Cars or the planet? What would you choose?

I'm choosing a helicopter. Less traffic.

I choose my truck over the planet.

But that's not really the choice though, is it?

Poll for your favourite car.

"Get rid of the car. Get a bike"

FFS 🙄

Can I not just vote that everyone else should get rid of their cars - and other climate change influencing lifestyle choices , ?

Leaving me free to drive around on empty roads in a giant pick-up truck , eating steak sandwiches and running my air-con with the window open .... Yee-haw...

Cars

Build a public transport system fit for purpose if you want less cars. Still waiting on the metro (one line which we’ll see probably in another fûckin decade… no actually, 2034 is the accepted revised completion date…both my parents still working when it was approved, now they 1000% won’t live to see it….. they’d be mid to late ‘90’s….when it’s up and running….

provide an alternative to cars….

currently it’s gonna be 33 years since it was green lighted in 2001 to it being built and used…

Want less cars, provide an alternative fit for purpose public transport system ..

Could we just get rid of all the CO2 catastrophists instead? I'll take cars.

There are lots of equally fatuous and stupid questions you could ask; like which 5 billion are we going to cull for the sake of the planet? Which do you pick - hot water and home heating, or the planet?. Between cooked food or the planet, which do you choose? Elctricity and health care, or the planet?

Right so what do you suggest? I suggest that driving a horse and carriage is more realistic than pedalling a bicycle over large distances.

When cars were first invented they were called horseless carriages.

You don't want cities to be dominated by motorised cars. But not all travel is within cities, i.e. within cycling distance.

So... horses

Covering the whole country? Won't happen. Have you been around Ireland?

How many decades will an interlinked electric rail system take to build? We can't even build a metro to airport.

Yes horse and carriages spring to mind because they would work and have worked. They are roughly equivalent to motorised cars which replaced them at the beginning of the 20th century.

That is more realistic than expecting people to hop on a bicycle each time they want to travel from Waterford to Belfast.

Nobody's saying to get rid of all cars. Just lots of solutions for different scenarios that all add up to dramatically reduced emissions.

Firstly public transport - as one of the linked articles mentioned, very few people living in Manhattan own cars because public transport is easier and more efficient to use and a car basically becomes a liability. The more access to public transport, and the more efficient public transport is, the more cars are voluntarily taken off the road by people who realise they just don't need them.

Secondly car sharing - bicycle sharing has already proved very successful with increasing uptake in many cities. Car sharing services do exist in much more limited numbers but aren't yet as widely accepted. But if they did, and you knew you could access a shared car easily near your home and near your work, then this may cut down the need to own a car, in the same way many people now cycle without owning a bike.

Thirdly automated cars - this depends on technology that isn't fully proven yet outside of limited areas. I suspect road layouts in Europe will be a particular challenge as you get much narrower, twistier layouts than the US and newly developed regions of China for example. But assuming automation is proven, it basically becomes a much much cheaper taxi service, where you can easily and reliably have a car come to you and take you to your destination, negating the need for a car of your own.

Neither car sharing or automated cars will necessarily reduce the number of miles being done and the amount of tailpipe emissions, but if they are then combined with zero emission electric vehicles, they become vastly more efficient as you have a single hit of manufacturing emissions then far far more zero emission mileage once that car is on the road. You can have one electric car operating for 20 hours per day instead of 20 electric cars operating for 1 hour per day.

The key to all of these is that they become so convenient that people don't feel the need to own a car. And if you do live somewhere or have specific needs that still require car ownership, then that is always an option. Preferably electric to keep emissions as low as possible of course. We're already at a tipping point where EVs have comfortably enough range for the vast majority of people and make more sense than ICE when buying a new car as the running cost savings make up for increased initial price, even if all you care about is overall cost of ownership and not the improvement in local air quality or the reduction in emissions. This is not so much the case for second hand yet, but that will trickle down in the coming years.

No way would I share some econobox with anyone else. I'm living way out the countryside and need MY OWN car.

What's this no planet nonsense? The planet isn't going to die beacause of a mild increase in temperature. It's been a lot, lot hotter in the past and life thrived. So much life that a tiny fraction of it gave us all the fossil fuels we have been using.

People should be a lot more concerned about the planet getting colder.

You are aware that it's the Greens and EPA who are to blame for all those deaths from that Air pollution, if it's real ,and not more back of the envelope epidemiological hokum, of course?

Where did you get this 60% of night time electricity from renewables? Eir grid said 2020 renewables generation was 40%. Currently it's only 26%.

Would like to see a proper breakdown of these air pollution deaths because I suspect smoking would play a large part in them,

Covid really opened my eyes to the actual seriousness of the situation we are in. Way too many people at all levels in society who don't give a fcuk about whether or not others might be at risk or indeed are suffering right now, not to mind in the future.

They unwillingness to accept scientific direction or evidence even when presented with accompanying pictures and videos of hospitals as literally millions of people dying has been very telling.

And when it comes to the environment, it's way easier to absolve oneself from responsibility. And the scope of the problem here is so much greater, every facet of society and the all powerful 'economy' is part of the problem because it is fueled by increasing engagement, production, sales, use etc etc etc.

@Thelonious Monk 'And people saying it's just a Green attack and wanting to lower living standards by suggesting not everyone has a car'

It's an objective fact that replacing personal car ownership with shared, unowned vehicles would be a massive lowering of living standards.

It's an utterly insipid vision of the future and the only selling point is to say it's inevitable, unavoidable etc., etc.

So the Greens have no solution bar dismantling people's way of life and saying 'Sorry, we've no other choice and no new ideas'

Basically green foot-soldiers like yourself will soon be reduced to trying to convince people that shared vehicles are 'a good thing' ("why wouldn't you want to ride with friends?" etc.)

@Tell me how

Cars. Every time. Mainly because I've no intention of having kids so my line dies with me, so I don't have future children to leave the world in crap to. Just other peoples children, and they're not my problem.

Seriously though, Ireland was ranked 95th out of 115 countries on this list from mid-2021. https://www.numbeo.com/pollution/rankings_by_country.jsp

As someone said earlier, me changing to an electric car (can't afford one, and it's not greener to charge) won't make a blind bit of difference in a country that produces less pollution than 94 of 115 countries. Get ta feck. Proper public transport is the only way, and change city centres to public transport only and create park and rides for every city. I'll continue to live in the country, so public transport and electric cars are useless to me.