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You're listening to A Climate Change this is Matt Matern, your host I've got Daniel Knowles, Midwest correspondent for The economist and author of Carmageddon, how cars make life worse, and what to do about it. Welcome to the show, Daniel, thank you for having me on that. Looking forward to Daniel, tell us a bit about your journey to writing this book, what brought you to the point where you felt compelled to write it.

So I think this book kind of began in my head maybe five or six years ago, and I was I was living and working in Nairobi, in Kenya at the time, The Economist, one of the Africa correspondents, and it was the first time in my life that I'd really been dependent on a car to get around this kind of all Mitsubishi and spent my entire kind of life living around traffic jams, working around traffic jams, dealing, you know, cars, parking, Hanks drive all the time, in a place where actually the majority of people can't afford to have a car.

And but the city that you know, has ever more roads being built and new expressways and bypasses designed to kind of get people around in their cars. And yet the traffic stays pretty much as bad.

How much Vicky building cars go up. And it seemed to me an incredibly kind of dysfunctional way for a city to work. And after that I lived in Mumbai. And then I moved back to London, and it was around them when pandemic hit that I kind of began, began working on the scenario back to London and living on my bike, I'd realized how much I appreciated being able to get around without a vehicle and began thinking you know, a lot about sort of, kind of the way in which cars and reliance on cars and making cars are kind of primary means of transport creates all of these other problems.

And climate change is one of the most urgent ones, but there's an awful lot of other things, but how they affect the way we live our lives that I think is quite negative overall. And so that's sort of the web the web book, isn't it, it comes out early next year. It's now written and finished. So it's been it's been a great fun to kind of work on it.

Well, I you know, it's fascinating, I mean, maybe we will go down both paths in terms of the emissions issues related to cars, but also the quality of life issues that are related to having a car based society.

So how big of a deal our cars in relationship to the whole problem of global warming was so depends how you measure it, I mean, by pretty much any measure a lot, you know, so transports makes up something like a quarter of CO2 emissions in the US, and I think it's kind of similar globally. And a very large share of that is vehicles.

And it's the only shared that enrich countries has been growing kind of continuously, you know, we've most rich countries have sort of managed quite successfully to reduce the intensity of carbon emissions from industry and from electricity generation, that sort of thing. But we're burning evermore gasoline in our vehicles, and that's producing more CO2. So it's a good chunk kind of directly. And then on top of that, you have the way in which kind of cars and car dependent living sort of forces to live.

So when you have, you know, very sprawling, car centric sorts of cities, places like Houston, or Los Angeles, where you people live farther apart, they have to go further distances to get everywhere. So they're going further, they're also tend to, you know, have homes that are less energy efficient for, you know, bigger homes that are that are less well insulated, so people heating.

So it kind of indirectly causes an awful lot more emissions to live, you'll see if you look at the average New Yorker, they consume, they produce something like 60% Less CO2 overall per head, then, you know, then the average American overall and some of that is just directly that they're driving less, but an awful lot of it is stuff that's only possible, because they're driving less because they live in a more dense kind of urban environment.

So sort of directly quite a lot. And then indirectly, it's really, you know, the vast majority of carbon emissions anyway. Well, it's fascinating that those two problems are intertwined so much, how does reliance on vehicles add more to carbon emissions than say, taking mass transit?

Well, it's just, you know, you're moving a lot more around so you need to use a lot more energy, you know?

So that's the first thing you have have, you know, a car is maybe, you know, three or 4000 pounds of weight, that that takes a lot of energy to move it. So right now we're getting that energy from from burning gasoline, and you're moving, you know, 7,10, or 20 pounds of metal or something for every pound of passenger. So, whereas, you know, train or a bus is sort of full of passengers, so, you know, moves a lot more people per vehicle.

So, you know, so just straightforwardly cars are less efficient at moving people than mass transit. The other thing is that, you know, when we have kind of when everybody's got their own car, you need a lot more land used for parking, for road space, people are going further distances, everyone's further apart. So the distances also a lot longer people traveling further, in more kind of polluting vehicles. So it's sort of when you have these cities, like most American cities, where kind of everybody or you know, the vast majority of people have their own private vehicle to get around, it's a very energy intensive way of living.

