> “What Elon Musk wants to produce is a lifestyle,” Zulkifli said Wednesday when asked about the entrepreneur’s comments. “We are not interested in a lifestyle. We are interested in proper solutions that will address climate problems.”
Electric cars are poor, even counterproductive stand-ins for long term solutions such as public transportation and the elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle. They hide a multitude of externalities forced on the public and not paid for directly by owners or manufacturers.
Climate change aside, it's not hard to imagine a country as densely populated as Singapore opposing electric cars.
Electric cars are not at all "counterproductive" for long term solutions to climate change. They are one piece in the big picture of fixing climate change, drawdown.org ranks electric vehicles as #26 on their solution list. (https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank)
Also, by your qualifying "long term" I assume you think they are fine short and even intermediate term? Given the urgency of the climate crisis, short and intermediate term matters - a lot.
I agree with you that public transportation and the "elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle" (hard to define, but giving you the most charitable interpretation here) is very important. However, we don't have to choose one or the other, the decision as to which car to buy is typically an individual decision and I would think it correlates well with support for greener public transportation. Additionally, I fine it hard to believe that even in the long term there will be no need electric cars in more distant areas. Finally, development of electric cars and their infrastructure will also support electric public buses used for public transportation.
I'm glad Singapore is pursuing public transportation (a no-brainer in a city state) but the claim that it is not a "proper solution" isn't helpful and worse, it assumes that there is a solution. There isn't. There are MANY solutions which will be implemented at different speeds, with different levels of effectiveness and by many different organizations and individuals.
In general, it is better to encourage any useful efforts on this front rather than arguing that solution X isn't "proper" or less effective than solution Y.
> Electric cars are not at all "counterproductive" for long term solutions to climate change. They are one piece in the big picture of fixing climate change, drawdown.org ranks electric vehicles as #26 on their solution list. (https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank)
That thing is literally written by Americans who are 95% likely of living in a car suburb. Of course I’d also put electric cars as a necessity if I were them, they don’t want to change their lifestyle (which, you know, is why we’re in this in the first place).
> Connect suburbs to viable public transportation solutions
This is the thing that can't work. Public transit inherently requires density. Otherwise you have a bus that only comes twice a day and is still mostly empty because there aren't enough people per unit area to fill it.
Expecting commuter rail to eliminate cars in Spokane or Colorado Springs is delusional. It only works at all in major cities and even most of the cities in the US don't have enough density to make it really efficient -- and are prohibited by zoning laws from building at the density necessary to make that happen.
More to the point, even if we fixed the zoning today, it would take many years to actually build the density required to make it work, and until then people are still buying cars. And electric cars are better for the climate than gasoline.
It's way better to ride an ebike to the commuter rail station than a tesla to work. Build excellent bike networks for the suburbs. It's as cheap as sidewalk and/or paint.
I want to know AnthonyMouse's response to your argument: the treshold density in walking distance versus the treshold density in cycling distance will scale quadratically with the distance (since area is quadratic function of the radius), an electric bike that extends your range twice, will result in a 4 times higher "effective population density" for public transport to make sense.
Edit: just adding that any environmentally responsible form of personal transport doubles range, also results in quadratically (so four times) fewer stations and stops to be built, and linearly (so only half) the total length of rail or road to be laid and maintained
> the treshold density in walking distance versus the treshold density in cycling distance will scale quadratically with the distance (since area is quadratic function of the radius), an electric bike that extends your range twice, will result in a 4 times higher "effective population density" for public transport to make sense.
That's exactly the problem you're working against. A bicycle doubles the radius from walking, but a car at 70MPH on the highway multiplies it by 20 or more, so you get hundreds of times the area and consequent sprawl. And ebikes at those speeds are fatally dangerous, so they can't be a replacement.
The thing that can actually be competitive is trains that can go as fast as cars, but then you need the density to fill them.
Restructuring communities around bus hubs doesnt sound like an awful idea to be honest. Even if everyone had a car, since it's the suburbs, it would probably cut down on day to day traffic and allow people to have more affordable housing.
> Electric cars are poor, even counterproductive stand-ins for long term solutions such as public transportation and the elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle. They hide a multitude of externalities forced on the public and not paid for directly by owners or manufacturers.
Sure, but that's the solution you get from people who've never really experienced a well designed public transportation system. It's essentially a "faster horse" solution to traffic pollution issue which doesn't address the reasons behind the insane amount of tarmac space in modern US cities.
People aren't dumb. Building a city requires decades of coordinated action by thousands to millions of people, and it only works if rich people volunteer or are coerced to give up the disproportionate amount of real estate they enjoy, and no one gets a luxurious amount of space. It's not a matter of individuals seeing the light.
