aperson_hello

The share of the world population in extreme poverty has gone down by about 80% since 1960. And the number of people in extreme poverty has gone down by about 2/3 since 1970.

It's getting better. Not as fast as it could or should, but it's getting better!!

There's a philosophical discussion to be had here regarding the difference between a gigawatt and a jigawatt!

While 93% of trips are less than 30 miles...I bet the percent of miles travelled on longer trips are significantly higher. I'm probably 80-90%% miles travelled for trips longer than 30 miles (I also work from home, which skews this a bit higher, but even when I was working in an office, it was at least 50% miles on longer than 30 mile trips). I'd still go EV (with a long range battery) if there were more charging infrastructure and more reasonable EV options. But there just isn't yet, so I'm in a hybrid (because the payback vs. ICE only was something like 2 years!). Would have gone PHEV too if there was anything available when I bought my car, but there wasn't.

Do a 700 mile roadtrip through the center of the US in an EV in the middle of winter and you'll understand why I have range anxiety around EVs. I have range anxiety in my gas powered car in a few spots in the US and there are many more gas stations than there are charging stations! I'd absolutely buy an EV as a second car for my more local trips right now...but I don't need a second car and the production carbon costs of a car outweigh the gas carbon costs of not having a second car (not to mention the economic costs of having a second car!). Eventually once the second hand market improves, that around town+ EV might make sense for me to have. But not until then (but by that time, charging infrastructure should be highly improved and it might make sense to go full EV!).

Beyond all the safety stuff, it's also because that car often saves a huge amount of time compared to walking/biking - especially when there are multiple stops involved in an outing.

And that car can haul groceries, etc. much better than a bike or hands can. I have a grocery store well within walking distance of me (on safe-ish sidewalks even), but I only walk when I only have a few things to pick up because otherwise I'm trying to haul 50lb of fragile and bulky stuff back half a mile to my house by hand (I also tend to go there mostly while I'm already out doing other things, so the marginal additional mileage is nearly zero). Yes, I could take the approach of going to the grocery store every day, but I flat out don't have the time for that (or the weather for that!). Or I could take the approach of buying a much nicer bike with more hauling capacity, but I already have a car (and do enough with it that there's no reasonable way to go without one) so I'm not going to spend $2k on a bike that would only reduce my mileage by 100 miles a year. Heck...just the savings from fixing things DIY covers the cost of my car in a typical year (I have an old house!), not to mention the car rental fees I'd incur for trips pretty much anywhere outside of a 5-10 mile radius.

But to your point, this is also highly situational. If I were in an apartment in NYC, that's a completely different situation than being in a house in a small-size city (honestly, my city in the US even has public transport that nearly rivals comparable cities in Europe...but they key there is comparing to comparable cities in Europe...where everyone still has cars because to go anywhere outside of a small radius, they need a car).

This footprint based fuel economy is (one of the reasons) WHY the civic is so much larger

Solar and wind are on an exponential trajectory. Our usage isn't. That in itself is enough to make a pretty good prediction that they'll make an impact.

That said, there are absolutely going to be issues taking the entire grid to solar/wind (namely, storage!). There are potential options to solve those problems...so we'll get there. The question is just how long it'll take.

This is exactly the problem. If you do your job as a PM, you get pushed out because doing your job means you'll be ruffling feathers in senior management. So to stick around, you schmooze instead of doing your job because doing your job properly invariably pisses off management at some point

Accelerating and who knows - everyone is extraordinarily terrible at making predictions about power generation. New solar/wind capacity is already significantly cheaper than new nuclear (and new plants of any sort other than natural gas), but more expensive than running existing nuclear plants. Nuclear is a great way to get stable base load capacity - while wind and solar require significant storage to be used as base load (because the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine). We'll ultimately probably land on a mix of power sources.

So I might be missing something here, but is there actual data showing autopilot to be unsafe? And if so...where is it?

Elon's marketing claims are wild, safety isn't a priority in the factories, and data protection isn't exactly great either. Those are extraordinary clear from this account (and many others). But I'm not seeing any data on safety except for elon's claim about airbag deployments. I don't believe that number because it's Elon...but is there data that refuses this claim? It's not clear in this article that there is?

Yes, because despite there being setbacks, the ozone layer is still healing! The hole is getting smaller

Good luck rebuilding all of our built infrastructure in the next two decades to reduce car dependency in time to meet decarbonization goals...

Decarbonization will have negative externalities. Yes, even environmental ones. I'd argue that those externalities are necessary and delay to mitigate them is going to be worse than fixing them later.

Building new inventory and making housing more affordable would dissuade individuals from buying new homes?