> Natural gas extremely expensive? Let me introduce you to renewables, which btw are getting better and better every year.

Shutting down a natural gas pipeline that people depend upon just before winter, and then lecturing them about solar panels is not a good look. Artificially increasing the price of natural gas causes famines, it causes food and fertilizer to be more expensive, and it makes it hard for people to heat their homes.

But one thing it doesn't do is increase reliable renewable energy sources. Solar is not a replacement for home heating oil during the Michigan winters. And renewables do not spring instantly into existence out of suffering. Another thing it doesn't do is help the air, because instead of this pipeline, we will need to run 5000 trucks per day from Canada to the Midwest to deliver that natural gas in time for winter. So it's a good thing we don't have a shortage of truck drivers or any supply chain issues.

This idea that we should be punishing end users who need to heat their homes and buy fertilizer instead of actually deploying reliable alternatives is a form of scolding eco-sadism. It may be fine for you to absorb an increase in home heating oil prices, but other people really suffer. It's pure mismanagement and very much has a "let them eat cake" vibe.

> It may be a painful few years to navigate that transition

The pain inflicted on households in the midwest will be returned with interest in the next election. The next time you wonder why it's 2050 and the US hasn't raised any gas taxes or instituted carbon credits, or really done much to reduce CO2 emissions, then remember that to pass a green agenda you need to win battleground states like Michigan, and then remember back to this moment and the kinds of finger wagging lectures that were being delivered all over the country to people worried about how they will heat their homes in the winter.

I sympathize with this, but if climate experts are to believed, we’ve stalled to the point where we have perhaps a decade to get emissions under control in order to meet targets, and most countries haven’t even begun to make significant changes. At some point there will be pain. The question is, “do we want a little pain now or a lot of pain down the road?”. And to be clear, “wearing a coat inside during winter” may just constitute “a little pain” compared to the famines and wars that are likely if we fail to get our emissions to zero in time.

"we have perhaps a decade to get emissions under control"

Every year we're told it's our absolute last chance. Environmental brinkmanship hasn't work and the tune needs to be changed. Literally no economies are planning for mass famine or wars because no-one actually believes that is going to happen, except religious cults.

Because every year IS our absolute last chance. Each emitted ton is there "forever" (at least for multiple centuries). Climate change can be stopped (like, paused indefinitely) but can't be reversed.

You are right that there is no absolute deadline. Now we are stuck with our hotter summers "forever". But we are not yet stuck with what comes next.

> no-one actually believes that is going to happen

That is the problem exactly. We do not listen to scientists, because it's more convenient to ignore it. And when their models become reality, we'll just blame them for it, as they "knew" and did not prevent it.

All I'm going to say is always look at where these 'scientists' are getting their funding from. I'm not a climate denier, but realize much of the NGD is really a redistribution of funds. Driving EV machines will still require electricity, most of which is still generated by fossil fuels. Then there's the quagmire of what to do with spent batteries. The Earth has heated and cooled over millions of years, so I really doubt we're at the point of no return.

>Driving EV machines will still require electricity, most of which is still generated by fossil fuels.

Most, compared to all. And power plants are much more efficient at capturing energy than internal combustible engines. I see no real issues with the technology, just small kinks to be worked out, which is expected

Every year the goalposts move a little bit. Thirty years ago the goal was ca. 0° of global warming. Now we're debating whether we can muster the political will to limit warming to 2° (unlikely) or 3°.

Could it also be our understanding is gradually improving and the externalities are just lagging more than first thought?

No,it’s mainly that business won’t change until it’s forced on them. Big tragedy of the commons problem

Right. They want regulation...but NOT THAT REGULATION!! No one will be able to agree on anything as politicians bounce between big donors bitching and various voter poll data.

Somewhere out in left field are the right things that need to be done.

1. The same thing could've been said about the Covid-19 pandemic back in February 2020. In fact, a certain American President said as much. The fact that people are incapable of envisioning major disruptions to their lives does not prove that scientists are wrong; it's proves that humans can be blindsided by their own biases.

2. Countries don't plan their economies half a century ahead. Most struggle to plan beyond the next election cycle.

I have was a denier of: CO2 emitted by humans causes global warming until I studied chemistry. Then it hit me. The earth is warming, we are making it warm faster. This place is normally hot...we are making it worse.

