I don't get it honestly. If we lived in a socialist utopia fair enough, but we don't, and never will, the neo-liberal kleptocracy is more or less here to stay for the foreseeable future. And yet people like you want to get rid of the few remaining freedoms the current socio-economic system affords us.
Complete worst of both worlds. Work 50 hours a week at poverty wages controlling drones at the Amazon Enrichment Centre then come home to your eco-cube to eat soy paste and look at pictures on the internet of places you'll never visit because personal transport is illegal, and a ticket to the seaside on the carbon neutral hydrogen maglev is a full week's wages.
>>93175 You see, lad. What you need to do is this:
1. Read up a bit wikipedia and realise the Greens as a political unit didn't exist in the 1980. Maybe take some time to digest the question.
2. Get a thumbtack and place it just under the nail of your big toe.
3. Toe-punt the wall as hard as you can.
Building a new car produces somewhere in the region of 20 tonnes of CO2. We can't afford to replace all of the old fossil fuel cars, nor can we afford to keep them on the road.
A purpose-built electric taxi can easily run for half a million miles without the need for any major repair work. Self-driving and smart routing means that it can be kept in near-constant use, rather than spending most of the time sitting in someone's driveway and rusting away.
The next generation of young people won't want to own a car, because the alternative will be cheaper and more convenient. Commuting will be less common as we shift to work-from-home. Dynamically-routed buses that pick up passengers on demand rather than following a fixed route and schedule will manage a big chunk of peak travel and we'll incentivise people to use alternative modes, particularly bikes and e-scooters.
>the neo-liberal kleptocracy
Of which cars are a vital element. There's very little freedom in borrowing £20,000 to buy a tin box so you can spend two hours a day stuck in traffic. Owning a car isn't freedom, it's a symbol of servitude. A system that relies on people doing pointless labour to buy shit they don't need to impress people they don't like can't survive the zero-carbon transition unscathed. Our survival as a species depends upon us imagining new ways of living.
>The next generation of young people won't want to own a car, because the alternative will be cheaper and more convenient. Commuting will be less common as we shift to work-from-home
>There's very little freedom in borrowing £20,000 to buy a tin box so you can spend two hours a day stuck in traffic
You're arguing a strong point. A lot of young people today really don't see much of a point anymore owning something that's going to cost an outrageous sum of money, for a 20 year old anyway, and which will spend 20 hours a day or more parked on the kerb. Especially now that there are increasingly car sharing and other shared mobility solutions, where you can hire a car for the few hours that you occasionally actually need it, and at a very acceptable price. Add to that the whole Uber what-have-you, and the arguments for actually buying a car at that age become quite thin. Maybe when they settle down and start a family that will change again, but your own shiny new car in your driveway will never be the same kind of status symbol as it used to be for decades.
Unless we really come up with a way of powering cars that is neither going to rely on fossil fuel nor on our present-day power grid, the future looks kind of glum for personal cars as we know them today. Giving each car its own miniature fusion reactor would probably solve that problem in that it could run on one proper deuterium-tritium fill the size of an average petrol tank for twenty years, but that kind of technology is probably still more than 100 years away.
Electric vehicles are actually a huge help in transitioning to a renewable grid.
The biggest problem with renewables is that they're dependent on the weather and the time of day, so we need massive amounts of storage capacity to deal with daily variations. EVs are a huge fuck-off battery on wheels - you can run the average house for a week on the battery in a Tesla Model 3 or a Kia e-Niro.
By using smart chargers, we can vary the price of electricity on a minute-by-minute basis and offer to buy back electricity from EV batteries at times of peak demand. Whenever they're plugged in, EVs can collectively work to balance the grid.
When an EV is written off or reaches the end of its useful life, the battery pack can be refurbished for use as a fixed grid storage battery.
These technologies aren't hypothetical - they're already being rolled out.
The rural population has been ageing and shrinking for decades, because few young people actually want to live in the countryside and there are far more people than useful things to do. Of the 11 million people who live in rural areas, less than half a million are directly or indirectly employed in the agricultural sector; continuing increases in productivity and illiquidity in the labour market means that supply of agricultural products vastly exceeds demand and the agricultural sector is drastically over-staffed.
Some people legitimately do need private transportation and we'd be mad to refuse them that, but we'd be equally mad to subsidise unsustainable lifestyles for purely sentimental reasons.
