Funds Divesting From Fossil Fuels

Just on the news that electric rates in Texas this summer are 70% higher than they were last year. Rate increases like that will really boost solar adoption there. Plus Texas has lots of sunlight.

Texas has its own isolated grid so they could give the finger to federal regulators. It worked ok but beginning of 2021 that lack of regulation and no connections to other grids caused their big blackout. Now electric ratepayers are holding the bag.

Increasing fossil energy costs are just going to be a fact of life now. Today it’s Texas in the news. Tomorrow it will be somewhere else. But it’s coming sooner rather than later. The southwest is looking at losing hydroelectric generation in the near future as the reservoirs dry up. Where will that energy come from? Texas is heading into peak power demand with a number of power plants offline. Energy shortages, hard and mandatory conservation, and maybe even rationing is coming.

The company that installed my system is buried. They have jobs lined up just waiting for parts and enough time to get to them. They are expanding. But right now, call any good installer and ask them how far out they are booked.

If these posts convinced anyone of the need to get solar and they are able to do it, they will probably still have to wait to actually install. Permitting and design reviews and utility approvals also eat up lots of time before work can even start. Meanwhile, current events are just making the lines to get solar longer. Cleetus and others who think it’s all a joke won’t be changing the rates of solar installs. There is no shortage of customers. The only question is who those customers are.

I posted this stuff to hopefully alert others here to what’s likely coming. This whole Ukraine thing and a big looming energy shortage in Europe because of it are going to be spiking prices here too. US oil and gas will be selling at market price. They’ll be making massive bank while the world deals with high prices and shortages and all that brings to economies. Plus we probably have blackouts and brownouts coming.

I just wanted to alert to these issues. This whole energy and global warming thing is not going to get better going forward. With all the delays and availability issues, folks might want to look ahead to fall/winter and consider what their energy situation might look like. If forecasts are correct, we’ll be seeing things that will have people lining up.

Maybe Putin will die or be killed and Russia can open fuels back up to Europe. That should collapse oil prices and increase supplies but still leaves the whole issue of climate change. Putin may go away but global warming won’t. We have to move away from fossil fuels anyway.

Pretty much all I know about this is already here with enough keywords where anyone should be able to find out more if they choose to. I’m done on this. It’s a dead horse now, maybe long ago. Remember there are finance options too if you can’t buy a system outright. You can have solar and just keep paying that bill that won’t go up (assuming fixed interest rates). Texans‘ electric bills have almost doubled in a year. Check references. Educate yourself. Good luck.

Speaking of Fossil Fuels, just read this from National Geographic

Around here, and in a number of documented cases elsewhere, the police and criminals are cut from the same cloth. They may well be the perps themselves or in cahoots with them. Mmm no this is not hyperbole but neither is it universal. The reality is in my experience, I can't depend on them.

Gee. What a delightful thread. I studied the process and pieced together a solar electric system with a morning star charge controller, lifepo4 storage battery bank, and 2k inverter. I lived off-grid because of the remoteness of my camp. I got into a car wreck and had to move into town for various health reasons and recuperation.

When I had someone check my camp after a few months, all of my stuff was gone including my vehicles. My jeep was recovered and torn to hell but still running. I left it at a cousin's place who then sold it, as it turns out, to the original thief. There were a lot of valuable equipment and tools. but all my personal and "sacred" items, photos, gifts from significant persons in my life, photo albums, and news items of projects I had been involved in, were all gone. 3 years of earnings and hard work from the ND oil boom were invested in this now gone.

I know who a few of the culprits are and I've fought off thoughts of revenge and payback. Many times in my life when I've tried to live right and do the right thing, I've been attacked and all movements towards what I understand to be progressive, essential, and positive have been purposely been sabotaged and destroyed.

Since then I've made my life minimalistic. I've considered going full Luddite and joining the ranks of the homeless. I likely wouldn't survive long because of my age and the fact that older people are statistically easy targets for those criminally aggressive, possibly psychotic, and aggressive predators. They appear to be nothing but another animal on the planet without the qualities that make being human a worthy existence.

I don't care anymore as that which we title evil, is alive, well, and in some cases becoming more powerful. Man wants to destroy himself and the environment through avarice, arrogance, greed. and ignorance. In some cases, he/she has the ability to do so through the misuse and nefarious application of tech.

I am not going quietly into that good night, but I am going. In a relatively short time, knowledge of my existence will be forgotten and unknown just like the innumerable number of human beings that have come before me.

