I liked this week’s comment because it comes from the reader every writer wants — a person at the receiving end who puts some work into it. Charley read a wonky article (The Alpenrose hearing: Nollan and Dolan), clicked into an even wonkier critique by Keith Liden, and then made all that information his own and thought about it.
He collected his ideas (which went beyond Nollan/Dolan or Liden’s Alpenrose critique) and took the discussion to a different level.
Here’s the big picture from Charley:
Keith Liden’s prepared testimony was very readable, and seemed convincing. Impressive work.
One comment (about the City wondering why more people don’t ride bikes) made me think of both the City’s elected leaders and the City’s voters in a new light: I think *both* the elected leaders and voters are overstating their support for policies related to bicycle safety, pedestrian safety and CO2 reductions.
I’d argue that we have a lot of preference falsification around these issues.
The way I see it, the elected leaders are representing voters’ preferences pretty well: most voters like the sound of “let’s fight climate change,” and like the sound of “pro-bike,” but aren’t personally invested in either cause.
I mean that literally. What amount of their own money would voters be willing to spend on climate mitigation? Voters are more enthusiastic about taxing “rich people” or “corporations” to fight climate change, but directly taxing the middle class is clearly unpopular.
Similarly, many local people like bikes and want safety for riders… but clearly there’s a good bit of local pushback against new bike lanes, or other safety treatments.
Surely, some of these are not the same people! I mean, many people who oppose bike lanes also don’t give a hoot about bike riders’ safety.
However, I think there’s some overlap: how often do we hear someone say “I’m a bike rider, too, but bike lanes are not a good fit for my street because we need on-street parking.”
As regards elected leaders, I’ve never gotten the sense that any are *particularly* invested in cycling as a solution to our problems.
Many are of course happy to sign off on some amount of funding for safety improvements, and some have even gone to bat on controversial issues (Sam Adams over BES funding, iirc; Hales on off-road cycling). But more often we have examples of public support and behind-the-scenes disinterest or opposition (Hardesty, Mapps, Fritz).
Perhaps I’m being too cynical about this. Even if it’s not as strong as preference falsification, I’d still argue that politicians and voters overstate their support for cycling and climate mitigation. Most local voters want to think of themselves as environmentally-minded citizens, so candidates flatter us by adopting “pro-bike” positions, etc. That’s the mechanism by which the transportation safety hierarchy adopted by the full City Council, but is ignored (as Liden expertly points out) when it comes to accommodating the housing development at Alpenrose.
I do not mean this as some kind of denunciation of rank hypocrisy! I think bike/pedestrian safety and climate mitigation are hard and expensive nuts to crack. There are differences in impact that create entrenched opposition to change, and fully funded solutions would require enormous sums of money.
It’s no surprise that some people feel hopeless, or conversely, that some people maintain a kind of blissful ignorance as to the true costs of either project. Most of us feel “on edge” to one degree or another. Who really feels economically secure? Secure enough to devote a substantial part of our income to climate mitigations? Few people feel physically secure enough to risk commuting by bike, much less give up owning a car.
Even then, we’d still like to see positive change… just as long as it doesn’t cost us too much.
Thank you Charley. You can read Charley’s comment, under the original post.
Thanks for reading.
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I agree, and as a case in point was when congress in both houses and majority of both parties voted in favor of a highway expansion bill that effectively pretends that there is no climate change or global warming – a bit more money for trains and transit – but huge amounts for highways even in California and Oregon, yet hardly any extra funding for bicycling, let alone for building dikes and tidal barriers to deal with rising sea levels.
I had a vision, while reading Liden’s testimony, and the vision spurred my long comment:
The City (personified) wonders aloud why people aren’t riding bikes more, while theatrically winking at the majority of voters, who would probably be pretty upset if the City actually pulled out all the stops to get people to ride bikes more.
Someone who is good at memes would have been able to convey the idea with fewer words!
I’d be willing to be taxed at ~60-80% because this is the level of taxation (of high income people) that is optimal for creating less ecocidal and more equitable societies without negative economic effects (under capitalism):
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17616/w17616.pdf
That’s a very round about way to describe outright climate crisis denial.
Very relevant new polling:
“Overall, most respondents said that climate change sparked their concern for the well-being of future generations (68%). But less than half of all respondents (48%) said they would be willing to pay $10 a month to strengthen Florida’s infrastructure to weather hazards.”
https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/climate-resilience-survey
It’s like it falls into people’s bucket of “problems that other people need to solve”.
I wonder what the results would be had they asked if respondents would be willing to pay $10 to help reduce the severity of climate change, rather than just harden things against it.
Good point. Might not account for many people, but they’d be like those people who didn’t support Obamacare because it didn’t have a public option, or wasn’t single-payer, etc.
I don’t think the analogy with Obamacare holds; that’s an example of perfect being the enemy of the good, and what I’m talking about is more cure vs. palliative care.
Personally, I would be much more willing to pay a tax to directly reduce emissions (and this is what I expected PCEF to be) than to focus on making it easier to live with the damage.
I may not be typical, but I expect there are at least some others like me.
They would say yes – because it’s an easy way to say they care, while not actually impacting their lifestyle.
If someone wanted to convince me they actually care they’d do something that actually takes effort:
Cut their yearly VMT by 30%
Cut their meat consumption in half.
If everyone in the US did those things we’d actually move the needle in GHG production. (and they’d be healthier to boot).
Your suggestions aren’t bad but a person who is convinced could go further. If I’m going to find nutritious and tasty food that isn’t animal flesh, why not just go for it? If it’s worth the time to replace some car travel, why not take the expense bonus of going car free and put the work time saved into some sport, entertainment, or mission that makes you feel better? Or, of course, retire early.
Well, if one area does that alone those paying the taxes will leave. This is already happening in Mutlnomah County. As the tax base flees the tax loss death spiral will take over….less taxpayers..less money coming in….what’s next? Raise taxes on those remaining or cut basic, essential services even further. Meanwhile non-essential programs (ineffective non-profits, DEI teams, Cannabis Empowerment Days, Black male achievement analysts, etc) will continue to be funded as they are politically untouchable.
Measure 118 would get a lot more support from me if instead of taxing gross receipts it put a price on CO2e emissions created in, exported from, or imported into the state, and used that as some kind of basis for universal income. It would basically be rent paid by industry to the commons for the privilege of polluting the commons. Very easy to scaremonger against, though: “Oregon wants to raise the price of a hamburger by 500%!” “New car sales plummet as prices for Honda Civic start at $60,000!” “Price of gas in Portland now $20/gal!” But there’s simply no more effective and all-inclusive way to mitigate climate change than to force people to pay for the social cost of their emissions, which in turn encourages them to seek out more sustainable alternatives. People really like the convenience of owning their own automobile and being able to take it anywhere they want whenever they want without having to worry about parking, speed, or cost. But that convenience becomes a whole lot less convenient if people are appropriately charged for the damage that they’re causing when they do so.