And the bulk of that energy comes from, you know, from fossil fuels. So in terms of take a city like Chicago, where you're living and where I happen to be currently, and where I grew up, it has a fairly robust public transit system, but most people don't actually use it. How do you deal with that situation in order to take advantage of the public transportation that's in place, so you get more people out of their cars?

Well, right. So Chicago is probably one of the better cities in the US, you know, certainly the kind of Top Top Thrill for in terms of the ability to live without car, and I live without a car here. And you can see there was actually a study published recently by the University of California looking at kind of emissions in urban and suburban areas across the US. And you see that the average Chicago and emits an awful lot less CO2 than then people elsewhere.

You know, because even though a majority of Chicagoans do drive, they drive a lot less distance than most Americans and, and there are, you know, a quarter of the population who don't drive and and I kind of think Chicago has, you know, it really, it's a place where you don't need to drive, maybe occasionally, but that is, you know, in a way, it offers a chance to really improve things.

I mean, the public transport system here, the bones of it are actually very good, it doesn't run as well as it should, especially at the moment, I think, because of kind of staff shortages after the pandemic, but when you have a city like like Chicago, which kind of dense central core in which a lot of people work in the same place, you know, and have to get that public transport, because you simply couldn't have everybody drive into the loop.

Each day, there's just not enough land for those cars. It's quite efficient. The problem is that, you know, the Center City of Chicago still, even though it's one of the more affordable big cities in America, it's still quite an expensive place to live. And, you know, and and sprawls out into the, into the suburbs, and in the suburbs, you really do need a car, because public transport, you know, it's not an alternative in any kind of realistic way.

Perhaps commuter train lines and American cities in general have sprawled out too much in the last kind of 6070 years that it's become very difficult for people to live without cars at all. And with that, the sort of amount of energy everybody's using has just shot up.

So you know, in an American context, what you want the cities to look more like Chicago and you want Chicago, or like New York and New York, perhaps to look more like Tokyo, even

if you want to kind of reduce the amount of energy that everybody's using in the and still have good lives. That's the kind of key thing I think, you know, people want to look like the city. So it's not that it's a sort of immiseration of everybody. It's just a more efficient way of living.

So in terms of Chicago or any other big cities, the thought is, how do we incentivize people to use the public transport system more? Do you make it free? I mean, to to make more people want to ride it? I mean, that's a good question.

You know, I think the more and more places are kind of experimenting with making public transport free and I think one of the difficulties with it is that while it's, you know, it's quite effective at getting people, particularly the poorest people to use it more what doesn't seem to happen very much when you make public transport free is people switch it switch switching from driving to using it because it still tends to be the case in most cities in this country that public transport is slower and less convenient, comfortable and less reliable than driving and if you've got a car available, you'll probably…

They'll drive. I think the big thing is basically is about land use. And you know, you're normally based in Los Angeles and de la is beginning to do some really interesting things around, you know, building more housing near to the sort of great metro lines that you've had built there. And, you know, reducing the amount of like parking that's required in housing that's built in so that not everybody, so that you don't have to build loads of parking so that not everybody living there, transit, has a car. Land use is basically the key think and if you kind of use land differently, you can make public transport a very efficient way of moving people around.

And when it's very efficient, people will use it, you know, instead of driving as they do in New York, and in, you know, even Chicago, to a large extent, and certainly kind of cities around the world, you know, New York or Amsterdam, or Tokyo or whatever, you know, kind of if the city is built for to public transports convenient people will use it.

So that's probably the main thing. Well, that is the challenge in Los Angeles is to break the zoning grip that the neighborhood's had had to block building larger apartment buildings by the transit lines. And certainly, you know, Los Angeles as a whole would benefit if greater density was built along those lines. It's just challenging politically to do it. And it seems as though the the governor there is now putting some more pressure on the city's to, to actually go ahead and do that.

