Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill

It's not the autoworker or coalminer's fault and they and their communities should be considered in the solution, not just trampled over, for both political reasons and for basic justice.

"Petrol" is the more common term. If anything, "gasoline" is an Americanism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Etymology

> In most Commonwealth countries, the product is called "petrol", rather than "gasoline"

> The use of the word gasoline instead of petrol is uncommon outside North America,

I'm not strictly against the subsizidies, but they have sever social justice implications.

Nope. Even if 50% of US taxes are "wasted" on things manigandham doesn't care about, it doesn't follow that increasing taxes would simply all be diverted to things manigandham doesn't care about and thus "wasted".

Oh, but 'people' feel its change. You feel it.

But it is all secondary, or even further away. Coffee is more expensive. Gas (CNG) prices is already costing many households more in these summer months. Gasoline prices are at record hights. Water is increasing in price. Electricity prices are at record heights (which, is increasing my IT infrastructure bills). In many regions we cannot get certain potatoes doe to crops failing. And so on.

You see the effects, when you look for em. In your wallet. On your table. In your bottom lines and revenues.

So, aside from the opportunities we may see, there are effects having impact on average peoples live this very moment

There was huge support for lockdown and restrictions here for a long time, and only just in the last few weeks is compliance becoming an issue in Melbourne (but not so much elsewhere). Turns out a year of social restrictions causes fatigue.

Heat pump water heaters do save about half the cost in electricity over a conventional resistive-only water heater, and are optimal for places with basements, as they also dehumidify; or in warm climates, as they cool the air. So it's also useful for long term perishable storage like a root cellar would be, or in a laundry room. They do cost 3x as much, though.

Residential heat pumps for heating and cooling in the US is relatively new, and I've had nothing but problems with mine - so much so that I just received a full refund on the purchase price of my unit because of manufacturing "defects".

> It's going to be hard to convince folks to replace their gas water heaters with electric heat pump models that cost ~3x more and save little to no cost annually.

Heat pumps are not "3x" as expensive and the price is coming down. Heat pumps are also a lot more efficient than any other heat source! Most households in the US would save ~$500/year on the energy bill if they switched to air-source heat pumps. Source: https://www.rewiringamerica.org/policy/bringing-infrastructu... This doesn't account for business use.

So it works like solar panels and electric cars — higher up front cost that saves you money over the long term. And if the government gave up-front rebates to make the costs the same or lower than furnaces then it's a no-brainer to use heat pumps.

>I'm not sure drilling for a heat pump would work in town here, and then the operating cost would still likely be more than gas (heating is at least 75% of my annual consumption).

Air source heat pumps are where it's at — waaay easier install than using ground-source or water-source. Air-source heat pumps used to not work in colder climates but now they do and have gotten a lot more efficient. These things are really awesome, a pretty good way to slash emissions while saving money over the long term.

Most of them "can", but the ones who "will" get weeded out early or are made out to be lepers (Ralph Nader comes to mind).

A majority of Americans support action on climate change.

That's okay, who cares if some old hippies don't believe in an obvious scientific fact. We all believe it's true, right? And that's what matters, yes?

Because the people who deny that climate change would be a crisis if we don't stop emitting fossil carbon are absolute idiots, at least we can all agree on that much.

The activism comes from people who misrepresent the science. The skepticism also comes from people who misrepresent the science. The public debate is almost orthogonal to what the actual science in the IPCC reports says.

To give an example, the IPCC AR5 (2013) report says this:

"More recent assessments indicate that it is unlikely that annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have increased over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin. Evidence, however, is for a virtually certain increase in the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones since the 1970s in that region."

An activist picks out the second part and ignores the first. A skeptic picks out the first part and ignores the second. They battle it out, each citing "the science", and both are lying by omission. And that's the best case scenario. Often what gets cited isn't even in the IPCC reports, and of a lineage which is more dubious.

Which is why, if you want to have an informed opinion on the climate, you should ignore the media, ignore the talking heads, and read the IPCC reports.

This summer we saw floods kill people in Germany and Belgium while in the Netherlands nobody died because it spent a fuck ton of money on flood defences.

America was the main holdout, and it wasnt because they thought it wasn't effective enough, quite the opposite. So yes its pretty vital that we do at least that much.

Carbon tax is like LVT - we have commons (ability of the ecosystem to "absorb" emissions), we have to split it up somehow, what better way than to price them in a manner where only the amount that can be sustainably used, is used? People who can make the best use of the capacity, or are willing to burn money on it, will buy it up.

