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> “What Elon Musk wants to produce is a lifestyle,” Zulkifli said Wednesday when asked about the entrepreneur’s comments. “We are not interested in a lifestyle.

• Bizarro 7y ago
  ...and the elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle How are the central planners planning that one?
  • CydeWeys 7y ago
    If you correctly price in the negative externalities of burning gasoline, then the suburbs suddenly get a lot more expensive, and it makes more sense to densify.
    • Bizarro 7y ago
      All your solution does is hurt middle-class and poor people.
      • Scoundreller 7y ago
        Write them a cheque. Or increase the amount of income you can earn before income tax is paid. Then they get all the benefits of conservation without being poorer, while particularly punishing those that don’t rearrange their lifestyles.
        • selimthegrim 7y ago
          Doesn’t Canada do this?
          • Scoundreller 7y ago
            Yes. I don’t quite trust the government’s accounting, but yes.
      • SauciestGNU 7y ago
        I am largely opposed to regressive measures like this, but in this case I tend to believe the continued survival of our species and our planet supercede concerns about temporary inequalities imposed by our solutions.
        • noonespecial 7y ago
          Still we must be vigilant that our solutions don't accidentally (or intentionally!) factor down to "there's too many humans, lets starve out some of those poors".
          • SauciestGNU 7y ago
            I completely agree with you about that. There are a number of climate change solutions (particularly around population control measures) that land uncomfortably close to eugenics. As a side note, my wife and I are not having children precisely because of the climate crisis. We don't want to bring children into a world that is looking increasingly unsurvivable.
        • wait-a-minute 7y ago
          There are much better solutions that target the actual large polluters. People living in suburbs is a small percentage of total global emissions, especially when you consider transportation of goods. Transporting goods across the oceans is a far larger percentage of emissions than people living in suburbs. If the goal is to continue to survive as a species, there are much more effective strategies to implement.
          • kasey_junk 7y ago
            You can (and we need) to do both. Suburban living on average doubles the climate impact of the same number of people in a city. The OP notes correctly that this externality is not correctly priced in the current market.
            • wait-a-minute 7y ago
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • xondono 7y ago
      whatever you do with fossil fuel prices, it won’t do much if you don’t price in the negative externalities of zoning restrictions
    • wait-a-minute 7y ago
      The amount of carbon emitted from people driving to and from suburbs is actually a small amount compared to the real big polluters. It makes no sense to target such a giant restructuring of society for so little gain.
      • antoineMoPa 7y ago
        Any data supporting this statement?
        • falcolas 7y ago
          Have a look at a google search on “cargo ship pollution” and draw your own conclusions. Simply moving cargo, the lifeblood of our economy, across the oceans burns hundreds of tons of fuel oil - releasing more (and more varied) pollutants into the atmosphere and oceans. One ship, by some reports, emits as many emissions as some 50 million (or more) cars. And there are well over 9,000 on the ocean.
          • lorenzhs 7y ago
            Those numbers are for some very specific substances (which are also bad, nobody's contesting that), but not for CO2-equivalent emissions. It's the same kind of dumb number as that cloth bag reuse count vs plastic. Technically true for some aspect, but utterly misleading.
          • wait-a-minute 7y ago
            And that is why researchers are proposing we bring back Zeppelins! Zeppelins that are 10x as long as the Empire State Tower is tall, to be exact. Way better for the environment, can be operated autonomously, and cheap to produce. https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/zeppelins-stopped-flying-after-hindenburg-disaster-now-scientists-want-bring-ncna1043911 https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/zeppelins-stopped-flyin...
            • hanniabu 7y ago
              You figures are incorrect, this is taken directly from the linked article: > As proposed in a recent scientific paper, the new airships would be 10 times bigger than the 800-foot Hindenburg — more than five times as long as the Empire State Building is tall
    • DennisP 7y ago
      Also makes more sense to stay in the suburbs and get electric cars.
      • asdff 7y ago
        Half the lifetime pollution from a car happens during manufacture. Lets not buy more shit that does the same a-b.