>Some people legitimately do need private transportation and we'd be mad to refuse them that
Some people seem to either not understand (or not want to understand) that even if we did make owning private cars illegal, there could still be exceptions. They very quickly get angry on the grounds that if you ban their car you'd have to ban disabled people from getting around in them too, how could you be so cruel? Seemingly forgetting that even just temporarily disabled people are legally allowed to use drugs that are otherwise effectively illegal, or bring animals into places where animals are banned.
>The greens have a history of overperforming in polls only to fail to gain traction on voting day.
Bradley effect, innit. And suggestive questioning.
If you ask somebody, especially in a phone poll setting, if they support a candidate or a party that's part of a social progressive movement which wants to save the environment and promote diversity, a lot of people will feel guilt shamed into saying they do. If only so they won't seem like a cold hearted dick to an anonymous interviewer on the phone, or won't have to defend their much less socially acceptable actual political views.
There's also the "least worst" problem whereby people will vote for a lesser evil if they think nobody else is going to vote for the candidate they actually prefer.
>>93199 Those numbers are lower than I'd have guessed, but fair enough, I live a biased life.
A complicating factor may be local food production. Is there a consolidated 'green' position on global farming for efficiency, with shipping and single point of failure issues, versus less efficient local farming with less transport and more redundancy?
The latter would need/provide more rural jobs.
Come the collapse of society, I know which I'd rather was in place, but that's not how most people plan.
Wouldn't the frequency of public transport become an issue? You'd have to have a fuck tonne of buses and they'd have to run 24/7 for people who start work at 3am etc. I'd give up a pwesonal car in a heartbeat if the transport system was flexible enough. But I suspect enough buses or trains or hovertubes to account for even a small percentage of the advantages and freedoms a car can provide would not really look hugely different to the current system.
Speak for yourself but I love having a car. I love being able to go where I want at leisure, on my own time, and it's nobody else's business. I didn't have to borrow 20k for it, it cost me four grand second hand.
I'm all for the environmental reasons of switching to electric. I'm all for reducing the number of privately owned cars- By this point we must surely have more cars than people, and it's ludicrous. We absolutely MUST eliminate the wasteful consumerist market that requires people (the ones who don't know any better, at least) to buy a new car every two years like with smartphones and laptops. It sickens me how we waste perfectly good machines to scrap because we've created a disposable culture.
But when you talk about eliminating cars entirely, you're bloody barmy. You must live in London, and not only that but you must have never fucking set foot outside it. Work from home is great, but there's plenty of jobs where actually being physically present is a requirement, to physically actually carry out the actual work, and not just shift numbers about on a spreadsheet. By all means you can argue a more efficient replacement would do the job, but that's to miss the point. We are not robots. We do not exist to serve the economy. The economy exists to serve us.
>But when you talk about eliminating cars entirely, you're bloody barmy. You must live in London, and not only that but you must have never fucking set foot outside it.
You must live in a developed country, and not only that but you must have never fucking set foot outside it. People cope.
Trying to argue that it makes things difficult misses the point by a mile. You can't debate with the atmosphere. It's not going to agree to stabilise and stay cool if you impress on it how important cars are to us. Trying just makes you look a silly Cnut.
There's also the fact you've got to be incredibly naive to believe it would ever be illegal, and not just "completely unobtainable for anyone but the exceptionally rich."
I mean fair enough if we're talking about a hypothetical fantasy world where a Green government gets everything it wants unopposed and nobody objects or votes against them, for the Greater Good. But that's basically about as much use as our collective wank fantasy about Vorders.
I've a feeling we went over this stuff a while ago in another thread, but a lot of eco-policy needs a good cold hard injection of real world pragmatism. There's a real danger that present day elites will just flip the coin one day, and go from complete climate denial, to embracing eco policy wholeheartedly.
What a wonder it'll be if they can kill two birds with one stone- Save the planet at the same time as making everyday freedoms like international travel or driving into expensive, status affirming luxuries, available only to the chosen few.
I should hope I don't have to make a case for why such a situation ought to be avoided. Maybe I've missed something here but we were discussing the German greens, who are arguably the most rightward leaning of any Green party. It's not out of the realms of possibility.
>You can't debate with the atmosphere. It's not going to agree to stabilise and stay cool if you impress on it how important cars are to us.
You can, however, debate with people. And if you think banning cars is going to get you any popular support within the framework of the democracies we live in, we're all going to fucking drown, because nobody is going to vote for your party.
Make electric cars, limit it to one per household or something if you really must indulge your puritan abstinence fetishism, and bring in a law that ensures they must remain serviceable for a minimum of 20 years or something. But in no universe are the people of Earth going to give up their freedom to travel in a hurry.
