> Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement posted on X that Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense and not one dependent on "costly subsidies".
I agree. This is why we are building offshore wind and not subsidizing fossil fuels, right?
Mostly this is just about giving back the money RWE paid for the leases from the US government to build those turbines. Plus various fees. They could have went for suing for total profits too.
> RWE U.S. Offshore secured these leases from the U.S. government with a long-term commitment to develop offshore wind capacity in American waters and invested more than $1 billion toward the leases and the development of these projects. These leases provided legal rights to develop offshore projects and represented years of planning, investment, and partnership with federal agencies.
> After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. The settlement resolves RWE U.S. Offshore’s legal claims and provides $1.22 billion in settlement funds.
What "world order" is this? One where cheap energy generation is seen as a good thing? Bizarre that anyone would be against a private company building solar or wind farms in this day and age.
For a guy in the ai and cybersecurity industry you seem to have incredibly poor judgement Gyan.
i actually like solar SK .. I’m with Elon on that, which I suspect may already bother you. :) .. but wind is different .. it’s flakey .. harms birds .. creates noise pollution in rural areas .. and industrialises landscapes that shouldn’t be industrialised.
As for my “poor judgment,” kind sir .. this is not true .. see, what i like about startups (which is also how i found HN) .. is that there is no place to hide .. your judgement will either kill you or make you fabilously rich (this is even more true when all your startups are boot strapped, with no sales team .. and you end up exiting 3 times ..another way to look at it SK is that in my world, if mess up my judgement, i dont get to eat .. curious what you do for a living ?
Provide one example where solar and / or wind generation have penetrated a market to a level worth mentioning and electricity prices have come down or remained stable adjusted for inflation.
South Australia is a good example. In 2023–24, wind supplied 45.2% of South Australia’s electricity generation, rooftop solar supplied 18.3%, and large-scale solar another 10.7%. In other words, roughly 74% of the state’s electricity generation came from wind and solar. [1]
And this isn’t a comparison that ignores inflation. AEMO publishes its historical wholesale electricity prices in real June 2024 dollars. South Australia’s average wholesale price in 2023–24 was A$79.53/MWh, compared with roughly A$95/MWh in 2012–13. It was also 40% lower than the previous year’s A$131.90/MWh. [1]
AEMO also specifically identifies increased rooftop and grid-scale solar output as one of the factors contributing to lower wholesale prices. [1]
So there’s a fairly straightforward example: South Australia reached roughly 74% wind and solar generation while its inflation-adjusted wholesale electricity price was lower than it had been around a decade earlier.
That obviously doesn’t mean renewables were the only factor affecting prices - electricity markets are influenced by fuel prices, interconnectors, demand, storage and plenty of other things. But it does disprove the claim that high penetration of wind and solar necessarily results in higher inflation-adjusted electricity prices.
California has the lowest wholesale electricity rate in the country. It's retail electricity rate is the second-highest but that's a problem independent of electricity source.
We could collectively provide a long list of examples across several US states, Europe, and Australia. Is that going to change the minds of people who don't believe it? It will not, the discussion is irrelevant and wasted energy (mental models are rigid, people are irrational and emotion driven broadly speaking), all that matters is the economics.
> Renewables Remain Lowest Cost New-Build Generation; All Generation Faces Increasing Cost Pressure: Despite rising and inflationary cost pressures across all generation technologies, renewables remain the most cost-competitive form of new-build generation on an unsubsidized basis and will account for the majority of near-term capacity additions in the U.S. Continuous upward revisions to demand projections have driven a sharp increase in announced new-build gas generation despite a 15-year high LCOE, which is expected to continue to rise, and historically long development and equipment delivery timelines.
> The world has reached the 3-terawatt threshold of solar power, with the first terawatt taking 10 years to deploy and the next two terawatts taking less than five years.
> Forecasters expect the world to deploy more than 9 terawatts of solar by 2036, with poor countries' share of solar deployment expected to start growing again from this year onward.
> The main constraint for developing countries to adopt solar power is the lack of accessible financing, and the growth of solar power is also limited by the need for energy storage, such as lithium-ion batteries, to absorb excess power.
The global clean tech supply chain will still be around when the US comes around.
The drugs I take inhibit most, if not all, of any emotions I might have, leaving me aggressively data driven by evidence, observations, data, and facts. I am a complex expert system with a pulse.
