ever thought they needed them for.

[lhorie]

> A lot of Americans talk as though needing a car is a law of nature

I can't speak for other people (especially those who do live in really-car-first parts of the US), but for me it's definitely not a law of nature. I've been single with no car, married with no car, had a kid with no car, had a kid uptown with no car. Can it work? Sure, with some concessions it can totally work. But things like taking the newborn to the doctor using public transportation _suck_, even though I consider the public transit system _good_.

> Most of the world's households do not own a car.

Right, and the sort of logistics that sucked for me with just strolling one kid in downtown Toronto suck for them too, often tenfold. Where I grew up (Brazil), it's common for single moms of 4 to need to take 3-4 buses to get to their first job of the day. There's plate rotation, vehicle ownership tax, tolls, alternative forms of public transit, uber, but also high crime, floods, corruption, inequality, you name it. The cars-vs-public-transit discussion doesn't even begin to scratch the transportation problems in Sao Paulo, let alone the environmental impact. For my specific situation and my level of disposable income, a car happens to make life much easier, but I'm fully aware that cars aren't a one-glove-fit-all solution, just as I'm aware that making sweeping political commentary wrt city design isn't going to cut it as a solution to the many different types of challenges involved in optimizing transportation in a non-idealized world.

> You're painting it as if the only people who could possibly disagree with you are this tiny box of single European instagramming metrosexuals

Not at all! Not having a car does work for a lot of people, and in places like the Netherlands, one can even happily bike everywhere with their kids without getting almost killed by taxis. But cars can be undeniably useful for saving time and for carrying things around. People giving labor use cars to go to the hospital for a reason. People uber for a reason. People drive in much of the rural world for a reason. I'm not sure what's there to disagree with.

> recognise that you do have a choice in the matter; recognise that approaches like the currently-under-discussion California SB 827

Generally speaking, the problem with social activism is that most people don't have the time, energy or interest to pour into the political game, and it's not even clear that a half decent solution would emerge even if they did (see, e.g., housing in SF). For my particular case, as I mentioned before, I'm not american and I'm about as unmotivated to be politically invested in San Francisco as I am in Sao Paulo.

> A good life without a car is possible

Yes, it is, but currently, as I mentioned, it unfortunately involves making a lot of concessions. If a better option came along, I'd totally be open to it. As I said, I've held the anti-car position for a long time, and I'm certainly not shy to change camps again.

[jrobn]

Do you eat meat? Because if you do, the meat and dairy industry has a much bigger impact ecologically than a car does, at least in the USA. Raising beef or dairy cows requires orders of magnitude more water, land, corn feed (or even grass feed) for less calories than growing plant based sources of food would. Not to mention the conditions these animals are raised in (USA being the worst affender). So next time you take a bite of your steak, think how much ecologically impact that bite cost the world.

[lmm]

I eat meat on occasion, but not "just for the heck of it", certainly not in the case of beef (you're misleadingly equivocating between "meat" and beef in your post when their ecological impact is very different).

Back-of-the-envelope numbers from a quick search suggest that a day's eating beef is equivalent to driving maybe 15 miles in terms of climatic impact, a day's chicken equivalent to ~1 mile. So "only drive when you're getting at least 1 steak/15 miles worth of fun out of it", and conversely "only eat steak when you're getting at least a 15 mile drive's worth of fun out of it", seem like good principles to live by.