Free access to this WaPo article if you're interested.
Obviously less individual vehicle is better for people and planed, but a campaign focused on getting Americans to stop driving is just plain not going to win enough votes to do one iota of good so it is actually going to do harm at this point.
It provides a nice campaign messaging to help convince people to trade in their fossil fueled vehicles for EVs. Vehicles are the largest polluters in USA now so it is worth considering if you care about that sort of thing.
Take the $56,000 F-150 Lightning. With the standard 98 kWh battery, it offers energy storage equivalent to seven Tesla PowerWalls ($15,500 each installed) for about half the price per kWh. So, for slightly over the U.S. median car price of $50,000, you get a home battery and a car. https://wapo.st/3I4f3ou
I agree about "getting people to stop driving" -- that's distractivism: putting the blame/responsibility on individuals to fix what is really a systemic problem.
The transition to EVs, and the ability of EVs to provide backup power for households, is a systemic solution; normalizing that by promoting it in the mainstream media should help speed the process.
@woozle @GreenFire strongly did afree with everyone espousing this.
EVs are an easy but fake panacea. You literally can't EV your way out of the climate crisis. Roads themselves cost carbon and oil. EVs degrades roads much faster because they're so heavy.
As does all the hidden subsidies we give car drivers.
The first step though is to shift money from blind car subsidies to providing safe, pleasant alternatives for transportation. People use it is it's there.
These are also good points. It occurred to me after I posted previously that I probably should have said "shift funding away from road infrastructure to other forms of transit".
EVs are a part of the solution, because they will get us off fossil dependency sooner, which is vital. The culture will take longer to change; providing transit infrastructure to help the culture change will take awhile -- but it still needs to happen... and there's certainly no harm in encouraging people to switch away from cars where possible.
It's just that you've also got to make sure there are viable alternatives -- else many people will not be able, in practice, to make those changes. Providing viable alternatives is a systemic issue, not an individual one.
TLDR: Yes, we need to do All The Things, as quickly as possible: switch individually where we can, get off fossil-fueled vehicles where we can, build public infrastructure where we can, work as hard as we can to change the culture around all of this so the political will will be there to do as much as possible. This is a global emergency, and we need to be funding it accordingly.
"they will get us off fossil dependency sooner": only if we aren't charging them from fossil sources. Doesn't this just push exactly the same problem one slot further up the chain?
