I appreciate the comedic premise of the article, but just like tariffs don't bring back manufacturing jobs, high fossil fuel prices don't lead to clean energy, but throwing soup at a painting and slowing down commuters REALLY doesn't lead to clean energy. If you Google gas prices in the last 20 years and the number of EVs on the road, the graphs look very different. Gas prices have fallen and risen and the number of EVs has just increased over the same amount of time; there's no obvious correlation between the two. EVs started out as very expensive, and now they are just expensive; the cost has come down as the battery tech improves, but the EVs are still more expensive than gas cars. If climate activists want clean energy, they need to create new or improve existing clean energy sources, not try to guilt trip and shame people into consuming clean energy...if Mamdani really wanted free buses and non-profit grocery stores, then he should start a company or a non-profit to run free buses and non-profit grocery stores rather than become mayor and then order people running the city to run free buses and non-profit grocery stores.
Put another way: you can't induce me to go to Morton's steakhouse by making McDonald's cheeseburgers more expensive. I either need to have a higher income or Morton's has to be cheaper if you want me to go to Morton's.
Sure, but I might go to the grocery store and pick up a steak instead of going to Mickey D's.
Thing is, if this war did have the result of moving people away from dependence on fossil fuels and spurred investment into dealing with some of the issues that keep solar and wind power from being really viable (and getting us into building nuclear power plants again) I would be down for that, because I would really like it if the US could someday tell the Arabs and the Russians that they can drink their oil for all we care.
Amen, but nuclear has to be a huge part of that. Wind doesn't blow at our command or convenience, etc... Also, the rebranding seems obvious to me (and likely many others) - New Clear power, that's the ticket. See how that sounds to the kids.
But now the electrical tech is "kind of" out there at competitive prices.
You just have to get the majority of it from China.
More conversions would already have been happening if there weren't so many incumbent political forces invested in fossil fuels. Parts of labor and the fossil fuel industry really don't want that electrical energy competition eating there lunch and dinner.
OTOH: China decided it preferred not buying from others, so they developed non fossil energy tech, not because they're green energy fanatics, but because they can't get the fossil fuels they need without going to others.
The reality is that there are energy companies that produce and sell different sources of energy. BP and Shell had solar going back to the late 70s/early 80s. Fossil fuels is just one energy commodity and it makes much more sense for an oil company to also have solar or wind rather than try to prevent wind and solar products from coming to the market. McDonald's is a fast food company, not a hamburger company. Why would a corporation spend money to prevent a competing technology from being used instead of investing money in that technology to have a diversified inventory?
I appreciate the question, because its one I don't think I was thinking of that.
Once I did, I came up with a tentative answer.
I think fossil fuel companies know they can be market leaders with their existing technology, and can profit from it, because they've spent years developing skills and resources and reputation particular to that market and technology. Entering a significantly different market, they are less likely to be reaping as big a share because they will have to compete against firms with no legacy market they need to also maintain. Something similar I believe would apply to firms built around internal combustion engines. I've been assuming this is one of the reasons that hydrogen has been more enticing to such firms, as a switch of combustible fuels would allow them to leverage more existing knowledge and talent, than would operating from a battery based electrical energy store. This isn't a knock on the firms, its just hard. I'm thinking it was easier for bicycle manufacturers to move into motorized wheeled vehicles than it was people involved in steam engines or horse carriages. I also recall mainframe and minicomputer powerhouses, really struggling to maintain market when things switched to microprocessor based industry. There were successful offshoots from those starting in those firms, but the majors and their market share lost out.
I think the electrical utilities are also incentivized to try to cash in on a rise in electrical energy use, but they are also starting without manufacturing and design expertise, and obvious concerns about their quasi monopoly status.
But this is a little off the top of my head.
Maybe you can again see something I'm overlooking. 😉
The thing you might be overlooking is an existing company with a solid revenue stream and profit margin will be able to afford the R&D that is required to innovate.
When it comes to EVs precisely the opposite occurred. Tesla succeeded because they were a startup with no legacy product base, and their investors expected them to burn billions of dollars for many years before becoming profitable. It's not just about R&D, but building out the factories to build electric vehicles and their components at the scale which makes it a profitable business.