You could randomly pick any of several of Charley’s recent comments, and it would make a good COTW.
I agree.
Awwwww shucks.
I hit a pothole and broke my arm and wrist last spring while riding to work. I literally couldn’t type for a while, and of course riding a bike was not possible. So I took a bit of time off from BP.
It’s only in the last few weeks that I’ve returned to bike commuting, and biking is on my mind again. 🙂
Welcome back! Sorry to hear about the injury. I hope your return to bike commutes is smooth and happy.
I had the opposite happen, when an injury to my middle finger prevented me from driving.
Charley, I wonder how bicycling & climate change could be seen/viewed from the perspective of 2nd hand cigarette smoke, or mandatory seat belt use, or clean water at the spigot, or a healthy river to swim in. We have seen many changes that benefit our health and well being. We should be able to change the way we transport ourselves around Portland and other places.
I personally have pretty selfish primary reasons for riding my bike to work: I like the fresh air, exercise, consistent timing (as compared to driving) and reliability (as compared to taking Trimet). Mostly, I get aggravated doing the commute in my car because I hate sitting in traffic.
In addition to those reasons to ride, I also skirt some of the reasons-not-to-ride that some people have. I am bald, so I don’t have to worry about helmet head, and my worksite has safe indoor parking, a place to change, and a place to put wet clothing. That’s a lot of privileges!
I do think more people would ride more often if they had strong selfish reasons to do so!
Welcome back
I would argue that lifestyle choices and conscientious consumer choices go the furthest when asking people to “put their money where their mouth is” around the issue of global climate change. Many people who do great damage to the environment don’t really have the money to spend on fixing it – asking them to stop damaging as much as they realistically can sounds like a reasonable request, though.
I would rather vote for politicians who have ditched their cars, avoid plastic packaging, advocate for reuse and recycling, and then (towards the end of the list) use their voice to advocate for change.
Do or don’t do because actions have always screamed at me louder than promises.
There is a long old essay on Personal Goodness and Social Injustice. The summary is that personal goodness doesn’t make much difference, you need to move society to actually accomplish anything.
Let me suggest that lifestyle choices are easy, because they are your choices. But I don’t think that not avoiding plastic packaging is going to be done at a scale that makes any difference.
Emissions are tied to GDP and wealth is how we measure it. Personal wealth is a great placeholder for a person’s responsibility to global warming. What we need to do is get clear that the only way to have a major impact on emissions is by forcing wealthy people to not only stop adding emissions but demand that they use their wealth to clean up the mess they created. We need to stop letting people like Bill Gates pretend they are “carbon neutral” because they buy carbon offsets for their private jet.
And we need to stop blaming everybody as if we are all equally responsible. We all helped create the climate crisis but, if you use wealth as an indicator, most of us have created a pretty small share.We need a 20% annual tax on personal wealth that gets used to remove the carbon from the atmosphere that has been put there to create that wealth.
I hope we do something else in the meantime because if we wait to act until we pass a 20% wealth tax, we’re going to be waiting a very, very long time.
Sounds like a lot of excuses, which is exactly why there’s little consumer pressure towards environmental responsibility on the part of the biggest actors. How does society move anywhere if all the individual actors don’t act? Waiting around for the “responsible parties” to do something about it is exactly why humanity seems content to be bystanders while the next mass extinction event unfolds before our eyes.
You have to believe what you do makes a difference, even if the numbers look small, and then do it. Blaming other people before you take responsibility yourself leads to us just wasting our energy on fighting instead of acting on what is genuinely possible right NOW. The urgency of action needed can’t wait for a process that will probably yield results far too late.
It’s both. Yes, the wealthy are outsized individuals contributors to climate change–I still can’t believe there’s not more of a popular push (at least) to ban private jet travel, and the challenge of a truly global wealth tax is both immense and essential.
However, numerically speaking, it’s the carbon intensity of an average American lifestyle–we’re almost at 1 car per American, and our VMT keeps going upwards, and we still eat a lot of red meat, and we still waste a lot of food and plastic, etc.–that is well and truly sustainable.
It’s the smaller-scale injustice of the wealthy’s lifestyles’ being grossly unsustainable, and the larger scale of the general American lifestyle’s unscalability to the entire planet’s population, that are the twin challenges of our country’s ecological hypocrisy.
The fundamentally immoral hyperconsumption and wealth-hoarding of the ‘murrican middle class and upper class is the same “challenge” from a global perspective.
Absolutely agreed, and ironically I think a lot more middle class Americans would be much, much happier if we’d realize how privileged we are, globally speaking. Suffice to say, the average middle class American seems to look only ever-upward; “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, instead of conditionally and extremely lucky paupers.
Cars don’t get much improved mileage because of consumer demand — they get it because of a government mandate telling people that if they want to continue selling cars in CA, they needed to be more efficient. Lo-and-behold… they got more efficient.
I’m a big believer in capitalism, but it’s a pretty formless force. If you want to get something big done, create the incentives for people to do it. It’s pretty much that simple.
Early adopters of climate change remediation if any would have moved long ago.
I don’t think it’s too late for individuals to push for change in a market economy because some of the things we can do must be researched, patterned and rewarded before they can be scaled. People can chose to act on their own initiative. I will say that it makes me feel a little better day to day.
However, it’s too late to totally avert bad consequences. We are in the soup. I think the tipping point for Oregon state policy change might be wild land fires that dwarf what we’ve seen, in appalling ways nobody cares to think about. That would almost certainly touch urban areas.
The unique Portland situation could be sunny day high tides over the sea wall which should provoke consensus in whatever government is afoot. This might seem facetious because:
-it’s not projected for any decade in our lives, and
-a global catastrophe will be well underway long before that.
The reason that the seawall thing is not ridiculous is this: large ice shelf melting and movement is stochastic and regularly found to exceed projections and modeling.
I believe that personal choices can have an impact in a market economy. In the case of plastic packaging, a person can ask if a product is available in bulk, and if a business can’t supply it, accept the cost of seeking it out. Reward the business that has what you want with your money and take any opportunity to let other people with the same problem know that there is a choice.
I’m choosing to eat less meat. At a restaurant that I like, I try their vegetarian options, and if they’re good I tell other people about them. I ask owners if they would consider a vegetarian menu item. This works better in a place where the people know me at least by sight.
This isn’t virtue signaling, it’s a way to move good ideas around in a market and link up people who have similar priorities. It’s better than waiting for government or some large corporation to anticipate and meet my needs.
