only get new big stuff on birthdays and christmas.
This thread started out really interesting, then when the usual suspects arrived it was quickly ruined. I wonder if said usual suspects realise or care how much this constant behaviour annoys and drives other people away from this forum.
TJ is absolutely right about reducing or removing the need to commute. Sadly it isn't always that simple. My case being that I would have to drastically reduce my pay to be able to sustainably commute by foot/bike. And my choice is to not do that as it will negatively impact my life and more importantly the children's lives.
Similarly I can't move closer to my job without then being miles away from my kids. So it isn't that easy, the concept may be simple but reality is not.
Society has evolved to become dependent on cars and it needs to go full circle and get away from that dependence.
Your living in the past trying to apply what worked 20-30 years ago to today.
No I am not. This is the point. to make sufficient changes in order to even slow global warming will take huge lifestyle changes. Making personal attacks on me because you do not like the choices that leaves you with does not alter that.
Yes the UK property market is totally bonkers but I still would not take a job / house where I had to commute by car.
As per the post above this is stinking up the debate. Its not about me. Its about realising that lifestyles need to change and change dramatically or else the planet becomes virtually uninhabitable in your kids lifetimes
the idea that insulation or electric vehicles of similar will do everything needed without major lifestyle change is bogus.
Oh I’m pretty sure. Its shooting the messenger. You cannot refute the validity of my point
No, your point is bobbins, we've worn our fingers out demonstrating why, and you utterly refuse to consider anyone else's viewpoint. You're legendary for not understanding others' points of view - you've said yourself you don't understand other people - so the least you could do is actually try.
How can we all live near where we work? This is simply not geographically possible because there aren't enough houses near workplaces. And everyone hates commuting. We all do what we can to reduce it but sometimes the alternatives are worse.
My wife needed to change jobs. She didn't want to work at Asda so she now drives to a better job. Are you saying she should be working at Asda? What if Asda's not hiring?
Yes the UK property market is totally bonkers but I still would not take a job / house where I had to commute by car.
That would leave millions of people without jobs and millions of unfilled roles in companies, that would then collapse. You're an intelligent man at times TJ I can't understand why you are so incredibly dense on this subject.
Molgrips - because you are missing the point I am making. Its not me that is being dense. You fail to see the point I make here which is that without major lifestyle changes then we can do nothing about global warming. commuting is a large part of the lifestyle changes needed
I give in an will not contribute further
No one has refuted my point with anything other than - " I can't make the changes because I am not willing to change my lifestyle"
TBH, the major lifestyle change would be homelessness with the current state of the job/housing market.
Or maybe bankruptcy.
Or being born 60 years ago. It's not a personal attack it's a fact. Your ideological lifestyle is not widely achievable starting today.
That doesnt mean we shouldn't strive to make things better but the things that worked 30 years ago would mean destitution today due to the nature of modern society....
But it is something to work towards, is it not?
Whilst it might not be achievable here and now for some of us, maybe it is in 5/10 years. When my kids have grownup and if my career path changes from a highly technical role to a management role then I can and will look to work closer to home.
I accept it is my choice and I am not willing to either move from my current location or change jobs to anything I can get my hands on. It is my choice to keep my relatively well paid job and the commute associated with it. However, I fully plan to work towards not commuting by car in the future.
I know people, my other half included, that occasionally or even very often drive to work when they could very easily walk. That is down to convenience, which is were society has evolved to. So now we society needs to continue to evolve and make it easier for people to make more environmentally informed choices.
I'd also be terrified of riding a bike to work as I do not trust road users to care about my safety. So investment in infrastructure and education is vital to this ideology.
What is the average commuter distance?
Of those surveyed, 75% commute less than 10 miles to work, with 20% commuting between 5 and 10 miles to work each day.
Pre-pandemic, 3.58% of those surveyed commuted more than 40 miles to work, compared to 2.69% in 2022.
12% of commuters travel less than a mile to their place of work, compared to 10% pre-pandemic.
From here
So, to summarise, affordable housing is what's needed so people can leave near their work. Pleasant cities that have desirable attributes like green spaces, lack of traffic etc.
Your ideological lifestyle is not widely achievable starting today.
It is you know. You just have to be prepared to make compromises that many of you are unwilling to do. I would have loved a garden and a shed. Because I put a greater emphasis on a car free lifestyle than most that is one of the things I have forgone.
By February next year I'll have worked from home for 25yrs, even with 2 or 3 days a week requiring site visits out & about it is still a very isolating experience that could have unknown knock on effects in society and don't think it should be a model to base future working life on.