I mean, at very least, it will buffer your poll ratings until you unveil the real bad news, that we're all going to have to live in Judge Dredd megablocks anyway because we've run out of room for nice suburban houses with gardens and the infrastructure required to support them is too carbon intensive and destructive to natural habitats.
You can slip your car ban in after that, but of course, it'll be largely redundant by then.
sorry lads I'm a bit drunk and I don't like the choices humanity has made with its existence
>if you really must indulge your puritan abstinence fetishism,
This just underlines the fact that you don't understand it's a question of necessity and not of what people want.
>their freedom to travel in a hurry.
Cars aren't that, no matter how many times you insist it after it's been explained to be wrong.
Baerbock's opponent from the Conservatives looks a bit like the most forgettable person imaginable. Like a dulled-down Jean-Claude Juncker.
Apparently the Bavarian Marcus Soder was a people's favourite to run, but lost a behind-closed-doors power struggle against Mr. Laschet.
Could've been a better move to let him take over during Merkel's final term, and not let him face elections after the end of it. They may have missed a strategic opportunity there.
John Major had luck with that approach. Gordon Brown admittedly didn't.
>if you think banning cars is going to get you any popular support within the framework of the democracies we live in, we're all going to fucking drown
Then we're all going to fucking drown. As >>93206 so eloquently said, you can't debate with the atmosphere. There is exactly one pragmatic solution, which is to do everything in our power to limit the impact of climate change. We have a very narrow window of opportunity to avert total ecological catastrophe and we won't get a second chance if we waste that opportunity. If people understood half of the horrors that await us over the next century, they'd be begging to give up their cars.
However grumpy you might be about the choices humanity has made, those choices all pale into insignificance compared to the choice to fundamentally break the climate. We have about 30 years left to steer the ship away from disaster; if we don't, our grandchildren won't be arguing about cars, they'll be fighting each other for drinking water and wheat.
The climate doesn't give a fuck about politics, it doesn't give a fuck about fairness, it's just a big system of wet gas that we've made dangerously unstable. Either we figure out how to live with considerably lower CO2 emissions, or we figure out how to live in a country with considerably less landmass. There is no third option.
If the last year has taught us anything, it should be this: no matter how bad you think things are, they can always get worse. The idea of putting the country on lockdown was completely unthinkable until we saw the alternative. We have every reason to be pessimistic, we need to be pessimistic, but nihilism is a luxury we can't afford. Our roof is on fire and we have one chance to put it out; if we fail in that task then the rest of politics is an irrelevance, because the reality we face will be worse than whatever dystopia you might be imagining.
>>93211 >There is exactly one pragmatic solution, which is to do everything in our power to limit the impact of climate change. We have a very narrow window of opportunity to avert total ecological catastrophe and we won't get a second chance if we waste that opportunity. If people understood half of the horrors that await us over the next century, they'd be begging to give up their cars.
Oh look it's this nonsense again. Perhaps the world would have a whole lot less hot air if only you'd stop parroting XR bollocks about how we're facing the apocalypse - a claim I will add that has repeatedly been criticised by actual climate scientists.
>>93212 I can't imagine why a chart from the IEA, a think-tank founded to propagandise against state intervention in the market, might be suggesting that the state shouldn't intervene because the market is going to fix it by 2070.
It'd be good if you actually read your own sources. The IEA's Sustainable Development Strategy is described in its own text as "hugely ambitious", will require massive and disruptive changes to our way of life, far exceeds projections based on current government policies, falls far short of IPCC recommendations, only offers a likelihood of keeping warming below dangerous levels and is based on a lot of very optimistic assumptions:
>The World Energy Outlook does not provide a forecast of what will happen. Instead, it provides a set of scenarios that explore different possible futures, the actions – or inactions – that bring them about and the interconnections between different parts of the system.
>Innovation is central to the Sustainable Development Scenario. Almost 35% of the cumulative CO2 emissions reductions seen in the Sustainable Development Scenario by 2070 compared with the current trajectory come from technologies that are currently at the prototype or demonstration phase and that will not become available at scale without further R&D (including commercial demonstrators) and technical improvements.
The IEA Current Policy Scenario projects warming of approximately 3°C if governments actually stick to their existing commitments, which is dangerously close to the tipping point for the loss of the Greenland ice sheet. Our current energy demands and levels of emissions are considerably higher than the IEA's 2008 Reference Scenario; in other words, over the last 12 years we've gone backwards rather than forwards.
