> I'm not sure what your point is? "Just be like europe"? "America bad"? My point is that the US is doing something that is making everyone's footprint signifi

> I'm not sure what your point is? "Just be like europe"? "America bad"? My point is that the US is doing something that is making everyone's footprint significantly larger without improving their quality of life, so clearly there are other factors to reducing the footprint than "downgrade the lifestyle". > You could argue "but we can just make public transport better!" but the economics just don't work as well compared to europe, so you'd pay more and/or pay less which is still arguably a downgrade. Citation needed. > Moving to denser/"walkable" cities rather than suburbs is also a solution, but is also a downgrade. Citation needed. Also the US doesn't have walkable cities, so you're comparing suburbs to a thing I already said is bad, not the thing I said would be better. > Except to the most diehard urbanists, most would prefer a 4 bedroom house in the suburbs with a yard than a 3 bedroom apartment. Do you think this preference is part of the immutable fabric of reality or do you think this is an emergent property caused by the total lack of public transport infrastructure, horrible zoning and white flight? "Urban center" vs "suburbs" is a false dichotomy caused by the missing middle in American urban planning, namely mixed-use zoning. You don't need a car in the suburbs because the suburbs are sparsely populated, you need a car in the suburbs because everything other than housing is miles away and despite the roads being ridiculously congested the infrastructure is hostile to bikes and pedestrians and there are no trams, metros or buses. Meanwhile US urban centers are so hyperdense that nobody wants to live there and New Yorkers in 2023 are throwing a fit about the introduction of trash cans because there's literally nowhere to put them without impeding traffic, vehicular or otherwise. Frankly, all I hear from you boils down to the same old tired "the US can't be improved because it's special" which is not just another boring rehash of American Exceptionalism but also demonstrably wrong. The thing holding the US back is that one of the major political problems has no qualms pushing nonsense conspiracy theories like the so-called "15 minute cities" being part of a dystopian plan to create real-world Hunger Games rather than a catchy "doing the bare minimum" plan to address climate change.