Well, no *one* of us in a position to save the coral reefs. Not even world leaders can do it. But we *all* are in a position to do a little bit, and collectively all those little bits add up to matter.

Sure if you're the only person trying to reduce is carbon footprint you will make no difference. But if enough people do it, then that captures the attention of industry and politicians and shifts the Overton window. Clearly we can't save everything, but there's still a lot on the table and marginal improvements matter. All-or-nothing thinking is a big part of denialist thinking; if you can't fix everything then there's no point in fixing anything and therefore people say there's a problem are alarmists predicting a catastrophe we couldn't do anything about even if it weren't happening.

As to the loss of coral reefs not being the worst outcome of climate change, that's probably true, but we really can't anticiapte the impact. About a quarter of all marine life depends on coral reefs for some part of their life cycle. Losing all of it would likely be catastrophic in ways we can't imagine yet, but the flip side is that saving *some* of it is likely to be quite a worthwhile goal.

Well, you bringing *evolution* into the argument shows that your views are so far off base theyr'e not even wrong.

You're missing the point.

The point is that CA has now gotten to the point where storage is a real requirement to continue growing renewables, at least if they don't want to simply be discarding a lot of renewable generation. That is, CA has now gotten past the easy part of renewable growth, where the renewables are cutting into but not fully replacing fossil fuel generation. From here forward, it's going to be harder, and the state is going to have to be breaking new ground.

This is both a major milestone and an inflection point in the difficulty of converting.

Even that is not enough when renewables generate >100% of consumption for significant parts of each day. Then you have to start figuring out how to store that excess production. In the short term they can probably sell some of it to other states, but as other states transition their own production that's going to become less useful, especially for solar. Time to start building out storage!

I used my Leaf quite happily for years. My daily commute was only about 25 miles, so the car could make the round trip easily. In the winter making the round trip without charging got me closer to empty than I liked, but that just meant that I shifted from charging only on the L2 at work to also plugging in the L1 at home. The only real problem was that I often got home with low enough miles remaining that we couldn't take the car very far in the evening if we were going out to eat or something. So then we'd have to take the Durango. This was in Cololrado.

Then I moved to Utah (where I'm from)... but here I work from home. The Leaf was fine for running errands as long as you didn't have too many stops, too widely separated. In a pinch, there is a Nissan dealership with a Chademo charger not too far away, just at the bottom of the big hill I have to climb to get home, so sometimes I had to stop there for 5 minutes to make sure that I had enough juice to get home -- where I had installed a 10 kW L2 charger. Two of them, actually, because then I bought a used Model S and sold the Leaf to my son. By then my lease had ended (after being extended twice) and I bought the car for a steal. In total I only paid $14k for the car.

My son still uses it to get to school and work. He doesn't live far from me and has to climb the same hill, and the car has lost some range, so in the winter he always has to stop and charge on the way home. He seems fine with that, though, and even prefers to charge more than he needs to because the Nissan dealership's electricity is free.

Unless the battery was too small to begin with, you won't even think about it. I normally only charge mine to 70% anyway, so the difference between 100% of capacity or 90% is completely irrelevant on a daily basis. For long road trips it's also irrelevant, since it's most time-efficient to charge to only 70-80% -- charging slows way down as you get close to full.

So, why not get a smaller battery if you rarely use the whole thing? Two reasons: First, so that losing a little capacity or charging to 70-80% is still sufficient range. My first Tesla, a 2014 Model S, only had 200 miles of range when charged to full, and that meant that time-efficient road-trip charging required stopping every 100 miles, which is too often. Second, because using the full range of the battery causes it to lose capacity faster. So, you buy an EV with a battery that's 30% larger than "needed" in some sense. Losing some of that doesn't matter.

So, you wouldn't think about how to pay for a replacement every time you get in the car, because you wouldn't plan to get a replacement, ever.

You'd need to bundle that law with a law that would make the tickets refundable until a certain point too close to the event.

It's legitimate, in my mind, to resell tickets for some event you wanted to go to but now cannot because life circumstances got in the way. It's less legitimate to scrape a website, buy a zillion tickets, and resell them at a huge markup.