>Without additional mitigation efforts beyond those in place today, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, wide-spread and irreversible impacts globally (high confidence). Mitigation involves some level of co-benefits and of risks due to adverse side effects, but these risks do not involve the same possibility of severe, widespread and irreversible impacts as risks from climate change, increasing the benefits from near-term mitigation efforts.
You're confusing the "hothouse Earth" scenarios with the "billions of deaths and potential civilisation collapse" ones. The former has been criticised, the latter is pretty much widely accepted by "actual climate scientists". Yes, you can probably name some who disagree but for every one that does, I can find you a thousand who aren't taking oil money.
Ah I've enjoyed this thread. Posters really debating and engaging with the kind of radical ideas to transform society that green parties push, and we were able to sustain that for about thirty posts before someone inevitably started pushing climate denialism.
In principle there is nothing wrong or dangerous about carbon dioxide removal proposals. In fact developing ways of reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide can feel tremendously exciting. You are using science and engineering to save humanity from disaster. What you are doing is important. There is also the realisation that carbon removal will be needed to mop up some of the emissions from sectors such as aviation and cement production. So there will be some small role for a number of different carbon dioxide removal approaches.
The problems come when it is assumed that these can be deployed at vast scale. This effectively serves as a blank cheque for the continued burning of fossil fuels and the acceleration of habitat destruction.
Carbon reduction technologies and geoengineering should be seen as a sort of ejector seat that could propel humanity away from rapid and catastrophic environmental change. Just like an ejector seat in a jet aircraft, it should only be used as the very last resort. However, policymakers and businesses appear to be entirely serious about deploying highly speculative technologies as a way to land our civilisation at a sustainable destination. In fact, these are no more than fairy tales.
The only way to keep humanity safe is the immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way.
It's going to be impossible to remove carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere at the same rate that they are currently released into it. Even efforts like that campaign where they want to plant a trillion trees worldwide will take decades to really bring down CO2 levels by more than a few decimal points, and it still won't be enough.
CO2 levels in the atmosphere have always fluctuated throughout Earth's history. There were times when they were very low, and there were times when they were much higher than today. In the early Jurassic, they were more than four times what they are today, at around 1800ppm. The Earth can self-regulate, but it needs time to do so. And in an age where we burn a quantity of crude oil every year that the Earth would take three million years to reproduce, it goes without saying that we are drastically overloading the Earth's natural capacity for CO2 regulation. And even our best science is not going to change that unless we reduce CO2 emissions very sharply.
Also, we really don't want a global climate like in the Jurassic. It was marked by a complete absence of polar ice caps, with subtropical vegetation as far north or south as the Polar Circles. Sea levels were 200 feet higher than they are now, and lower latitudes were covered by vast expanses of desert. Temperatures were around 5 to 10°C higher than today. While we're still here bickering about one or two degrees of acceptable global warming, that's what we're headed towards if we don't reverse course completely.
Aren't trees basically useless at CO2 scrubbing anyway? The great myth is that trees are the lungs of our planet when really it's the sea, and the algae that live in the sea.
Deforestation should till concern us deeply because it destroys wildlife habitats, not because of our own impending doom. Typical human behaviour though really, we only start to care when it affects us.
>>93230 Trees are hulking great stores of carbon, so rather than scrubbing the air they capture the carbon from it as they grow. They are still needed.
>>93232 Wood is also a usable building material, in many cases able to replace bricks and concrete, both of which require an absurd amount of energy to produce.
Wood is, to a first approximation, good.
Every tonne of concrete produces 72 kg of CO2. I vaguely remember hearing on TV once that the average family home is made up of around 200 metric tonnes of concrete, so that's 14 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
I'm sure that wood processing from a tree to timber that you can build a house from also produces an amount of CO2 that isn't negligible, but those trees obviously absorb a lot of carbon dioxide as they grow. So you could really build net-zero houses from wood.
Then again, the problem with wooden houses is not only durability, but also heat insulation. A wooden house will never have the same kind of room climate as a concrete structure. You will have to spend more on heating, and possibly on air conditioning during increasingly warm summers.
>>93235 >Then again, the problem with wooden houses is not only durability
Wood is extremely durable when used properly. We have some buildings with the original wood from the 1000's still around. Some being a dozen maybe - I'm not suggesting that wooden buildings will often last a thousand years but given concrete's longevity is only 10-50 on average I don't think it's fair to say wood's less durable.
