zlacker

>>Brajes+(OP)
I'm starting to wonder whether the conventional wisdom of reducing carbon emissions in favour of more electricalisation is really solving the actual problem. As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier than their fossil fueled alternatives, and generate other pollution along the way. Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment, without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment or what impact the mines themselves will have.

With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?

Naively, it feels like we understand C, O and H, better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing in the name of climate change.

>>alexch+Ei
When NYC turned manhattan's 14th street[1](a bidirectional wide traffic street) into bus only for rush hours with very strict rules for cars, car farers yelled and hollered and people warned of traffic snarl-ups up the wazoo. In reality none of that really materialized.

And In reality all of SOHO(Greenwich village, Chelsea, Fidi etc) the interior excluding the west side and east side high way could be 90% car free with high speed mass transit to bus/electric street cars you anywhere there could work much better. Cars move at not more than 20 MPH on most streets there any way now and are inefficient at transporting people.

People will realize they can just park outside manhattan in Brooklyn or Jersey City and just take a train in and just use car as a luxury instead of a necessity of transit to work the economics of the auto based economy will change. Cities and areas around them are high density once car use changes there it will change everywhere(LA I am looking at you).

[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/brt/html/routes/14th-street.shtml