Favorites July 19th 2022

David Watson

Jul 20, 2022

James Medlock @jdcmedlock

It’s weird how AC gets more hate than heaters, when heaters are significantly more harmful to the environment

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.

Carol Leonnig @CarolLeonnig

MORE NEWWWS - @SecretService will tell Congress it doesn't have any new texts from its agents around Jan 6 attack to provide. Anything not already turned over has been purged. Its gone.

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".

KQED News @KQEDnews

Foresters and ecologists say a half-century of intentional burning or ''prescribed fire'' practices in and around the area dramatically reduced forest ''fuel'' there, allowing the blaze to pass through the grove with the trees unscathed.

kqed.orgDecades of ‘Good Fires’ Save Yosemite’s Iconic Grove of Ancient Sequoia Trees | KQEDSaving the centuries-old trees in Yosemite’s famed Mariposa Grove took hard work from firefighters but also half a century of intentional fires.

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!

Gabe Fleisher @WakeUp2Politics

BREAKING: The House has passed the Respect for Marriage Act, codifying same-sex marriage. The final vote was 267-157, with 47 Republicans voting "yea."

Awesome! Now bring it to the Senate to hold Republican's feet to the fire!

David Roberts @drvolts

The rapidly falling costs of batteries have brought the prospect of *fully electrified international maritime shipping* into view.

nature.comRapid battery cost declines accelerate the prospects of all-electric interregional container shipping - Nature EnergyThe maritime shipping industry is heavily energy-consuming and highly polluting, and, as such, is urgently seeking low-emission options. Here the authors examine the feasibility of battery-electric ships and show that the battery price declines could facilitate the electrification of short to medium…

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.

2 Comments

Salim Damerdji

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

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