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For those concerned about the potential of climate change to severely harm our society, income inequality, particularly as it relates to housing, should be fron

For those concerned about the potential of climate change to severely harm our society, income inequality, particularly as it relates to housing, should be front-and-center in our list of things to address. Why? People need to get to work, so they drive. Two hour commutes in carbon-spewing cars happen because people can't afford to live near their work. In many cities, people have been pushed further and further away from the city core because of high housing costs. This leads to more and more driving. It's not like driving is a choice, either. It's easy to say "stop driving so much, you're destroying the planet!" But, people have bills to pay, mouths to feed. So they drive (long distances) to work. Housing inequality, income inequality, transit inequality. These things are a major problem directly related to climate change. By addressing these things head on, we can make the world much safer, in terms of climate change, and much better, in terms of actual quality of life for the majority of people living and/or working in cities.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
The solution is quite simple too. Make fuel $10/gallon. If that is not sufficient, then $20, or $30. And so on.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  This is a good solution, but it needs to come with some significant cash transfers for people most immediately harmed (e.g. via universal basic income), and with a significant public commitment to build affordable walkable neighborhoods with world-class public transit.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    Not a "commitment." They need to actually exist, at something like 10,000x the scale they currently have.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  So your solution to include poor people in cities is to have the poor pay more money for gasoline? Wouldn't the more immediate effect be that the poor stop coming into cities?
  - smileysteve 5y ago
    It works better for the "poor" people if these taxes/incomes go towards immediate public transit. And work closer to homes (it raises the visible costs of restrictive zoning). The cost of owning, operating, and insuring a vehicle is a pretty high tax. Funny thing about public transit too, if you build transit to businesses in walkable communities you don't just help the poor.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    If you live in a city you do not need to drive.
    - rascul 5y ago
      Maybe for some occupations in some cities. No way I could carry all the tools I need with me on a bus that rarely takes me within walking distance to the job site in the cities I live near, if I still lived in one of them.
      - SilverRed 5y ago
        Sure, for some jobs you will need a car and in that case you bump your prices to match. Since everyone doing this job is hit with the same fee, no one is disadvantaged. While if you work an office job or similar, you can get ahead by not driving and eventually everyone capable of not driving will not drive. The actual price of fuel does not matter much, only the price you are paying relative to others with the same job title.
        rascul 5y ago
        It would be nice if I could afford one of those new and expensive electric trucks, though.
- patothon 5y ago
  great way to make the poors poorer and make poors pay for a problem that richer folks tend to create. This would effectively create a tax on the poor, as poors are the ones that live further away the pockets of work.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Income/wealth disparities are a separate issue from the problem of excess fossil fuel usage. That problem can be addressed via wealth transfers.
    - garmaine 5y ago
      You’re missing the point. Fossil fuel usages is largely paid for by the poor. Gas to go to work, gas to transport food and cheap plastic goods to Walmart, etc. Poor people don’t have a choice in how they shop or how far away they live from their job, yet they are the ones paying the fuel tax whether it be by buying gas directly or by paying higher prices at Walmart. Raising fuel prices just fucks over the poor, and transfers wealth to the owners of the businesses they shop at who keep the same margin of a bigger pie.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        There are two separate problems. One is excess fossil fuel consumption, causing people to be able to live further away then they should be if the goal is to reduce carbon emissions. It does not matter how rich the person consuming them is, total consumption needs to go down. A separate problem is a rich person being able to consume far more fossil fuels than a poor person. This is solved by taking from the rich person and giving to the poor person. There is no “fucking over”. Based on the amount that fossil fuel consumption needs to be reduced, everyone will need to feel pain while cities are rezoned, people’s expectations of how much space they have are changed, and hence, politically, there will never be a solution to fossil fuel usage without the advent of technology that replaces it.
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  All this does is siphon money from people, and increase people's desperation. It's not like you can just choose to not work anymore. If your job is a long commute away that's money you have to spend no matter what on transport. There often aren't other options. Most transit in North America sucks inside cities and doesn't serve outlying areas very well at all. Long commutes are an effect of companies centralizing in big urban areas. They don't care how long it takes their workers to get to the office as long as they don't have to pay for it. Maybe make companies responsible for their employees gas, insurance, and commute times, you might see satellite offices spring up all over the place in more rural areas so their workforce has smaller commute times.
  - soperj 5y ago
    >Most transit in North America sucks inside cities and doesn't serve outlying areas very well at all. I've done transit in most of the major cities in Canada to/from work & school, or airports, and most are pretty decent. I don't know that transit should really serve outlying areas?
    - bluefirebrand 5y ago
      If a goal of transit is to reduce emissions from single occupancy vehicles commuting to and from work, then it seems to me that it should service outlying areas because those people are commuting too, and further But of course it's not really practical.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Yes, imposing costs increases trhe costs of some activities. Unfortunately, there isn't a solution that involves no change in anyone's behavior. If employees have to pay more on a commute, it will change companies' behavior.
    - bluefirebrand 5y ago
      > If employees have to pay more on a commute, it will change companies' behavior. I don't see why it would, why do you think that?
- lumost 5y ago
  This assumes that people have a choice in their daily commutes. Unfortunately the majority do not, if gas went to 30 dollars a gallon many would be forced to sleep in cars/tents closer to the office. Starbucks won’t cover 400 dollar daily commutes for baristas in downtown SF.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    I wonder if there is anything we can do to affect those who do have a choice. I know a lot of people who drive and are perfectly able to take public transport or live closer but they chose to live a far way away and drive because they can afford it.
    - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
      I don't think that's the right approach. Removing choice is a great way to motivate people to resist your mandates. Why do so many people want to play dictator these days?
      - SilverRed 5y ago
