It helps, but it’s no longer a requirement. For instance 70%+ of Americans support higher taxes for the rich, but they’ll have virtually zero say in the matter the next time a Republican President tries to roll out cuts, just like with Trump. And Net Neutrality was massively popular up until the point they completely cripled it under Ajit Pai.
Its like Putin’s election “campaigns”. At the end of the day he is getting his way. Reducing public backlash through propaganda saves him money on riot police and jail cells but is not a factor in his policies. Propaganda isn’t the source of his power, being unchallengeable is his source of power.
The only thing that will challenge US politicians is credible threats to losing their office through massive voter turnout.
Propaganda is just a tool. Its always been around. The root issue is the greed, corruption, and rot at the center of our political system that leads to politicians regularly betraying the interests of their constituents and country. This is why propaganda has gotten worse, why criminals are in office, why elections are under attack. They serve a different master.
Don’t you hate it when you have another control by the atomic agency just because you had a little meltdown in the garden. All that because the neighbours complained that their grass became fluorescent to the cops. Silly scared people!
Nah, it’s not worth it… at least, if you strictly look at “saving money” overall.
ROI is on average 10-25 years, depending on your current cost of energy. The components/inverters/etc, are usually rated for 20-25 years.
At least- this applies if you have a properly licensed contractor install everything. If you do everything yourself, its extremely worth it, and would achieve ROI in a decade or less.
those parts (panels, inverter) are easy to replace since all the installation has been made, and they will be cheaper than they were when you bought them. Im my case panels + inverter were about 40% of the total cost. I imagine a similar powered panel will be way cheaper in 20 years
I’m gonna wait a few years, until prices go waaay down… and I plan on doubling/tripling the PV capacity, which will make everything much more effective, as well.
Solar power is really cheap. If we only needed it for low wattage DC, like lights and electronics, it could be built fairly cheap even with storage. But most home energy use is high wattage AC. That gets expensive pretty quickly, unless you do your own electrical work.
From our perspective it’s been worth the investment. We did a new water heater while the electrician was wiring everything up, and that’s saved us an additional grand (at least) every year not using heating oil. Last time we talked energy prices with the neighbors they were averaging over $500 per month, but we generate enough to bank credits to last us through the winter at the hookup fees.
Granted, our winter heat is primarily the wood stove and a low consumption floor fan to circulate the air and not space heaters, but our overall ROI is below 10 years given heating and electricity costs in our area.
It’s worth noting that grid scale tends towards far better ROIs of 7 to 10 years. Home systems are a lot more expensive seeing as about half the cost of them tends to be in labor and markup as compared to the economies of scale larger projects. Still often worth it, but significantly more than a properly managed power company in a favorable regulatory environment can do.
What part wasn’t worth it? You said it’s not worth it, then made it sound worth it.
The ROI is 10-25 years based on the electricity prices you locked in at the start.
With regular inflation, and general increases in the electricity rates, over the long run you’re going to save money. The return might not be investment market level returns, but if you can justify the up front costs it’s unlikely to not come out ahead.
If the ROI => 25 years, then it’s not worth it- because the hardware and equipment is considered deprecated at that point.
If it lasts 30 years, sure, its making good use of itself. But- everything is rated between 15-25 years. As such, after that period, it’s considered end of life, and no longer supported.
Now- I will note, it is not worth it for the “Rate I currently pay”, which is 0.08c/kwh. If next year, my electricity rates tripled, it would vastly reduce the amount of time until this solution reached ROI. And- I am betting that electricity does not get cheaper in the future, otherwise I would have not have pulled the trigger on a 50,000$ project, where the math told me it wasn’t the best idea.
Also, if you really want to see everything quantified- I plan on publishing all of the math, and numbers at the one year mark… which will be around march. -> static.xtremeownage.com/pages/…/Solar-Project/
for the “Rate I currently pay”, which is 0.08c/kwh
How did you get that rate? We pay 33 cents, and it was 24 cents just a few months ago… wouldn’t be surprised if it goes up again next year and the year after since even 33 cents is government subsidised (so - there’s no cheaper option available).
otherwise I would have not have pulled the trigger on a 50,000$ project
Ooof. Why’d you do that? We simply put (a bit over) 5kW of panels on the roof, and a good 5kW inverter. One day of sun generates about as much power as we use in a week, and even if it’s overcast we still come out ahead.