Of course most EV startups fail because most startups fail. Point is though that Ford and GM (and most other legacy automakers) couldn't go all-in on electric vehicles the same way. These are mature companies and their investors expect consistent returns. They were already making good money selling gas-powered cars and trucks. They couldn't bet the entire company on an EV market that didn't exist yet. Tesla could bet the company because that was the company, that's what investors signed up for.
The legacy companies didn't have to go "all in," and yeah of course it's not all about R&D. But stating Tesla succeeded because they didn't have a legacy product base means that they succeeded because they didn't have a revenue stream, which is pretty economically illiterate. And the big companies didn't go all in but now they all have electric vehicles. Those companies still gave returns on investments and they have EVs and they didn't have to "bet the entire company on an EV market that didn't exist yet." Of course they couldn't do that but they also wouldn't anyway.
There's no reason that gas prices would be expected to fall in a way that was noticeably correlated with electrical vehicle adoption.
Electric vehicles are still only 1.9% of cars on US roads, and about 4% globally. (Numbers are shooting up, over 25% of new sales are EVs, and a huge majority in China are EVs.) So you are already talking about a marginal effect.
And then on top of that, you consider that gas prices are set based on crude oil prices, and not exclusively gasoline demand, and only about half of oil produced is used for automobiles.
A little bit of the electricity for the EVs would also come from oil, although oil plants are not common these days (having mostly been converted to natural gas.)
So in the end you are talking about a 1-2% effect on demand, something that is impossible to see in an oil market that has wild swings like those caused by the Ukraine and Iran wars.
EVs have been gaining more market share because they are a better product than ICE cars (after a long history of efficiency and innovation gains made this possible). It isn’t because buyers care about the environment.
They go 0-60 in 2-3 seconds, they never need maintenance other than tires, you get 30 minutes a month of your life back because you basically never have to visit gas stations again, and, oh yeah, it’s cheaper to run than gas.
They are just better cars. That’s why they are gaining market share. If the USA was not so hell bent on suppressing the business, the market share would be larger, but one need just look around at every other nation and see that the trend is obvious.
I love my EV, but in the interests of not overselling it, I will say that the "cheaper than gas" thing is only true if you can do the majority of your charging at home (or at work, or another place the car spends hours parked on a regular basis). Public fast chargers, where you go there specifically to charge the car, are about as expensive as gas stations (probably a bit cheaper at the moment). And of course there are a lot fewer of them, and they take longer than pumping gas. That's a fine tradeoff if you only use them for the occasional road trip, and do the majority of charging at home overnight. But it kinda sucks if it's your only way to charge. For people who can't charge at home (I was one of them, a coastal street-parking apartment-dweller, before I moved to a "red state" with cheap housing and cheap wind power) a hybrid is probably a lot cheaper and more practical to operate.
There is a big education gap too, like I run into people all the time who could charge at home if they bought an EV, but they don't even know it's an option or understand how central it is to having a good experience. They are worried about where's the closest fast charger to my house, how long will it take, when that is not something I think about at all. It is kind of weird that we had so much focus in this country on huge expensive EV trucks and public charging networks, rather than getting lots of cheap EVs in that second/third vehicle commuter role, enabled by home charging (and in many cases, even the regular 120 volt outlet you already have in your garage is sufficient).
EV sellers need to sell the chargers, too. Not everyone has a garage, for example. But I’ll bet if a dealer said, “Tell you what, I’ll throw in this nice little charger, installation included,” there are buyers who would jump like a rabbit.
RE: Charging at home, absolutely true. But there are many homeowners in the US. A BEV is a no-brainer upgrade for anyone who lives in suburbia, I just think that many people don't realize it.
Agree on your second point. It is astonishing how many people have range anxiety when they literally never drive more than 20-30 miles a day, and even a slow charger is going to refill that overnight, AND they have 2 vehicles anyway.
