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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Fuck Cars
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The worrying thing here is the assumption that we can choose...
The world has 2 billions individual cars. Lithium extraction rate may not be sufficient to make 2 billions cars by 2030... and that's assuming we don't need lithium for computers, smartphones, but also not for batteries for the grid (because no solar cell works at night and wind farms are not on demand erther), and... not for electric trucks! Then comes the question of the other metals: copper, nickel, cobalt, ...
Trains will not work everywhere for everyone, but not deploying them now and fast will be a severe issue for North America when resources will get scarce.
We need a smart mix of trains, buses, subways, tramways, shared vehicles, bikes, everything but one individual car per person. That era will come to an end because we're closer to the bottom of our planet's natural resources stock than the beginning.
There's not even a real option of keeping gas cars a little while more, as cheap oil is also coming to an end.
The difference between accepting this and "choosing" individual cars is how ready countries will be when resources will get scarce. It may get ugly...
Yeah, unfortunately what people aren't getting is that continuing car dependency -- electric cars or not -- is fundamentally not an option. Sure we'll probably have electric firetrucks and tractors, but having 1 ton of lithium batteries and 2 to 3 tons of steel per person -- plus mind-boggling amounts of asphalt roads and parking lots -- was never going to be a sustainable option, be it environmentally, economically, or socially.
We as a society keep shoving forwards as if switching to a better transit mix is a choice. It's not. Car dependency can never last.
We will never, ever run out of resources. When one resource gets scarce, its price shoots up incentivising either more expensive extraction from hard to reach ores or it being substituted by a cheaper alternative.
Plus, everything we've ever used is still here, lying around.
The issue is in your statement: price increases to no limit. One day, though, we won't be able to afford it. You'd be surprised how close we might be from that day...
We already have early warning on the oil: conventional oil production is on a plateau since 2008, and non-conventional might peak in 5--15 years. Without cheap oil, globalization dies. It heavily relies on cheap transportation worldwide. Without globalization, either we're prepared or we collapse!
Right now, not a single country gets prepared.
Exactly because the reasoning you have: modern economy is still based on a hypothesis made at the beginning of the industrial revolution "assume infinite resources", and when you run out, it's just because you don't put enough money to extract more.
We've buried most of what we produced. Yet miners go after ppm or ppb metal levels in rocks rather than just dig out waste and extract metals from them. There is a reason.