Sonori

Of course there is an alternative, as the article is arguing implicitly, you ban mining and other unsightly industrial activities in rich areas with strong environmental and safety laws, and outsource it to poor nations without the political leverage to strongly regulate mining companies. This objectively results in far, far more environmental damage, but that environmental damage is contained to highly populated areas full of poor people you don’t have to think about.

I really wish more environmentalists were pushing for potentially environmentally hazardous processes to be moved to areas with strong regulation and environmental protection laws, instead of just pushing them onto poor people, but unfortunately a lot of people seem to be so (purposely) disconnected from the industrial processes necessary to make everything from wind turbines and trains down to the food that appears on the shelves that they view the mining and manufacturing of these things as completely unconnected to these things themselves appearing in their lives.

If it is it’s not current, as the storm has dropped to a category 3 as it neared land. We were up to 171mph a few days ago as it was building though, so it may just be a forecast from around then.

Ya, if the article is using Finish survey data than it’s definitely ridiculous to talk about it being powered by coal, I had assumed that given the article’s presentation they were at least looking at gobal statistics.

Given the the title of the paper they got this from, if they are not getting paid by an oil company somewhere already they really should work on collecting the free money for the work they are already doing.

Technically, it’s not wrong that worldwide the largest method of electricity generation is coal, but it does tend to be far smaller and shrinking in the richer western nations with lots of EV’s people are probably thinking of, even before getting to the whole electricity is on track to be made carbon neutral a lot sooner than gasoline thing.

I’m actually very impressed that Finland managed to avoid the ‘clean LNG’ that North America got sold on, good work.

Generations? The average American passenger vehicle is 14 years old, so if tomorrow all new cars were electric, you would have haved car transport emissions within 15 years, and be at a 75 percent reduction within the first generation. Cut out fossil fuel subsidies so people are paying the 8 or so dollars per gallon it actually costs for gas and incentivize US manufacturers to actually build affordable cars and you’ll see much quicker adoption that what normal wear and tear causes.

Of course that isn’t going to happen tomorrow in the US, but you are also going to have a lot of vehicles already sold in the decades prior and which tend to stay on the road longer.

Compared to the fifteen or so years it takes to build a single light rail line, much less intercity high speed rail, and you are not going to be able to replace half of all car traffic in a single build cycle, much less reach 75 percent within thirty years, by which point you’re trying to replace all traffic in the very small towns and unincorporated areas that even nations renowned the world over for their public transit connectivity often struggle to reach.

Does the US need to build more mass transit, yes. Can it do so faster than it already buys new cars, no.

There are, with the federal government alone paying 7k on most EVs sold in the US. The problem is that they are neoliberal flat subsidies applied at the point of sale that needed Republican support to enter law and as such companies just tack on 7k to the price customers are willing to pay anyway.

What we need is to incentivize manufacturers to focus on bringing down costs by focusing on things like LFP batteries and smaller vehicles, but manufacturers are currently incentivized to make larger vehicles because people are willing to pay a lot more than the added space cost to make, thusly increasing margins. At the very least making the full subsidy only available on vehicles under 25k, with a decreasing subsidy for vehicles under 50k would probably help, but you would need to be ready and willing to call manufacturers on their near certain attempts to get around it.

Some actual price wars between manufacturers would help too, but US auto manufacturers will fight tooth and nail to forestall that possibility.

The problem is that to effectively fight climate change you need to cut emissions in five to ten years, and not fifty to a hundred, and in a nation where even a solidly blue locality openly dedicated to fighting climate change can take ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars to open a bus lane, it should not come as a surprise that many people with the resources to do so are choosing an imperfect solution now rather than running for office so they can get a bus line to their neighborhood in a few decades.

This is before we get to the fact that even nations which world leading public transport systems known for connecting to every small village and house still have plenty of cars and highways, people just don’t try and use them to for every trip in a dense city and plenty of people can get by without owning a car at all. We need to eliminate all emissions, not just city emissions, and we needed to do so ten years ago.

Yes north america needs more common, frequent, and reliable mass transit and the fact that the richest country in the world’s mass transit is in such a state is a national disgrace, but that is not opposed to the quick elimination of oil burning cars but rather should be done in parallel to them.

I can imagine it pretty well, seeing as in my neck of the woods a local village or neighborhood owned conventional power plant or desalination plant arn’t common, but they arn’t unheard of either as an alternative to everyone having their own individual generator and water maker. You just generally find them on small islands or very remote towns and villages.

Wind and solar have proven useful in augmenting these generators, and given how expensive diesel is they were some of the first to use it, but yes, people have been doing this for quite some time with conventional power generation.

I mean a lot of Amarican infrastructure was built by the new deal with a hundred year lifespan, so it’s not exactly a surprise that now a hundred years after the new deal there is a lot of Amarican infrastructure that needs to be replaced.

Average percentage of the building process, pg 3 so about 20% in the US, maybe more if you accept the interior finish. That being said I am highly skeptical this changes the needle, especially in the third world, because almost always if you have the land to build a shack, the cost of the shack isn’t going to keep you on the street.

Fundamentally, developers intuitively understand that building will be just about as profitable in ten years as now, but if you build to much now you will have an ‘oversupply crisis’ and the price as well as the associated profit margin will go down. Similarly, if you build a new building and are selling units very quickly, that means you’re below market price and should raise the price until they just barely sell, because that price jump will more than cover the cost of that apartment being empty for a few months or even years.

