The shift to proof-of-stake basically eliminated Ethereum’s emissions.

Ethereum runs fine on proof-of-stake, and choosing not to be decentralized is another way of accomplishing pretty much the same tasks without needing to waste a huge amount of electricity.

It is just arbitrarily burning electricity. The security comes because people see a hashed sequence of blocks and agree on them, not because of the extra work done. Proof of stake and a trusted broker with an open book would do equally well to producing a consistent verifiable ledger.

If time-matched, additional, and you banned proof of work cryptocurrency, sure

1 & 2 Four years is enough time to go through the EPA rule-making process. So Trump will do it to get rid of the rules. He did it before.

3. Trump isn’t just “in the pocket of billionaires” but in the pocket of specific billionaires, who want to get rid of it.

4. Biden had a bad start, and then took new leases down to near zero after his first year:

5. Yep.

For sure. Actually winning a civilization-supporting planet is going to be a decades-long fight to get things to where we need to be

There are some indicators that Chinese coal consumption might have peaked a couple months back. Not definite yet, but a very real possibility

It’s too late to have no identifiable impact, but absolutely not too late to stabilize temperatures — every 1/10 of a degree matters, and it’s better that we do it now than wait until we’ve burned every last bit of coal, oil, and gas.

He’s actually done a lot — the Inflation Reduction Act is the biggest piece of climate policy the US has done.

It’s not sufficient on its own, but it’s a good beginning.

There’s a well-publicised list of the 400 wealthiest. The least-rich on that list has about US$2.9 billion in assets.

You and I just did. That’s a starting point. It takes moving from there to actively pressuring politicians and electing favorable officials to make things change.

I’ve been there. It takes significant and sustained effort, and you get a lot of partial wins along the way.

Which is reason to push your government to actually take those measures, not to just assume that doomsday is guaranteed.

This is specifically scientific research saying otherwise.

Telling people about it is a way to change that

Because somebody will yell “communist” if you do that.

The most likely one is a mismatch between how long the startup stays in business and how long the greenhouse gas emissions that they “offset” stay in the atmosphere

The flip side to that is that you can actively work to change things.

You definitely can do only heat pump, but adding resistive backup is cheap if you’re already putting in new wiring anyways. So people do.

The ride predates most US freeway construction — it was meant to serve as a vision for what an automobile-heavy society could look like.