The claims sound fantastic if you don't have a solid education. The people you are trying to convince do not have an education that will allow them to understand for themselves. They fundamentally distrust the people trying to convince them. There is no "to be believed." That has already reached the saturation point.

In democratic countries, the answer to the question of "do we want a little pain before the elections or a lot of pain down the road?" is quite clear - if you accept the pain now, you'll get voted out and get replaced by someone who will proclaim that the pain isn't needed, promise to undo your measures and kick the problem even further down the road to some other future government.

> Your mistake is weighing superstition vs tangible harm.

Care to share which of the thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's website, you have:

a) read

b) understood

c) found errors in

d) brought to the world's attention?

500, 10, 1, ? I thought not.

And yes, of course it sucks - no one wants this. You seem to think the unpleasantness of the diagnosis and remedy gives you and yours an out.

https://www.ipcc.ch/

> You seem to think the unpleasantness of the diagnosis and remedy gives you and yours an out.

This is such an interesting observation. I had always thought that with a dire enough problem, humanity would band together and come up with a solution at all cost.

But after observing the worldwide response to the pandemic, I’m quite sure the world will become engulfed in wildfire and famine while a notable fraction of the population continues to insist that “this is normal and everything is fine”.

It’s an odd situation where magical thinking (“it can’t happen to me”) negates self-preservation.

The IPCC has been making dire predictions now for 3 decades. Can you point to any that came true?

Off the top of my head I know that

1. Glacier park was to vanish by 2020. Its still there, barely changed, some glaciers shrank, others grew.

2. Sea level didn't rise as expected.

3 Polar bears are strong, and are not on the endangered list.

4. Temperatures did not rise as much as expected. We are still way below the Roman and Bronze age warm periods.

5. Damage from weather has increased in America, but that is a result of a policy to rebuild, instead of abandoning areas prone to bad weather. Increasing the probability of being damaged by bad weather. Actual weather severity has not changed much.

6. In school, I was made to feel terrified of desertification. The opposite happened, the deserts retreated. The globe is greening.

As I said, that is off the top of my head, but it can all be backed up by data. Or prove me wrong. Can you show me a few ipcc predictions which actually came true? Thanks.

The IPCC does not make predictions. Never has, never will. The whole point, which real climate scientists repeat as nauseum, is we can never know absolutes because of the huge number of variables and timeframes. So what they do instead is provide scenarios. And each scenario has a series of weightings or probabilities. The summaries spell these out in rough terms, the full reports go into intricate detail and sources. If you spend the time to read the summaries you will find a good number of scenarios which are currently playing out as we speak.

Thousands of researchers making predictions with ever shifting probabilities is what you call unfalsifiable.

The predictions we’re talking about play out over decades. The sources cite other predictions. It’s a feedback loop of assumptions and peer review from people who you know already share the same assumptions.

Climate science is much more akin to sociology than a hard science.

Except climate science has tons and tons of hard data that the models need to agree with to be publishable, whereas sociology has questionnaires administered to a group of 20 sociology students.

Making a model that agrees with historical data is literally the base case for modeling. Like it is a feature of all forecasting solutions

The settled science used to be that leeches were a valid cure for a ton of medical issues. Lots of peer reviewed research on it at the time, I’m sure.

> The idea that we should eliminate fossil fuels is truly a privileged take.

It is, and it's our only option. It's the reason nobody is doing a lot to combat climate change: because it'll require a lot of tears, effort and money, and nobody wants or can afford to spend them.

At the end, it's always the poor that have to pay. It's always been like that. Doesn't make climate change any less real.

Climate change is indeed a justice problem and we should optimize for justice rather than just raw temperature management. There are "solutions" that cause more injustice by denying efficient energy to the global poor.

But the wealthy people who make this argument tend to argue for total inaction rather than a justice-focused approach where they sacrifice greatly in order to permit the global poor to have access to efficient energy for as long as possible.

It's difficult to believe the working class in America should bear the sacrifice when the richest people in the world just flew their private jets to a lavish climate conference thousands of miles from home to discuss how much the working class should sacrifice.

Any sacrifice that is called for should start at the top.

Cool. I think you'll find that a large number of climate activists are very on board with pretty extreme policies pulling from the rich. The people calling it "superstition" tend to be people who don't support high taxes on the wealthy.

