When I think of a “do nothing party”, the Greens are at the top of the list. They quite literally do nothing and have no power, except to spoil tight races in the direction of conservatism/fascism. I guess if that’s you’re goal, you’re happy.

The Cheney cohort supports Harris not because she is a conservative warmonger, they support her because she’ll broadly maintain US legal and political structures, which as they’ve stated, they feel are more important than specific policy. I.e., she will preserve the state of the Republic and not do the fascism thing. They’re endorsement says a lot more about Trump than it does about Harris, which you probably know but are being purposely disingenuous about.

Good luck with your third parties in a system that mathematically will never support a third party though, real big brain stuff. You’re literally playing a different game than everyone else.

To be clear, I’m not trying to convince you of anything, this is for anyone else that may happen upon this thread that might be smart enough to connect the dots about an alternate reality where Gore won the election with respect to climate change.

I’m too lazy to look this up, but I believe death rates were higher out of cities vs in cities. Half the reason hospitals were packed in cities is because rural people went where the ventilators were. Everywhere had all the covid waves, they just hit cities first.

Elderly tend to be more R, and D folks were more likely to mask and vaccinate. But elderly vaccinated pretty well across the board and the divide was bigger in the young. Lots of factors, but my money is on D making out slightly better as a broad cohort. Tragic all around though.

Ok I did some searching and excess mortality points to higher rural impact, but official cause of death data is mixed (too lazy to link though).

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-sas-comparing-urban-and-rural-excess-mortality-during-covid-19-pandemic

Nader, the spoiler candidate that gave us GW Bush instead of Al Gore, the climate guy? If you’re in FL you should be profoundly embarrassed, and if you’re in a different state just regular embarrassed.

Notice they barely mention refrigerants because they are planning to use HFOs to meet low GWP targets rather than only actually sustainable choice - natural refrigerants. HFOs are PFAS and we are already seeing environmental accumulation of PFAS (primarily TFA) directly linked to HFO use around the world. We need to shift to natural refrigerants now.

Any chance this is sensitive enough to pick up methane emissions from particularly gassy individuals in their homes? Asking for a friend.

Don’t forget about the massive insurance scheme designed to deal with the aftermath of millions of largely preventable collisions and tens of thousands of deaths each year, the regulatory complex, the adverse health impacts and burden on the healthcare industry, and perhaps biggest of all - the infrastructure (and space) needed for all of this unnecessary driving, all of which come at the expense of all other forms of transportation. The scale of the auto industry is mind boggling, especially considering how useless most of it is.

Aren’t your just describing the current credit? There’s a mechanism for the dealer to provide the incentive at the time of purchase vs during tax filing the following year. There’s also an income limit for eligibility.

That being said, the whole point is to move battery supply chains to the US, not to actually make cheap cars for folks.

Unless the plan is something more like Terminator. If you “unshackle” AI and give them a mandate to get CO2 back to 250 ppm things are going to get real.

I’m not looking to put real names out here for someone at NYT customer service just doing their job, but you can reach a real person through “contact us” in the app settings. NYT is a legit company with real customer service, but it probably only works if you’re a paid subscriber. I find it cathartic to complain to companies about stuff.

That’s a fair point. It still seems like focusing on the supply side would just result in higher prices (I’m thinking just oil imports), while enriching other countries that still pump. So money is sent abroad, Americans pay more and are pissed off and are back to being dependent on global markets. Whereas a tax would lower demand in an “artificial” way that keeps the money in the borders to be used on stuff that benefits people, like enabling the transition itself. Taxes are simple and they work. I imagine we’d have to be basically off oil already before moratoriums would be feasible politically. Gas is a bit different than oil because it’s not really a global market, but I’m no expert on this stuff. I just want to the fossil fuels to stay in the ground one way or another.

They certainly have. I’ve complained to NYT several times over their full page BP greenwashing ads, citing misinformation. I don’t suppose it helps, but it’s nice to at least push. I even emailed back and forth with a real person over it, so I got that going for me which is nice.

Net metering had to go. I’m not going to argue that the CPUC nailed it with fair NEM policies across the decades and today, but the simple truth is that solar production at high noon is so high now that it’s essentially worthless. That’s what killed NEM, everyone expecting retail rates for their worthless production was bound to fail at some point. Self consumption and load shifting are necessary to add value back to solar now that we’re firmly embedded in the belly of the duck.

How cold is it supposed to get? They’re installing heat pumps, not ACs so while the current generation of heat pumps will struggle with the ice age, cold weather performance keeps improving.

I’m just having trouble imagining the sort of global cooperation required for something like this. It seems significantly more difficult than a carbon tax, which is practically impossible already.

How are we supposed to do that though? We’re talking about BP partnering with the Iraqi government to extract their oil reserves, which then hit the global market. I realize BP brings technology to the deal but it’s not exactly rocket science. I’d love to see moratoriums around the world, but that’s going to be a bunch of individual countries/jurisdictions making those decisions. Companies are legally required to maximize profit and that means maximizing extraction. Killing the capitalism and making BP a workers co-op probably gets us the same decision, based on the reticence of any workforce to abandon their livelihood.

Here in the US we’re at record oil/gas production but half the country thinks we’re killing the entire industry. Like I wish we were actually doing that, but instead we just have the IRA (which is great all things considered) but it’s mostly industrial policy focused on mostly the right industries for once.

“The harms imposed by the Rivian are three times the harms imposed by the Prius, in terms of air pollution and death from accidents,” said Hunt Allcott, a co-author and professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University. “But we are subsidizing the Rivian and not the Prius.”

EV fans have some reckoning to do. There’s an argument that the carbon matters “more” than the other effects, but good luck not sounding like a psychopath saying the children gunned down by 8000lb pickup trucks with 0-60 times under 3 seconds and zero visibility are worth it for slightly lower carbon.

Meanwhile I’ll keep riding my unsubsidized bicycle and not killing people. We should all have safe paths and trails to ride and communities designed for humans - that’s where I’d like to see hundreds of billions go. We should absolutely also do a carbon fee and dividend (since this polls better than a “tax”).

That’s entirely the wrong denominator for this comparison. IRS doesn’t write the budget nor do they write tax law, they just collect.

Frankly a highly speculative set of conclusions. Despite the green deal forbidding converting woodland to crops, the author assumes the opposite. Then they basically ignore the organic requirement. The idea that EU will wholesale move their food production (likely the strictest in the world) to Africa is so outlandish as to not be taken seriously.

The original post I responded to was someone talking about how starlink lets them game in a rural RV. What about carbon emissions from thousands of rocket launches? What about atmospheric damage? What about astronomy? I’m saying the downsides don’t appear to be worth the upsides for these niche scenarios. Humanity survived just fine for quite some time before ultra remote Internet became a thing.

I’m not trying to alienate anyone, I’m trying to understand why low latency gaming needs for digital nomads is worth the real downsides of providing such a service (scientific, GHG, atmospheric tinkering, etc). I also believe that we should leave a lot more of the earth alone and that nature matters. I’m not trying to put people anywhere, just recognizing there are pros and cons to different living schemes, humans are social creatures, and population of 2 areas don’t warrant large societal investments. I’m similarly against a hypothetical drone sushi delivery service for rural Canadadian boreal forests if that happens to have real downsides too.