[nebula8804]

>tons of transport fuel for lots of driving, and high heating/cooling costs due to detached, poorly insulated buildings.

We have fixes for these don't we? Electric cars + solar panels could go a long way towards reducing this emissions source. I wonder if the government just aggressively subsidies solar + electric so much so that alternatives go out of business that we might just accelerate the solution to this problem.

The core issue is that people want the suburban lifestyle and they will not downgrade unless the government incentivizes them to or they are forced to due to climate disaster at their doorstep.

[epistasis]

We need to drastically scale up battery production to make this happen on a quick enough time scale. Solar panel production is scaling at roughly the appropriate speed, but for cars we will need some people to lessen their driving needs if we want to keep pace with climate goals that are compatible with 1.5C of warming.

Which leads to my second point. I'm not convinced that as many people want the suburban lifestyle as are forced into it. My preference would be to have a non-suburban lifestyle, but it has been banned in most of the US. Our entire legal, tax, and governmental infrastructure is set up to prioritize and prefer suburbia, and it's been that way since WW2. My evidence that more people want alternatives to suburban lifestyles is that suburbia has to legislate its existence. Single family home owners fight super hard against allowing row houses or apartments, and that's the main impediment to their creation, not market forces.

[elihu]

An alternative to scaling battery production for cars is to electrify the highway system so that cars don't need huge batteries to go long distances. A side-benefit of that is it shifts energy use from overnight charging to daytime charging (since that's mostly when people drive around), which would be more compatible energy availability if we convert over to mostly-solar.