And we'll see how that plays out. But in the meantime, you're listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern. And I'll be back in just one minute with our guests, Daniel Knowles, who is the Midwest correspondent for The Economist, and also author of Carmageddon: How cars make life worse, and what to do about.

You're listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern. And I've got Daniel Knowles, Midwest correspondent for The economist and author of Carmageddon: How cars make life worse, and what to do about it.

Daniel, what amount of carbon emission is created by say, building a internal combustion engine car versus say, an electric car? Is there a substantial difference in that in the construction of the cars?

I mean, it's my understanding that, you know, both, the production of both cars is fairly intensive, but producing electric cars is actually more carbon intensive, in terms of that production, you know, obviously, not so much the driving around, because of the amount of mining that is required, you know, for the minerals for the batteries, particularly cobalt.

And for the book, some of the reporting I did, I went to Kolwezi, which is in the southern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where most of the world's world's cobalt is mine. So if you haven't electric car, your battery, you know, certainly a chunk of it comes from Congo. And it's these kinds of mines, you know, absolutely tearing up huge chunks of southern Congo, and it's incredibly carbon intensive, the amount of material that has to be extracted to make one kilogram of of cobalt is enormous.

Stop there for a second and just talk about the political problems of that, in that I understand that Chinese and Russian governments and companies are in control of a large measure of that cobalt mining in in the Congo. Is that correct?

It's sort of correct. Yeah, it's broadly right. There's there's several large firms that there's several Chinese firms. There's a big Kazakh firm. And there's there's also Glencore, which is a sort of Anglo Swiss firm that all involved in mining, there's also an awful lot of what they call artisanal mining, which is kind of basically, you know, people themselves, in smaller groups digging out the ore, kind of very primitive, sort of pickaxes, shovels and stuff.

So as you know, an awful lot of these metals go to China in a process that so there's a geopolitical aspect to it. There's there's also a local kind of political aspect in Congo, which is, you know, that that this industry kind of relies on and both feeds an incredibly kind of kleptocratic government that that takes, you know, takes the revenues and uses it sort of stay in power and maintain this kind of terrible political system and generally speaking, big resource rushes that have kind of come to Congo over the past century,

You know, going back to the sort of robber boom, which also had a lot to do with the automobile, but also bicycles at the end of the 19th century, through to sort of the copper boom in the Vietnam War, and now this cobalt, have not always gone well, for Congo, they've tended to kind of worse than its governments and lead to the most sort of extractive vicious kind of governance.

And, yeah, if we're going to produce electric cars, we're gonna need to kind of keep mining that all out. And you know, there are new mines in places like Canada that are producing cobalt, but the bulk of it, the bulk of the world's reserves are in Congo. And I do wonder how much you can kind of realistically expand that, you know, to, in the scale that we apparently want to if we really want to replace, you know, almost every car on the roads with an electric one, I kind of think we just need to have fewer cars.

So our electric cars the solution to the problem of reducing carbon emissions, you kind of lead up to, you don't think so? But why don't we get some details on why you think that might not be the case? Yeah, so I think electric cars are part of the solution, I think you have to replace some cars, because that we have on the road will have to be electric in the future.

But if we just seek to replace kind of every car, on the road, the amount of cars that we have with electric cars, and not only the cars that we currently have, but the cars that sort of, you know, if the world keeps going on the path, it has been that all of the sort of new middle classes of the kind of fast growing economies of the world will also want to, we're going to need so many electric cars and so much electricity generation to power them, that I just, you know, not saying there won't be possible, eventually to do that.

But if we need to, if we want to reduce carbon emissions, as fast as it looks like we need to, you know, to really prevent global warming being catastrophic. You know, we need to replace some cars with electric cars, but we also need to just have fewer cars on the road, and the ones that we have, you know, driving less far.

Because otherwise, it's just it's not, it's not going to be plausible to replace, we're talking something like 1.4 billion vehicles on the road with electric ones to do that. Anyway, quickly enough. So one of the downsides of replacing all of our internal combustion engines with electric battery powered vehicles, well, just apart from the first one, which I just said, which is that, you know, the difficulty of actually doing it, because of the minerals and the cost, you know, I mean, electric cars are going to be expensive for a while.

