Notice they barely mention refrigerants because they are planning to use HFOs to meet low GWP targets rather than only actually sustainable choice - natural refrigerants. HFOs are PFAS and we are already seeing environmental accumulation of PFAS (primarily TFA) directly linked to HFO use around the world. We need to shift to natural refrigerants now.

Any chance this is sensitive enough to pick up methane emissions from particularly gassy individuals in their homes? Asking for a friend.

Don’t forget about the massive insurance scheme designed to deal with the aftermath of millions of largely preventable collisions and tens of thousands of deaths each year, the regulatory complex, the adverse health impacts and burden on the healthcare industry, and perhaps biggest of all - the infrastructure (and space) needed for all of this unnecessary driving, all of which come at the expense of all other forms of transportation. The scale of the auto industry is mind boggling, especially considering how useless most of it is.

They certainly have. I’ve complained to NYT several times over their full page BP greenwashing ads, citing misinformation. I don’t suppose it helps, but it’s nice to at least push. I even emailed back and forth with a real person over it, so I got that going for me which is nice.

Net metering had to go. I’m not going to argue that the CPUC nailed it with fair NEM policies across the decades and today, but the simple truth is that solar production at high noon is so high now that it’s essentially worthless. That’s what killed NEM, everyone expecting retail rates for their worthless production was bound to fail at some point. Self consumption and load shifting are necessary to add value back to solar now that we’re firmly embedded in the belly of the duck.

“The harms imposed by the Rivian are three times the harms imposed by the Prius, in terms of air pollution and death from accidents,” said Hunt Allcott, a co-author and professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University. “But we are subsidizing the Rivian and not the Prius.”

EV fans have some reckoning to do. There’s an argument that the carbon matters “more” than the other effects, but good luck not sounding like a psychopath saying the children gunned down by 8000lb pickup trucks with 0-60 times under 3 seconds and zero visibility are worth it for slightly lower carbon.

Meanwhile I’ll keep riding my unsubsidized bicycle and not killing people. We should all have safe paths and trails to ride and communities designed for humans - that’s where I’d like to see hundreds of billions go. We should absolutely also do a carbon fee and dividend (since this polls better than a “tax”).

Frankly a highly speculative set of conclusions. Despite the green deal forbidding converting woodland to crops, the author assumes the opposite. Then they basically ignore the organic requirement. The idea that EU will wholesale move their food production (likely the strictest in the world) to Africa is so outlandish as to not be taken seriously.

TOU isn’t the issue, it’s just the rates themselves that are out of control. The reality is electricity costs vary dramatically throughout the day and seasonally, so reflecting that in customer prices is a natural way to shift some load.

Agreed. The unfortunate conclusion here is they think that many people (particularly voters they feel are critical to this election) don’t actually care about the climate. They’re probably right too. So while the DNC platform is clear on their stance, they don’t see it as a winning issue from a campaign perspective. Frankly that’s not the worst outcome, I care more about action than campaign slogans. They need to win in order to do anything.

Might need to use an oil with a lower smoke point than olive.

Another example of the legal system serving the wrong parties. Somehow NIMBYs keep blocking housing, transit, wind/solar, but when it comes to fossil extraction then they suddenly have no power.

It’s a fascinating topic. It’s top of my mind too - we have had very reliable power historically (Colorado) but in the last year had a major preemptive wildfire shutdown and a few other shutdowns (whereas literally less than 5 minutes of outage the last decade). I also got rid of my gas service last year and fully electrified. I have solar, but was waiting until battery prices dropped before going that route. Figured I’d yolo in the meantime, but that assumption has me increasingly on edge. From a climate perspective, I do hate to see a renewed interest in gas but I get why. We need cheaper batteries and standardized V2H/V2G asap.

My knowledge is probably even lower, but I do recall hearing that most of the US law is just copied from UK law as of the 1700’s, with some divergence since then.

Right, but remember only like 60% of homes have gas anyway, so that’s not necessarily the baseline from a resiliency perspective. And a huge chunk of those aren’t actually prepared to operate without electricity either. So while I agree that resiliency is worth focusing on, we should also look holistically about what gas can/cannot do and the associated costs relative to electrification/solar/storage. A modern gas home will still need a backup generator to run condensing hot water/furnace and there’s a significant cost to whole home generators, so it’s not all fun and games just having gas appliances.

That’s where local battery storage/EVs come in. Also passivhaus in and of itself is a form of resiliency - if the power goes out during a cold snap, the house will stay warm for quite some time, and the dozen kWh in a battery or the several dozen in an EV go alot further. Efficiency has a multiplying effect.

Are you looking at the same article as me? On both the NYT app and the website using this link, I see a heading that exactly matches the data displayed. It’s a dynamic page that adjusts the figure as you scroll and the heading clearly matches the data. It says “abnormally hot nights” in every bar chart, and temperature for all of the line graphs. NYT has some really nice visualizations, with the notable exception of the potato graphic the other week with your states electric production sources - that was hot dog shit. There’s a different baseline temp for the hot night graphs depending on the city - this clearly responds to a low level baseline pre-warming.

I showed this to my partner who isn’t an engineer and she thought it made perfect sense too. Not that my anecdotes are special, but I truly don’t understand the confusion.

It sounds like a system design issue, i.e. they always intended there to be a “primary” heating system below 25F and it was sized as such. For every customer like you, there are 3 more that want to keep a fossil backup system in place so that’s where the market is. Unfortunately that also means customers need to be very educated themselves to select the “right” opinion. There are also downsides to oversizing heat pumps too, and typically oversizing is very common since manual J is overly conservative and installers are used to oversizing fossil systems. Your best bet is more weatherization to decrease heating load so that your HP can meet that load. Yes capacity drops as temperatures decrease, but good ccASHP can maintain full output closer to 0F. Do you have like a 1 ton mini for a whole home in Maine?

Not sure why you jump to “blame”. It’s about awareness of reality. You’re more than welcome to raise awareness about the damage of corporate overlords, which is what’s needed to do something about it politically. We alll need to talk about things to change things.

Wattage is power, not energy. But I still generally prefer carbon as a metric because that’s the climate issue, so by focusing on it directly we can make more informed decisions. It also incorporates time of day/seasonal (peak) impacts implicitly, which also have profound effects on the grid, more than total energy used. The essence of our comments is the same though.

“New generation of engineers” is a bit cringe. The old generation knew thermodynamics pretty damn well. All that’s changed is they’re using R290 refrigerants and variable speed compressors now, but those don’t change anything from a physics perspective. COP is fun but it’s not even the right metric to use from a policy perspective, just like MPG. And despite being unitless, COP suffers from the same exagerative effect as MPG numbers. What matters is the carbon associated with delivering BTUs to a home, so here you can have the ridiculous case of delivering more BTUs at a higher carbon cost achieving a higher SCOP than the same exact heat pump delivering fewer BTUs at a lower total carbon cost achieving a lower SCOP for a better insulated home, and the person with the higher SCOP bragging about it like a clown. At least when the government tests COP it’s a standardized test so you can actually compared equipment (somewhat).

Regardless, nerds gonna nerd and no harm done (and I also track real time energy use of my heat pump, so I consider myself a nerd).