I bought an electric power washer and weed wacker recently. The performance is just laughable compared to the petrol powered version.
Electric cars have given people hope that a fossil fuel free future is possible. However, electric cars seem to occupy a niche where carrying around 30x the amount of “fuel” is possible. Most fossil fuel uses don’t share this luxury.
Climate change will likely force a fossil fuel free future. But it probably won’t look much like the society we have today. There certainly won’t be high PSI pressure washers.
Weed wackers need to be cordless, though, so that's a different issue.
I don't think code prohibits it, but in my (not very educated) opinion, you might get into some gray territory if you try install them everywhere.
There are some safety related provisions which are mandatory for regular 120V (GFCI and/or AFCI), but I don't think they are required for 240V circuits. Building inspectors might have questions if you install these outlets everywhere. Although, again, I don't remember any limitation of where you can have them.
Another issue is the type of the receptacle. Apparently, Leviton makes receptacle that might be allowed in US and is combination of regular 120V plus European style 240V. However, it is only limited to 2.5A, which is very little (I think, this receptacle is primarily designed for hotels / shared spaces where you only want to charge your devices). Also, I don't think it has ground for 240V.
Probably, the best would be to use US 15A/20A receptacles (NEMA 6-15 / NEMA 6-20), which look very similar to the regular 120V ones (the difference is blades are horizontal).
However, I've never seen any actual plug using them (even though I did install these 240V in my garage, expecting some 240V equipment). But you can rewire plugs on your "imported" equipment / appliances.
There are also some interesting differences of the supply: in US it is typically split phase 120V+120V=240V, but sometimes (according to the internet) it could be 3 phase 120V with 208V between phases; in some parts of the world, it would be 3 phase 230V with 400V between the phases. This probably would cause some differences in how grounding works, might affect safety.
But yeah, generally, 240V should not be a problem. Power-hungry equipment (water heater, range, electrical dryer, EV chargers) -- they all typically use 240V already.
Edit: I think it’s a 14-50r.
Edit2: You almost certainly don't need these. A plain old 20amp 110 receptacle, on a dedicated circuit, GFCI, is a perfectly reasonable and code-compliant receptacle to put all over the outside of your house and will power anything you might need.
I can believe that a 15amp (pressure washer, weeder, etc.) might seem underpowered but I am skeptical that a 20amp one would be ...
14-50R is not what I would use in that case, they are bulky, unsightly and don't offer tamper resistance.
6-20R / 6-15R have variants that are tamper resistant, and they look like regular outlets.
"20A should be enough for everything".
We used to have 2.5-3kW kettles before we moved to US, which would require 20-25A (although, I don't think the math is that simple -- circuit breakers don't trip on "exactly 20A").
Also, the issue with 20A receptacles is that, again, I have never seen 20A plugs (NEMA 5-20P) on appliances (it has neutral connector "flat" rather than vertical). Which is understandable, why make them if nobody has 20A receptacles anyway. There is a requirement to have two 20A branches in a kitchen, but commonly they are wired to 15A receptacles.
As for 20amp, it may interest you to learn that I have a commercial microwave with two magnetrons that is actually 20amp (and has the horizontal pin, etc.).
They're also the socket found in datacentres (in Europe) to connect a UPS or PDU.
Home users see them at campsites, marinas, and for charging electric cars without a special car charger.
And those are usually 240V/50A outlets, a lot more powerful than the 240V/12A outlets of Europe.
I have one with an 80 watt hour battery. The level of power seems just fine to me, for the moderate amount of time it lasts.
And that's barely over one pound of battery. Add five more pounds and that's a ton of power while probably still lighter than a gas engine.
They certainly do make 240V 60Hz 20A rated pressure washers for the US market that typically come with inline GFCIs as well.
So you can feel good about saving the planet whilst cutting your toes off with the water jet.
They don't really. I've had corded electric weed wackers. You've gotta be more careful, of course, and within an extension cord of an outlet, but that's fine for acheivable lot sizes in most of suburbia.
Indeed. I did cut through one extension cord with my hedge trimmer already,
120 * 15 = 1800 watts. 240 * 5 = 1200 watts. US circuits generally carry more power than their overseas equivalents. If you plugged that Indian 240v pressure washer into your 20 amp circuit, it wouldn't likely draw more current unless it was designed badly, and wouldn't perform any better.
Where in Europe have you seen 5A?
