[redahs]

Compact urban settlement is a direct market substitute for the hydrocarbons which would otherwise be required to transport goods and people across longer distances.

The most important thing we can do to transition off of oil and fossil fuels is to maximize the intensity at which we utilize renewable resources which directly substitute for them.

We maximize the intensity at which urban land is utilized by phasing in a 100-1200% national or global land value tax over the next century on the appraised market price which all land is expected to sell for if cleared of improvements.

We can also promote the development of a national, inter-state, zero-emission, passenger & freight rapid-transit market several times faster than automobile highways by allowing private rail and hyper-loop operators to deduct qualified ticket sales from their land value tax liabilities.

[toomuchtodo]

I think you're more likely to promote a shift en masse to EV manufacturing before you're able to institute a global land value tax (Tesla is building >200k EVs/year, other manufacturers are following suit, a million EVs are sold every 6 months [1]), with the added benefit that all of that EV manufacturing is going to stoke demand for more battery manufacturing capacity we'll need for utility scale energy storage. We don't stop building solar PV, wind, battery, and EV manufacturing capacity until CO2 emissions are halted (remember, we need to account for current energy usage, the transition of mobility to electricity, electrical growth and the amount of energy we're going to need to sequester existing atmospheric carbon back into the ground).

Urbanizing is a noble goal, but not realistic in the decades timeframe the necessary solutions demand. Build more solar [2], wind [3], energy storage, and electric transportation now, rebuild cities over time. Everything I mention above can be scaled in a massively parallel fashion.

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank (Project Drawdown: Summary of Solutions by Overall Rank)

[1] https://i.imgur.com/21eLTwr.jpg

[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/01/22/solar-will-rebound-th... (Solar will rebound this year with more than 100 GW of new capacity)

[3] https://nawindpower.com/eia-2019-to-be-biggest-year-for-new-... (EIA: 2019 To Be Biggest Year For New Wind Capacity Since 2012)

[maxsilver]

The biggest current roadblock to urbanization is the insanely high cost of living in cities, and your solution to this is to add an up-to-1200% land value tax?

This would be a really quick way to force working class people to live even further away from the city than they already are.

[socialist_coder]

Yes, I believe the goal is to kill the low density housing with 2 parking spaces per unit. For mass transit to truly work, we need more density.

[dr_dshiv]

Why we subsidize low density suburbs is beyond me.

We need to stop pretending roads are free and trains/trams are subsidized. Government plays an essential role in transportation. People should pay for the roads they drive, income adjusted. That's healthier capitalism, because the prices are clear and better mobility = better markets.