That may be true at the grassroots level, but I've never seen it materialize at the policy level.

Perhaps I've missed something. Could you cite an example of an actual (not merely theoretical) climate policy that pulls from the rich without hurting the working class?

I mean, there is barely any climate policy at all in the first place.

The working class in America is part of the richest people in the world.

How many of them have a private jet? Your working class American might make 5 times as much as a person living in the third world, but the clowns at this climate conference are easily 1,000 times as rich. Your comparison is meaningless.

The actions of a few thousand extremely rich people have little influence on global emissions. The actions of 300 million Americans do.

Anyone could use that excuse: "I'm just one person, it doesn't matter what I do."

It's even less credible when the one person is putting 10x as much carbon in the atmosphere as the average person.

And until the rich start making personal sacrifices, they lack any moral authority to demand sacrifices from others.

So because removing fossil fuels will be difficult to do, we shouldn't try and we should instead bury our head in the sand about the very real problems that lay ahead of us?

Yes, this is precisely why we should have phased these out in the first world (and required the same of our business partners in the second world) decades ago. The longer we wait, the worse it will be. It’s like credit card debt—if you stop depending on it, you’ll have a little less money in the short term, but you need to or you’ll have much less money in the long term.

Solar is an excellent replacement for home heating oil during the Michigan winters.

The vast majority of people in Michigan are already connected to an extremely efficient distribution network for electricity. The marginal cost of delivering additional energy through this network does not round to zero, it is zero. Meanwhile heating oil is delivered by trucks with a large cost in depreciation, labor, and fuel (further fossil fuels burnt in support of a system which was designed to make economic sense with <$10 oil). Whereas domestically produced oil can never drop below $40-50 a (marginal) barrel at the refinery, and imported oil never realistically below $30 + the cost of fighting forever wars for resources, there is a clear and feasible convergence of the marginal cost of solar energy generated in the Southwest US to $0. All this would make solar a viable replacement even without the role of heat pumps, which reduce the raw energy cost of heating with solar to around 20% of that of burning fuel.

I live in Michigan. I have a 5.9kwh solar array. Spring/fall, I can produce over 40kwh/day. Summer heat lowers my production to upper 30-40kwh.

January 2021, I produced 197kwh the entire month.

I know this discussion is focused on heating. But from an electric vehicle perspective; 197kwh is not that much. In the winter, I don't think it would be enough electricity for a homes electric needs + EV or electric heat.

I can make 1MWh over 1 month in the summer. Basically, Michigan has short days in the winter. Snow does sit on top of the solar array until it melts, which robs me of production during sunny winter days.

It wouldn't be impossible to use solar to replace heating oil in Michigan, and the over capacity installed to satisfy winter demand could serve as a "peaker plant" during the warm summer months.

While I know renewables have decreased in costs, I think the costs related to building overcapacity is a hindrance.

It's not that hard to store solar power as Hydrogen and turn that back into electricity. The end-to-end efficiency is not as good as for batteries, but building something that can hold Hydrogen for a few months is cheaper than building the equivalent amount of batteries.

It's true that hydrogen is more practical for storing energy for months, but I think that storing energy for a few hours each day between daytime and nighttime (and transporting it from hot, sunny states to freezing, dark ones) is the important problem to solve.

You need to solve both problems to reach 100% renewables, but doing in the order of demand side improvements, short term storage and then long term storage is probably the cheapest way to proceed.

Did you miss the part where Michigan is already connected by a transcontinental electricity distribution grid to places like Las Vegas (8 average hours of sunlight in January, average temp 9C in January)?

That’s a gross oversimplification of reality - to the point of outright falsehood.

Michigan can’t get any electricity from Nevada today - they are on different grid ties, and there would need to be a ton of upgrades in the DC-DC and VFT ties between them to get that significant a chunk of electricity sent the ~2000 miles from Nevada to Detroit.

Can you not get out there with a long handled broom and knock the snow off?

Serious question, I’m debating a similar setup for myself.

There are roof rakes that you use for getting the snow off of roofs. I assume they also remove snow from solar panels.

So connect to some wind power which in the midwest produces 3x the capacity in the winter as it does the summer [0].

[0]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=20112

That's the job of utilities, not individual consumers.