        Because driving is unsustainable and destroying the planet. It can not be allowed to continue in its current form so the easiest option would be to push people away from it when they are able to.
        _carbyau_ 5y ago
        Less pushing, more enticing please. If you give people a better option, they will take it.
        thebradbain 5y ago
        Better options need money, unfortunately. And barring a complete change in how the US works [1], that money isn’t there at a federal level. That leaves cities with no other option than to pay for a better option on their own — by raising taxes (e.g. congestion pricing, gas taxes, tolled roads), which also has the side effect of disincentivizing driving [1] the infrastructure bill that’s looking to pass, while it gives much needed funding to public transit, still centers car-centric planning, and nothing paradigm-shifting (e.g. a comprehensive regional high speed rail network, a dedicated bus line on every street, a protected bike lane on every arterial) will likely come from it.
- riversflow 5y ago
  This is a fantasy and completely regressive. How do you plan on dealing with the ensuing riots? Housing supply doesn't appear overnight, especially in the US where building, worker safety and environmental standards slow the process down to a crawl. Most of the new urban housing is 4 story wood construction because of the above reason, not nearly the density needed to eliminate cars without massive mixed rezoning efforts that are politically unfeasible or massive mass transit infrastructure investments that would also suffer the same issues as higher density housing developments listed above, also throw into the mix that there is a cultural aversion to mass transit in the US that won't likely get resolved in time to fight climate change effectively. You will be displacing 10s if not 100s of millions of people with such a policy, you need a place for them to go if you don't want severe civil unrest.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    I would implement it with a cash rebate to everyone in America for the average number of gallons used by an American in a year * $10 and call it the "green rebate" or something like that and make it clear that it paid for by a gas/car emissions tax. The average American would be paying $0.
    - chidg 5y ago
      Australia tried something similar with a carbon tax a few years ago - not for fuel, but for carbon emissions generally. The policy was very well designed and ensured that lower income earners were compensated for any increase in costs to the extent that they had a net benefit, and in the short time it was operating, was successful at reducing emissions. Unfortunately for us (and the world) this was too complicated for many Australians to understand and the political right exploited that to tell a scary story about a 'new tax', leading to their election and the removal of the scheme. While economists (and rational thinkers) generally love carbon pricing schemes, they have been pretty unsuccessful politically because people are generally too stupid to understand them and cynical politicians in bed with the fossil fuel industry are happy to play to that.
    - rascul 5y ago
      When would I get the rebate? Edit: For clarification, if it's the type of rebate typical in the US, that means I get it later and I can't afford the fuel now. If it's a rebate that's done at the time of purchase, then it wouldn't seem to make much difference, on average.
- closeparen 5y ago
  As long as the housing stock is what it is, most people need to drive in order to live. We can and should transition towards walkable and transit-connected apartments, but the problem there isn't a lack of demand.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    The housing stock is what it is because of low fossil fuel prices. Most families prefer detached single family homes with two car driveways and quarter acre lots, away from all the homeless and in the most exclusive school districts they can afford.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Do you think this is politically viable, particularly in the US, which has a lot of open space and long commutes? Are you going to apply this tax to rural communities and farmers as well?
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Of course not. Reducing carbon emissions and avoiding climate change has never been viable, because it lowers people’s quality of life now for the benefit of people not alive now (or in decades past). The only viable solution within the timeframe humans had was to reduce fossil fuel consumption in total, from some combination of reducing per capita consumption and reducing population itself. However, it is a prisoner’s dilemma, and there was never going to be unity in reducing everyone’s consumption and hence quality of life, especially not from the 80% of up and coming people around the world who are looking forward to enjoying life like the upper 20% have been.
  - prawn 5y ago
    What solution is politically viable in the US though? There is serious resistance to almost anything.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  That would have a particularly large impact on food prices. Increasing the portion of food cost attributable to fuel by between 3x and 10x would hit poorer people particularly hard. It would raise the price of pretty much everything else too, all of which hits people harder the lower they are on the economic ladder. Maximizing the speed of implementing renewable energy that can power EV's, and scaling EV production to more affordable levels are much less likely to stomp on the poor. And unlike trying to raise gas prices to $30 it's actually realistic from a social/political standpoint, especially since we're already on that path, just not as fast as we could be. This is not a simple problem, and it's exceedingly rare that a complex problem has such a simple solution as this. Even the renewable/EV combo has inumerable variables behind it that have taken decades to get us to the point we're at now.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    It would return food to local grown again. Making it no longer the cheapest option to ship food from the other side of the planet rather than growing in the same state.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Local isn't available everywhere in the quantities needed to feed large local (city) populations. That might change over a long enough period of time, but waiting for market forces to adjust the food supply to to closest locations available would leave a lot more poor and hungry people in the meantime. If we're going to tinker with things in that way, it's better to do it on the side of pushing renewables and EV's as fast as possible. Until then, things like raising a gas tax are regressive, falling significantly harder on people least able to bear the extra burden.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Then we shall continue on the road we have been on, consuming enough fossil fuels to affect climate change. Hence the conclusion one comes to is to live it up while we can.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  The market didn't find an efficient solution to this problem, so you want to use non-market forces to influence the market and then double down on relying on the market to find an efficient solution again? How much do we have to sacrifice to the market before we'll admit that maybe we should consider other solutions?
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    "The market" only cares about things that are factored in to prices. External costs like the environment are currently not factored in so the market will never optimize for them. If you simply set a carbon tax, overnight the whole market puts a huge effort in to lowering their environmental damage because now that damage has a number next to it and can be optimized for.
- oblio 5y ago
