They don't want to admit it because it's not clear it's true. Except perhaps for cars, because we need to drastically reduce vehicle miles travelled as we can't swap out our fleet fast enough and transportation miles are the biggest, hardest to solve sector of US emissions. Personally, if regulations allowed more living without cars, I think we would all have massively higher quality of life. The suburban lifestyle of living on a tiny island that can only be left with a car has drastically reduced most people's health, left them isolated, and has effects like making it so kids no longer play in streets. Allowing more people to live in neighborhoods where their daily errands and school drop offs could be met by short walking or biking trips would drastically improve their quality of life, instead of piling the family into the SUV and spending hours in traffic everyday.
For the rest of the word, we are having that massive technological innovation right now that will increase quality of life globally. For electrifying the developing world, micro grids with renewables and storage will be immensely cheaper than building our massive transmission grids and large centralized production.
Industrial sectors have the least clear path to decarbonizations, as well as sea-freight and flight, but if we can solve electricity and transportation in the next decade we have a few years so solve these far smaller sources of emissions.
There is a lot of reason to be worried, but there's also a ton of reasons to be hopeful. GDP is already decoupling from emissions, and I think as we decouple it further, we will find a higher quality of life for the vast majority of people, both in developed or developing nations.
It's not going to be a dystopia, and yes, urban design/zoning in the US is absolutely terrible. I hate it. I could rant about it for hours.
But if we have to drastically reduce ground freight and shipping emissions to reduce co2 emissions enough, which we do, goods will be more expensive. And it's also not free to switch private cars to EVs. If goods in general are more expensive, then peoples' money goes less far.
To be clear, I am in favor of this. Maybe you can make the very wealthy eat the cost, but somebody has to pay for it, and I can't see how it doesn't result in lower mean quality of life.
Average age of a car in the US is 12 years. The fleet gets swapped out naturally pretty quickly, and slight incentives would accelerate that. It's faster than swapping out electric generating capacity.
The other side of that is that we can't ramp EV production quickly enough to cause that swap out to happen any time soon, at least as far as I understand the industry.
If we are at 100% of new vehicles being electric in 2030, I'd be surprised but also ecstatic.
For the rest of the word, we are having that massive technological innovation right now that will increase quality of life globally. For electrifying the developing world, micro grids with renewables and storage will be immensely cheaper than building our massive transmission grids and large centralized production.
Industrial sectors have the least clear path to decarbonizations, as well as sea-freight and flight, but if we can solve electricity and transportation in the next decade we have a few years so solve these far smaller sources of emissions.
There is a lot of reason to be worried, but there's also a ton of reasons to be hopeful. GDP is already decoupling from emissions, and I think as we decouple it further, we will find a higher quality of life for the vast majority of people, both in developed or developing nations.