Grand River Transit

[dtkvictim]

And yeah, families DO want to have a livable planet for their children. But guess what, NOTHING we do will make a difference. All it will do is make people live elsewhere, and depress the economy. We’re a small country population wise, with a huge area. We’re not the problem. And I have been preaching, and no parishioners obviously, cars will be mostly electric in the future.

You make some valid points about understanding why others think the way they do, but I feel like this part totally undercuts your argument.

Canada has terrible per-capita emissions, and electric vehicles aren't going to change that. Only a fundamental change to a more dense urban form, more European, will do that. Saying that it's pointless and we can't do anything is EXACTLY the problem. Per-capita we're a terrible emitter of CO2. So unless you have justification for why Canadians should be entitled to more CO2 than other countries, we need to be taking action.

Whether people want car-dependent suburbs or not is as irrelevant as whether people want private jets or not, it's not something we can afford for every person. Our CO2 budget is as real as our economic budget, people just don't like to be told that.

To be clear, I don't fault people for owning cars. I own one too (though an EV, as even if not a solution, they are better). But at a societal level, we need to be making changes to how we build our cities.

I sometimes wonder about this, how valid per-capita emissions are as a measurement of responsibility. If Canada set a specific limit on emissions per capita, it would be fine for a businessperson to make frequent flights as long as someone else (or many other people) in the country have below average emissions to balance it out. But how about globally? Should one country be allowed to have higher per capita emissions if another country is below average? What about emissions per land area? What is the correct measurement? Do we not care about total emissions, just per capita?

If the pope flew a private jet around all the time, the Vatican would have massive per capita emissions, but it would probably be fairly sustainable. So, maybe governments regulating emissions should be taking the size of the population they govern into context. If a country specifically chooses not to grow their population (a luxury most developed countries have available to them, and developing countries could do more on this front though it's more complicated...), but maintains their per capita emissions, then they are doing better than a country that lowers their per capita emissions but grows their population at an even faster rate.

Now of course, Canada wants to grow it's populate at a rate I strongly disagree with, as our population size is probably the single most effective tool we have to lower our total emissions.