{"id":5100,"date":"2026-01-21T14:42:22","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T14:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/global-social-challenges\/?p=5100"},"modified":"2026-01-21T14:42:22","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T14:42:22","slug":"were-not-people-who-love-going-far-weve-been-shaped-by-a-long-distance-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/global-social-challenges\/2026\/01\/21\/were-not-people-who-love-going-far-weve-been-shaped-by-a-long-distance-system\/","title":{"rendered":"We\u2019re not people who love going far, we\u2019ve been shaped by a \u201clong-distance system\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Article by\u00a0Jiale Li<\/p>\n

Photo by\u00a0Kathy on Unsplash<\/a><\/p>\n

Ruled by \u201cdelivery in minutes,\u201d \u201cnotifications that summon,\u201d and \u201cbook-and-go\u201d flights, I once mistook this for freedom. Reading John Urry\u2019s Sociology and Climate Change<\/a> made the story harder to sustain. We live inside a self-reinforcing, interlocked high-carbon mobility complex: roads and airports, cars and suburbs, platform logistics and de-spatialised consumption all lock together to hard-code \u201cfarther, faster, more\u201d as everyday default. This isn\u2019t a moral plea to \u201cfly less.\u201d It\u2019s a call to rewrite the operating system of daily practice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Zoom out and the data are blunt. This, from an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report<\/a>, among many such reports, shows transport contributes about 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions and about 23% of energy-related CO\u2082, and it has kept rising since 1990. In 2024, energy-sector CO\u2082 emissions reached another record, with atmospheric CO\u2082 reaching new highs.<\/a> The curve isn\u2019t bending by itself, and the \u201cefficiency myth\u201d won\u2019t save us.<\/p>\n

The core insight by Urry is lock-in through path dependence. High-carbon infrastructures and imaginaries were co-solidified as normal in the twentieth century through electricity networks, steel-and-oil automobility, and suburban living. Real decarbonisation involves the reorganisation of social life so that low-carbon activities become new path dependencies, rather than merely fiddling with prices or changing the hardware. I agree because the technical gains get swallowed up by the system: the classic rebound effect.<\/p>\n

When efficiency rises and usage costs fall, total use climbs and erodes the savings<\/a>. More efficient cars can induce more kilometres, slicker logistics train us to expect \u201cnext-day as baseline.\u201d Without caps on totals, efficiency dividends are instantly spent as extra distance and extra orders.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a deeper lock-in at the level of culture. Since the twentieth century, \u201cspeed\u201d has been equated with efficiency, \u201ccirculation\u201d with freedom, and \u201cconsumption\u201d with happiness. A society running on that accelerator measures value in minutes and progress in convenience. Even \u201cslowness\u201d is sold as a luxury. When identity and status are fused to high-velocity mobility, any attempt to slow down looks like failure. Urry\u2019s reminder lands sharply: changing this temporal culture may be harder than refitting the energy system.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And resistance is real. For instance, the “15-minute city,” a concept to return daily needs into walking and cycling reach and make proximity a premium rather than a compromise. In the UK, some politicians and conspiracy narratives miscast it as a “climate lockdown,” leading Oxford to drop the phrase from planning documents while retaining practical measures.<\/a> It is not the failure of an idea but what happens when you touch the default settings of behaviour and space and, therefore interests and identities. Systems don’t budge on reason alone.<\/p>\n

So what now? I proposed that make low-carbon the system default, not a will-power project for individuals:<\/p>\n

First, set mileage KPIs for the system. At the city scale, hard-target \u201cper-capita motorised travel distance\u201d and \u201clast-mile freight vehicle-kilometres,\u201d with year-on-year reductions tied to budgets and performance reviews. This goes straight at rebound\u2019s root cause, locking in efficiency gains instead of letting new demand eat them.<\/p>\n

Second, reorder infrastructure priorities. Make continuous footways, bus priority, and connected cycling grids the default while require justification for high-frequency short car trips. Roads and zoning are behavioural engineering, as Urry argues, and the IPCC underscores how urban form shifts travel demand. Change the street and you change the person.<\/p>\n

Third, rewrite platform and organisational rules. For meetings: \u201conline by default; in-person requires a carbon-budget sign-off.\u201d For e-commerce: \u201cbundled delivery gets the discount; instant delivery pays the carbon premium.\u201d This isn\u2019t anti-mobility; it separates necessary movement from system-manufactured over-mobility, aligning with the transport structure shifts highlighted in net-zero pathways.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m done pretending this is about individual laziness. Sociology\u2019s value is to show that people aren\u2019t the problem, and technology alone isn\u2019t the cure; the problem and the cure are embedded in the system. When cities make proximity a premium default, firms bake low-carbon into operating rules, and policy uses total-volume circuit breakers to neutralise rebound, low-carbon stops feeling like sacrifice and starts reading as a smarter, more resilient form of abundance.<\/p>\n

If that future actually lands, the next generation will grow up in walkable cities. They won\u2019t need to learn the term \u201ccarbon budget\u201d to live gently on the planet, by which it will simply be how the operating system works.<\/p>\n

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Related<\/h1>\n

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Is Renewable Energy a Viable Solution to the Climate Crisis?<\/h2><\/div><\/div><\/a>
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Rising Temperatures Spark Migrant Crisis: Who is fanning the flames?<\/h2><\/div><\/div><\/a><\/div>
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