BP to slash green investment and ramp up gas and oil

Similar with Shell indeed. From what I’ve heard, Shell electric car chargers are very unreliable. I think it’s a bit like Kodak. They know solar is going to eat (a part) of their lunch, but if they invest in solar then the oil revenue goes down even faster. So they don’t.

Also worth trying to steer your career towards something meaningful. I get at least some satisfaction that I spend my days trying to make heat pumps better and cheaper

Bill Gates calls it the ‘green premium’ which I thought was a good way of highlighting that a green option is often there for those able and willing to afford it.

It's easy to demand this if you have enough resources/money to spare. Given that the wealth gap widens from year to year, this strategy does not work in the long run. People simply don't have that money to spare. The same issue already exists regarding cheap mass produced food. You only hear privileged people talking about more expensive choices, because they can. The bigger part of population buys the cheap food, because they have no other way to feed their family...

....and stop buying rubbish from China, who dont care about the environment?.

I don’t know which company you’re referring to because British Petroleum hasn’t existed for nearly 30 years.

> We couldn't have had a worse hegemon. Saddening.

The other candidates for hegemon are worse IMO. The Soviet Union could have conceivably replaced the US as hegemon, and China might yet do so.

Maybe the EU would be a better hegemon, but never really had the capabilities to take on that role.

Related to this I'm surprised how expensive still Tesla Powerwall is: ~$10k for 13.5kWh. Even Segway these days sell cheaper Portable Power Station Cube that is modular and stackable (upto 5kWh but IMHO much better design and useful) for $1k for 2kWh - and segway it's still kind of premium brand.

Not sure why Tesla still qualifies for 30% Federal Tax Credit if they been operating and getting this for a decade and didn't bring price down. Some people on youtube were buying Tesla Car battery and retrofit them to have equivalent of 5x such Powerwalls for the same price. It seems ironic that they made DOGE to reduce government spending but still running this tax credit that in Powerwall situation benefits only higher income class.

All those greedy western companies doing EV cars and residential batteries IMHO deserve to be eaten by chinese competition.

It’s only economically viable because we don’t price externalities correctly.

It should be cheap and easy to live a bike ride away from work in a well insulated home. Instead we’ve priced things completely backwards

I'd say "economically viable" is not useful pharsing. It's of course economically viable to slow down the climate catastrophe as the costs will be so vast also economically (in addition to humanly, morally, etc) and we have the policy tools to do it. But it's a collective action problem and it needs a lot of international trade coordination and govenrment regulation.

> economically viable

Or just regulation.

China and India are outperforming most of the developed nations in meeting their committed climate goals.

This makes perfect economic sense, without any environmental arguments.

Rooftop solar now produces 11.2% of the electricity in the Australian market [1], as it's the cheapest source of electricity. That percentage is not a peak value, but averaged across the year. On some summer days, rooftop solar is effectively powering the entire grid and is having to be throttled.

That 11.2% only includes the power that enters the market. It does not include power which houses generate and consume on-site, which does not pass through the meter, so the actual percentage is higher.

[1] https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/australia-solar-2024-mb3...

Yip, I've also installed a heat pump and solar in my house, insulated well, removed my gas connection, etc. Not the most economically viable decision I guess, but it felt like the right thing to do.