Politicians exaggerate their support for just about everything. With the possible exception of how important it is to them that you vote for them. It goes with the territory. After all they are going to have to represent the interests of a wide variety of people all of whom want them to be their champion. Are you going to vote for someone who says “bikes are important to me but so are a lot of other things”? If a candidate said that, I would, quite rightly, translate as “Bikes aren’t all that important.”
As for voters, we all overstate the importance of climate change and homelessness to us along with a bunch of other things. Pretending that applies only to other voters is being disingenuous. There are rare people who actually walk the walk but most of us aren’t willing to.
I have a friend Simon. Simon works a couple days a week. Lives in a small room. Dumpster dives for food. Rides his bike everywhere all year including in temps below -20 and windchills of -50. By everywhere, I mean when he offered to donate his kidney to a friend, he road 250+ miles (500+ RT) from our town in northern Minnesota to Mayo clinic to be evaluated as a donor. He does break down occasionally. When he actually donated the kidney he got a ride, he didn’t think he would be in shape to ride back.
His entire life is built around not consuming things and reducing his impact on the earth. Unless you are like Simon, you should keep a humble view of other people’s failures.
None of us are doing enough to end climate change. And most of us aren’t willing to. Just suggest we shut down commercial airlines and see how many takers you have. Yet one airplane trip will dump more emissions into the air than a whole year of bike trips will save.
Reminds me of Peter Singer!
The cognitive dissonance of a bike blog where the host repeatedly celebrates bicycles as tools to fight the climate crisis while also repeatedly advocating for bike parking at airports just about sums up why we won’t see much progress in addressing the climate crisis in the next decade or so.
lol. Damn man, this town is exhausting sometimes.
Here’s a possible reason we don’t see as much climate progress: Too many folks like you are too busy fighting with folks like me based on performative purity bullshit instead of organizing together with what should be allies and building our coalition as large as it needs to be to actually win something.
But go ahead, keep finding ludicrous reasons to criticize people who share your values and want 80% of the same things as you do, but who aren’t pure enough for you to support and work with. Keep on scapegoating big and easy targets like me as a way to deal with your anxiety and anger about the situation. And then sit back and watch how Portland elects a majority centrist city council with a center-right mayor and watch how much progress we make for truly progressive ideas and solutions to our problems.
I am sad that this is too many words to be a tattoo.
That’s what keeps this comments section alive!
hahaha! Good one
I disagree. It MIGHT be true if he’d said 83%, but this blog pretty much lost me as a reader with his 80%. Also, it’s not a “comments section”, it’s a “comment section”. This is exactly why we need the downvote function back.
Damn, does that just roll off your tongue, or do you edit a little?
With all due respect, I have zero interest in your coalition.
You don’t know me and you don’t have a clue what my values are (or the things I want[sic]).
I hear you. That’s fair. I should never assume someone else’s beliefs, since that’s something that people often do to me and it’s really frustrating. To be clear though, I was sort of using your comment as an example of a larger trend that I see in Portland.
I agree in principle and get the point, and I know the “80%” number was just off the cuff (and that there is probably no way to quantify such things so the numbers are meaningless). But the problem with saying “want 80% of the same things as you do” is that what is in that 20% disagreement matters. I probably want 80% the same things as just about everyone in this country. Most people want mostly the same things.
My point is just that sometimes a seemingly small detail that people disagree on is the difference between solutions that work and those that don’t even come close. I’m just saying, the criticism of “purity tests” I feel is misguided because what it’s really saying is that “these things that are very important to you, are not important to me”.
Most of what we argue about has nothing to do with finding and improving practical, implementable solutions to actual problems we face. That’s where I often try to direct the conversation (and often get insulted as a result).
What actually gets discussed is mostly purity-test level stuff. To keep the peace, I’ll omit a list of specific topics.
I see what you are getting at John V., but I fear you are hanging onto the 80% thing when to me it was just a throwaway reference. I agree these details can really matter. But again, my point is that what often feel like very important details are less so when we take time to actually listen and open our hearts and minds to other people — instead of the default being to unfairly criticize them or push some untrue narrative just to show further your anger or dislike of them.
COTW
One of the great things about my friend Simon is he doesn’t preach to others or try to hold other people to his standard. He just models the behavior and forces me to think about the choices I make while setting a higher bar.
This is a bike blog. Its about promoting cycling. That sometimes has a positive impact on the efforts at climate change. But it not a major contributor to solving that problem.
There are lots of reasons we are unlikely to prevent a climate catastrophe. But the largest one is the idea that a lot of painless personal choices will add up to significant change. Riding my bike is painless. When the BTA still existed they had a message on their voice mail that said “Smile at the motorists, you’re having a better time than they are.”
We need to identify big changes that can be made and make them politically possible. Because right now very little is being done if it isn’t promoted by someone who stands to make money from it. And the really big opportunities get set aside while we focus on plastic packaging and getting more people to ride bikes. Those are things we should do because it is personally satisfying,
We need to take bigger steps and focus on the things that provide the largest benefit and forcing the people who create the biggest footprint to change their behavior. Because with out collective action, we aren’t going to get there.
For example, why haven’t we reduced traffic speeds? That was one of the first things done during the 1970’s oil crisis. Why aren’t we limiting the size of new houses and requiring all housing old and new to meet energy standards for heating and cooling them. Why aren’t we making sure every house is fully weatherized with storm windows. Why aren’t we rationing gas and freezing the production of oil. Why are we still exporting oil that gets burned somewhere else and creates climate change here. Why are we allowing drilling for oil on public lands. Why do we continue to allow cattle grazing on public land? Why don’t we put a huge tax on parking spaces, at least if they are not covered by solar panels. Why don’t we ban SOV’s during rush hour? The list of potential changes is endless and we need to start making them “politically realistic”.
You are insufferable.
You are right AND we should have bike parking at the airport. One, for the people who work there. And two, because it is one more of the many little things that makes people think they just can’t live without a car. I mean, I know they could take a taxi or very trivially the bus/max. But people just have this damned habit, they drive to the airport for some reason and it may be one more of those straws that makes people unwilling to live without a car. And if you have a car, you’re going to use it.
That’s what I thought, but then as I’m typing that out, I truly don’t understand why people don’t take transit to the airport. And I can’t imagine someone who would otherwise drive is going to ride their bike there. I would do it, but I would also probably just take the bus/max otherwise.
There is also the point that flying in itself is wasteful (regardless how you get to the airport). That’s true for sure, but I don’t think there is likely a future where air travel can just go away (unless it is forced by the impacts of global warming). Even if it’s for just rare occasions, I don’t think people will give it up. Unless of course we did trains, but trains don’t leave the continent.