We’re basically only paying for overnight power and pretty easy to keep that to a minimum (with good insulation, efficient overnight appliances, avoiding unnecessary overnight power consumption - such as putting the beer fridge and hot water heater on a timer).
How did you get that rate? We pay 33 cents, and it was 24 cents just a few months ago… wouldn’t be surprised if it goes up again next year and the year after since even 33 cents is government subsidised (so - there’s no cheaper option available).
All about location. There are supposedly many in my area on a different coop utility, who are only paying 0.03c/kwh.
Ooof. Why’d you do that? We simply put (a bit over) 5kW of panels on the roof, and a good 5kW inverter. One day of sun generates about as much power as we use in a week, and even if it’s overcast we still come out ahead.
I had a few other goals I wanted to accomplish-
Reliability. The grid here isn’t the most stable, and blinks a few times per week. And, a time or two per year, we have an outage. This solution has handled this fantastically well, so well, that I don’t even notice when the grid has dropped unless I specifically go for it.
Apart of this, was bringing some of my wiring/electrical up to code. This accounted for 10k of the price-tag… I relocated/replaced the mains panel across the house to a location more suitable then my daughter’s closet. Also- the panel itself, was pretty old, and needed to be modernized.
One more issue- my PV is undersized a bit. Adding another 3kw, would yield much better returns for me.
Its undersized, because if I oversized it, and sent more energy than I consumed, my lovely utility slaps on a 42$ fee… which is no-bueno.
I feel like this is 1.5C thing is like the $15 minimum wage in the USA. It’s been so long and things have gone so poorly that we need new targets and ideas.
Yeah these people are looking at a fantasy. They’re acting like this isn’t a capitalist market and money is more important than facts most of the time.
Reducing meat/dairy consumption seems to be one of the easiest changes we can make to lower GHG output, since it doesn’t require major infrastructure changes.
But it also means changing habits, which is hard for other reasons.
It’s a lot harder to drop carbs out of my diet but I have to. I let any of them in my body and now I’m dying again woo! Yall can do what you want but I will find a source of animal products if I have to eat the local quails and their eggs. When you can’t eat legumes or tubers or fruit or grains, you’d be better off starving to death if you can’t even have a steak with your green beans. I just wish I weren’t addicted to carbs. I need to get back on keto to get my body back again… 😩
I have Coeliac's and things with gluten are out for me unless I want a lot of misery for a couple of days (which sucks because I love bread). This cuts out a lot of things for me. I also typically do a very low-carb diet because, for whatever reason, it vastly improves my mood and how my body feels.
That said, I am moving to grow a lot more of my own food with plans to have my own chickens for eggs and eventually raising most of the meat my wife and I consume. The rest we plan on sourcing from local hunters (wild boar and overpopulated deer are big issues where we're moving) and farmers We also eat a lot of seafood, so probably less land-based meat than most already (definitely less than when I lived in the US).
I think it is higher, the current food production is something like 25% of the global GHG emissions, 2/3 are from the animal industry. Besides the direct impact there is less land use and the opportunity to re-nature large areas.
Scanning the article, this is the positive news: Yet, there is some positive news: greenhouse gas emissions have not yet risen beyond pre-pandemic levels and there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the past decade has slowed compared to the 2000s.
So growth of emissions has slowed. Not emissions, but growth thereof has flattened somewhat. If that’s the positive news we’re fucking boned.
The key new info is not the decadal trend, it’s ‘not yet risen beyond pre-pandemic levels’ - in other words global emissions are ± flat. More recent info (also from carbonbrief) suggests that China’s emissions may now be falling (and therefore likely global too -as China was such a large fraction of recent growth). On the other hand feedbacks from high temperatures in 2023 - forest fires, ocean circulation etc., made the atmospheric CO2 rise break another record, but several temporary factors (e.g. reduced shipping sulphate, El Nino, solar cycle, etc.) contributed to that spike.
