I just don’t buy this zero sum “every dollar helping vehicle electrification hurts public transport” idea. In fact, I think this zero sum idea is actively harmful.

Every year, our society spends VAST amounts on fossil fuels and fossil fuel vehicles. THAT is the real problem. Anything spent on electric vehicles is minuscule in comparison because every single new internal combustion car sold, about 60 tons of CO2 is released from the gasoline burned, in addition to manufacturing. It is conventional cars that compete with electric cars, NOT public transport. In fact, people who live in places where public transport or bikes (whose CO2 emissions per mile depend on not having a high beef diet) is not an option, such as many suburbs, are where electric vehicles are most suitable (can charge at home).

You’re making claims that people will, in the 10 years we have left to fully decarbonize, majority move out of the suburbs and into denser areas that are bike friendly and can have good public transport is absurd. Firstly, there’s nowhere for them to move into as prices in denser areas are often higher, so we’d have to kick off a massive apartment building campaign starting NOW (with all the cement emissions that implies… and cement is decarbonization resistant). Second, are we asking people (as most people in the US own homes) to abandon a massive $250k investment just to pay rent in an apartment? If everyone moves out of the suburbs on timescale you think, there’ll be no one to buy that house… it’ll just rot or will have to be torn down. Houses can last over 100 years (mine was built in 1919), much longer than cars, so you’re wasting the embodied emissions of the house. Thirdly, people often LIKE living in the suburbs with large yards (I live in a small duplex in a dense neighborhood with a small yard, but it’s clear that having more space has advantages), and this totally unrealistic idea that we can force everyone into a dense cityscape in just a decade or so is bananas. The political pushback would be enormous.

So the only option is to encourage densification on the margins (by getting rid of parking mandates, getting rid of local zoning that bans duplexes and multiplexes, etc), funding public transport infrastructure and bike infrastructure (which is cheap) to stop sprawl while decarbonizing people in-place. That “factor of 2” emissions for living in the suburbs is only because of building energy costs and commuting, which can both be decarbonized much cheaper (via heat pumps, solar panels, and electric vehicles) than the cost of abandoning a $250k house for more expensive and more cramped urban housing. PLUS you won’t have the massive political cost of taking the middle class’s most valuable asset and making it worthless while also forcing everyone to change their lifestyle.

The whole “electric cars are bad, ACKSHUALLY” argument relies on a chain of thought that is absolutely absurd when you look at the political capital it would take to achieve on the timescales we’re talking about.

Regardless, there would STILL BE CARS. Japan, the Netherlands, and every other large developed nation that is put up as a model of public transport STILL has a heck of a lot of cars per capita, much higher than we can afford to be fossil fuel run in a decarbonized future. Best case is we get rid of half of all cars with the rest electric. We are currently at like 1% electric, and the consumers who buy from biggest manufacturers in the US (GM and Tesla) don’t even get federal tax credits for their vehicles as those companies already used theirs up, so you argument that electric cars are bad because of competition for tax dollars already is shown to be false. We need to get to 50% electric in the BEST CASE SCENARIO of bike and public transport centric decarbonization, and ban the rest. We are not going NEARLY fast enough and many states have now added EV taxes that are HIGHER than the equivalent state gas tax. Plus, actual business (meaning practical things like contractors who do plumbing, bring food to market, etc) need electric vehicles as well which must be decarbonized, as well as all buses and trains and mining vehicles and semi trucks and whathaveyou needing if you be electric, so the whole sector needs a massive push.

Normies understand this better than too-online degrowthers who think you’ll be able to convince the politically diverse America to abandon the suburbs in a freaking decade and all take trains (which require expensive infrastructure that America takes literally decades to build), buses, and bikes. There is no plausible world where that happens outside of hellscape authoritarianism. We must decarbonize in-place with solutions that don’t require everyone to get on the same exact page lifestyle-wise within a decade.

(And a side note on zero sum thinking about climate change solutions: we need to decarbonize so fast and spend a LOT of money to do it, so even if we DID want to spend it all in one sector, we’d run out of qualified people to do the work and machines capable of building the thing, ie you’re supply-constrained and so you’d get massive cost inflation. Spreading the money over several solutions at once, however, prevents that from happening as those who build cars & heat pumps are different from those who build railroads and trains and multiplexes. So we SHOULDN’T put all our money on just electric cars or public transport or whathaveyou, but actually spend it on a wide spread of solutions to be most optimal & enable the fastest decarbonization. This is in addition to all the other arguments above. It is NOT zero sum.)