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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

An electric water heater does NOT help the environment - quite the opposite, it makes things worse, since 38% of electricity is generated from natural gas, which is less efficient than just burning the gas at home.

What should we do? We should build nuclear plants, at least a hundred of them.

> almost like they hope CA fails.

The California Air Resources Board (CARBS) is responsible for forcing everyone to use special gas nozzles that spill tons of gasoline, while pretending to prevent spills. See: https://fee.org/articles/the-epic-failure-of-the-government-... and https://fee.org/articles/how-government-wrecked-the-gas-can/

The do not exactly have a reputation for intelligent decision making, rather they have a reputation for emotional decision making.

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Heat pump water heaters are drastically more energy efficient. Also, there are immediate air quality improvements from not burning fracked gas in your home. Also, recent research has shown that methane leaks happen far more than previously realized at every stage of the natural gas ecosystem, from initial extraction to pipelines to refining to residential usage, and every gram of methane is equivalent to something like 30 grams of CO2, so you need to consider the massive savings in warming from reducing that systemic leakage.

Finally, it's important to get these processes started immediately. It's still going to take decades for this policy to result in the millions of houses updating their equipment, and we might be down to a far smaller percent of grid power coming from fossil fuels by then.

> Heat pump water heaters are drastically more energy efficient.

And also don't work in most of the United States. They are very slow, and only work in places with warm climates - in cold places they are dumping their cold into the living area, which then has to heat it.

On top of that the incoming water is cold, and they don't do a good job heating it.

I've looking into buying one, and they just don't work in cold climates. They could work in California, true, but are they mandating that? Nope. They are just eliminating gas.

Excellent advice, but in this case the libertarian anti-regulation think tanks are right: CARB compliant gasoline containers are a great example of how good intentions can have negative effects when decision makers are divorced from reality.

Libertarian anti regulation think takes are not a reliable source for opinions on new regulation. It’s like going to a peta or vegan website to see their opinion on whether more meat eating would be good.

It was just the first result on Google.

I have the same personal experience with those horrible CARB gas cans. You can google it if you need other experiences.

I spilled so much gas using one of those CARB gas cans I couldn't believe it. I then went online and bought a normal spout and have not spilled anything since.

Every since then I assume anything from CARB is going to be bad.

Quote from the starting paragraphs of an article on fee is like satire of libertarians “ I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice”

Omg my toilet doesn’t use several gallons of water any more, it’s the horrible regs!!! I remember toilets from the 80s/90s. The ones I saw clogged easier than modern toilets and even better, they used so much water that when they clogged there was a significant chance they’d over flow. Yay poop water!

There you go, one incident that shows the libertarian principle on regulations is terrible. If I use the logic from your comment that means all regulations are good, even although the example was niche. I’m not going to make that claim about all regs, there’s some bad ones but don’t get info from libertarians on what regs are good or not.

Okay throw the baby out with the bath water if you will. Carb as a whole is terrible because of gas cans, one of a large number of things they’ve done?? And because of that all regs they are now proposing are bad?

And for what it’s worth I used a new 5 gal gas can from CA recently and it was a little fiddly for sure but didn’t seem that bad … and I’ll admit it’s the first one I’ve used so I dunno. Maybe it is that bad and I had a good one but I’ll take a few missteps by Ronald Reagan’s regulatory agency since it means I can breath in LA. Where’s all that smog go?

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