To sum it up. The inital thought was that the bill would be a public investment of $385 billion in renewables, but it seems it will be more in the line of $1.2 trillion, so about three times more money. Certainly a big change and extremly good news.
I don’t like any politicians but I am willing to put this guy or his party back in in 2024. IDC what happens. Another liar zombie conservative is a waste of time and life.
And to be honest, we’re running out of time.
We are out of time. We are past the tipping point. Now it’s just a matter of how much time we have left before the mass mortality events affect humans in a way that we notice.
Tldr: Conservatives have won. We will die soon. How soon is not clear, but it will be soon.
It’s an extreme exaggeration to say we will all die soon and that all hope is lost. Please do not fall into the doomer cesspit of despair, or attempt to spread it.
Yes, things are bad, but we’re not out of the game yet. Renewable energies have gotten so cheap, even the capitalists can’t resist adopting it for profit (as much as I hate capitalism, I do enjoy forcing them into making the right choices through profit).
We’ve just proven how effective geo-engineering is from the removal of sulfer from bunker fuel, and there are much cleaner ways to seed clouds on purpose to cool the planet and the oceans, which could give us more time for those juicy profitable renewables to fully take hold, slowing our descent into disaster.
Remember, once we’ve successfully switched to renewables, the fossil fuel industry will never be able to reverse it.
While I love your optimism and agree with your outlook on industry, the feedback loop of global warming has begun. The commercial changes you are talking about are fantastic and will certainly extend our lives. Much like treating a terminal disease, however, these treatments may increase our lifespans, but cannot completely save us. Here’s why.
Even if we were completely carbon neutral starting today, the feedback loop of global heating cannot be stopped. I know we don’t want to hear this, but this feedback loop will eventually result in a mass mortality event affecting humans globally. The technology to reverse this is not close. Could some deus ex machina technology save us at the last second? Yes, that is possible. But there is no evidence of it currently.
We should acknowledge our trajectory and openly discuss why this is happening. We should also be realistic about our expectations.
We already have technology that could be deployed to save us, it’s just a matter of producing enough of it and deciding that the risks are outweighed by the danger of doing nothing. We could deploy mirrors to block a portion of solar rays to reduce global temperature, engineer hyper-sequestering ferns (similar to the cause of a previous ice age), paint surfaces to increase global albedo, etc.
Each of these could massively disrupt ecosystems and climate due to the abrupt change, or who knows what else.
As long as we’re still around and still have access to the tools that enable mass production and bioengineering, there are things we can try. Are we trying them? None of the super risky ones that would actually pull us back from a tipping point, and not enough of the less dangerous solutions to reach net zero, but there’s momentum building.
If these ideas involved profit, I would have some hope they could be adequately tested or even deployed on a test scale. But between a lack of a clear profit path and a long history of conservative obstructionism globally, I think it’s a fair prediction that these treatments will not be attempted on a meaningful scale.
When things start getting bad enough that people in power at the moment are deeply affected, we’ll see an incentive to focus on immediate solutions that actually work. That’s when the window for drastic measures opens. For now, it’s just a waiting game. Vote for the least worst candidate, donate if you can, and do your best to explain the situation without freaking people out so much they won’t listen. Hopefully renewable energy wins that race, but as long as it hits the rich before we hit collapse, there’s a chance for drastic measures to occur and work.
Defeatist takes like this are right wing propaganda, prove me wrong.
Im not a defeatist but we aint winding back global warming and the right wing certainly does not see me as their kind. We need to do our best to mitigate and honestly geo-engineering is a desperation measure that is more likely to bite us in the ass than living with it as we can.
Read my comment history for your proof.
If you don’t want to be accused of spreading rightoid propaganda, stop spreading rightoid climate defeatist propaganda.
What specifically are you talking about? Accurate descriptions of scientific concensus are not right wing propaganda. For the life of me, I can’t find a single right wing outlet that will admit it is as bad as it actually is. Pretending things are not that bad (your position) is the standard right wing position. Your gaslighting will not work on me.
Furthermore, my comment history stops just short of advocating the eradication of conservatives by force. If there is a conservative troll between us, a look at each of our comment histories should clear up which one of us it is.
No doubt. I mean I look back and carter, reagan, bush, clinton, bush bugaloo, obama, trump, and biden and only half of those administrations ever did anything useful for me. I remember when the bush tax cuts allowed me to afford a drink at the bar. woohoo.
This combined with the fact that utilities like renewables due to their cheaper deployment and opex and you’ve got something going. Now all you have to do is accelerate and cap the depreciation of old equipment. Thanks Joe.
Love the idea, but: A lot of rich people will get much more rich. There will be a lot of money wasted on things, that will not work and the grifters will know that it was not gonna work. There are numerous examples from the „green coal“ projects that siphoned off a lot of money with unrealistic ideas without repercussions. The more desperate the world get for fast solutions regarding climate change, the more money will be thrown around unvetted.
Mind you, a lot of is getting spent on things we know work, such as wind, solar, storage, and electrification.
don’t forget insulation. Its the cheapest, easiest, quickest return on investment green thing there is.
The alternative is doing nothing, and we know how that’s gonna turn out
I recently listened to a podcast where the guest made the argument that the untied states is set up to benefit the petty elite. That means the guy who owns a car dealership or six McDonald’s franchises. Suddenly these people love free government money when they’re getting their hands on it.
According to this article, much of these tax breaks will go towards electric vehicles. This means that business owners and other 1099 workers like realtors will bend over backwards to justify getting these credits. Overall, this will help shift people away from using gas cars. Not the best outcome to still have all these cars on the road, but it’s a compromise at least.
