Waymo Arson, Stroads, Olivine, and European Heat Deaths
Off-Ramps for 8 July 2025
Welcome to Off-Ramps! Today I’ll highlight four interesting pieces that I think you will enjoy reading. Please enjoy all of these on your morning commute, or save them for your weekend.
No Good Way to Save a Waymo
A few weeks ago, I offered my analysis of the recent spate of Waymo arson in Los Angeles. Now friend of Changing Lanes
has offered his own take on what he describes as Propaganda of the Deed against complicity in ICE enforcement.From Jeff’s perspective, the attacks are a form of anti-tech and anti-ICE sentiment. I think he’s right to emphasize that Waymo's vehicles are vulnerable in several registers: they’s designed never to harm humans, so they won’t defend themselves; the lack of a driver lowers psychological barriers to violence; and they do indeed surveil their surroundings. For some, that is illegitimate, and as such makes Waymos legitimate targets for righteous fury.
Waymo's lame responses—withdrawing service, geofencing protest areas, and behind-the-scenes PR—highlights the company's impossible position. At the broadest level, people are nervous about this technology, and any steps taken to defend their property will only make it seem more menacing. Getting them out of harm’s way is the best of a set of bad options.
Jeff reviews other, worse options, and finds he had no better ones to offer; I appreciate his honest perplexity. The only thing that occurs to me is that as Tesla's robotaxi rollout, currently restricted to Austin, expands its coverage, might serve as a lightning rod, drawing street rage to Tesla’s vehicles and away from Waymo’s. But that is also no solution: some appetites grow with the feeding, and I think the desire to smash up a robotaxi—a valuable machine that people love to hate and that won’t fight back—will be one of them.
Stroad 101
Another friend of Changing Lanes,
, offers a brisk 101 on the stroad, every North American urbanist’s bête noire.As a reminder: roads and streets serve different purposes. Roads are conduits, infrastructure for moving people and goods efficiently between destinations. Streets are interfaces, public spaces where buildings meet pavement and community life unfolds. Because they have different purposes, they should have different features; but in North America, we tend to meld them into a single urban feature, the stroad. The result is we get neither effective transportation nor vibrant public space.
This isn’t a new observation. As Andrew points out, planners in the middle of last century understood the distinction very well, and mapped arterial road systems complimented with nearby street grids. But as those arteries became full of commercial development, their character changed, and urban life degraded.
There is no quick fix to this problem once it’s set in. But Andrew has some ideas about a slow fix, which involve cities asserting their responsibility to regulate the interfaces between buildings and streets/roads. I must confess, I don’t understand what he’s getting at yet, but that’s because he’s thinking out loud. Whatever his proposed solution, I imagine I’ll be on board. As I’ve written before, merging land use and transport use—thinking about the speed we want any given right-of-way to have, and using design to encourage appropriate use—is the right move. I look forward to seeing how Andrew elaborates these ideas in the future.
Crushing Rocks to Save the Planet
Climate change is a difficult problem – but one in the same category as pumping water out of mines, refining aluminium from ores, or ensuring the world's fields have enough nitrogen. What once seemed impossible, with sufficiently abundant energy and ingenuity, could become a bargain.
Campbell Nielsen, Olivine Weathering
Earlier this year I pointed you towards
’s high-level explainer on how to address climate change, or—in Jason’s framing—how to put the Earth’s climate under human control. As per that account, there are three tools at our disposal: reducing carbon emissions at source, controlling Earth’s absorption of solar radiation through albedo manipulation, and removing CO₂ from the atmosphere.Where Jason went high, this Works in Progress deep dive goes low, exploring, in depth, the most promising tool for carbon removal, which is ‘olivine weathering’.
This tool depends on manipulating Earth's own carbon regulation system. It makes the excellent point that, in the past, Earth’s climate has been even warmer than it is today, but it cooled. So climate change isn’t a ratchet, it’s a process; there are ways that the Earth can cool itself. One way it has done so is through the slow weathering of silicate rocks. Reduced to appropriate fineness, these silicates enter the oceans, bond with CO₂ there, and sink to the ocean floor as silt. That process works, but it does so on geological timeframes, that is, tens of thousands of years.
Olivine weathering would speed it up. Put simply, we would mine olivine, a natural and abundant silicate ore; grind it into microscopic particles; and spread them in shallow tropical seas. It would take the same process and accelerate it from centuries to years.
This would not be a trivial effort. Nilsen estimates that at least 80 gigatonnes of processed olivine would be required annually for serious geoengineering; eight times what we mine today. But the problem of scale is the only problem; no new technology is required. We already know where the olivine is, how to mine it, how to crush it, and how to distribute it. The only hard part would be paying for the energy required, and compared to the costs of climate change, the bill would be small, at less than 1% of global GDP. And that is the cost before Wright’s Law kicks in.
As a techno-optimist newsletter, Changing Lanes believes in the power of technology and automation to promote human flourishing. Whether or not olivine weathering proves viable, the approach is correct: considering how to leverage abundant energy and industrial capacity to build a better future for all. Climate change may be humanity's greatest challenge to date, but it's still just an engineering problem… and engineers build solutions.
Europe's War on Air Conditioning
We can either let tens of thousands of Europeans die preventable deaths or we can increase the capacity of the European electricity grid by less than the amount of solar energy China has added in the last month and give everyone AC.
Kevin Kohler’s latest essay shows what happens when we decide to handle climate change without building solutions. He’s a mild-mannered guy, but his piece is anything but: it’s a righteously-angry denunciation of Europe’s approach to climate management. While Europe experiences fewer extreme heat days than most regions, it leads the world in heat deaths per capita, an outcome Kevin blames squarely on Europe’s “ideological and regulatory resistance to air conditioning”.
Kevin’s tour of the situation left me stunned. Geneva approves roughly four residential AC permits annually, on behalf of half a million residents. Paris effectively bans landlords from installing AC units on the grounds of energy efficiency. And they do this even though tens of thousands of Europeans die during heatwaves that wouldn't be fatal with basic cooling technology. Instead, regulations promote “passive cooling”, which doesn’t work, and inadvertently encourage people to use portable units, which waste far more energy than dedicated installations, while also providing inferior cooling. The result is higher emissions, lower comfort… and more deaths.
There is a fundamental tension here between scarcity and abundance. Scarcity may feel virtuous; I’m not the first to notice that modern degrowth ideology resembles old-time Calvinism dressed in twenty-first century clothing. But though abundance may seem like sin and vice, it’s abundant energy that will enable both emission reductions and climate adaptation. Electric vehicles, carbon capture, and air conditioning all demand more electricity, not less.
Kohler's proposal—adding roughly 80 GW of grid capacity for universal AC coverage—sounds massive until you learn China added 93 GW of solar capacity in May 2025 alone. The bottleneck is not Europe’s technical capability, which is extensive—it was France that built out nuclear power to face the 1970s oil crisis, after all—but political willingness to embrace growth and abundance as supports to human welfare, not vices to be punished.
Climate change is humanity's greatest challenge, but heat deaths in wealthy European cities is not so difficult an issue to solve. I hope Kevin’s perspective, that these are policy failures that we can fix—goes mainstream, and quickly.