  Well, it would actually be a good start and maybe push Americans to smaller and more efficient cars. The average price of gasoline is ~$7 in Europe, in poorer countries, and people seem to make do. But I doubt the average American will give up the quality of life of owning a car that probably weighs have half a ton more than the average European car.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
My Dad recently needed a place to live. No matter how far I drew the circle on Zillow in our part of the state, there were no rent houses, for any price. I texted my realtor about it and asked if it was the Airbnb effect. She said “Yes, probably.” Infuriating.
- epistasis 5y ago
  I would say a much bigger problem is the lack of building, and the lack of new houses. The population grows about 2% per year. We have not been building nearly enough to keep up. Even if Airbnb is taking 5% of the units in a huge metro area (how?), then that is still just a few years of building that have been missed. The root of the problem is that we let people hoard land by severely limiting what can be done with a plot of land. By doing this globally over metro areas, we cause a huge shortage of land which drives up land "rents" (rent in the economic sense, not as much in the apartment leasing sense).
  - unixbeard1337 5y ago
    I'm pro-YIMBY, but building more will only solve part of the problem. The problem it won't solve is that our winner-take-all economy is winner-take-all for cities, too. Everyone is pouring into the top n metro areas and even the most ambitious building program won't do more than put a small dent in all that demand. A small dent will make a real difference for a lot of people, but it also won't make much of a difference for a lot more. If we can't figure out a way to get people to live in Cleveland and St. Louis again, we're spitting into the wind.
    - derefr 5y ago
      Obviously, we should just build more world-class metro areas. Of course, top-down planning a city (as would be needed to "stamp" one out whole) has never worked; but how about we copy-and-paste the zoning plans from cities we already know are functional, and then incentivize all the same major companies that have headquarters in City The First to build secondary HQs in City The Second? (I'm not sure if I'm joking.)
mogadsheu 5y ago
Agree with most of the observations but... what does climate change have to do with metropolitan inequality? All other factors being equal, high city populations relative to the countryside should be more resource efficient.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  The point is that moving people to far-flung low-density suburbs with >1-hour car commutes (and a need to make all other trips by car) is also very polluting and resource inefficient, compared to locating people where they can commute quickly on foot, bicycle, or public transit. Better is to build a serious transit network with regular fast access to the city center, with dense neighborhoods near transit stations (3–6 story apartment buildings for at least a couple blocks surrounding each station). Look to Japan for an example of how to do zoning and urban planning at a national scale.
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    > Look to Japan for an example of how to do zoning and urban planning at a national scale. Doesn’t Japan have basically everyone live in Tokyo and ignore everywhere else?
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      Huh? There are several big cities in Japan like Oosaka, Kyouto, and Fukuoka, and they're all zoned similarly to Tokyo.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    Also look at NZ how they solved covid, look at thailand how they solved drugs, look at arabs how they solved alcoholism, look at africa how they solved obesity, look at north korea how they solved dissent. Maybe compare life satisfaction and some other outcomes when looking at places like Japan. I'd never want to live in 10 sq meter apartment and be jammed each morning into train like a sardine... That's not to say places don't need to solve public transport and bike infra.
garmaine 5y ago
> Why? People need to get to work, so they drive. Two hour commutes in carbon-spewing cars happen because people can't afford to live near their work. The emissions of all consumer cars together is a drop in the bucket compared to other CO2 sources.
- boplicity 5y ago
  Source? "Light Duty Vehicles", which are presumably cars, make up over half the "transportation" emissions in the US, and transportation is the leading source of emissions. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
  - garmaine 5y ago
    By your own link all light duty vehicles make up a mere 17% of emissions. Also if you track down the original report that pie chart is drawn from, you’ll find that is only considering direct fossil fuel combustion. Consider all sources and it drops down to 12%. ALL consumer cars everywhere, for every purpose, amounts to 12% of emissions. Commuting is a smaller fraction of that. I stand by my claim.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      > Consider all sources and it drops down to 12%. What does this mean? All sources? How is 17% emissions a small amount? It's as much as our agricultural and commercial emissions combined and 1% more than our residential and commercial emissions combined. It's more than the the emissions of all airline travel. Only industrial and electricity related emissions are more. What other category would you pick to lean up on?
      - garmaine 5y ago
        There are other ways CO2 or other greenhouse gasses are emitted besides burning fossil fuels. Examples include outgassing from construction (e.g. concrete), metal refineries, and livestock.
makeitdouble 5y ago
Housing inequality, income inequality, transit inequality are major problems that have deep effects on our societies and our future as nations. > For those concerned about the potential of climate change to severely harm our society IMHO they should heavily focus on the most impacting forces to climate change, which are industrial emissions. Or really, we could try to think of any huge impact environmental crisis, and come to the conclusion we should do something about industrial accountability as they represent more than 90% of the volume in most cases.
- boplicity 5y ago
  Can you cite your source for this? Transportation, in 2019, was the leading source of emissions, with industry ranked third, behind electricity. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
  - spullara 5y ago
    I wonder what the breakdown is between personal and commercial vehicles.
    - boplicity 5y ago
      The link above spells it out. 58% of transportation emissions were from "light duty vehicles", and 24% were from trucks.
      - heavyset_go 5y ago
        Light duty vehicles doesn't necessarily mean that they're personal vehicles.
  - simongr3dal 5y ago
    Aren't all these statistics able to be infinitely nitpicked since nobody can agree on which bucket to sort the emissions into? Example: a car is produced, does the responsibility for the emissions go to the manufacturer or the consumer who buys the vehicle? Now do this for every single part and bucketful of metal ore down the chain of suppliers, manufacturers, shippers etc. Drawing a line seems difficult and how do you even know whether you double counted at any point.
xwdv 5y ago
The only thing that should be front and center for climate change is the large scale adoption of nuclear energy across the globe. And then, carbon recapture. Everything else, is a pet project riding on the coat tails of a larger crisis.
- boplicity 5y ago
  Can't say I disagree!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- epistasis 5y ago
  If you spend a small amount of time investigating nuclear and the recent failures in construction across the globe, and compare it to the successs of renewables and storage, I think you'd change yourself mind fairly quickly. Nuclear was a technology that was overhyped in the 20th century but never delivered on its promise. We have far better, cheaper, and more flexible tech now to replace it.
