tandempower

You live in Australia, where population density seems to be relatively low and not growing at a rate that threatens natural and rural land (too badly) with automotive sprawl expansion, so maybe Australia will be a place where ubiquitous driving stays tenable farthest into the future without having to take measures to reduce automotive 'overpopulation.' If this is the case, Australia may face more pressure than already exists for in-migration.

In-migration for 'automotive freedom' will be a migration of relatively affluent people who can afford to drive, but are increasingly limited to do so by changing laws and norms in other areas of the world. It seems a bit analogous to migration to the US from Europe during the mid 19th century when slavery was being abolished worldwide but not (yet) in the US. For this reason, there were economic opportunities for free whites in the US that were being challenged elsewhere.

I don't think Australia will be the only place people try to move to drive. I think it's already happen because of the desire for convenient motorized transportation that you mention. But I see it as a problem; more so than other forms of migration, because any area that has room to drive is under threat of infrastructure expansion that will result in further deforestation/development. So the question is what happens when we try to protect areas against automotive expansion, when there are migration pressures to get out of areas where driving is becoming too congested and/or limited by regulations designed to shift traffic away from driving-dependency.

Idk because I think it is entirely possible to just say F-you to sustainability and blame problems of automotive sprawl on population growth. Then, when recessions or other causes of social problems occur, people can just be impoverished and imprisoned to clear the roads; OR more and more roads can keep being built and those who don't want more and wider roads told to shut up and be realistic. This would be a sad future to me, but I don't exclude it as a possible future. Nevertheless, I hope for better and try to show that it is not only possible with more LCF, but also far more reasonable and ultimately desirable.

It took severe economic collapse of the great depression and an authoritarian New Deal regime combined with Military-Industrial Complex to make the post WWII automotive-consumerist society happen.

Awareness is growing of how our activities and lifestyles impact environment and resources. Wasting time on a laptop doesn't harm anything. If anything, it is a lower-impact activity than most, if not all, others that involve 'power tools.'

There are more annoying people. For one, those who stereotype 'groups' instead of regarding individuals individually. Second, those who are willfully ignorant to the point of pre-emptively hating people like vegans and Jehovah's Witnesses instead of making an effort to understand why these dedicated individuals are dedicated enough to their causes to put in effort that most people don't even put into useless hobbies like gaming.

Most people couldn't afford a car if governments allowed recessions to take their course and avoided stimulating artificial growth.

Even passenger jets aren't very fuel-efficient. Commercial passenger jets get about the same passenger mpg as driving. Buses and trains get much better fuel-efficiency per passenger.

You should do things that are better for yourself and others. Your right to do waste and harm for your own indulgence is a waste of your freedom and a waste of the lives that have been sacrificed for the freedom to responsibly self-govern.

Do you understand the reason people see these things as important beyond personal choice? If not, you should put some effort into understanding them.

Why are you preaching against preaching? If you're going to preach, wouldn't it make sense to preach about something less hypocritical?

That's because you haven't developed a strong-enough sense of right and wrong to go beyond protection of individual autonomy as an ethical mission.

Pride and shame are ego trips. It is a huge obstacle to democratic discussion for the sake of promoting good self-governance when people exhibit emotional knee-jerk reactions against good ideas because they feel shame about the fact that they haven't come up with every good idea for themselves before hearing about it from someone else. Put pride aside, listen to others, and use/develop whatever intelligence you have to sort out what is reasonable and thus worth doing from what is unnecessary.

Threads are the topics. Posts are the things that are on or off topic, depending on the thread.

I-Like-To-Bike

Apparently the caretakers of this institution have taken leave and a couple of the residents are running amok posting on LCF their free-form thoughts on whatever Foo-ish political, economic, religious, sociological or imaginary subject strikes their fancy, with no concern about its relevance to Living Car Free, or to reality. Nor with any concern that the Foo-ish and P&R posts and threads will be moved to an appropriate list for Foo-ish and P&R posts.

Rollfast

+2, more bacon.

Rollfast

Those are the benefits of free thought. These things stimulate other things elsewhere and a MOVEMENT begins

mconlonx

No.

Walter S

People don't need to get inventive with irrational reasons to find anti-automotive sentiments threatening. Being exposed to a variety of posts by you should be enough to generate much more basic reasons.

Maybe so. Or at least a right that's traditionally been granted in modern societies and for all of their lives. Whether it's "fundamental" isn't as important as the fact that it's assumed and expected and its revocation or significant limits will naturally be met with great resistance considering how much driving is integrated with most people's lives.

Because foreigners and primitive/developing peoples need to climb out of the gutter like we did.

cooker

LOL. It is not in any way a basic human right any more than owning a television is a basic human right. Of course, car ownership is for the moment a societal norm and both privately and government-funded infrastructure supports it, and, just like television seems to be going, cars may go out of fashion at some point and be replaced with other technology.

And you are right, there is nothing immoral about owning a car, even though cars have killed hundreds of millions of people, both directly and indirectly Cars are a systemic problem, not an individual one.