        • DennisP 7y ago
          Building the physical infrastructure for all those suburbians to live in the cities would also have a carbon impact. In practical terms, in five years or so it's not going to be hard to get people to buy electric cars instead of gasoline, but it will still be practically impossible to get them to give up their houses, back yards, and cars to go live in the city.
    • scottlocklin 7y ago
      It's not working well in France with the Giletes Jaunes. Basically taxing the suburbs told a large social class of working poor people they have no right to exist. I suppose you could try warehousing them in the projects, but good luck with that.
  • nostalgk 7y ago
    As well, is this really something that harmful to the environment? I get that people driving > people not driving when it comes to climate harm, but I don't want to live in a city and I feel like there are much larger climate concerns (in manufacturing, for example) that outweigh passing the blame onto suburban commuters.
    • asdff 7y ago
      Smog from freeway traffic is very real and harmful to public health.
• izacus 7y ago
  > Electric cars are poor, even counterproductive stand-ins for long term solutions such as public transportation and the elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle. They hide a multitude of externalities forced on the public and not paid for directly by owners or manufacturers. Sure, but that's the solution you get from people who've never really experienced a well designed public transportation system. It's essentially a "faster horse" solution to traffic pollution issue which doesn't address the reasons behind the insane amount of tarmac space in modern US cities.
  • lonelappde 7y ago
    People aren't dumb. Building a city requires decades of coordinated action by thousands to millions of people, and it only works if rich people volunteer or are coerced to give up the disproportionate amount of real estate they enjoy, and no one gets a luxurious amount of space. It's not a matter of individuals seeing the light.
    • wbl 7y ago
      NYC billionaires did not stop nyc from being a city.
    • timerol 7y ago
      It's also a matter of the government allowing a city to be built. This sounds trivial, but is actually the biggest component to the lack of affordability in SF and NYC. There are places where a lot of people want to live, but the gov't is actively preventing housing being built there. Instead of allowing the next increment of development (SFH -> missing middle -> mid-rise apartment buildings -> high rise apartment buildings), many US cities do their best to block development wherever possible. The only developments that can make it through the process are 1) huge, 2) well-backed by capital, and 3) hugely profitable. We need less Hudson Yards, and more of https://twitter.com/mnolangray/status/1163863367439802369 https://twitter.com/mnolangray/status/1163863367439802369
  • JamesSchriver 7y ago
    That kind of mentality makes me cringe every time. Public transportation is not a solution to anything and is even far more inefficient and wasteful, even if many people don't understand that because a typical communist/socialist/academic fraudulent sleight of hand is used. Sure, public transportation is "better" once you sufficiently curtail and negate and ignore sufficient number of factors; but if you do an honest and objective analysis, it's not at all efficient or better. Intentionally hidden and fraudulently ignored factors include things like: * the convenience factor public transportation would need to be evaluated against for 24/7, high frequency availability for everyone that does not infringe on people's lives. * the indignity and risks of public transportation that causes people to be forced to be exposed to people against their will, whether that's their odors or behaviors or criminality or even diseases. Partial responsibility for the "Spanish Flu that killed somewhere near 100 million people was public transportation. * the systemic risk of systemic failure in a racked. For example you can look to Washington DC right now for an example of how after months of a rolling partial shutdown of the whole system, a whole leg of the public transportation system had to be totally shut down for several months now due to emergency repairs that had compounded over decades of mismanagement and malfeasance * which brings me to the collectivist, authoritarian nature of public transportation, especially when it is in the hand of government that can, again looking to DC, lead to several decades of malfeasance, mismanagement, negligence, corruption, and outright embezzlement all due to the SJW factor of putting poisonous communist ideals of subversion ahead of merit based leadership and performance. * there are also the hidden/obscured corruption factors that can be observed in Europe, where the wonderful world of "good public transportation" is really a seedy den of corruption and subsidies to wealthy industrialists that is propped up on the backs of the population as a kind of make work industry, while the population grinds its teeth in agony because outside of very few urban centers, the public transportation system only runs every hour and then only from 0700-1900 during the week an all other times every two hours on even more curtailed schedules. on a side note: the "cheap" and "good" public transportation in Europe that newly hatched college juveniles gush about on their first venture out from mommy and daddy's nest, is only so on the backs of Europeans who are forced against their will to subsidize the "cheap" public transportation with their lower wages and higher taxes. The result of which is that to Europeans that wonderful public transportation system the children gush about in tourist cities they visit, is not at all as useful and reliable outside fo the tourist centers, and is not at all as affordable to the average European that makes even less than most of the green eared American juveniles living off mommy and daddy's purse stings.
