Sounds reasonable to me. If some state agency or state court says forcing providers to lower rates is against state law, the court should rule that providers in that state are ineligible for the aid until the state law is changed.

That would put all providers in that state on the same playing field: None would get the aid, but none would be forced to lower rates.

It strongly depends on where you live. I'm in Penticton, BC, and there are times of the year where renting is easy. That is, any time that isn't the summer, because we're a big tourist destination in the summer. Between May and October, forget about short-timeline rentals. You need to book MONTHS in advance.

As to the proposal that EVs be made compatible with small generators: that's a lovely idea on paper, but I think you're deeply underestimating how much design that would take. A generator is heavy and hot. It needs ventilation and a way to fuel it. You can't just throw it in the trunk or the frunk. The generator itself would have to be okay with being in a confined space and not be a fire hazard or a fuel spill hazard. Like, little generators that you plop in your yard aren't being used at highway speeds and don't have to be built to be safe in the event of a collision. Nothing about that idea is practical, and to make it practical would take an insane amount of design.

Honestly, for people in North America that take long road trips sometimes, but need very little range most of the time, a PHEV like the plug-in Prius or similar is absolutely the answer. You get from 50-75km on battery alone, more than enough for errands around town. The Prius has something like a 1000km range when fully charged and fuelled up. It's an incredible solution, and it's not even that much more expensive. I honestly don't even know why mild hybrids exist anymore, the PHEV is far superior and has all the advantages of what you're talking about with a generator.

As if an Xbox 360 was an Xbox turned one.

Our car even has pillar airbags for both head and body, and it has a 5 star NCAP rating (a small weakness at chest height was determined with a side pole impact though).

My wife has a laptop built in 2014, and it runs perfectly fine. We upgraded it to 32 GByte RAM, a new screen with higher resolution (yes, it was possible to get a new screen!) and SSD, and with them, everything my wife uses runs fine and dandy. There is no reason to switch to another laptop, as this one is more than sufficient for all her use cases. In no way, it feels under-powered except for graphic intensive games, which none of us plays anyway.

And yes, our car has 110 HP (81 kW). It has a top speed of 120 mph. It gets up to 60 mpg. I don't see any reason to call this one under-powered or garbage. We are driving about 25,000 miles per year with the car, and there never has been a situation where I felt that there was a serious lack of power. It even has a towing hitch and is licensed for pulling up to 3400 lbs.

Basically, you are hinting that I should do an NPR and suppress my viewpoint to let the other guy's viewpoint stand, because my viewpoint would help the wrong people.

Or did I misunderstood you completely?

And there I was thinking that the free exchange of thoughts and ideas implies that you can freely state your thoughts and ideas? Those are mine. And my thinking is that to pinpoint a (geologically or historically) short term trend, it is sufficient to look at a short time period. I don't know how the climate on Earth will be in one million years, and my interest into the weather forecast for the year 10002024 is mainly academic. But I am very interested in the next 30 years, because that's what I expect to experience myself, and I am quite interested in the climate in 2100, because that's what my children maybe, and my grandchildren hopefully will experience. And for that, looking back 30 or 80 years, is very intriguing, while the climate at the time Homo neanderthalensis appeared for the first time is less interesting.

You can easily calculate how many years of plant growth you need until the damage done today is reversed, and this does not include all future damage.

Humans have added about 700 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the last 120 years. You can look up the yearly mining of coal, lignite and oil since 1900 until today to compare them to the increase in CO2 content in the atmosphere, if you are not sure where this increase comes from. This is equivalent to 270 billion metric tons of pure Carbon. Your average plant contains about 15% carbon. So this amounts to about 1.6 trillion tons of plant mass, which you need to add to the world, just to offset the current increase. All harvests right now on the world amount to about 5 billion tons of plant mass per year. This amount you have to add would be equivalent to 300 years of world harvests, of which none can be used for human consumption, because you urgently need the carbon to stay sequestered.

Additionally, plants growing better in higher CO2 are mostly dicotyledons, while monocotyledons don't profiteer as much. There have been experiments where, depending on the CO2 levels, dicotyledons will suppress monocotyledons at higher CO2 levels, while at lower CO2 levels, monocotyledons outcompete the dicotyledons. Sadly, with the exception of the potato, most of our food providing crops are monocotyledons, like wheat, rice,bananas or corn. Dicotyledons give mostly fruits and some vegetables, but not the starch rich crops, which yield the highest harvests. The same goes for temperature: Higher temperatures are preferring dicotyledons, while moderate temperatures are better for monocotyledons. There is a reason why most food is grown away from the equator in the moderate climate zones, and why the most people are living there.

What you are doing with higher CO2 levels and higher average temperatures is basically killing off all our crops and forcing us to really fast find new, dicotyledon based food sources.

While I agree, that higher CO2 levels will increase plant growth in general, it will not increase the amount of food we can grow. For that to happen, we are planting the wrong crops.

Yes, because the life span of a human is about 80 years.

No one claimed that climate change will destroy the planet. Or wipe out Life on Earth. It will affect humans. It will affect human living conditions. It will affect human civilisation. It will affect human housing, human harvests, human migration patterns.

Earth will happily spin around Sun for the next few billion years. Some kind of Life will evolve which can cope with the new conditions of Earth's surface. But it might include far less humans as of today, and not all of the missing humans will die peacefully after a long and fulfilled life.

I never understood the "follow the money" battle cry of the self proclaimed climate sceptics, when all the money spent world wide on climate research is dwarved by the monthly revenue of a single oil or coal company.

That a car is about to hit a wall can be told even by ignoring 99.99% of the mileage. You only need the last few second and the ever decreasing distance between the bumper and the concrete in that time frame.

This is not a narrative, this is just a data point. You can actually prove that this is the warmest March on record, and you can prove, that the previous nine month all were the warmest of their kind on record. A narrative is to call this a narrative.

"Where do you back up 189 square kilometers of real estate?" - my first thought before I read the actual summary.

I know how it works in principle (I wrote banking software back in the days). The problem is that for a band to be "safe", you have to make sure it stays safe. So you will make sure that the companies you have invested in for your "safe" band are returning yearly dividends at the expected rates, and if they don't, you will vote on the next board of director's meeting that they get their shit together and take measures to drive dividends up again.

Because differently than airplanes, which cost millions a piece, for a CNC machine for less than 10,000 dollars, there is no business case in developing a modernization. The manufacturer will just tell you that they offer you a newer model for a really big friendship rebate.