Walter S

Maybe cars are just what we need to combat the population problem. They just need to be more dangerous. Get rid of speed limits, air bags, safety belts. But keep traffic signals at intersections for the benefit of pedestrians.

rossiny

Cars are are our gods. They give us jobs and sustain our souls.. But really they are just so intertwined with human life it is scarey. Driving is a way of life.. It is so involved with our economy, livelihood and way of being in this world . scarey. I have been able to reduce car and truck usage. My livelihood depends on my van and remodeling.. Luckily the jobs are close .

rossiny

QUOTE: " Even passenger jets aren't very fuel-efficient. Commercial passenger jets get about the same passenger mpg as driving. Buses and trains get much better fuel-efficiency per passenger." According to google a 747 holds 48,000 gallons of jet fuel ,,,mind boggling to me we have not run out of oil yet, maybe the fire at the center of the earth produces unlimited oil??

tandempower

Well put, except those drivers who can't drive safely or can't resist harassing other road-users.

You could also make sprawl more of a hurdle to affording to live and do business. That way fewer jobs are created so people can make more money by sharing revenues among less employees/partners. That leaves people with more money each to spend on driving and patronizing businesses that afford their employees lots of driving and further patronizing of driving-dependent businesses. Those who stay unemployed won't be able to find a low-paying job close enough to bike/walk to and they'll end up expiring in a tent somewhere without income. Indeed, you could view driving and sprawl as 'helping' 'the population problem' in this way, disturbing as that may be.

This is why I think the term 'automotivism' makes sense beyond other expressions of automotive culture and driving-dependence, though it sounds rather dramatic to say it the way you do. Maybe we should start calling cars the "steel calves of modernity" in reference to the "golden calf" of antiquity.

It's a really good question to wonder how much core/mantle heat gets converted into fossil fuels. Right now, we are learning how neutrinos from the sun penetrate through the Earth and catalyze certain nuclear reactions. So the core/mantle may not be an insulated supply of ancient energy, but it may be absorbing energy from the sun all the time the way the day side of the planet does. On the other hand, though, trees absorb sunlight and grow roots underground that gradually get buried and form coal deposits, which gradually get buried deeper and deeper; so assuming not all of that energy gets released by volcanic eruptions and tectonic movements, it may also be helping heat the core.

So what I'm trying to explain is this complex idea that you might be right that the core/mantle is helping generate fossil fuels, but that radioactive elements in the core/mantle might also be at least partially due to fossilized energy delivered via solar neutrinos; and that would still not make it a good idea to mine these fuels and use them on the surface because doing so upsets the balance of energy, water, and CO2/oxygen/nitrogen that regulates planetary climates and supplies living ecosystems with the water and food they/we need to live sustainably.

Walter S

The heat from the earth is not what produced fossil fuels. And there's not more coming. We're using them up and then they'll be gone. Fossile fuels were formed in the Carboniferous Period and depended on the unique climate and species of life and swampy-layered decomposition, I believe in a way that was starved of oxygen as a result. We're essentially living off the remains of billions of dead creatures from the distant past.

rossiny

Okay I was kinda being silly about the earth core burning and churning all this stuff and makinf fuell... But man a jet pulls up to the gas station and pumps in 48000 gallons. And we still have not run out.. Consider a jet lands like what,, one a minute at O'hare airport? Amazing earth can still function with what we spew out at her on a daily basis?

rossiny

By the way amazed at the Einsteins who know all thesr theories and facts....

Walter S

No, he would not be right about that. And your speculations are not right either. Physics is not one of those things you can make up by throwing together some stuff you've read and extending it with your own ideas about what seems reasonable.

Walter S

It is indeed amazing. Like you say it's not intuitive. The world is bigger than it seems from looking around in your own neck of the woods.

tandempower

Physics is understanding the basic mechanics of energy and matter. Physics is understanding how forces like gravitational compression consolidate chemical energy into denser molecules, how radioactivity works, etc. Then there are all the scientific theories that attempt to make sense of larger scale processes in terms of what is known about the fundamental (physical) mechanics of the components. Yes, there is a traditional theory that fossil fuels are formed purely by eons of buried biomass sinking down from the surface. But it is not unimaginable that core/mantle heat/energy is also being converted into biomass, and being fossilized as well. Surely you have seen documentaries showing ocean life that lives under immense pressure and feeds on geothermally-generated nutrient chains? Life absorbs energy and grows biomass, and biomass gets fossilized and compressed. We're not making any claims about the relative quantity of fossil fuels generated from geothermal energy, just that it might be a factor in the process.