I have pretty good transit access to the airport, and used to be committed to taking Max every time I flew. No longer.
When guests arrive, I’ll pick them up because I don’t want to inflict post-pandemic Max on them; When I depart, I’m schedule sensitive, so if I can arrange a ride to the airport, it’s a lot less stressful. Last time I took transit to the airport, the train I needed didn’t show, so I had to have an Uber pick me up at the Hollywood Transit Center.
I usually take transit home from the airport (when I can tolerate some schedule uncertainty), but will be less likely to do so in the future as I often arrive at night and TriMet is switching some of their airport trains to much slower buses.
So I, at least, totally get it. Driving is more reliable, cheaper (if you get dropped off), faster, and more convenient. Those things will all be more salient for people with less convenient access to transit than I have.
PS Long distance trains are much worse than flying from an emissions standpoint.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/04/climate/trains-planes-carbon-footprint-pollution.html
MAX doesn’t switch to a bus until midnight. You must fly frequently enough to encounter this, but PDX has very few flights landing after 11pm, so this does not impact the vast majority of travelers.
FWIW, I have had no issues taking the red line with my family to and from PDX in the last year or so. It does seem noticeably better. More security presence and the Better Red project has sped up that agonizingly slow section at Gateway.
I haven’t actually encountered the switch to bus, and with luck I never will, but it is a contingency I have to consider. I fly pretty infrequently, so random outlier experiences (ghost train, puke on the platform, etc.) may loom larger for me.
Amtrak disappoints me on many levels. The last trip I booked, on the Empire Builder to Chicago, was not just late, it never left. The line was shut down for days due to weather and mechanical problems. On the other end of the scale, they pour your coffee in a plastic lined paper cup which isn’t what I’m used to.
I’ve read that Times article twice now.
Nevertheless I’m catching a passenger train in Topeka tomorrow morning to spend 63 hours or more en route to Portland. Is this cognitive dissonance or just crazy?
Amtrak is running full trains, partly as a result of reducing coaches. I confess I’m not great at writing representatives but I’m a great believer in voting with dollars.
I have time in my life to wait on trains, and my kin are reasonably close to stations.
Passenger jets have gone through generations of upgrades since Amtrak’s long haul trainsets were new. My first adult impression of a train in the US was of wasted space. Trains won’t be replaced until demand pressure makes the operation difficult so I’m riding trains and talking about trains.
I can’t guess what events would make it plausible to electrify train lines and open new lines for passenger rail, but tunneling technology and more electric power will help.
The Times article had some numbers but also a bunch of qualified statements. I think Amtrak could do incremental things with existing rolling stock that would increase fuel efficiency by 20-30%. They’re doing a poor impression of a first class train, they could focus on carrying people instead of offering stuff that was sort of cool in the 50s.
It’s just crazy (unless you have time and money and enjoy train travel, in which case it could be perfectly rational).
The train is going anyway, so whether you hop aboard or not makes very little difference. Same for flying — if you’re not on the plane, that seat will still be filled (even if the airline needs to lower the fare by $10 to sell it). Hell, you could catch a ride with a friend who was already making that trip and have the same overall impact (plus or minus some fragment of an iota).
They’re not going to add another plane or train to accommodate you. And your one trip per year isn’t going to convince anyone to add system capacity to anything.
Enjoy your trip!
Maybe it’s the last seat that matters. More likely, somebody or something takes note of trends in passenger miles. One of my personal beliefs about capitalism is that if I consume something there’s a dead hand out there replacing it.
I do enjoy trains. There are more chances to talk to people for one thing. It’s a better way to live.
Adding a flight is a pretty big deal: you need to get an extra plane; figure out where to store and service it and what you’ll do with it the rest of the day; get the plane back to the starting point; negotiate landing slots; make sure you have enough mechanics; figure out pilots and staffing and their return trips; etc.
Your annual ticket purchase doesn’t weigh much against all that. It’s much easier to raise fares a little, report better earnings to the owners, and avoid all the hassle.
I know that nobody is laying on another flight because I alone bought a plane ticket. Point taken.
That script no doubt consoles a bunch of other center left greenish bikey people who fly out of PDX, probably a plane load or perhaps a trainload every day.
As we’ve established we both know, for long trips, flying emits less carbon than Amtrak does, so perhaps those folks should feel consoled.
I like a newspaper but I’m not taking that article as the last word. Maybe taking the train is a wash but even after three nights of short sleep I don’t regret it.
I’d ride the train for three weeks in anticipation of several conversations of a sort that never seem to happen on a plane. We can agree that my quirk is reducing Amtrak’s carbon per passenger mile so there’s that.
I’m not trying to get you to regret traveling by train; I think it’s great that you enjoyed your trip. And since I think it’s the marginal costs that matter, and they would be pretty low no matter how you traveled (with the exception of driving alone), I don’t think there’s reason to feel any guilt whatsoever.
I never recommend the MAX to anyone going to PDX anymore.
I regularly take the 1st or 2nd Red Line of the day from Beaverton TC to Goose Hollow then ride to Clackamas.
I still get antsy if I don’t hear the crossing signals on Lombard by 2minutes to the time it’s due because I’ve had so many simply no show on me. What’s more painful than losing 30minutes of work time is watching the people with their luggage start realizing their schedule is shot.
Even though the train has been far more reliable this summer than years previous, I’d still never take the MAX to the airport for an early flight. The few times I’ve flown in the last 4 years (afternoon flights) I’ve neurotically left 45minutes (or more) earlier than the schedule would indicate.
To the point about the disconnect between reducing GHG and having bicycle parking at the airport – if there was decent train service in the US then we would be talking about bike parking at Union Station and bike storage on trains.
Alas, we don’t have that luxury, so when I have to go to Missoula (no longer! We bought our division from the previous owners!) I have no choice but a plane.
Well, another thing. Trains can be electrified without large batteries. Planes, not so much.
Short haul flights are the most polluting and, conveniently, the most easily electrified. For longer range aviation, fuel derived from non-fossil sources is available now (for a price).
More sustainable flight is an option… all it takes is the proper incentives.
Electrified trains are a mature technology. Electric planes are somewhere between that and cold fusion. (Ask Boeing about planes loaded with big batteries).
Having just spent some hours on the SW Chief I would say that service, speed and efficiency could be improved by filling the rough single track section back with double track ribbon rail. BNSF can’t quite see their way to do it but it’s worth my nickel to offer them a 2% loan and see what happens.
They’ve had some memorable derailments in that part of the line, the last time I made the trip they were still cutting up the debris.
