Carbon neutral and CO2 emissions, etc

bennty
Thu, 09 Sep 2021 01:52:45 +0000

I agree with everything you’ve said here. The bus thing’s very interesting and there are a lot of good projects running that explore why people do and don’t use buses, and an idea I had here seems to already be a thing in lots of places: if you grow up with public transit, it’s an obvious thing to use, and while you’ll have to figure out some new things in a new place, transit works like transit pretty much anywhere with money. But if you grow up in a non-transit culture, it’s a mystery and can be forbidding. So as part of our efforts to get more in-town trips made in a sustainable fashion, I’ve started working with city people to create a Bus Buddies program: there goes the bus, you don’t know where it came from or where it’s going, you kind of want to start using the bus because you know you should drive less, but you don’t know how to do it. Just click through to Bus Buddies and a human will give you as much help as you want, all the way to meeting you somewhere and sherpaing you along, introducing you to the bus driver, showing you how to ride, read a schedule, get on and off the bus where you want, talk to the driver if you need help figuring out what to do or where to pick up the bus coming back, etc. until you can try it on your own and gain some confidence.

If you must replace a private car, then yes, I agree, electric is better. Better though to examine how your life is set up and ask what exactly you’re getting out of having the car, and whether it’s really worth everything you’re paying in terms of money, time, and environmental cost.

Why I think we can shift much more to transit: I think it’s got much less to do with infrastructure than with culture, and you can do a lot that doesn’t involve contractors and bids and policy through culture.

I’m a native NYer, but didn’t grow up in NYC. Even so, because my parents are native NYers, I took the bus on my own from the time I was a little kid; I didn’t bother learning to drive till I was out of college and had to so I could get to my job (where I stayed for ten weeks, in part because I thought commuting was stupid). I now live very far from NYC and my kid’s hardly ever been there. Never lived in or spent a lot of time in a major city outside a summer university program, and we live in the middle of an enormously strong car culture, with the minivan brigade outside the schools, kids driving the second they’re legal, etc. When she was 12, though, I taught her to ride the bus so she could get around on her own, so she learned to be comfortable using buses and trains, and could get around a major city on her own before she left high school. There was a bump as she got older and her friends were getting their permits – she was all about driving for a year or so – and then lost interest when she realized how expensive it is and was annoyed at that, though she learned to drive last year because she thought she ought to know how before she went to college. The other day, though, she left the house to go downtown, and she walked straight past the car her grandparents had lent her and went to stand at the corner for the bus. When she came back, I asked her why she’d done that, and she looked at me as though I’d lost my mind, and said “You can read on the bus,” and also said she hadn’t wanted to pay for parking.

Culture’s a powerful thing. Now that she’s got some experience, she’s also hella annoyed at how expensive cars are to maintain and how unreliable they can be, and can’t see why people would bother. When she comes home from college, she rides her bike or takes the bus, rather than finding a ride…just as I did over 30 years ago.

About the house temp variation: yeah, agree. I find that people freak about that until for some reason they have to forgo climate control for a while, and then, unless there’s an illness involved, usually they forget to freak about it afterwards. The seasonal thing also helps with electricity use: in summer the days are also long, and you’re likely cooking while it’s still pretty sunny out. So if you’re using solar panels and you have some pointed in the right direction, that goes a long way towards covering your a/c, even late in the day. (Similarly, in winter you’re cooking when it’s dark out and the temp has dropped, so if you’re using the oven, you can open the oven door afterwards and let the accumulated heat do something nice in the kitchen.) If you want to go deeper into it, you can also think more carefully about energy use at particular times of day, and energy costs of different kinds of, say, meal prep. I cook a lot, but I also do a lot of large-batch-and-preservation cooking, which means most evenings I’m heating up food in a microwave, not cooking on an electric stove for an hour. Again, this has more to do with norms and learned practices more than it has to do with infrastructure.

The only thing I’ll quibble about is the pocketbook argument, which I think most people will eventually see as pound-foolish if you’re talking at the level of monthly bills. (And if you’re poor enough for this to be make/break, that’s a whole other set of issues.) Again, which do you want, a world where you’re not wondering whether it’s flood or fire or tornadoes or snowmageddon or polar vortices that’ll get you this season, or adjusting how you live and paying around the same or possibly slightly more? Sure, over 20 years, I come out ahead a few thousand dollars living as I do, using the solar panels and more-expensive-up-front heating equipment. But that’s not why I do it. (I also totally horked an eco-rep-guy’s spiel in front of a bunch of apartment-dwelling grad students when he asked, “Who here thinks your heating bill is too low?” and I raised my hand and said for sure, we’re not paying for any of the externalities, this is all artificially cheap dollarwise for us and the damage costs get disconnected.) What I do think will matter quite a bit is whether people have to front the risk themselves for expensive efficient/renewable gear if they don’t know how long they’ll live somewhere and aren’t assured that they can get the money back in, say, a house sale. Rental properties, also an issue, especially at the low end.