• spodek 7y ago
  > long term solutions such as public transportation and the elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle Would it be too off-topic to mention the most effective solution: having fewer children? > a country as densely populated as Singapore Nope, population control seems on-topic.
  • fzeroracer 7y ago
    Population control isn't the issue because we're already consuming far more than we should per person. Even if you completely stopped the growth rate of all nations, that doesn't change the fact that the first world lifestyle is at odds with climate change.
    • spodek 7y ago
      Population and per-capita consumption are both issues.
  • esoterica 7y ago
    The birth rate in Singapore is one of the lowest in the world at 1.14 children per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2 and below the United States at 1.8. How much further do you expect it to fall?
• ozborn 7y ago
  Electric cars are not at all "counterproductive" for long term solutions to climate change. They are one piece in the big picture of fixing climate change, drawdown.org ranks electric vehicles as #26 on their solution list. (https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank) Also, by your qualifying "long term" I assume you think they are fine short and even intermediate term? Given the urgency of the climate crisis, short and intermediate term matters - a lot. I agree with you that public transportation and the "elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle" (hard to define, but giving you the most charitable interpretation here) is very important. However, we don't have to choose one or the other, the decision as to which car to buy is typically an individual decision and I would think it correlates well with support for greener public transportation. Additionally, I fine it hard to believe that even in the long term there will be no need electric cars in more distant areas. Finally, development of electric cars and their infrastructure will also support electric public buses used for public transportation. I'm glad Singapore is pursuing public transportation (a no-brainer in a city state) but the claim that it is not a "proper solution" isn't helpful and worse, it assumes that there is a solution. There isn't. There are MANY solutions which will be implemented at different speeds, with different levels of effectiveness and by many different organizations and individuals. In general, it is better to encourage any useful efforts on this front rather than arguing that solution X isn't "proper" or less effective than solution Y.
  • thatfrenchguy 7y ago
    > Electric cars are not at all "counterproductive" for long term solutions to climate change. They are one piece in the big picture of fixing climate change, drawdown.org ranks electric vehicles as #26 on their solution list. (https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank) That thing is literally written by Americans who are 95% likely of living in a car suburb. Of course I’d also put electric cars as a necessity if I were them, they don’t want to change their lifestyle (which, you know, is why we’re in this in the first place).
    • augstein 7y ago
      So serious question: What should they do? Some solutions come to mind, but they would obviously only work for a fraction of the people currently living in suburbs: - Work remotely - Move closer to the city - Connect suburbs to viable public transportation solutions
• lonelappde 7y ago
  The most ecological thing to do is to kill ourselves. Any environmental plan has to allow for people to love rewarding lives, or else it's not a good environment for humans.
• everdrive 7y ago
  Very serious question here: Do you propose that everyone should live in a city in the future? Or that public transit should extend into the suburbs?
  • baby 7y ago
    If your question was serious you would focus on starting with public transportation in cities, which the US lacks.
    • everdrive 7y ago
      No disagreement there. I'm just curious what this looks like if we advance our infrastructure enough. I'm not suggesting we prioritize suburbs at all. (I wasn't actually suggesting any course of action) I am curious if the intent here is that people should not live in the suburbs or the country, just in cities where transportation can be most efficient.
    • _fq4v 7y ago
      Which us city lacks public transit in the city center? Not trying to be thick but in all american cities ive lived in, there was sufficient transit in the urban core. I understand arguments that it doesnt extend satisfactorily to the suburbs but your claim is much more specific
      • baby 7y ago
        Compare that to asian/european cities and you understand why even in large cities in the US people prefer to use uber.