Some drivers do buy EVs because they care about the environment, but that's a luxury. Yes, they are gaining market share because the quality of the car is as good or better than some other gas cars, but I don't think the US is hell bent on suppressing the business. A lot of EVs are eligible for tax credits upon purchase, and they're already more expensive than gas cars, so the tax credit is actually going to wealthier drivers. Especially when Biden was president there was a push by government to purchase EVs.
The suppression of the business is largely through:
- Tariffs. These are supposed to protect US businesses, but in practice, they do the opposite. Since Detroit does not have to compete with cheap Chinese cars, their innovation lags. Contrast this with VW, which at first suffered against Chinese competition but now is a dominant BEV player in the EU market. Tesla is really the only at-scale BEV maker here, every other US automaker is operating at very small scale in this market, or just "dabbling" and refusing to invest heavily in it.
- No federal investment into charging. If it weren't for Tesla investing heavily here, we'd be even further behind.
- Massive gas subsidies. Gas is 60-80% cheaper in the US than it is in many other countries, most notably the EU. This, again, lets Detroit just keep lazily making the same ICE engines without really suffering for it (domestically). Unfortunately, though, those cars won't sell in foreign markets, so this is bad for the US Auto industry.
It's very very bad for the US that the only manufactures taking BEVs seriously are Tesla (hated by 50% of the country) and Rivian (expensive, low volume).
The tax credits are gone under Trump. And they did include a credit for used EVs with a fairly low income cap ($75k single / $150k MFJ). Most people buy used cars, but you need to sell new cars to wealthier people in order to have used cars a few years later. Ironically, now that the credits are gone there are a bunch of cheap used EVs from lease returns. I bet $4.50 gas will sell quite a few of those even without the credits. All this regulatory whiplash is terrible for the industry but what can you do.
Everyone worries about battery degradation with used EVs but it isn't much of a problem with anything modern (i.e. not the original Nissan Leaf) and there are services like Recurrent that will track battery health for you.
Purchasing EVs for fleet use that can charge at some government building overnight is a no-brainer. It would save the taxpayers a lot of money if not for Trump idiocy trying to undo all of those purchases and shut down working chargers, but again, what can you do.
1. It probably would be, if considering only GHGs, though not as clear a win as with renewables and especially when you add in the other pollutants of coal.
2. India has already been using coal, but they’re moving more towards renewables with a 40% CAGR. The biggest growth has been in oil… so this would arrest that and help move them towards renewables faster.
I think it is many times more likely that they electrify with solar, because China will be more than happy to sell them panels, batteries, etc, at a cost that is much lower than coal (and, obviously, the US will not be in a position to compete for any of this business due to its incredibly wise industrial policy of intentionally sabotaging our own ability to build these things).
Iran is certain talking as though they won the war, but so did the black knight in Monty Python.
I'm sorry to say this, but Americans are wimps, they can beat the other guy down, break all his limbs and pound him until he's bleeding from his eyes, but if they chip a nail while doing so, a large contingent will cry that they've lost. Obviously no disrespect meant to the soldiers who have died in this war, and trust me, I know how each life lost is like losing an entire world. But that's war. You don't honour them by pussyfooting around. You honour warriors lost in battle by making those loses mean something.
Obviously Trump is at least partially to blame for this defeatism. He let the American 5th column define victory when he should have come out with clear objectives, and harsh reprisals to cease fire infringements. He is not an astute man, except for in the sense that he has the cunning to channel the mob. But there is also a rot in America, where far too many people in positions of power actually seem to PREFER an Iranian victory over an American one. This rot isn't partisan, but it certainly seems to be more entrenched on the left and in higher education. I really hope you all can purge it, and get back that pride in being American that the rest of the world used to make fun of you for. America, Fuck Yea!
It's the "big empire with a lot of fronts to care about vs. small power who cares a whole lot about this one front" thing. It's entirely possible for the small power to lose AND the big empire to lose; if the small power gets sandblasted away but undermines the big empire's big picture ability to contest all of its frontiers, both limp away from the fight wishing they'd have avoided it.
We don't get kudos for an impressive K/D ratio if we expend vast amounts of treasure and expensive weaponry that are not easily replaced just to fail to get what we want.
