Yes.
Total lifecycle carbon emissions of EVs are literally less than half that of ICE cars.
They're an improvement over ICE cars, if not e- bikes.
Pipoca
joined 2 years ago
I mean, you also see that in the US with bike path design in general.
Bike paths around me in the US mostly go along creeks and railroads. There's one in the suburbs that's an abandoned rail line out into farmland. They're mostly designed as places for suburbanites to drive to for exercise. They're more of a park than a piece of transportation infrastructure.
Oulu, on the other hand, has bike paths that go through the center of town, out to the suburbs. There's over 300 bike underpasses on the main bike paths. It's designed for commuters, for people running errands, and for kindergarteners to bike to school. They're a practical bit of transportation infrastructure.
Plenty of people in Oulu, Finland bike literally all year round. Fully 12% of all trips in winter are made by bike.
Their secret? Just as the roads are plowed, so are the bike paths. If we didn't plow and salt the roads up north, cars would also seem ridiculously impractical compared to a snowmobile or cross country skis.
Oulu invests in making winter biking safe and practical, while American cities of comparable size and climate like Syracuse, NY don't. The results are predictable.
He wasn't perfect, sure. But I think you're simultaneously giving him too much and too little credit.
Presidents are figureheads. They get blamed for a lot of trailing indicators they have little control over, and are limited by the particular congresses they have to deal with.
Recently, for example, Biden was pretty limited by the fact that any climate legislation has to get voted on by Joe Manchin.
Obama's policies were impacted by what he thought he could pass.
Look at healthcare, for example. Obama was 32 when universal healthcare blew up pretty spectacularly in Clinton's first year in office. Insurance companies, in particular, spent tens of millions on very successful FUD ad campaigns. Unions were against it, because they often negotiate for "cadillac plans". Much like how Trump moved on after 'repeal and replace' failed dramatically, Clinton did as well.
Obamacare had the advantage that it wasn't an existential threat to the insurance industry. Obamacare was deliberately something Obama thought he could successfully pass, while still being an incremental improvement. And, of course, it did actually pass.
Could Obama have passed Medicare for all instead, or would we have just seen a repeat of Clinton's failure? Honestly, it's impossible to know for sure.
The walkshed of public transit is also really important.
People aren't going to take a train to a parking lot...
The problem with this is lifestyle inflation.
Pre-industrial technologies will only get us pre-industrial amounts of meat, which has to be split between the current population.
There's a lot of people who probably won't be very happy with only being able to afford meat once or twice a week. That seems like a surefire way to trigger a backlash.
(3rd party voting, voting for independents, refuse to participate and vocally deride the whole process and so on)
What exactly do these acheive? How do these improve things? Why would this cause literally anything to be fixed? Why wouldn't this just entrench the current system?
Trumpism didn't take over the Republican Party by the alt-right voting third party or staying home. It took over by the alt-right showing up in droves at primary season to drag the Republican Party kicking and screaming in their preferred direction. Look at what Republican senators said about Trump just before and just after the primary.
AOC didn't get into congress by running third party. She did it by successfully primarying a more centrist incumbent.
It seems to me that to win, you need to do one of two things:
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Win under the current rules. Show up at primaries to get progressives on the ticket, then show up and win.
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Change the rules. Get your local and state governments to switch to using halfway- decent voting systems like instant runoff, or good ones like 3-2-1 or STAR. Get enough bottom-up movement on that to eventually change the way the president is elected.
Keep in mind, the president is only so powerful. President Sanders would still be limited by whatever he could get past Manchin.
The problem is that it isn't a matter of cars vs busses. It's a matter of urban design in general.
Public transit gets better as density goes up. A bus that drops you off at a giant-ass Walmart parking lot with nothing else but two drivethroughs in walking distance isn't very useful. A bus that drops you off in a neighborhood with 4 dozen shops, a dozen restaurants, 4 bars and 3 coffee shops within a 5 minute walk is way more useful.
By contrast, density makes driving worse. Density means more people are driving the same way you want to go. More people in cars means more traffic on the road with you. Designing for cars pushes you to low density sprawl.
Just building public transit isn't the solution. Just building public transit in a typical American suburban sprawl makes something about as compelling as a Ford F150 in Vatican City.
You have to fix urban design - stop building stroads and start building streetcar suburbs again.
Yeah.
Technically, the states can decide how they allocate their votes. Nearly every state currently goes with the winner of their statewide election.
There's the interstate popular vote compact, though. Basically, states will vote for the popular winner if enough states to guarantee the popular winner wins pass the compact.
But until that happens, we're stuck with the current system.
saying "Yeah but you have to vote Biden because otherwise you get Trump".
This is true, though.
The way the US elects presidents is terrible. It's basically certifiably insane.
There's an election in each state. The winner of that statewide election gets all the electoral college votes for that state. If no candidate gets an absolute majority in the electoral college, then it goes to the House of Representatives. However, each state delegation gets one vote.
Functionally, that means that if the election goes to the House, the Republican wins.
Third parties have never done well in the US because the system structurally disadvantages them. This is mostly because the US was the first modern democracy, and social choice theory was in its infancy when the constitution was written.
If you want to vote Biden out in favor of someone more progressive, the only chance of that is to primary him.
Monorails are often considered a gadgetbahn.
Gadgetbahn is less about being new, and more about being gimmicky with few real advantages.
The body doesn't actually sense the amount of oxygen in your blood. Instead, there's assorted ways it detects elevated levels of CO2.
That works great when you're e.g. swimming under water or are holding your breath. Low oxygen naturally coincides with excess CO2.
But it's dangerous in low oxygen environments. CO2 doesn't build up, so you don't sense that you're running low on oxygen.
People die accidentally from inert gas asphyxiation. It's sneaky like that.