yep.

Here, in Atlanta, public transit is so limited that you have to drive most of the distance you want to travel, just to get to the train system.

exactly.

I think flying is excessively demonised. It accounts for less than 2% of emissions. It's like 10% of surface transport. But by going after flying a certain class of eco people can look down both on those who drive up to the private jet terminal in a giant range over, and the people who are going 3 hours away for their one 2 weeks holiday of the year. Without actually tackling any of the far bigger sources of emissions

I wish there was more campaigning for public transport

I like how France is coupling it to rules. "If a destination can be reached by train below 2h (or similar it was) then a plane route there can be removed."

If we would turn all of this into similar logical rules the of course you would just not apply them to say... the canaries.

EXACTLY ALL OF THIS!

For me getting to a doctor - depending on severity - would mean walking a kilometer, taking a bus or worst case an ambulance.

For someone in the Maldives, it may be hours if not days on a boat or an air taxi.

I disagree with a few crucial points. !stly, it's no coincidence that people refuse to accept their own responsibility by pretending it's the fault of fossil fuel extremists.
That's more often than not a lazy, convenient excuse. And no, I'm *not* per se blaming people living in rural areas.

2ndly, there's much more GHG/environmentally harmful than mobility, and people are 100% responsible for these lifestyle choices, e.g. compare SK's meat consumption in the 1960s vs today.

When environmental harm gets framed as individual moral failure, attention shifts away from the structural changes that would actually matter.

Thank you for a very lucid post, you sum up the situation many people are in fairly.

We can not all live in citys or the majority of for example food production would stop.

Thankful to see this post.

I live in a rural area. There are no buses, no trains, no carpools. We try to consolidate our trips out as best we can but there's only so much we can do.

I've straight up seen people suggest that people living in rural places were unethical - fully disconnected from the fact that this is where their food comes from.

Not everything can get concentrated into cities and not all of us want that life. Rural public transport is possible but lacking.

1000% agree. I think these personal choices are valuable when someone is feeling helpless. It can make a difference! If someone feels better having changed their habits, that is great and the carbon saved is great too. But I would never ever use them as a cudgel to shame someone. That’s completely misplacing the responsibility in my opinion.

The systems need to change. When we think of our roles it must be more about how we pressure the systems (voting, joining orgs we align with, pressuring reps) than about our tiny imprint we can make within the system.

It's the dose that makes the poison, is a saying in Germany and in my opinion that fits good for the things you pointed out.

Driving and flying isn't the problem but how it's done, regarding to the technology that's used to do it, to this day a very pollution heavy one but there are cleaner alternatives that work as well.

Like you already mentioned, it's a structural problem and not a individual moral failure. 😉

(Added some hashtags for better visibility in the Fediverse, feel free to use them in your own post.)
#Transportation #PublicTransport #Public #Transit #Car #Plane #Driving #Flying #City
@bestiaexmachina

For ne, the question is how many externalities am I willing to impose on future generations. What share of the worlds CO2 emissions am I willing to be personally responsible for due to my decisions?

What proportion of the planets non-renewable resources am I willing to consume? How many earths would it take to maintain my lifestyle, and who pays the consequences - my grandkids in 50 years, or the global south?

Driving might not be optional for some people, but the normalised way of driving actually prevents others from, for example, taking a bike.

Taking a bike medium distances used to be a normal activity in many parts of the world where it's now dangerous because of people driving their cars too fast, too close, and too much.

If a car driver consider bikes and pedestrians annoyances that are "in the way" on a country road, the driver is forcing car culture on them.

The first ten words just made me hear Sham 69.

«I don't need a flash car to take me around
I can get the bus to the other side of town»

m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEsN3YFz…

#Sham69

Hi Thanks for sharing ! I agree with you when you say that it depends on the conditions we live in, and that it depends on public policy.

However, on the following point I disagree with the "nothing" word.

> If the alternative is missing or unusable, shaming people for not choosing it solves *nothing*.

I live in France, and going in north / South america is basically not possible without fly. (1/x)

First rate post. Thank you for taking the time to build this so well, for making the insight, for formulating it into a message, and for making the message respectful.

Ta.

I have lived in many different situations and this can't be truer.

Sometimes I was in such a small town I had to take the car to buy bread.

Sometimes I only take the car to do long trips to badly connected cities.

Do I use the car as less as possible? Yes.

Do I still own a car because it is a need on my situation? Also yes.

"But you could rent a car and not own it" environmentally it would be the same. And more expensive to me.

There is another aspect: Cars form the geography of the world. They let people live in areas formerly out of reach. Getting rid of cars may make it necessary to abandon these places.

It's similar with air conditioning which made it possible to live in hot climates. Read Jeff Goodell’s analysis of air conditioning in “The Heat Will Kill You First”.

This is not sustainable in the long run.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heat…

not sure tarnishing carbon footprint reporting as the "oil company choice" is particularly helpful. People do have agency - to varying degree (e.g., nobody obliges people to buy supersized US SUV's, fly private jets etc.). And producer based accounting is anyway what drives NDC's.

The moral angle of sustainability is imho a quagmire that we barely started unravel. E.g. people feel "normal" to inherit financial assets, how about inheriting also family environmental liabities? 🤔