Economic populism is more in vogue on both the left and right today than it was in the 90s.

Ban TicketMaster/Live Nation from the lucrative resale market and watch how quickly they conjure up an effective solution to solve the problem of bots snatching up all the tickets.

We purchased tickets for Alanis Morissette's tour this summer, within 60 seconds of sales opening, and magically all the first sale tickets were gone and we had to go to the resale market. From nosebleed to "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", literally, every single seat in a ~20k person arena sold within a minute? Who knew she was still that popular....

TM gets to collect their bullshit fees on every single sale, so what incentive do they have to do a damn thing about bots?

Sure, the planet does not care, but we're not asking what the *planet* should do, are we?

Of course this isn't science, it's just wishful thinking and hand waving about things you don't actually know much about. It's probably worth noting that actual reef scientists aren't so cheerful about the prospects for coral reefs as you are.

It's not even that what you *think* you know is necessarily wrong. You're talking about about something reef scientists aren't particulary worried about: the extinction of coral *species*. In other words it's a straw man. What scientists are worried about is something quite different: a massive reduction in the 348,000 square kilometers of coral reef habitat that currently exist.

That's something that will take millions of years to recover from, and which will cause countless extinctions It will result in multiple species extinctions; sure that's survival of the fittest, but "fittest" doesn't mean "better"; it means more fitted to specific set of new circumstances, in this case circumstances we *chose to create*. And sure, in a few million years it won't matter. But that's not the test we use to decide whether anything other issue needs addressing. If someone broke into your house and took a dump on your kitchen table, it wouldn't matter in a million years, but you'd sure report it to the cops and expect something to get done about it.

No, it's not evolution *at work*. It's human intervention in the environment at work. Sure, evolution will *respond* to this intervention; if you want to see *that* at work, go into suspended animation for a hundred thousand years.

You could argue that *humans* are part of nature and therefore anything we do is natural. That's just quibbling. By that argument it would be just as natural for us to choose not to shit in our own beds.

Yeah, specific battery packs can be faulty. It also depends a lot on whether the car properly manages battery temperatures. My first EV was a 2011 Nissan Leaf, and the Leaf has no battery cooling so in hot climates the batteries often die quickly. That said, it's 2024 and that 2011 Leaf still has about 60% of its original range (my son bought it from me). We live in a temperate climate, but it does get pretty hot in the summer.

I live in rural America, and EVs are great here. Oh, public charging infrastructure mostly doesn't exist, but that's fine because I have electricity -- get this -- at my house!. I even have flush toilets, 'cause we're high class. The nearest Supercharger is ~100 miles away, but I have a garage, and a barn, and I put EV chargers in both. For normal daily driving, it works fine to just charge at home -- car is fully charged every morning -- and when I go on a long trip, well, the Supercharger network has me covered.

Works perfectly.

It's not clear that will ever be needed. EV batteries don't just stop working (barring some unusual fault); they just gradually decline in capacity, and the decline is very slow after the first 1-2 years. So expect to have 95% of capacity after two years, 80% after a decade, 60% after two decades, 50% after three, etc.

So it's just a question of when the capacity drops so low that the vehicle no longer has enough range -- but over time charging infrastructure is going to get better and better, so long range will become less and less important. Also, batteries are going to get cheaper.

So, yeah, it seems entirely reasonable to me to replace the battery in 20 years (if you haven't replaced the vehicle by then). Especially since the fuel savings over that time will far more than cover the replacement cost, even if the replacement cost hasn't come down, which it will!

Turbotax offers free service to low-to-moderate income people as part of an agreement it has made with the IRS. In return for this, the IRS doesn't provide free electronic tax preparation services like most other advanced countries do. For most consumers, the IRS could in fact automatically fill out their returns and the consumer could simply check it by answering a few simple questions rather than puzzling over instructions written for professional accountants.

If you've always wondered why filing your taxes couldn't be simpler, a bit part of this is marketing from companies like Intuit that make a lot of money out of simplifying the process for taxpayers.

The free tier service is something Intuit is contractually obligated to provide. Upselling low-income people to a paid service that wouldn't benefit them in any way is morally dubious at best.