• 0 Posts
  • 125 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 18th, 2020

help-circle

  • We needed to get this shit done 10 years ago. Any delay in removing all fossil fuel emissions now is just a matter of how bad we want climate change to get, rather than preventing it. Net zero by 2050 is a fucking eternity away and is a shit goal, and all the projections that get us on track to 1.5 °C of warming have us extensively using carbon capture which is entirely unrealistic.

    Existing nuclear plants in France work, they can load follow to some degree, and renewables can make up the difference with minimal energy storage. But at a certain point you have to stop investing in renewables if you have minimal energy storage and your electricity solution is working.

    I am going to emphasize that last part: IF you can’t get enough energy storage, and IF your energy mix is fine, you must stop investment in renewable installations. Without enough storage, the baseload+peak paradigm works, you just have to regulate it.














  • The joke is on you. There are places where it already is easier than driving. What do such places have in common? There are so many people that having everyone drive is literally impossible to accommodate. You wouldn’t drive in Manhattan, Tokyo, or Seoul. It literally makes absolutely no sense to. In these cities, public transit is faster and way more convenient.

    Smaller cities can replicate this effect by just… not outrageously favouring car infrastructure like they do today in North America. That doesn’t mean exclusively making driving worse, it means making public transit better at the same time with the freed up funding. And the freed up money is a lot, car infrastructure is super expensive. More routes with more stops at higher frequencies are made possible because of higher ridership, which increases convenience and makes it more likely you will get almost exactly from your origin to your destination.

    But the American brain cannot conceive of this. “Communist transportation” fucking lmao. What if we made cities more liveable for humans, not for cars? Nah we can’t do that that’s communism.


  • If you make driving easier than transit, more people will drive who previously took transit. The reverse is also true. One of these situations is more desirable for myriad reasons.

    As well, additional demand can be created by convenience. People will make trips they otherwise never would have if it’s easier to make them.