This specific policy is because one thin-skinned narcissist lost a legal case in Scotland over wind turbine aesthetics. His personality disorder makes him hold grudges forever and lash out and punish unrelated parties. I bet the two of you would get along well!
This is exactly correct ^ and I’m not even aligned with Democrats. There’s no end to the ego and butt-hurt of that man, and conversely, he’s the easiest to exploit via flattery of anyone I’ve ever heard of.
My guy, your account is nearly 10 years old, but your karma is only 36, and you are active on here... there is a reason. You are derisive, and abrasive, and your comments (specifically the ones that get downvoted to hell) are low-effort, and "troll-y".
You seem like you've been successful in life, you didn't get that way being low-effort, so let's apply that level of effort toward this community that has brought so many people together for their love of technology.
you make some fair points .. and I respect you for making them openly (and taking the time to do so!) .. also that ur a real person standing behind your words .. and that carries more weight with me than karma ever will :)
I can be abrasive .. but Id rather own my words including the unpopular ones .. than hide behind a pseudonym or tailor them for approval ..
either way .. you seem like a good human. respect!
Narrative is defined by ideology and the media machinery able to sustain it. Facts are woven in only when serving the desired reality.
If you and I listened to the propaganda on the regular basis, our intuitive knowledge would associate clean energy with isolated from reality snowflake liberals, hippies, abortion, subsidies, as opposed to fossil fuel energy associated with manliness, strength, common sense, “good old values”, military strength, and freedom.
Just like beef (“it’s what’s for dinner”) and a delicious juicy rare steak. See?
I recommend checking out George Lakoff’s work on the power of identity and metaphors. Look up his “moral politics” lecture on YouTube.
Oh that's not nearly the amount of fossil subsidies. Some say it's
$31b/yr direct. If you factor in indirect costs like climate damage, health expenses, oil wars, etc, it's much higher. Renewables are much, much cheaper regardless of a little incentive, if there are any left.
It’s kind of amazing and horrifying at the same time that a democratic country like the U.S. is doing all these shenanigans like blocking clean zero carbon energy, while a communist authoritarian country is massively moving towards clean energy.
Based on what our media and our education system teaches us, one would have assumed that common sense and sound logic would prevail in a democracy, but rather what we see is insane nonsense, paranoia, and misinformation (including about vaccines) prevail in the U.S., to the point of burning piles of money (including the 1.2B in this case) just to satisfy a childish and bully like need to spite and trigger the progressive side (like talking about causing more pollution with the goal of “owning the libs” or triggering “delicious liberal tears”). And we’re talking about massive negative externalities with increased pollution. This kind of childish bully behavior is as though you had a neighbor who cared about not littering in public and the streets being clean, and you just threw garbage on the streets to upset her. A ridiculous level of immaturity, truly.
Meanwhile, we have totalitarian dictatorships (like the Emirates which has heavily moved toward zero carbon electricity sources like solar and nuclear) behaving far more logically, rationally, and soundly with a view towards the long-term rather than the short-term.
I work in renewables in the US. The current picture is actually a lot more positive than people believe. But good news are usually boring at not good for click bait, so they aren’t covered by the media. There’s a lot of work on solar energy currently and the forecast is VERY good. We do have some issues like grid connectivity and shifting policies but the market economics are working extremely well. The fact is solar is too cheap and, unlike wind, very easy to deploy, so it doesn’t matter what your political views are, you will eventually support it. Texas for example, the conservative oil and gas hub of the US, is already outpacing California in total capacity additions because 1) they have tons of land and 2) no BS, quick local permits. So if you are a solar builder, you go to Texas not California. And yes, Texas is still pro fossil fuels, but the laws of supply and demand will continue favoring solar so that’s where the money will flow to.
> fact is solar is too cheap and, unlike wind, very easy to deploy, so it doesn’t matter what your political views are, you will eventually support it
this is my point, too
renewables, especially solar, just have gotten very competitive to a point they will gain ground even if not subsidized
and I believe we will see (and in some niches have already seen) this happening for electric cars, too. They are plain simple just better technology which for now is still in the earlier stages.
How much relevance wind will have we have to see, it's less advantages then solar and less easy to deploy. It's pretty good in some very windy northern (i.e. also less solar efficient) places and often iff it's extremely windy it's not extremely sunny and if extremely sunny it's often not extremely windy. This makes them complement each other quite nicely. So I still see a future for it even outside of the more northern regions.
