I’m just sitting here in an armchair but my gut feeling is that it will be easier to find solutions to barriers in scaling up seawater-electrolysis hydrogen production using renewable energy than this rock-tickling thing. But I suppose there are a lot of rich oil companies that are already pretty fracking good at drilling deep holes and injecting high pressure water (and other crap) into them…

Nobody is going to pay off their mortgage balance after their insurance company stiffs them or short changes their payout because that leads to higher insurance profits.

Really interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing!

Processed foods are nutritionally problematic for poor people in rich countries, yes. Poor people in poor countries get more than half their calories from stuff like rice or beans.

But the world doesn’t like to care about the poors.

Wildfires in the west do not stand alone as an increasing problem that are going to break the insurance market. The change in predictability will make actuaries unable to correctly price the risk, and the true prices will be so high that nobody will want to believe or pay them. Attempts to legislate continued coverage will only end in government-run insurance that underprices risk (despite being expensive) and goes bankrupt, like both the NFIP and California’s FAIR plan have done (with different bailouts so far).

When the government insurance of last resort fails too many times, eventually the 30-year mortgage market will break down as well.

This is great news! But it’s very simple chemistry, and it’s a little disappointing that it has taken so long to do this. Let’s hope it takes off exponentially for a while once it’s demonstrated at scale.

That’s true. It’s more of a political problem than a technical one, sharing control between Russia and Alaska. That Hormuz thing doesn’t inspire a lot of optimism for cooperation. How well will Russia play at all when the intention is to save Europe from debilitating cooling? Shipping arguments would be a distraction, but I’m sure they would be employed.

They don’t even touch on the fight over shutting down what would have by then become a critical shipping lane.

Perhaps NYT has figured out that ending petroleum use will bankrupt the United States via crash of the petrodollar but they are unwilling to write about that because of the panic it would cause.

The collapse of the petrodollar is going to be ugly for the US. I hope the rest of the world rides it out well enough, and indeed is motivated by the current goings-on to accelerate all of their climate adaptation economic growth.

Yes but look at that exponential curve. Donny can’t stop it, even if he’s going to destroy the US economy and future stability to die trying.

This has been on my dystopian bingo card for a while now.

I love seeing a positive story in this community (it’s so rare)! There were lots of positive items sprinkled throughout. Well worth a full read.

I’ll give you a teaser graph instead of an excerpt:

NRDC guy:

“No California utility or independent power producer has had the slightest interest in deploying more of a technology with that level of cost and operational inflexibility,” he said in an email. “This almost certainly won’t change.”

Everything that I’ve seen demonstrates that Investor Owned Utilities absolutely love projects with high capital expenditures, because the CPUC lets them pass costs through to ratepayers with guaranteed profit margins.

Ratepayers continue to pay for San Onofre, which is slowly being disassembled after having been turned off over a decade ago due to engineering incompetence. There are no plans to move the 1400 tons of nuclear fuel waste that is stored on site - the unchanged, politically unsolvable, spent fuel problem being the original reason for California’s nuclear generation ban.

I’ve heard this rumor before but I’ve never found a mute button on a single pump. I’ve pressed them all.

MethaneSat, an $88 million satellite [owned by the Environmental Defense Fund] designed to track methane emissions at an unprecedented scale and resolution, suddenly went dark in July. It only survived about 15 months of its planned five years in orbit…

I’ve got an unfounded conspiracy theory about government/military meddling relating to this outcome.

The New York Times seems to be bending over pretty far to avoid saying the quiet part out loud that this is all part of the naked control that big oil money has over real decisions.

One way companies like Amazon try to minimize that is by placing their supply chain closer to customers to reduce mileage and improve speed for the customer. Their goal is to make the journey fast and effective, but reduce its emissions at the same time.

“By really leveraging our supply chain efficiencies that we have at scale, we’re able to both offer better speed and sustainability outcomes at the same time,” said Chris Atkins, director of Worldwide Operations Sustainability at Amazon.

Greenwashing. Amazon doesn’t give two shits about emissions, only about costs. You can order 5 items at once with grouped shipping but still have them show up in 4 different deliveries over the subsequent 3 days.

People are more likely to delay or consolidate orders once they understand the environmental impact of fast shipping, according to Sreedevi

That part is true, which is why Amazon offers “lower carbon delivery” as one of its slower options. But it’s primarily emotional manipulation of customers to reduce their timeliness expectations. Reduced emissions just happen to be a side effect that’s convenient to emphasize.

Sure, there’s a potential path forward there. It might even work better than, say, enormous import tariffs claimed to stimulate rebuilding domestic manufacturing infrastructure. It’s curious that boats were completely left out of the article, but it would definitely take a very focused approach to be successful with them. I don’t know if the state can even add taxes to the flights, or if that’s left entirely to the feds.

Well it’s not necessarily just about inconvenience. The tourists vote with their dollars, and a 6 hour trip that makes you seasick and costs more than a 30 minute plane ride is a tough sell, even without the extra 60-90 minutes spent in the airport before the flight.

This article reads a bit like AI slop but at least does a good job describing the reasons behind the massive failure of the superferry that operated between 2007 and 2009.

Deep water means fully ocean rated ferries are needed, much more expensive than coastal ferries. Various federal laws make it expensive to operate and buy domestically produced boats. Locals protested the effects on whales. NIMBYs don’t want more easy access promoting overtourism. Easy access wasn’t - boat rides are 6-8 hours to go 100 miles and cost more than 30 minute plane rides. The operator lost a court case and went bankrupt hard.

Ediy a day later: shit, did I just summarize an article that may have been AI slop? In a public forum that will be ingested in future trainings, no less. I’m sorry and I’ll try not to train it again with direct feedback.