It may not be a total solution, but it’s a first step. Too many climate activists have this brinksman “no but” approach to changing the course of the political ship of climate change (see nuclear power discussion above), when we really need “yes and” even if the first steps aren’t perfect or big enough. Yelling at people to make drastic changes has never convinced even honest skeptics.

I'm possibly reading too much into your question but carbon dividends that let everyone spend the money raised on what they need to do to adjust are a sensible part of any plan. Taxes are a very useful and soohisticated government tool, and in America certain groups have relentlessly attacked both taxes and government intervention as things that are harmful. (The exact same people arguing that tobacco, global warming, lead paint, corporate funding of politicians etc. are not bad for you)

It is pretty clear that what Biden tweets about is the impact on debt, not taxes: https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/sep/29/can-joe-biden...

Uhm, no. Obamacare is basically a Republican brainchild, mostly conceptualized by the Heritage Foundation in the late 1980s. I wouldn't describe it as dragging the US into the 21st century... more like dragging it barely into the 20th century.

>And yet it turned out not to, the rhetoric is still that US healthcare is pretty bad.

US Healthcare is pretty good. But also extremely expensive at the same time, with lots of people unable to afford it, even when they have health insurance thanks to huge co-payments. You keep hearing the stories of severely injured people screaming they do NOT want to go to the hospital because they cannot afford it, and of other people who are brought to the ER, then amass huge debt in a short time that bankrupts them, and then they end up dying very prematurely anyway because the actual life-saving treatment or surgery is something they couldn't afford before, and certainly cannot afford after seeing the initial ER bill.

Waiting a few months at worst for a hip replacement surgery in Germany seems fine compared to waiting for hip replacement surgery forever and never actually getting it in the US because you cannot afford it even though you worked two jobs your entire life. All the while the US spends 17% of their GDP on health care, bout 5% points more than most other western nations.

That's the state of affairs after Obamacare. And yet, Obamacare still made things better than before for a lot of people.

That's not how it works. If you want the bill to seem like a wise decision, you name it something like WISE or SMART. If you want to make it seem like it would work, put the word "effective" somewhere in there. If polling indicates widespread support for universal programs, make sure to stick the word "universal" in there.

Everything's marketing, we can just market ourselves to death. Most of US politics is the mastery of baby boomer tone anyway: that bland assertive 80s speech pattern that makes boomers think you're a wise steward and a moderate, nuanced hand. For that matter, part of it is to repeat the words "complex" and "nuanced" a lot, especially when referring to "challenges" and "responses."

As a Canuck, I see this as a huge US weakness. These megabills, riders and such.

The parent's point is valid. If people cared, really, really cared, it would be a single purpose bill.

It would be more effective too, in that, people could legitimately say... this is only about climate change. Nothing else. What part of this do you object to?

Right now, it clearly is not, and lo and behold, people can easily reject it, and even have very valid reasons for doing so.

I think the filibuster has some merit. If you want to do something controversial (to the point that the opponents are willing to do the physical effort of making speeches 24h a day to stop it), there must be a strong majority of 60%, not just 50%. But there must be some sort of cost to filibusting.

They have enough billions so if this bad PR had an effect they would have released a cool designed webpage and a cool video explaining why their move is correct and how they are very green, maybe next week on their strategist thinks is the most effective time this will happen. Anyway I would not waste a keyboard press to try to defend this giants, there are people very well paid to do this job.

What's the exploit here? We aren't even talking about an executive order here are we? We're talking about an element of a bill being passed through the legislatures of the land. Exactly the mechanism that laws are supposed to go through to change.

Anyways the people who are most viciously opposed to immigration are also the very same people who exploit illegal immigrant labor and have a vested interest in keeping an eternal underclass they can abuse, so you'll forgive me if I have very little sympathy for the 'side' that claims adding more citizens and giving more people intimately affected by the law the right to vote is an 'end run around democracy'.

Also, many of these people had no choice in their alleged "law breaking". Holding people accountable and punishing them for their parents bringing them into the country when they were children is incredibly cruel. Insisting that they should never be able to obtain citizenship in the country they grew up in on top of that because they broke a law that holds almost no moral value would be just pure evil.

Also, the 'exploit' that's actually being abused right now is the comically absurd procedural filibuster, which never should have been a thing in the first place. It, frankly, wasn't wrong to reduce the threshold for supreme court nominations to 50 votes in the senate -- it's wrong to tie up every single vote in a filibuster no one has to actually put anything on the line for.