Favorites July 19th 2022
Cooling a house by one degree takes less energy than heating it by one degree with conventional heat sources. Las Vegas and Phoenix are not actually great examples of urban environmental harm, Syracuse is. This also is an argument for taxing carbon, because people's intuitions are terrible about trying to ban or restrict individual activities.
Here's more. They deleted the texts after being told repeatedly not to. Maybe the Secret Service was a bad idea, Yglesias asks what if "Diplomatic Security Service took over presidential protection and the FBI handled counterfeiting".
So, firstly, good news, secondly, what an excellent example of why we need to be doing prescribed burns as part of our forest management everywhere!
Awesome! Now bring it to the Senate to hold Republican's feet to the fire!
With reasonable estimates of future battery energy density, a container ship could actually gain capacity by replacing it's engine with an electric motor+batteries for trips between 2000 and 5000 Kilometers.
Threads
• A very silly thread starting with power sources for future mars rovers and going on from there.
• A thread about a new paper discussing "the winners and losers of from rising asset valuations?" The key element is that they managed to separate people who only made money 'on paper' from those who actually got value out of their wealth gains. In general, the wealthiest people benefitted way more from the same increase in valuation of their assets than those with less total wealth.
My old housemate works on state-level climate change policy, and he says the oil lobbyists all push for a carbon tax precisely because of how politically toxic it is. Given big oil has skin in the game, I'd think they'd be right about the politics.
I think wonks try to persuade other wonks about the merits of policies without accounting for the political merits of policies. And the politics affects the policy: enough backlash, and your policy gets rolled back or hands power to an opposing party that's hostile to your policy's aims.
A lot of academics write white papers with this blindspot. I guess their assumption is that the policy would be good if everyone agreed the policy is good. But that's not our world and it's not even a feasible world given polarization, given how few voters are engaged on policy details, etc.
Whatd be really cool would be some framework for doing cost benefit analyses for a policy that includes the political benefits and political costs. I think nowadays the policy wonks and the politics gurus operate in separate silos mostly - or at least there's no formal framework for unifying the two categories of costs and benefits. But politicians make decisions regarding both but mostly go off of their gut, not anything rigorous about statistical expectations