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Driverless cars were the future but now the truth is out: they’re on the road to nowhere
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Technology
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Self driving cars have always been a solution to the wrong problem.
The problem isn't really "I don't want to steer this car". It's "I want to fast+safe+cheaply get from where I am, to where work/school/fun is". So you could spend billions on machine vision and car tech to try to accomplish that, and maybe you will eventually. Or you could invest in historically proven solutions that have incredible side benefits like public transit and better zoning. Because having your self driving car cart you around suburban sprawl is still going to suck. Living spaces that are built for humans first instead of cars are better on like every metric.
I heard this guy going on about this amazing machine a company had invented to sequester carbon. They were not happy when explained that a tree does the same thing and they grow like crazy just about anywhere.
We already know what we need to do but people don't want to do it.
That's the thing that gets me about AI solving global warming or whatever. You think a computer telling you that you have to get off oil is going to make a difference?
Soon it'snot going to be we don't want to do that it's we are going to have to.
Also if you look at happiness. We do want that some people don't know that, some don't know it's possible and some people have been outright lied to.
Unless you can take a dead tree and prevent it from decaying, you're just moving around carbon and not actually sequestering it. We would basically need to grow billions or plants and turn them into coal/oil and then just leave those fuels sitting around. Good luck with that.
Uhhh, I think you’re confused on what carbon sequestration is.
Here’s how forestry is important for carbon sequestration.
The primary source of green house gas isn't deforestation, it's fossil fuels pulled up out of the ground.
Yes, you can think of trees as solar-powered CO2 crystalization, so more trees, more CO2 removed. The problem though is that this is a temporary solution. When trees die and rot or burn (forest fire), they ultimately release most of that CO2 back into the atmosphere. Even worse, that carbon may be released as methane instead, if it decomposes anaerobicly.
There's only so much biomass the earth can sustain to naturally store carbon. The page you link is correct in that we definitely shouldn't make the problem even worse by reversing what carbon the biomass does store.
But it is in no way the solution to putting carbon we mined out of the earth back into the earth. Well trees as a carbon sequestration did already happen: it just took millions of years for buried biomass to be turned into oil and coal.
I didn’t propose a solution. I simply corrected wrong information presented by the other user. Trees sequester carbon, even if with volatility, as explained in the links.
New research, published in Nature Climate Change and available on Global Forest Watch, found that the world’s forests sequestered about twice as much carbon dioxide as they emitted between 2001 and 2019. In other words, forests provide a “carbon sink” that absorbs a net 7.6 billion metric tonnes of CO2 per year, 1.5 times more carbon than the United States emits annually.
I agree, it’s not a solution.
You missed part of the problem. It’s actually,
“I want to fast+safe+cheaply get from where I am, to where work/school/fun is, and I want to do it without sharing transportation with anyone else who might be sick, annoying, crazy, or a member of an ethnic group or economic class I don’t care for”
The good solutions for transit do not account for how much people hate being around each other. My city has phenomenal bus infrastructure, that often gets you to your destination faster than driving. But people drive anyways, because there are sick people and crazy people on the bus.
You're not wrong, but I don't really think society should bend too far to the whims of it's most antisocial members.
Like, if they don't want to share the bus with a black person they can leave. And I don't want to subsidize their selfishness by ceding space to cars, for example.
Also that's a bit of induced demand, probably. People drive because it's easier. Take away the subsidies or internalize the costs of driving, and people's habits will change.