@mekkaokereke also good for showing your children that you love them and want them to live in a healthy world.

@mekkaokereke I have an EV van and hybrid car here, plus I use trams and buses a lot. The less I suck on the teet of big oil the better.

Luckily our local buses are EV too, and the trams by the very nature of their being are electric.

This year we get our solar installed and our own battery storage so hopefully we can start going off grid for more days of the year.

@mekkaokereke We should use as little gas as possible because the planet is burning, not for the reasons you invoke as oil doesn't really follow the usual rules of offer and demand.

@mekkaokereke Excellent point.
My dad’s a geologist, two decades ago we were in Venezuela, where he was working on unbelievably heavy crude extraction.

This was rather expensive, you needed to drill horizontal wells, and inject solvant into some of them to get the oil out, and then you needed complicated refinery process to get it to a reasonable state. (Separate from the solvant and then crack the long chains into something lighter)

(At the time the threshold was $60/barrel for this to make sense)

This process also ends up wasting energy and thus cause more émissions for the same amount of fuel produced.

@mekkaokereke
I picked up my first Electric Unicycle many years ago in Seattle. They are the funniest way to travel let me tell you. I've commuted on it, food delivery service, and zoom around traffic with ease.

@mekkaokereke I need to find a way to heat my home without fossil fuels.

Already bike or take public transit when possible, drive an EV, and work on EVs for work, but I'm still buying oil to heat my house.

Looked into heat pumps a few years back but a ground source system that was capable of heating my house was prohibitively expensive. Maybe I'll need to check back in on that, or see if air source systems are able to keep up with Vermont winters yet.

@mekkaokereke if we can believe the oil (among other things) economists on bluesky, Sky Marchini, the Venezuelan oil is actually pretty worthless, because very complicated to refine. Seems like this is all just something to project power and intimidate others.

@mekkaokereke

the price of oil is already nearing glut levels (source below) & the price has been dropping for months

the fact that oil is already cheap obviously didn't stop this attack because the people looking to steal Venezuela's oil (& gold) can't lose money using the US Treasury to transfer the wealth of that nation into private pockets

saving gas is a good thing to do but we need something else to put a stop to this ongoing saga of murder & piracy

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil

@mekkaokereke Yes! Electrons and human power are little bits of ammunition against the fossil fuels oligarchs, So switching to electrons for other energy needs not just transportation. Heat pumps, solar panels, etc. All also good and important in this fight.

@mekkaokereke but not a Tesla right?

@mekkaokereke

I don't drive and have never owned a car. That said, I recognize that unlike me, many in the US live in areas with poor or nonexistent public transportation.

(I normally avoid social media and news on Saturdays, but our government capturing the leader of another country tends to get my attention.)

@mekkaokereke The solution to that (from the perspective of the oligarches) is easy, though. It's such an obvious ploy that it was a throwaway gag in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Kill public transit.

@mekkaokereke ...but I've been told for years that my individual choices don't matter, and choosing to drive an EV, recycle, conserve energy, etc., is almost meaningless? That only systematic changes make a difference, and I might as well not bother?

What would you recommend I say to those people?