Weatherproofing is absolutely key with wood, for obvious reasons. And the main thing in most cases is going to be watertight roofing. Concrete is much more forgiving when it comes to leaks in your roof. You can have a leak that's left unattended for two or three years, and a concrete structure will be fine after it's been given time to dry out. Timber that is used for internal construction normally isn't pressure treated or otherwise weatherproof, and it can start to rot after just a year or two.
>We have some buildings with the original wood from the 1000's still around
The keyword being "some". Plenty of other houses probably rotted away pretty quickly. Only the ones that were really structurally sound and weatherproof have survived.
On average, wooden houses have about a 20-percent shorter lifespan than concrete. On the other hand, a wooden house can still last 150 years, and that's a pretty long timespan for any kind of house in today's world. A concrete house you build today could be torn down again in 80 years because somebody will have different ideas about how they want to use the plot it's sitting on.
>>93237 >A concrete house you build today could be torn down again in 80 years because somebody will have different ideas about how they want to use the plot it's sitting on.
More likely it'll be torn down in 30 because the concrete's no longer structurally sound.
>>93235 >Then again, the problem with wooden houses is not only durability, but also heat insulation.
Not true at all as long as it's built properly.
Yes of course we're not going to build houses out of 100% wood and nothing else, there are plenty of building methods to modern standards which use a wooden frame and cladding and a cavity for insulation.
There are insulation materials that are zero or negative carbon, such as hemp fibres, sheeps wool, expanding foam based on vegetable oils. As well as most other common insulation materials being based on recycled products anyway.
In some ways wood is a better building material as whether you're heating or cooling inside the house you don't have to waste energy putting heat into the huge thermal mass of the brickwork on the inner side of the wall cavity.
Slow-growing hardwoods can be very durable, but the fast-growing softwoods we'd need to use are not. Thermal or chemical modification can increase rot and insect resistance to a significant extent, but that substantially increases the energy inputs and you're still nowhere near the long-term durability of masonry. The British climate really isn't kind to timber.
There's also the obvious fire risk - it can be mitigated through good design and the use of modern fire suppression technology, but that adds considerably to costs.
Isn't there a massive problem in the States where low-rise apartment buildings are made out of wooden frames with cladding, that burn down constantly, only to be rebuilt more or less exactly the same?
We had one big fire in a block of flats and it became a national tragedy, but it happens constantly in the States and it's more or less jut a fact of life.
>>93241 insects can be bastards - at least we don't have termites here, but this was holding up my barn. Looked like a perfectly sound sleeper, but had been completely hollowed out by ants in a mere sixty years. If climate change means the UK gets termites, I'd worry about wooden buildings given our lack of building inspections.
Wooden houses in the States are very often built to absolutely awful standards. Americans really don't value longevity as much as we do, and it's much more common that houses get torn down again just 40 or 50 years after they were built to make room for new developments. So there's often no point using materials that will last beyond that, especially if you're a land developer who is knocking up entire streets worth of new units for-profit.
The upside is that, at least until the recent new spike in house prices, you could buy full-size, four-bedroom suburban family homes made out of low-end timber and plasterboard for $200K. But again, you couldn't expect quality for that price.
Run-down of candidates for Chancellor in September.
Mr. Laschet could face a similar fate as Gordon Brown. They definitely missed an opportunity by not letting him take over during Merkel's final term.
On the other hand, Green Party candidates in Germany seem to have a history of being the political equivalent to vaporware when Germans then actually go and cast their vote. I guess it's that whole thing about a lot of people agreeing that a lot needs to be done to save the environment, but they then can't bring themselves to vote Green because they don't like the idea of higher taxes and petrol prices that directly affect them. Apathetic bloody planet. I've no sympathy at all.
Could end up being a very interesting election though. I was in Germany visiting a friend once while there was some state election going on that weekend, and it was a complete cliffhanger till after midnight, and ended up producing a lowest-common-denominator coalition between very unlikely partners. If you think the 2010 hung parliament in Britain was a cliffhanger, then the knife edge of German elections can be ten times thinner. It's not unheard of that three parties from diametrically opposing ends of the spectrum have to go together and still only have a razor-thin majority.
>The latest poll showed the Greens have dropped 6 points in the polls to 20% and the CDU has risen 5 points to 28%, prompting speculation over whether the Greens will manage to regain their momentum.
>The poll results have also led to calls for Baerbock’s co-leader, Robert Habeck, to take the candidacy from her, although the idea was rejected at the weekend. Their joint leadership was also reconfirmed in a vote on Saturday.