You can always add the wires later, the rail lines might be glad to schlep less fuel.
That’s overstating it a bit (there are electric passenger planes with a 300 mile range in testing today), but your point is taken.
I have no problem with electrifying trains using a catenary, but I also know that I’ll fly on an electric plane long before the railroads erect wires over their main haul lines.
After a quick search, it looks like some planes with limited range, some with limited capacity, and some outright vaporplanes.
You may well fly in one.
Should we put our research effort into developing batteries for planes? The energy density is a lot less than liquid fuels and they’ll have to compete with current notions of what is a plane. Battery planes will also suffer in comparison to high speed rail. How high would you like to get with a really tweaky battery pack on board?
It’s too bad that our rail companies have chosen to compete by making trains really long and squeezing labor costs instead of by improving technology.
I’m glad people are trying all sorts of stuff that “we” are skeptical about. You never know what’s going to work.
Just a quick anecdote: I know a pilot who has a glider with a small electric motor (eliminating the need for a tow). He said the electric motor is far more dependable than a gas one would be; when he wants it, he knows it will work. So yes, I’d trust an electric plane that was certified for carrying passengers.
It may turn out that electric planes are more dependable, less polluting, quieter, and cheaper to operate, which would be beneficial for everyone.
Unfortunately in Portland it costs us A LOT (especially for higher income taxpayers) and there is zero positive change. In fact it seems the more we tax and the more we spend, the worse it gets.
Won’t someone think of the higher income taxpayers?
The city and county seem to be chasing a smaller and smaller group of upper-income taxpayers, as many flee to lower tax jurisdictions. We should at least consider the impact that new taxes have on our actual tax revenue. There is a point where it could result in negative returns.
Good riddance!
If too many people who are subjected to the preschool tax, for example, leave Portland, what happens to the preschool program?
These good-for-nothings are also, by in large, the people who financially sustain the arts, theater, symphony, and museums. Many contribute financially to local schools, and buy the expensive bikes built by local frame builders.
I don’t know if you care about those things, but I do.
I respect and appreciate philanthropy (and Portland’s commendable record of enacting progressive taxation schemes), but I reject the notion that the vibrancy of our society flows from the generosity of our oligarchs. When somebody leaves (or threatens to) over tax policy, what they are saying is that they are not willing to contribute to public life in the way we have collectively determined they should. In such a case, I’m not sure it’s worth it to conform our society to their desires — it might be a better route to just live within more modest means in a way that is equitable.
Do you reject the notion that it does, or that it should?
Because it absolutely does. Should is a bit more squirrely — do you want the arts to be hostage to governmental politics? Would it be better if theater companies (for example) survived on ticket sales alone?
I saw Sweeny Todd a few nights ago, and it was a great show. If not for the long list of “oligarchs” whose names were read before the performance, my ticket probably would have been $250, which would mean I wouldn’t have seen it. So thank you to any of you who generously donated to help make it possible for me to enjoy the production.
Thanks for the reply, Watts. I’m glad you enjoyed Sweeny Todd — I concede that PCS is an asset to the community, and I hope it has a vibrant future. I do think public funding is probably preferable to private funding for the arts (do you want to arts to be held hostage to the whims of entitled donors?), but I certainly have no beef with the generous donors that provide what we now have.
To answer your question I reject both the notion that the magic of Portland comes from our rich people and the notion that in a perfect universe it would. If the hand of God swooped in and made the top 10% of Portlanders and all their wealth and possessions vanish, the remaining folks would just be promoted up the pecking order. In absolute terms Portland would be less wealthy, as donel has noted, but I don’t think absolute wealth is what makes Portland a great place. We have been accumulating wealth at a pretty good pace for a long time, but there is still a fair bit of misery. My position is that regular people with typical jobs and financial situations are well positioned to govern themselves (and fund their government through collective taxation) at a level that allows for human thriving and the provision of basic services. Sure, large public investments by rich folks are great, but they don’t make us who we are.
BTW: the original discussion was about people who would move as part of a temper tantrum about not getting their way vis a vis tax policy. I don’t think it’s a good move to give in to that kind of threat.
I don’t claim either of these things. I do claim that much of the money that allows others to make the magic comes disproportionately from the wealthier segments of society, and that if they left, there would be less money for the arts here in Portland (and more somewhere else).
Theoretically, I agree with you. How is it working in practice?
We currently have a very small arts tax, funded by regular people with regular jobs, and it is both hugely unpopular and woefully inadequate. Which is why we rely on donors who are generally aligned with the mission of the theater and are much more reliable than the vagaries of government funding and the popular mood.
It’s not a threat — it’s an prediction based on observation of other high tax jurisdictions.
Well you did a couple comments up:
It’s also the unspoken but obvious context of Chris I’s comment that prompted my original sarcastic remark.
I agree with what you are saying about funding the arts, but that’s far from the only thing that makes this a nice place.
I just can’t understand this take. I’ve tried. A poor city will have weak infrastructure.
Irrational tribalism?
I prefer ‘rational tribalism’.
I prefer this as well. What is your rational case that Portland would be better off without higher income folks?
Hi Donel, chalk it up to ideological differences. I’m just not jazzed about giving the power to form the policy and identity of our city to capitalist overlords. If they are not willing to play nicely, they can leave. If they want to work constructively with us serfs, we can all be happy. Do you think Donald Trump has been good for NYC? Do you dispute that tech bros have ruined the bay area? They may have more dollars, but we have more votes.
It’s cognitive dissonance, also. People can genuinely want to do things to mitigate climate change, and yet also genuinely not agree that their own lifestyles are part of the problem. It’s the two swords of blaming systemic issues as a way of averting individual responsibility, and solely blaming individuals for problems they exacerbate because they have a fairly meaningless amount of choice to do otherwise.
I still give people who at least make gestures towards individual responsibility–driving more efficient vehicles, avoid driving when possible, consuming less (meat, or plastic products, or just things, generally), contributing to local/global environmental/social equity causes, etc–some credit, because American culture sui generis is not something that really values consideration of others.
This is only possible when someone denies the basic facts of the climate crisis. Cognitive dissonance is simply a defense mechanisms that allows people to behave/advocate/vote in a fundamentally immoral manner while pretending that they are “good” people.
The vast majority of ‘murricans are just narcissistic jerks who value the comforts of their current immoral lifestyles than the future suffering of hundreds of millions. This cognitive dissonance is in many ways a mirror of the way ‘murricans can see themselves as good people while eating animals that experience unimaginable suffering in our ubiquitous factory farming system.
I personally prefer beef as they are big and so there is less killing (unlike preparing fields for crops) or chickens which I kill myself (no fun at all) or I’m holding out for python meat to get hold of the general market. However, I prefer beef that does not…
I prefer it, but it is not possible too much of the time and so I willingly participate in the cruel torment of fellow creatures.
