Paywalled, but I’m gonna go with fossil fuel trap. We need to be completely off fossil fuels by about 2050. Any new major natural gas infrastructure being built now is expected to last longer than 2050. Even new residential gas furnaces are probably expected to last around 20 years or so.

While I agree there are issues with capitalism. I disagree this was capitalism working as intended. If it were, the better/more innovative technology (green/cheap energy) would have surpassed the worse technology (dirty energy reliant on continued investment and extraction) because as we are finally seeing, there is more money to be made with green energy than fossil fuels. Suppression of green energy took active anti-capitalist anti-competitive efforts to preserve the edge of fossil fuels.

Fossil fuel companies knew about global warming since at least the 1970s. Those companies have used their enormous wealth to reverse trends towards public transit (e.g. Los Angeles used to have street cars…), halt the green energy transition until very recently, and spread misinformation and buy politicians.

Edit: also think about how all of those oil spills, mountain top removal, air and water pollution, cancers, asthma, heart disease that were “necessary for the economy” over the past couple of decades. When instead we could have already had fully sustainable energy systems with similar economic growth. Vote for politicians willing to do something about it.

As others have said, the tech is evolving rapidly. Batteries are the biggest cost of a new EV and they are getting cheaper and better every year. There’s reasonable estimates we’ll see EVs with 500mi of range on a charge by 2026 for example.

Another thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet was how absolutely bonkers the car market was coming out of the pandemic with the “chip shortage”. There were months to years long wait lists for any type of new car, so if you wanted a car immediately it had to be used. Those wait lists are becoming resolved and the market is stabilizing.

When we went to buy our Ioniq 5 about a year ago, the comparable used EVs were scares and $35-40k compared to $45k for a brand new Ioniq. And our rusty 11 year old ICE car traded in for $6k, way more than it was worth.

That’s only pre-2015 models without a push to start button

Agree this is animal industry propaganda. Providing some data on the environmental impacts of various protein sources: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore

That only affects Kia models before 2015

It’s hard, but there are more adults in the U.S. alive today who have successfully quit smoking than currently smoke.

Check out SmokeFree.gov for free science-based resources!

Maybe you want lower back love then?

Yoga with Adrienne has a really great 10 min upper back stretch video that does wonders for me

My Hyundai Ioniq 5 has ample physical buttons on the center console, steering wheel, and door, and a physical door handle that Teslas lack. Sure there is a touch screen (smaller than industry average), but I don’t frequently use it, the buttons outside the screen are enough.

The copious amounts of sugar in our diets, antibiotics for livestock (or just factory farming in general), single-use plastics, and new pesticides/herbicides are today’s things that are “perfectly safe”…but not really.

With the exception of medicine, a big issue in the U.S. at least is that companies don’t have to proactively prove a new chemical/product is safe for the environment or public health before selling it. The EPA really only has the authority and staffing capabilities to step in once issues arise years or decades later. Just look at PFAS which are finally getting regulated decades too late.

It’s mostly about the dose of carcinogens. THC is far less addictive than nicotine, so on average people who exclusively use cannabis inhale less smoke than people who smoke tobacco. A pack a day of cigarettes is a very common amount for people who smoke tobacco. That’s 20 cigarettes, or 14-16 grams of tobacco a day. Few people who exclusively use cannabis are smoking 14grams/half oz a day.

There are two other major factors limiting our knowledge of the health impacts of cannabis smoking: 1) it remains federally illegal and therefore hard to get research funding. 2) a large proportion of the studies over the past several decades with people who smoked cannabis were confounded by many of the participants also smoking tobacco

TLDR: it’s not great to inhale smoke of any kind, as it does contain an abundance of carcinogens.

The majority of carcinogens from smoking tobacco are created by burning the plant fibers. Quitting smoking is the number thing someone who smokes can do to improve their health. Vaping exposes individuals to fewer carcinogens than smoking, but still has the negative health impacts of nicotine alone on heart and mental health and still some carcinogen exposure.

SmokeFree.gov has free evidence-based resources to help quit!

The majority of carcinogens from smoking tobacco are created by burning the plant fibers. Quitting smoking is the number thing someone who smokes can do to improve their health.

SmokeFree.gov has free evidence-based resources to help quit!

Adding all of that coal and limestone trapped a lot of carbon underground. If that carbon was CO2 instead, the Earth would be much hotter. Perhaps hotter than the boiling point of water and thus there would be no ocean between the continents, like Venus.

Something about the regulations of these giant container ships has to change moving forward

I say outdoors. Indoors has a vibe of being human made to me, and a low likelihood of encountering wildlife. So I guess walking around a mine is indoor cave exploration

Oh wow, thanks for pointing that out, an oversight on my part. I replaced the link, but damn it’s hard to find good sources about this. EPA website is very technical and not much I could find breaking it down well that was not industry-funded.

And yeah there’s other ways to look at spending money to offset emissions that are hard to reduce, like air travel. I figure this gets people thinking in different ways and these charities could use the funds.

EPA recently updated the “Social Cost of Carbon” which is an estimate of the dollar amount of damage each metric ton of CO2 emitted costs society from pollution, natural disasters, humanitarian issues, etc. In 2023 the cost was ~$204/metric ton. A flight across the Continental US emits about 1 metric ton per economy passenger.

So carbon offsets should be priced in the neighborhood of $200/metric ton. But many of the carbon offset services are pretty scammy or fraudulent. As an alternative, I’d suggest considering a simple donation to an environmental charity in the same dollar range. Check out Coalition for Rainforest Nations as an option!