[jdshupe]

Does anyone have recommendations for good reading on this subject? What this means for combustion engines as a whole? I am trying to imagine where the push for clean energy will lead. I am fully on team green but I think the switch happened too late. I feel like there is a future where you have a large percent of the population (at least in the US) where EVs are too expensive to afford the monthly payment/up front payment to switch but gas prices rise to a point where they can't afford to fill their tank anymore either. People will always say "just use public transit" but most cities in the US have a barely managing system if they even have one.

[ericmay]

Best reading recommendation would be to look at climate change projections from NOAA or similar organizations for where you live or want to live, assume those will be true within some +-, and then base your decisions off of that. There doesn't seem to be a substantial downside to getting it wrong if bad scenarios don't occur but if they do occur you'll want to have gotten it right.

> People will always say "just use public transit" but most cities in the US have a barely managing system if they even have one.

If only we could possibly do something about that....

but yea, EVs on the whole are better than ICE in this context, but 1-1 replacement schemes are a very bad idea and don't really address the underlying problems we face on climate change and other problems (social division, obesity, premature death, etc.); we need to stop driving everywhere.

Unfortunately subtractive solutions (which are almost always better) such as building a little bit closer together (nobody is taking your SFH away), allowing businesses to operate near homes, and building sidewalks don't sell cars, don't fill transportation department budgets and justify jobs, don't win elections, and don't increase GDP. Some big multi-million dollar project that brings "300 new manufacturing jobs" gets the headline and gets the funding, even though building a few sidewalks and converting surface parking lot into businesses bring even more economic activity.

[jdshupe]

Thanks for the response! I will definitely dive into that.

> even though building a few sidewalks and converting surface parking lot into businesses bring even more economic activity.

I will say, I think we are seeing a bit of movement this direction. The work-from-home boom from Covid has shows that living at the office isn't the dream it used to be. People are beginning to see the benefits of local community and business as not just the economic impact but the freedom that that proximity can provide.

[whimsicalism]

Right, but, to a large extent, Americans love the burbs and you are not going to be able to get them to vote for their demise, no matter how many benefits you can see .

[ericmay]

Well I don't think all Americans love the suburbs for sure. Home prices in the city where I live for example seem to be skyrocketing compared to the suburbs and that's despite bad schools.

I think you are right in that many Americans won't "vote" for a lot of these benefits. Again the "300 new manufacturing jobs" headline sounds better than "16 small businesses and a 2% drop in obesity-related premature deaths over a 5 year period" [1] and that's what we optimize for.

To your point though, as many Americans won't "vote to get rid of the suburbs" they'll eventually just go bankrupt trying to maintain all of the highways and cars [2], or we'll have to go to war to secure oil flows. There's certainly a social choice to be made and I think we'll choose suburbs, cars, war, heat, and all of those things.

[1] There's nothing wrong with 300 new (or any amount) manufacturing jobs, and the numbers I'm using are made up, though my point is largely that better urban planning and design, zoning, etc. will produce greater economic benefits it's just that they aren't concentrated into a single headline that some dumb idiot can point to and say "Mission Accomplished".

[2] Please note that there's nothing wrong with cars existing, the main problem is cars being a hard requirement (government mandate really) for every single thing you do in your life.

[nobody9999]

>[2] Please note that there's nothing wrong with cars existing, the main problem is cars being a hard requirement (government mandate really) for every single thing you do in your life.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "government mandate" in this context.

I've lived for more than half a century and have never owned a car or attempted to purchase one. In all that time, no one (affiliated with a government or not) has ever even hinted that I must have a car.

I'm not playing "gotcha" here, I just don't understand what you're getting at.

Sure, there are many places (especially in the US) where having access to a personal, motorized vehicle provides access to many of the necessities of modern life, but that's not a result of government fiat/mandate.

Rather it was population increases, cheap oil, poor land use decisions, bigotry and a host of other factors -- including government support for such decisions -- that are at the heart of those results.

Perhaps my take is too US-centric and/or I'm missing something important.

tl;dr: Governments supporting the status quo/big economic actors creating/maintaining unsustainable environments is bad public policy, but doesn't add up to a "mandate," IMNSHO.

[ericmay]

Sure I can take a stab at it.