It's also a matter of the government allowing a city to be built. This sounds trivial, but is actually the biggest component to the lack of affordability in SF and NYC.
There are places where a lot of people want to live, but the gov't is actively preventing housing being built there. Instead of allowing the next increment of development (SFH -> missing middle -> mid-rise apartment buildings -> high rise apartment buildings), many US cities do their best to block development wherever possible. The only developments that can make it through the process are 1) huge, 2) well-backed by capital, and 3) hugely profitable.
Public transit doesnt have to be publicly run. I mean it can be, but services like cruise in SF are not and are better than individual cars as is uber pool. Both let many people in san Francisco live without cars.
Also in san francisco, many of the ferry lines are or were run by private companies. I dont understand how one can oppose the idea of available transit.
In reality what is needed is for governments to deregulate transportation. It is actually ridiculous that the city originally demanded uber drivers have medallions to pick people up. That should be a basic right so that transit companies can start to provide cheap and reliable transit options for city dwellers. If I recall correctly, Cancun has a mostly privatized bus system that works very well.
Finally, roads are also currently publicly funded and governments already have a huge say in transit that individual citizens cant really affect. Having multiple private transit options would mean larger organizations able to stand up to the authorities.
You make some fair points here but overall your argument seems to come from a point of paranoia of the communist boogeyman.
You deride a lot of public transportation points but don’t offer an alternative. Are we to believe automotives are satisfactory by your own yardstick?
* Automotives have way higher health risks than your pathogen boogeyman. Blaming 100M deaths in 1918 on public transportation is a reach when Germ theory was only really widely accepted a mere 50 years earlier. On the other hand automotive incidents remain the top cause of death for individuals ages 15-34 in the United States
* Goverment incompetency in public works is not anymore unique to public transportation. The government still operates the roads and bridges that the automotives drive. Look no further than Boston’s big dig where a project was overrun by 10 years and several billion dollars.
* Again, government mismanagement is not something unique public transportation. Are we to pretend cronyism didn’t exist before the SJW Boogeyman?
* For your final point, why are the externalities of cars not applicable here. It’s certainly not 0 - without the obvious threat of climate change, I’d rather have alive annoying tourists than dead adults from automotive fatalities.
Your only strong point, to me, is high availability transportation. However is high availability actually needed or is it just the comfort of knowing that is actually desired. How many people actually need to be able to drive anywhere at 3am on a consistent basis - and for those that do why wouldn’t they be able to accept the economic premium of doing so?
Wow. Was a relative of yours hit by a bus full of communists?
You're making taking public transit sound like the modern equivalent of storming Omaha Beach.
All of the problems you list apply just as well to any department of transportation that is responsible for building and maintaining roads... With taxpayer money, collected not from drivers, but off the backs of working people, regardless of how much they use those roads.
Which us city lacks public transit in the city center?
Not trying to be thick but in all american cities ive lived in, there was sufficient transit in the urban core. I understand arguments that it doesnt extend satisfactorily to the suburbs but your claim is much more specific
The problem isn't that there is no transit in the city center, the problem is that the city center isn't allowed to expand or increase in density, so more people can't actually live there.
Then more people live in the suburbs, but you need a car to get from the suburbs to the city. Then you get more demand for roads and parking in the city and people stop using the public transit even there.
> Then more people live in the suburbs, but you need a car to get from the suburbs to the city.
Your assertion ignores the fact that network coverage means nothing if the time to traverse the network just to get from point A to point B is much more expensive, time-wise and economically, than simply using personal transportation to get to where you want to go.
That isn't inherently true in the city center. If you have the population density to run subways every ten minutes that aren't subject to traffic jams, you can get from one part of the city center to another faster on a subway than in a car. But that only works if both of your endpoints are on a subway line, which requires more people to live in the city center than they currently do.
I've traveled extensively in Europe. While transit was available in most cities, and usable, aside from the real metros, like London and Paris and Barcelona, and a few gems, like Budapest, transit was often not frequent enough and clearly took longer than a car. The reason I took transit was it was cheaper in absolute terms, and, as a student, my time wasn't worth much. Also, that was pre-uber. I daresay that if I visited those places today -- places like Oslo, Prague, Porto, Rome, Dublin, etc -- I would have taken uber. It would be faster, and my time is worth more.
The only Asian cities I've spent any noticeable time in are Bombay and Hong Kong. Bombay -- I guess it's called Mumbai now -- is a shit show, in every sense of the word. It's one of the largest cities in the world. Transit is awful and dangerous. The only reason my parents took it growing up was because when they were young they were too poor to afford anything else. When we go back now, as rich foreigners, we always take a private driver or taxis everywhere. It's just not worth it.