This all applies wether you’re in a shanty town in Brazil or in downtown Vancouver, and since even if you snapped your fingers and the cost to build in that shantytown halved it wouldn’t really change, I am really skeptical that even a highly transformative technology could change things, much less an expensive replacement for a few pallets of cinder blocks, a few friends, some drinks, and a weekend.

What you need is something like plentiful public housing providing a minimum quality of house at cost that the market must do better than, but groups like the IMF tend to despise countries doing things like that, because it’s a highly profitable investment when private foreigners do it but a reckless waste of money if the government tries to do the same thing.

Worth noting that the cobalt and magnesium that they want to mine from the seabed are not necessary for net zero, and indeed are largely being abandoned in favor of significantly more affordable alternatives.

Deep sea mining remains a few influential investors trying to drum up government subsidies and funding for an incredibly unprofitable and destructive method to solve a nonexistent supply problem.

Firstly, you’ll have to refresh my memory on where I praised Australia’s carbon tax.

More to the point however, a carbon tax does at least provide some direct financial incentive for the price to go up and for the body tracking companies emissions to proactively look into dodgers, while a company selling carbon credits is directly incentivized to both lower the price and to overstate the actually sequestrated carbon (if any). As such a tax is far more likely to rise in the long term compared to the stated price of maybe sequestrating carbon or limiting emissions elsewhere, and without giving the illusion that a company isn’t responsible for putting carbon into the atmosphere so long as it pays another company to say they took care of it.

Add on to that the government is in a far better place to use that money for catalyzing emissions reductions/social good and that of course you ideally want to keep money within the local economy/prioritize domestic reduction rather than the profit margin for a carbon credit scheme and I feel that you get far more benefits with a direct tax than with cap and trade.

Finally, ideologically I just don’t particularly like private rents and tolls on common goods, in this case dumping rights to the atmosphere we share.

To be fair, carbon markets and carbon taxes are two very different things. One gives you an easy way to avoid taking responsibility for your emissions by giving a pittance to a paper reduction, and the other gets promptly repealed once in danger of being finalized because oil and gas companies raise prices and then claim it’s due to said taxes despite said taxes never actually taking effect, see Australia.

I agree that the oil company support for carbon taxes are because they think they’ll either never get implemented and are easy to remove once put in place due to public outcry, but I suspect a carbon market is something that they want implemented because it allows for business as useful.

A quick google also shows that for instance the price difference between the Hyundai Ionic hybrid vs plug in was about €6000 so while thouse subsidies would come close to covering the difference you would still be paying more to then pay even more by not plugging it in.

I also really don’t think 90% of people are willing to throw that many hundreds of euros away just to avoid the few seconds it takes to plug something in.

So you think the EU study was almost exclusively looking at places where the subsidy actually came close to covering the price difference between Plug In’s and traditional hybrids? And people just ignore the plug because plugging your car into a normal wall outlet is too much bother to save five hundred to a thousand dollars a year?

I’m not disputing the results, but I would be really interested in a follow-up study that looks at why. From this data it would seem that only 10% or so of people with plug ins actually use the plug, which seems really odd. You have to pay massively more for it, and at least anicdotaly the dealers will try and steer you away from them allmost as hard as they do EVs. Given plug ins are often more expensive than both traditional hybrids and EVs, it seems really odd to spend a lot of money on somthing and then waste even more money to not use it.

Given the small battery size any wall outlet will charge them fine, which would seem to rule out infrastructure. So why does it seem that almost everyone who goes through the trouble and cost of getting one apparently not using it?

The only thing I can think of would be people believing that european electrical prices are higher than fuel prices, but while european electricity prices are higher so are gas prices.

With luck this ban on palm oil from land that was cleared post 2020 should also help cut down on the haze and air quality problems southeast asia has been experiencing as a result of the slash and burn practices that up until now while illegal have been relatively unhampered given lackluster enforcement. So if nothing else the positive sourcing requirements are great news for people in all the nations around Indonesia and Malaysia who have had to put up with all the health consequences of their neighbor’s practice of turning a blind eye to these farming methods.

Truly though, the real victims in all of this are the poor plantation owners who now suddenly have to provide some evidence that they didn’t break the laws that have been in place for over 20 years after they kept getting flagrantly broken time and time again. Surely the handful of ineffectual token industry efforts to premote sustainable palm oil should have been enough to keep anyone from actually doing anything./s

To be fair, with the minimization of the dividend, the primary driver of stock price is expected future returns. Stock buybacks are one way to reassure the market that there will be someone to sell stock to in the future at a higher price, even if the company’s long term prospects don’t look very good.

Let’s just say I don’t think that Shell’s going to be in a very good place financially in twenty five years, at least compared to what they are at currently.

I feel like the problem this startup is going to run headlong into is that air source heat pumps are literally just air conditioners, and while they may be less common in parts of europe they are still common and simple enough to install that most installers already know how to do it, their companies nuts gouge on prices.

This makes the talk of the startup creating specialized schools seem odd, unless they specifically want to foucus on something like geothermal systems, but thouse systems require space around the building even if using vertical shafts and major renovation work to the building to replace the common steam boiler systems with underfloor or central forced air, which is why they are almost exclusively used in new build construction not renovation.

All this means that I suspect startups either built to solve the wrong problem, or else isn’t working with the right tech to switch exsisting buildings off gas anytime soon.

The problem is that all of the current discussion and hype is about Chat GPT and similar whole internet models. They are not as useful as more specialized small model ones, but they also not as easy to hype.