No one has refuted my point with anything other than – ” I can’t make the changes because I am not willing to change my lifestyle”
or as I have done bought a small flat in an unfashionable part of the city so as not to have an unsustainable comutte
OK, so which one of these should I live in? These are my choices in the entirety of Edinburgh
Just done a quick Google to see what I could have bought near him in Edinburgh for up to what I paid for my nice 2 bed Victorian flat with a little garden, peaceful location and lovely views.
To my surprise there were 7 properties come on Rightmove. Then I realised that 4 of them were garages and the other 3 were parking spaces
is your flat worth under £150 000? Surprising number of properties in Edinburgh for under that amount. rightmove is poor. Look at ESPC 100 ish properties to choose from in that price range
Barely half that.
Do a search for under £80k...
If the budget will stretch tk £90k I have a choice of two 1 bed flats in the entire city (and which are listed on Rightmove)
My mortgage payments are £274/month with 27 and a bit years to run. Could I rent something in Edinburgh for £274/month? Maybe one of those garages
It is you know. You just have to be prepared to make compromises that many of you are unwilling to do. I would have loved a garden and a shed. Because I put a greater emphasis on a car free lifestyle than most that is one of the things I have forgone.
Your compromise was about a shed/garden vs. a car. Your freedom to make that choice was due to circumstance - don't make it out to be anything more than that as it's simply not true.
If you work in manufacturing, or construction, your place of work will change and quite often - if you have both a house and a family, should you uproot everything? How much time, money and pain does that cause for everyone else? This isn't the 1960/70s/80s/90s when there was a local version of almost everything. There are now 10s and 20s of things in the country that used to exist in the hundreds. Times have changed, society has changed. People have had to move with the change in business and industry to national and regional centre models. People have distributed family groups. You can't fix this by saying/mandating "everyone should live/work locally cos I've done it and it's worked for me for the last 45 years" You @tjagain are an outlier and in a set of datapoints would be eliminated as such.
As others have said, infrastructure is the key here, bike share schemes, safe local routes, enhanced bus and train links. NONE of those are easy to implement, but they're far easier to implement than the pre-internet, oddly bound system you describe and believe should be adopted.
Easy to implement measures should be things that can be implemented by legislation or taxation from a high level and can be done so quickly. If you want to encourage adoption of those things/measures, there should be some economic incentive to do so. People change faster when they believe it's in their own interests, but especially so if it also has some virtuous internet which they can additionally feel good about. Penalising people will have the same effect, but will take longer, especially if the financial penalty is charged weekly or monthly as it's quickly forgotten. Road tax, fuel duty, etc are largely now forgotten due to their ability to pay monthly.
Can I suggest it would be more constructive to make actions to reframe what is an acceptable distance to cycle to work. There's lots that can be done towards this before we force people to move house. Hounding councils over poor cycle infrastructure, embracing low traffic neighbourhoods, forcing employers to provide good storage and changing facilities, Ebike trials (My partner is participating in an ebike trial through work and has gone from cycling 10 miles once every other week to having not used the car at all in October). All of these things are at the lowest end of the scale compared to lots of mainland Europe.
Plus, try not to forget that in 2019 transport was only 27% of UK emissions, yet it's the topic people most focus on. Eating veggie, reducing consumption, buying second hand and fixing things can all have a big impact, especially if you count all the emissions we have offshored to big manufacturing countries.
FWIW it's mildly infuriating to have older generations (who knew about the problem for decades and did nothing!) tell us it's all our fault and we must live within sight of work and **** trying to find any pleasure in life beyond the grind.
Plus, try not to forget that in 2019 transport was only 27% of UK emissions, yet it’s the topic people most focus on.
Transport emissions are largely unchanged since the 90's though and now make up the largest portion of UK emissions. Industry emissions in particular have dropped off sharply, partly due to there being much less industry anyway and partly because what is left is much cleaner now than it was (or has changed type from manufacturing to things like finance)
Transport though has stayed broadly the same. Cars have got cleaner but there are far more of them. Van traffic in particular is up quite a significant amount.
It really is transport that needs focussing on. You're right about cycling as well, that is the answer to so much of the problems - health, cost of living, pollution, congestion, parking...
FWIW it’s mildly infuriating to have older generations (who knew about the problem for decades and did nothing!) tell us it’s all our fault and we must live within sight of work and **** trying to find any pleasure in life beyond the grind.
x1000000
A suggestion away from the travel debate - regulate landlords to insulate their rentals to a very high level. Renters have no control over how much fuel they use when landlords are trying to maximise their own assets. That's 11 years so far for me where I've had no option other than to turn the heating up. The number of rentals missing even the most basic things like double glazing is shocking.
rsl1
Insulation of buildings is a good one. In Scotland we are supposed to have an energy efficiency cert for any flat for let. No one pays any attention
FWIW my rental is insulated by me at great cost to almost passivhaus standards. My tenant paid £30 for last winters heating. That cost me many thousands to do and I get nothing back from it
Insulation is a key component
but they’re far easier to implement than the pre-internet, oddly bound system you describe and believe should be adopted.
