Shifting to EVs is not enough. The deeper problem is our car dependence

&gt; Electric vehicles tend to produce fewer emissions over their life cycles than equivalent vehicles powered by fossil fuels, but the framing often used by government and industry that they are &quot;zero emissions&quot; is misleading.<p>&gt; Unlike a conventional vehicle whose emissions come from burning fossil fuels, a greater share of an EV&#x27;s emissions come from its production; more specifically, its battery. This is the side of the EV that often doesn&#x27;t make it into the ad campaigns.<p>while no greenhouse gas emissions directly come from EVs, they run on electricity that is, in large part, still produced from fossil fuels in many parts of the world.<p>Thats the real side that doesnt make it into the ad campaigns (and yes, Canada is one of the better countries out there for Energy mix)

I&#x27;m curious what&#x27;s going to happen with the existing suburbs. Normalisation of remote work already permanently killed some commute. But a lot of American suburbs won&#x27;t be usable without a car without massive changes. Before you can cycle to the shop &#x2F; school, there&#x27;s a lot of houses that would have to go down.

Rebuilding infrastructure across a country the size of US to be non-car centric is going to release far more CO2 than EVs ever will.<p>It&#x27;s not just laying train tracks everywhere, you have to tear down and rebuild housing to be more dense, streets to be more walkable and bikeable, and all the according infra such as electricity, internet cables, water pipes and anything else you can imagine to support the new public-transport friendly layout.<p>It&#x27;s a mind-bogglingly expensive enterprise compared to replacing ICE vehicles with EVs.<p>There&#x27;s also no reason at all why these 2 processes can&#x27;t be happening simultaneously, in places where it makes sense. By presenting the argument through a false dichotomy, you&#x27;re just alienating people from each other. But hey, that&#x27;s modern journalism!

The self feeding cycle we have now is: science advances -&gt; more energy production -&gt; higher gdp -&gt; more environment destruction + population growth.<p>The solutions proposed so far is to produce more, do more science, create more green jobs etc. we all know that this doing “more” won’t work but we are scared to lose our jobs or funding etc. So we have these pseudo intellectual-socio-scientific discourse trying to “solve” the problem but all the while we are just digging our graves deeper. To fix the problem we just need to rip that bandaid quickly and ruthlessly. This will cause economies to fall, governments to fail and wars to be waged. Good luck getting this through - the proponents already know all this, they are just making money while the sun shines organizing conferences and marketing their pet funding projects.

Also particulates from car tires eroding against all the asphalt. (All the asphalt and other pavement is also an environmental concern.)<p>We&#x27;re going to have to reconfigure some pretty basic aspects of our civilization if we want to prevent environmental disasters, and this goes beyond climate change.<p>Too many birds crash against our windows.<p>Too many earthworms die on sidewalks when it rains.<p>We use too many toxic chemicals, we waste too much energy and food and water.<p>We can change all of this. We can live in ecological harmony <i>and</i> improve our standard of living at the same time.

Excessive travel is indeed a problem