this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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The first car-free community built from scratch in the US is starting to take off: 'For some, cars equal freedom, but for me, it's a restriction' (www.thecooldown.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Also a huge number of people in the US travel to places that are walkable:

  • Disney World
  • Las Vegas (The strip is anyway)
  • DC
  • NYC
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

Yeah, I agree with you. Being 100% without a car is hard in most cases.

And the answer I see is trains. For the amount of money that does into the car industry (+ multi lane roads, administration, maintenance, etc) we could have super fancy, comfy, fast, frequent, and cheap/free trains.

And people would have more mobility too, at a fraction of the cost and environmental damage.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Trains for long distance + trolleys and subways for local travel. There will invariably be people whose transportation needs require a private vehicle but this combo alone would clear up the majority of cars on the road in my opinion.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Even in countries with pretty good public transit like the UK and Germany, a large majority of families have a private vehicle. If we had better trains and subways in the US, I don't think too many people would sell their cars, but only use them once or twice a week, rather than once or twice a day.

That's a huge win in my book.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

UK and Germany don't have good public transport, maybe except for individual cities. Switzerland on the other hand has good and frequent public transport nationwide.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

As an American who has experienced Deutsche Bahn, National Rail, and Amtrak, I'll stand by Germany and the UK having pretty good inter-city rail compared to us. Lübeck and Bath are the cities there I've been with the worst public transit, and they would be well above average in the US.

I haven't been to Switzerland yet, but it's not shocking to hear the public transit there is all-around better.

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