I have described no system. I have pointed out that moving people around inefficiently is one key area to make carbon savings.
I actually as initially stated would move to a carbon based tax so the polluter pays. As a result of that other things will be solved over time.
Daffy - those circumstances are the result of choices made - and FWIW both Mrs TJ and I changed jobs multiple times without moving
Insulation is a huge issue for both businesses and households. I’d love to do more with my house but simply can’t afford to. I think a lot of people are in the same boat.
Ok just stop now.
You had a set of circumstances that you made to your advantage - great, well done you. But we cannot all do those things. We try to explain this to you, you refuse to acknowledge anything anyone else says to explain why they do what they do (which is pretty obnoxious by the way). For that reason it's absolutely pointless so we should move on.
Whats obnoxious Molgripos is people refusing to make any compromises in their lifestyle and attempting to claim I have said things I have not.
Anything to reduce pollution is shot down as not possible because "I NEED to do this"
What that attitude means is an uninhabitable planet in your childrens lifetimes
Fiddling around the edges will not be enough. We need major lifestyle changes all round. Even my lifestyle is unsustainable.
But we cannot all do those things.
Yes you can if you are prepared to make compromises in your lifestyle. This is the point. Few folk are willing to make the changes needed.
It would need huge economic change to implement what you suggest TJ. If everyone attempted to do as you suggest house prices would rocket in some areas, there would be skills shortages in others and it would need proper planning from a governmental level.
I agree with what you are saying it’s just not possible for everyone to do as things stand today.
Yes you can if you are prepared to make compromises in your lifestyle
Change career from engineering to nursing by the sounds of it, and get rid of the kids.
I'd love to have a time machine.
My mortgage payments are £274/month with 27 and a bit years to run. Could I rent something in Edinburgh for £274/month? Maybe one of those garages
Maybe TJ could rent you one of his properties, after all he said he was renting them out for below market value?
Transport though has stayed broadly the same. Cars have got cleaner but there are far more of them. Van traffic in particular is up quite a significant amount.
I'll often be in one of those vans on my way into London, for example.
A lot of our jobs require bulky equipment but sometimes we can take the bare minimum and use public transport.
Most sites/facilities companies insist you cannot use their equipment (stepladders for example) which means dragging a van into the centre of a city, for the sake of some stepladders.
Maybe a push towards access equipment becoming the facilities/clients responsibility.
Also stop buying/making crap that can't be viably repaired.
A ban on bottled water
Or at least only making it available for sale in the country of origin.
San Pellegriono, Evian, Volvic, Perrier - nope
Highland Spring, Buxton, Brecon Carreg - yes
Cirrect funkmaster. It requires massive coordinated change over a generation. The problem is so big that fiddling around the edges will do nothing significant
I find it intensively frustration that folk will not grasp this and also always
Say it wont work because they are not willi g to compromise
Going back insulation. Thats a winner with few losers. Massive subsidised programme of insulation and all new houses to be thermally efficient. Pay for it by consumption / carbon taxes.
TJ -this thread was about EASY TO IMPLEMENT CHANGES - Nothing you've described was constructive AT ALL. You've suggested changing jobs and careers, moving house, going back in time to revisit "choices". How is any of that EASY to implement on a societal level?
Also - WRT your "choices" - Did you decide to live car free as soon as you started your career? You didn't and we both know it. Your happenstance choices of education, first job, second job, availability of work, where you chose to buy/rent, market dynamics and MANY MANY other things dictated that you had the later ability to enabled you to live car free - It's not the same thing, it wasn't planned like that, it worked out like that as did other people's lives, but in different ways.
I mentioned it earlier in the thread and so have others. Two of the simplest things we can all easily do are.
1: Look at where your pensions and savings are invested and change them to sustainable/ethical equivalents. Make your money work for change.
2: Cut down on meat consumption, particularly cow. The carbon footprint of animal agriculture is huge. Land, growing of crops for feed, rearing the animals, the methane they produce etc.
I’ve done both and it took little to zero effort.
If you look at ‘success’ in life in a purely biological way then if you don’t pass your genetic material on, then what is the point?
