Tiresia

Food seems like it would be difficult to harvest. Anything bigger than a peach might represent a fall risk, as well as any plant that gets big enough that it could hurt someone if it gets ill, rots, and falls to the street. Better to use the inaccessible spaces for small local flora.

Suburbs were deliberately built to have low density to keep groups away from each other, with "inner city youths" (nonwhite people) demonized and their public services defunded. Public transit was bought out by car companies and deliberately destroyed, even leading to General Motors being convicted of conspiracy (and given a slap on the wrist). Highways were built to tear apart neighborhoods and empower suburbanites at the cost of locals, and draconian zoning laws were installed to ensure nobody could build something reasonable that could serve as a third space or impromptu hangout. All of this at a massive cost to taxpayers through subsidies and government contracts, with cities now often facing bankruptcy issues as they're unable to maintain the low density suburbs.

It takes hard work and strict government interference to make cities as inhospitable as the US'. Even just loosening up zoning laws would naturally give you cities like Japan's over time, dense and mixed-use. What real estate developer in their right mind wouldn't want to build high or medium density shops and housing as close to public transit as possible?

America is super big and super stretched apart

Perfect for long-distance rail travel. Just get in the train, wait X minutes to get to the next town over, and get out. It's literally how the west was colonized in the second half of the 19th century.

What makes America bad for public transit isn't that the nation is spread out, it's that suburbs are a death knell with how spread out they are. I honestly don't think there's a way to make suburbs self-sustainable short of quadrupling the US' population so you can get decent density even there. Sort of like the SF Bay Area except actually building medium density housing instead of having >8 people to a low density home.

More realistically, the suburbs will probably have to be scrapped. It's not like those homes were built to last, anyway. Just don't replace them when they need to be condemned.

As for there not being enough greenery in cities, that's just a matter of choice, isn't it? Pedestrian boulevards can be lined with trees, building facades with ivy, public parks next to apartment blocks, etc. etc. Almost all the toxins in western urban areas today are from car tire dust and exhaust. Just ban motorized personal vehicles except mobility scooters and e-bikes, and most of what you seem to hate about urban areas can just go away.

I don’t think they were prioritizing one group over the other

And you don't think it's weird that they don't prioritize ongoing race riots, arson and assaults over planned pacifist protestors?

Each single cop can't be in two places at once. Every cop occupied with arresting a pacifist is a cop not occupied with preventing arsonists from burning down a building.

As for disruptive protest not helping, have you looked at politics the past two decades? The general public loves disruptive protest.

ASML is basically a strategic asset. Breaking them up to have a more level playing field inherently threatens the West's economic-political position. If ASML abused their position, it wouldn't be the regulators so much as the CIA that showed up to tell them to reconsider.

Sounds like an set-up to ensure long-term dependency on natural gas mining, then.

Sorry, we built our infrastructure assuming 80% natural gas, so we just have to mine more natural gas to prevent people from losing their ability to cook food. You wouldn't want poor families to go hungry, would you?

Police have discretion on which crimes to prioritize. They're not honor-bound to ticket someone who is double-parked in the middle of a car chase. They can opt not to arrest people for trespassing if it gets them to cooperate with a murder investigation.

Going to arrest pacifists engaging in criminal conspiracy to temporarily block nonessential industry and infrastructure at one location while ignoring ongoing racially motivated assault, looting, and arson is a choice.

but the vast majority of us aren’t doing anything at all that depletes resources at a too-fast rate.

Sure, but only because the vast majority of us aren't European or North American.

Rich people and companies are the winners of a game that hundreds of millions actively support through purchasing patterns, voting, peer pressure, and political activism. Populists winning elections on platforms of ignoring climate change are responsible, yes, but so is everyone who voted for them.

Every example you name for how you could reduce consumption involve you remaining an individual consumer, continuing to work within their system. But there are co-ops, library economies, unionization, political groups, collective activism - many ways to work together to far greater effect. They want us to see ourselves as snowflakes in an avalanche, none of us strong enough to fight the system, but we can fuse our economic power and become a boulder or a barricade, digging into the ground and taking energy out of the system rather than adding to it.

This is something we have always been able to do, and we, as western consumers in relative privilege, are responsible for every second that we do not do so, and let ourselves vote with our wallets instead.

"Good news, after decades of searching we have finally been able to imagine one (1) possible future world that is worse off than we will be."

I need a drink.

If you let a sabretooth tiger loose into a playground full of unsuspecting children in order to catch the rats that are eating all the shrubs, does it fail catastrophically? Or was it just catastrophic to begin with?

In the struggle against human-caused climate change, this is a completely new avenue for humans to change the climate.

Yes.

Technically that's not a public health issue. And you can reliably store hydrogen for a day or two without too much leaking out, which does make it economical and reliable in rocketry and maybe aviation.