It is a stain beyond description that we as a people have succumbed to the lure of specialization and no longer even attempt to raise our own food and allow the food we eat to be tortured to death or doused in chemicals (read the relaxed regulations of what foreign countries call organic) or the DNA twisted together or turned into ethanol for ICEs or all the other horrible ways we ingest calories.
I understand your argument: consuming beef involves killing 1 animal compared to the numerous small animals that might be harmed during crop harvesting. However, this perspective doesn’t hold up under closer scrutiny.
First, let’s set aside the debate about the relative sentience of cows versus mice, as it’s a complex and currently unresolved issue. Producing beef is highly inefficient: it takes approximately 100 calories of grain to produce just 3 calories of beef. This means that your beef dinner not only involves the life of one cow but also the lives of many small animals that are harmed during the harvesting of the grain needed to feed that cow.
In contrast, producing plant-based foods like tofu directly from grains involves significantly fewer resources and less harm to animals overall.
TL;DR: 1 cow + lots of mice > no cows and fewer mice
I respect that you own your decision, but this particular argument is a crock.
You’re not wrong on the caloric inefficiency of beef. Chickens are a bit closer to leveling out. I just can’t produce enough calories of tofu or other vegetative protein to get by, now or especially when things start to slip even more. We’re thinking of branching out to pigs to split the difference a bit. When the supply lines start to crumble due to a faltering power grid because of poor foresight and the ongoing climate crisis where will the bulk calories come from? How will the vegetation be converted to readily available food stuffs? I’m not trying to be rhetorical, any ideas are helpful. As you say, any discussion on sentience is too much in the eye of the beholder . I don’t like killing things and yet the universe exists by a simple principle of consume or be consumed.
“When the supply lines start to crumble due to a faltering power grid because of poor foresight and the ongoing climate crisis where will the bulk calories come from?”
I don’t know about you, but I plan to eat my neighbors.
In the meantime, I don’t know if you can justify your diet today by what food might be available at some point in the future. I’m not going to start eating rat meat and seagull before I absolutely have to.
Completely agree with you that it is good to be a modern American and be above the lesser nations that subsist on all kinds of pigeons, rats, worms, seagulls, insects and the list goes on. Had enough of that in China and like you am in no hurry to live out the climate apocalypse before its time.
The way I justify my diet is that too much of American processed food (which is all food I don’t get at a butcher shop, local farm, grow or harvest myself) has too many additives that adversely affect my health and greatly affects my partner’s health. When they went to France several years ago they found they could eat a far greater variety of foods there without ill effect. It was magical.
Along with struggling against petroleum pollution I think the struggle for improved food quality is the most important battle for long term health we face in American.
The simple answer is – in that event people starve.
Subsistence farming, with its inherent inefficiencies can’t support the modern American population. Heck, it couldn’t support the late 1700’s English population very well, hence enclosure.
In the meantime I simply eat way less meat.
I’ll end up around 40lbs consumed this year.
A third of that is locally caught wild salmon.
Several pounds of it is lamb raised the same way we did – large pasture/grass fed.
Still not able to go completely vegetarian like my cousin (she’s a firefighter and has to really work to keep muscle mass on).
Heck, even maintaining my muscle mass at 57 with 75-100 miles of riding a week is a bit tough.
The simple answer is – in that event people starve.
Subsistence farming, with its inherent inefficiencies can’t support the modern American population.
I agree with what you are saying. For the vast number of urban and suburban residents and plenty of rural folks (look at North Carolina right now) it won’t be good. I don’t think modern American has any idea what being hungry without recourse to food is like. No food at the soup kitchen, no food in stores to steal, just not enough food and no prospect of getting anymore. If it starts to go that way the crisis will increase exponentially as the people go nutso.
The Donner Party incident was only 168 years ago after all.
I don’t see people talk about what they are going to eat as the climate crisis worsens, although maybe I’m just not seeing the info.
Whatever follows “I’m a bike rider, too, but…” should be examined for humorous content, and otherwise disregarded. If it’s said through an open car window the response is: I don’t see your … bike.
“people’s bucket of ‘problems that other people need to solve’.”
But that is exactly how the f%#^ing Oregon Global Warming Commission (to pick just one example) always framed this topic. Never could they bring themselves to invite everyday folks to co-create a future that is climate friendly. Instead every bullet point spoke to how some experts were going to do more research, or spend more money on technical gobbledygook.
We have the blase attitudes at least in part because we never recognize or exhort our fellow bipeds to step out of their comfort zones, stop over-consuming, never dare pillory capitalism.
Ultimately, we run into the difficult problem that, while altruism and pro-social behavior are clearly an important part of Homo sapiens’ evolution, the ability to think clearly about atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, and very long timescales are not.
We have quite a lot of evolutionary pressure to provide for ourselves and our loved ones, but little evolutionary pressure to do so with regards to factors such as the chemical processes that will determine the climate of our great grandchildren.
Not only is the feedback loop obscured by the hard science that most of us don’t truly understand, but it’s also extremely temporally displaced from our current activities. The primary victims of today’s pollution (with regards to climate change, at least) will live decades in the future!
In comparison, any reduction in one’s quality of life is understood and felt viscerally and immediately.
Our brains did not evolve to solve problems like this, and it’s a wonder that any humans are trying at all.
That is true and valid but is also rapidly becoming less true. Our world is coming unglued as we speak, and everyone knows it. But of course now it is too late to really do much of anything about it.
I think I recommended this book here recently? Andrew Boyd: I Want a Better Catastrophe, Best book I’ve read in this (enormous & pressing) topic in years.
Well, it’s not too late to do something about *future* atmospheric carbon concentration! Maybe the association between current natural disasters and climate change will spur more interest in reducing pollution. It won’t help *us* very much, but it will help future generations!
Big asterisk: carbon pollution is really bad for us *now*, in terms of respiratory health. Sometimes I think we should have just focused on the number of annual deaths from this kind of air pollution. Shifting the emphasis to the *current* costs might have led us to electrify sooner.
Strong consumer narratives, like the “idyllic house the suburbs,” the “safe car of comfort,” the “everybody owns one of everything,” are so normalized that it is very rare for people to imagine that these things may not be necessary for happiness and may actually be lynch pins of societal self-harm. It takes a huge leap, with thousands of hours of lived experience, to reinforce and confirm that life without these things is fundamentally ok and not a strained crucifix of rebellion.
In my experience, somewhat unusual in being half Indian half Oregonian, its an uphill battle convincing people that they don’t need these things for happiness.
