It depends how far back you want to go, but it absolutely was true.
Ignoring that fact, everything is designed around car transportation. You can’t just kill that off in any reasonable amount of time with a different solution. You’re talking no less than 50+ years if that is the main focus, ignoring all of the other much more significant issues. Rails don’t just pop-up. Rural living residents and small townships aren’t just gonna up and leave. Cars are here to stay, the best you can hope for is better public transport, some functional rails, and realistically, more efficient vehicles. Welcome to reality.
If that’s true, and it’s going to take 50+ years, shouldn’t we start, like, now?
Cars will be around for our entire lifetimes. I do think that having a modern rail system in place would be great, to complement cars. In cities it’s easier and makes more sense, but there will never be a train that comes to my house, and if there is, I’m moving, because I sure as shit don’t want to live next to a train. I’d love to be able to jump on a cross Continental, high speed rail to go on affordable trips, but that isn’t possible and won’t be. As long as I can pay roughly the same for a flight to my destination, and get there significantly faster, I will probably never opt for a slower option, and I’m definitely not in the minority by saying that.
With that said, assuming we spend the next 50 years eliminating cars and moving to rails, it still won’t touch emissions, because cars are not the leader and are continuing to get better and more efficient. So starting now would be convenient and not a bad idea, but it won’t change anything substantial from an emissions standpoint.
In 2021, transportation accounted for 28% of U.S. CO2 emissions, the largest source by economic sector. Absolutely, we need to address cars to reduce emissions; they’re not getting that much better. Getting rid of them won’t fix the problem, but conversely, fixing the problem requires getting rid of most of them. But why does it have to be rails? What if it was a café near your house? A doctor’s practice? A bookstore? It’s not foreordained that everything has to be so far apart that you need motorized transport (car or train) to get to it. The large majority of car trips Americans take are short distances, not cross-country journeys for which we need high-speed rail or airliners. Do away with single-use zoning, put the places people go every day close to where they live, and we eliminate the need for a huge number of daily car trips. No rails through your front yard needed.
Which is why it’s not the right solution to emitting less pollution. It would take far longer than we have until we’ve fucked the planet completely at the rate. That’s why switching to green vehicles is a far more achievable goal. Humans are selfish and they’ll burn the world if their short-term livelihood is at stake.
“Green” vehicles aren’t doing to do it, though. They solve the problem of tailpipe emissions, yes, but not the resources needed to manufacture, operate, and dispose of them. I saw an infographic recently that pointed out than an electric car uses (generously speaking) only about 2/3 of the energy of an ICE car over its whole lifecycle. That’s… good, but not enough. It also doesn’t account for the direct CO2 emissions from the chemical process of curing concrete. EVs still need concrete to run on.
Also, CO2 emissions are not the whole story on how cars fuck the planet. There are the lifecycle resources, all of the plastic, glass, and metal, which still take fossil fuels to produce, either as a raw material, or as energy. There’s ecological destruction to get those resources, to get the resources to build the roads, to clear the space for the roads, for the sprawl that they facilitate, in the fragmentation of habitat, and the heavy toll taken on wildlife directly by roadkill. There’s also the pollution, like PM2.5 from tires, which causes asthma and heart disease in humans, and runs off into waterways and destroys zooplankton. There’s groundwater, lakes and streams becoming saline from widespread use of road salt.
I mean, we’re in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event on Earth, and it’s only fractionally driven by climate change. Automobiles, even the “green” variety, contribute greatly to the problem.
We don’t have 50 years. As Bill Nye said, the planet’s on fucking fire. Emit less carbon, motherfuckers.
Cars aren’t the main problem. They are a factor, yes, but not the big fish. Good thing EVs are become more mainstream and as technology progresses, they will be the dominant choice. Trying to get rid of all cars is quite frankly fucking stupid.
We need net zero by 2030. We need to turn that 100% of CO2 into 0%. Cars are 12.1%. Cars are our second priory behind manufacturing and construction, and we need to eliminate ALL of the priorities. No half measures.
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