For my own part, my family's carbon footprint used to be quite large when we lived in a suburb...better defined as an ex-urb, since it was a 2 mile drive into town. I had to drive 50 miles/80 km to get to work each day, so we always had to have two cars in running condition. Since we were still paying a mortgage and my wife had to stop working for health reasons, the shear costs of suburban life were more than I could afford. So, although I didn't really want to live in the city where I work, we moved to an older neighbourhood where I could ride my bike or run the 3 miles to and from work. So, our one remaining car gets a tank-full every two or three weeks.
If I had my way, I wouldn't even keep one car! I know a lot of people...especially younger people, are in love with their cars and would sacrifice almost everything to keep them, but car culture has to be phased out if we are ever going to have a sustainable future. It's not just a matter of switching to battery-powered electric cars; we are running out of the resources that are needed to keep building millions of new cars every year, and then there is the huge carbon footprint of building and maintaining roads and highways. When I was young, the vision of the future (back then the year 2000) was that we would be traveling from city to city on high-speed rail, but the special interests behind subsidizing car culture has made sure that rail continued to decline -- even for transporting freight! If it wasn't for the special interests involved, it would be easy to make the conversion to a post-auto era. And it should be done now, before civilization itself collapses, and we are back to an age when people rarely, if ever left their own villages where they grew up!
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