The other big one is power generation, which is, you know, we will have to increase, I'm not sure what the US so the estimates for the UK are that we will need to generate roughly three times more electricity by 2050, as we do today.

You know, somebody who's driving, if you take, say, you've got a Tesla,

Tesla with 100 kilowatt hour battery.

And, you know, in your, in average, California, and you've got two cars in your household, you got two, Tesla's 200 kilowatts, and you both drive them kind of 40 miles a day, just the average for us driver, it's probably slightly less than California, but you're using pretty much as much electricity charging those cars as you are, you know, in your whole sort of life otherwise, and your household consumption.

So it says radical increase in the amount of electricity that we need to generate just at a time when we're trying to move our electricity grids away from fossil fuels add on to more sustainable forms of energy, so we're adding a lot of demand.

And then the other thing is that if we all kind of switch to electric cars, we still sort of maintain these like sprawling urban planning urban forms for our cities, which require everybody to travel these enormous distances which require, you know, which generate an awful lot of of carbon emissions sort of indirectly through, you know, the amount of concrete that we're reusing and the amount of energy used to heat and, and cool houses, what they're separate, as opposed to sort of in, you know, dense apartment buildings where they kind of cool and heat each other.

So, so it sort of adds to the unsustainability of the rest of our lives to which which which, you know, and it's not that people people want to live in, in dense cities where they can walk around, it's not that we're going to be forcing lifestyle change.

You know, the cost of living in kind of densities, the cost of housing shows how much people want that option, but they mostly can't afford it because we just particularly in this country, but even even in Europe kind of don't build enough places like that, to meet the demand, we sort of forced people to live in the sprawl and to own cars, even if they prefer not to.

That's very true. A number of questions raised by that. One, from kind of the optimist standpoint of creating enough energy to power the electric cars.

Couldn't we just put a whole lot more solar on people's homes and businesses, you look across the the cities, and most people don't have solar arrays, if they did have solar arrays, we could capture a lot of that energy and power a lot of those vehicles. Wouldn't that be a partial solution to this? Or is that pie in the sky?

I'm quite optimistic about sort of energy production and in, you know, in the longer run, and, you know, I think solar is becoming cheaper and cheaper. And offshore wind is also growing very fast. And I think we will be able to sort of decarbonize our electricity grids, but, but I'm just not sure that kind of driving should be as much as we need should be the priority as as we do that, it's going to still take time to kind of put in all of that capacity. And we don't have time in terms of the climate,

I guess I wouldn't push back on you there in terms of that, you know, from a timing standpoint, it's not realistic that in the next seven to 10 years, we're going to readjust Los Angeles, Cal, you know, or Chicago, or any of the major cities and bring millions of people back into the cities. And of course, that would take a lot of rebuilt, you know, building new places, and so on and so forth, which is fairly carbon intensive to build millions of new units.

So what's, what's your response to that? Oh, you I mean, you're not wrong, I, you know, the stuff I'm advocating will also take time, but I think kind of any realistic kind of plan or have to have a bit of both under cities, and particularly in the US where you're really not going to sort of de-sprawl them quickly. And so it will just have to generate lots more energy to power the cars that people are going to be using.

But I think what I'm trying to make the argument in the book is that, you know, we have been moving towards more and more sprawl that sort of all over the world do you know, cities like like Los Angeles, Los Angeles is not the worst in American terms at all. It's actually relatively dense. You know, looking at compared to someone like Houston, or Dallas, you know, there's no Los Angeles's politically sustainable way to live.

So, but I think that, you know, electric cars are clearly part of the solution, but I think they can't be the only facet solution, we do need to begin working towards people driving, driving less and requiring cars less and so only cars that we're adding to our electricity grid. You know, we also need heating, well, you've just thrown another variable into exactly moving past the topic.

Okay. But you know, but do we think is moving from transport is kind of powering our cars, the priority, carrying more and more cars really the priority for the electric for the extra electricity, energy that we're going to be generating? We have lots of choices and a lot of bass, a lot of problems.

