211–220 of 281 posts
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gotta pay for all that wildfire liability somehow!
To be fair, they also have to pay for blowing people up in natural gas explosions too.
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Why? Because it’s cool to break the rules? Does it matter to you that these rules are trying to protect our civilization from dissolving in a heap of wildfires, floods, power outages, droughts, storms, etc? This stuff is not just hypothetical any more.
Address the dirtiest sources and the largest sinks, not the symbolic tiny sinks. Your laptop using 6 watts of idle power is not going to make a meaningful difference.
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Why? Because it’s cool to break the rules? Does it matter to you that these rules are trying to protect our civilization from dissolving in a heap of wildfires, floods, power outages, droughts, storms, etc? This stuff is not just hypothetical any more.
Society is collapsing because of the idle power consumption of laptops?
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It’s funny how wrong people are about what consumes electricity and not. Washing dishes by hand is far less efficient than a dishwasher. It depends on exactly how you load it and how your water is heated, but running the dishwasher produces probably half the greenhouse gasses that washing by hand does. As a general rule of thumb, the guide here is to track heat and where it goes. Hot water down the drain is a bad thi…
I wouldn't be wrong if you just charged me for carbon. I'm sure there's plenty of things people are wrong about carbon emissions and have no idea, because no one pays for the negative effects of pollution and therefor everyone does.
Targeted incentives and regulations, in contrast, can force industries to adapt quickly in ways that we know are actually not economically painful. (You just gotta enable low power mode on your laptops Dell, seriously it’s not hard just stop whining and do it.) Yeah it is a bit annoying, but it’s just annoying, no worse - not like putting a carbon tax on concrete which would be super expensive, basically impossible to avoid, and drag down economic growth everywhere.
We need the government to protect us!
Just want to remind everyone how far California has gone in energy efficiency: > In 2018, California's energy consumption was second-highest among the states, but its per capita energy consumption was the fourth-lowest due in part to its mild climate and its energy efficiency programs. Source: https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=CA#tabs-4 This is an achievement to be proud of.
High energy prices have probably done a lot to incentivize lower consumption & efficiency. But mild climate does still give it an unfair advantage if trying to compare it apples to apples with other states. South eastern states are always going to eat a huge chunk of Watt Hours in air conditioning, and in some states many people have little choice but to use electric heat or furnaces. I'd be very interested in state-…
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> This is an achievement to be proud of. I mean I'm all for reducing power consumption, but is having a mild climate an achievement to be proud of? I'd guess that California's main population centers have fewer degree days away from 72 F than any other state in the country. By default, you'd expect their power consumption to be the very lowest. (The other states close to CA in consumption per capita have much worse c…
Talking to Californians is otherworldly. I had one tell me that everywhere should put street signs on the roadway itself. Had no concept of what snow was apparently.
Of course, we do also have overhead signs as a backup and for longer-range visibility. But it's more likely that the overhead signs are useless due to a setting sun than that the on-road ones are due to snow. The streets with on-road signs are very high priorities to plow, so the on-road signs are going to be visible unless it's a very bad storm where you probably shouldn't be on the road, and if you are you're probably going home and already know which lanes to be in.
I'm not saying this should be done for every road; it works best for roads known by a number (I-71; US-23; OH-315, etc.) where you don't have to read a long name. But it's not an daft as idea as it might sound.
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Incandescent light bulbs are generally illegal now.
Where are incandescent bulbs illegal?
Though the laws typically have many exceptions and take effect over time, so saying “incandescent bulbs are illegal” is a somewhat strong statement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_ligh...
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Society is collapsing because of the idle power consumption of laptops?
Of course not. But here’s an analogy. “Nobody got fat by eating just one little scoop of ice cream.” It all adds up.