The Iran War is even more complex because a big empire with a lot of fronts (USA) and a small power who cares a lot about this one front (Israel) are fighting against a kind of regional empire with a lot of fronts (Iran and its proxies), with another regional bloc (Sunni Gulf states) kind of fighting and kind of hedging... oh, and there's Turkey waiting to be the next regional empire if Iran falls... who knew the geopolitics of the Middle East were this complicated?
Yeah, if we are going to talk about "given the current set of circumstances, what would be the best thing for the US and the world" it is very possible the answer is "send in a half million US troops and indefinitely occupy coastal Iran." But that is politically impossible in the US, and also morally offensive when we're the ones who created the conditions that make that extreme action a possibility.
Also, like, it's kind of weird to me that nobody brings up how pissing people off, particularly fundamentalist Muslims [or Irishmen], can make things blow up unexpectedly, anywhere in the world. Terrorism was literally the top political issue in the US for like, a half decade, not that long ago.
I know you’re not a war correspondent but “Iran asked for something!l is not the brilliant masterstroke of 6D chess you seem to be assigning to them. Since when is “someone asked for something” a sign of success? Iran asked for Israel to be destroyed a million times. I guess that means it is.
The masterstroke is that despite our military strength, Iran has the leverage in these negotiations. We apparently don't have the power to reopen the strait by force, so they have essentially won the war and can now dictate terms.
I doubt they're going to get everything they want in the end, but this isn't like most US military interventions where we win overwhelmly. It's not even like Iraq or Afghanistan, where we can just decide it's over and go home. Here, we can declare it's over, but then Iran can just keep the strait closed, which will continue to inflict economic pain on the US and our allies indefinitely.
That might be true, but I wouldn't automatically say that someone making a demand that they would make if they were winning indicates that they are winning.
Forex, as late as early 1865, the Confederacy was insisting upon independence.
The difference is the in 1865, the Union ultimately crushed the Confederacy, capturing its capital, causing its government to flee, and forcing its main army to surrender. In 2026, the US doesn't have the strength to impose an outcome like that on Iran. In fact, it's Iran which has the strength to keep the strait closed - they can't stop literally every ship, but they can make it dangerous enough that no ships will try to make the passage.
What one party asks for at the beginning of a negotiation does, indeed, tell you something about their relative position of power. I think this is obvious.
Someone desperate does not open a negotiation by shooting for the moon.
Meanwhile it's apparently not legal to operate vehicles in Washington State that can accelerate to highway speeds on on-ramps. I'm hoping they legalize that some day, as well as vehicles that have the capacity to change lanes without hitting their brakes first, or vehicles that can drive in the right hand land when having no interest in hurrying. Dare to dream.
Why do you have to piss me off in a very good piece like this by asserting Joe Biden had dementia? I am deeply sorry if "stuttering gets worse with normal age-related cognitive slowdown as compensation techniques work less well, and Biden's fear of misspeaking froze him up" sounds like partisan "cope," but it's just how the god damn situation is. That doesn't mean he should have run for a second term - in fact, it describes a very good reason he should not have - but that is a far fucking sight from what you, and a depressingly high percentage of my fellow libs, so casually allege.
Do you think you're not "poisoning the Democratic brand" by saying it's a party that runs demented old men for President?
This is the greatest visual of all time for grown up dog lovers who grew up in the 80s when pit bulls were then deemed “super predators”! 🤣 “they’re like pit bulls who have been fed cocaine and poked with sticks.”
Where the Green New Deal failed, the Green Springtime for Hitler succeeded.
I appreciate the comedic premise of the article, but just like tariffs don't bring back manufacturing jobs, high fossil fuel prices don't lead to clean energy, but throwing soup at a painting and slowing down commuters REALLY doesn't lead to clean energy. If you Google gas prices in the last 20 years and the number of EVs on the road, the graphs look very different. Gas prices have fallen and risen and the number of EVs has just increased over the same amount of time; there's no obvious correlation between the two. EVs started out as very expensive, and now they are just expensive; the cost has come down as the battery tech improves, but the EVs are still more expensive than gas cars. If climate activists want clean energy, they need to create new or improve existing clean energy sources, not try to guilt trip and shame people into consuming clean energy...if Mamdani really wanted free buses and non-profit grocery stores, then he should start a company or a non-profit to run free buses and non-profit grocery stores rather than become mayor and then order people running the city to run free buses and non-profit grocery stores.