It also makes manufacturers build more energy efficient appliances, and solar panels. It will drive the cost of these things down over time as it becomes the default to put in a heat pump HVAC or water heater. We will see more changes in the design of things which makes them more efficient as demand for less efficient units falls off.
The all or nothing approach was never going to work in the system we have now. It is a dumb compromise, but, it is at least a compromise. It gets the petty elite, that guy with a car dealership or six McDonald’s, to embrace something that is better than what we have now.
Goldman Sachs expects higher-than-expected private investment in all green energy categories affected by the IRA, but sees the biggest gains in two areas: electric vehicle production and advanced manufacturing.
Neither of these are green energy.
Electric vehicle production is green energy in the same way that renewable powerplant construction is green energy. Both enable the US to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and move towards a more sustainable energy grid.
Renewable powerplant produces renewable energy.
An EV is better than gas cars but it still may be using fossil fuel energy
Your comments hurt our brains. Are you implying that shifting the method of powering transportation to renewables is a bad thing or no better than putting gasoline into an internal combustion engine?
you’re getting hung up thinking EV automatically means renewable energy. investing in EV’s in no ways shifts the method of powering them. Investing in renewable energy does that.
You’re technically correct on the surface. But people who get an EV are also probably more likely to get solar in their roof to charge that EV. I think your point though is that some states (I think Idaho?) power homes with fossil fuels, and buying an EV there will give the illusion of making a difference when it’s really about the same.
I don’t think most states are as bad as that though.
I think your point though is that some states (I think Idaho?) power homes with fossil fuels
what? The US in general gets most of its electricity from fossil fuels by a huge margin.
The US is about 60/40 fossil vs non-fossil, with much better ratios in the places that the most EVs are being sold right now. This is also likely to greatly improve over the useful life of any new vehicle sold today.
On top of that, EVs are much more efficient at turning electricity into motion than fossil cars are in turning gasoline into motion, so you end up with a reduction in emissions even in fossil-fuel-heavy parts of the US.
So you’ve confirmed our worst suspicions about you. Good job.
You mean you’ve confirmed
lol. Weird hill to die on for you but whatever. Anyone with half a brain knows we have to transition to EVs so that renewables can power transportation. But I guess that concept is impossible for you to comprehend.
The term used is green energy effected areas. An EV can be run with green energy without any problem. A gas powered car can not. That is the key difference.
Run, yes, manufactured, no
A guy who smokes 10 packs of cigarettes a day, and then switches 10 E-cigs is still harming himself with nicotine, and still paying money to those same Tobacco companies – but he’s no longer ingesting tar, and is slowly slowly weaning himself off the substance.
No true Scotsman doesn’t help us.
They’re greener than the existing alternatives.
Im not saying theyre green energy that dont deserve the title, im saying theyre literally not energy production. EVs are an energy use.
You don’t think green energy use qualifies as a green energy “category” that one could invest in?
it’s not green energy use. it’s just energy use. EV’s predominantly run on fossil fuel energy in the US.
It’s the capability for green energy use, in a very energy-intense application. That possibility is not there with combustion engines.
We cannot have a green energy economy unless all the usage endpoints consume clean energy rather than hydrocarbons.
most things that use energy are capable of using green energy, you wouldnt call an investment in a coffee machine company a green energy investment. We need the green energy first.
Anything that already runs on electricity isn’t really part of the discussion then, because there’s no need to change anything at the point of use.
A better analogy to the car thing might be investing in (or subsidizing) heat pump production over natural gas furnaces.
True. EVs plus those crappy fossil fuels power plants though are still more efficient at using energy, and thus better environmentally, than ice cars. We really need more nuclear and renewables here though. It’s pretty bad and it doesn’t have to be.
Everyone having a hard ime on this, EV are not green energy production, widhout green poweplants very little changes with more EVs.
They are ways to use green energy, just not ways to create it.
This is good news.
Finally some good news from the US now that the orange idiot is gone
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Are you living under a rock? The IRA impacts are everywhere. For my home I was able to leverage a tax credit last year for installing an EV charger.
There’s rebates on EVs, home efficiency upgrades, solar, batteries, electric (+heat pump) water heaters, etc. etc. etc.
There’s also tons of money on the table for businesses pursuing cleaner energy, etc.
I’m not American. Stuff Biden does seldom reaches here. I just have to go with whatever I hear when I enter the country. I was under the impression fxck-all was happening, and that China was the only one seriously making progress on their green goals. Lord knows Europe’s been slow af.
Per capita CO2 emissions in 2021:
Country Emissions per capita USA 14.86 China 8.05 EU 6.28 World 4.69 Country Change in % USA -15.92 China 14.59 EU -17.00 World -3.73 In other words Europe is pretty fast in reducing emissions, from a higher then global average. China was well below global average and has increased emissions by a lot. Seriously the EU has some pretty good laws to reducing emissions and is besides Latin America one of the regions with the best relation between quality of life to emissions. France and Spain even have per capita emissions close to the global average.
The estimates from before passage looked like this:
And per this article, we’re likely doing better than the pre-passage estimates.
China by contrast has had increasing emissions over the past several years:
Those increases by China are used by opponents of climate action to argue that it’s not worth doing anything, when every country needs to get to the same emisisons: zero or less.
Was actually not aware that emissions have gone down. Much more used to the US not doing anything or actively screwing people over (such as the arrest of Donziger) but at least it’s going down.
Those increases by China are used by opponents of climate action to argue that it’s not worth doing anything,
Hate that too.China has been doing thins to curb emissions and generally fix the environment like the Gobi tree wall. Course there’s plenty more that could be doing but I digress.
It is; things could be worse than they are. The problem is that both absolute and per-capita emissions are going up, to the point where China crossed over to be the largest emitter on a national-total basis, and we’re at the point where they need to be going down.