One complaint I have in the opposite direction is hybrid water heaters. In heat pump mode they draw 500 Watts. But they require 240V @ 30 amps for the resistive heaters. Would be nice if they would run in heat pump mode only if connected to 120V single phase.
https://bataviatools.co.uk/product/garden-tools/garden-machi...
- importing tools from Europe can kickstart the market and is a lot less risky than designing new tools
- 240V garage & exterior outlets are becoming common for hot tubs, RV's and electric car chargers.
Which is not a problem for dedicated circuits (you could wire receptacle just for this specific dryer / hot tub / RV / whatever, plug it and never remove), but would be a bigger problem if 240V is shared between appliances.
I think, NEMA 6-15 / NEMA 6-20 would be the best (they look very similar to standard 120V outlets; they have tamper resistance; 15A or even 20A should be plenty enough), but nobody wires them.
Also, there are other minor differences like:
1. 50Hz in Europe vs 60Hz in USA. 2. The voltage between ground and "power" lines would be different. In Europe it would be 240v between line and ground and 0V between neutral in ground, in USA it would be 120V between ground and both power connectors, due to how 240V is typically delivered to single-family homes in USA (split phase). Should not make much difference (you are not supposed to have any current to ground anyway, and any short-circuit should trigger the circuit breaker), but maybe it will affect safety somehow? 3. Seems like in some cases in USA you can get 208V instead of 240V (and Europe is nominally 230V).
But that's certainly not where you'd connect a leafblower.
Something wired in might be 32A or more, like a car charger or electric shower (7.5kW).
I went and checked and mine are actually 32A
that money doesn't dissapear, it could be used to reduce other taxes, say income tax or VAT.
it's purpose is to rebalance relative cost of things
if you care about stopping carbon emissions i think this is the most realistic and efficient way. otherwise we get caught up in discussions of how this changes redistribution and "economic/environmental justice" or whatever and it will never happen. but unfortunately there are many people who care more about adding more free stuff or using the funds for more dumb congress policies then actually passing a carbon policy.
>no its purpose is to fix an externality. it should be exactly equal to the cost of carbon offset for the amount emitted.
So it would only cost 8% of the cost of a flight to completely remove all the carbon emitted from that flight? That seems pretty reasonable. How is this done?
This seems like one of those things that sound right on a macro level, but doesn't take into account the inelastic demand of travel. For it to actually reduce emissions (the goal), the tax would probably need to be much, much higher to the point where you just don't go to grandma's funeral.
Honestly, for me, the TSA and the actual flight experience in the US as kept me from flying at all since about 2006. I can't stand any part of it. I don't care much for driving either and only put around 2000 miles a year on my vehicle. Most of this is because I can work at home. I guess I've got a pretty low footprint.
Nah, you just need enough pressure to move people onto electric cars.
A plane might be one of the last holdouts on fossil fuels, but even then renewable fuel shouldn't be that expensive in bulk.
If it's to fix an externality, then it specifically should be exactly equal to the cost of that externality - that is, sufficient to compensate for all damages (and repairs for said damages) resulting from that externality. This should be right around the same as a carbon offset, but it's worth remembering why a carbon tax is necessary: not for the mere sake of punishing some dirty activity, but for the specific sake of compensating the victims of reckless negligence.
Well yeah, but surely some compensation is better than the current status quo of nothing at all.
> What price would you put on human extinction?
Well, if we want to get hyper-capitalist about it: whatever the resulting opportunity cost is from those humans no longer being able to produce value. Of course, seeing as how humans can produce other humans who then produce value and yet more humans and so on in perpetuity, that opportunity cost rather quickly approaches infinity.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/04/porsche-invests-75-mill...
I just mention this because what might not seem like an option for you can work fine for other people. She loves not having to pull start a gas mower or deal with the noise and smell of it.
It's a hard thing to accept, but I believe it to be true.
What's disturbing is that people can't even begin to imagine this ever being true. They vehemently refuse to accept the possibility that many of our modern comforts will cease to be - just look at the responses here talking about all the tech that will ostensibly save us and make everything okay and allow us to continue living exactly the way we do now, indefinitely. That's not good, because we really ought to be talking about a low-tech future as a serious possibility.
If we take it seriously, there are things we can start doing now to smooth the transition period. That transition period could be complete and utter hell, or it could be smooth and painless.
Humans have been around long before pressure washers and cars and planes, and they'll continue to be around long after these things are gone. If we wean our municipalities, our families, and ourselves from fragile dependencies, then the transition period might not cause serious harm.