Put another way: you can't induce me to go to Morton's steakhouse by making McDonald's cheeseburgers more expensive. I either need to have a higher income or Morton's has to be cheaper if you want me to go to Morton's.
Sure, but I might go to the grocery store and pick up a steak instead of going to Mickey D's.
Thing is, if this war did have the result of moving people away from dependence on fossil fuels and spurred investment into dealing with some of the issues that keep solar and wind power from being really viable (and getting us into building nuclear power plants again) I would be down for that, because I would really like it if the US could someday tell the Arabs and the Russians that they can drink their oil for all we care.
Amen, but nuclear has to be a huge part of that. Wind doesn't blow at our command or convenience, etc... Also, the rebranding seems obvious to me (and likely many others) - New Clear power, that's the ticket. See how that sounds to the kids.
Exactly. The best time to build more nuclear plants was ten years ago; the next best is now.
"Exactly. The best time to build more New-Clear plants was ten years ago; the next best is now." -- attempted fix for you.
But now the electrical tech is "kind of" out there at competitive prices.
You just have to get the majority of it from China.
More conversions would already have been happening if there weren't so many incumbent political forces invested in fossil fuels. Parts of labor and the fossil fuel industry really don't want that electrical energy competition eating there lunch and dinner.
OTOH: China decided it preferred not buying from others, so they developed non fossil energy tech, not because they're green energy fanatics, but because they can't get the fossil fuels they need without going to others.
The reality is that there are energy companies that produce and sell different sources of energy. BP and Shell had solar going back to the late 70s/early 80s. Fossil fuels is just one energy commodity and it makes much more sense for an oil company to also have solar or wind rather than try to prevent wind and solar products from coming to the market. McDonald's is a fast food company, not a hamburger company. Why would a corporation spend money to prevent a competing technology from being used instead of investing money in that technology to have a diversified inventory?
I appreciate the question, because its one I don't think I was thinking of that.
Once I did, I came up with a tentative answer.
I think fossil fuel companies know they can be market leaders with their existing technology, and can profit from it, because they've spent years developing skills and resources and reputation particular to that market and technology. Entering a significantly different market, they are less likely to be reaping as big a share because they will have to compete against firms with no legacy market they need to also maintain. Something similar I believe would apply to firms built around internal combustion engines. I've been assuming this is one of the reasons that hydrogen has been more enticing to such firms, as a switch of combustible fuels would allow them to leverage more existing knowledge and talent, than would operating from a battery based electrical energy store. This isn't a knock on the firms, its just hard. I'm thinking it was easier for bicycle manufacturers to move into motorized wheeled vehicles than it was people involved in steam engines or horse carriages. I also recall mainframe and minicomputer powerhouses, really struggling to maintain market when things switched to microprocessor based industry. There were successful offshoots from those starting in those firms, but the majors and their market share lost out.
I think the electrical utilities are also incentivized to try to cash in on a rise in electrical energy use, but they are also starting without manufacturing and design expertise, and obvious concerns about their quasi monopoly status.
But this is a little off the top of my head.
Maybe you can again see something I'm overlooking. 😉
The thing you might be overlooking is an existing company with a solid revenue stream and profit margin will be able to afford the R&D that is required to innovate.
When it comes to EVs precisely the opposite occurred. Tesla succeeded because they were a startup with no legacy product base, and their investors expected them to burn billions of dollars for many years before becoming profitable. It's not just about R&D, but building out the factories to build electric vehicles and their components at the scale which makes it a profitable business.
Of course most EV startups fail because most startups fail. Point is though that Ford and GM (and most other legacy automakers) couldn't go all-in on electric vehicles the same way. These are mature companies and their investors expect consistent returns. They were already making good money selling gas-powered cars and trucks. They couldn't bet the entire company on an EV market that didn't exist yet. Tesla could bet the company because that was the company, that's what investors signed up for.
