291–300 of 368 posts
As a European this is the main fear I have during this election. 4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. Not that I’m super proud of how we are doing in my country, but it can’t get worse.
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It was a big virtue signaling show where nobody involved made any changes. Which some will always see as a huge success because it avoids any need to do anything as long as declarations of support are cheered and awareness is raised and verbal support is given.
Politics is always going to have an element of self-interest. As bad as the agreement is, can't we agree that doing something is better than doing nothing? We can change an existing accord to make it better in a few years, but you can't improve something that doesn't exist.
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And people still say Malthus was wrong. At least some of them have woken up to the realisation that exporting your pollution/nasty stuff to other parts of the world doesn't really solve all that much, but even so, they're still a minority, the great majority still believes in silver bullets like recycling, "clean tech" etc.
The silver bullet is natural self-regulation. Mankind will shrink automatically after hitting a real ceiling.
As a European this is the main fear I have during this election. 4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. Not that I’m super proud of how we are doing in my country, but it can’t get worse.
Stop worrying about the US and stand on your own feet!
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If this were the 50's again we'd have an 84% marginal rate on income over $400,000. Which we would use to fund our infrastructure and energy projects.
It's hard to imagine anyone would keep working for that $400,001th dollar if they only got to keep 16 cents of it. Surgeons, for instance, can literally stop taking patients and go to Aruba when they get near the bend. High-dual income households is another example-- imagine a double-physician household where one of them is taxed at 84%-- they'd save money by one of them not working at all considering daycare expense…
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> A third option would be to increase demand response at the industrial and customer level. Meaning, power isn't generally expected to be 100% available in that scenario. If there isn't enough generation capacity, those that aren't willing to pay the high prices are shut off (or something along those lines). That is generally how supply/demand is supposed to work anyway I don’t think any of these solutions are viable…
I agree it would be unpopular, but it's what the US has been pushing towards for a long time with deregulation and it's the dream of the economists as the prices should be more transparent and optimal.
The result for individuals: many people just subscribe to a flat rate from the electricity companies to avoid the uncertainty and pay the same predictable price each month (but of course, this predictable price comes at a significant markup with respect to the "free market" price). The rest of us go with the fluctuating price but just don't bother, because we are not going to spend substantial amount of time every day looking at how the prices evolve to decide when we turn stuff on or off. So we just read the bill every two months, not even making an effort to understand it, grumble a bit and go on with our lives. I suppose there may be some people who actually try to optimize, but I don't know any - from what I know, people short on income tend to go with the flat rate because they can't afford the uncertainty.
I don't know how it works in industrial applications. I do know that some industries (e.g. steel) complain about the fluctuating prices because they operate 24/7, and basically they reaction is that if the government doesn't subsidize their electricity bill, they'll just close and go to some other country. So my guess is it's not really working either.
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Only if Biden wins. We won't know for sure yet, for a while.
And it still doesn't mean squat if the US Senate does not approve.
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>coal to natural gas Fossil fuel to .. fossil fuel. Sigh.
What do you think Germany is doing? They are going from fossil-fuel-free (nuclear) -> fossil-fuel (Russian natural gas).
[1] https://i.imgur.com/KgcCyWu.png
[2] https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
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> Mail in votes will almost certainly heavily skew blue. Is there a good explanation for that assertion? I've seen it being said in many places but never any reason for it. Why would mail in votes skew in a particular direction?
The going conspiracy reason is that it's because the "Left" is using mail-in ballots to commit election fraud. To be fair, I still don't understand how we can have such manual, potentially-manipulated and mistrusted voting systems in 2020. Like, how difficult would it be for everyone to vote in a secure, cryptographically hidden and verified manner, using some sort booth/app/device/website with proper identity verifi…