  - AngryData 5y ago
    We do not have power storage facilities to run the globe off renewables, theoretically yes we could, but it is sort of depending on the tech improving in certain areas or large scale reservoir projects which themselves will take a decade or likely more to put into operation. Nuclear power is something we could have been running off right now, and something we know is feasible to build within or sooner than the same time spans that full renewable rollout will take. Not to mention it would allow us to shut down all these ancient ass reactors we got going now which is the equivalent of driving around in a Model-T because we can't be assed to get a newer car. I love renewables, but we still have a long ways to go in scaling renewables to not only provide global power demands, and we also need to be using ass tons of additional clean power just trying to stabilize the environment and sequester CO2.
    - epistasis 5y ago
imjustsaying 5y ago
literally only retards are worried about climate change
- tomrod 5y ago
  This is incorrect.
- dang 5y ago
  We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
gravypod 5y ago
Just to demonstrate, because I've met people who've never been in this sort of situation, this was my commute for ~2 semesters of college: https://goo.gl/maps/8deDf74vRGDkeovRA https://goo.gl/maps/8deDf74vRGDkeovRA My mom had recently begun using again and I said "enough" and moved in with a relative. ~3 months in I had gotten a job in Hoboken, NJ (https://goo.gl/maps/ruU5Ppz746xv5ZeXA https://goo.gl/maps/ruU5Ppz746xv5ZeXA) and would have to drive from my relative's house to my college/job every day and drive back. I couldn't afford the boarding costs for on campus residency especially with the added pain of having to move in/out every semester. Each day I drove ~80 miles and had to fill up my tank. It was still some how barely cheaper than renting in the area and all I could afford. This kind of thing really kills you inside. It's truly painful. For me, I would wake up at 5AM each day to drive west to east with the sun in my eyes. Then I would stay at school and work until around midnight where I'd drive back east to west with the sun in my eyes. I was surviving with ~4hr/night of sleep. I wish we lived in a world where no one else had to go through that torture (for lack of a better word).
- rexreed 5y ago
  How was the sun in your eyes during the midnight drive back east to west in NJ? Even during the summer solstice, sunset is around 9pm in NJ. I get your point though, driving bleary eyed is not only soul sucking, but very dangerous for yourself and others on the road. Not to mention the ecological and time waste issues. Although I would note a 40 mile each way commute is sadly not out of the ordinary for America. Turns out the average commute distance for NJ is 40.9 miles. See stats here: https://www.answerfinancial.com/insurance-center/which-states-have-the-longest-commute/ https://www.answerfinancial.com/insurance-center/which-state...
  - gravypod 5y ago
    Was probably plus it minus a few hours. Still not fun :)
  - clifdweller 5y ago
    most likely spearte mwf/t th schedules mixing timings or weekdays weekends. 40 miles each way is rookie numbers here in michigan. Due to the large changing in manufacturing and other job shifts since the 90s many people live in one city then commute to another work in flint, detroit, lansing. detroit<-> flint 60+ miles detroit <-> lansing 80+ miles lansing<-> Flint 50+ miles . Decent factory job pays enough to get a mortgage on a house so many are able to afford a house but 2008 the housing crisis also brought recession and factories closed down. Then 2012 on jobs started coming back and many took first thing available but as recovery wasn't in each city uniformly ended up with a plant in lansing largely being run by people living in flint that couldnt afford to move to lansing
jader201 5y ago
Many on HN seem to forget that not everyone lives near the city or works in a city, where “city” is defined by an area with enough commercial, residential, and industrial within walking distance of each other to support a car-less lifestyle. But in fact, only a portion (of the US, at least — 31% [1]) live in urban areas that would allow them to go car-less, even if you take the housing issues out of the equation. If the rest (69%) even lived right next to work (which many couldn’t, since in many areas, there isn’t housing close to their workplace), they’d still have to commute everywhere else. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demogra...
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  The term “commute” is typically used for the daily drive to work. You seem to be using it for something else.
  - jader201 5y ago
    No, it’s that commuting is only part of why most people need cars. But a) this only addresses commuting, and b) many people have no housing options that would allow them to eliminate commuting. My point is that I’ve seen many highly upvoted comments on HN lately (this one included) that seem to think living near work would put a dent in the climate change problem, when the data suggests this isn’t the case. Many people on HN either live — or if they could afford it, would live — near work allowing them to go car-less, and therefore assume most of the world is like that, when, in fact, most of the world could not go car-less in their current job/residence.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > The term “commute” is typically used for the daily drive to work. You seem to be using it for something else. Maybe in the US where driving is prevalent, but in many other places your "commute" is simply your trip to work. In Toronto, Canada, many people commute via transit (TTC). We have a commuter rail system for the region (GO).
sershe 5y ago
It has much less to do with inequality, and much more with zoning patterns in North America (and few other countries). I am not so sure about that, but it may actually be reverse - the richer people may choose to live far away, and drive, in most cities. If inequality had anything to do with it, you would expect more unequal (or more expensive) cities to be more sprawling - as people are "pushed out" further by higher prices; but that is not the case. Why? Probably because people actually want to live far away, or don't care either way if they can trade off for e.g. more space, so they do (disclaimer: not me until 2020). Similarly, you would expect more unequal cities around the world to be sprawling, with more driving. Yet, many cities where the central area is unaffordable to locals do quite well with transit. Related to the above, many do have a ton of people who drive, and they may make up in low speed/inefficiency what harm they fail to produce because they don't drive as far. Again, because people, apparently, want to drive as soon as they can afford it (disclaimer: not me).
raxxorrax 5y ago
You won't get rid of individual transportation. This just won't happen, even if you triple or quadruple investments in infrastructure. Getting into a city core is actually readily available in most places. The solution has to be to make individual traffic CO2 neutral.
- lkbm 5y ago
  True, but can we cut it 50%? Can we convert 20% to bicycles, or 10% to walking, or 5% to scooters, or all of the above? I don't think we'll get rid of all personal transportation, or even all car usage, but it's highly variable from city to city, and I suspect we could convert some of the "worst" cities to be more like the "best". We should also decarbonize private cars, but we should be pursuing battery of solutions.
RickJWagner 5y ago
Did the Covid era of lockdowns and Zoom day-to-day make a dent?
Phrodo_00 5y ago
> People need to get to work, so they drive. This is not an immediate conclusion. There exist multiple alternatives to driving, but it's also up to cities to provide them.