Look, if the government wants to migrate utilities away from gas for heating and replace that with something else, the way you to do that is to have the government build, or contract out to build, the something else that is just as reliable and just as affordable, and then when that is in place, you work with the utility to switch over to the new thing and then retire the old thing. This is called a migration.

Shocking, I know.

The way you don't do it is to adopt some neoliberal obsession with turning everything into a market where end users trying to heat their homes are facing higher prices, and the hope is that these higher prices just cause the utility to transition to something else through the magic of markets.

That's not what markets are good at. Funding big infrastructure projects and coordinating the replacement of one infrastructure with another is the responsibility of government, not markets.

We didn't build our hydro and nuclear capacity by relying on the magic of the free market. We had a planned decision to build this infrastructure as a result of public need, and so we built it, and then the utilities hooked up to it, and the end user got power. We didn't build the interstate highway system by relying on free markets either. When people want to deploy subways, the solution is to build subways, not just tax gas and hope subways just spring up out of the market.

Telling individual homeowners "Well, there is wind power technology out there" is eco-sadism.

It is taking things offline or penalizing them instead of having replacements provided, and we just hope that the penalties will cause replacements to spring up.

This is faith-based energy policy. It is not effective governance, and it is not politically sustainable.

The Michigan pipeline shutdown has been discussed for most of this year; back in May the MI governor began her attempts to shut it down by revoking easements issued to the operator.

It's not honest to characterize what has been happening in the last few weeks as a last minute action by the administration "just before winter".

It's also not honest to focus exclusively on the costs of the pipeline being shutdown without also considering the potential costs of it staying open. I'm entirely open to someone presenting the case that the costs of shutdown vastly outweigh even the worst projected cost of it remaining open, but if you're going to present that case, do it while being aware that there are people (including the MI governor and various Indian tribes) who don't agree with this assessment.

MI voted for Biden in 2020, its US HoR representation is split evenly between both parties, and both US Senators are Democrats. If you're suggesting that those in favor of carbon credits and higher gas taxes might lose representation if this pipeline is closed, maybe make that case more explicitly.

Also, it's not unambiguously clear that winning battleground states like Michigan is synonymous with winning Michigan, nor that it's necessarily required at all given the steady drifts of some red states into the purply-blue zone.

Are you talking about the nearly 70-year-old oil and gas pipeline "Enbridge Line 5" that bisects Lake Michigan and Lake Huron?

Indeed, it would be great if the United States proactively funded deteriorating infrastructure before it was past-expiration and at risk of collapsing.

Woah, what are you honestly on about?

You can claim that the US is artificially raising natural gas prices, but the exact opposite is true. By chance of circumstance, we've historically underbuilt LNG processing facilities and that is isolating the US market from the rest of the world, so we have some of the lowest natural gas prices in the world right now.

Please take your uninformed takes and cringey political rallying elsewhere, it's not what this platform is designed for.

Flamewar comments like this will get you banned on HN. You've been breaking the site guidelines in other places too, unfortunately. That's not cool. (Edit: and we've already had to ask you more than once to stop doing it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28378481

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22198190)

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.

I feel like you are being unnecessarily confrontational over a difference of opinion.

I think they make a decent point, and contributed to this conversation. Calm down.

This is such a bad take. HN regularly hosts popular discussions on topics like this. Your attempt to silence discussion is unwelcome and offensive.

Amy Goodman Is Facing Prison for Reporting on the Dakota Access Pipeline 621 pts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12719333

US passes emergency waiver over fuel pipeline cyber-attack 611 pts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27101092

Biden shutting down natural gas pipelines is certainly relevant and on-topic in a discussion of the supply shock and why, as you said, "Natural gas [is] extremely expensive".

Trying to bury relevant facts because they're politically inconvenient is trampling curiosity.

> The above makes oil and gas more costly to extract and to ship, which raises the price.

I'm not sure if you're just expressing your personal concerns over what you believe can hypothetically happen, or whether you're grossly misinformed.

Meanwhile, even though gas prices are breaking records all over the world, in the US they are still below the prices from 2010, back in the days no one in the US was concerned about gas prices because they were 3 times higher a couple years back during Bush2's presidency.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdm.htm

> I'm not sure if you're just expressing your personal concerns over what you believe can hypothetically happen, or whether you're grossly misinformed.

So do you have an argument to make, or just a stream of ad hominem followed by smoke and mirrors?