We're going to be taking a break right now. We'll be right back with Daniel Knowles, Midwest correspondent for The Economist. This is Matt Matern, you're listening to A Climate Change.

You're listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern. And I've got Daniel Knowles, Midwest correspondent for The Economist and author of Carmageddon: How cars make life worse and what to do about it.

Well, Daniel, uh, one of my pet topics is hydrogen power. I have a hydrogen powered car. And what do hydrogen powered cars, trucks, buses, trains, how can they be used to lower our carbon emissions? And are they as good as or maybe better or worse choice than electric power vehicles?

That fascinates me. I've never actually met anybody with a hydrogen powered car. I you know, I mean, I think they have less of the issues to do with with minerals for sure. My impression is that hydrogen powered cars are probably still quite technology that's still really, you know, in its infancy from the beds, battery powered cars, and maybe we'll see some great kind of innovations there.

I think the problem, you know, a with that is that I've kind of stick to two by visual points is that a chi of what however it's powered, including a hydrogen powered car is getting to be quite an inefficient way of getting around compared to that to sort of mass transit, sort of, on your own bicycle or your own feet.

But the other thing is that, you know, some of the benefits of electric cars comes from the fact they don't rely on combustion, or sort of exploding fuels, which does make electric motors very, you know, an awful lot more efficient as a way of sort of converting energy to, to power to sort of movement. And so I'm, you know, I did not find, I guess, a long way of saying, in my reporting, I did not find a great deal of, you know, sort of optimism about the future of hydrogen powered vehicles that said, I'm very interested in kind of hydrogen.

I'm more interested in hydrogen powered kind of aeroplanes and things, because I think we're very far away from having the energy density and batteries that we'll be able to fly with, with anything other than a sort of combustible fuel, and maybe hydrogen is the solution to sort of getting rid of fossil fuels in, you know, an extraordinarily polluting flying, you know, most of what I do not pollute by not driving I make up for in the flights, unfortunately, that they take.

So it's so yeah, that's my response. I'm sorry. So not a very good one. I'd love to hear more about your hydrogen powered car, you know, it is it is a an emerging technology. And some have said, well, it's probably best for trucks and buses and trains, and maybe planes, which are larger, where the batteries don't work as well.

And, you know, it's it's hard to say, because there is a lot of mining that is done, as you pointed out for, for electric cars, it can be a problem. And if we're talking about building 1.4 billion new vehicles, then the mining concerns become even that much greater. And whether or not there's even the mineral content to, to build that many batteries is another thing and disposing of that many batteries is yet another problem.

So but turning to something else, what positive steps are being taken to reduce our carbon emissions? And, and how do you see that playing out in the future. So if you look kind of specifically at transport vehicles around the world, that can you know, this book is not completely original these days that you can see, you know, if you look at the US, an awful lot of cities are beginning to do things like getting rid of parking minimums, you know, that the idea that we will always kind of widen roads as a sort of solution to traffic is, is going away.

I think New York may eventually it seems finally get a congestion charge. So that'll kind of begins to shift the incentives way, because the thing about cars is that right now, they are effectively very heavily subsidized. You know, they, you the roads you drive on, you know, historically were kind of built and paid for with the proceeds of the gasoline tax.

But the the gas tax hasn't kind of covered the cost of maintaining or building roads for decades. Now. There's all of this subsidy in the form of kind of free land, and I think beginning to reduce some of that can make governments and taxpayers better off, people better off even while sort of just shifting the incentive, so that maybe you see an alternative way of getting around that that's been to happen.

And if you look, you know, elsewhere, you kind of look abroad, you can see, you know, particularly for the book, I spent some time in Paris, and what they've been able to do, recycling in the last few years has been phenomenal, you know, they put in all of these protected cycle lanes, and they really accelerated this in response to COVID-19. Because they realized, you know, people wouldn't be able to ride the kind of the metro subway anymore in great numbers because of the risk of infection, but they couldn't have everybody driving because Paris is just too small for the cart.