lotsofpulp 5y ago

The solution is quite simple too. Make fuel $10/gallon. If that is not sufficient, then $20, or $30. And so on.

jacobolus 5y ago
This is a good solution, but it needs to come with some significant cash transfers for people most immediately harmed (e.g. via universal basic income), and with a significant public commitment to build affordable walkable neighborhoods with world-class public transit.
- closeparen 5y ago
  Not a "commitment." They need to actually exist, at something like 10,000x the scale they currently have.
dragontamer 5y ago
So your solution to include poor people in cities is to have the poor pay more money for gasoline? Wouldn't the more immediate effect be that the poor stop coming into cities?
- smileysteve 5y ago
  It works better for the "poor" people if these taxes/incomes go towards immediate public transit. And work closer to homes (it raises the visible costs of restrictive zoning). The cost of owning, operating, and insuring a vehicle is a pretty high tax. Funny thing about public transit too, if you build transit to businesses in walkable communities you don't just help the poor.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  If you live in a city you do not need to drive.
  - rascul 5y ago
    Maybe for some occupations in some cities. No way I could carry all the tools I need with me on a bus that rarely takes me within walking distance to the job site in the cities I live near, if I still lived in one of them.
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      Sure, for some jobs you will need a car and in that case you bump your prices to match. Since everyone doing this job is hit with the same fee, no one is disadvantaged. While if you work an office job or similar, you can get ahead by not driving and eventually everyone capable of not driving will not drive. The actual price of fuel does not matter much, only the price you are paying relative to others with the same job title.
      - rascul 5y ago
        It would be nice if I could afford one of those new and expensive electric trucks, though.
patothon 5y ago
great way to make the poors poorer and make poors pay for a problem that richer folks tend to create. This would effectively create a tax on the poor, as poors are the ones that live further away the pockets of work.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Income/wealth disparities are a separate issue from the problem of excess fossil fuel usage. That problem can be addressed via wealth transfers.
  - garmaine 5y ago
    You’re missing the point. Fossil fuel usages is largely paid for by the poor. Gas to go to work, gas to transport food and cheap plastic goods to Walmart, etc. Poor people don’t have a choice in how they shop or how far away they live from their job, yet they are the ones paying the fuel tax whether it be by buying gas directly or by paying higher prices at Walmart. Raising fuel prices just fucks over the poor, and transfers wealth to the owners of the businesses they shop at who keep the same margin of a bigger pie.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      There are two separate problems. One is excess fossil fuel consumption, causing people to be able to live further away then they should be if the goal is to reduce carbon emissions. It does not matter how rich the person consuming them is, total consumption needs to go down. A separate problem is a rich person being able to consume far more fossil fuels than a poor person. This is solved by taking from the rich person and giving to the poor person. There is no “fucking over”. Based on the amount that fossil fuel consumption needs to be reduced, everyone will need to feel pain while cities are rezoned, people’s expectations of how much space they have are changed, and hence, politically, there will never be a solution to fossil fuel usage without the advent of technology that replaces it.
bluefirebrand 5y ago
All this does is siphon money from people, and increase people's desperation. It's not like you can just choose to not work anymore. If your job is a long commute away that's money you have to spend no matter what on transport. There often aren't other options. Most transit in North America sucks inside cities and doesn't serve outlying areas very well at all. Long commutes are an effect of companies centralizing in big urban areas. They don't care how long it takes their workers to get to the office as long as they don't have to pay for it. Maybe make companies responsible for their employees gas, insurance, and commute times, you might see satellite offices spring up all over the place in more rural areas so their workforce has smaller commute times.
- soperj 5y ago
  >Most transit in North America sucks inside cities and doesn't serve outlying areas very well at all. I've done transit in most of the major cities in Canada to/from work & school, or airports, and most are pretty decent. I don't know that transit should really serve outlying areas?
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    If a goal of transit is to reduce emissions from single occupancy vehicles commuting to and from work, then it seems to me that it should service outlying areas because those people are commuting too, and further But of course it's not really practical.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Yes, imposing costs increases trhe costs of some activities. Unfortunately, there isn't a solution that involves no change in anyone's behavior. If employees have to pay more on a commute, it will change companies' behavior.
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    > If employees have to pay more on a commute, it will change companies' behavior. I don't see why it would, why do you think that?
lumost 5y ago
This assumes that people have a choice in their daily commutes. Unfortunately the majority do not, if gas went to 30 dollars a gallon many would be forced to sleep in cars/tents closer to the office. Starbucks won’t cover 400 dollar daily commutes for baristas in downtown SF.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  I wonder if there is anything we can do to affect those who do have a choice. I know a lot of people who drive and are perfectly able to take public transport or live closer but they chose to live a far way away and drive because they can afford it.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
    I don't think that's the right approach. Removing choice is a great way to motivate people to resist your mandates. Why do so many people want to play dictator these days?
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      Because driving is unsustainable and destroying the planet. It can not be allowed to continue in its current form so the easiest option would be to push people away from it when they are able to.
      - _carbyau_ 5y ago
        Less pushing, more enticing please. If you give people a better option, they will take it.
        thebradbain 5y ago
        Better options need money, unfortunately. And barring a complete change in how the US works [1], that money isn’t there at a federal level. That leaves cities with no other option than to pay for a better option on their own — by raising taxes (e.g. congestion pricing, gas taxes, tolled roads), which also has the side effect of disincentivizing driving [1] the infrastructure bill that’s looking to pass, while it gives much needed funding to public transit, still centers car-centric planning, and nothing paradigm-shifting (e.g. a comprehensive regional high speed rail network, a dedicated bus line on every street, a protected bike lane on every arterial) will likely come from it.