California has only four really good wind sites, and they already have wind farms on them. The real US wind belt is from the Texas panhandle northward to Canada. Look at a wind map of the US.[1]
Grid-scale battery storage just keeps getting installed at an increasing rate.[1]
9.7 gigawatt-hours installed in Q1 2026.[2]
It's not very visible. It's just shipping containers laid out on cement pads. It doesn't take up that much space. It can be placed anywhere there's good access to transmission lines. It's profitable if you can buy cheap solar power in the daytime and sell it at night. It's safe now that it uses lithium-iron phosphate batteries.
88 days to the midterm elections. Trump will still be in office for a while longer, but with less power to make trouble.
all the US needs is Australia like pricing and combine it with individual energy independence branding + clean long term financing like mortgage and there is no better place in the world to harness the urban sprawl and single family homes for rooftop solar. This assumes utilities and their business models can be quietly upended which is probably the biggest bottleneck
I do perfectly believe that there's a lot of progress in renewables and am happy about it. I also think of how much farther we would have come if it wasn't in spite of 40-50 years of obstruction by governments to satisfy coporate entities stuck in the old world.
The sweet spot is representative democracy with a tendency of socialism, to mildly distribute welath and assure social coherence. A voting system which results in a division of force, representing the voters will.
The current US administration calls such things comunism.
The thing we have called "democracy" for the past three hundred or so years is basically just shadow government by whoever has the deepest pockets to influence public opinion with propaganda and pay politicians to do what they want. The politicians get blamed and cycled out while everything continues as before.
this way of thinking, is not very useful and can be pretty harmful,
just because something is imperfect doesn't mean it's fully broken. Just because
people have always manipulated democracy doesn't mean it "basically just shadow government".
And sure, the US is a very bad case, _especially_ in recent years. But also let's not forgot that for most of it's history just one of the countless scandals of Trump would have been enough to highly risk impeachment for a president and be equal to political suicide. I.e. there has been quite a bit of limits on corruption and influences from behind the scene. It's just that the US went and broke itself. And yes a two party system was never truly democratic, it's still better then a one party system nor the same as a full shadow government.
Which brings us to another point, there never was "the" shadow government, just many different people which had way to much influence behind the scene in not so democratic ways. A shadow government implies some form of organization/structure which actually governs and then puppets in front, but that was never really the case in the US AFIK. Even today it isn't as a lot of the escalating corruption is just pretty much out in the open by the governing people, instead of in any shadow, by people not in a official position.
Money is deep on both "sides". It didn't help Harris to have the most either. But you can't deny that some political steerage toward donor agendas occurs.
Nobody with cursory knowledge of the US voting system would though.
Edit: to the downvotes, our system doesn't care about popular vote, and neither do the most democratic/left left leaning states, who don't care to use proportional voting.
Its because democracies werent and arent really democracies.
But that aside. Corruption is rampant, the oil sector has politians in their pocket for a long long time and since the cold war, a counter narrative doesnt really put any weight in the scale. The billionaires arent afraid anymore.
> Meanwhile, we have totalitarian dictatorships (like the Emirates which has heavily moved toward zero carbon electricity sources like solar and nuclear) behaving far more logically, rationally, and soundly with a view towards the long-term rather than the short-term.
The difference you’re spotting is the leaders of those nations have some remaining incentive to care about the wealth and wellbeing of the country they’re leading beyond the expiration date of a 4 or 8 year term.
For better and for worse, they have that, the US doesn’t.
It's been a common saying for a long time that a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government and a tyrannical dictatorship the worst. Democracy exists primarily to avoid the latter, not that it's better than the former.
Neither China nor the UAE can be said to have a purely benevolent dictatorship but it's not purely tyrannical either. So not surprisingly they're better than democracies in some aspects and worse in others.
I do think authoritarianism on its own is bad. I want the freedom to criticize my government, and I want the freedom to run for elections or to advocate for changes I want to see. I think democracy and logical long-term thinking shouldn't be mutually exclusive. I feel democracy and sensible behavior are two not connected things.
You can have idiotic authoritarian governments that ruin the economy. China and Vietnam were exceptions among communist countries, who switched to a form of market economy, when they saw that central planning was poverty-inducing and nigh impossible to do.
The problems we're seeing in democracies might lie with the level of disinformation for electioneering purposes that is permitted under free speech today.
