|
|
Blog Feeds
Anti-Empire
The Saker Indymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.
Lockdown Skeptics
Voltaire NetworkVoltaire, international edition
|
international / environment Friday September 20, 2019 00:43 by 1 of indy
An earlier version of this article was written but unpublished back in 2008 and it has now been revised and published to take account of various changes since then. The case is made for the provision of free public transport in every major town and city worldwide for a multitude of reasons. It has always been a good idea and should have been done a long time ago, but now with three major issues of our time; resource depletion, including oil, pollution and the climate crisis; they make it imperative that we move to such a system, both to conserve dwindling supplies of cheap energy, to reduce the use of vast mineral resources to make hundreds of millions of cars and to dramatically reduce our carbon emissions because climate change is happening faster than expected.
Are buses the future instead of the electric car? Heresy?
The Earth's climate has turned out to be more sensitive and complex than anticipated as evidenced by the recent dramatic record breaking summer ice melts in the Arcticc1 in 2007, 2008, 2012 and basically every year since then. With such a large change in the albedo or reflectivity over a huge area of the Arctic, this signifies the jump into positive feedback of the climate system, although it is not the only positive feedback. Combined with preliminary reports that frozen methane is beginning to be released from the Arctic sea floor and tundra and given that methane is 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas, it is clear we are probably at the point of things running out of control. Emissions need to be cut drastically, starting about 20 years ago. 
Maybe global warming is happening after all ....
Arctic sea ice, going going,..gone? Moving to free and well-designed public transport allows society to deal with these problems in the least disruptive manner and to do so in the most equitable way and it would increase the shared sense of everyone working together to cope with what are essentially going to be permanent problems. Free public transport is not the full solution but is definitely an important first step. Switching to public transport has the potential to achieve large scale reductions in fuel use and it can be done immediately without further research or perfection of any technology. The current status quo plan to replace all the petrol and diesel fuelled cars with electric ones still leaves us with the problem of massive resource usage, a replacement of oil wars for lithium wars, traffic congestion, deaths from air pollution , high accident rates and actually high energy use. It does not matter if the heavily promoted so called solution of producing millions of electric cars is run on renewable energy because it would require vastly more wind farms, solar farms and whatever else compared to a transport solution based on highly efficient, globally deployed free public transport system which would only require a fraction of energy and resources of a car based one.
Full Story & Comments >>
 4 images
Promoted Headlines SHOCK: Israel Has Killed 20.7% of Gaza's Population. That's 434,000 People. Sat Jul 26, 2025 |
Wed 08 Oct, 19:25
Fraud and mismanagement at University College Cork Thu Aug 28, 2025 18:30 | Calli Morganite Deliberate Design Flaw In ChatGPT-5 Sun Aug 17, 2025 08:04 | Mind Agent AI Reach: Gemini Reasoning Question of God Sat Aug 02, 2025 20:00 | Mind Agent Israeli Human Rights Group B'Tselem finally Admits It is Genocide releasing Our ... Fri Aug 01, 2025 23:54 | 1 of indy China?s CITY WIDE CASH SEIZURES Begin ? ATMs Frozen, Digital Yuan FORCED Overnig... Wed Jul 30, 2025 21:40 | 1 of indy |
1 video file 3 attached files 
1 audio file 
|
