As others have said, the tech is evolving rapidly. Batteries are the biggest cost of a new EV and they are getting cheaper and better every year. There’s reasonable estimates we’ll see EVs with 500mi of range on a charge by 2026 for example.

Another thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet was how absolutely bonkers the car market was coming out of the pandemic with the “chip shortage”. There were months to years long wait lists for any type of new car, so if you wanted a car immediately it had to be used. Those wait lists are becoming resolved and the market is stabilizing.

When we went to buy our Ioniq 5 about a year ago, the comparable used EVs were scares and $35-40k compared to $45k for a brand new Ioniq. And our rusty 11 year old ICE car traded in for $6k, way more than it was worth.

EV batteries don’t typically catastrophically fail, they gradually degrade in max capacity. And many combustion cars also have expensive repairs needed near the 10-15 year mark. My Ioniq 5 has 300 miles of range now, and we really only need about 120 miles for a week of commuting for my wife. So we could afford a 50% hit before needing to do something about it, which should be quite a long while from now. We just couldn’t take it on long road trips. So at least for me, the battery replacement cost in 10-15 years is not a big concern. We’d probably lean towards replacing the the whole car before just the battery.

For comparison, our combustion car is 11 years old at this point. It’s in rough shape and could be replaced, but my commute is short. Hoping to hold off on replacing it for another ~4 years unless there’s an expensive repair needed. The EV battery tech is evolving so rapidly these days that I expect cars with 500+ miles of range will be on the market by the time we buy a second EV.

You have conservatively at least 10 years before needing to replace a battery. Even with a greater upfront cost compared to combustion cars, EVs are considerably less expensive over a 10 year period because of the lower energy and maintenance costs. The only regular maintenance most EVs should need are tire rotations and replacements of consumables like the cabin air filter, windshield wipers, brakes, and tires.

That’s only pre-2015 models without a push to start button

Agree this is animal industry propaganda. Providing some data on the environmental impacts of various protein sources: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore

That only affects Kia models before 2015

Maybe you want lower back love then?

Yoga with Adrienne has a really great 10 min upper back stretch video that does wonders for me

The copious amounts of sugar in our diets, antibiotics for livestock (or just factory farming in general), single-use plastics, and new pesticides/herbicides are today’s things that are “perfectly safe”…but not really.

With the exception of medicine, a big issue in the U.S. at least is that companies don’t have to proactively prove a new chemical/product is safe for the environment or public health before selling it. The EPA really only has the authority and staffing capabilities to step in once issues arise years or decades later. Just look at PFAS which are finally getting regulated decades too late.

The majority of carcinogens from smoking tobacco are created by burning the plant fibers. Quitting smoking is the number thing someone who smokes can do to improve their health. Vaping exposes individuals to fewer carcinogens than smoking, but still has the negative health impacts of nicotine alone on heart and mental health and still some carcinogen exposure.

SmokeFree.gov has free evidence-based resources to help quit!

Adding all of that coal and limestone trapped a lot of carbon underground. If that carbon was CO2 instead, the Earth would be much hotter. Perhaps hotter than the boiling point of water and thus there would be no ocean between the continents, like Venus.

Something about the regulations of these giant container ships has to change moving forward

I say outdoors. Indoors has a vibe of being human made to me, and a low likelihood of encountering wildlife. So I guess walking around a mine is indoor cave exploration

Oh wow, thanks for pointing that out, an oversight on my part. I replaced the link, but damn it’s hard to find good sources about this. EPA website is very technical and not much I could find breaking it down well that was not industry-funded.

And yeah there’s other ways to look at spending money to offset emissions that are hard to reduce, like air travel. I figure this gets people thinking in different ways and these charities could use the funds.

EPA recently updated the “Social Cost of Carbon” which is an estimate of the dollar amount of damage each metric ton of CO2 emitted costs society from pollution, natural disasters, humanitarian issues, etc. In 2023 the cost was ~$204/metric ton. A flight across the Continental US emits about 1 metric ton per economy passenger.

So carbon offsets should be priced in the neighborhood of $200/metric ton. But many of the carbon offset services are pretty scammy or fraudulent. As an alternative, I’d suggest considering a simple donation to an environmental charity in the same dollar range. Check out Coalition for Rainforest Nations as an option!

Would you rather fight 100 lemming-sized hippos or 1 hippo-sized lemming?

Ours was 50 amp, which seems to be pretty common for 30-36in wide cooktops

Yeah we went with the GE Profile 36in induction cooktop.

It’s more responsive than either gas or electric coils. The catch is you need pans that a fridge magnet will stick to. A trip to the thrift store with a magnet worked out for us.

The heat goes down immediately with most pans. Cast iron retains more heat though.

We went to the thrift store with a fridge magnet to buy our new pans, stainless steel lasts a long time

Love my new induction stove! Our old gas stove was leaking and could have blown up the house. We’ve noticed a lot less waste heat too, metal pan handles can be grabbed without a hot pad, the kitchen doesn’t heat up as much from cooking. And it heats up blazingly fast.