As an atheist I wouldn't survive in Texas for 15 seconds lol. I think I'll stick to my little Euro socialist country where politicians don't swear on a bible.
That communist country is sitting on a year’s worth of oil reserves, and rolls out a ton of coal for when they run out of oil. Makes you wonder why… almost looks like they know they’re going to be under complete sanctions sometime soon!
That communist country also likes the current war in Iran. They get all that oil cheap for their reserves stockpile.
"common sense" is common sense because it is not "specialised sense" or "expert sense"
So if politicians base their decisions on "common sense", they confess to not being able to use experts that refine their knowledge and position about a topic.
A "common sense" strategy is therefore what is most popular and on the basis of the understanding of laymen without deeper understanding or knowledge.
For at least a few years, "common sense" has been hijacked by populist politicians, now it just means whatever simplistic idea that fits their worldview, even when it's not complicated to see that said idea is clearly misguided. The original meaning seems lost to me.
Furthermore, using the phrase “common sense” to describe an idea inherently dismisses any individual that will argue against it. They either are too dumb to have common sense, or too much of an elite to have common sense.
This is the word smithing they are known for. By labeling “common sense” means anyone who argues against it is against “common sense” because every argument is a strawman argument.
"Common sense" might also mean "do the simple thing" which, given how cheap it is to invest in renewable energy sources like solar farms, and how much room we have to build daytime capacity that way without large scale storage, might mean installing a lot more solar.
Don't pretend the current US admin is anything but corrupt and stupid.
Or pumped storage. Or lifting a really heavy thing and letting it fall slowly.
Or retaining an amount of fossil fuel capacity to be turned on during peak consumption and sun and wind dips while still focusing on renewables and storage with the goal to reduce the duty cycle of peaker plants to zero.
> Or lifting a really heavy thing and letting it fall slowly.
I challenge you to run the numbers on this.
Or at least read or watch someone who has.
Whenever you’re certain you know the answer, it behooves to try to prove yourself wrong.
Unsurprisingly, gravity is an extraordinarily weak force. It merely appears otherwise because the total mass of the Earth is literally astronomical at around the 5.9722×10^24 kg mark. Concrete blocks hanging from a crane, much less so.
Pumped hydro is a nonstarter: do you see any suitable geography anywhere? Yep, they’ve already been dammed damn it. So approximately no one^ can have their existing hydro upgraded to pumped hydro retro fitted to pumped, and have the surrounding landscape covered in solar and wind.
How helpful!
Chemical batteries? South Australia has a decent sized one. I think it can power some of the state for about 12 seconds.^^
^okay, not no one: Hydropower accounts for approximately 15%, but you have to choose pumped hydro sites where it also makes sense for wind and / or solar, so it’s clearly not an answer for everyone everywhere. Not even close.
^^hyperbole! I know. Look, it’s actually around 1–1.5 hours, which is statistically closer to my estimate of 12 seconds than anything actually useful like a day or a week.
Oh yes, "sound" and "prudent" haven't been in the ballpark nearly as often as they used to be :(
The dictionary definition is in spite of the fact that the phrase "common sense" is more often than ever being used to rebrand what was formerly known as "common lack of sense".
Anytime I see "common sense" adjacent to politics, it's a dodge. It's for issues that pander to their base or where they're just getting bribed. If there's a better reason, they'd say it.
A significant part of science is plucking the true bits from common sense. A fair chunk of what we call medicine is folk remedies that stood up to rigorous testing.
Curious what you mean by this. There is very, very little medical knowledge today that aligns with historical folk wisdom.
(Even simple things like "an apple a day" - apples are fine, but foods like berries, kiwis and avocados tend to have both lower sugar and much higher nutritional content.)
In practice "common sense" just means "things I learned from public TV when I was ten and never bothered to learn more about." Renewable used to be more expensive but that hasn't been the case for almost a decade. But you still see people, even on this "news" site for technologically curious people, claim that fossil fuel is the "obvious" cheap option.
Ha! Like the common sense to dam migratory river systems to make hydroelectric power. Good idea at the time, and who cares about salmon. I have a toaster, and a percolator, and a new fangled “ice” box (formerly chilled by ice, now a maker of ice).
S/ My common sense says 1.2B compensation to not do something we otherwise need is bananas as opposed to the common sense—pound salt response. Good thing I’m not in government, yeah. /s
Dams are subject to silt buildup up, which requires maintenance.
