291–300 of 342 posts
One interesting feature of articles like this that I don't really get is that they often leave out a huge huge quality of life benefit that electric vehicles bring: reduced urban machine noise.
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As someone who generates a lot of waste - environmental responsibility just doesn't factor into my consumption decisions. I work from home so I have the A/C set to be fairly cold. I enjoy a specific brand of bottled water. A major online retailer sells this water cheaper than my local store. I drive a car that gets about 15mpg because I enjoy driving it. I generate approx 13 gallons of trash per day. This is mostly s…
While I don't dispute that economic incentives are important in changing people's behavior on large scales... on a purely individual level, whatever happened to doing something because it's the right thing to do? You're not some self-serving automaton. You're aware that these practices produce unnecessary waste. Is your tap water unsafe to consume?
Taken to its logical conclusion, one could follow anyone around and claim they aren't doing the most right thing. The "right thing to do" is a scale, not binary, and it often conflicts. E.g. right thing to do for self health, vs environment, vs for my customers, vs for my employees, vs for my family (and time with them), vs happiness (for self and others), etc. GP is right, you have to align "right thing to do" with "prudent thing to do" and it becomes viable. Otherwise, to many it comes off as preaching as though they are bad people when they only optimize for other right things.
Usually whatever is done in Europe is ignored in the US, with the reason that China is so much worse. China has been a useful bogeyman for conservatives for decades as a reason to not make any sort of improvement whether related to the environment, workers salaries, work conditions, universal health care etc.
It's a strange shift in affairs that China appears to have the greatest incentives (urban pollution, petroleum imports) today to advance clean transportation and energy while the US has stalled or moved backward, at least the Federal level. Western European countries, for whom fossil fuels don't seem to be an identity politics issue like in the US, are also making more progress in electrifying their transportation an…
> the US has stalled or moved backward, at least the Federal level. It has at the individual level too for most individuals. Try to get someone to consider flying less. Look at the size of vehicles on the road. How much meat we eat. Air conditioning to point of needing sweaters in the summer and heating to wearing shorts in the winter. All personal choices anyone can make, no legislation necessary. We can blame fossi…
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As someone who generates a lot of waste - environmental responsibility just doesn't factor into my consumption decisions. I work from home so I have the A/C set to be fairly cold. I enjoy a specific brand of bottled water. A major online retailer sells this water cheaper than my local store. I drive a car that gets about 15mpg because I enjoy driving it. I generate approx 13 gallons of trash per day. This is mostly s…
I wanted to change my habits because I thought it was the right thing to do. So we put solar on the roof and bought a cheap used electric car (a Leaf). My goal was to do the right thing, but the result has been unforeseen benefits. The solar power more or less makes us net neutral, even when factoring in the electricity for the car. In short: - The solar power will pay for itself in less than five years. - We don't h…
I think people don't realize the happiness and emotional reward that comes with acting on your values in the face of resistance.
That's why my podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast focuses on leadership first. The joy, fun, meaning, value, purpose, and community parts of acting on your values are what make it fun. I'm in it because my food is more delicious, though it's cheaper too.
Crossing the finish line of a marathon is similar. It costs me money and causes me pain, but it's one of the best things I've ever done. People can live life for comfort and convenience, but for me the best things come from activity.
One interesting feature of articles like this that I don't really get is that they often leave out a huge huge quality of life benefit that electric vehicles bring: reduced urban machine noise.
don't worry about the noise. At least here in France we've got you covered with scooters all over the place, including the heart of town! these things seem to be mostly unregulated since the 80s or so when it comes to noise and "stinky" emissions... :|
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As someone who generates a lot of waste - environmental responsibility just doesn't factor into my consumption decisions. I work from home so I have the A/C set to be fairly cold. I enjoy a specific brand of bottled water. A major online retailer sells this water cheaper than my local store. I drive a car that gets about 15mpg because I enjoy driving it. I generate approx 13 gallons of trash per day. This is mostly s…
I wanted to change my habits because I thought it was the right thing to do. So we put solar on the roof and bought a cheap used electric car (a Leaf). My goal was to do the right thing, but the result has been unforeseen benefits. The solar power more or less makes us net neutral, even when factoring in the electricity for the car. In short: - The solar power will pay for itself in less than five years. - We don't h…
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> The US has a population density of 33 people per square kilometer; Yes, and they are evenly spread out across the country, right? What you conveniently leave out, and which turns all these kinds of arguments based on a "total area / total population" numbers into absurd exercises in futility in showing anything useful, is that you have some few mega regions: http://osnetdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/2050_Map…
> Yes, and they are evenly spread out across the country, right? Not evenly — but the population in the US is in fact much more geographically dispersed than in most of Europe, India, and East Asia. These measurements are not what you claim ("total area / total population"); here is a map of population density per square kilometer over the globe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density#/media/File... It's tr…
It also does not explain the car addiction at all, because it would make much more sense to connect wide-spread centers using trains, for example.
Also, most transport is local - and as far as it is not combining it into larger "packages" (train, ship, large trucks) would be more efficient.
I'm also a bit amazed at your response. Your initial comment, the one I replied to, is only about comparing total area and total population. I find it at least a little bit disingenuous how you dug deep to come up with a new version of the argument.
I find the effort in many comments to point out how the US is "special" and "different" from all the rest of the world very weird. I would not find it as weird if it looked like a detached analysis, but it seems to be mostly emotional. Why? So strange. What's the big deal, what do you lose, if you come to the conclusion that it's of course true that all problems are local and none are completely the same, the variability and the base problems are not actually different? What's the big deal? Isn't it enough to look for "exceptionalism" in the achievements and possibilities, why does it have to also be true for such mundane stuff at any cost (e.g. suffering quality of arguments)?
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> the US has stalled or moved backward, at least the Federal level. It has at the individual level too for most individuals. Try to get someone to consider flying less. Look at the size of vehicles on the road. How much meat we eat. Air conditioning to point of needing sweaters in the summer and heating to wearing shorts in the winter. All personal choices anyone can make, no legislation necessary. We can blame fossi…
As someone who generates a lot of waste - environmental responsibility just doesn't factor into my consumption decisions. I work from home so I have the A/C set to be fairly cold. I enjoy a specific brand of bottled water. A major online retailer sells this water cheaper than my local store. I drive a car that gets about 15mpg because I enjoy driving it. I generate approx 13 gallons of trash per day. This is mostly s…
Simply prioritizing yourself and only caring about economic incentives would motivate stealing when you know you won't get caught.
You sound as if you know your waste is hurting other people. You have your values, but if I lived as you describe, knowing my externalities needlessly hurt people would eat me up inside -- no right, wrong, good, or bad, just my personal values. I would change simply to feel better about myself and my role in my community, local and global. Just because people can't see how I'm affecting them, I still am.
If you don't value how you affect other people, my view is to live and let live and hope that people who care enough to act outnumber people like you enough that your waste doesn't hurt that many people.
I suspect that if you started changing a few things, you'd find the emotional reward to change more. I created my podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast for people to hear leaders doing just that.
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"Pros" are subjective, of course. But if you ask an American to describe why US is great, it would be things like: * Largest economy on the planet * Biggest and most well known tech companies (or companies in general) * Majority of the top research universities * Quality of medical system (if you can pay!) * And so on For us in tech, living in the US is no comparison - it's the best place to be an engineer by a long…
I don't feel any of these things provide people with more or better opportunities than those I have here, or elsewhere in many western-European or Asian countries. The universities here are great, and actually rank equal to or better than all but a handful of US ones. The quality and availability of health care is basically the same, for a much lower price. Even for rare treatment options that are only available abro…