"...when I'm done I hit the OFF button and go back to reality" - Cleetus F

Debatable

Hey,i found Greta..😂

I think I'm done in this thread now. I know I'm not going to get an answer to what I raised, because Cletus isn't here for a discussion of ideas. What others and I presented stand on their own merits. If he had something (anything at all) he would have posted it already. If he wasn't a liar about not caring about Internet service, he would already be calling his Internet provider to have it disconnected.

I don't waste (much) time arguing with liars. I still find it curious why someone is so committed to the talking points of billionaires and promoting them. I suppose that's why I could never be a conservative: I can't parrot talking points of my betters and refuse to reassess my positions based on new evidence.

Back to the main thread. Antivaxxers have the same mindset, but they sometimes inadvertently provide a laugh or two when they aren't actively trying to kill people.

I see Cletus up there is one of those folks the New York Times talks to on their Cletus Safaris to diners.

"The Earth cools and heats in cycles." Now for the Kewpie Doll, how many of those cycles were less than two hundred years long?

In 1816 (the year without a summer, due to a volcanic eruption), Earth's temperature dropped about 0.7°C. That was enough to trigger a mass famine across Europe, Asia, and North America as crops failed from that slight change in climate. It essentially ended the feudal economy of Europe over the mass starvation of peasants.

Humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to exist in this climate. While Earth will go on regardless of changes in the atmosphere, we won't.

Powerful interests with trillions of dollars of unrealised assets (that is, fossil fuels which have not been mined or pumped) are the ones purchasing conservatives in many countries to ensure their profits aren't ruined by a change in technology. Buying those politicians and befuddling the public is simply the cost of doing business. By the time the disasters are too great, they'll be dead and they don't care. Exxon itself commissioned studies back in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies indicating it was fossil fuels driving climate weirding, not sunspots, or Earth wobbles or any other nonsense. Those documents are now in the pubic domain (though they sued to keep them from being released). Their business solution was to create FUD, using the very same lawyers and lobbyists who did the same with denying the effects of tobacco. They didn't have to convince you were wrong, they only had to sow enough doubt.

The worst thing that can happen from transitioning away from fossil fuels is cleaner air and water, even if what you assert incorrectly was true. The worst thing that could happen to fossil fuel companies is they go the way of buggy whip manufacturers if they choose not to update their 150 year-old technology.

As an anecdote, if there was powerful monopolies in telecommunications, would you like to be restricted to the technology of the mid-XIX Century? Oh wait, there was a massive telecommunications monopoly (Ma Bell) and they did the same: Sowing FUD that telephone services would be destroyed if the government broke them up.

The technological advances in telecommunications have exploded since Bell Telephone was dismantled, because it allowed innovation and new competition. That created a burgeoning new marketplace for multitudes of competitors to enter.

Like Ma Bell, that's what the oil oligarchy doesn't want. And like Ma Bell, they will buy off, lie, or lobby to restrict competition so they can maintain their profits. Corporations don't give a flying fuque at a rolling doughnut for you, so standing in as an unpaid shill with their talking points debunked by physicists in the XVIII Century about what causes climate change seems a bit too much like libertarian fanbois (groupies).

Fan-fucking tasting! About time someone takes a look at the long term outlook for my kids and future family. This hopefully will start a discussion about the effects of fossil fuel i trying to combat global warming. Bravo U of C!

Thanks so much TheyShouldHaveVaxxed -- I learned a lot from your knowledgeable posts! (And thanks to cath for linking to this forum from the main site!)

I just gifted a little old ezra klein article in the nytimes, here (<== link).

It points out, among other things, that particulates from air pollution currently kill approximately 10,000,000/year?

That fact isn't directly related to atmosphere-warming pollution -- if anything, some of the particulates may reflect sunlight back? -- although, when particulates land on ice sheets, of course, that does the opposite (i.e., causes them to absorb more light, thus heat).

I'm no scientist! The point (in part) is that we already live in an imperfect world, filled with consequences -- good and bad, many of them good of course -- of technology and industrialization.

This point is so basic it's hard to accept that it has to be made, but here goes: we should try to minimize the bad consequences of technology. Climate change is a bad consequence; it's up to us to deal with it.

No one is telling anyone to "worry about" it. Just as I wouldn't tell anyone to "worry about" Trump and election denial. But it is something we have to deal with.

$.02/ymmv

Thanks to the people, above, who have the patience to explain the science.

It will never change the mind of someone who has been brainwashed by the fossil fuel propaganda, but might sway someone who is "sitting on the fence"

So, thanks again to TheyShouldHaveVaxxed.