I live in a 1000 square foot two bedroom condo. When it gets below 20° f, which does a lot during the winter, I have to use the auxiliary heat on my heat pump unit.
That's 7.5 kW.
So just to stay warm during the night, when solar stops working, I would need 3-5 Power Walls?
If you make less than 400% of the federal poverty line and are at a job that doesn't offer insurance or are part time - that's then you qualify for an Obamacare plan.
The problem is most people don't live in 15 minute cities and it's impossible to turn the suburbs into 15 minute cities as most things are just physically too far apart.
If you live in a gigantic McMansion neighborhood that takes 5 minutes to get out of by car and then your job is an additional 20 miles away there is no bus or train solution - you'll have to have a car.
Funny you should mention living in your car. I used to have a 40 mi commute from my suburban town, each way, to work. I lived slightly north of Baltimore and commuted to just outside of DC. I would spend an hour minimum each way driving. When traffic was bad easy 2 hours. I did this for 4 years and it was soul destroying, but it was an extremely lucrative job.
Then I found a job in my little suburb that pays about the same amount of money and it's close enough I can ride my bike to, which I do sometimes when it's not hot, by car it's only about 5 minutes. The extra time I've gotten back has been amazing and looking back I would have taken 20% pay cut to not have to do that horrible commute.
That is not a solution for everyone as there aren't enough jobs in the suburbs to support the population. They're called bedroom communities for a reason.
I'm really not pro or anti car. I just think you have to be realistic. The realistic part is the suburbs are just too spaced out and too far from jobs to have a functioning mass transit system.
Why would anyone blame Obamacare and not their employer for not offering health insurance?
How about blaming our horrible system of employer sponsored health insurance?
If you're part-time and making $15 an hour don't you qualify for an Obamacare subsidy? That would limit the cost to 10% of your income.
10 or 20 years from now when you're taking a nap or jerking off or eating fried chicken or playing Call of Duty while a self-driving car (you can call it an "automated transportation pod" if the word "car" triggers you) takes your extremely drunk self right to your front door you'll think it's fine.
I think it's from a movie or something. I can't exactly remember.
There are about a dozen Google results for it, none of them are me.
You can't have this both ways.
When a magat in the Senate brings in a snowball and says that global warming isn't happening because it's snowing...
"That's weather not climate!"
When there's a wildfire somewhere...
"That's global warming!"
We can definitively say that this year is the hottest year on record, but we can't attribute individual forest fires or tornadoes or hurricanes to climate change.
If we're going to electrify everything we need nuclear power plants.
The federal government should be dumping tens of billions of dollars into modular nuclear plants that can be built in a factory and then shipped places.
The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.
Unless you plan to bulldoze the suburbs and then force everyone to move into higher density areas your anti-car dreams are never going to happen.
Although there are many American cities that could get much more anti-car and public transport would work. LA could theoretically not be such a car city with the appropriate infrastructure built in.
Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car? With self-driving cars we could mostly eliminate private car ownership.
Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.
They'll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.
Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations... Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.
Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.
On the one hand I don't like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it's damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.
The main subs or sublemmies or whatever they're called on here have enough users that it's a perfect alternative to Reddit.
Little niche subreddits, like my favorite gaybros and askgaybros, just a few dozen users and I'm going back to Reddit for that.
Are you going to buy me a new heat pump?
Also why doesn't anyone make a hyper efficient central system? I've only seen those hyper efficient units as mini splits.
Are you going to replace my 2016 Sonata I spent $13k on buying in 2018 with a $55k EV with car to grid for me?
What happens if it's dark and cold for multiple days? I just can't drive because my car emptied out running my minisplits?