I didn't need them in Europe, I do in the US.
Manual labor used to be applied to these things. One could argue the fossil fuel industry got us hooked to petrol solutions in search of a problem.
Look at us too addicted to our inventiveness to get our hands dirty, a little sweaty outside the air conditioned gym, or give up a grass lawn.
The various chemical versions of hydrocarbons all have different amounts of energy per carbon content.
Maybe an electric weed whacker will never compare to a petrol one, but maybe the issue is that the typical suburban manicured lawn is an artifact of the petrol era, and we shouldn’t try to fake it with electric lawn mowers and weed whackers.
> There certainly won’t be high PSI pressure washers
I wonder if a 220v plug in pressure washer would be practical.
Steam is used to heat a lot of things outside of power generation and without steam our economy falls apart and this means without natural gas we are fucked.
This is not necessarily true. Oil has a traditionally low elasticity of demand, meaning that demand for it does not change significantly even when its price changes. This is particularly true in the US, where there are few public transportation options in most cities.
Fossil fuel lobbyists aren’t the problem. No one individual nation is willing to commit economic suicide while the rest of the world advances. There is no appetite at present for a global economic suicide pact.
Your 8% comment is fundamentally wrong, too. You don’t think the “lots of other costs” would be impacted by a 40% fuel tax?!? Back to reality, please.
Edit: you’re -> your
I agree with the former, sort of. It would be like losing your life trying desperately to stop a bunch of suicides on your own. (Not sure if that counts as suicide) which is why there is in fact very strong movements towards international agreements on these matters.
e.g. one of the EU aviation rules specifically addresses that long distance flights leaving the EU need to leave with enough fuel on board, to disincentivize them stopping elsewhere to fill up on untaxed fuel.
But if they all don't do it, that is collective suicide (or if just one country continues on the path it's more like murder-suicide).
So we're trying to find a path where we can all work together with people we don't fully trust to do the thing that is best for all of us, even if we dont even fully agree on what that is.
Not an easy task. Especially when people would rather listen to fossil fuel lobbyists or their paid political pundits than economists on what would and wouldn't work.
Fortunately, I don’t need a study. Fuel costs rose in the US 40% over the last year before falling. If you want to know what happened in the US, pick up a newspaper and read about record high inflation.
Did it seem too reasonable a suggestion to phase it in over decades with plenty of advance notice? Too achievable, too simple, too sensible?
Not to mention, the "extra cost" would be getting paid to the government in your own country, not to Vladimir Putin or similar in another. And then new business opportunities would be created, again in your own country, to meet this new demand.
Luckily, we've actually started doing this already. It seems important that the people who complain about it being impossible seem to have not noticed that it's already started and been quite successful so far, giving confidence to people who are paying attention.
If that's the case, how bad can it actually be?
News story with a summary but there's plenty of source documents out there if you feel like a deep dive.
Where would this money go? Who would allocate it? Would it be allocated effectively, efficiently? As effective as road tax dollars, or as effective as lottery tax dollars? Would it just go to make more factories for Tesla? More eco-warehouses for Amazon? For the bureaucrat-in-charge's cousins? Where does it go and how does it get there?
> Alberta, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Yukon and Nunavat use the federal carbon tax system, the Federal Fuel Charge, which started in 2019. Of these, all but Nunavat have a carbon fee and dividend scheme in place that redistributes tax revenue to the public. [0]
Since carbon use is skewed heavily to those that use the most, this means that the median user of carbon is actually given a tax credit each year.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend#Implem...
Every point along the supply chain absorbs the price signal and will find cheaper (ie less CO2-producing) options where possible, raising the price a little. Where not possible the price goes up by the full CO2 tax amount. (In other words if it’s still the cheapest option to just pay the extra tax, like jet fuel, then the price just goes up.)
The consumer might hypothetically not get any different choices, but still see a CO2 tax cause all deliveries to use electric trucks, for example.
Consumers “putting pressure on companies” is a terrible way to fix this problem because few consumers have a clear picture of the current landscape of CO2 intensity and possible best fixes across the whole economy. But if you just price the externality in, then the market constraint-solves the problem for you.
(To be clear I don’t think markets are perfect, they are just much better than human coordinators at solving this class of problem.)
Why should a random citizen get paid more just because in their country there's heavily polluting industries? It makes no sense.
Because everyone - including that random citizen - experiences harm from said heavy pollution. That's my air being contaminated, my water being poisoned, my planet being wrecked; by what rationale would I somehow not be justified in demanding compensation for that harm?
