Thankfully, most accelerationists are privileged white people living in very blue states and cities, so that’s very easy to ignore.

For sure changing the party in charge is only a first step. Now we need to come together in the fight to change Democrat party leadership. The old leadership is clearly part of the problem and needs to go.

Was meant to be not entirely serious, but yes.

• the more we stoop to Chinas level on genocide, human rights violations, data privacy issues, they do look better. Relatively speaking
• global adoption of renewable energy has accelerated recently in respond to trumps actions such as disrupting international trade and bombing Iran

China is far from a good guy.

How many countries has China bombed in the last two years?

The autobahns arent doing illegal wars, genocides, and accelerating climate change lol.

Actual, healthy, walkable cities are few and far between, and are almost always reserved for rich people.

“Actually Healthy,” meaning what?

I don’t agree—there are many old cities and even new urbanist planned areas. If people create demand, construction will follow, and that has consistently been toward greenfield developments.

The northeast has many more densely populated places with great walkability, but in general, look for place built out before cars drove sprawl.

And many of these places are also the most desirable. The places people most want to live.

You got us on the “rich people” though. We definitely have a real problem with high cost of living. My state’s population has long been stable to shrinking, predominantly because people just can’t afford to live here.

We lost ballot question 7 to override minimum lot sizes across the state to a mere 5,000 sq ft, by only 32,000 votes and many of these opponents thought it wouldn’t have been enough. The breakdown was exactly as you’d expect with urban areas agreeing and sprawling suburbs disaagreeing

Trump (unintentionally) made gas prices skyrocket and just caused one of the most lopsided elections in modern US history.

To be honest, there is a massive difference between prices going up because of taxes and going up because someone started a stupid war and told everyone costs were going down.

Asking middle and especially lower class people to pay more for energy, even just in the short term, runs the risk of turning them against eco-conscious legislation.

It’s not just about the ones that can’t afford to pay more for the energy, there also usually isn’t a viable alternative available for them to even look at moving toward instead. It’s one thing to make a decision pay more for convenience, if you have another option. If there is no other option, you just feel like you’re getting personally fucked.

In the US, all of the public transit infrastructure outside of like 4 major cities is dogshit. There may be a bus, that doesn’t go everywhere, runs at odd times, and is poorly maintained. Technically available, but if you need to travel across town to work, takes 3 hours one way to do so through 2 different transfer stations. And since everything was built around personal vehicles, things are also not within walking distance even if you are lucky enough to work from home or have something closer.

Having a car is a necessity for most of the country. Without having viable alternatives, increased fuel prices aren’t going to actually fix anything, just turn people even more against any changes.

This is why things like EVs are a good middle ground with the current lack of public infrastructure available nationwide. It’s an easy drop in replacement that’s a better ongoing option, with a side effect of also costing less to maintain along the way.

There’s always disagreement between the carrot and the stick. It’s high time for both: the carrot or renewable energy and EVs and the stick of higher gas prices. We’ve wasted hundreds of billions of dollars over the last few decades trying everything except renewables: it’s time to focus on building out the obvious answer rather than finding yet another way to avoid reality while making fossil fuel executives even wealthier

But we had those incentives

• we had incentives to build out a solar industry, but no one had the patience when it’s more profitable to just let Chinese companies do it
• we had incentives for wind, and we do have huge generating capacity in a few areas but we were finally getting to building our wind for less resource rich areas (offshore wind in the northeast).
• we had incentives for companies to invest in wind and solar and retooling for new technology. Spent and thrown out before any results: it’s just more profitable to buy from China
• we had incentives for consumers to adopt solar - they were claiming a payback period of only like 5 years even here where there’s no sun
• we had incentives to make EVs cost comparable to gas cars, to guarantee a market to manufacturers and to help Manufacturers transition. It was incentive driven for all sides

I hate to be cynical of incentives but our entire economy of the last 12 years is the “face eating leopard” economy. Continuing to step on our own feet as we stumble drunkenly down the stairs is an underrated cause of Chinas success

Yeah, if we could have been building out the renewable energy infrastructure since 2021 like we needed to be doing, then by now it could already be a viable enough alternative that we would be able to end fossil fuel subsidies without too many people feeling the pinch, and even the stragglers would climb on board the green energy express shortly after. At that point it would be time to start ramping up taxes on fossil fuels to disincentivize it for the billionaires who would be insulated from the original price jumps.

But no, fucken Joe Manchin had to side with republicans on blocking the original Green New Deal so that we ended up with a fucking neutered compromise.

So now we have two roads in front of us: we can start building the renewable energy infrastructure and converting the grid. Or we can continue feeling the squeeze tighter and tighter each year until the price of oil is the least of our worries as food and water become scarcer and scarcer.