You point out that oil and gas prices are high all over the world with a price gap between gas prices in the US and the rest of the world -- because gas is shipped overseas in LNG form and it's a separate market, thus there is generally a gap between world gas prices and domestic gas prices -- to address this we do things like build pipelines from cheap gas countries (like Canada) to other countries and we build more liquefaction plants. But you take this price gap as some sort of vindication of U.S. policy, that perhaps Biden is keeping gas prices low?

So let me spare you the trouble. The facts that Biden has restricted Oil and Gas drilling, cancelled one pipeline and is about to cancel another, and is trying to discourage oil investment by taking away the investment tax credits from this industry -- these increase gas prices, and gas prices have been increasing. Just not as much as in other parts of the world. That is true even if there is there is structural gas price gap vis-a-vis the rest of the world and even if prices are not at the level they were before the fracking revolution caused them to tumble and be truly affordable to many.

Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN and breaking the site guidelines. You've done it repeatedly lately, it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. That means we have to ban such accounts. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to posting in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.

> So do you have an argument to make (...)

I already did. You made an unsubstantiated claim, and I pointed out your personal assertion was wrong and baseless, and provided a time history of gas prices as evidence, including the fact that not so long ago they were over 3 times higher than the current market price.

If you have a problem with the facts feel free to point out what exactly leads you to believe that justifies the discrepancy between your personal beliefs and the facts.

No, you are wrong.

>the fact that not so long ago they were over 3 times higher

They never were. You can check futures price data here: https://www.investing.com/commodities/natural-gas On top of that you're probably talking about those spikes in 2005 and 2008, but they were short lived and spikes are natural for gas markets because of various circumstances (seasonality, pipeline situation, weather, how full are the reserves etc).

>not so long ago It was 13 years ago! And now it's the highest price since. The reason for such a ridiculously low prices for so long was shale gas extraction. Now US is losing this and more. Because natural gas prices are so sensitive (and react quickly!) to various things - you better hope for warm winter with decisions like these...

Also comparing prices in US and in other countries is intellectually dishonest or you simply don't know how natural gas market works.

I just don't get why everyone maintains JIT manufacturing is bad, it's one of the many reasons we can have such reasonably low cost goods, its efficient.

Efficiency at a trade-off of resiliency. If you're talking about discretionary purchases, you probably value efficiency over resiliency. If you're talking agriculture, we should value resiliency over efficiency.

So we have benefited from decades of cheap consumer electronics and now people had to wait 10 months to get their playstation at RRP so their proposal is to build double the number of playstations for decades and landfill half of them so in the extremely rare case, they will have just enough.

I would consider consumer electronics to be discretionary purchases. So what I suggested is the opposite of that. If disruptions are an acceptable risk, then you should prioritize efficiency. Consumer complaints are meaningless if they don't have a viable competitor to shift their money to.

But we must prioritize resiliency when an economic shock would result in societal instability. I'm willing to pay more for food to be available 100% of the time versus paying 20% less for food to be available 80% of the time.

Isn't that why the US government has longstanding agricultural subsidies, guarantees on prices, etc.? Do we really have a shortage of food?

That's the stated purpose. But it has no teeth. Last year we saw aisles empty of meat and lots of news about meat shortages. But during that time domestic pork supplies were down 40% in the same period that pork exports to China quadrupled.

Those subsidies failed in their stated purpose of resiliency. During the bad times, all that mattered is where more profit could be found.

Meat can be easily substituted, so I'd consider that discretionary spending. Furthermore, producing meat consumes many times the plants, than if humans directly consumed those plants. So in an emergency, just stop producing meat and you'll have plenty of plant-based food left.

Can you eat grass? I know I can't...

Yes, producing meat requires animals eating a ton of plants and they also need a lot of water.

Except that can be mostly grass (that humans don't eat), and the water is just rainwater (that the animals in question will piss later, so it will end on the ground anyway).

The reason why animal-based farming exists is because it is the only way we have to get any food in certain parts of the planet where the only thing that grow naturally is grass.

There is a certain level of meat production that uses only waste as fodder, land that has no other agricultural value, and doesn't require destroying areas of high biodiversity to make room for our animals. The current global levels of meat productions are extremely far away from this. We cut down vast swathes of forests to get cheap farmland, both for grazing as well as for producing grain and soy as fodder.

