I think you wildly misunderstood what the other commenter was trying to get at, namely that you are trying to extrapolate a gobal and relatively volatile value of a single material to the scale of the entire gobal economy. If for instance a major mine was forced to shut down then you would see a major increase in the price of gold, but no change to the economy as a whole outside of a small fraction of the aforementioned change making its contribution to the outputs of a few niche industries.

Moreover if a commodity can work as a pure measure of inflation in the economy then we would expect the gobal price index of all commodities to provide a more accurate measure, right? Actually doing that relative to USD however actually shows minor deflation since Q3 2023, which itself saw a whopping 30% deflation between 2022 and 2023.

Given these numbers do not seem at all indicative of my personal or observed change in the average price of goods and services across the entire economy, it would seem that commodity prices don’t have a significant direct correlation with inflation.

Obligatory two hour Soup Emporium video essay.

Don’t forget Putin bravely defending himself against western imperialism by invading neighboring nations, and how he must secretly be a communist no matter how much of the country he has privatized and sold off to his cronies.

Primarily LFP, and as for cars that currently use them, off the top of my head base model Teslas, Fords, some Kia, and basically everything BYD or other Chinese manufacturers export use it.

Ment to hedge that with the qualifier often, as some manufacturers with little competition or reason to make cheap EVs do just use a cut down high end cobalt battery bank and pass the large additional cost onto the customer. It is a practice that is increasingly going away, and when it comes to things like moving everyone to EVs the general assumption is that regardless of what Amarican manufacturers want, most of them will go with the lower cost and longer lived chemistries over the premium density ones.

Neglecting that Cobalt isn’t even used in non-luxury EV’s in favor of cheaper chemistries like LFP or Sodium Ion, it’s worth noting that while so called ‘artisanal mining’ has been supplying much of the cobalt needed for over a half century now in oil processing, it’s being replaced by larger and cheaper industrial mines as demand for cobalt in electronics and premium EVs grew.

Not that such industrial mining doesn’t come with local environmental costs, or that we shouldn’t work on better recycling capture for personal electronics, but sticking with oil sure hasn’t done anything to help the Congo so far.

Opinion pieces on the Internet and political saber rattling by low level politicians does not a nuclear policy make.

States actually have quite a few different ways of signaling they are serious about potentially ending the world as we know it, and Russia is currently using none of them.

As an example, the Russian state’s own published nuclear policy has remained unchanged for over a decade and still explicitly prohibits nuclear first use in cases like this. Currently high level Russian politicians including Putin continue to reference said defense policy in response to questions about the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. If they were seriously considering using said nuclear weapons in Ukraine, they would be unambiguously signaling through changing these documents and other such methods that other governments actually take seriously.

More to the point, breaking the nuclear taboo would be massively harmful to both Russia and Putins own interests. It would at best result in a NATO backed no fly zone over Ukraine while China and Iran completely abandon them, and quite possibly result in a direct conventional or nuclear war with Nato. I simply don’t buy that they would do that with no warning or previous signaling simply because an artillery rocket was manufactured in a different country.

I mean, the government has mandated that all cars built since the 90s have to have a lot of computers and sensors for engine monitoring and emissions logging so that ship has long since sailed. Automatic braking is also credited with eliminating something like 1 in 5 fatalities in car accidents, so as long as we have any motorized vehicles around at all I don’t really have a problem with the government requiring manufacturers to spend the extra 20 dollars or so per vehicle it costs them to add a few ultrasonic sensors and a microcontroller it takes to slow the vehicle to the point where a driving into a pedestrian might just be survivable.

As we all know, the Catholic Church is a famously anti-God institution, what with all their talk about combating climate change and not destroying the planet God left for us./s

To be fair and provide a decent answer your rhetorical question, a lot of people in general and his constituents in particular believe that a lot of his actions, especially his vetoing of a whole host of progressive laws passed by the California legislature, has been driven by an desire to succeed Biden by wishing to appear moderate following the decades long Democratic political strategy of being just to the left of the Republicans as to appear to moderates.

This has gennerally frustrated a lot of his constituents, who feel that by vetoing anything that might not appeal to theoretical swing state voters the governor is putting his own political ambitions ahead of his duty to the state and the work of the rest of the party to draft and pass these laws in the first place.

All of this context means he is seen as already focusing primarily on trying to win over swing states by his own constituents, and as such it’s worth noting to a national audience that this guy really, really wants to be president of the US and him making comments that might alienate moderates is a noteworthy event as well as providing any reason at all for them to care what he says.

Unrequested brilliant take over.

The more important question however, is if the short term loss in biodiversity is offset by the long term gain in both biodiversity and all the other benefits that come with not burning more coal and natural gas.

They highlight south america as an area that is seeing the largest declines and which is highly dependent on hydro power, but the only other options that area has are either to cut down the rainforest for solar, tie the entire national grid to a few offshore wind farms, pump a massive portion of their limited GDP into a rich western nation and go into dept for a nuclear program, or most likely to actually happen, build lots of new natural gas plants and buy fuel from all those new LNG exports terminals the US just built. Given a hydro reservoir is also the cheapest way to bulk store renewables for night/calm days, it actually ends up being a double cut to renewables generation as a whole.

Talior made fish ladders plus effective reserch and monitoring obviously helps eliminate most of the barriers created by a dam, but are an additional cost with little direct benefit to the local community and as such tend to be the first to go when people start to ask why the government has money to study some fish’s comfort but not for the town to get drinkable tap water or subsidize small AC units so the poor don’t die in the next climate change induced heat wave. Also harder to get the IMF to let your nation go into debt for.

Obviously every method generating electricity is going to have its sacrifices, unless you are like Australia and most of your country is desert with large lithium reserves, but I feel like this sort of conversion is best served by ‘and that’s why the West should be giving poor countries tailor made fish ladders to preserve our shared climate’ and not ‘and that’s why we can’t let poor nations build the same dams the rich countries used to build their industry and provide rural electrification a century ago. Indeed we need to go farther and replace these new dams with a vauge something(Hint: that vague something is fossil fuels).’

It is worth keeping in mind that lot of migratory fish are not expected to be able to survive the warmer rivers of the next few decades or will be right on the edge, so 2C vs 2.2C vs 2.4 is probably going to be the deciding factor and as such the oil and gas prices pants those dams took offline do matter.

Electricity is also only one of the three main reasons you build dams, with the other primary one in the rainforest being flood control. People tend to live near water, and when that water rises because of a climate change induced storm it tends to be bad for the people.

Also, while I’m certain the actual study accounts for it, the article uses loss of freshwater fish populations as a whole without acknowledging that a significant factor of that is climate change making rivers warmer, and that warmer water stresses fish, so it comes across as pretty disingenuous.

Why? A company could always have ordered a new small batch of molded parts, and machine shops exist to build whatever plans you give them, or just take the worn or broken part and make a not broken part to match.

Moreover, most of the parts on a vehicle like this are going to be metal shafts, gears, barrings, ir panels, upholstery, etc… Not the small, highly intricate parts 3D printing excels at.