I don't really know what woke me up about this, but it's bugging more every day. Maybe it's the extreme heat lately and seeing it pop up more and more on reddit, or the fact that we're having rolling blackouts that's causing a feedback loop. I want to be greener. I want to go emission free, but the unfortunate reality is that for a majority of the world in my financial status, that's borderline impossible.
The first thing that came to mind was converting over to an electric vehicle. But even the cheapest ones go for over $10k, and that's far out of my price range for the time being. I know there's incentive programs in place, but getting over that first hump of just getting one is a massive hurdle.
The second thing would be solar – well, I'm renting in an apartment, so I really don't have any say in the matter. I can do small things, turn things off when I'm not home, I've got a solar battery pack for my phone that I can start using again, considering most of my day now is spent outside in my car due to my situation.
And going along with both of those, the electricity costs here are absurd.. In most parts of the country, it's 14¢/kWh. In San Diego, it's recently moved to 31¢/kWh as a baseline – I get it's an incentive to use less, but.. wow. Gas prices are already over $4/gallon here. I'm spending over $120 a month on gas alone now. I know it's incentives to go electric, but it seems like it's really just strangling the lower class with both absurdly high electric and gas prices.
With the heat waves getting worse every year, I really don't see this getting much better over the next few years. More emissions means more heat, leads to people cranking up the A/C, draws more power from the grids, more emissions, more heat…
This has just been a 3am drunken rambling. I know there's little things I can do as an individual, but it's insane to see that billionaires are having their own private space-races, while the world is continuing to burn. will probably delete tomorrow
submitted by /u/Nova1395
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