The Great Plains in the US are huge. Lots of cattle grazing out there in an environmentally sensitive way. Most of the feed is hay cut from fallow farmland. Maybe what you’re describing happens in South America, but it’s not at all what happens in the US.

Cows eat grass? Farmers are all panicking and buying hay (premium hay that tests properly for nutrients) at outlandish prices. You need a crap ton of the right hay to keep beef cattle alive. No to mention all the corn to fatten them so that your meat gets graded as choice+.

That is not how the water cycle works.

I'd claim those subsidies worked fine then. The problem wasn't supply - It was delivery. There weren't enough drivers to move stuff around, so stuff didn't get moved around and shelves were empty. The supply chain's weakest link was delivery, so that broke. Exports to China used different infrastructure that wasn't as affected, so they still happened

The US doesn't subsidize meat production, your comment has no basis in fact.

> During the bad times, all that mattered is where more profit could be found.

The people in China need to eat too; the pork is going to be eaten. It is hard to understate how hard the Chinese have been working to provide goods, services and technologies to the rest of the world for the last 40-odd years. They've been quite clear the whole way through that one of the things they want in exchange for that is support feeding themselves.

Them buying American pork in a tough year is not some capitalist failure. This is what hard work and savings is supposed to get China - front of the line in a crisis. It would be grossly unfair to pay them then tell them that they've actually got monopoly money that can't even buy pork.

If hair clippers become mildly more difficult to procure over a 2-year window of an 80 year lifespan, all-in-all the efficiency seems to be worth it. I get 78 years of low prices for goods are that are useful to my everyday existence, but not critically vital and to which there are reasonable substitutes, if I need something in a pinch.

Human experience simply cannot be averaged over large spans of times while ignoring the extremes. Dipping into the red means permanent damage. Imagine applying this line of thinking to your bank account -- "sure I spent $500k in two years on fast cars and fancy bars, but averaged over 80 years of paying small amounts of interest, the bank should be glad to make the sacrifice of stability in favor of efficiency."

"Sure I spent $500k in two years, but I've been in the positive and saving for 80 years".

The pandemic was just a blip on the radar, a period of adjustment we still don't understand fully economically, but it was not a Great Depression as it lasted only a couple months and affected just a part of the population (layoffs, but with goverment safety nets)

umm... this is kind of the purpose of banks... get car now, enjoy car now, pay 3%, inflation is 5%. If you buy the car cash you pay more, and get it later.

Lets take a C8 Stringray @ $100K, if you buy it today, it will cost $107K over 5 years. In five years it will cost you $128K.

No bank will let you go on a $500k spending binge when you've never had more than $5k in your account. And no amount of averaging over a lifetime will make up for the fact that rent is due now.

Like nearly all good things, it has outsized consequences when taken to the extreme.

JIT iPhones? Sure why not?

JIT ventilators and PPE? Maybe not great. Maybe it’s ok to have some slack in the production of those types of things, you know in case of emergency.

It also eliminated deep discounts of old stock. A lot of people would have relied on that kind of thing to be able to afford something.

Still, I think for the environment it's a win, not producing anything that's not needed. But in the end most of it would get sold anyway at a discount.

Turo* is AirBnb for cars. I’ve used it a few times and it worked well.

* http://www.turo.com

Yeah I imagine Turo is exploding. When I traveled this summer my options for a 5 day rental were $2,200 from all the rental car companies, or $375 from Turo.

How do they deal with insurance? I'm not sure I'd feel very comfortable trusting a random stranger to use my car for 5 days, unless I was sure I'd be paid out in full (or more) if they were to damage or total the vehicle.

Most companies like Airbnb, Turo, Boatsetter (airbnb for boats) offer some insurance they negotiate with an underwriter like Geico. Getting this sort of insurance individually is much more costly or next to impossible, which is why we don't see people short-term renting expensive assets to each other on Craigslist. I imagine negotiating the ability to dole out these sorts of policies at scale with Lloyd's of London or GEICO is fairly arduous, but it seems like one of more key pieces for these companies to successfully get off the ground to me.

Lloyds et al wants to do business. They are super easy to deal with. Far easier to talk to someone at Lloyds than any major tech company. Only Google would be audacious enough not to let someone spending $100k / month not talk to a human / ban them without warning / send canned email responses to business inquiries at scale.

