spidermanchild

Not sure who's downvoting you, you're absolutely correct. Infrastructure for rural, and even suburban areas isn't even close to being paid for by the people living there. I thought this was common knowledge. It should be obvious that 5 families living in a single large building require significantly fewer resources than 5 individual homes 5 miles apart.

I'm not sure what your comparing here, but there are constant budget shortfalls for rural paving in my state. It's not cheap. There's also the cost to build the roads (and run electric, phone, internet, etc). There's a reason we needed a bunch of subsidies to add services to rural (and even suburban) places. I think we owe it to everyone in our society to provide basic services, but we don't have to pretend it isn't expensive to do so.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money

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.