[livueta]

Whenever I see an argument like this I'm confused by how hand-wavey "just achieve societal change" is. Like, sure, there's various issues with various technological approaches, but it's not as if the kind of broad social change that'd see private cars outlawed develops overnight.

If anything, the last couple of decades demonstrate pretty convincingly and depressingly that putting together real momentum (read: won referendums on things like carbon taxes, _not_ push polls) is capital-H Hard. It's absolutely true that various bad actors play a factor in that level of difficulty, but they're not going to shut up and go away if we clap our hands and wish really hard either. Consider [1]: this is in a constituency electorally dominated by one of the most avowedly socially-liberal cities in the US and year after year it goes down by similar margins, and that's incredibly anodyne compared to straight-up getting rid of private cars.

Conversely, supply-side energy mix changes have, over the same timeframe, made drastic improvements in emissions-per-capita without requiring much/any self-sacrifice. Martyrdom doesn't really scale in the same way.

So: what's your plan for gaining the power required to implement your scenario, taking into account the apparent ineffectiveness of decades of messaging? "just ban the cars" would be sensical if you were emperor for a day, but failing any miracles it seems to me that the real distraction is this sort of utopianism.

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[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1631,_Carbon_E...

[ZeroGravitas]

Worth noting that Washington implemented a plan that is basically the same as that proposal:

https://ecology.wa.gov/About-us/Who-we-are/News/2021/Aug-6-S...

[livueta]

That's true, though the intent behind posting the referendum was as a reflection of (lack of) direct public support for potentially personally painful measures. Getting something done through legislative channels obviously isn't worthless or meaningless, but it's not as direct of a reflection of a willingness to incur changes as a referendum is. In a unipolar state like WA, the actions of the legislature can be pretty divorced from actual popular sentiment, and runs the risk of being undone by referendum - which has a lot of precedent in fairly recent WA history.

[ZeroGravitas]

It's a bit circular to refer to it as personally painful measures though, and that seems to be a regular trope.

Carbon taxes etc., are fairly subtle and boring technocratic method to achieve a goal. The reaction to them is almost entirely based on false impressions, a nested series of false impressions actually. There is no problem, there is no solution, this solution would make things worse, this solution would hurt me personally. this solution is just a scam and so on.

"I don't want to do the thing that economists say is most efficient, because it would be painful" as a democratic opinion doesn't really make any sense. If it's efficient then you can use the efficiency gains to compensate anyone who loses out.

And then that deliberately misinformed reaction is somehow raised as yet another reason for not doing the most sensible thing, and to talk about how "painful" it would be to stop polluting and incentivize efficiency.

And the only reason we appear to need to talk about what people want in this weird, third-hand, circular way, is that if you actually ask people what they want, then they say they want to address climate change. And since that answer isn't acceptable to some people, they need to come up with elaborate ways to prove that people don't actually want what they say they want, and that economists say is the best thing to do.

[livueta]

> It's a bit circular to refer to it as personally painful measures though, and that seems to be a regular trope.

I guess I should have said "popularly perceived to be personally painful" - which I think you'd agree with? Carbon taxes are fantastic measures that are one of our best shots at success, and I think it's a shame the referendums didn't pass. The actual harm to voters would objectively be pretty low, but again, perception is what matters. Fact can obviously feed into perception, but in a case like this where we're explicitly dealing with misinformation campaigns correctness is necessary but, alone, insufficient.

And yeah, of course that reaction is deliberately misinformed - I tried to catch that in my original comment:

> It's absolutely true that various bad actors play a factor in that level of difficulty, but they're not going to shut up and go away if we clap our hands and wish really hard either.

The proponents of these bills had their shot. So did the deceptive oil majors. So far, hasn't worked out. What's the new plan - cede the fight for public opinion and try to do everything via administrative rearguard actions? I'm sticking to this point because the implicit response usually seems to be either that or "wait for a utopian mass moral awakening" - and neither is much of a strategy.

> is that if you actually ask people what they want, then they say they want to address climate change.

Well, kinda, and that's what I was getting at by mentioning push polling. If you position addressing climate change as a common-sense positive-balance deal requiring zero self-sacrifice, then sure. However, the gap between what people say they want and what they actually do is well-documented. If you drill down a little into what that willingness to incur change actually looks like, you get results like [1]. This is why referendum results are interesting as indicators of revealed preference. What I'm trying to avoid here is taking the push-poll cheap idealism as deep commitment, and using that to inform commitment to dead-end policy choices.