riversflow 5y ago
This is a fantasy and completely regressive. How do you plan on dealing with the ensuing riots? Housing supply doesn't appear overnight, especially in the US where building, worker safety and environmental standards slow the process down to a crawl. Most of the new urban housing is 4 story wood construction because of the above reason, not nearly the density needed to eliminate cars without massive mixed rezoning efforts that are politically unfeasible or massive mass transit infrastructure investments that would also suffer the same issues as higher density housing developments listed above, also throw into the mix that there is a cultural aversion to mass transit in the US that won't likely get resolved in time to fight climate change effectively. You will be displacing 10s if not 100s of millions of people with such a policy, you need a place for them to go if you don't want severe civil unrest.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  I would implement it with a cash rebate to everyone in America for the average number of gallons used by an American in a year * $10 and call it the "green rebate" or something like that and make it clear that it paid for by a gas/car emissions tax. The average American would be paying $0.
  - chidg 5y ago
    Australia tried something similar with a carbon tax a few years ago - not for fuel, but for carbon emissions generally. The policy was very well designed and ensured that lower income earners were compensated for any increase in costs to the extent that they had a net benefit, and in the short time it was operating, was successful at reducing emissions. Unfortunately for us (and the world) this was too complicated for many Australians to understand and the political right exploited that to tell a scary story about a 'new tax', leading to their election and the removal of the scheme. While economists (and rational thinkers) generally love carbon pricing schemes, they have been pretty unsuccessful politically because people are generally too stupid to understand them and cynical politicians in bed with the fossil fuel industry are happy to play to that.
  - rascul 5y ago
    When would I get the rebate? Edit: For clarification, if it's the type of rebate typical in the US, that means I get it later and I can't afford the fuel now. If it's a rebate that's done at the time of purchase, then it wouldn't seem to make much difference, on average.
closeparen 5y ago
As long as the housing stock is what it is, most people need to drive in order to live. We can and should transition towards walkable and transit-connected apartments, but the problem there isn't a lack of demand.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  The housing stock is what it is because of low fossil fuel prices. Most families prefer detached single family homes with two car driveways and quarter acre lots, away from all the homeless and in the most exclusive school districts they can afford.
goatlover 5y ago
Do you think this is politically viable, particularly in the US, which has a lot of open space and long commutes? Are you going to apply this tax to rural communities and farmers as well?
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Of course not. Reducing carbon emissions and avoiding climate change has never been viable, because it lowers people’s quality of life now for the benefit of people not alive now (or in decades past). The only viable solution within the timeframe humans had was to reduce fossil fuel consumption in total, from some combination of reducing per capita consumption and reducing population itself. However, it is a prisoner’s dilemma, and there was never going to be unity in reducing everyone’s consumption and hence quality of life, especially not from the 80% of up and coming people around the world who are looking forward to enjoying life like the upper 20% have been.
- prawn 5y ago
  What solution is politically viable in the US though? There is serious resistance to almost anything.
ineedasername 5y ago
That would have a particularly large impact on food prices. Increasing the portion of food cost attributable to fuel by between 3x and 10x would hit poorer people particularly hard. It would raise the price of pretty much everything else too, all of which hits people harder the lower they are on the economic ladder. Maximizing the speed of implementing renewable energy that can power EV's, and scaling EV production to more affordable levels are much less likely to stomp on the poor. And unlike trying to raise gas prices to $30 it's actually realistic from a social/political standpoint, especially since we're already on that path, just not as fast as we could be. This is not a simple problem, and it's exceedingly rare that a complex problem has such a simple solution as this. Even the renewable/EV combo has inumerable variables behind it that have taken decades to get us to the point we're at now.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  It would return food to local grown again. Making it no longer the cheapest option to ship food from the other side of the planet rather than growing in the same state.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Local isn't available everywhere in the quantities needed to feed large local (city) populations. That might change over a long enough period of time, but waiting for market forces to adjust the food supply to to closest locations available would leave a lot more poor and hungry people in the meantime. If we're going to tinker with things in that way, it's better to do it on the side of pushing renewables and EV's as fast as possible. Until then, things like raising a gas tax are regressive, falling significantly harder on people least able to bear the extra burden.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Then we shall continue on the road we have been on, consuming enough fossil fuels to affect climate change. Hence the conclusion one comes to is to live it up while we can.
heavyset_go 5y ago
The market didn't find an efficient solution to this problem, so you want to use non-market forces to influence the market and then double down on relying on the market to find an efficient solution again? How much do we have to sacrifice to the market before we'll admit that maybe we should consider other solutions?
- SilverRed 5y ago
  "The market" only cares about things that are factored in to prices. External costs like the environment are currently not factored in so the market will never optimize for them. If you simply set a carbon tax, overnight the whole market puts a huge effort in to lowering their environmental damage because now that damage has a number next to it and can be optimized for.
oblio 5y ago
Well, it would actually be a good start and maybe push Americans to smaller and more efficient cars. The average price of gasoline is ~$7 in Europe, in poorer countries, and people seem to make do. But I doubt the average American will give up the quality of life of owning a car that probably weighs have half a ton more than the average European car.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

