Gayle Rodgers: Public transportation is best solution to meter problem

providencejournal : "People who need to go to Thayer Street, Hope Street or wherever for the day should use public transportation. That way, those who shop in these trendy areas - and I frequent them myself - can stay all day. All one has to do is check the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority schedule for arrival and departure times. If more folks used RIPTA, it would run better for all riders.

When people complain about trying to go to the movies or shop for five hours with the worry of that parking meter hanging over them, I have little empathy.

Take the bus, meet your friends in any part of Providence, and make RIPTA work for everyone. Merchants can also suggest that their customers take the bus, and they can list the bus line on which their business is located.

Gayle Rodgers

Providence"

Physicist shows direct relationship between energy and wealth

Economics: "The coming century is guaranteed to be one of immense change. At current exponential growth rates we will double our energy demands in just 30 years, adding as much to our consumption capacity in our working lifetimes as we have in the entire history of civilization.
...
Expressed quantitatively: summing over all the world’s nations, 7.1 Watts is required to maintain every one thousand inflation-adjusted 2005 dollars of a very general representation of historically accumulated economic wealth."

This means even if emissions are zero, heat will rise with growth. At 2.3% growth we double every 30 years in the amount of energy needed to maintain our economy. Human energy use releases heat. Heat melts clathrates and peat.

Why, for #climate, heat is more important than emissions

There are two things about fossil-fuels that are often confused. First, they put out a lot of green-house gas. Second they have enabled us to grow to over 7 billion people.

There is a lot of focus on reducing emissions, but what if we do not address heat? Heat is the form that energy takes when used for human life. Even if that heat is from a solar panel it will still add to overall heat. Those solar rays should be hitting plant life and being stored.

Much worse, heat now threatens to dissolve the permafrost and underwater clathrates. Recently a massive store of peat was discovered in Africa. If these things release their gases and heat, it won't matter how many solar-powered gadgets we have sold.

There is only one policy that directly addresses heat. Luckily it also is the best policy for emissions. That policy is degrowth. We already have falling birth rates in many areas. We can encourage that with carfree cities. When people urbanize, birth rates fall.