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Go to Economist.com and get your first month free. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

My name is Alex Trembath and I'm the deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, which is a think tank in Berkeley, California, focused on technological solutions to environmental problems, and I recently published a piece in persuasion titled

Cars Are Here to Stay.

So despite the problem with cars and with suburban

sprawl they remain extremely popular. Over 85% of Americans commute to work by car

overwhelmingly alone and that's compared to only 5% of Americans who use public transit and less than 1% who bite to work.

And while the work of environmental researchers and advocates like myself has proven relatively easy to do remotely.

Most jobs are not so easily distributed.

By the end of summer 2021, only 13% of Americans

were still working remotely, which is down from a high of 35% in May of 2020 right after the lockdown started.

I'm an advocate for climate action, and I personally live in a very dense walkable neighborhood in Oakland, California, which I love.

But the way that I increasingly see other especially young environmental researchers and

advocates talk about density, transportation about housing has kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

...