My Dad recently needed a place to live. No matter how far I drew the circle on Zillow in our part of the state, there were no rent houses, for any price. I texted my realtor about it and asked if it was the Airbnb effect. She said “Yes, probably.” Infuriating.

epistasis 5y ago
I would say a much bigger problem is the lack of building, and the lack of new houses. The population grows about 2% per year. We have not been building nearly enough to keep up. Even if Airbnb is taking 5% of the units in a huge metro area (how?), then that is still just a few years of building that have been missed. The root of the problem is that we let people hoard land by severely limiting what can be done with a plot of land. By doing this globally over metro areas, we cause a huge shortage of land which drives up land "rents" (rent in the economic sense, not as much in the apartment leasing sense).
- unixbeard1337 5y ago
  I'm pro-YIMBY, but building more will only solve part of the problem. The problem it won't solve is that our winner-take-all economy is winner-take-all for cities, too. Everyone is pouring into the top n metro areas and even the most ambitious building program won't do more than put a small dent in all that demand. A small dent will make a real difference for a lot of people, but it also won't make much of a difference for a lot more. If we can't figure out a way to get people to live in Cleveland and St. Louis again, we're spitting into the wind.
  - derefr 5y ago
    Obviously, we should just build more world-class metro areas. Of course, top-down planning a city (as would be needed to "stamp" one out whole) has never worked; but how about we copy-and-paste the zoning plans from cities we already know are functional, and then incentivize all the same major companies that have headquarters in City The First to build secondary HQs in City The Second? (I'm not sure if I'm joking.)

mogadsheu 5y ago

Agree with most of the observations but... what does climate change have to do with metropolitan inequality? All other factors being equal, high city populations relative to the countryside should be more resource efficient.

jacobolus 5y ago
The point is that moving people to far-flung low-density suburbs with >1-hour car commutes (and a need to make all other trips by car) is also very polluting and resource inefficient, compared to locating people where they can commute quickly on foot, bicycle, or public transit. Better is to build a serious transit network with regular fast access to the city center, with dense neighborhoods near transit stations (3–6 story apartment buildings for at least a couple blocks surrounding each station). Look to Japan for an example of how to do zoning and urban planning at a national scale.
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  > Look to Japan for an example of how to do zoning and urban planning at a national scale. Doesn’t Japan have basically everyone live in Tokyo and ignore everywhere else?
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    Huh? There are several big cities in Japan like Oosaka, Kyouto, and Fukuoka, and they're all zoned similarly to Tokyo.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  Also look at NZ how they solved covid, look at thailand how they solved drugs, look at arabs how they solved alcoholism, look at africa how they solved obesity, look at north korea how they solved dissent. Maybe compare life satisfaction and some other outcomes when looking at places like Japan. I'd never want to live in 10 sq meter apartment and be jammed each morning into train like a sardine... That's not to say places don't need to solve public transport and bike infra.

garmaine 5y ago

> Why? People need to get to work, so they drive. Two hour commutes in carbon-spewing cars happen because people can't afford to live near their work. The emissions of all consumer cars together is a drop in the bucket compared to other CO2 sources.

boplicity 5y ago
Source? "Light Duty Vehicles", which are presumably cars, make up over half the "transportation" emissions in the US, and transportation is the leading source of emissions. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
- garmaine 5y ago
  By your own link all light duty vehicles make up a mere 17% of emissions. Also if you track down the original report that pie chart is drawn from, you’ll find that is only considering direct fossil fuel combustion. Consider all sources and it drops down to 12%. ALL consumer cars everywhere, for every purpose, amounts to 12% of emissions. Commuting is a smaller fraction of that. I stand by my claim.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    > Consider all sources and it drops down to 12%. What does this mean? All sources? How is 17% emissions a small amount? It's as much as our agricultural and commercial emissions combined and 1% more than our residential and commercial emissions combined. It's more than the the emissions of all airline travel. Only industrial and electricity related emissions are more. What other category would you pick to lean up on?
    - garmaine 5y ago
      There are other ways CO2 or other greenhouse gasses are emitted besides burning fossil fuels. Examples include outgassing from construction (e.g. concrete), metal refineries, and livestock.

makeitdouble 5y ago

Housing inequality, income inequality, transit inequality are major problems that have deep effects on our societies and our future as nations. > For those concerned about the potential of climate change to severely harm our society IMHO they should heavily focus on the most impacting forces to climate change, which are industrial emissions. Or really, we could try to think of any huge impact environmental crisis, and come to the conclusion we should do something about industrial accountability as they represent more than 90% of the volume in most cases.

boplicity 5y ago
Can you cite your source for this? Transportation, in 2019, was the leading source of emissions, with industry ranked third, behind electricity. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
- spullara 5y ago
  I wonder what the breakdown is between personal and commercial vehicles.
  - boplicity 5y ago
    The link above spells it out. 58% of transportation emissions were from "light duty vehicles", and 24% were from trucks.
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      Light duty vehicles doesn't necessarily mean that they're personal vehicles.
- simongr3dal 5y ago
  Aren't all these statistics able to be infinitely nitpicked since nobody can agree on which bucket to sort the emissions into? Example: a car is produced, does the responsibility for the emissions go to the manufacturer or the consumer who buys the vehicle? Now do this for every single part and bucketful of metal ore down the chain of suppliers, manufacturers, shippers etc. Drawing a line seems difficult and how do you even know whether you double counted at any point.

xwdv 5y ago

The only thing that should be front and center for climate change is the large scale adoption of nuclear energy across the globe. And then, carbon recapture. Everything else, is a pet project riding on the coat tails of a larger crisis.