Check their website, they have this crazy idea where you put in the country where you are and then they give you a list of people to call so you can do business with them. The even crazier thing is the people who pick up the phone aren't humanized robots, but are incredibly intelligent and talented people who want your business and will create tailored plans to suit your needs.

If I want to talk to their President all I have to do is call him.

https://www.lloyds.com/news-and-insights/data-and-research/m...

The reason you don't see people renting expensive assets to each other on Craigslist is because the nonmonetary transaction costs are too high. When someone wants to rent a car, they're looking to straightforwardly solve their problem in a predictable manner. They don't want to sift through different Craigslist ads looking for one that meets their requirements, emailing to see if it's available, figuring out if the rental is legitimate, etc.

On the lessor's side, since the primary market prefers bona fide businesses you're left with the customers who cannot rent from the primary market. Meaning you're much more likely to end up on the receiving end of abuse (outright theft, vandalism, being an accessory to a crime), or at the very least problematic customers ("I know I rented it for one day but I have to pick up my kids tomorrow so I'll return it Thursday"). A business can absorb such variance, or at least create the illusion of doing so, whereas for an individual such events present a major hassle.

You can bundle all of that transactional risk up into a kind of insurance, but that only works if you're large enough that the insurance company can verify that you're not defrauding them.

Isn't the crux of insuring anything 'doing it at scale'?

If you are AirBNB, why would you need an insurer at all?

Insurers can spread their risk along multiple insurance lines.

If you're Airbnb, you're exposed to one type of risk: houses getting damaged. If you're Lloyds/GEICO, you're spread out over health risks, housing risk, car risk, maybe some financial assets risk etc

Could you clarify what you mean here? I'm not sure I follow.

Say someone rents an AirBNB and absolutely trash the house, racking up thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of damages. Or steals valuables that are in the house. Or on the flipside, perhaps the property has not been repaired and the Airbnb renter is injured on the property. Surely AirBNB would require insurance for such types of incidents.

Why would they not require insurance when they are in the business of rentals? Most jurisdictions would allow a property owner to include AirBNB in a lawsuit against a renter conducting criminal activity or a renter suffering damages from criminal negligence of the property owner.

To limit your downside. What AirBnB likely has is a high deductible policy. AirBNB pays for minor damages, but if the world goes on a AirBnB party rental spree Lloyds pays.

As a company it’s probably better to just deal with 2 years of chaos every few decades than to have tons of unused inventory sitting around all the time.

> Our economy ... is doing a bad job of adapting to new behaviors [because] just-in-time

I have been astonished at how well the world has responded to the shock. Our first world economies seem to be amazingly resilient (although perhaps I am biased by being in New Zealand so I am unaware of what is going on elsewhere).

It seems to me that just-in-time is helping us, and capitalist price signals are working.

So far I personally haven't lacked anything important (albeit, I live in a rich county. I did have to wait a month for an iPad).

Sure there is plenty of fail, but I'm not sure the obvious "better" answers would actually improve anything.

It is easy to criticise given perfect hindsight, and easy to see from my armchair what should have been done.

We are doing okay because the Chinese supply chain held on even during the pandemic, which is why their orders have grown so much during 2019-2021

If the entire manufacturing line is essential, why would a pandemic create gaps? It was only over a year or so of higher demands. Nothing dramatic. 5 years would be hard. 1 year just uses a bit of warehouse space for most consumer items. No one ever stopped making stuff, and they started shipping more where they could.

Most people who couldn't get what they wanted would have no way to prove that. Whereas people who got what they think they couldn't, would have that memory strongly planted and even shared.

Natural gas isn't expensive. I pay 7.2 cents USD per kW/h and it's still cheaper to heat my house with natural gas. Given that the world is switching to electric cars I only foresee it getting even cheaper (comparatively) given how much hydro will need to be built to service the energy needs of the electric car market.

Didn't more Americans already live in suburbs then cities before covid? What percent of Americans were regular public transit riders?

Re: % transit riders, seems like not a lot except in NYC: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/07/who-relies-...

8 Million people, which, while a small % of population, is huge compared to the c. 100mn cars that get sold globally per year.

And similar to the suburbs point, sure the suburbs existed before COVID, but they are becoming more heavily utilized (extra bedrooms turned to offices reduces the supply of housing) at the same time as an uptick in demand.