I'm not following. Random citizen also pays more in tax.
In other words, the tax you pay varies with your carbon emissions, while the dividend is constant (or rather, depends only on the total emissions of everyone). You still have a very strong incentive to reduce emissions, as it would reduce your living costs substatially but reduce your dividend by only a fraction of a penny (I.e. the change in total tax collected divided by the population).
But also consider: in the long term, higher gas prices due to supply shortages encourage companies to drill for and produce more oil -- because they are getting the profits. But higher gas prices due to a carbon tax have the opposite effect -- the buyer is paying more, but that's because the producer is paying the tax, and passing on some or most of that cost to the buyer. They aren't making more profit, but less -- reducing their incentive to pull more oil out of the ground. So that's something powerful that a carbon tax does that inflation doesn't.
And inflation is (ideally) a temporary thing, and variable. A carbon tax is intended to be permanent (and ideally, slowly and steadily increasing), something predictable and inevitable that people can plan around. You'll act differently if you think gas is going to go back down by 20% than if you think it's going to stay at the higher prices forever, or keep getting more and more expensive over time.
My understanding is that even the possibility of a future carbon tax has caused some companies to start reducing their fossil fuel dependency, because if a tax happens, they'll be in a better place than if they did business as usual.
It probably helped a little, temporarily, but it probably helped a lot less than a carbon tax.
Imagine if anything that runs on electricity was immune to the inflation. That's closer to what you'd get, though still very different in other ways.
That means that if things you buy use cause an average amount of carbon emissions you break even. The price increases you see due to the tax are balanced out by your share of the revenue.
If your things are responsible for a less than average amount of emissions, you come out ahead. If your things are responsible for an above average amount, you pay more net.
I'd like to see most forms of pollution handled this way--take the vast majority of pollution laws and throw them in the dumpster. Instead, make a list of pollutants and set a tax per ton (or other suitable unit) for emitting them. This tax is assessed at the point of creation (mining is considered a form of creation) and is rebated upon verified destruction (in many cases you'll "destroy" A to make B--you pay the tax on B but get back the tax on A) or long term sequestration. (Thus you can do things like grow trees and chuck the wood in an old salt mine and recoup the carbon tax even though you never emitted carbon.)
There ceases to be any issue of what is feasible and no issue of company A emitting a lot more than B because what B does is easier to control emissions. You don't get situations like what happened to my former employer--kept being hounded by the EPA because their record on reducing emissions had been so good and then they stopped. Duh, they stopped because they had done everything viable at that point--effectively we had the EPA on our case for doing too good a job!
That are two problems with that as opposed to just returning the carbon tax money to the general population with each person getting an equal share.
First, which other taxes would you reduce? In the US I'm almost certain that the list of taxes that Democrats would want to reduce would be different from the list of taxes that Republican would want to reduce.
Second, even if we can get agreement on which tax to reduce, the benefits to the individual taxpayers aren't likely to be proportional to, or even correlate well with, with how well they are personally doing on emissions.
For example, suppose it is done as an income tax reduction. People who don't make enough money to own income tax would not benefit, but they would have their costs of living go up from the increases in fuel and energy costs due to the carbon tax. They are in effect being taxed to subsidize the carbon emissions of wealthier people.
I don't see how a negative income tax is any different from a direct payout, you're just playing with terminology. Alternatively, if what you described is not a negative income tax then what you just did is a tax cut for people with high incomes which is anti progressive. People who pay little or no income taxes wouldn't get anything.
Giving to everyone equally would invest a very large number of voters in continuing and expanding the program.
Devoting 10% to carbon emissions reduction tech would fund a never-before-seen flowering of development.
Eliminating subsidies for carbon miners would be helpful.
I'd rather drag the 0% bracket into the negative than make it wider.
Can set it up so the average person is unaffected. The eco conscious consumer ends up richer. And the over consumers end up poorer.
Whether 40% correctly offsets pollution externalities is a tougher question.
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/administrations/assistant-sec...
Things like, does the delivery truck have an efficient engine. Does the refinery use green or gray hydrogen to desulpherise the inputs, do they buy their fossil fuels from Norway vs Russia and so on.
It might only be a small difference but small differences across the whole economy is how the carbon tax is supposed to work.
Here's an aviation industry take on the plans, which seek to reduce the carbon by 55% by 2030
https://www.eurocontrol.int/article/eus-fit-55-package-what-...
