So tell me, in the situation you are describing, how would you do your job and care for yourself or the people you like / who depend on you without access to e.g. a car?
I don’t understand how you do not seem to care why those emissions, that cause global warming, take place in the first place?
It might be hard to believe today, but humans lived for millenia without any cars. Sure they are necessary in many places now, but that will probably change drastically after peak oil is reached (because renewables can never provide enough energy to power electric cars for everyone).
I didn’t phrase this correctly. My point wasn’t that cars are needed in a general way.
My point was that most people, as of today have some dependency on cars, whether they like it or not. People by large have not been involved in the Urban Design decisions that shaped the cities in the last 100 years or so.
I further want to add that even if more people would decide to go without a car (and I believe that this in many countries is actually what is happening), the impact on global warming would be minimal.
Also I think you are correct in saying that the current way of using cars will change in the future drastically.
So in summary, if we care to put effort into avoiding the worst of climate change, we need to address the areas where the damage is done, which is industry. As I stated above, we haven’t done this in the last 40 years and I feel that the “personal responsibility” approach was something that actually caused significant problems and side tracked meaningful action.
We need cars because our society has decided for us that they should be incentivized. Public transport is a mess (and not very affordable) and many railways in western Europe have been decommissioned. We could have modern society without cars, or at least without everyone needing to have one.
Most emissions is not due to a person’s activity but to industry. The scale of waste is unprecedented: just consider for a second the environmental impact of surveillance capitalism: of all these Google/Facebook/NSA servers running exactly ZERO useful services for users/society, of all the CCTV cameras and other control mechanisms deployed in the streets. Add to this mix:
that most companies/jobs are utterly useless or destructive
that planned obsolescence across industries means even when we produce too much we’ll keep on wasting
And you start to have a basic explanation of what’s fucked up about capitalism destroying our planet.
Sure, for most of my life I didn’t have a car either. But that’s not really the point. Some life circumstances are outside your own control. The point I poorly tried to make was more that people are driven by their current circumstances. Climate change is a systemic problem. You can’t rely on people reactively fixing climate change 8 billion times in their own little yard. It just won’t happen.
My point was that if individuals make up for less emission non-individual actors will automatically make up for more of the total emissions, so the screenshotted post is kind of silly.
I’m sure there will probably be no substantial change (at least in time) if we just let consumers decide, but that doesn’t except them from being responsible for driving around in child-killing, cancer-inducing, environment-destroying and fossil-fuel-wasting private tanks.
The point of the screenshot comment is that we are not focusing on the right things when discussing climate change.
There are lots of issues with SUVs but to say that some end product is the real cause of the problem (talking about climate change, not cancer here) is just inaccurate. It is the tremendous industry that was built, the associated physical assets, and the associated economic and financial incentives.
Live in a place where cars are not necessary? America was really the pioneer of forcing people to live in places where if you dont have a car you can’t advance in society.
So tell me, in the situation you are describing, how would you do your job and care for yourself or the people you like / who depend on you without access to e.g. a car?
I don’t understand how you do not seem to care why those emissions, that cause global warming, take place in the first place?
It might be hard to believe today, but humans lived for millenia without any cars. Sure they are necessary in many places now, but that will probably change drastically after peak oil is reached (because renewables can never provide enough energy to power electric cars for everyone).
I didn’t phrase this correctly. My point wasn’t that cars are needed in a general way.
My point was that most people, as of today have some dependency on cars, whether they like it or not. People by large have not been involved in the Urban Design decisions that shaped the cities in the last 100 years or so.
I further want to add that even if more people would decide to go without a car (and I believe that this in many countries is actually what is happening), the impact on global warming would be minimal.
Also I think you are correct in saying that the current way of using cars will change in the future drastically.
So in summary, if we care to put effort into avoiding the worst of climate change, we need to address the areas where the damage is done, which is industry. As I stated above, we haven’t done this in the last 40 years and I feel that the “personal responsibility” approach was something that actually caused significant problems and side tracked meaningful action.
We need cars because our society has decided for us that they should be incentivized. Public transport is a mess (and not very affordable) and many railways in western Europe have been decommissioned. We could have modern society without cars, or at least without everyone needing to have one.
Most emissions is not due to a person’s activity but to industry. The scale of waste is unprecedented: just consider for a second the environmental impact of surveillance capitalism: of all these Google/Facebook/NSA servers running exactly ZERO useful services for users/society, of all the CCTV cameras and other control mechanisms deployed in the streets. Add to this mix:
And you start to have a basic explanation of what’s fucked up about capitalism destroying our planet.
That’s exactly right. The problem is largely systemic and clearly linked to the way we run our economy.
I have a bicycle and a train flatrate, never needed a car except for moving where Ihad to rent a small truck anyways.
Sure, for most of my life I didn’t have a car either. But that’s not really the point. Some life circumstances are outside your own control. The point I poorly tried to make was more that people are driven by their current circumstances. Climate change is a systemic problem. You can’t rely on people reactively fixing climate change 8 billion times in their own little yard. It just won’t happen.
My point was that if individuals make up for less emission non-individual actors will automatically make up for more of the total emissions, so the screenshotted post is kind of silly.
I’m sure there will probably be no substantial change (at least in time) if we just let consumers decide, but that doesn’t except them from being responsible for driving around in child-killing, cancer-inducing, environment-destroying and fossil-fuel-wasting private tanks.
The point of the screenshot comment is that we are not focusing on the right things when discussing climate change.
There are lots of issues with SUVs but to say that some end product is the real cause of the problem (talking about climate change, not cancer here) is just inaccurate. It is the tremendous industry that was built, the associated physical assets, and the associated economic and financial incentives.
Live in a place where cars are not necessary? America was really the pioneer of forcing people to live in places where if you dont have a car you can’t advance in society.