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This may sound intuitive but is actually wrong. [0] All construction activities including roads, account for about 10.6% of emissions. For comparison energy u

This may sound intuitive but is actually wrong. [0] All construction activities including roads, account for about 10.6% of emissions. For comparison energy use inside buildings accounts for 17.5% of emissions. Transport emissions (Land, Air, water) account for 16.2%. There are absolutely lifestyle choices at play here: Size of houses, size of car engines, car tonnage, commute distances, Travelling/Shopping habits. We cannot change minds and infrastructure overnight, the second best thing we can do at a policy level is to (magically) find ways for our energy production to not depend on coal/natural gas. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Spread out living (which is equivalent to car dependent living) has a knock on effect on consumption of everything, and it is more than a linear relationship. The more spread out people are, the further water, electricity, gas, sewage, trash, food, human bodies, and everything else has to travel. Energy is mass times acceleration times distance. In other words, detached single family homes with garages and 2 cars driveways on a quarter acre lot preclude any environmentally conscious changes one could make, barring the miraculous discovery of some new technology that supplants fossil fuels. Or drastic reductions in population. The simple, but not politically viable, solution is to increase fossil fuel taxes so much that it forces people to give up detached single family homes and individual cars and move into apartment or rowhouses so that public transit can be implemented.