The core of my argument here is

1) real climate action is essential, and carbon taxes are one of the best means of implementing this from a technical perspective

2) voting outcomes and polling suggest that public support for changes that are popularly perceived as personally painful is limited, even in cases of subtle and boring technocratic methods like (1)

3) given (2), attaining the popular support necessary to wholesale ban private cars appears wildly unlikely

4) therefore, maybe focus on the stuff that we're actually somewhat close to (2016 vs 2018 referendums gained ~4%) instead of utopian pipe dreams that inspire fierce opposition

I may have been unclear because I feel like a lot of your point is addressing arguments I didn't make - I agree that carbon taxes are great and that opposition to them is largely not substantive. The problem I'm trying to point out is that if _even in this case_ things are ropey, talking about banning cars is beyond pie-in-the-sky. There's a strong need to focus on interventions that are minimally disruptive to lifestyles in order to maintain the degree of popular support necessary for long-term change. Convincing someone of the (true facts!) that a supply-side intervention like carbon pricing will have a minimally negative or positive impact on their day-to-day is way easier than talking that hypothetical person out of their car.

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[1] https://apnews.com/article/8e6baa6c2d3badeb4e91b6e6d078a5c0

[cardanome]

Transitioning from car-centric to human-centric cities is not about sacrifice. It is about understanding how cars actually keep cities from being places that could be much more enjoyable to live in.

Having finding trouble an apartment? Without all the wasted space for cars we could have much denser cities. Problem solved!

Want to have a place where children can actually play outside safely? Again, ban cars and you don't have to move to the country or suburbia.

Tired of how loud cities are? Oh boy, do I have a solution for that.

I am not preaching sacrifice, I am saying if we change some things we can achieve much better living conditions for everyone, a plus in living standard.

So it is more of a matter of getting people to be conscious about how things actually work.

So no, I am not Utopian. The point still stands that Tech wont solve the issues. It is sink or swim for humanity.

[YarickR2]

OMG . Not personal, but you're delusional and/or straight up lying. Denser cities are more enjoyable to live ? Wrong. Denser cities safer for children to play outside ? Wrong. Cities are loud because of cars ? With all that increased density you will have your surroundings much noisier when it hurts most - at the end of the day, when everyone is back from the job, and having a good time at home. Loud music, celebrations, brawls, arguments, etc. No, cramping more people in the same space will not this space more livable; ask Chinese .

[cardanome]

I don't get why I am getting such emotional responses.

Most of the noise in cities comes from cars, that is a fact. Even dense cities can be fairly quiet. I suggest watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

Plus China has probably not the best building codes, the problem can be further improved by having proper sound isolation in homes.

Dense cities mean you will have everything in walking distance. There will be much more space for parks and other areas of recreation.

[livueta]

You're preaching to the choir: I personally agree with much of this (lived in metro Tokyo), but that's honestly quite irrelevant. The point of contention isn't whether it'd be better in some absolute sense - it's whether you can convince enough people of the correctness of your vision to attain the support required to implement it.

It's not like your average American isn't aware of these arguments; they're just not broadly convincing (even if, from your or my perspective, they are). If they were, population flows would be headed in the other direction.

I'm pushing back here because your solution appears to be to continue to make the same arguments that have, so far, failed to convince enough people to deflect us from our current trajectory. More of the same, but louder? And given the urgency of the position, it's not like waiting on natural generational shift is much of an answer.

That's more or less why I take the exact opposite position and am bullish on anything that involves supply-side efficiency and bearish on anything that involves people having spontaneous moral awakenings.

[bluescrn]

'Take away cars and meat from the poors and forcibly relocate them into tiny pods in Mega-City One'

Don't you see any problems with that plan?

[cardanome]

I have never owned a car in my life. Am I living in 1984?

It is really not a big deal.

[bluescrn]

It's not about car-free life. It's about dense cities being terrible places to live unless you're at a level of wealth high enough to isolate yourself from the poverty, crime, noise, etc in a secure luxury apartment in an upmarket area.

IMHO, big cities are dying, they're a relic of the past. The Internet had already killed physical retail. The pandemic killed off more businesses while WFH workers fled the cities. Soft-on-crime policy trends seem to be hastening the decline.

And in a digitally connected world there's simply fewer reasons to physically pack ever more people into small spaces.

[cardanome]

Cities in the Netherlands are very good and safe places to raise kids in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw

It is just a matter for human instead of car-centric city planning. This will also help with poverty and crime.