Economic Satisfaction and Social Connection vs Carbon

 Transportation is a wonderful thing, especially when you need it.  And modern highly dispersed and interconnected societies need it.

So suppose we are to reduce the carbon produced by such transportation without radically transforming the nature of that transportation, on the principle that many such alternatives, including worldwide energy capture and storage facilities could introduce even greater environmental costs?

Solving the problem by "using less" or even "using hardly anything" (and no doubt a lot of using less is going to be required in any case).

Would that be 'success' or could it alternatively be described as 'collapse.'

It depends on how economically satisfactory (to Everyone) that can be made to work, and how much social connection it maintains.

So the optimization problem becomes reducing transportation costs (to the environment, now and in the long haul) while maintaining or even improving how well off people are both economically and socially.

(At the broadest level, this suggests people should be living closer together, or perhaps reorganized in a way that keeps them closest to the social connections they value and more distant from the ones they don't.  As well as other improvements to re-empower social connection.  Such as people being together in socially enhanced mass transportation system...subways with parlors...as opposed to one person in every car, etc.)

Of course this is the opposite direction that maximizing profit brought us to.  At every turn, the ability to form satisfying social relations was sacrificed on the altar of selling more stuff, including personal cars, insurance, accessories, maintenance, and fueling.  And instead of keeping people concentrated in urban centers with more vertical housing, people were dispersed into suburbs and then exurbs, all the better to require people have more of that stuff.

AND, though I believe direct in-person interactions are better than electronically mediated interactions in many ways, there is little doubt that more electronically mediated interactions are a necessary component to maintaining and enhancing social connection, provided that is the way they are used.

There is little doubt of the value of direct personal electronic communications (when they are that way and not some form of spam) as compared with nothing.   But what about Social Media?

I seems to me in principle that Social Media is a good thing, a way of making a public space for people who are widely dispersed.  That's not necessarily an endorsement of modern private Social Media monopolies.  Those are primarily designed to extract profit (selling more stuff) from people's desire for such things, a mixed blessing at best.  (Personally I use various social media monopolies and may be adding more.)