So they suddenly tried to encourage people to get on bikes and the amount of people who get around and bikes down in Paris and not just in the center in like, the suburbs, as well as it's grown phenomenally. It's become, you know, a city like Amsterdam or Copenhagen and people can be encouraged to kind of change how they get around. Really, very easily.

Often, particularly cycling is one of those things that you know, an awful lot of Americans say like a third of Americans regularly go out on buy bikes, you know, as a form of kind of recreation, an awful lot of those people I think would be very happy to get to work or to get to school or to the shops or whatever on their bikes if they felt safe doing so. And so if you begin to sort of, you know, make that an option available, people can shift very, very quickly.

It shouldn't be that expensive to do it, because there's not that much infrastructure required to do it. And you do see that I was in Copenhagen this summer and Amsterdam, and there were just a tremendous amount of bike traffic. And, you know, 1000s of people are using their bike down the major thoroughfares, Washington is how do we do that in the US? We don't exactly have that bike culture the same way? Or maybe you're saying we do and what what's the tipping point?

How do we how do we move from kind of having bikes in our garages that we use occasionally to using them for day to day activity. So I think it is happening in the US, it's not the same speed. But you know, there are places like I was in Minneapolis over the summer, they built an incredible network of protected bike lanes, and people use them, I'm not sure how much they use them in the winter, I'd like to see, but I've told people do so use them in the winter, certainly in the summer, extraordinary numbers of people on bicycles.

Here in Chicago, the amount of people getting around by bike has increased enormously, despite the fact that the bike lanes here, it's still really quite poor. So I think the demand is there, I think it's trickier when you look at somewhere like Los Angeles or Houston, where you know, the distances people are traveling Gen Z, Gen tend to be longer, and the roads, you know, wider and the rest of it. But even in LA, I think, you know, one thing is that that's making a huge difference in this is the rise of electric bikes.

Because an electric bike, you can kind of zoom along at, you know, 20 miles an hour, without putting in so much work. And suddenly, it turns into a kind of, I always thought that like a normal, realistic sort of bike commuters maybe three or four miles, but on an electric bike, it might be six or seven. And that, you know, the vast majority of car trips in the US are less than five miles.

So there's there's space, even in some of the most kind of sprawling cities, I think for some change there, you know, in quite a quick way, perhaps won't be as dramatic as it is in Paris and might be difficult to do that. So, you know, I think some places like New York City might be able to do that, or Washington, DC. But But even you know, even the Los Angeles is what I think can get a lot of people on their bikes and outs of their carts. Well, I think you kind of have to subsidize or push people or incentivize people to move in that direction.

Because I don't see it happening quickly enough. And going back to another kind of related point that you had made about people wanting to live in the city but being priced out, you certainly see that in LA and New York, where lots of people live out 50 miles from the city. And it's an it's because there is no housing stock that's affordable 10 miles from downtown LA or there's very little housing stock available in that band with how do you solve for that problem, where you can actually bring people back to the central city where they probably many of them would like to live, but they're just they're priced out of it?

Well, this is linked to cars as well, because you can build an awful lot more. You know, one of the things that drives nimbyism is completely rational is fear that people are going to, you know, newcomers are going to have more traffic, and they're going to use up the parking spaces and make it harder for you and your car to get around.

And that's, that's that's not insane that people do do that. And particularly in the way that kind of housing is built with parking spaces. That means that everybody does a default assumption that new new residents will drive but as you know, I think is beginning to happen. It's a little and in Los Angeles, and perhaps more elsewhere, it's there actually, if you build this kind of dense housing that is near public transport, then not everybody will drive and I've had friends in Los Angeles, even who, you know, didn't kind of drive.

It's possible. It's difficult. So basically, you need to build more of that housing. And that needs to be done by it's a lot easier to use up some of the land that's currently used for everybody's cars. Oh, it's certainly going to be a political challenge to do that. But we we have an existential threat in climate change. So I guess, we need to make those hard choices.

