What could be more normal than getting in the car and driving somewhere?
Driving is such a normalised activity. Almost everyone I know does it -- people that don't drive are a bit strange, and their options are greatly constrained.
I love a road trip. When we moved from Brisbane back (home) to Adelaide, we took 5 weeks to drive home along the coast, which we followed from Brisbane to Melbourne. It was a fantastic trip.
It's so easy to get in the car and watch the world rush by. It's also easy to forget just how much energy is being used in that process. Here's an example:
We recently went to visit Monarto Zoo which is (the only?) open range zoo in Australia and is about 65 km from my house. It's an easy drive, about 40 minutes up the freeway. Google Maps estimates it as a 4 hour bicycle trip (I'm presuming that is without kids)
So the round trip is about 130 km. Our car uses about 8 L per 100km on the open road, so that works out to about 10.4 L of petrol, which is about 100 kWh (each liter of petrol has about 10 kWh of energy). For us, that is a month's worth of energy (as consumed by our house of four people) used in 1h:20m of travel.
Faced with these numbers, it is clear just how much of a problem driving is for our carbon emissions, and how easy we make our lives elsewhere if we can just drive less. If we want to avoid damaging climate change, we simply need to drive less, and this will make our other goals (eg. renewable electricity, reduced consumption, more sustainable agriculture, etc) that much more achievable.