For the vast majority of America in order to participate in life you have to drive a car somewhere to do something. So this could be driving to get a prescription filled, it could be going to school, to work, etc. The way the government "mandates" it is by only building additional car-only infrastructure (highways, etc.) and using zoning policies that dictate that SFH and big-box retailers are the only thing that can be built. Of course places like, say, New York City have public transit but for most of America the government effectively mandates that you use a car.

While the government may not explicitly state that "you must use cars" if you take a look at state transportation department budgets, for example, you'll see that the funding is all for cars. We could split hairs and say it's not a "mandate" but I think it is effectively a mandate and if you asked, most politicians would say something like "Americans love their cars and freedom" which means "we support car-only infrastructure".

[nobody9999]

>While the government may not explicitly state that "you must use cars" if you take a look at state transportation department budgets, for example, you'll see that the funding is all for cars. We could split hairs and say it's not a "mandate" but I think it is effectively a mandate and if you asked, most politicians would say something like "Americans love their cars and freedom" which means "we support car-only infrastructure".

Thanks for putting a finer point on that. As an American who lives in NYC, but has traveled/lived all over the US, your assessment is spot on.

Except for the "mandate" part (at least IMHO). Which, I argue, isn't splitting hairs at all.

I say that because the activities of state and local governments are, in fact, what the people they represent want. If it were not, those folks wouldn't have been elected in the first place.

And that's especially true for local governments, where a couple dozen folks dedicated to making something happen can usually do so. That's also true (generally with a few more folks involved) for state governments.

As such, those governments are, in fact, executing the will of their constituencies. So, in my mind, that's not a "mandate" (An authoritative command or instruction)[0] by the government, but a mandate (A command or authorization given by a political electorate to the winner of an election)[0] from the folks those governments represent.

So the car culture is, as wasteful as it may be, what the citizens of such towns/cities/counties/states have demanded (or at least voted for) and not some "edict from on high," which is the sense I got from both your comments around this. If my understanding is mistaken, my apologies.

[0] https://www.wordnik.com/words/mandate

[GolfPopper]

While there are convincing arguments for many problems with suburbs and sprawl, the one that really resonated with my own experience is their inability to maintain their infrastructure. Various schemes get them built in the first place, but there doesn't seem to be a way to get enough tax base to support all the necessary infrastructure long-term.

[dimitrios1]

I live in the burbs, and everything I need is a bicycle ride away. I currently work remotely, although that's about to change because we, like most companies, seem hellbent on making people drive in traffic and be generally less happy. During the pandemic I put maybe 4-5k miles on my vehicle. I would fill up gas once a month.

Long story short stop making this about 'burbs vs cities vs rural. It's not going to work, you aren't going to guilt enough people into doing the right thing. We need to make living sustainable for a variety of different type of living arrangements because nothing in America is ever this clear cut and dry or uniform. You can exercise positive patterns of behavior and living/lifestyle choices where ever you are. Besides, 99.9% of human existence was the village model: clusters of independent and self-sufficient communities. There's nothing wrong with this, and it's what we've evolved with.

[whimsicalism]

> Long story short stop making this about 'burbs vs cities vs rural. It's not going to work, you aren't going to guilt enough people into doing the right thing

Right, the exact point I was making.

That said, your suburbia apologia is a bit silly - naturalism fallacy aside, the suburban experience isn't even close to that of primordial human tribes.

And it matters little if you bike to your stores, the goods you're buying at your store are not brought there on bikes, just the emissions from the concrete needed to pave over that amount of land is ridiculous, etc. etc.

Unlocking suburban "sustainability" would require next generation sequestration tech or full electrification + renewables.

[dimitrios1]

My suburbia apology wasn't an apology, suburbia isn't without its faults either, but recognizing that suburbia is closer to the roots than dense urbanism.

[generalizations]

It's going to be about suburbs vs rural for as long as the suggested solutions only work in urban environments. If you don't like it being that way, then suggest a solution that works for people who don't live and work in a dense environment.

[dimitrios1]

My entire point is the suggested solutions aren't solutions. The onus is on those suggesting to suggest something practical and that will actually work, not utopian fantasies.

[dublinben]

You’re right that EVs are not enough to solve this. We also need to significantly reduce the amount of traveling in all cars, electric or not.