Hong Kong is a different story of course, due to the British influence and the fact that it was Britain when I last visited. Also, its constraints as a small island mean transit is a must have. And I would agree that it's transit system is better than most American cities.
That all being said, the American cities with densities approaching that of London, Hong Kong, etc all do have rather good transit options. As I stated elsewhere, the issue is the US has no large cities in the European and Asian sense. Our cities are sparsely populated. Yes, a lot of that is due to government policy, but it's also due to the fact that America is -- for the most part -- completely empty land.
I agree, the buses are usually empty to half full. Unless you get soldiers marching people out to buses the US to go work for the "greater good" everyone is going to use cars until the traffic jams become simply too long.
No disagreement there. I'm just curious what this looks like if we advance our infrastructure enough. I'm not suggesting we prioritize suburbs at all. (I wasn't actually suggesting any course of action)
I am curious if the intent here is that people should not live in the suburbs or the country, just in cities where transportation can be most efficient.
The car is one of the ultimate goals of individualism: constant access to what Mills called "Negative Liberty", essentially the freedom to do whatever physical thing you desire to do at any given time. Unfortunately, that means that the subject must self-coerce themselves into believing it's ok that everyone own a car, and something that we can maintain forever. I wonder how many people in the US refuse to believe climate science simply because the idea of losing their car is physically painful.
When individualism leads us down a path of bad decision making (building electric cars rather than the far superior collective path of building up mass transit), I'm always reminded of a scene from the Cixin Liu "Rememberance of Earth's Past" books, where an individualist decision is made that ultimately dooms the people of the solar system, and the person who would have been the true hero of the story only gets to tell that decision maker that they are a child before he is sent off to prison.
This is essentially our battle against climate change right now: technologists trying to make enough toys to keep the rabble of toddlers happy so that we can actually fix the problem.
Owning a car is absolutely not an example of negative liberty. Owning a car is a privilege. Negative liberty is the freedom not to have your basic freedom infringed (it's essentially analogous to the non-aggression principle). Not the freedom to do "whatever physical thing you desire to do."
There's huge tradeoffs between cars and mass transit that you're completely failing to acknowledge. Mass transit works fine when you have a high density urban core. It doesn't work well for suburban or rural populations, which is most of the land area of the U.S. Not everyone is going to live in a dense city nor should they.
Even if electric vehicles do not substantially reduce greenhouse gases, they do pollute the air far less assuming you have cleaner electricity generation.
Moreover, ending the reliance on unsustainable fossil fuels is an end in itself. It would reshape global geopolitics and of course there’s a ton of destruction that happens from oil spills and oil extraction. Going full electric has many benefits beyond just reducing greenhouse gases.
Population control isn't the issue because we're already consuming far more than we should per person. Even if you completely stopped the growth rate of all nations, that doesn't change the fact that the first world lifestyle is at odds with climate change.
The birth rate in Singapore is one of the lowest in the world at 1.14 children per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2 and below the United States at 1.8.
From all the cities that I used, Singapore was the one where I used most often taxis, because they were so cheap. It may have changed since 2004, but I think even for Singapore having electric cars, even for taxis might be better. What am I missing?
Other than this I agree that for cities public transportation, together with good infrastructure for bicycles is very important, because in most cities driving your car yourself is so bad: it is slow, demands a lot of attention, getting a parking place is often very difficult.
What about inspiration? Huh? The fact that you can buy salvaged tesla batteries and experiment for an even greener future. We gotta take steps, and this company is feeding the american keep up with the joneses framework along with car heads desire for horsepower. Don't give me this externalities BS. We need it mass produced because it's a stepping stone.
I don't agree. I think it's a positive. Not everyone agrees with your utopian public transportation and cutting back to as minimalist a life as possible.
If you correctly price in the negative externalities of burning gasoline, then the suburbs suddenly get a lot more expensive, and it makes more sense to densify.
It's not working well in France with the Giletes Jaunes. Basically taxing the suburbs told a large social class of working poor people they have no right to exist. I suppose you could try warehousing them in the projects, but good luck with that.
Building the physical infrastructure for all those suburbians to live in the cities would also have a carbon impact.
In practical terms, in five years or so it's not going to be hard to get people to buy electric cars instead of gasoline, but it will still be practically impossible to get them to give up their houses, back yards, and cars to go live in the city.
I am largely opposed to regressive measures like this, but in this case I tend to believe the continued survival of our species and our planet supercede concerns about temporary inequalities imposed by our solutions.
Still we must be vigilant that our solutions don't accidentally (or intentionally!) factor down to "there's too many humans, lets starve out some of those poors".
I completely agree with you about that. There are a number of climate change solutions (particularly around population control measures) that land uncomfortably close to eugenics. As a side note, my wife and I are not having children precisely because of the climate crisis. We don't want to bring children into a world that is looking increasingly unsurvivable.
