My point is that if they were serious about protecting the environment, they would promote WFH (for those who can...not everyone can obviously) in addition to EVs. Instead, there seems to be a big push for return to office.

[–] blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Got it. Thanks. It definitely read like you were saying EVs were some secret not as good as you thought it was issue...

When they're pretty damn fantastic at lowering pollution over time.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110016823009055

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I think he was explaining that EVs ARE more efficient, but like everything with industrial capitalism, the idea is that they're solving for:

"How can we increase efficiency, while keeping inefficient traffic jams and pointless office commutes?"

When, if they actually cared for the environment, reducing office commutes in the first place has proven to work wonders in dropping pollution. There's just no psychopathic control and exponential corporate real estate profits involved.

An EV is more efficient than an ICE, but industry wants never-ending constantly-exponentially-growing production and purchasing of EVs, so they can enjoy a future of EV-majority traffic jams, instead of gas and diesel traffic jams.

We'll then get emotional-piano commercials about how they saved the planet by mass producing a product that was mass consumed.

But we could simply not have traffic jams, and everybody knows it. That would make people too happy though, and give them time to think. Like 2020, it would once again be difficult to find people who will put up with corporate nonsense.

Solving problems by putting dents in demand also has a way of making quarterly projections inconvenient. :p

[–] blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

While true I think most people understand that most of our modern economies that sustain billionaire corpos and the stock market are almost purely run by the magic that unstainable growth based gdp. This will always be the case until we work properly on fusion and a Dyson swarm.

We will reach a point when we hit 11 billion people and growth levels off. People will revolt en masse when they realize they can't retire without the magic rich made richer money generation machine that is the stock markets compounding interest. Turns out you'll have to save for a retirement by not magically generating more money from just hoarding it.

Until then, keep putting in your 401k and understand that any large change to an American economy to fix commute problems is going to cost way more than Europe due to our land size and heavily suburbian population centers.

Everyone is down for mass transit until they realize they have to pay for it lol.