The good news is that there are fast and cheap solutions that cities can implement nearly overnight. Cities like Paris showed in recent years that “pop-up” bike lanes can be installed very quickly, and significantly increase travel by bicycle.

Many cities also have a bus system, which would also be positively transformed with just painting some bus lanes on existing roads.

The short term fixes support the longer term changes (enabling walkable communities, allowing more efficient compact housing, etc.) that we also need to be adopting as fast as possible.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/10/13/cycling-through-covid...

[jdshupe]

> We also need to significantly reduce the amount of traveling in all cars, electric or not.

I agree with the idea of this but in saying this you are forgetting about ~20% of the US populace that lives in rural areas.[1] I personally live ~1 hour from the nearest city. The area I live in has no access to high-speed internet to enable remote work, and the cost of driving to the city for a good paying job is still money ahead than taking a low paying job closer by. I also know I am not the only one of my neighbors in this boat.

This goes back to my original point, I think we have made the change too late. Sure we can implement solutions in cities with relative speed but the type of large scale changes that it would take to help areas, like where I'm at, will be too late by the time they are finished.

[1]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america...

[dublinben]

Obviously, this isn't a one-size fits all solution. But even per your numbers, the vast majority (80%) of American's don't live in rural areas. The solutions I mentioned are the biggest bang for the buck because they are the most broadly applicable.

Even for those that do live in rural communities, this isn't an intractable situation with no possibility of improving. First of all, many rural communities existed before the invention of the automobile. They began as compact towns centered around the train station. Nearly all of them have lost passenger rail access, but places like Germany, Austria, and Switzerland show that this need not be the case. Traditional community planning would allow many people to accomplish daily tasks within town without a car, even if one was used to travel outside of town.

Second, fewer people should be living an hour away from their job in an urban center, and nobody should be forced to. It must be affordable and convenient for everyone to live close enough to their job so as to enable them to easily get there without a car, but this is not a problem that can be solved overnight.

Third, we must invest in an effort to install fiber optic internet access in these communities, in a 21st century repeat of the Rural Electrification program of the 20th century. Remote work is a vital lifeline to stave off the steady decline of population in rural areas.

Rural communities face several existential threats, climate change is just one of them. Hopefully there can be some synergy among solutions that will make these communities more resilient in every dimension, not just climate.

[kitkat_new]

it's always possible to improve public transport, and it could happen fast if people would get their priorities straight; more options are car sharing and concentrating on more dense areas with walkable and cyclable infrastructure (keyword 15 minute cities).

something to watch instead of read: NotJustBikes

[aaronbrethorst]

David Roberts, formerly of Vox and now independent, has been a great resource for years. You can find his archive at these two links:

https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts

https://www.canarymedia.com/about/people/david

And he now podcasts at the site https://www.volts.wtf

[glitcher]

The Physics of Climate Change by Lawrence M. Krauss

https://www.lawrencemkrauss.com/single-post/the-physics-of-c...

Perhaps not exactly what you're looking for in terms of potential solutions, but it's an honest and sobering account of where we're at without any undue sensationalization.

[jdshupe]

Like you said, not exactly what I was looking for but still a great read regardless. Thank you!

[kelseyfrog]

I'll give a gaming rec that's tied to a book. https://play.half.earth/

The discussion here mirrors many of the themes in the game, and presumably the book.

[maerF0x0]

IMO What we're consistently failing to see is that necessity is the mother of invention. Mankind has summoned seemingly unfathomable ingenuity and effort in response to dire need. It seems it will be Gen Alpha/Beta who will have their "ww2 moment" but in response to existential threat from Environmental and second order societal collapse.

Likely changes will include mass adoption of nuclear (potentially including Fusion or Thorium based), Carbon (and other gas) sequestration, Biodomes (to deal with a toxic environment), etc.

It clearly wont be the end of mankind, just mankind as we currently experience it.

[vharuck]

>It clearly wont be the end of mankind, just mankind as we currently experience it.

Cold comfort if the new experience will be an economic crash and global food shortage. And you're assuming that, once things are terrible enough that political and economic powers can no longer ignore climate change, there will still be available solutions to have something better than a life of war and hunger.

Cities have fallen to disasters throughout history (easy example is Pompeii). Cultures vanish. The only reason anyone's still around to talk about it is because natural disasters, wars, and human errors have largely been localized. Climate change won't be.

