Yeah, because more humans live in cities than rural areas definitionally, so of course the environmental consequences for human life are greater. The one depends on the other.

Any serious policy to help humans generally or Americans specifically live a carbon-neutral, ecologically sustainable way of life needs to account for how people live right now. That’s the starting point to an effective policy.

If your plan is for Americans who lives in cities to become nomadic herbivores who ride draft animals, that’s a serious change from our current way of life. Would we have grazing rights? What about right of ways for our noble steeds?

The reality is that many rural areas are desertifying and other rural areas have barred themselves from developing further, so the options on the table are die or move to a city. People are pretty resourceful and open-minded when the alternative is “or death.” Eddie Izzard said it better.

Urban sprawl is a logical fallacy people tell themselves in order to deny Black people lines of credit to purchase homes. Humans have lived in cities since antiquity - Nubia, Egypt, Sumeri, Indus River, Cararabe, Olmec. Living in a city has a lower ecological impact for a number of reasons but primarily because people live closer together. The less space between your house and mine, the more space for nature to do her thing. Climate change and ecological balance affect everyone because they are a part of the human condition. In order to survive climate change, more people are moving to cities globally. Any policy that doesn’t rationally embrace those trends, is going to swim against a global storm.

MA hasn’t build enough housing to keep up with increasing population and population density - it’s supply and demand. Across the Commonwealth, there seems to be an acknowledgment that there isn’t enough affordable housing, but many communities have barred themselves from becoming denser (which is also where more of the jobs are). People will always need a place to live, so demand has increased while supply has stagnated to the point of extinction for anyone who doesn’t own a house already.

Jean Jaques Rousseau said that whether one generation supplied the next generation with sufficient housing stock would be the project that made or broke future democracies. The Greatest Generation built and funded housing, schools and lots of other projects for babyboomers. Since reaching maturity, babyboomers have slashed tax revenues, ran up the deficit and mortgaged the biosphere several times over. I personally believe this was at least in part a response to the Civil Rights movement successfully forcing Americans to invest in infrastructure more equitably.

It doesn’t make sense and it’s why Massachusetts lost a seat in the House.

It’s a noble albeit late start!

We live on a finite world and unless something about space mining lets humanity undo the last 50 years of carbon emissions and pollution, there’s no solution that will avoid global climate catastrophe. I’ve been protesting for 20 years now and IMHO some catastrophic events are probably unavoidable at this point. The world is at least looking at massive famines. If the oceans acidify, forget Ukraine, that will be WW3.

We subsidize oil and gas tremendously, which is one reason why people continue to use it to power everything. Another is that an outspoken subsection of the population sees environmentalism as a fig leaf that is used to justify raising taxes that won’t change anything. Central Massachusetts has arrays of solar panels that generate electricity for municipalities who refuse to buy it. It’s more expensive to move the electricity to Boston than it is to burn fossil fuels, so that’s what the city does.

If a sizable minority of Americans sees it as their mission to subvert climate change policy (which is what Republicans have been doing for 40-50 years now), things can and will only get worse.