Yeah I’m in Germany so my context is somewhere in between and here the projects that improve my life the most is when cars don’t get to/need to travel on the streets as much, this can either be through modal filters, removing car lanes or just banning cars (with the usual delivery window in the morning and such). And they are starting to get to the kind of streets where you could go 100km/h (in terms of size) that are in practice 50km/h, and are now getting them down to 30 (taking 1 of 2 car lanes and giving it to bikes as well as adding obstacles to indicate slower speeds). So it’s doable and of course it takes time, but with a bit of luck it might be faster than some Americans imagine it could be.

So of course bike lanes along mayor roads (corridors) make sense, and it can be a good starting point to get a skeleton network in place, which then can Kickstart intersection redesigns and traffic calming, wherever it’s reasonable around it. To me the best bike paths don’t go along roads though, they are the “recreational” paths that still connect things. Cutting through a patch of Forrest or a park, going along the waterfront, parallel to a tramway or rail corridor or just along/through the fields. These are probably also politically cheaper than some other measures, but you run the risk of building a thing that just connects nothing because there is no real infrastructure on either end.

I feel like Americans think they are 60+ years behind when they are probably only 30-40, if the attitude turns somewhat sharply, either just in your local area or more generally, maybe just 15-25.

A lot of this stuff is monetarily very cheap, depending on how desperately you wanted change the actual infrastructure you’d need, would boil down to planters, bollards, cones, maybe hay bails or large stones/concrete pieces. The problem with that stuff is that it’s only possible with the right opportunity politically, otherwise your traffic calming might get bulldozed by police or something.

I sorta agree and sorta don’t, all streets should be 30km/h or less and shared traffic, everything else should be with bike lanes. Streets meaning a piece of infrastructure that provides access to places lining it, not a piece of infrastructure for longer distance travel.

The Netherlands is good not because there is a bike lane on every street but because all the streets with destinations (private homes, business, schools)are connected by bike lanes as well as roads, often more and more direct bike lanes.

There are a lot of areas where cars bikes and sometimes pedestrians share the same space both in inner cities and in residential neighborhoods, it’s just that they aren’t through roads for cars or at least very very slow ones, while they are often through roads for bikes and peds.

Probably because trains are limited in both weight and volume compared to ships and also less efficient. If you have this short route and know it’ll need this amount of cargo shipped it likely makes sense.

This single ship can carry more containers than any train could be expected to pull, likely by at least one order of magnitude.

All in all I’d guess the advantages are roughly:

• Reduced staff
• reduced energy use (land based shipping is less efficient almost by default)
• no need for infrastructure except ports (if you assume there is no train line or this shipping would move existing lines over capacity building this ship is likely cheaper or at least in line with 300km of rail)
• simpler logistics (loading / unloading)

Disadvantages:

• Speed (a train would likely move at 3-5x the speed)

I would also not expect the risk for catastrophic fires to be all that high. This ship has the batteries be containers. So once you’ve designed a container that is a large battery, you’ve already spent so much that a proper BMS including proper battery fire suppression as well as proper breakers/contractors are things you’ve built into it without even thinking about cost. The separation provided by building containers as the battery is the next line of defence if one container fails spectacularly, it also allows the batteries to be maintained on land, much cheaper than if they were part of the ship.

But only for the 4 weeks a year you spend in unusually cold weather, the other 48 it’s more efficient.

It’s not like truly arctic places are a reasonable application but the overwhelming majority of our population lives south of Quebec and north of Wellington. So it’s not a relevant point, everyone in the Arctic can just use resistive heating or burn fuel, and if we get everything else on heat pumps we reduce our enegy use by a factor of 2-3 regardles.

Isn’t the former very naturally part of the latter though ? And doesn’t the article also raise that point as well? Fundamentally it’s an idea that often gets interpreted through both those lenses because it could help with both conflicts, which is also what by definition is it’s purposely trying to accomplish, the first explicitly and the second is implicit in

… within planetary boundaries.

This connection I think should be embraced because climate change is more attractive as a topic to most people than critiques of capitalism but obviously one leads naturally into the other. Saying that degrowth aims to address climate change is more just a description of partial content rather than a mischaracterization and the body of the article tries reasonably to explain other parts as well, less work and better well being are right there in the title, both not a dishonest description of other parts of the philosophy.

After all no one that accepts degrowth as a concept would answer the question “Should we degrow to combat climate change ?” with a “No” All answers would be “yes and …” or “yes but …”

At the end of the day Vice writing will never be perfect but nowadays for genpop media outlets it tries much harder than most to paint an honest picture of the world, and calling this article a mischaracterization seems to me a little harsh, if you’ve never heard of it the article certainly could honestly teach and spark interest for a this “new” way of thinking, and you need just one word to google to get more rigorous explanation if you wanted it.

