strommen

No. Less restrictions.

Currently every area of a city is "zoned" for what is allowed to get built there. "Single family home" (SFH) zoning is the most common, and the strictest: it requires every building to be a house meant for one family. No multi-family housing (even duplexes) and no commercial use (even neighborhood stores or home businesses).

This NYTimes articles discusses some of the issues and how Minneapolis is changing its policies. This should be done everywhere:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/us/minneapolis-single-fam...

Carbon credits vs. carbon tax isn't an either/or.

Carbon tax discourages emitting carbon into into the atmosphere. Carbon credit encourages sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. Both are needed.

One advantage to carbon credits is that anybody can pay them, whereas only the government can enforce a carbon tax. And when it comes to the Amazon, this means the Brazilian government...whose leader is a climate denier that wants to bulldoze the Amazon for agriculture.

Abolish single family zoning.

It's terrible for the planet, terrible for economic and racial equity, and terrible for our mental health.

You're being super disingenuous here. The main priority of Germany's energy transition program was not to lower electricity carbon emissions; it was to phase out nuclear. They were far more worried about a 2nd Fukushima than global warming.

And as you point out, they are managing to reduce CO2 emissions anyway.

I think you misunderstand the linked doc.

Oak Ridge Electric Company, which is a tiny municipal utility that sources electricity from TVA, has 7.09% participation in its green pricing program (which presumably bypasses TVA). This has nothing to do with TVA itself and how it generates power.

Coal is dying in the US. There hasn't been a new power plant built in years, and facilities are getting retired early because it's cheaper to build new solar/wind than to run on coal.

The bad news is that many of the coal plants are getting converted to natural gas rather than being replaced by renewables. And when it comes to climate change, gas is only marginally better than coal. (Though when it comes to air pollution, gas is much better.)

A tiny coal plant recently opened in Fairbanks, Alaska.

The reason why stuff like this (electrolysis, desalination, etc.) is not widely done is that the capital cost of the facilities is too high. If you spend a bunch of money on an electrolysis plant and only run it 10% of the time, you'll never make your money back, even if your electricity is free.

The battery in a Nissan LEAF is warranteed to retain 75% of its capacity for 8 years, 160,000 km. So there's a good chance you'd be on a 2nd battery, considering a 3rd at your stage.

But on the upside, there's virtually none of the other engine maintenance that is required of combustion-run vehicles.

I don't see this as much of a problem. Drag coefficient on a Dodge Ram is 0.357; on a Prius it's 0.29.

That's less than a 25% penalty on efficiency.

The net effect is not even close to the same; it's far worse.

Methane is ~36x more potent as a greenhouse gas over a 100-year timespan. This includes the eventual decay to CO2.

Yes, paper degrades in a landfill.

Any carbon-based stuff you put in a landfill generally degrades to methane, which is 25-86 times worse than CO2 when it comes to global warming.

So recycle your paper :)

Companies piling downtown helps the environment. It allows more people to live close by or commute via mass transportation. Suburban sprawl is the energy-intensive way of living.

I've got an EV in Minneapolis (colder than Toronto but less crowded) and I love it. So does every EV owner I've ever met.

2x cost for electric is not typical. The average cost premium is more like 10-15k (and the US government will allow you a $7,500 tax credit for the electric).

Of course the top-selling electric vehicles (Tesla and Leaf) don't have a direct ICE equivalent so it's tough to compare...

It's carbon neutral when plants decay to carbon dioxide. But they need oxygen for this to happen - and when they don't (like when they're underwater), they decay to methane.

And methane is a greenhouse gas 20-80x more potent than carbon dioxide.

A company that converts clear-cut land to forest could earn money.

There is an entire sector of the economy dedicated to voluntary carbon offsets, and re-forestation efforts are the primary supply. People and companies use these as a sort of carbon tax to offset the emissions they cause by taking airline flights, hosting events, or just living their daily lives.

Climate science is absolutely "a fight between science and self-interested industry".