Choose wisely!

Yep, massive expansion of solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and maybe nuclear power for some base load in combination with large amounts of battery capacity is the way to go. General enforcement of electrification is needed. Every instance where hydrocarbons are simply used for their energy content instead of their chemical properties has to be replaced by the grid (outside of emergency measures). I am sure that this would be more than enough to get global emissions under control, and would also lead to more geopolitical stability.

With food is harder, especially cow milk which has no real substitute with the same flavor

We still have corporate carbon taxes in effect, for now. I know there were talks about carving out exceptions for certain provinces that were hit hard by them but I haven’t kept up on that thread.

Yes, that’s the point, to get all of those industries to move to renewables instead. I agree it would have to happen slowly, but you could take the money directly from the taxes and ending subsidies on fossil fuels and apply them to subsidies on renewable tech. It wouldn’t take too long before rhe crossover happened.

We can’t make striving more expensive because it would harm more vulnerable people, but we can’t build alternatives because everyone drives.

I don’t know how to break that cycle of self-harm but maybe it starts by making driving more expensive. This is the least impactful direction because it costs only a little at a time and your own choices of vehicle and habits can make a difference.

I bought my 2023 Bolt EUV used still with the manufacturer warranty for $15.5k. Not cheap, but certainly not insanely high either.

As for charger, most people don’t need more than a standard wall outlet provides at 115V 12 amps. I charge mine on a 230V plug at 24 amps, which most people can accomplish easily with even an existing 100 amp service panel.

Maybe also the price to install a charger at home?

I have owned an EV for 7+ years and do not have a home charger, but rarely charge anywhere else. You can charge them at 8A 120V overnight and still get more range than most people use most days. I mostly charge at 12A 120V.

If car manufacturers would make more affordable EVs I bet more people would happily get one when they need a new car

Maybe. The lack of BEVs (or even PHEVs) in the US market is certainly woeful.

I wish we could make the entire US watch that Technology Connections video. He does a very good job of explaining how cheap charging solutions are enough for most of us

I did install a level 2 charger

• it was similar cost to installing a stove circuit, plus $500 for the charger. Really not that bad
• there are several cheaper options that would have been sufficient
• after three years it’s probably paid for itself

Don’t get me wrong, a full 48a level 2 charger is a great convenience, but minimally different from, say, repurposing an electric dryer circuit

Absolutely

You sure it’s not $0.036? That seems excessively high.

If that’s actually what you’re paying, I’d seriously consider getting solar to offset the costs.

Creating carbon credits didn’t help. Traded like baseball cards, or more often “lost” in the shuffling around of buying more carbon producing time.

Also like recycling, EVs are a way for corporations to push the responsibility for environmentalism onto the individual.

Technically true but I stopped buying that line decades ago

• if true, why has it been frozen for decades? Gas taxes long since stopped being anywhere near enough. We’re paying for road maintenance out of general taxes. It’s not valid to claim road users pay for themselves
• there’s no world where incentivizing less efficient vehicles is good for anything beyond immediate profits

Gasoline taxes are like coal, failing to achieve its goals in a decades long slide to meaninglessness. We long since have needed to replace gas taxes for funding road maintenance

If the extra taxes on your volt were justified, they are justified for all personal vehicles, fairly. Let the gas taxes go toward reducing the industry’s impact on the environment and society

If you work with any kind of machinery the reliability of modern ice vehicles is crazy good. People treat them like shit often and they still go. Lots of other machinery has maintenance schedules in single digit hours.

I think we need to be careful about pushing this. In concept there is less maintenance, more reliability, but it comes down to quality and engineering.

Legacy technology has very mature engineering where they’ve done really well with cars that keep running despite everything. EV technology is less mature and legacy companies are still struggling to transition to new concepts and practices. It hasn’t always been smooth and any race to cheaper prices will not help

Yeah I hate people too

It’s a nice thought, but presumably (based on geography) you might be able to live with lower gas consumption. At least here in the US, it’s wholly possible that you only have one place to acquire groceries where you live.

Well that’s a double edged sword. There’s so much fluctuation in part because it’s such a ubiquitous commodity, availability is high and margins are low.

If branding mattered more (like with groceries) then prices would be more stable (but higher).

But as it is, nobody cares that much what brand of gas they get, it’s just gas. A name brand can’t demand a higher price just because it’s a name brand, nobody cares.

Society would collectively say get your shit together on pricing! And we’d never buy bread again.

I mean, prices at the pump aren’t fluctuating that much, but I do get your meaning. That said, in general people don’t really have much of a choice when it comes to food, we have to eat. I mean, do you remember how eggs surged in price during the pandemic years? People still bought them, it just sucked. Oh we complained about it alright! But we as a society didn’t do anything