There are much better solutions that target the actual large polluters. People living in suburbs is a small percentage of total global emissions, especially when you consider transportation of goods. Transporting goods across the oceans is a far larger percentage of emissions than people living in suburbs.
If the goal is to continue to survive as a species, there are much more effective strategies to implement.
Suburban living on average doubles the climate impact of the same number of people in a city. The OP notes correctly that this externality is not correctly priced in the current market.
How do you calculate the value of such an externality? Even if for argument's sake I were to just accept that it's double the climate impact on average, doubling a very small value is not really meaningful. The average American carbon footprint is roughly the same regardless.
You also haven't considered that as you move people into cities you need to scale up infrastructure in the city itself. Living spaces, transportation around the city, supply lines for supermarkets. Everything needs to scale. It's not black and white that moving everyone into a tightly packed city is going to make a meaningful difference to global emissions.
What would make a tremendous difference is turning the entire grid into a green smart grid powered by solar, wind, geothermal, etc. That would change things regardless of where people live, because the sources of energy are decentralized and can exist basically anywhere that natural resources like solar and wind exist.
You sort of can’t directly calculate externalities. That’s what makes them externalities.
The common answer is to not calculate it but to add a carbon tax. If you make gas more expensive, road taxes higher and non-renewable energy higher cost, the market actors will change their behavior.
As for the infrastructure cost, you pay that in either case and it’s more efficiently built the denser things are.
This isn’t a bottleneck style problem where removing the worst thing reorders the thing underneath it. We need to start targeting all of the inefficiencies and carbon emitters. The suburbs are worse for the environment plain & simple so we need to improve on that.
The amount of carbon emitted from people driving to and from suburbs is actually a small amount compared to the real big polluters. It makes no sense to target such a giant restructuring of society for so little gain.
instead of trying to quantify this statement, let's look at trends and actions in governance (since this is not new)
from the Global Climate Action Summit 2018, convened by CA Gov Jerry Brown:
Every 5 weeks, China adds a fleet of electric buses equivalent to
the entire London bus fleet – 9500 buses. Technologies are now
market ready, societally acceptable and economically attractive to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport by 51% by 2030,
through electric vehicles, mass transit and adapting the global
shipping fleet. A complete global and technological shift to electric
vehicles now looks very likely and, given recent announcements from
cities, countries and car manufacturers, is possible between 2020
and 2030. However, the transformation will slow dramatically without
strong national and city policies, for example setting target dates to
ban internal combustion engines.
Have a look at a google search on “cargo ship pollution” and draw your own conclusions.
Simply moving cargo, the lifeblood of our economy, across the oceans burns hundreds of tons of fuel oil - releasing more (and more varied) pollutants into the atmosphere and oceans. One ship, by some reports, emits as many emissions as some 50 million (or more) cars. And there are well over 9,000 on the ocean.
And that is why researchers are proposing we bring back Zeppelins! Zeppelins that are 10x as long as the Empire State Tower is tall, to be exact. Way better for the environment, can be operated autonomously, and cheap to produce.
If I take hanniabu's numbers, that ends up with 8000 ft. zeppelins--the length of airport runways. That's probably not going to be operationally viable: going by the space the largest seaports take up today, you have space to berth only a few of them--maybe 5 at best--at the very largest of them. There's therefore going to be very poor operational flexibility for choosing routes, and with the sheer size and capacity, multi-destination itineraries are going to struggle with long dwell times to partially load/unload them.
You figures are incorrect, this is taken directly from the linked article:
> As proposed in a recent scientific paper, the new airships would be 10 times bigger than the 800-foot Hindenburg — more than five times as long as the Empire State Building is tall
Those numbers are for some very specific substances (which are also bad, nobody's contesting that), but not for CO2-equivalent emissions. It's the same kind of dumb number as that cloth bag reuse count vs plastic. Technically true for some aspect, but utterly misleading.
The Wikipedia article does not say this: « It also includes greenhouse gas emissions. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) estimates that carbon dioxide emissions from shipping were equal to 2.2% of the global human-made emissions in 2012 »
As well, is this really something that harmful to the environment? I get that people driving > people not driving when it comes to climate harm, but I don't want to live in a city and I feel like there are much larger climate concerns (in manufacturing, for example) that outweigh passing the blame onto suburban commuters.
The most ecological thing to do is to kill ourselves. Any environmental plan has to allow for people to love rewarding lives, or else it's not a good environment for humans.
Electric cars are poor, even counterproductive stand-ins for long term solutions such as public transportation and the elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle. They hide a multitude of externalities forced on the public and not paid for directly by owners or manufacturers.
Climate change aside, it's not hard to imagine a country as densely populated as Singapore opposing electric cars.