boplicity 5y ago
Can't say I disagree!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
epistasis 5y ago
If you spend a small amount of time investigating nuclear and the recent failures in construction across the globe, and compare it to the successs of renewables and storage, I think you'd change yourself mind fairly quickly. Nuclear was a technology that was overhyped in the 20th century but never delivered on its promise. We have far better, cheaper, and more flexible tech now to replace it.
- AngryData 5y ago
  We do not have power storage facilities to run the globe off renewables, theoretically yes we could, but it is sort of depending on the tech improving in certain areas or large scale reservoir projects which themselves will take a decade or likely more to put into operation. Nuclear power is something we could have been running off right now, and something we know is feasible to build within or sooner than the same time spans that full renewable rollout will take. Not to mention it would allow us to shut down all these ancient ass reactors we got going now which is the equivalent of driving around in a Model-T because we can't be assed to get a newer car. I love renewables, but we still have a long ways to go in scaling renewables to not only provide global power demands, and we also need to be using ass tons of additional clean power just trying to stabilize the environment and sequester CO2.
  - epistasis 5y ago

imjustsaying 5y ago

literally only retards are worried about climate change

tomrod 5y ago
This is incorrect.
dang 5y ago
We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

gravypod 5y ago

Just to demonstrate, because I've met people who've never been in this sort of situation, this was my commute for ~2 semesters of college: https://goo.gl/maps/8deDf74vRGDkeovRA https://goo.gl/maps/8deDf74vRGDkeovRA My mom had recently begun using again and I said "enough" and moved in with a relative. ~3 months in I had gotten a job in Hoboken, NJ (https://goo.gl/maps/ruU5Ppz746xv5ZeXA https://goo.gl/maps/ruU5Ppz746xv5ZeXA) and would have to drive from my relative's house to my college/job every day and drive back. I couldn't afford the boarding costs for on campus residency especially with the added pain of having to move in/out every semester. Each day I drove ~80 miles and had to fill up my tank. It was still some how barely cheaper than renting in the area and all I could afford. This kind of thing really kills you inside. It's truly painful. For me, I would wake up at 5AM each day to drive west to east with the sun in my eyes. Then I would stay at school and work until around midnight where I'd drive back east to west with the sun in my eyes. I was surviving with ~4hr/night of sleep. I wish we lived in a world where no one else had to go through that torture (for lack of a better word).

rexreed 5y ago
How was the sun in your eyes during the midnight drive back east to west in NJ? Even during the summer solstice, sunset is around 9pm in NJ. I get your point though, driving bleary eyed is not only soul sucking, but very dangerous for yourself and others on the road. Not to mention the ecological and time waste issues. Although I would note a 40 mile each way commute is sadly not out of the ordinary for America. Turns out the average commute distance for NJ is 40.9 miles. See stats here: https://www.answerfinancial.com/insurance-center/which-states-have-the-longest-commute/ https://www.answerfinancial.com/insurance-center/which-state...
- gravypod 5y ago
  Was probably plus it minus a few hours. Still not fun :)
- clifdweller 5y ago
  most likely spearte mwf/t th schedules mixing timings or weekdays weekends. 40 miles each way is rookie numbers here in michigan. Due to the large changing in manufacturing and other job shifts since the 90s many people live in one city then commute to another work in flint, detroit, lansing. detroit<-> flint 60+ miles detroit <-> lansing 80+ miles lansing<-> Flint 50+ miles . Decent factory job pays enough to get a mortgage on a house so many are able to afford a house but 2008 the housing crisis also brought recession and factories closed down. Then 2012 on jobs started coming back and many took first thing available but as recovery wasn't in each city uniformly ended up with a plant in lansing largely being run by people living in flint that couldnt afford to move to lansing

jader201 5y ago

Many on HN seem to forget that not everyone lives near the city or works in a city, where “city” is defined by an area with enough commercial, residential, and industrial within walking distance of each other to support a car-less lifestyle. But in fact, only a portion (of the US, at least — 31% [1]) live in urban areas that would allow them to go car-less, even if you take the housing issues out of the equation. If the rest (69%) even lived right next to work (which many couldn’t, since in many areas, there isn’t housing close to their workplace), they’d still have to commute everywhere else. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demogra...

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
The term “commute” is typically used for the daily drive to work. You seem to be using it for something else.
- jader201 5y ago
  No, it’s that commuting is only part of why most people need cars. But a) this only addresses commuting, and b) many people have no housing options that would allow them to eliminate commuting. My point is that I’ve seen many highly upvoted comments on HN lately (this one included) that seem to think living near work would put a dent in the climate change problem, when the data suggests this isn’t the case. Many people on HN either live — or if they could afford it, would live — near work allowing them to go car-less, and therefore assume most of the world is like that, when, in fact, most of the world could not go car-less in their current job/residence.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > The term “commute” is typically used for the daily drive to work. You seem to be using it for something else. Maybe in the US where driving is prevalent, but in many other places your "commute" is simply your trip to work. In Toronto, Canada, many people commute via transit (TTC). We have a commuter rail system for the region (GO).

sershe 5y ago

It has much less to do with inequality, and much more with zoning patterns in North America (and few other countries). I am not so sure about that, but it may actually be reverse - the richer people may choose to live far away, and drive, in most cities. If inequality had anything to do with it, you would expect more unequal (or more expensive) cities to be more sprawling - as people are "pushed out" further by higher prices; but that is not the case. Why? Probably because people actually want to live far away, or don't care either way if they can trade off for e.g. more space, so they do (disclaimer: not me until 2020). Similarly, you would expect more unequal cities around the world to be sprawling, with more driving. Yet, many cities where the central area is unaffordable to locals do quite well with transit. Related to the above, many do have a ton of people who drive, and they may make up in low speed/inefficiency what harm they fail to produce because they don't drive as far. Again, because people, apparently, want to drive as soon as they can afford it (disclaimer: not me).

raxxorrax 5y ago

You won't get rid of individual transportation. This just won't happen, even if you triple or quadruple investments in infrastructure. Getting into a city core is actually readily available in most places. The solution has to be to make individual traffic CO2 neutral.

lkbm 5y ago
True, but can we cut it 50%? Can we convert 20% to bicycles, or 10% to walking, or 5% to scooters, or all of the above? I don't think we'll get rid of all personal transportation, or even all car usage, but it's highly variable from city to city, and I suspect we could convert some of the "worst" cities to be more like the "best". We should also decarbonize private cars, but we should be pursuing battery of solutions.

RickJWagner 5y ago

Did the Covid era of lockdowns and Zoom day-to-day make a dent?

Phrodo_00 5y ago

> People need to get to work, so they drive. This is not an immediate conclusion. There exist multiple alternatives to driving, but it's also up to cities to provide them.