The general scientific principle, that higher levels of CO2 in the air increases Earth's temperature, is supported by both evidence and theory.

The fossil fuel industries have been hiding, obfuscating, and denying this for the past 30 years.

The suburbs are a happy medium. I have a nice yard, a quiet neighborhood, and can drive to any amenity I'd ever want in under 30 minutes.

In the USA, quality of schools are another big plus for the suburbs over both rural and urban areas.

Lundgren claims that the assistant U.S. attorney on the case told him, “Microsoft wants your head on a platter and I’m going to give it to them.”

Are you kidding me.

When this loophole exists, it's tough to blame Google for not taking advantage of it. You may as well ask them to donate their profits to the federal government.

China is moving unbelievably fast on electric vehicles. Their government is extremely motivated to stamp out air pollution, and there's nothing really stopping them. It's easy to spend lots of money on infrastructure when there is a rocket-ship economy and no political opposition.

The US is behind the rest of the world on vehicle electrification for a couple good reasons (very cheap gasoline and long distances between cities) and a few crappy ones (anti-science Republicans and large rent-seeking auto companies).

Can't believe I had to scroll way down to find a comment that actually understood the article!

There are new refrigerants called HFOs that are chemically-similar to HFCs, but do not exhibit the greenhouse effect. Ammonia and propane also work, and are commonly used in commercial refrigeration today.

CO2, and its interchangeably-used measure of CO2e (which is a sum of all greenhouse gases weighted based on how much they contribute to global warming) is the only pollutant that matters in this context.

Our disposable-good society is a small fraction of our overall impact on the climate. It is 100% possible to power our world with solar, wind, and batteries while keeping the rest of our lives largely unchanged. The only climate-hostile things we can't easily solve for right now are a) beef and b) air travel. Every single HN reader can go all-electric today, and most can sign up for a renewable-energy program through their utility.

If you think our society should build fewer, higher-quality goods then I agree. But doing that won't come close to stopping climate change.

Electricians, plumbers, etc. all make very good money without 4- year degrees. But nobody aspires to these professions nowadays - everybody assumed they must go to university.

The public universities don't cut capacity or quality - they raise costs. And the private colleges follow suit because they can.

I have to wonder what was going through the mind of somebody who selected the username "douche".

Thanks for correcting me. And agreed about production vs investment tax credits.

It's unfortunate that the first "victim" of renewable energy is going to be nuclear (another carbon-free energy source). The intermittent nature of solar and wind require other energy sources that can be ramped up late in the evening and early in the morning, and turned off at night. Nuclear plants take days to ramp up, so they can't meet this need.

The federal government provides a tax credit for 30% of project cost for solar and wind. Unfortunately, this tax credit is non-refundable, meaning it can only be used to reduce your tax liability.

This effectively means that in order to do large-scale renewable energy projects, you must have backing from a large, profitable company to take advantage of the tax credit. This is called tax equity investing, and it's a big money-maker for giants like Goldman Sachs, Berkshire Hathaway, Bank of America, Google, etc. ROI for tax equity investing is amazing, like 20% annual rates of return. But the entire structure shuts out small players, non-profits, and government entities.

The tax credit is phasing out over the next 7 years, and the hope is that solar will then be profitable enough to be developed without tax incentives. But until then, investment is limited by companies with large tax liabilities.

For anybody who cares - the first iteration of temperature data supporting the 1940-70 cooldown period included only latitudes from 20 to 90 degrees North. When equatorial and southern-hemisphere data become available, it showed the cooling was less than previously thought.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GISSTemperature/gi...

Have you checked out pjax? I believe it does the same thing.

The biggest problem I've had trying to use stuff like this is that the page load events don't fire. And many pages run lots of JavaScript in these events.

The biggest dietary change involved for Paleo is eliminating heavily-processed high-carb foods: bread, pasta, donuts, pizza, candy. This is a major nutritional improvement for everybody.

The high-fat aspect just helps people stick with it by making them feel full and also allowing them to indulge.