The legacy companies didn't have to go "all in," and yeah of course it's not all about R&D. But stating Tesla succeeded because they didn't have a legacy product base means that they succeeded because they didn't have a revenue stream, which is pretty economically illiterate. And the big companies didn't go all in but now they all have electric vehicles. Those companies still gave returns on investments and they have EVs and they didn't have to "bet the entire company on an EV market that didn't exist yet." Of course they couldn't do that but they also wouldn't anyway.
There's no reason that gas prices would be expected to fall in a way that was noticeably correlated with electrical vehicle adoption.
Electric vehicles are still only 1.9% of cars on US roads, and about 4% globally. (Numbers are shooting up, over 25% of new sales are EVs, and a huge majority in China are EVs.) So you are already talking about a marginal effect.
And then on top of that, you consider that gas prices are set based on crude oil prices, and not exclusively gasoline demand, and only about half of oil produced is used for automobiles.
A little bit of the electricity for the EVs would also come from oil, although oil plants are not common these days (having mostly been converted to natural gas.)
So in the end you are talking about a 1-2% effect on demand, something that is impossible to see in an oil market that has wild swings like those caused by the Ukraine and Iran wars.
EVs have been gaining more market share because they are a better product than ICE cars (after a long history of efficiency and innovation gains made this possible). It isn’t because buyers care about the environment.
They go 0-60 in 2-3 seconds, they never need maintenance other than tires, you get 30 minutes a month of your life back because you basically never have to visit gas stations again, and, oh yeah, it’s cheaper to run than gas.
They are just better cars. That’s why they are gaining market share. If the USA was not so hell bent on suppressing the business, the market share would be larger, but one need just look around at every other nation and see that the trend is obvious.
I love my EV, but in the interests of not overselling it, I will say that the "cheaper than gas" thing is only true if you can do the majority of your charging at home (or at work, or another place the car spends hours parked on a regular basis). Public fast chargers, where you go there specifically to charge the car, are about as expensive as gas stations (probably a bit cheaper at the moment). And of course there are a lot fewer of them, and they take longer than pumping gas. That's a fine tradeoff if you only use them for the occasional road trip, and do the majority of charging at home overnight. But it kinda sucks if it's your only way to charge. For people who can't charge at home (I was one of them, a coastal street-parking apartment-dweller, before I moved to a "red state" with cheap housing and cheap wind power) a hybrid is probably a lot cheaper and more practical to operate.
There is a big education gap too, like I run into people all the time who could charge at home if they bought an EV, but they don't even know it's an option or understand how central it is to having a good experience. They are worried about where's the closest fast charger to my house, how long will it take, when that is not something I think about at all. It is kind of weird that we had so much focus in this country on huge expensive EV trucks and public charging networks, rather than getting lots of cheap EVs in that second/third vehicle commuter role, enabled by home charging (and in many cases, even the regular 120 volt outlet you already have in your garage is sufficient).
EV sellers need to sell the chargers, too. Not everyone has a garage, for example. But I’ll bet if a dealer said, “Tell you what, I’ll throw in this nice little charger, installation included,” there are buyers who would jump like a rabbit.
Ford eventually started doing that: https://www.ford.com/powerpromise/
RE: Charging at home, absolutely true. But there are many homeowners in the US. A BEV is a no-brainer upgrade for anyone who lives in suburbia, I just think that many people don't realize it.
Agree on your second point. It is astonishing how many people have range anxiety when they literally never drive more than 20-30 miles a day, and even a slow charger is going to refill that overnight, AND they have 2 vehicles anyway.
Some drivers do buy EVs because they care about the environment, but that's a luxury. Yes, they are gaining market share because the quality of the car is as good or better than some other gas cars, but I don't think the US is hell bent on suppressing the business. A lot of EVs are eligible for tax credits upon purchase, and they're already more expensive than gas cars, so the tax credit is actually going to wealthier drivers. Especially when Biden was president there was a push by government to purchase EVs.