Seems like mostly a window dressing report that is avoiding the major news story of the last four years, which has been fraudulent credits and difficulties in enumeration of uncertainty in both the voluntary and regulated marketplaces.
The easiest to access, most immediate solutions to carbon sequesteration are still based around land remediation in the form of forests, grasslands, and wetlands. Pretty much everything humans have ever touched in terms of land has been degraded in some major way, impacting it’s ability to function as a carbon sink or ecosystem services center. And sure, these approaches to co2 removal are limited in capacity, but unlike most of the other approaches discussed, they can be done today, and don’t require some additional technology to be viable.
The issues with nature based solutions has been fraud, bad/ poorly implemented systems, and an over reliance on the assumptions inherent to market capitalism around efficiencies. Both redd+ and verra have been plagued by issues of fraud on their existing credits. On top of that you have the issue of ghost credits that emerge from poorly implemented markets (see CARB, badgley et al 2022). Then finally whatever you call it when a market fizzles due to a lack of supply and confidence.
I still think carbon markets are just kind of a jack off way of implementing a carbon tax. It’s a way to try and bury the lede of the fact that products need to account for the damages they caused in there purchase cost, and a denialism around the true cost and damages the vast majority of the products we consume cause. The answer has to be at the nation level with manufacturing taxes levied at the point of production. We need a international system for LCAs to be able to do apples to apples comparisons, and more carbon intense products should be taxed to offset the cost of lower carbon cost products.
We are currently doing the easy part of dropping emmissions. We have not yet peaked, globally speaking. Then we need to get to zero.
The only possible pathway now is overshoot and return. Which means we depend on carbon removal in a big style, in whatever form that will be.
It also means we will go temporarily over 2 °C. That is a critical number where several tipping points could be reached.
Pretty much the hardship has just begun. Now we need to stop emitting completely, somehow in the same time start to remove atmospheric CO² and hope that while we will be over 2 °C that no crucial tipping points will be reached.
While power-sector emissions stabilised, the largest source of reductions in emissions in March was the continued decline in demand for steel and cement from the construction sector…
China’s economy is not doing well, especially construction and real estate. It’s not “happening” until there’s a continuous drop in Co2, across many months, and while the economy is stable or expanding.
This is as China’s real estate sector is actively deflating and dragging down GDP growth (real estate as % of GDP estimated to drop from a high of 24% in 2018 to 19% in 2023) on the order of about 1 percentage point annually.
I’m really not sure what you’re talking about? Labour is rotating into clean tech deployments, GDP growth numbers actively account for the deflation of the real estate bubble, manufacturing is still expanding, and estimates for GDP growth from Western analysts continue to shoot up. Meanwhile, bankrupt developers are having their projects be repurposed into public housing.
In fact, investments are rotating rapidly from real estate into industrial capacity, which tends to have higher short-term ROI and a more significant short-term contribution to GDP.
The biggest concern IMO is the rapid expansion of debt at the national level, which reflects the collapse of LGFVs as a viable method of supporting provincial coffers due to the decline in real estate - China’s government is becoming more centralized, and that has the potential to intervene with the (astonishingly successful) hands-off policy that’s been adopted in the past.
I’m curious. When you read articles about how great the economy in the US is and it’s just the voters that don’t understand, do you agree? Do you believe the US government no matter how badly they do? If you don’t believe the US government on this, why do you believe what their propaganda says about their enemies?
The US will not recover socially or economically from another Trump presidency. His massive tax cuts for the extremely wealthy alone pushed us 20 years ahead on worsening wealth inequality. Deregulating all industry and corruption at all levels would complete the decline into a banana republic and hasten the coming climate refugee crisis from the coastal areas. If America wants a 1/2 billion dollar tax fraud who loves to rape women and fuck porn stars who has never worked an honest day in his life so be it. Count me out.
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