They’re so destructive to local ecosystems that environmental groups have blocked any new hydroelectric dams being built in Australia for over 40 years.
All modern concrete eventually fails, and dams are notoriously difficult to remove and replace.
Fortunately they last long enough that if you paint them pink and plug a torch battery in to them they can remain somebody else’s problem for quite some time.
To do the thing would require paying the original contracted amount.
Whatever that might have been.
Melbourne, well Victoria the whole state, is looking at a similar scenario for rail tunnels many believe serve little purpose.
Around $1.2 billion to stop the work now and pay the early termination penalty. Plus maybe another billion (estimated, who really knows) to bury the tunnel boring machines and remediation work.
Or something like $200 billion to complete the work and operate the rail network over some number of probably too many decades. Although this number seems to increase at a regular cadence.
A new road tunnel was recently completed and people who use it often report they are the only vehicle in the tunnel.
Meanwhile our roads haven’t been maintained in a decade and are literally falling apart. It’s not uncommon to hear reports of multiple cars being recovered after suspension and wheel damage from the same section of poorly maintained road in one day.
All of this in a political and economic setting so corrupt the now former state Labor Premier came out and admitted knowledge of a criminal element having infiltrated the union that represents the workers on the projects. She was recently replaced with her deputy. As if that helps.
Electricity prices have also increased by something like 150 to 200 percent more than inflation over the past 20 years but mostly the past 6 years (so this decade) because state and federal governments seem to want to insist on ramming Net Zero down our power lines, yet we export around the same amount of gas as Qatar. And we have the worlds largest know uranium deposit and yet we have a ban on nuclear power reactors.
- spikes in energy need, mainly AI in recent years
- extremely badly handling of power grids in a high multitude of ways not related to net zero (like seriously, the German grid is pretty bad compared to an optimal grid. But compared to the nonsense many parts of the US have, it looks like a pristine optimal solution.)
- health/environmental protections _not to be confused with climate protection_!! Not wanting your citizens to have massive health issues due to air pollution, acid rains etc. has _nothing_ to do with net zero. People tend to somehow always conflate it. But a lot of the policies the US ended up doing (compared to the ones they say they want to do) where more about that then anything climate related.
- inflation statistics being... badly done. Like if most relevant daily use products have price increases noticeable above inflation then your way to measure inflation is the problem.
And a lot of the net zero things, tend to actually produce relatively cheap energy, even if you include cost for e.g. some gravity energy store and similar buffers. Just if you don't properly modernize, then you can run into troubles. As part of the US has never been in favor of renewables at all you can guess what happens there wrt. making decisions to which make things work compared to decisions which hinder things and then blame the technology instead of your bad politics.
> You seriously believe coal fired power hasn’t evolved in the last 40 years?
no but even with evolution it still is way worse then literally every other (practical used/usable) alternative
e.g. the quality of German brown coal is so bad that there is a saying that burning plastic wast gives you both more and cleaner energy
> approximately nowhere
you mean no where except everywhere where you have decent sized hills or mountains (and even in flat land under some circumstances) and is already build and in use in Germany in multiple case (and also not just Germany)
> "Electricity prices have also increased by something like 150 to 200 percent more than inflation over the past 20 years but mostly the past 6 years (so this decade) because state and federal governments seem to want ... "
There's a few factors.
The main one from what I hear / read from those I know down that way was private industry getting their hands on the energy grid ... from what I have heard read it's a royal shit show at times and pricing just kept on leaping upwards with what looks like fly by night to the public retailers that aim to just maximise the amount people are willing to pay. Pricing is my locale is spared electricity customers somewhat, from dealing with the same profit based clowns [1] down southern end of Australia getting any sort of market share here.
Almost getting the top spot for higher jump in costs, is the increase of infrastructure spending on the network. Some of that has to do with population growth and increase of grid demand due to urban sprawl and higher energy demands from the average customer. But the jump you see down in your state has been that much of the network down that way has not seen much investment in its upkeep and the rise of weather events affecting the various electricity grids that were not specifically designed for high winds in mind. The southern states high winds especially during dry periods is linked to wild fire events, so there's additional pressure to perform. This costs money and private companies are once again going to recoup that cost harder than what a govt governed entity would do, but then again in my locale being without power for half a day to days while a transmission line is repaired that failed isn't that uncommon.