        • tathougies 7y ago
          I've traveled extensively in Europe. While transit was available in most cities, and usable, aside from the real metros, like London and Paris and Barcelona, and a few gems, like Budapest, transit was often not frequent enough and clearly took longer than a car. The reason I took transit was it was cheaper in absolute terms, and, as a student, my time wasn't worth much. Also, that was pre-uber. I daresay that if I visited those places today -- places like Oslo, Prague, Porto, Rome, Dublin, etc -- I would have taken uber. It would be faster, and my time is worth more. The only Asian cities I've spent any noticeable time in are Bombay and Hong Kong. Bombay -- I guess it's called Mumbai now -- is a shit show, in every sense of the word. It's one of the largest cities in the world. Transit is awful and dangerous. The only reason my parents took it growing up was because when they were young they were too poor to afford anything else. When we go back now, as rich foreigners, we always take a private driver or taxis everywhere. It's just not worth it. Hong Kong is a different story of course, due to the British influence and the fact that it was Britain when I last visited. Also, its constraints as a small island mean transit is a must have. And I would agree that it's transit system is better than most American cities. That all being said, the American cities with densities approaching that of London, Hong Kong, etc all do have rather good transit options. As I stated elsewhere, the issue is the US has no large cities in the European and Asian sense. Our cities are sparsely populated. Yes, a lot of that is due to government policy, but it's also due to the fact that America is -- for the most part -- completely empty land.
• outlace 7y ago
  Even if electric vehicles do not substantially reduce greenhouse gases, they do pollute the air far less assuming you have cleaner electricity generation. Moreover, ending the reliance on unsustainable fossil fuels is an end in itself. It would reshape global geopolitics and of course there’s a ton of destruction that happens from oil spills and oil extraction. Going full electric has many benefits beyond just reducing greenhouse gases.
• moosey 7y ago
  The car is one of the ultimate goals of individualism: constant access to what Mills called "Negative Liberty", essentially the freedom to do whatever physical thing you desire to do at any given time. Unfortunately, that means that the subject must self-coerce themselves into believing it's ok that everyone own a car, and something that we can maintain forever. I wonder how many people in the US refuse to believe climate science simply because the idea of losing their car is physically painful. When individualism leads us down a path of bad decision making (building electric cars rather than the far superior collective path of building up mass transit), I'm always reminded of a scene from the Cixin Liu "Rememberance of Earth's Past" books, where an individualist decision is made that ultimately dooms the people of the solar system, and the person who would have been the true hero of the story only gets to tell that decision maker that they are a child before he is sent off to prison. This is essentially our battle against climate change right now: technologists trying to make enough toys to keep the rabble of toddlers happy so that we can actually fix the problem.
  • davidivadavid 7y ago
    Owning a car is absolutely not an example of negative liberty. Owning a car is a privilege. Negative liberty is the freedom not to have your basic freedom infringed (it's essentially analogous to the non-aggression principle). Not the freedom to do "whatever physical thing you desire to do."
  • chrisco255 7y ago
    There's huge tradeoffs between cars and mass transit that you're completely failing to acknowledge. Mass transit works fine when you have a high density urban core. It doesn't work well for suburban or rural populations, which is most of the land area of the U.S. Not everyone is going to live in a dense city nor should they.
• reirob 7y ago
  From all the cities that I used, Singapore was the one where I used most often taxis, because they were so cheap. It may have changed since 2004, but I think even for Singapore having electric cars, even for taxis might be better. What am I missing? Other than this I agree that for cities public transportation, together with good infrastructure for bicycles is very important, because in most cities driving your car yourself is so bad: it is slow, demands a lot of attention, getting a parking place is often very difficult.
• pcdoodle 7y ago
  What about inspiration? Huh? The fact that you can buy salvaged tesla batteries and experiment for an even greener future. We gotta take steps, and this company is feeding the american keep up with the joneses framework along with car heads desire for horsepower. Don't give me this externalities BS. We need it mass produced because it's a stepping stone.
• stjohnswarts 7y ago
  I don't agree. I think it's a positive. Not everyone agrees with your utopian public transportation and cutting back to as minimalist a life as possible.
• tinus_hn 7y ago
  Electric cars are not perfect. Better keep burning fossil fuels!