[whoknowswhat11]

I've noticed more an more "environmental" or "green" type politicans and activists seem to be very anti-progress? Has anyone else noticed this?

For example, automated cars would allow you to park your car outside of the city, but still have car driving to get places. Get's criticized. Would allow for larger capital investments in cars (batteries etc). Just removing parking alone would free up so much space for either more efficient car transport or additional options (yes, bikes).

Auto cars increase sharing opportunities as well. Reducing car ownership.

Smaller / safer nuclear power research would be near totally CO2 emission free - but big fights against that or even exploring it - while talking about how serious climate change is?

Carbon sequestration, storage, capture, ideas to drive global cooling - all shot down.

I've come to think we may end up with a rich group of folks able / willing to invest in stuff creating a sort of second tier society (ie, clean water, air and temp control for them - the rest of us suffering).

This path of emissions reductions can't be the only option worth exploring, even while we pursue it, start thinking of other ideas!

[ARandumGuy]

> I've noticed more an more "environmental" or "green" type politicans and activists seem to be very anti-progress?

"Anti-progress" is a very loaded term. What one person views as progression, another may view as regression. Just labeling any opposition as "anti-progress" eliminates the nuance of any actual criticisms. For example:

> Carbon sequestration, storage, capture, ideas to drive global cooling - all shot down.

These aren't shut down because environmentalists just hate the inherent idea of technological countermeasures to global warming. Those ideas are fantastic... if they work. Most environmental activists would rather focus on things that we know will help (reducing energy usage, increasing green energy production), instead of gambling on undeveloped and unproven technology.

[mola]

How are automated cars and parking outside the city related?

You can park your car outside the city, and use public transport, no self driving technology is required.

It's not that that they are against progress, they are against shiny new things that don't make sense.

Our need is less cars on the road. Not automated cars available per person in anytime of day. at most this will solve parking, but not congestion.

[throwaway0a5e]

An autonomous car can drop you off at the train stop and then go to the parking lot. That's the same mileage as driving to the parking lot and then walking to the train stop but makes the commute far less soul crushing so more people can/will choose it.

[notahacker]

I don't think most people's resistance to using public transport is a two minute walk between the parking lot and the station entrance.

[whoknowswhat11]

This is where green folks aren't paying attention to what folks want.

Go ahead and ban straws (put in the trash in the restaurant) while letting tons of plastic blow into the ocean from street litter.

Some folks don't want to be on public transit, including liberals and definitely liberal elites (ie, COVID / crime / dirt / safety / whatever).

There is no middle ground on the green / left. We all have to cram into public transit (I took it for a while, the bus would skip my stop if full, NO ONE took action on the clearly crazy idiots disrupting the ride forcing the bus to stop etc). Ideas like robotaxies are fought. Why? I don't get it.

I'm also convinced many liberals / green folks are either very wealthy or don't live in tougher areas. It seems to be -> you take the bus, while I fly my private jet to talk about climate somewhere.

Weirdly, it's going to be the ruthless capitlists, google, uber (ugh!), tesla (run by a bit of maniac) who are moving us forward.

Little support locally. Ie, do a lane on highway dedicated for auto-drive truck trains and cars etc.

[jefftk]

"the bus would skip my stop if full"

Minor, but the problem here is that the bus is full, not that it skips your stop. If there's no room on the bus, there's nothing it can do, so it might as well move faster.

We should not be allowing buses to reach capacity, but this calls for more investment in public transit, not less.

[whoknowswhat11]

The issue with public transit is that

a) its often out of my control in terms of options to fix it

b) some things (violence) seem to have become accepted.

c) there are a ton of (very) entrenched special interests which make touching any element of this difficult.

Options like auto-cars put control in users hands, who can self organize if they want to car share etc.

[danhor]

It's already possible to self organize car sharing, with a spiffy app, insurance rating systems and . But keeping the car in good shape and checking it, as well as the risk on non-availability (which might get better with a self-driving car, but no one wants to wait for the car to driver 30 minutes back) now make it an unattractive option compared to commercial car sharing.

At least here in the Region of Stuttgart, Germany b) and c) mostly don't apply (and I'm pretty certain they don't in most other parts of europe) and most issues with public transit here (limited core capacity leading to overcrowding, higher prices) similarly apply to cars and automated cars (with congestion and usually higher cost of ownership than public transit time cards) and can't be solved there either by an individual. The unique issues not common to other modes of transport are bad service in some parts, depending on the route a long duration compared to car travel and an aging infrastructure leading to a few issues (but due to be replaced in the near future™).

Most of those stem partially from chronic underinvestment with some rail connections closed in the 50s still not being reactivated. But unless a car isn't needed for the daily commute (due to public transit or more home office or active transportation) it's hard to imagine car sharing or self driving cars helping a lot.

[whoknowswhat11]

I lived in Europe for a number of years. At least then, transit was great and I used it extensively. In San Francisco at least, for policy reasons, transit is pretty grim.

I witnessed a guy getting beat up for stopping a tourist scam. Interestingly, after they grabbed his shoes and he chased them HE was arrested.

I saw an old women be spit on (huge spit) while sitting in the handicap seat.

What's very unique in San Francisco, passengers know that if they get involved and a claim of excessive force, racial etc factors come in - they may have a career ending consequences or liability. AS a result, again, no one will help you. It's really amazing watching TOTALLY brazen theft from stores, from cars, folks getting harassed while on transit. No one will step in. I wouldn't be surprised if someone was dying that folks might step over them or around them, it's that socialized.