What I am saying is that even if this is the case, it doesn't support the notion that we should mine up fuels and their energy to the surface. My point is that there is an underground energy system that relies on BOTH sinking biomass from the surface AND neutrino penetration from the sun to maintain the molten core/mantle and thus the magnetic field that shields the planet from harmful solar wind. What you're calling speculation is just very general synthesis of basic scientific information that's coming out all the time. I'm not making any claims about how these processes work in detail, just noting that sunlight is a source of energy and so are neutrinos; that the light doesn't penetrate underground except by growing biomass that gets buried and sinks; but the neutrinos do penetrate underground - and we know from the detectors we build that at least some of that neutrino energy is interacting with other materials and thus getting deposited. You could speculate about the details of what's happening with that energy in the core/mantle, how much of it goes into plate tectonics, volcanic activity, etc. but it's not speculating to make simple summary conclusions about the fact that it is there and that biomass is growing from the energy and being fossilized.

tandempower

Don't be amazed. Just keep paying attention, learning, and thinking critically. Come up with your own conclusions and then subject them to critical scrutiny to see what's wrong with them and why another theory might be better. People who just accept things they read because someone important published them are not getting the most out of science. It's only by thinking things through as thoroughly as you can that you arrive at a really robust and critical sense of what all is at stake in the theories.

Don't let your mind get discouraged by the idea that Einstein and other great minds are lightyears beyond your own. They aren't. They are just people who cared more about the scientific material they were thinking about than other things, so they devoted all their time to keep working through ideas to further refinement. They communicated fruitful thoughts with each other and helped each others' ideas and understandings evolve in this way. They weren't afraid to admit when they were wrong, and in fact they wanted to know asap when they were wrong and why so they could reform their thoughts to take account of new information and reasoning. They simply wanted to get things as right as possible and they knew that it would be a neverending process of refinement. There's nothing wrong with anyone devoting their minds to their own process of refinement. Intellectual honesty goes a long way, so as long as you are open to being wrong, and you stay tentative about your conclusions and extrapolations, you can formulate thoughts such as the one you had about fossil fuel bubbling up from the core.

The big caveat is not to get too romantic about ideas that can turn out to be wrong and/or misguided. Being tentative means being open to the fact that your working model will require revision sooner or later. What's more, be aware that much of what you read is propagated by people with underlying interests. E.g. there are plenty of people who jump on an idea like fossil fuel bubbling up from the core because they see it as a justification for liberalizing fossil fuel mining and usage. They are not so much interested in finding the truth or being tentative as they are in grabbing any theory that rationalizes what they want to do, which is use more energy to make more money and have a more convenient life. That's not science, it's rationalized indulgence.

enigmaT120

Think you're hearing from liberal arts majors?

I-Like-To-Bike

Possibly, more likely college as well as cultural dropouts.

RichSPK

I don't know about all that. I suppose I could, on occasion, be offended by anti-auto sentiments. I like living car-free, but I also love cars, and most things with engines, motors, and/or wheels. I love the health benefits of living car-free, but it's mainly about saving money for me. Being out in the breeze, smelling your environment - that's all great, but I could get that on a motorcycle, too.

It's all good. I just don't see the need to attack cars because you like to live without them. Isn't there room for all of us?

cooker

People who "attack cars" aren't doing it because they "like to live without them", they're doing it because they think cars cause problems.

tandempower

There's really not room for everyone to drive if you consider the congestion and need to stop expanding pavement and reduce it and reforest it where possible. I have always been fascinated by the mechanics of motors and the industrial aspects of designing all these parts and having them fit together so well; but I get very irritated working on cars, all the grease and headaches and expensive specialized parts and tools. I don't like relying on shops, and the costs are always a trap, whether you DIY, take it to a shop, or spend more on a new(er) car so you can get better reliability and/or a warranty. Anyway, I'm done with motorized vehicles except transit, to the extent those are necessary. I have learned to appreciate natural sounds and motor noises drown those out and are generally obnoxious. Plus I've realized that every trip I take is time I have to choose spending on healthy exercise or sitting while a motor gets exercise; so I try to opt for the exercise if possible.

Anyway, the point of the thread isn't whether anti-automotivism is warranted or not, but why people react to it in defense of cars. Why, for example, if I would say there are problems with crime don't people rush to the defense of crime? Just because you like cars doesn't mean you have to attack people who dislike them or criticize them for other reasons. Also, just because you like cars doesn't mean it's good for them to be the primary form of transportation for everyone and all roads and developments should be oriented toward everyone driving and parking. Why don't car lovers realize that if LCF was more popular, the roads would be less crowded and driving would be much more fun and scenic for people who drive, when they drive? It's like we all have to drive and traffic has to keep growing or else everyone will be forced to LCF. That's a completely unrealistic scenario, but that's the level of antagonism some people have toward transportation-reformists; i.e. that they have to defend against the extinction of the automobile by extinguishing any thought that less cars, driving, and roads/highways/lanes/pavement would be better.

RichSPK

There's a lot of ways to answer that question. I'm not particularly invested in the debate (and I don't want to be), so I'll keep it simple. I defend cars because I like them. I don't like crime, generally (everyone can probably think of a law they think is stupid), so I don't defend that.

Roody

Things that people like can be unintentionally destructive. For example, 100 years ago, everybody heated their buildings with coal or wood. That seemed like a right, or it was believed to be the only practical way to make it through the winter. Certainly no harm was intended. But when there were thousands of coal fires burning in a big city, the result was disastrous.

Cars are a lot like that, IMO. They've gotten to be pretty destructive in cities. But at this point most people just can't imagine a way past them.