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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I mean, I do not know if EVs are as bad to the environment as regular gasoline-powered vehicles, but I do know that they won’t fix the problem of the environmental devastation caused by car culture since they still run on energy made from gas and coal plants and they are still as inefficient in transporting people as regular vehicles.

    I know that it will be very difficult to substitute cars for public transit. Actually, public transit will never fully substitute cars since there will always be places that are too far away for trains, trolleys, and other forms of public transit to reach. Also, ambulances, police cars, and firefighter trucks should never be substituted by public transit, since they need speed and versatility more than anything. But for most people, public transit could be insanely attractive if enough investment was put into it. Most people go through the same few paths every day, and even then, they almost always go at the same time every day.

    I suggest that cities go substituting cars for public transit in small batches by building infrastructure and changing urban development laws in key places and then expanding to the rest of the city.

    edit: Oh, and by the way, here in Brazil EVs are literally just dumb. Although Brazil is mostly run by clean hydrelectric energy, which would be very nice for EV development, we also have lots of sugarcane farms producing sugar and ethanol. Ethanol is widely used here as a biofuel, and there is a dynamic between sugar prices and ethanol prices, where low sugar prices make ethanol a more lucrative business, thus making the agribusiness produce more ethanol, and vice-versa. So, if we just put lots of taxes on sugar and make it less profitable, or we subsidize ethanol, we could make people use ethanol instead of gasoline, and then we would have a near carbon neutral fleet of cars without having to transition to electric.

    (public transit is still better, though)