This may have changed in the EU, but when I was there it just wasn't comparable at all. The US model for transit has soured me a bit on transit. At some point you need to make it so it serves the 95% that want a safe ride, perhaps doing on call pickup transits for those struggling with mental health / drug and other issues who still need to get places?

Bottom line though - I'd encourage govt to create safe options people WANT to use vs focusing on banning things (out here major efforts to get uber banned so taxi cartels could take over again with their "broken" credit card meters, unreliable pickups, failures to service areas etc).

[wolverine876]

Where do you ride public transit? I use it regularly. I've never seen violence, there is plenty of public input, and for specific needs, the personnel generally are helpful.

[wolverine876]

Could you back up some of these claims? Skip the stereotypes.

> it's going to be the ruthless capitlists, google, uber (ugh!), tesla (run by a bit of maniac) who are moving us forward.

They haven't done a great job of it yet, but when people spread these claims, the 'ruthless capitalists' sure benefit.

[xmprt]

A full bus sounds like a great problem to have. Imagine if every single person in that bus decided to take a 4 seater car to their destination instead.

[wolverine876]

Also, full buses provide funding for a second bus, more routes, and more frequent pickups.

[wittycardio]

There's various factions amongst environmentalists, personally I'm very pro nuclear energy , carbon capture and self driving tech (to use outside Cities ideally) . But in some cases low tech solutions are actually better, for example walkable / bike able cities with good transit are amazing for quality of life and the environment.

[wonderwonder]

This is most politicians. They have to say one thing to get the votes from individual citizens but they have to actually do something else to get the money they need from the corporations and special interest groups that they need to actually campaign and travel and do all the other things that they seem to be able to do on a 170k salary. Politicians live like rich people but only get a middle class salary. To make up the difference they vote in a manner that will get their PAC's funded. Most of the time all politicians have to do is not do anything. Status quote means special interests are happy and money keeps flowing. End of the day this works well for the politicians, citizens don't care what they actually do as long as they have the correct letter next to their name, just what they say.

[_lqaf]

> Has anyone else noticed this?

That has been popular criticism going back at least to the 70s. Sometimes it is even true.

Much more often, "anti-progress" is pretty meaningless code for "attacks things I like".

I mean, make no mistake, there are all sorts of bad ideas in environmental circles, including some outright fascists. But nut-picking weirdos to brand anyone involved in environmental policy circles is just nasty propaganda, no different than calling all capitalists slavers.

[danhor]

> For example, automated cars would allow you to park your car outside of the city, but still have car driving to get places.

People aren't limited by available parking anymore, more cars will just drive idly, increasing the traffic issue which leads to non-bus lane busses being more undesirable and active transport on streets (primarily bikes) being more annoying and thus undesirable. Also increases emissions (particulates from tires and brakes even when using electrical propulsion) and power usage.

> Auto cars increase sharing opportunities as well. Reducing car ownership.

Current Auto cars with a human element (called uber) increases greenhouse gas emissions and displaces public as well as active transport (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c01641), exactly the opposite of what was hoped for. (much less air pollutants tho due to less cold starts, but electrification is probably gonna make that a non-issue)

I don't see how auto cars very much increase car sharing opportunities in cities compared to traditional sharing. For common commuter-type transit auto cars bring very little improvement compared to regular car ownership (since everyone needs a car at the same time). Automated cars have some potential for helping with climate change as a small part of the solution, but very much as infill and not a primary mode of transportation. Probably will make congestion worse though and decrease average people in cars much below 1. (there are also other issues when considering a mostly automated car pool, such as rampant jaywalking due to automated safety stops and the reaction to such a thing)

> Smaller / safer nuclear power research would be near totally CO2 emission free

A more wide spread adoption of a new working design now would take > 20 years and the western world is currently having very tough luck while building new nuclear reactors. It's probably not going to help much with climate change, especially considering that alternate technologies such as wind and solar are in a great position and probably (together with storage solutions) will get better much faster than nuclear. Another hard part is that nuclear power is expensive (due to the needed security, probably no matter what since fission is hard) which stems not from the fuel. Thus it makes little sense to use nuclear as a complement to renewables as peaker plants, as opposed to e.g. gas plants which are ideal and might (hopefully) be converted to use non-fossil fuels in the future (but power-to-gas based stuff).

> Carbon sequestration, storage, capture, ideas to drive global cooling

The first three are (afaict) very much received as a positive, but as a measure of last resort due to cost and energy intensity and not as a replacement to moving away from carbon emissions as possible. They're most likely needed no matter what to archive 1.5°. The last one sounds like a bit science fiction, so probably not a really workable idea (especially due to the potential risks).

The issue is that solutions need to be implemented in a large scale in the next ~10 years which is really not enough time to scale up a newly invented technology, both in the transportation sector (due to long replacement cycles), manufacturing sector (also long replacement times as well as uncertainty) and other infrastructure.

Most governments are still funding research in many things that will probably not make sense for solving climate change (e.g. fusion) and if something unexpectedly works much better and can be implemented much faster than can be expected now we can still use it.

(This is getting a bit long, but...)

To further illustrate the point: Most parts of the solution that get propagated and are getting implemented were already commercialized 10 years ago. Transit, electric cars, wind turbines, heat pumps, PV. Most stuff that wasn't isn't ready to get used on a large scale now.

And for most issues we have working commercial solutions either needing to be utilized on a larger scale (mobility, energy production, heating and some production) or in the pipeline and almost certainly succeeding (energy storage with power-to-gas or other methods, hydrogen for steel and airplanes and similar stuff, concrete). The only issue is doing it, which seems to be the hard part.