The people I met during 4 years in the jungle of central India who are regarded as “indigenous” are the only people I’ve met in America or India who seem to be contented with a low impact lifestyle, but even their lifestyle has impacts–they hunt and clear land which cuts down on wildlife.
Urban Indians, who, not needing heating in winter and being quite poor, use very little carbon, most of them want to use more.
At the time I lived in Central India, i was radical in my thoughts about the environment and only took cold showers and viewed Americans as immoral narcissistic whatevers like I read above.
Looking at the UK, where I’ve also lived, when their economy was better 20 years ago they seemed happy; now they don’t.
They have, however succeeded in decarbonizing with the result that their energy prices have skyrocketed causing the economy to, in a sense relative to ours, decline. Now their young people are having a huge trouble making ends meet.
There’s no free lunch here at present.
Thus to avoid making a banal post, I offer a solution–don’t rely on people to stop wanting to have more things–it’ll be a long wait. I think the best thing is to offer up urban density, wind and solar power per haps with nuclear or gas backup, and good insulation. People should also fly less. I know I started flying less when I read that one flying mile is the same as one mile driving alone. Most people don’t know this.
Great to hear experiences outside of the PNW and in the wider world! Thank you.
I think this is a concept that wealthy activists don’t seem to be able to grasp. There are a lot of people all over the world eager to increase their carbon
footprint for basic health and a basic level of comfort. Increasing energy availability is really the only way to go and I like your suggestions of increasing density (such as in Singapore) although I lean towards advocating for nuclear power with solar as back up.
Great comment. What I see among my peers is a complete blind spot for urbanism. Even the folks that are essentially living minimally and conforming to pro-city lifestyles lack the vocabulary or conceptualization of how cities can be the biggest antidote to carbon waste. I mean JFC, I have seen cybertrucks in the school drop off line this year. I agree that shame may not be the best tool to promote ideas, but the lack of embarrassment when dropping off your kid in a cybertruck on bike to school day shows that all pretense of sustainability is being drowned out by conventional consumer messaging. People complain about ideas, comments and words in print being a waste of time compared to action, but the zeitgeist is desperately lacking. We need a strong penetrating voice to normalize living in a city in a way that it is not being sold as a penance but a bounty, an achievement.
To be fair, using one of these is a fair bit more sustainable than a Suburban or some crapbox made by Jeep or most other “normal” vehicles people would be driving instead. [I know your point was the driving itself, which I fully agree is ridiculous, but from a sustainability standpoint, a Cybertruck, if you’ve got one, isn’t a particularly bad way to go.]
“is a fair bit more sustainable than a Suburban or some crapbox made by Jeep…”
not necessarily. The embodied energy takes a long time to amortize. And if the crap box isn’t driven much it might even be better than the cybertruck, It all depends on the details, like product lifetime, embodied energy, etc.
You might notice my sustainability comment was caveated with “if you’ve got one”. If you have to go out and buy a Cybertruck to do the drop off, all bets are off.
The price of the 2024 Tesla Cybertruck starts at $81,895 and goes up to $101,985 depending on the trim and options.
https://www.caranddriver.com/tesla/cybertruck
Not even as stupid expensive as I thought. Horrifying that starting at $81,000 isn’t an insane amount of wasted money for a vehicle, but it’s really not these days. A co worker recently purchased a giant Chevy truck like electric that he spent $100,000 on and it weighs 9000 pounds.(which is more than any Humvee I’ve ever driven) I asked if he’d be able to change the tire and he said it doesn’t come with a spare or jack. The world has gone insane and the symptoms are everywhere.
Decoupling energy production from pollution offers such huge dividends! I know there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but unless we return to Stone Age technology and population levels (an ethically dubious undertaking), we’ll need cleaner, cheaper energy to lift people out of poverty without polluting ourselves into poverty.
“unless we return to Stone Age technology and population levels (an ethically dubious undertaking), we’ll need cleaner, cheaper energy…”
I think it is always important to distinguish between /preferences/: we want lots of goodies, comforts, conveniences, & /constraints/: we already used a pup all the good stuff, the concentrated minerals and fossil fuels, and fish and clean water. Now that that is mostly gone and not about to return what is going to govern our (near) future isn’t preferences (what we’d like, have gotten used to) but constraints, what is physically available, possible.
Reading all the posts here brings me to a simple conclusion. The problem is not climate change denial. The problem is denial of the scale of changes required to prevent it and the need for immediate effect. We are encouraging people to buy new electric cars on the assumption that we can maintain an auto-dependent culture by replacing all the fossil fuel vehicles with electric vehicles. And that we have 30 years or more to wait for the impact.
yes! Great point.
Adoption of EVs is a relatively easy way to get “immediate effect”. Does it preclude more effective options for similar-scale short-term reductions?
“Adoption of EVs is a relatively easy way to get “immediate effect”.”
Emphatically no.
The CO2 signature of producing and fueling a cybertruck is enormous. I don’t know why I keep having to make this point. Compared to driving the crap box (as you put it), the additional (new, additive) environmental burden of producing and transporting and driving this new vehicle is gargantuan. And if we were to extrapolate this scenario, this switch to everyone (as you seem eager to in these pages) then heaven help us.
I think the basic claim that buying a new EV instead of a new ICE vehicle will add fewer lifetime emission is correct. The problem is that is comparing the EV to the worst alternative. It would be better if people stopped buying new vehicles entirely. But that isn’t realistic.
If someone is going to buy a new car it should be electric. But they shouldn’t buy any new car thinking that it will reduce emissions. In fact, there are very few things you should buy that will reduce emissions, most stuff adds emissions.
“ It would be better if people stopped buying new vehicles entirely. But that isn’t realistic.”
It really depends. COVID and its consequences also wasn’t ’realistic’ in the sense you are using the word. The end of automobility will come. We aren’t going to choose to end it any more than we chose to experience COVID.
You could be right. But until that day comes, electrifying transportation is still essential.
Do you have any actual data you can cite to support your counterintuitive notion that EVs are bad for climate change? Because without that, it’s hard to take the idea seriously when every lifecycle analysis shows exactly the opposite.
As Ross Williams & I have been saying here, any additional vehicle (in this case EV) represents a significant additional burden to the planet, the climate, the biosphere. Before anyone gets in and drives it around. Proper accounting must recognize this. Neither the climate nor our overshoot situation can handle any more of this extra burden. That is the point of overshoot: the time for the sort of calculus that you always bring to the discussion was ca. 1988. At this point none of that is helpful.
Obviously you have in mind that the lifecycle emissions from a cybertruck vs the lifecycle emissions of a crap box (your term) will be better/lower but that is an example of relative not absolute accounting. And we don’t know whether the cybertruck will replace anything, or just be additive. I would assume until I know otherwise that it is additive. Do you have any reason to think it isn’t?
