HFCs include popular refrigerants such as R-134a, which was introduced as a less bad alternative to CFCs such as R-12, but which has also been superseded by even less bad alternatives such as R-1234yf. This has been good for American manufacturing, as it stimulates turnover in durable goods (expensive) rather than just recharging leaking systems with additional refrigerant (cheap):

Air-conditioning and refrigeration manufacturers had supported the original restrictions, saying less harmful chemicals were available and that a shift toward those alternatives was already underway. The original rule was also seen as a win for American companies like Honeywell and Chemours that produce and sell alternatives to HFCs.

“American manufacturers did what Congress and the first Trump administration asked them to do: They invested in new equipment, new refrigerants, new production lines and American workers,” said John Hurst, the executive director of the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy, an industry group. “The administration has now changed course in a way that weakens those investments.”

So this move is a combination of environmental middle finger and drag on US GDP, hurting sales of domestic manufacturing.

Allowing Kroger to further limp along their leaking refrigerators will be somewhat meaningful to their bottom line, by delaying capital expenses that they’ve been expecting to incur (and presumably budgeting for). But it’s not going to be meaningful to retail grocery prices.

Consumers owning old vehicles with bad A/C might benefit from being able to buy more R-134a for a bit longer, but that’s not what’s motivating it, since Trump doesn’t care about the little guy.

El Niño events are measured by looking at temperature levels in a vast rectangular zone in the central Pacific. In a moderate El Niño, temperatures might climb, say, 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, above a longer-term average. But in the biggest El Niños of the past 50 years — the ones that started in 1982, 1997, and 2015 — temperatures have soared 2 degrees Celsius or more beyond the norm. Each of those events levied a global economic toll.

This year, many forecasts say the temperature could increase by an unprecedented 3 degrees Celsius. Even the 1877 El Niño, by the best estimates, didn’t have that magnitude.

“A number of the models now show a real chance for a record-setting El Niño event,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. “It is still too early to know for sure.”

El Niño events typically peak in strength late in a calendar year, and then cause warmer global temperatures on land in the months that follow. As a result, many scientists predict that 2027 will be the warmest year on record.

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.