Yes it is. I don’t know why you picked Russia to compare to. Russia’s government heavily intervenes in markets to keep prices low, including subsidizing refineries and banning exports at times. The fact that our prices are as low as theirs means our gas is cheap.
You have completely missed the point. The gas is cheap due to the government forcing it to be.
If the prices were set by the free market, it would not be $4 per gallon with shortages causing lines to stretch 10 hours long.
Comparing ratios of bills is confusing. This statement would be unsurprising if you drove 10 miles per week in a Prius. It would be very confusing if you were filling up your tank every week and spending $1000/month on a water bill.
Are you irrigating an enormous yard?
On a macro scale all you can really do is vote for national level candidates that care about these issues. Luckily it’s not hard to see which ones do and which ones don’t.
I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy (and they have spent whole meetings on it). Our city of 80,000 people could disappear from the face of the planet and it would not make a bit of difference.
Working on your own carbon footprint is a $100M marketing trick played on you by oil companies like BP.
Leah Stokes' new book offers instead a "carbon wave" -- how to evaluate and maximize your impact at a local, state, national, and global level. Here's a LinkedIn post. She's got a new book coming out about this: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7496265286...
Happy to sacrifice some of your CnC to ease obligations on those you give no assurances to.
It would be hard for me to vote against indoor plumbing if that was needed to save the planet
I would vote against "Same Day Delivery" in a heartbeat though, if it helped
This type of cynicism is both unwarranted and unhelpful.
Better to volunteer for a swing district. You can write letters or fundraise from home, anywhere in the country.
You should also volunteer for a swing district though! Very good idea.
Trump is paying people to burn more coal, blocking solar, canceling wind.
Could the dems have done more, sure. Are those programs perfect, absolutely not. But one party is moving in the right direction and the other is actively trying to accelerate climate change. Gtfo with that both sides crap.
The both sides bit is jaw droppingly ignorant if you pay attention to regional and national politics.
Every meeting minute spent on discussing climate change is another minute not spent on authorizing things like Flock or permitting data centers. That's nothing to roll your eyes about
that's the difference between you and the public servants that you roll your eyes at.
Now he's more worried about which toilets people use.
People rarely 'go bad' like that. You just learn more about who they really are over time.
I think that, if people who believe in climate change want to be convincing, it would be more effective to avoid blaming specific instances of weather on climate change without strong justification. Especially when the weather isn’t even abnormal.
Los Angeles, especially inland and in the valley, is hot in the summer. It was hot in the summer 30 years ago and it’s still hot in the summer. It’s the typical hot season right now, and the valley appears to be only slightly above season average temperatures today, and coastal LA seeks be slightly cooler than average. Apparently it will be unseasonably cool in a couple days.
More tropical storms are approaching LA and that’s increasing humidity is why it’s sweltering.
"Forecasters attributed the punishing humidity to the remnants of Tropical Storm Iselle moving over the state, as well as unusually warm ocean temperatures due to a combination of a months-long marine heat wave, a powerful El Niño and climate change.
"Dew points in the Los Angeles Basin have been “really high,” hovering around 70 degrees in many places, with a few coastal areas like Redondo Beach and Torrance reaching a dew point of 73 to 75 on Friday, said Ryan Kittell, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The metric measures the moisture content in the air."
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-28/forget-f...
To put it plainly, everyone wants the problem to go away without having to change anything about their lifestyle.
If you insist on finding a way to criticize leftists on the climate file, a much better tack would be pointing out how some environmentalists have opposed nuclear power or densification.
The way individuals can meaningfully contribute is by supporting politicians that will make policies and rules and regulations the meaningfully encourage that collective action, and when they have a choice between more than one corporation for some product or service that are not too different as far as impact on the lifestyle goes choosing the one that is better from a climate change point of view.
The politicians and the corporations (encouraged by incentives and regulations by the politicians) can then bring about changes that will make it so the lifestyle changes for individuals that help with climate change also improve the individual's situations so people voluntarily make them in large numbers.
For example there are a lot of people in the US who would be better off if their next car was an EV except the public charging infrastructure isn't good enough for their needs. Build a lot more public chargers that support 800V cars and many of these people will pick an EV. This is something government can bring about.
For an average individual it is perfectly fine, to use a sports analogy, to play the game as it is now while supporting league wide changes to the rules to make it a better game in the future.
We'll talk climate science, impacts, and what we can do to avert the worst impacts of the worst El Niño in human history.
The numbers are daunting and the returns are scant, but the effort is one that should be made.
The upside is I saw little sign of Gorgan LNG style Carbon Capture; where a massive source of CO2 greenwashes releasing 100 units of CO2 by stuffing 1 unit back in the hole it came from.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/24/shell-ccs-facility-in-canada...
Dubious accounting trick at best .. not even working as it was sold on the box in practice.
Atmospheric CO2 already floating about appears to be what the air-mining crowd are targeting (albeit small scale so far).
When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.
We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.
And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
Those materials are mined also. At least forethought is given to handling/disposal for nuclear since it’s a known issue.
An economy that seizes climate solutions can zoom ahead in terms of innovation, manufacturing, and enforcement. The changing climate is one of the biggest economic opportunities we've ever seen in human history, but somehow we've convinced ourselves that it's not only the worst non-opportunity ever but somehow would break capitalism. The richest man on the planet makes electric cars.
The big problem is this is all driven by consumption and it’s hard for people to cut back on consumption. I don’t know how to explain to people how a simple life is much easier than the complicated life of the rich and famous they see every day on the Internet.
I don’t think there is an answer for this, I think there’s way too much propaganda on the other side of the equation. My only hope from this El Niño is that it creates such damage and disaster that it starts waking people up. I think if it affects the ranchers and farmers that will be a big plus because they are usually on the side of not believing in climate change.
