Heat pumps easily exceed 2.5 COP. More like 4 in the UK climate. And gas isn’t 100% efficient either. But yeah it’s a wash or can be more expensive to heat with heat pumps where electricity is really expensive. It helps if we all conveniently ignore externalities like pollution and carbon too.

What are you actually advocating for here? Not electrifying and waiting another few decades for hydrogen? You come off as excessively defensive of the practically nonexistent H2 industry and excessively critical of electrification, which is basically the Shell and Exxon position. We don’t have time wait for anything, we need to use the tech we have now to reduce warming. Where do we get the hydrogen in your world? Is it blue or green? Blue is just fossil fuels with extra steps and green doesn’t make sense until we have significant excess renewables and already electrified the easy stuff (buildings) and then it might still make sense only for industry/shipping and niche stuff. H2 itself has a GWP of 11 or so, and we will leak quite a bit. So again, what are you actually arguing for? I can’t buy hydrogen, period. I can’t buy a hydrogen vehicle, or a hydrogen furnace, or a hydrogen anything. What do you actually think we plebs should be doing here? I already want green steel as much as you do.

Also to compress it, chill it, transport it, and store it, while avoiding leaks and fires. You’re absolutely right though, first comes renewables (and a shit ton of batteries), hopefully in parallel some green steel and chemical processes, then heavy transit and the harder edge cases to electrify, assuming electrification hasn’t already solved those issues by then. Talking about regular folks buying fuel cell cars is not realistic.

Yep, it’s commonly called the “Idaho Stop”. Spending less time in intersections is safer for cyclists, and to me the biggest benefit is shutting down drivers that complain about bikes not stopping completely (even though most cars roll through anyway). If it’s busy cyclists still need to stop and wait like normal.

Yes in Colorado cyclists can legally treat a stop as a yield.

Looks like Boulder CO to me

Exactly. Colorado also has an independent committee. Those asswipes managed to give equal seats to republicans last election and now its 4-4 dems/gop despite dems having a large statewide majority. Like thanks a lot, what a noble and fair system we have here. Give me equal shenanigans until everyone plays by the same rules. Yes we still have Boebert.

It’s just microclimates. I particularly hate the article’s framing of white materials as “geoengineering”, which implies that black asphalt roofs and roads are somehow not. We also know urban heat islands shift moisture downwind. So they’ve modeled some micro interaction that shows piecemeal application of low and high albedo surfaces can possibly result in some weird local effects on precipitation, all packaged up for misinterpretation by EPDM manufacturers.

Meanwhile everyone with a brain knows that black asphalt and roofs are hotter than white surfaces. The solution is of course stop black roofs and the bate minimum amount of roads/parking lots, not try to make everything heat absorptive in the name of equality.

Yep, mostly becuase cold climates are high latitude and they don’t get a ton of free BTUs from the sun all winter anyway. An exception might be lower latitude, high altitude areas (just guessing). I’d also guess that people doing white roofs are more likely to do basic air sealing and insulation retrofits.

I’m not familiar with NordPool specifics but this is exactly right and is playing out in California and elsewhere too. Basically just the duck curve. Storage is all but required as solar covers 100% of midday load.

Is it a bribe or ransom? Trump is extracting favors by threat.

Temps should stay quite flat at net zero. Extreme weather will persist, but not get worse in theory.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached/

Not sure where you’re from, but in the US “training” is optional, the tests are worthless (I passed by driving around a parking lot with one stop sign and parallel parking in a space that could fit a bus), and the points barely matter. Humans kill >40,000 other a humans a year on US roads. “We” are absolutely ok with massive amounts of traffic violence, unfortunately.

Stop trying to sanewash this lunatic. Agreed it would have been much worse with a gun, but let’s not pretend he had a change of heart and wanted to help.

Officials say Soliman planned the attack for a year, wanted to “kill all Zionist people” and told investigators he would do it again.

https://boulderreportinglab.org/2025/06/02/live-updates-boulder-terror-attack-at-pearl-street-walk-for-hostages/

The IRA is getting gutted and Trump is trying to force coal plants to stay open. Even if Kamala did absolutely nothing, that would still be much better for the climate. 1.3% is not a big number.

Vance represents the tech bro “libertatian” wing with Thiel and those ghouls. Musk fits right in.

Maybe the study was more robust that this article suggests, but this doesn’t tell me anything. Humans are amazing at regulating our remperature via sweat, so I have zero doubt that normal healthy people will have the same internal and even skin temps wearing different color clothing in different conditions. If the group wearing e.g. dark codlors just sweat X% more to compensate, we can’t draw any conclusions at all. Clothing is complicated, since airflow and moisture retention matter significantly, but we know for a fact that lighter colors reflect more energy than darker colors.

This is not the whole story because not every heating day is equally cold. I have a high end cold climate heat pump in Colorado (which works great btw). I use about 1/3 of my total annual heating energy in January, despite heating for >6 months of the year. I’ll use 10% of my annual energy budget for a long weekend if its -10F, and that’s all heat pump (I don’t even have backup strip heat). It would be 20% if i was using electric resistnace for those 4 days. Electric resistance is really not great, so folks really should get the best heat pumps they can that cover the coldest normal days. It’s fine to install strips as a true backup but you’re going to have some very high bills and high carbon if you’re using it 20-30 days/year. If its hydro/nuclear power you’ll still come ahead on carbon but that’s not the case everywhere.

This is a bit dramatic. There are plenty of sanely sized cars available, and its not like everyone yearns for them but is forced into a suburban. Last time I checked you could still buy a corolla, an H-RV, a leaf, crosstrek, civic, Prius, several minis, a Mazda 3, BMW 1, etc. If people literally just bought rav4s instead of giant SUVs the average vehicle size would be significantly smaller, even though the rest of world thinks those are huge too.

It’s something. I’d like to see something more comprehensive, like also public transit for the islands and dramatically higher gas/car costs. Maui has like two roads, it can’t be that hard to add a train and kill all the tourist parking. Blows my mind that this isn’t a thing already.

Suing oil companies is great too but why not actually eliminate oil from the state entirely and make tourists pay for it? Hell I’d price out carbon for their flights and find a way to charge for that too, and spend the money on decarbonizing the entire state and climate adaptation.

That all being said, this is a start so let’s build from here and force the wealthiest tourists to be carbon neutral and take care of these places.