The article says the focus is on kid-friendly outdoor areas like parks and near schools, which makes total sense as a place to start. Doesn’t seem like it’s everywhere outside being banned. And generally encouraging people to not take up smoking in the first place is wonderful. For people who smoke, quitting is the biggest thing they can do to improve their health.

EVs don’t do any shifting and usually have a low center of gravity, even better for suspect road conditions!

Focus on progress that has been made, solutions to the climate crisis have been growing exponentially over the past decade. And it’s not a binary issue of everything is sunshine and rainbows vs we’re all fucked. There’s more of a spectrum. Also remember the past environmental successes we’ve had with like acid rain, the ozone layer, leaded gas, mercury pollution. We’ve come a long way.

Making any progress, no matter how small makes the future just that much better than it otherwise would be. Yes, systemic changes out of the control of anyone on Lemmy are needed, but if say every person on Lemmy worked towards reducing their own environmental impacts that could have huge ripple effects in the economy of the green transition. Just plan out pragmatically/realistically how much time, mental energy, and resources are worth it to you.

A lot things that individuals can do to help with the climate crisis often also have personal benefits like long term financial savings, less pollution exposure, healthier plant-based diets, etc.

I love my Ioniq 5, I was expecting Hyundai to gain momentum on EVs in the US.

Thanks!

Yes! The biggest factor with body weight is calories in vs calories out. Foods with volume and mass but fewer calories displace calorie dense foods. Even as simple as substituting popcorn vs potato chips is huge on calorie savings. Protein and fats (ideally plant based) can also help you feel full longer than say simple carbs like potato chips/white pasta.

I highly recommend Harvard’s Nutrition Source for science-based nutrition info and recipes, the language is very accessible too!

Edit: fixed link

When there’s more people who want to buy homes than there are homes for sale, the power dynamic is still in favor of the sellers. Sounds like this could potentially favor more experienced buyers/hedge funds over first-time home buyers. If sellers don’t want to cover fees for buyer’s agent, then that’s more a first time buyer would have to pay upfront.

Agreed! This is just the beginning, I’m convinced this was the plan all along for most smart devices. I will make an exception for products that can be conveniently operated when an account/app is optional at least.

Easy, buy up a bunch of land for conservation

I get this post is a joke, but PSA in case anybody is considering this new tide pod challenge… Swallowing batteries will fuck your shit up in life altering ways.

Reforesting agricultural land by reducing meat consumption would make a huge difference, particularly in the Amazon (#1 cause of deforestation in the Amazon is for beef production). Livestock farming uses around 50% of all agricultural land globally, while plant based proteins use a small fraction of that. Reforesting also has the benefits of improved biodiversity.

Drone on drone warfare! Makes you wonder what sort of cold war is playing out.

#BirdsArentReal

The article details issues with pharmaceutical benefit managers, which 2 of the big 3 are owned by insurance companies and the third is owned by CVS

QuantumScape is currently building the mass production line for a solid state battery and has been sending prototypes out to their auto manufacturer clients for testing.

This Undecided with Matt Ferrell video has a good breakdown.

Disclosure: I own 100 shares of QS

Plastic production is also one of the dirtiest industries in terms of air and water pollution… I doubt China has strong enough environmental standards

Paywalled, but I’m gonna go with fossil fuel trap. We need to be completely off fossil fuels by about 2050. Any new major natural gas infrastructure being built now is expected to last longer than 2050. Even new residential gas furnaces are probably expected to last around 20 years or so.

While I agree there are issues with capitalism. I disagree this was capitalism working as intended. If it were, the better/more innovative technology (green/cheap energy) would have surpassed the worse technology (dirty energy reliant on continued investment and extraction) because as we are finally seeing, there is more money to be made with green energy than fossil fuels. Suppression of green energy took active anti-capitalist anti-competitive efforts to preserve the edge of fossil fuels.

Fossil fuel companies knew about global warming since at least the 1970s. Those companies have used their enormous wealth to reverse trends towards public transit (e.g. Los Angeles used to have street cars…), halt the green energy transition until very recently, and spread misinformation and buy politicians.

Edit: also think about how all of those oil spills, mountain top removal, air and water pollution, cancers, asthma, heart disease that were “necessary for the economy” over the past couple of decades. When instead we could have already had fully sustainable energy systems with similar economic growth. Vote for politicians willing to do something about it.

As others have said, the tech is evolving rapidly. Batteries are the biggest cost of a new EV and they are getting cheaper and better every year. There’s reasonable estimates we’ll see EVs with 500mi of range on a charge by 2026 for example.

Another thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet was how absolutely bonkers the car market was coming out of the pandemic with the “chip shortage”. There were months to years long wait lists for any type of new car, so if you wanted a car immediately it had to be used. Those wait lists are becoming resolved and the market is stabilizing.

When we went to buy our Ioniq 5 about a year ago, the comparable used EVs were scares and $35-40k compared to $45k for a brand new Ioniq. And our rusty 11 year old ICE car traded in for $6k, way more than it was worth.

EV batteries don’t typically catastrophically fail, they gradually degrade in max capacity. And many combustion cars also have expensive repairs needed near the 10-15 year mark. My Ioniq 5 has 300 miles of range now, and we really only need about 120 miles for a week of commuting for my wife. So we could afford a 50% hit before needing to do something about it, which should be quite a long while from now. We just couldn’t take it on long road trips. So at least for me, the battery replacement cost in 10-15 years is not a big concern. We’d probably lean towards replacing the the whole car before just the battery.

For comparison, our combustion car is 11 years old at this point. It’s in rough shape and could be replaced, but my commute is short. Hoping to hold off on replacing it for another ~4 years unless there’s an expensive repair needed. The EV battery tech is evolving so rapidly these days that I expect cars with 500+ miles of range will be on the market by the time we buy a second EV.