No because assets and their place in capitalist enterprise represent control. I.e. an owner has fundamental rights to use workers according to the owners needs, and the owner also has the option to advertise and otherwise facitate propagand and take part in political process, including lobbying and corruption to affect circumstances outside of their direct control for example customer demand and government regulation, all of this control is proportional to the absolute wealth of that person family or group.

Obviously this is not to say the owners are in full control of all of their workers and assets individually, it’s just that they decide the system that all workers must use and this has an obvious effect on the things these workers do.

So the useful metric is certainly not pollution per $/person but one that is proportional in some way to the total wealth.

Sure this control can be mutually beneficial for the owner and the society at large, but it’s pretty clear now that with fossil enterprise especially, this is not the case, control gained from extracting an unfortunate life necessity from the ground, a resource that is set to destroy life on the planet as we know it, should not be able to be used for anything but to replace itself as quickly as possible, the tactic for the last 50 years from these owners was the opposite.

This culture/philosophy has been created over time and is called liberalism, it follows follows from the reformation (of the church) and feeds off support from capitalists(and political allies) themselves. This culture that upholds hard work as virtuous and discourages compassion is being taught to almost everyone even though it doesn’t mesh with the real world all that well. Especially what is commonly believed to be the result of hard work is more often than not inheritance or sheer luck.

Yes we all propagate this culture nowadays, but it isn’t actually part of humanity(in some human nature way) it’s just very ingrained propaganda.Some mainland Chinese people might have a very different ingrained culture regarding these things.

Nah Change isn’t scary, maximizing any single concern in the real world is just too shortsighted. Also not accepting transit or bikes as a part of walk-ability is just confused. Last month I traveled ~400km 206 bike 180 transit and just 8km on foot and 1km in a car. The 180km transit were traveled in a time slightly longer than the 8km walking. This travel is only for maintaining social connections, I don’t commute and I have 2 Supermarkets on my street still it is very important to me to be able to move in this way. Even if I could easily find new friends or get my family to move so close walking would be viable, still travel would be important to me just to experience a diverse collection of places and people. Nobody in a modern Context will ever consider a few km a far distance, you can feasibly walk 40+km in a single day bike 140+km in a day and take a train almost 2000km in a day, its nonsensical to discard the later two just because they use technology, especially in places where this technology exist.

Sure generally I agree splitting and localizing things might be part of a way to more equitable wealth distribution but at the same time, for some essential industries it is largely impossible, just because of the limitations physics gives us. We should take control from the owners of these industries and hand it over to the workers for real democratic control and not destroy thermally efficient production processes. Because thermal efficiency is actually not the same as profit, which is the primary reason for wealth inequality. But I get it even the slightest threat to property rights is scary :P

There are many problems with the idea that every community should be so maximally walkable that you don’t need any other modes of transit. Some urban uses like parks require local low density in an urban setting and they can easily get large enough where 20min walking barely gets you across. Also the social network of people even just including the closest friends and family usually even in dense cities spreads out at least a few km. Also super tall buildings aren’t actually particularly efficient. Also some services greatly benefit from a certain centrality that can never be in walkable reach for all people of large cities e.g. universities or other more specialised institutions. Transit and bikes are huge enablers for people to freely live their life as they see fit, and some level of global interconnectedness is probably needed forever. Build one efficient medical supplier, steel mill, semiconductor FAB or generally any larger factory and walkability is immediately gone just because these facilities need lots of space, and their entire supply chain would be much less (thermally/CO2/resource) efficient if we were to split theses factories to enable local production.

With how flawed the US democracy is and with how often the US undermines democracy in especially south America. What the US understands as a danger to democracy is more often than not a danger to neoliberalism, Cuba gets sanctioned while Saudi Arabia is embraced doesn’t really speak for the pursuit of furthering democracy.

Also the US has no one actually holding it accountable internationally, just because of military and economic might, so their leaders seem to think their forgein policy is reasonable, while it mostly is a disaster. Sure in Ukraine they are supporting a war where they have justifiable reason to do so, but this recently hasn’t been the case in Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq or Vietnam earlier. Militarily forcing democracy and/or neoliberalism on countries doesn’t really work.

Yep the comments on that article are garbage for sure. Here in the EU it is at least pretty common that non citizens can vote in local elections, at the very least citizens of other EU countries. And I don’t really see a reason third country immigrants shouldn’t also be allowed in these elections. Citizenship is pretty arbitrary, access to democratic institutions really shouldn’t be arbitrary, especially if these institutions are very important for the people who can’t vote for them.