I hate people who think like this. What is the point of them? They're so myopic in their worldview that they actually detract from the cultural richness of the world 🙂
The fact is didnthurt - there are too many humans for the planet to support. We can run about 1/3rd of the size of the global population if we are to be sustainable (and that's not got much margin).
I don't advocate banning people from having more than one kid. But 100% we should not be subsidising these people - and they are responsible for their selfish choices - having children puts a strain on the planet, intelletually we can undersand this - and intellectual knowledge trumps any animal instincts we may (or may not) have.
The single biggest thing you can do for the planet is not have kids. Because you not only eliminate a whole lifetime of their consumption - but you also eliminate the consumption of their potential children too. That's a hell of a saving for the global ecosystem.
So one kid. Reduce global population in a sustainable fashion. Get it down to about 2.5-3bn. And ramp up taxes on people who, selfishly, want more than one kid. They can have them, sure, but it should cost them - because they're taking from everyone else.
The single biggest thing you can do for the planet is not have kids. Because you not only eliminate a whole lifetime of their consumption – but you also eliminate the consumption of their potential children too. That’s a hell of a saving for the global ecosystem.
their consumption is likely to be different to ours. I attended the Manchester Green Summit the other week. The most passionate and vocal of the speakers were two young people. They’re the ones that will sort this shitshow out, not us.
Also some of the most over populated areas are the ones with the lowest carbon footprint per person. The affluent West has a huge impact and is mostly responsible for turning the rest of the world in to a factory/warehouse. Taking ownership of the issue is the biggest thing we can do, full stop. Start making change now!
Implementing a one child policy is neither simple or quick. It’s probably the most likely topic to cause large swathes of the population to disengage from the subject of climate change and that’s not the best place to start. Isn’t population in the UK declining anyway?
You had a set of circumstances that you made to your advantage – great, well done you. But we cannot all do those things.
Actually, looking at @Tjagain's arguments - we can, but we just don't want to, because we'd end up living somewhere we hate.
But we can.
It's a stupid argument though - we need to be redesigning cities and rethinking the siting of our workplaces - and that comes from joined-up thinking from government.
Which, considering we've just effectively outsourced our government to Infosys, ain't ever going to happen.
Aaaanyway. The first and most obvious solution, as some people have intimated, is insulation.
It's cheap, it's achieveable and it needed to be done 30 years ago when campaigners started jumping up and down about it. (Or we could have started this in the 1960's when scientists started pointing out the obvious).
The real fact is this:
We don't make it as a species. The reason we never heard from aliens despite a universe that seems ripe for life evolving is that they, like us, evolve in a darwinian fashion, they get to our level of technological sophistication - a level of sophistication and complexity that we are not intellectually evolved to handle.
Then we all make ourselves extinct.
If you dispute that then I present for evidence: This very thread.
their consumption is likely to be different to ours. I attended the Manchester Green Summit the other week. The most passionate and vocal of the speakers were two young people. They’re the ones that will sort this shitshow out, not us.
I left university over 30 years ago. Environmental based degree - there were 50 year old lecturers lamenting the fact that when they went to university nobody was listening to them then on subjects such as population control and the environment.
Your argument kicks the can down the road. Kids are not going to sort shit out - because we've left it too late. We needed to do this 30 years ago but we didn't. We need less humans, period - and having more humans is NOT having less humans.
Education? Yep - we've educated kids to be passionate about the environment. But the hypocritical little buggers are consuming more than anyone ever did - so it's not really anything but lip-serivce to the problem. The minute they get asked to make lifestyle changes - huge sweeping lifestyle changes - they're like the rest of us. We won't do it.
So we need less humans. And that starts with having less of them, not more.
Start making change now!
Yes. By taxing the shit out of people who want more than one kid. By raising living standards in the "developing" world (because nothing has been proven to be a better contraceptive than having better things to do than have kids to support you).
7.98 billion people in the world. We need to lose about 5 billion of them. No ifs, no buts.
And that starts with not having flipping more of them.
Did you decide to live car free as soon as you started your career? You didn’t and we both know it.
Pretty much yes. I was living car free before i trained. Sorry you are wrong on that one. This has been a key thing for me for a long time. Working in healthcare was partly do e fir easy availability of work
Living car free has been planned since i left school
Easy solutions that are acceptable to the majority do not exist. This is one of the things i am trying to get over. Only radical change across the world will do
Without raducal change then the planet becomes uninhabitable
7.98 billion people in the world. We need to lose about 5 billion of them. No ifs, no buts.
No we don't. We can support many more if we manage things better. It depends on what your priorities are.
Also, limiting ourselves to two kids each will achieve population decline, we don't have to stop having kids entirely.