[nobody9999]

>Cities have fallen to disasters throughout history (easy example is Pompeii). Cultures vanish. The only reason anyone's still around to talk about it is because natural disasters, wars, and human errors have largely been localized. Climate change won't be.

The "Bronze Age Collapse"[0] wasn't global, but it certainly wasn't "localized" in the sense that (I think) you're using it.

Yes, I'm picking a nit there. That said, you're otherwise spot on.

And that's not breaking news either, and it's been discussed ad infinitum, Fall of Civilizations[1] brings your point into a pretty clear focus. I highly recommend it!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B965f8AcNbw

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations/videos

[maerF0x0]

> Climate change won't be.

While I agree there will be some delta nearly every where, I disagree there will be a life ending delta every where. It's worth noting I'm talking about this very stoically. It will be horrific either way.

[mdgrech23]

What happens when we can't find a solution. In a lot of ways we're lucky b/c every major problem that has come along we more or less have found a solution to. I suspect climate change may be a little different. Not sure if you saw the movie Up but the basic plot is an asteroid is going to crash into earth. They devise a mechanism to blow it up but it doesn't work and everyone dies. Not everyone is going to die from climate change but it's very possible we don't "solve" it and life as we know it is fundamentally altered.

[maerF0x0]

> What happens when we can't find a solution.

We go extinct or evolve. But that's always been true about every existential problem that humanity has faced before, including how to get food, clothe ourselves, not die in childbirth, on and on goes the list of things we've solved in the past.

I'm not saying we should recklessly exacerbate every scenario but we know that distributed problems are very difficult for humanity to solve without a present crisis (as ww2 was, and unfortunately 2050 is not present enough for typical human psychology) .

> life as we know it is fundamentally altered.

Yes. This has happened dozens of times, at an increasing pace across human history. Agriculture, Printing press, Germ Theory/Antibiotics, birth control + feminine hygiene products, Nuclear theory, Extra terrestrial travel, the internet, "AI" ... Each of them has unlocked an order of magnitude difference in human existence

I fully expect us to invent something in this case, and do not fear if we do not. Given enough dice rolls something is going to end humanity eventually.

[shilgapira]

I think you meant the movie Don't Look Up.

[PaulKeeble]

At the moment I don't buy the trade off for EVs. They take a lot of carbon to make since most of the chain of mining through construction is still consuming fossil fuels and buying energy from the grid is still quite carbon intensive.

You can save more money and be more helpful with solar on your roof especially in the warm areas of the US. At some point hopefully the carbon cost of the vehicles will come down and they will make more sense, they just don't save enough currently compared to a Solar array which typically pays back its carbon cost in about 90 days a vehicle is more like 5 years.

[einpoklum]

Another "slogan", Use a bicycle.

Yes, it's:

* Not possible on non-level terrain (although e-bikes are sometimes an option).

* Potentially dangerous in some places because of traffic.

* Some places will not be accessible by bike due to various physical obstacles

* Requires some level of physical health (although you don't have to be fit to ride a bike)

but still, it's a decent solution for many of those towns without a public transport system. And if you can get your municipal authorities to support it, you can address the second and third points above.

[whimsicalism]

Guess people will have to move to more dense areas if they want to survive financially then.

[criddell]

For that to happen, living in a dense urban area needs to be much less expensive than living out in the middle of nowhere. The average income in Mississippi is around $25k / year. I'm not sure what the distribution curve looks like, but I'd guess 2/3 of the population make at least $20k / year. Cities should be designed so that a person can live a good life on $20k / year in a city.

[whimsicalism]

Yes, I agree. In many places, this is the case - but not in the US.

[criddell]

I'm trying to think of places where city living is significantly less expensive than living in more rural areas and about the only thing I can come up with are places where land is scarce and therefore expensive. For example, Hawaii.

[jdshupe]

And how do you propose to get produce if all the farmers move away? Saying "people should move to more dense areas" creates a whole other swath of problems to fix.

[ZeroGravitas]

Combustion engines are an inferior tech, so they'll get replaced everywhere they can be.

I also think we could have been a decade ahead on this transition, if not more, but I think you'll still also be suprised at how quickly EVs totally replace ICE cars, even if you live in some poorly run area of the globe.