You're listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern. And I've got Daniel Knowles, Midwest correspondent for The Economist on the show. We'll be right back to talk to him about his upcoming book Carmageddon: How cars may life worse and what to do about it. You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host, I've got Daniel Knowles, Midwest correspondent for The Economist and author of Carmageddon how cars make life worse, and what to do about it.

Well, Daniel wanted to talk to you a little bit about mass transit. And I assume that's one part of the story of getting people out of their cars. And there was a great story on the Ukraine train system in the paper, I can't recall for the New York Times or Washington Post, that a country that has 10% of the per capita wealth of the US but sound like they've got a better functioning rail network, even after being bombed repeatedly by the Russian army than the US has why I seen a lot of that to the Ukraine kind of there was some apology, sort of saying due to the war trains early running every six minutes and sort of Tiffany Chicago, Bangkok, we hope wish we had every six minutes.

I think, you know, it's a, it's a matter of choice. Like US public transport systems, even in the cities that most depend on them, like New York have just not been invested in to the level that they should be for decades. And it's partly due to that it's partly due to a bunch of other very complicated factors, public transport, investment has become very expensive and difficult to do in the US. But it's a sort of chicken and egg problem.

Because I think the biggest problem, there's actually essentially to do with land and planning, you know, this is a country with very sort of divided government, or very fragmented government block one big federal government and lots of cities and counties, and states all sort of overlapping.

And to do public transport, well, you need a lot of coordination, you need to kind of to make it sort of functional, it's not, it's not really enough to just build a train line, you also need to make sure that like, you know, that stuff is built along the stations, so that people can get off the train and immediately be somewhere that they need to be.

And what tends to happen in the US even, you know, I think of LA in this in particular, because LA built some great kind of new subway lines in recent years. But if you don't coordinate it with the land use so that when you get out of the train station, you're just surrounded by kind of parking lots and, you know, single family homes, and it's a long walk from the station to get anywhere, then the public transport system won't work very well, and then it'd be hard to sustain it.

We had to kind of run it with a frequency that's that people take for granted elsewhere, basically, for good public transport, you need density, you need people to be living, you know, and businesses to be clustered densely around the stations and American cities, sort of, mostly, and there are exceptions, but but don't have enough of that density, which makes it very kind of difficult to make public transport work. Unless you think of ways of increasing that, that density.

And the added problem to that is in the US, you know, this is a very rich country that's had, you know, 100 years really have kind of sprawling out to a lot of the places where you would kind of want to build do where you could do that see was pretty hard to do.

Because there's already people, they're all kind of built around car centric suburbs, so you're having to learn to, to build up in Europe, I think, you know, combination of the car coming later and city that poor and then, you know, also kind of older cities meant that a lot of neighborhoods grew up around public transport, sort of in the first place before the car come along.

And that's true of some parts of the US and it's true Chicago, for example. But it's it's not to a very large parts of it unfortunately, and and kind of getting getting the genie back in the box is definitely harder than sort of doing it differently first, first time around. So our cars and car ownership becoming a political dividing line, and I would work around this.

So that is something that I'm you know, fascinated by. And I think if you look at, you know, it's not only in the US, but if you you know, obviously kind of you know, Republicans are many times more likely to own a pickup truck, for example, whereas Democrats are still on balance, more likely to own a, an electric car and in general, you know, the Democratic parts of this country are the places you know, the center of cities where

You know, people, probably most parts of the country still own a car, but they might not into or they might drive it less, they may rely on it less, he may be, you know, more likely to use public transport, whereas the sort of heart of kind of, you know, the right is obviously, you know, the deep outer suburbs and the countryside where people have a lot of vehicles and rely on them.

And I think there's a sort of, you know, it's a real challenge, changing incentives, if you want to encourage people to live denser, you know, kind of more sustainable, less energy intensive lives while you are basically raising taxes and raising the cost of living on that lifestyle, which, which is the opposite to make the lifestyle that's more sustainable, that cheaper and that, you know, I think, you know, unfortunately, one, one thing that we're going to see it as far as we haven't seen, it already is basically the emergence of the kind of driver lobby.