>" And we have the worlds largest know uranium deposit and yet we have a ban on nuclear power reactors."
The public indirectly voted three or so decades ago, it from that assumed a mandate against uranium ... the dolts tried again last election, again no dice. Done and dusted, public no want. Some people will persist it's a good idea, thorium is with its safe waste is, uranium is not. The uranium nuclear path involves not millions but billions for studies, the companies like Deloitte are waiting in the wings. Soil studies, site locations, blah blah paid think tanks - lots of tax payer money. Going forward then there's design - Australia will pay again billions to some international company that's part of the old uranium crowd ... building I'd guess once more another international company will get the cream though yes some local employment will be touted and finally a waste facility and where to put it. If and when it got that far it might finally occur that uranium waste makes for good dirty bombs and the security around moving the waste each year will cost millions along with storage security, which isn't going to be some small depot with a six foot fence around it and a couple of security guards ... people that would want to make dirty bombs are not going to be waiting for it to fall into their laps. Of course at the end, it such a plant ever got up and running, the power is now centralised around one or more nuclear power plants and rather than resilience, this future grid had introduced large points of failure.
You dont need deeper understanding of knowledge for everything. Ask Grandma whether she needs a chemical engineering degree to bake apple pie.
Then there is the Theory of Bounded Rationality which tells us expertise may exist but resources, time, energy, info, attention etc etc may not therefore bounds and limits of expertise alone must be recognized and solutions reached are satisficable rather than optimal. Aiming for optima when other factors havent been sorted just creates new problems.
> You dont need deeper understanding of knowledge for everything. Ask Grandma whether she needs a chemical engineering degree to bake apple pie.
You've clearly never baked before. Baking is a chemical science. You have to adjust temperatures for your freaking elevation relative to sea level. Granted some recipes are pretty forgiving, sure, but far from all, and some are downright merciless in terms of complexity and effort required.
Even people who do it constantly have items that just don't turn out because it's legitimately hard shit.
No, but baking is still a process that requires skill — and that skill is not 'common sense'.
If making sourdough were 'common sense' then _everyone could do it correctly on their first try_. They don't. Most fail and never try again because the skill level required for sourdough is too high.
I'm an _expert_ cook, but I'm still having to go through the frequent failures of learning how to pickle with brine (fortunately, my failures have been mostly edible and have not turned moldy). Even vinegar pickling requires a certain level of expertise before you can do it successfully, even though that level of expertise is _roughly_ "knowing how to boil water".
There are too many interested parties involved in the energy sector. The only common sense I can think of is solar+storage at the single building level and interconnected through smart grids with neighbours.
But that leaves out the government and all those interested parties so we're never ever getting that.
The energy mix for electricity in Sweden, Norway and Finland is mostly made up of hydro+nuclear+wind, especially wind and hydro complements each other very well since hydro is very much on-demand and can cover for most temporary wind shortfalls.
Driving through my childhood area up north a few weeks back I was also surprised by the amount of solar going up, for comparison this is an area _north of_ Anchorage/Alaska with less than 3 hours of sun around Christmas, but already by late January (usually the coldest period of the year) there is over 6 hours of sun a day (so with high pressure cold peaks with less wind, the 6 hours probably eases the power bill quite a bit).
An interesting fact about those solar installations was that the panels were mounted almost vertically (probably to avoid being snowed over but also useful in the winter since the sun mostly just shines from the south anyhow).
The very very northern tip of Germany reaches almost as far north as the southernmost tip of the Alaskan panhandle, but most of Germany is more like mid-south Canada on a latitude basis.
Northern Germany is much more specialized into wind power, and the south is more solar intensive (though solar is more evenly spread throughout the country than Wind, thanks to ease of installation, and the fact that it still produces tonnes of electricity in the summer).
Solar should be built in Alaska, but wind and hydro is what should be actively subsidized and supported by the government. The market can take care of solar penetration in Alaska if you let it.
One additional tidbit of info. While the northern coast in Germany has certainly more wind, a reason why wind falls off so strongly towards the south, are the policies of the CSU party in Bavaria, which though not quite as bad as trump has been running Anti-Wind policies and making wind installations extremely difficult to build.
Even if they hadn't shut down nuclear, they still would be reliant on LNG imports, and being the most expensive power, LNG would be the price-setter in Germany.
