Comment by gravypod
13 hours ago
We will not reverse climate change by consuming less. The solutions are equally political and technological. Driving a smaller vehicle does help but real solutions would be: building homes next to jobs, public transportation, electrification, and carbon capture.
> On a motorcycle, you’re in the environment instead of sealed off from it. Lavender above Grasse in June, a 5-degree temperature drop when the road cuts through a forest, leaning into corners with your whole body
Very romantic, but not very realistic. Most commuters need to show up for work in heat, rain, snow, etc.
Electrification and carbon capture are interesting and need more investment, but beyond those you're also showing your own preferences here just as much as the motorcycle proponents.
>building homes next to jobs
This is almost certainly still "consuming less" in the US. You just cannot pack as much combined square footage + individual private outside space as most Americans are accustomed to next to all the jobs. (Without even getting into that people often change jobs, or have multiple household members working different jobs in different places.)
(This is where usually people say "well the non-generational-housing single-family-home is a dumb choice, or bad for mental health or society or whatever" but that would just take us back to debating about what sort of "consume less" is a "real" sacrifice or not.)
> public transportation
Here too I think that a 20-40 minute packed-standing bus or train car (as is the rush-hour case in cities where large numbers of people commute by public transit) is again "consuming less" than a vehicle that's essentially a private luxury pod (whether driving yourself, the car driving for you, or someone else driving you.)
You've touched on a key point: in a city, space is at a premium, so taking up a lot of it for yourself _really is_ luxury consumption.
> building homes next to jobs
That already exists, it's called a city. But cities are inevitably dirty, noisy and dangerous because they concentrate people by design, and many people, especially families, don't want to live in one.
Public transit has the same problems. Put many people in a small space and again you get something awful.
They’re not noisy because there’s a lot of people, they’re noisy because there’s a lot of cars.
Some people are noisy on public transit, and if they aren't policed to not do this (i.e. threatened with violence by armed agents of the state and/or physically removed from the transit), then they make public transit noisy.