In just a town of 15,000 or more, even, picture:
Air quality problems cut in half due to no internal combustion engine exhaust, no gas pump vapor leaks and more.
Noise pollution greatly slashed, with tire and wind resistance noise still moderate concerns, but internal combustion engine noises gone.
Picture even getting halfway there, if half our vehicles are hybrids and half are all-electrics.
Picture the nearby power plants to make this happen being coated glass panels soaking up the sun, or 100-foot steel blades slicing through the air.
It's all available.
For a couple of Trillion with a T dollars.
That's the real cost to really fight climate change, per Carl Beijer. And he's right.
But that's freedom — just another word for nothing left to lose but a lot of carbon dioxide molecules.
Per the header, your typical larger city wouldn't be totally silent, of course.
You'd still have the sirens of emergency vehicles. Hybrids, rather than full electrics, would still have some internal combustion engine noises. Large cities would still have airplane noises near airports.
But, the changes would be huge.
People in larger cities might hear sounds and not know what they're hearing.
Until someone like me says "That's a mockingbird" or something like that.
And, some of this would be changes of more than a century.
New York City 125 years ago had tens of thousands of horses, or more, tromping its downtown every day. They were pulling buses, streetcars and delivery wagons as well as personal carriages.
They were creating their own levels of noise pollution plus even more air and water pollution. (Think of all the horse shit. Think next of all the dead horses.)
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