LNG is NOT cheap. piped non-liquid natural gas is cheap, but once you liquify it, store it and ship it, it's very expensive.
North Americans mostly do not use electricity for heat in the winter. Around 60% use natural gas with forced air furnaces. Something closer to 80% have the option, but 20% don't bother to use it.
Some of the deep south get by with electric heat, but they aren't in places where the cold is a typically a legitimate danger to health and safety.
I find something very refreshing in this, reading from Europe where we get told "gas" is the big bad, even threatening to make condensing gas boilers illegal from time to time [0], despite over 95% of homes (in the UK) being heated by this method.
That said most of Europe doesn't heat or cool adequately, Spain and Portugal barely heat their homes in winter and boy it gets cold with 41F/5C nights. Then Germany/Switzerland refuse to use A/C even though the summers get to 95F/35C. Just a few days ago a friend told me he went to the doctor and the doctor passed out during examination from the heat.
ps. Not sure why it's downvoted, I think people read something into my comment that I didn't want to express.
> Reading from Europe where we get told "gas" is the big bad, even threatening to make condensing gas boilers illegal from time to time
Long-term this is true, and it makes sense to ban gas boilers (potentially with some exceptions): electric heat is significantly more efficient, and can run on renewable energy. But that requires a big investment in infrastructure build-out (heat pumps) which will take decades, and we definitely need to be careful that we handle the transition without screwing people over.
Yes, most households don't have the 25-30k available to switch to heat pumps. If we dig deep I think we partially solved why people don't have kids anymore in Europe: for that you need optimism, and to be told every few years even something basic as your heating system is due to be illegal (!) doesn't really fill people with optimism. Same thing with banning internal combustion engined-cars, which was reversed too... Europe as a whole needs to manage these tech transitions very differently in my opinion.
Yes that is a split A/C, which is also a form of heat pump, that's not really what people refer to as heat pumps by default in Europe. A heat pump is normally an air-to-water system here, which drives either radiators or heated floors. Heating with an A/C is practically unknown in most of Europe and definitely not the desired choice for most people here (even though it would make sense).
And you’d still need five or six split systems to properly heat a home.
Kitchen, dining, bathroom, three or four bedrooms.
I’ve never seen a split system in a bathroom, but I’ve definitely seen freezing cold bathrooms, or bathrooms with a radiant heater on the wall or heat lamps on the ceiling, which occasionally get left on all day and destroy electricity bills.
Ducted systems almost always extend to the bathroom, and almost always cost AU$15,000 or more to install.
Ortogonal to the discussion, but I think in an odd way, Australia is one of the most similar countries to Spain in this aspect. Very limited to no natural gas proliferation, electric heating, if any, but houses made rather cheaply but somehow still ending very expensive. I've seen houses near Melbourne resembling a tin hut costing AU1.5M. According to weatherspark, some Spanish locations have their climate counterparts in Australia, e.g. Perth is most similar to Malaga.
True true. The old housing stock is poorly insulated. I mean: not at all insulated, and retro fitting insulation is painfully expensive.
Sure, insulation in ceilings is relatively easy to do, but swapping windows out for double glazed windows with solar thermal reflective film, very expensive.
New homes are much better designed, requiring wall and ceiling insulation and double glazed windows or better.
And yeah, the state of Victoria is still prompting banning new homes even connect to gas. Seems strange when we export around the same volume of LNG as Qatar.
The people who need heat pumps the most don’t have $6000+ to blow on heat pumps.
So now we’re back to government subsidies, which routinely prove to drive up the price of whatever is being subsidised, especially at the scale of residential homes.
And your solution still results in the living room / dining room and other shared spaces being inhospitable in winter / summer, so you’ve underestimated the cost at least significantly.
> London can’t even work out how to properly ventilate their underground rail network.
This seems unrelated. It's not an energy problem: it's a problem with lack of space in the tunnels and lack of places to build ventilation shafts due to the issue not being considered 100 years ago when the tunnels were built.
> Or people can melt in the summers and freeze in the winters. Because that is exactly what “renewables” have been delivering.
I think this has very little to do with renewables. In particular, solar is perfect for reducing "melt in summer" cases (it's almost always sunny when it's hot) (and I'm not sure where has freeze in winter problems).
The issue seems to be more that weather has gotten hotter, and infrastructure needs to change in response to that (inevitably slow and expensive).
