We got the first to replace our 10-year-old, gas-powered Subaru, and after only two years of driving, the E.V. has created fewer emissions over its lifetime than if we had kept the old car. It will take our second E.V. only four years to create fewer emissions over its lifetime than the 2005 hybrid Prius it replaced. That’s counting the production of the batteries and the emissions from charging the E.V.s, and the emissions payback time will only continue to drop as more emissions-free wind and solar power comes onto the grid and battery technology improves.
The author of course did not look at having one less car, and substituting an ebike or mass transit for part of their driving, which would have lowered emissions by a larger amount.
Even if we go by your numbers, 30% is still negligible. (“Suburban” counts as urban, BTW.)
Also, my source is the US census and is newer than yours (2022).
Edit to reply to your edit: no, what you wrote…
…is bullshit. I absolutely do not accept that as a premise, because the suburbs are nothing more than defective urbanism. They are a straight-up mistake and should cease to exist. Every suburb, without exception, should either be densified to the point that walking and mass transit are viable, or razed and returned to farmland or wilderness.
See my edit note. Census.gov doesn’t distinguish between Urban and Suburban. Do you really think 50% of the US population switched lifestyles in the last 5 years? Be reasonable.
See my edit note, and stop trying to condescend to tell me what “we both know” or that I’m not being “reasonable.” You are not entitled to assume that your position is some kind of default unassailable truth.
The census is right not to make that distinction!
Yikes. I’m sorry you feel that way about the points I was trying to express. I’m frankly disappointed we couldn’t have a pleasant conversation here.
Your solution requires we fix culture, infrastructure, housing, affordability, mass transit, and urban spaces. And do that all while minimizing the carbon footprint of gathering the necessary resources and implementing these decades worth of changes quick enough to make a significant dent in the carbon footprint we’re all a part of.
Electric cars are a fantastic environmental improvement for the 70% (maybe a little less, adjusting for proximity to city center, seniors, with, etc…) of Americans that find themselves largely disconnected from urban environments where well implemented mass transit works wonderfully.
Reality can’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
No, my solution requires we fix zoning. Just that; only zoning. A change that can be made at the stroke of a pen. The rest will get handled naturally as the market reacts to that change. (This is because the other problems you mentioned like lack of housing quantity and affordability and non-viability of mass transit are caused by restrictive zoning!)
You want to talk about reality? Okay, here’s the reality: suburbs are not natural. They only exist because we force them to exist via government policy. Rural areas have existed since the invention of agriculture in prehistory. Urban areas existed for at least 10,000 years. But suburbs? Car-dependent suburbs didn’t exist until roughly the 1940s. Note that that’s not the 1900s as a consequence of the invention of the automobile; it existed for decades without causing car-dependency. It wasn’t until entities like Standard Oil and GM, along with misguided utopian planners like Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright (who presumably didn’t realize how badly they were fucking up), managed to convince the Federal government to essentially force car-dependency via things like FHA lending requirements and massive road subsidies that the suburbs as we know them really took off.
As for “culture:” people think all those millions of single-family houses everywhere exist because “that’s what people want” and the “Free Market” makes it happen, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Single-family homes are, in a sense, subsidized by the zoning code. It holds down property values by eliminating competition from developers who would build out the lot to its highest and best use given market demand and instead lets single-family home buyers compete only amongst themselves. The macroeconomic result is that makes dense development more expensive than it should be and makes single-family houses cheaper than they should be (but still too expensive for a lot of people to actually afford, since overall supply is so restricted by the massive inefficient use of land). It also forces quite a lot of people to either buy or rent single-family houses, when they actually wanted (or would have wanted, if prices weren’t skewed to make houses look unnaturally favorable) a unit in a multifamily building instead. Besides, “what do people want” is not the right question to begin with; the right question is “what do people deserve.” Are you really going to argue that relatively wealthy people who can afford to buy single-family houses deserve a subsidy at (generally less-wealthy) renters’ expense?! 'Cause that’s what restrictive zoning gets you!
Of course, not being “natural” isn’t a problem in and of itself, and unjust subsidies are a viable (albeit evil) policy choice. The real problem is that the suburbs also aren’t sustainable – and I don’t just mean they aren’t ecologically sustainable; I mean they aren’t even economically sustainable! Generally speaking, suburbs do not produce enough tax revenue per acre to build and maintain the amount of infrastructure per acre that they require. (To understand what I mean, a concrete example might help: say you’ve got an apartment building with 100 feet of street frontage and 20 units. The occupants of each unit need to pay enough taxes to maintain 5 feet of street. But if you’ve got a single-family house on that lot instead, the occupants need to pay enough tax to maintain the entire 100 feet of street – but of course, they can’t afford that unless the house in question is a damn mansion.) In fact, the suburbs are both subsidized by the densely-developed areas of the jurisdiction they’re in – a subsidy that’s on top of the zoning-induced subsidy I explained in the previous paragraph, by the way – and a Ponzi scheme that causes jurisdictions without large densely-developed ares to go bankrupt once the wave of greenfield development moves out past their borders.
This has to be fixed – we literally can’t afford not to, in a way even more direct and immediate than climate change. And electric cars do absolutely fuck-all to help with it. In fact, in this sense electric cars are worse than useless: they’re a red-herring that deludes people into thinking suburbs are less of an eminently nonviable catastrophe than they actually are. When you combine the fact that ending car dependency is better for the environment than electric cars with the fact that ending car dependency is better for solving literally every other major problem we have, from housing affordability, to crime, to poverty, to homelessness, to obesity, to even mental health, social cohesion and civic engagement than electric cars (which, again, do fuck-all to help any of it), it should become really fucking obvious which solution is the one we should be – which one we have to be – focusing on!