And, you know, in the UK, in particular, you know, similar, similar to the US in many ways, in terms of politics here, the conservatives have seen their sort of political support.

You know, actually one of the best predictors of wear has sort of turned conservative, or turned conservative in the last election was, you know, where do people drive who owns cars, car drivers are, tend to lean towards conservatives, the sort of difficulty that when you invested in owning a car or owning a house, in the sort of car dependent neighborhood?

Well, you've invested in it. So you don't really want that taken away from you. So I think that's going to be the big challenge. Maybe one way to deal with that is by subsidizing solar rollouts, and wind and electric vehicles, to the extent that is seen as a good for the people who are living in less densely populated areas.

And, and certainly the some of that is begun already, in places like Kansas and Iowa produce a tremendous amount of wind energy, and probably could produce a fair amount of solar energy to add somebody who's got land, a homeowner who has an acre of land has got a potential of, of having solar, a solar array on their property. So maybe you can use those things to our advantage.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's always gonna be a part of it, that kind of climate change thing, obviously, is my sort of car and getting rid of cars obsession, I kind of think that a lot of it can be done without having to make the lives of people in rural areas worse, in fact, in some ways, you can sort of take the pressure off for areas, if you can get cities to expand and to grow to, you know, not physically, but in terms of number of people who can live in them, if they become more affordable.

Well, the kind of pressure on on, you know, in those, those those parts of the country is particularly those rural areas, where, you know, people do rely on their vehicles, it becomes easier to switch those kinds of people remaining onto electric vehicles, they are perhaps powered, yeah, as you say, by kind of, you know, even solar on their properties.

But, you know, if not in their properties, then sort of nearby. So I think it's a combination of all of these factors, I think, you know, I'd like I get more militant moments, I get more, you know, kind of take away take away the cause of the making. That may work. But I think you can't do that. No, you have to bring people around you in terms of the carb standards of increasing fuel efficiency.

Is that something we should really be working on now? Or is the internal combustion engine essentially dead? And it doesn't make a huge difference whether we increase fuel efficiency standards for those remaining internal combustion engines?

Oh, I mean, that's a very good question. I think that kind of, you know, American cars are generally considerably less fuel efficient. Other cars, people drive in Europe are a lot heavier. And I think one of Ironically, one of the things that has sort of undermined the rollout of electric cars in this country so far is fuel efficiency standards in a kind of slightly perverse way.

Because, basically, you know, car manufacturers target a, what's called a fleet wide average fuel efficiency and that's raised, but they can for every electric car that they sell, or they can buy the permits from an electric car seller like Tesla, they can effectively sell a less fuel efficient car to balance it out. So that the kind of fleet wide average is still there. So so as electric cars kind of grow more and more of the kind of total sold, the fuel efficiency standards as they work at the moment will kind of begin to matter to you less.

And I think there's a case for raising them, you know, either either raising the sort of mile per gallon kind of target, you know, quite significantly, which Joe Biden did, somewhat, basically reverse what, what Donald Trump had done, but I think we kind of need to think about it slightly differently.

And we really need to think about how, you know, how people drive these cars and where, and, and whether we can reduce particularly those kinds of shorter trips, all those say, very long road trips, you know, by having alternatives that are less polluted, ready to make alternatives available to the car.

And then what cars, you know, what trips are left, which, you know, might realistically probably still be an awful lot more than I would like, yeah, we need to have more fuel efficient cars, and the car industry has really been very big on kind of selling, you know, larger and larger trucks, you know, pickup trucks and SUVs that have been less fuel efficient.

And I think we need to find a way of encouraging themselves smaller, more efficient cars. Well, there wouldn't be and that would be great. We need so much change. And that is that is a substantial one that people who are buying those, you know, should not be essentially subsidized by those who are buying electric vehicles.

So it's been a fascinating conversation. Daniel Knowles, Midwest correspondent for The Economist, author of Carmageddon: How cars make life worse and what to do about it.

Thanks for being on the show. It's great having you

It's been a delight. Thank you so much for having me on.

Well, everybody, tune in next week. Have a great week and we'll talk soon.