The suppression of the business is largely through:
- Tariffs. These are supposed to protect US businesses, but in practice, they do the opposite. Since Detroit does not have to compete with cheap Chinese cars, their innovation lags. Contrast this with VW, which at first suffered against Chinese competition but now is a dominant BEV player in the EU market. Tesla is really the only at-scale BEV maker here, every other US automaker is operating at very small scale in this market, or just "dabbling" and refusing to invest heavily in it.
- No federal investment into charging. If it weren't for Tesla investing heavily here, we'd be even further behind.
- Massive gas subsidies. Gas is 60-80% cheaper in the US than it is in many other countries, most notably the EU. This, again, lets Detroit just keep lazily making the same ICE engines without really suffering for it (domestically). Unfortunately, though, those cars won't sell in foreign markets, so this is bad for the US Auto industry.
It's very very bad for the US that the only manufactures taking BEVs seriously are Tesla (hated by 50% of the country) and Rivian (expensive, low volume).
The tax credits are gone under Trump. And they did include a credit for used EVs with a fairly low income cap ($75k single / $150k MFJ). Most people buy used cars, but you need to sell new cars to wealthier people in order to have used cars a few years later. Ironically, now that the credits are gone there are a bunch of cheap used EVs from lease returns. I bet $4.50 gas will sell quite a few of those even without the credits. All this regulatory whiplash is terrible for the industry but what can you do.
Everyone worries about battery degradation with used EVs but it isn't much of a problem with anything modern (i.e. not the original Nissan Leaf) and there are services like Recurrent that will track battery health for you.
Purchasing EVs for fleet use that can charge at some government building overnight is a no-brainer. It would save the taxpayers a lot of money if not for Trump idiocy trying to undo all of those purchases and shut down working chargers, but again, what can you do.
Indonesia and India electrifying … with coal … would not be an environmental win. And that possibility is on the table.
1. It probably would be, if considering only GHGs, though not as clear a win as with renewables and especially when you add in the other pollutants of coal.
2. India has already been using coal, but they’re moving more towards renewables with a 40% CAGR. The biggest growth has been in oil… so this would arrest that and help move them towards renewables faster.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_India
I think it is many times more likely that they electrify with solar, because China will be more than happy to sell them panels, batteries, etc, at a cost that is much lower than coal (and, obviously, the US will not be in a position to compete for any of this business due to its incredibly wise industrial policy of intentionally sabotaging our own ability to build these things).
Leave that to phase 2
Iran is certain talking as though they won the war, but so did the black knight in Monty Python.
I'm sorry to say this, but Americans are wimps, they can beat the other guy down, break all his limbs and pound him until he's bleeding from his eyes, but if they chip a nail while doing so, a large contingent will cry that they've lost. Obviously no disrespect meant to the soldiers who have died in this war, and trust me, I know how each life lost is like losing an entire world. But that's war. You don't honour them by pussyfooting around. You honour warriors lost in battle by making those loses mean something.
Obviously Trump is at least partially to blame for this defeatism. He let the American 5th column define victory when he should have come out with clear objectives, and harsh reprisals to cease fire infringements. He is not an astute man, except for in the sense that he has the cunning to channel the mob. But there is also a rot in America, where far too many people in positions of power actually seem to PREFER an Iranian victory over an American one. This rot isn't partisan, but it certainly seems to be more entrenched on the left and in higher education. I really hope you all can purge it, and get back that pride in being American that the rest of the world used to make fun of you for. America, Fuck Yea!
It's the "big empire with a lot of fronts to care about vs. small power who cares a whole lot about this one front" thing. It's entirely possible for the small power to lose AND the big empire to lose; if the small power gets sandblasted away but undermines the big empire's big picture ability to contest all of its frontiers, both limp away from the fight wishing they'd have avoided it.
We don't get kudos for an impressive K/D ratio if we expend vast amounts of treasure and expensive weaponry that are not easily replaced just to fail to get what we want.
The Iran War is even more complex because a big empire with a lot of fronts (USA) and a small power who cares a lot about this one front (Israel) are fighting against a kind of regional empire with a lot of fronts (Iran and its proxies), with another regional bloc (Sunni Gulf states) kind of fighting and kind of hedging... oh, and there's Turkey waiting to be the next regional empire if Iran falls... who knew the geopolitics of the Middle East were this complicated?