What I do right now is just keep talking to people and preparing, but I’m lucky since I live in a minivan full-time. I mean, I can drive anywhere. The weather suits me.
70°F is 21°C
Fish don't have AC.
And what about the years before that?
Eg: Totally not tracking submarines, we're looking at dolphins and whales!
With notable funky bespoke hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP
Scripps itself has been running since 1903.
In any event, who cares what the climate was like before humans walked the planet? We do care about what it is like while we’re around because it puts significant constraints on our lives.
There’s a lot of nuance in this stuff - far more than global average surface temperature (which is primarily good for scary headlines) and “fish don’t have AC”.
Translation: "I expect all areas to be affected the same, despite axial tilt, fluid dynamics, etc."
Im Australian, so it also means droughts, water restrictions, and significant increases in bushfire number and severity after a few years of drought. Drought followed by cyclone, or bulk rain events causes catastrophic flooding. Its a shit show.
That hypothetical you can look around at the rest of the global political class and see that the rest of the establishment will destroy the livability of the biosphere whether that hypothetical you starts putting all of your money into unions, green technology and BECCs or not and conclude that the only available choice is whether to be poor in a collapsing world or rich in a collapsing world.
Moving away from fossil fuels is cheaper. Green energy is very cheap, it just misses a base load component right now. It's just that the people benefiting are different ones. And those people are going to lose sooner or later anyway, because in addition to climate change, fossil fuels are also finite.
The only reason trump is on the oil bandwagon is because many of his buddies are benefiting from it. And probably because he's still pissed at the Scotland windmill thing.
But doing the right thing doesn't have to make you poor. It will benefit everyone including the investors.
The optimal strategy for long term biosphere habitability is a mixed strategy of mostly green tech with a tiny amount of fossil fuels exclusively for those metal smelting roles where arc furnaces and biofuels are unsuitable.
Investment portfolios dominated by technology that lifts everybody up are less profitable than greedy choices of risky investment, per some of the finer details of the mutual fund separation theorem.
And oligarchs have kids too, don't they want them to live in a world worth living in?
You could do the same with the accounting team on retainer for the US Commerce Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Education Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Interior Secretary's family portfolio, or the head of NASA's family portfolio, or the Middle East Special Envoy's family portfolio, or the Administrator-in-Chief of the Small Business Administration's family portfolio.
These are all individuals with a net worth of over a billion dollars who each separately employ a full time accounting and financial team with its own IT and HR just to maximise family income. What's ten million a year in operating costs versus at least sextuple that in return?
Each oligarch of size is the figurehead of a corporation dedicated to number go up.
I’m sympathetic to the intent of your argument, but man, that’s a hallava gotcha there. Other than nuclear there isn’t a compelling story for a base load source of green energy. And all the new-gen nuclear tech is a long shot for safe, cost efficient, rapid scaling right now.
Yet I can walk here in the city at night without getting robbed at gunpoint. Or any point really. Pickpockets are a pest here but that's about it.
That's how places like Denver ended up with 40k Venezuelan migrants and little federal assistance for them.
And you know what we did? Tighten our belts a bit and help these people get integrated into our city rather than just pawning them off onto someone else.
[1]J. E. Cole et al., Recent strengthening of eastern Pacific ENSO in the last millennium paleorecord. Science DOI:10.1126/science.ady2660
I feel this is going to be a "big one" this year? And probably the culmination of extreme heat, crop failures, and high diesel prices are going to trigger more conflict too? To be clear, I'm an optimist, I think things will be "good" in the long run, but I have a feeling the next 12-24 months are going to be a doozie with the 4 or 5 things converging...
Like, I don't want to have this crazy flamewar thing, but like, what do the numbers say, how fucked is this particular one?
I also want to state for those of you living in Southern California to be prepared for a possible earthquake. It’s a salton sea fills up with a lot of water quickly It could most likely trigger an earthquake.
But those are the impacts just in the United States. We might be looking at food price shocks in combination with the ongoing war in Iran.
By the way for those of you complaining about the heat in Los Angeles, it’s not really the heat. It’s the humidity. The LA basin has had record high dewpoint temperatures. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.
How do we fix this? The only thing I can think of is a spiritual awakening where owning and doing less is more attractive than flying around in jets and building AI data centers.
Oceans hit highest temperature on record
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424606
Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313428
Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475404
The Strongest El Niño Ever Forecast and the Hunger It Will Leave Behind
I’m not sure the human species has the capacity to actually coordinate behavior at the scale needed, irrespective of any future warning etc…, to be able to combat this
The problem with climate change is that there is a huge incentive to not fix it, and the culprit is not just rich oil corporations. Many countries subsist solely on oil profits and have no other natural resources to sustain themselves, i.e. Saudi Arabia. Those countries have influence over others like the US.
There are alternative options already available to replace fossil fuels for most things. In first-world countries, the only thing stopping a transition is the loss of corporate profits.
Come join! https://luma.com/tu0uvbx1
Are people in trouble? Perhaps. If we stop technological achievement in the name of a few degrees centigrade, then definitely.
Crash now and there will never be a second chance, just iron age stuff in a harsher environment for however many tens of millennia it takes to have some random pandemic that wipes the descendants out occur.
Theoretically, if we can crack fusion or some other source of abundant, cheap energy, we could build many of the bandaid solutions proposed today that are not feasible due to energy constraints, while transitioning society to a more sustainable path. Tilt the curve as it were.
Our psyches unfortunately aren't built for the globalized world we live in, and unless we figure out some sort of collective awakening to transcend our egos... Our best hope is likely solutions that allow the march of progress, while slowing, stopping, and eventually undoing a bunch of damage humans have done to the biosphere over our history. Definitely a moon shot, but hopefully we can figure something out.