But it's easy enough to find CO2 calculators and estimated costs of carbon and compare with current flight costs to get your own number for flights that matter to you.
When people do this though, they think "This seems suspiciously cheap? I thought this was going to take us back to the stone age, not just make long transatlantic flights a bit more expensive by not subsidizing them as much" then they come up with conspiracy theories about how it's all greenwashing to make sense of it all.
Increasing the cost of flights by 8%, and by doing so, killing the source of fuel for those flights sounds like economic Armageddon.
The main topic of this thread is saving humanity from adverse man-made climate change. We are also talking about saving millions here.
We now have examples from all around the globe. China's super strict approach seems like it sort of worked for a while, but even they had cases.
The US is 91 million of the 584 million cases identified so far. It's ~5% of the global population with pretty low density outside of, what, 3 cities? Truly embarrassing that one of the wealthiest G8 countries can't handle outbreaks of any sort — to the point that NY has identified hundreds of polio cases for the first time in a decade.
It's not going to be pretty if the US faces another outbreak of something that kills and cripples the way that polio did just a few generations ago. I'm not convinced the answer then won't be the same, except now instead of sacrificing grandma we can place anyone on the altar of capital.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
Click on deaths per 100,000
Draw your own conclusions.
No, they didn't. This has been studied six ways from Sunday. They had no effect.
"Probably millions"
Lol. If you're an epidemiologist, sure, they love fantasy numbers like this.
Actual numbers of lives saved are probably negative, given the apparent absence of any impact on case numbers combined with the poverty and loss of access to healthcare they created.
I am not say "always lock down", but when it is appropriate it is a good tool. NSW, Australia was very locked down ... until vaccination rates were up high and then it suddenly wasn't. I feel like although NSW has it's fair share of blunders, it did pretty well overall. Some of that was good luck despite some bad decisions. But I am happy with the lockdowns even though they were disruptive. Some businesses suffered, and some did better. Suburban hospitality seemed to do well as people working from home are now getting their lunch local not in the city.
What natural immunity obtains against variants like Omicron?
And you talk about birth rates being down, what about COVID stillbirths in unvaccinated mothers?
https://www.propublica.org/article/covid-maternity-stillbirt...
Public health measures didn't put your family in poverty. The lack of any social safety net in the US did. Stimulus should have gone to people directly and not companies, but that's communism or something.
Maybe in hindsight the pandemic could get us thinking about why it’s a bad idea to tie health insurance to employment? Or the idea that shelter is contingent on laboring. It costs more to have people suffering and it makes everyone less safe needlessly.
Everything you said was absolutely true, but nothing was done about it, even with a 2+ year plague that killed over a million people in the US. The only person with a plan was not elected; he didn't even win the primary. I'm not overly optimistic about change.
No. If the government had not locked down, their family would not have slipped into extreme poverty. Simple as.
They very obviously did do that, and attempts to deny their impact is a form of "socialism washing".
"Stimulus should have gone to people directly and not companies, but that's communism or something."
Great plan. Give people printed money so prices all immediately rise, and then forcibly destroy all the organizations that produce things, ensuring prices immediately rise again. Yes, printing money and giving it directly to people whilst the economy gets shut down IS in fact communism, which is why we are now dealing with the consequent poverty. And it was all for nothing, because the public health measures didn't have any effect.
These problems are hard as hell, and yeah, being paid well insulates one from a lot of problems if that's what you set out to do. Not everyone sets out to do that though.
It will also incentivize people to find better sources of fuel, and invent better aircraft.
We can chose something that is less perfect, but does not result in Armageddon. Solutions that are as bad or worse than the problem are a very hard sell.
Which 'solution' is as bad?
That said, the people who live in such places (including the aforementioned family members) tend to be the hardy and adaptable sort, and would readily figure something out should carbon-emitting transportation become cost-prohibitive.
I believe this is the case in parts of Canada and Austria for example.
They're often also phased per sector, so you might have a carbon fee for transport but not industry or vice versa, or have different levels of fees.
It's fairly flexible as a policy tool.
People don't seem to believe that though. Because a carbon tax high enough to make your flight cast 8% more, would totally destroy the fossil fuel industry, as everyone would suddenly have a financial incentive to burn less of it, and there's alternatives for almost all uses. And so, a measure that would kill the fossil fuel industry, and not really bother any other industry, is portrayed as an impossible dream because the fossil fuel industry has a lot of money and power.