Texas Tech University's Jennifer Guelfo was part of a research team that found the use of a novel sub-class of per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) in lithium ion batteries is a growing source of pollution in air and water.
Mass Transit and walkable cities are a lot of things and has a lot of benefits that makes it worth expanding, but they are not an full climate solution or anything like a replacement for electric cars.
Neglecting that even in small very dense countries with cities built wholly around high quality mass transit still have freeways and millions of cars, the facts that it almost always takes over a decade of construction to establish a new light rail or metro line in north america, that it takes many such cycles to fully build out a network, and that it can take years to even establish a simple bus line, mean that it cannot be built fast enough to be relevant to anything under a 2.5 to 3 degrees warming senecio at best.
We quite similarly don’t have the carbon budget to keep emiting two tons of carbon dioxide per year per vehicle for another half century while we wait for the best case where effective 24/7 transit with fifteen minute headways is extended to even the most conservative small town with politicians elected on culture war issues like eliminating public transit. Not when we have a nearly drop in solution that can be scaled up to the point where it can have eliminated nearly all personal transit related carbon emissions in the time it takes to build two stages of a single metro line.
And I haven’t even touched on the infatuation north america has with diesel, battery electric, and even hydrogen buses over seeing trollybus or tram wires, or the sudden pushback and NIMBYism you see in even very blue cities in blue states like Los Angeles the second you start talking about connecting the rich white neighborhoods to the poor block ones, or that time the Koch brothers quashed a new light rail line a small North Carolina city had spent hundreds of millions working on to provent woke walkable cities, or the third of north amarica that doesn’t live in or near a city, or the infatuation that both the liberals and conservatives who control north america have with running public transport at a profit.
Again, this isn’t to say that mass transit isn’t worth it or that we shouldn’t be building a whole lot more of it than we currently are here in north america, just that it is not something we should be expecting in time to reach net zero.
Work from home is great and something that should be encouraged for a whole host of reasons, but it isn’t something that most jobs with an actual physical output or effect on the world can do.
Mass Transit and walkable cities are a lot of things and has a lot of benefits that makes it worth expanding, but they are not an full climate solution or anything like a replacement for electric cars.
Nobody is advocating that. There is strong advocacy for electric cars instead of mass transit, fueled by the automaker industry. You can see influences of it even in this very article.
If we’re talking about the biggest impact to climate change, that is definitely industry activity, followed by cattle farming and only then transportation, of which daily commuting is a fraction. All the press seems to do is talk about “responsible consumption”, which is corporate speak for “don’t regulate us”.
Mass Transit and walkable cities are a lot of things and has a lot of benefits that makes it worth expanding, but they are not an full climate solution or anything like a replacement for electric cars.
Neglecting that even in small very dense countries with cities built wholly around high quality mass transit still have freeways and millions of cars, the facts that it almost always takes over a decade of construction to establish a new light rail or metro line in north america, that it takes many such cycles to fully build out a network, and that it can take years to even establish a simple bus line, mean that it cannot be built fast enough to be relevant to anything under a 2.5 to 3 degrees warming senecio at best.
We quite similarly don’t have the carbon budget to keep emiting two tons of carbon dioxide per year per vehicle for another half century while we wait for the best case where effective 24/7 transit with fifteen minute headways is extended to even the most conservative small town with politicians elected on culture war issues like eliminating public transit. Not when we have a nearly drop in solution that can be scaled up to the point where it can have eliminated nearly all personal transit related carbon emissions in the time it takes to build two stages of a single metro line.
And I haven’t even touched on the infatuation north america has with diesel, battery electric, and even hydrogen buses over seeing trollybus or tram wires, or the sudden pushback and NIMBYism you see in even very blue cities in blue states like Los Angeles the second you start talking about connecting the rich white neighborhoods to the poor block ones, or that time the Koch brothers quashed a new light rail line a small North Carolina city had spent hundreds of millions working on to provent woke walkable cities, or the third of north amarica that doesn’t live in or near a city, or the infatuation that both the liberals and conservatives who control north america have with running public transport at a profit.
Again, this isn’t to say that mass transit isn’t worth it or that we shouldn’t be building a whole lot more of it than we currently are here in north america, just that it is not something we should be expecting in time to reach net zero.
Work from home is great and something that should be encouraged for a whole host of reasons, but it isn’t something that most jobs with an actual physical output or effect on the world can do.
Nobody is advocating that. There is strong advocacy for electric cars instead of mass transit, fueled by the automaker industry. You can see influences of it even in this very article.
If we’re talking about the biggest impact to climate change, that is definitely industry activity, followed by cattle farming and only then transportation, of which daily commuting is a fraction. All the press seems to do is talk about “responsible consumption”, which is corporate speak for “don’t regulate us”.