But let’s say for the moment that you know someone who scrapped (not sold) their crap box and bought a cybertruck. The time (VMT) before the cybertruck will represent a (relative) reduction vis-a-vis the crap box is not today but at some point in the future. We first have to find a way to compare the embodied environmental burden of the cyber truck (+ fuel emissions) to the foregone burden of the scrapped crap box. This can be done.
But even then we have only performed a relative analysis. I posit that the cybertruck isn’t good for the climate even under this scenario because it continues to require fuel that is not climate neutral even if it is from ‘renewables’.
A new EV is better than a new gas car, and for some scenarios, a new EV may be better than a sufficiently old gas car. What happens with other vehicles doesn’t change that.
If you want no one to buy new cars, that’s fine, but if people ignore your wishes and do so anyway, it’s better if it’s electric. The science and data are crystal clear on that point.
“If you want no one to buy new cars, that’s fine, but if people ignore your wishes and do so anyway, it’s better if it’s electric.”
Here is our point of disagreement.
To avert catastrophic climate change I assert we must eschew both. You assert that mass adoption of EVs will save the climate.
People ignoring what you flippantly call my wishes, and what I consider a fact, is the crux here.
There is no “immediate effect” from EV adoption because most new EV’s don’t actually replace another vehicle, they just add one more car to the road. The immediate effect would come if an otherwise still useable vehicle was junked as a result. That rarely, if ever, happens.
And yes, it precludes someone walking, riding a bike or taking transit. Or just not taking a trip at all. It seems obvious to me that is the whole purpose of an EV, to allow someone to drive..
Every EV that gets purchased will have an immediate effect compared to a comparable gasoline powered vehicle. That’s the entirety of my argument.
What happens down-market is not relevant.
I own a car, and it does not in the least preclude me from walking, riding, transiting, or even sitting at home. If my car were electric, I don’t think that would change.
“Every EV that gets purchased will have an immediate effect compared to a comparable gasoline powered vehicle. That’s the entirety of my argument.”
I know that is what you think but you are not good at listening to what some of us are saying in response to that. You are not addressing the additive/overshoot/embodied energy angles at all, just keep repeating your mantra.
Your “immediate effect” claim crashes into our climate predicament in ways you either are willfully ignoring or don’t understand.
There is another, more important way EV’s distract from other solutions. The goal is to reduce the amount of fossil fuel burned. Why not just ration fossil fuel? Why not ration the number of gallons of gas that will be burned by vehicles sold each year by a manufacturer. Getting someone to move from a vehicle that burns 5 gallons to go a hundred miles to a vehicle that burns 2 gallons gives a greater impact than getting the vehicle that burns 2 gallons replaced by an EV. You could still set a goal of 0 gallons by 2035 while encouraging immediate reductions. And range anxiety and chargers are not barriers to that immediate impact.
The whole climate change issue reminds me of the Johnny Cash song, “Five Feet High and Rising.”
If I were king for a day, that’s exactly what I’d do, via a carbon tax.
I’m right on the economics*, but wrong on the politics, and since I’m generally critical of fantasy solutions that have no possibility of being implemented, I no longer advocate for that.
The rest of what you proposed is just a stricter form of fleet fuel efficiencies, which I would also support. And CA is doing exactly what you say — all new vehicles will be “0 gallons” by 2035 (assuming they can stick to their resolve).
In the end, the only things that can help us are those we can actually do.
*The only things that nearly every economist agrees on is that a carbon tax would reduce emissions and rent control is a bad idea.
Adoption of EVs, 1 for 1 over just the operable cars, means there’s a huge hole that we would have to take stuff out of to create them. A lot of special materials go into cars, competing directly with manufacture of e power buses, trucks, etc.
I don’t believe we can save ourselves by just switching all our wants to battery power. There are a billion cars in the world. Let’s not go to the end of that road replacing them.
Thank you.
That, in a nutshell, is what I’ve been trying to say in my protracted back-and-forth with Monsieur Watts.
We would have to take that stuff out of the ground to make conventional cars as well.
I completely agree we can’t “save ourselves” with EVs, but I’ve never seen an analysis that says we can do so without them. That is, they’re necessary but not sufficient.
If you have an analysis that says otherwise, please share. I’m easily swayed by data.
Is there a baseline assumption that the number of cars will remain constant? I’m willing to look up and read some stuff but remain unlikely to imbibe the notion that every driver needs a car.
In Oregon, cars outnumber drivers by 3,474,649 to 3,146,128. We now have about a billion cars on the planet, mostly powered by internal combustion. How many private EVs would be enough? Is it something we should leave to the market?
The market reduced the world wide population of humpback whales to about 5,000. That’s just one example of the output from a policy of laissez faire. And no, I don’t have a calendar with whales on it.
In my statement there was — all I said was that when people buy cars, we need as many of them to be EVs as possible. That presupposes buyers have already decided to get a new car.
“Electrifying transportation,” which is what we need to do, is agnostic about how many cars we have (though reducing the fleet size would actually make the problem easier).
If you want to have a parallel conversation about reducing the number of cars (or, more importantly, amount of car driving), start a new thread because that’s a totally different (and important) topic. But in short, let’s reduce driving. I’m all in favor and totally on board. All we need is an implementable strategy.
And who said “laissez faire”? Certainly not me. The market needs regulation and guidance, as I’ve said many times. Tell the market what you want, and you’ll get it.
How to regulate the
mileage market:
-carbon tax (unpopular, equity effects)
-limit new car numbers (rich people drive)
-high taxes on new cars
(rich people drive)
-harsh VMT tolls (rich people drive, equity effects, rampant fraud)
-make driving suck and be sketchy (the greenway plan)
A carbon tax could be quite equitable if you used to to give cash grants to people to offset some of their carbon costs. Those who used less could pocket the difference.
But while I totally support the idea of a carbon tax, it remains a dream along with the other ideas you listed, with the possible exception of taxing new cars… which is what Biden’s punishing tariff on Chinese EVs amounts to.
Other ideas for influencing the market include efficiency requirements, gas car phaseouts, and incentives for less polluting cars, all of which appear to be feasible.
Yes, what we do with any revenue is important. I’m down with carbon tax because the price is only the cost of extraction plus a variable rent. More tax would eat up some of the rent and make a volatile market less interesting.
It’s not simple to manage a market. You can wish for biofuels and get palm oil plantations.
You and me against the world, sadly.
It’s like the monkey’s paw. You have to be careful exactly what you ask for.
Just wait til you get Watts’ response to that (excellent observation, btw).