EVs already have lower TCO and leasing companies are keen to loan you the upfront difference and let you pay it back month by month instead of spending it on gas and use the more reliable EV as collateral, reducing financing risk and cost.

They'll continue to do that as the upfront price drops below ICE too.

It would be nice if the US moved to a healthier, more walkable lifestyle, but if they do insist on continuing that form of slow suicide, it'll only make the transition faster. EVs make more monetary sense the longer you drive, due to lower fuel costs.

[slothtrop]

Vaclav Smil - How the World Really Works, and Numbers Don't Lie.

[Daishiman]

I am a complete and absolute cynic on climate policies and outcomes, but battery technology is still having ridiculous breakthroughs day by day.

Ultimately if the base price of a vehicle increases the financial instruments to make them affordable in the face of regulatory disincentives for ICEs will appear.

[sourcecodeplz]

With China building 7 new coal plants everyday and cruise ships emitting more than all ICE cars combined I think the answer is either fusion or we just plant more and more trees.

[jcmoscon]

We should plant more trees for sure! Not because of carbon, but because of covering the soil. Check back to garden of eden documentary. Covering the soil is the solution to end hungry! Why? Watch the documentary.

[throwaway22032]

Public transport is impossible in most US cities. By impossible, I mean so uneconomical that it cannot happen at scale. The geography is not there.

Even in the UK, a tiny island, public transport works well in large cities like London and Manchester, sort of okay but a faff in the suburbs of those cities and smaller cities, marginally as something for tourists in small towns, and for the rest of the country there's nothing.

Almost everywhere in the US has less density than a small town in the UK. In most suburbs just getting to the end of your road is going to be 10 minutes walk. It would mean half of the country abandoning their homes and rebuilding, which I imagine would end up higher carbon than just using the ICE cars.

[CalRobert]

The geography's fine, it's the zoning that destroyed it. You don't need to have your entire country be oceans of parking with a few buildings sprinkled in the middle.

[throwaway22032]

I agree, I mean the human geography, not the size of the country, sorry if that was unclear.

A bit like how London couldn't turn into LA now without demolishing half of it. We tried to build a couple of freeways in the 60's and failed.

[brenns10]

To be fair, that's exactly how LA turned into LA: they ripped up streetcar lines, demolished parts of the city to make room for interstate highways, and changed the development rules to require low density and lots of parking.

Which is to say, American cities were not born with the car centrism, they were demolished and rebuilt with it. The reason it succeeded here, but not in London, may have a lot to do with the insane corruption due to the auto industry here (but we call it lobbying, not corruption, so it's fine :P), and also due to the hyper racist forces that drove white flight to suburbs. Also the incredible amounts of federal money that went to the interstate highway system.

[whimsicalism]

> It would mean half of the country abandoning their homes and rebuilding, which I imagine would end up higher carbon than just using the ICE cars.

Bet you it actually wouldn't, the impact of urban sprawl is absolutely massive and continuous as compared to a one-time cost.

[throwaway22032]

Fair enough.

I don't think it really matters to be honest, Americans are not moving into even something like my ~1500sqft terraced house en masse. You may as well ask half the country to learn Russian.

[dublinben]

The 60% of Millennials who don’t own a home, and the 60% of gen-Z who live with their parents would probably leap at the opportunity to own their own 1500 Sq ft row house.

We don’t need to convince anyone to move into more sustainable housing, we merely need to allow it.

[bcrosby95]

This is a large part of the problem. When we went house hunting, we wanted to live in a denser area. But we just plain couldn't afford it, so suburbs it was.

[bcrosby95]

I'm actually not so sure, especially if you use buses. The problem is its inconvenient, and if you have a car you take that instead of a bus, so no one takes the bus, which makes it hard to justify the bus and frequent schedules.

Our small suburban city of 15k actually has free bus service up and down our main stroad. Everyone is probably within a 15 minute walk to it. But it's aimed mostly at school kids, so the hours are very sparse during certain times of the day. E.g. when schools tend to get out it's every 10 minutes, but outside of those hours its every hour or so.

A lot of it is cultural too. My wife lived in Santa Monica, and she would drive for 1 hour to go 2 miles rather than walk or bike, and this behavior was common among her friends.

I live a 10 minute walk to school. My neighbors still drive their kids to school. There's no (good) excuse for that.