Yeah, if we are going to talk about "given the current set of circumstances, what would be the best thing for the US and the world" it is very possible the answer is "send in a half million US troops and indefinitely occupy coastal Iran." But that is politically impossible in the US, and also morally offensive when we're the ones who created the conditions that make that extreme action a possibility.
Also, like, it's kind of weird to me that nobody brings up how pissing people off, particularly fundamentalist Muslims [or Irishmen], can make things blow up unexpectedly, anywhere in the world. Terrorism was literally the top political issue in the US for like, a half decade, not that long ago.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
Cui bono? CUI FREAKING BONO!?!?
God, don't drag bloody Bono into this.
He knows what he did....
I know you’re not a war correspondent but “Iran asked for something!l is not the brilliant masterstroke of 6D chess you seem to be assigning to them. Since when is “someone asked for something” a sign of success? Iran asked for Israel to be destroyed a million times. I guess that means it is.
The masterstroke is that despite our military strength, Iran has the leverage in these negotiations. We apparently don't have the power to reopen the strait by force, so they have essentially won the war and can now dictate terms.
I doubt they're going to get everything they want in the end, but this isn't like most US military interventions where we win overwhelmly. It's not even like Iraq or Afghanistan, where we can just decide it's over and go home. Here, we can declare it's over, but then Iran can just keep the strait closed, which will continue to inflict economic pain on the US and our allies indefinitely.
That might be true, but I wouldn't automatically say that someone making a demand that they would make if they were winning indicates that they are winning.
Forex, as late as early 1865, the Confederacy was insisting upon independence.
The difference is the in 1865, the Union ultimately crushed the Confederacy, capturing its capital, causing its government to flee, and forcing its main army to surrender. In 2026, the US doesn't have the strength to impose an outcome like that on Iran. In fact, it's Iran which has the strength to keep the strait closed - they can't stop literally every ship, but they can make it dangerous enough that no ships will try to make the passage.
The question is whether your last few sentences are true. They might well be, but I'm not convinced.
Time will tell.
Fair enough, but I think if the Navy could open the strait, it would have done so by now.
What one party asks for at the beginning of a negotiation does, indeed, tell you something about their relative position of power. I think this is obvious.
Someone desperate does not open a negotiation by shooting for the moon.
But someone who is delusional will. And someone who has continued negotiation as their primary goal also will.
This type of analysis is why I subscribe! Plus calling out psychotic Massachusetts drivers. Chef's kiss 👨🏼🍳😘
Meanwhile it's apparently not legal to operate vehicles in Washington State that can accelerate to highway speeds on on-ramps. I'm hoping they legalize that some day, as well as vehicles that have the capacity to change lanes without hitting their brakes first, or vehicles that can drive in the right hand land when having no interest in hurrying. Dare to dream.
Deep breaths, and think good thoughts! Best of luck 🤣
Merging incorrectly isn’t suicide here, it’s a way of life
All along, they were hurling SpaghettiOs of GENIUS.
Why do you have to piss me off in a very good piece like this by asserting Joe Biden had dementia? I am deeply sorry if "stuttering gets worse with normal age-related cognitive slowdown as compensation techniques work less well, and Biden's fear of misspeaking froze him up" sounds like partisan "cope," but it's just how the god damn situation is. That doesn't mean he should have run for a second term - in fact, it describes a very good reason he should not have - but that is a far fucking sight from what you, and a depressingly high percentage of my fellow libs, so casually allege.
Do you think you're not "poisoning the Democratic brand" by saying it's a party that runs demented old men for President?
You had it at "they're idiots".
This is the greatest visual of all time for grown up dog lovers who grew up in the 80s when pit bulls were then deemed “super predators”! 🤣 “they’re like pit bulls who have been fed cocaine and poked with sticks.”
Hah! The only flaw is that Elon is probably the real mastermind behind this story 😂Teslas are flying off the shelves as we speak 😎
Amazing!