Oh, you should stop by Amsterdam.

This is all that ever needs to be said any time anyone mentions the idea of a flying car.

https://youtu.be/6fcWOivJ6bs

No, I left because I had the opportunity to get out while there was still a chance. I grew up in the US, and I couldn’t do that to my children knowing I could get out.

https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw

But if you’re not able to leave the US, you can still make it better.

https://www.strongtowns.org/

The simple fact is that you have to live in a world without cars, or where cars are much more rare, because it simply isn’t possible to build a sustainable society around them. This isn’t even a climate thing, it’s simply geometry. Cars take up space. In order to make space for cars, density has to go down. High population places with low density can’t afford infrastructure because there isn’t a concentrated enough tax base. Basically, most US cities are insolvent and are ticking time bombs that will collapse, like Flint and Detroit in time. As Trump increases economic pressures, American cities will become bankrupt faster.

American infrastructure is crumbling all over the place, because no one can afford to fix it. That’s a car problem. Car infrastructure costs too much to maintain. That’s not even taking into account climate change. The US has never built back from several of the climate disasters that have destroyed critical infrastructure, and these will continue to accelerate.

The US was built around trains, horses, streetcars, and bikes. It’s only within the last 100 years that it’s been completely redesigned around cars. That experiment has been a complete failure, and it was only possible to try because of cheap fossil fuels. That’s gone… and I’m only talking about one of the many headwinds.

So you do have to live without cars. That’s not actually a question. The question is if you will do that on your terms or by the force of complete economic collapse.

I left behind all my friends, a high paying job, a big house with a garden we’d been working on for years, and everything else I lost and sold, to get out because I don’t believe people like you will be able to accept these facts. Oh, and before you say something about me never living outside of a city, I spent the majority of my first 20 years living in places like Gates, OR and Cobb, CA. You can google those if you care to.

It’s not ICE or EV, it’s cars or not cars. Cars are not sustainable.

Ok, what do cars travel on? What lithium do you use to make all the batteries? How do you make the all the steel you need for those wind farms and the power lines you need to get the energy from the farms? How do you store it?

I’m not going to go in to all the problems, but I don’t think you’ve every questioned this story.

0. Stop building everything around cars so people can choose not to buy a car.

Not wanting something to be true doesn’t make it false. Oh where have I heard people reject inconvenient truth before?

EVs were always a way to save the auto Industry, not a way to solve the climate crisis. Add them to the list of greenwashing grifts (carbon footprint, plastic recycling, hydrogen fuel cell cars, etc) and move on to the real solution: bike infrastructure and mass transit, with cars as an absolute last resort until they can be eliminated.

EVs solve one of the numerous problems with cars, and make some of the others much worse. People should have seen EVs as a grift the whole time, it just took the biggest grifter to blow his cover to start making it obvious.

It made a slight recovery, but it’s significantly lower than it was a year ago. It’s gone significantly down since the Tesla protests started. It’s not a real company, so at some point it’s going to crash anyway.

Collect some horse chestnuts, smash 4 with a hammer and put them in an old sock. Throw the sock and nuts in the wash. It’s a free replacement for unscented detergent.

You can also make detergent from English Ivy and a bunch of other plants.

You can organize your way out. We are only cooked if we give up.

Exactly.

The problem with protesting is that it’s begging people to kindly do ask you ask. In the case of oil, you’re the “people” you are asking are a social cancer. The people doing the work are literally destroying their children’s future for money today. They couldn’t possibly care about anything you could do or any argument you could make. Very few relationships are really zero sum games, but this is one.

They exist or we do, there can be no common ground. There can be no negotiation. These are corporations we’re fighting, not people, and corporations don’t care about anything.

I’m glad people are waking up to the fact that there can be no rational dialog. It’s life or death, for humans and oil companies. They must be stopped, and stopping means death for the oil companies. They will not, and cannot, listen. They must be forced to stop or we all die.

“Direct action gets the goods.”

Don’t forget the cost of insurance. That’s the big one. If it stops being possible to insure fossil fuel infrastructure, then investments shift to renewables that can be insured. It’s pretty simple economic math.

Edit: that also works in all levels of the economy. Pipeline constitution vehicle get torched every time there’s a pipeline built? Uninsurable therefore reduce or stop investment. Cas in cities always get flat tires and vandalized? People won’t buy cars they can’t insure.

As a reminder, hydrogen is not a good technology for this type of application and hydrogen trials should be abandoned. Hydrogen fuel cells for land vehicles were always a grift by car companies to keep ICE on the road. https://youtu.be/f7MzFfuNOtY

Cars will probably destroy US society before they go away, but either way there’s a clear end point. I’d say fight like hell to get rid of cars so it ends on the best possible terms, but you do you.

This is a good high level start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmoJyvEFqkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s19okTYl8MA

There’s also this: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-man-who-ruined-99056594/

So one of the tings I’m saying here is that the Oil industry’s climate denailism created the post-fact reality that lead to Trump, a senile lunatic, who is now forcing everyone to eat his shit. Each thing I is specific, like climate change causing fires (I’m specifically talking about the LA fire) and suburban sprawl destroying farmland, and paving cities leading to flooding. Cars in the US regularly hit buildings. Car sizes have continually increased over the years, leading to massive increases in pedestrian deaths (especially among children). Children in the US basically can’t play outside because giant cars drive really fast all over the place. In the Netherlands, young children cycle to school (like they used to in the US). Now they don’t because they would die.

Thank you!

It’s not really that general, and it’s not really about drugs unless you think about oil as an addiction (which isn’t far off)… at least that wasn’t my intention. I’m curious if there might be some missing context.

Are you familiar with the history of how car culture became dominant in the US? Do you recognize who the king is?

Tell me what you think this story is about.