London’s tube system had an eminent domain, technology, political will problem. It’s entirely fixable.
Cold weather kills more people than hot weather. By a huge margin.
People frequently move from cooler areas to areas that have comparatively hotter climates than even the worst (completely fabricated) global warming predictions.
I live in northern Spain and it really doesn't get that cold. There's about a month during which I need a little plug in heater to stay above 18 degrees C. Then after a few weeks I find myself using it less and less. Honestly I wouldn't bother investing in a central heating system for how little I need it. There's only a few days a year the temperature actually drops to around 5C and that's only in the deep of night when I'm in bed anyway, and of course the indoor temp doesn't drop much.
Aircon I need a lot more. If anything I'd invest in more of that and more insulation. But a heating installation is just wasted money really.
That's kind of my point. It's not cold - to you - because you are used to it. In Hungary or Romania since energy is (or was) cheap, due to residual/waste heat from power plants everyone heats their homes to 23-24C. Because if you have "free" energy, why not? That's what people feel comfortable at home. If you would drop a Hungarian to your 18C northern Spanish home they would be incredibly uncomfortable, but the same for an American.
I'm not saying this for you to feel bad, or question your cultural heating standards - just pointing out in Europe we have an incredible energy poverty for the most part - and even Spain wasn't like this pre-Franco. People have heated their homes much more, same with coffee etc. That terrible torrefacto was not a thing before, but that's a whole another conversation. Re-reading what I wrote I don't think you will really grasp my point due to me not being to articulate it well enough and I hope I don't come across combative. Spain does a million things perfectly and I don't mean to criticize...
My point is I think somehow, to create and foster policy that focuses on the well-being of people, using a long-term plan that includes an abundance of everything, including energy. In an ideal scenario you could have your apartment at 18C if you wanted to, but since energy would be near-free and abundant, you could turn it up to whatever you want, guilt-free.
Hmm no, 23-24 in winter is not comfortable for me. It's incredibly uncomfortable. I'm much happier in 18 degrees.
But I'm not from Spain. I have been to Romania a lot and I really hated how much they heated the office during winter. I'd go outside in the -15C in my shirt just to cool off during meeting breaks.
Honestly I'm super comfortable in Spain most of the year. Just 1 month I need a little extra heating and 3 months I need aircon, and a lot of it. But summer is also peak time for solar so energy wise it's not bad.
But I don't consider it poverty at all, really. It's also important not to have too much of a temperature mismatch with the outside because we spend a lot of time outdoors here. And not in airconditioned cars because I don't have (nor want) a car. I'm a lot happier with the freedom that public transport offers.
Yes, for what it's worth, solar is an incredibly good start (for Spain at least) for said energy abundance. Approaching from the other way, there are actually quite a few Spanish who say using the aircon is wasteful, expensive or even claim that it's unhealthy. Most of these beliefs stem from the fact it's considered something exotic, expensive, consumerist and foreign. If energy was so cheap it costed basically nothing to run the AC, these beliefs would fade soon (as they had in the US, or China). My dream is to see a well-heated (to your personal preference), and well-climatized Europe where anyone can easily afford to do both.
Europe has unlimited wind, not unlimited gas. Electrification of most things is just a matter of time. Gas for heating is wasteful. I think AC will get very popular eventually once the stragglers realize that these are not unusual one-off warm summers, but is a result of global warming.
I love heat pumps, but they are well out of reach for most people at 25-30k for a full system with insulation and radiator change.
5C is indeed a cold night, for Spain, in an uninsulated house which most are, and 13C/55F daily high, it's teeth-chatteringly cold without heating, yet most Spanish just brace it, for similar reasons they don't have AC in Germany: "it's survivable, and it only lasts around 3 months". This is why I refer to this as "energy poverty".
Geothermal works in enough areas (geographies) for it to be an entertaining talking point in niche forums like this one.
But not much else.
Earth is an incredibly poor heat conductor, as evidenced by the fact that you don’t have to dig very far, maybe a foot or four, and it’s a fairly constant 14 degrees C, and yet the core is molten lava (rock) and has been that way for billions of years predominantly from latent heat from the planets formation.
So you have to be very careful with heat exchange, lest you exceed the ability of the earth to conduct heat through the rock surrounding the boreholes.
Drilling deep boreholes is difficult as the rock becomes more like plasticine as it approaches temperatures where usefully higher temperatures occur.
"Artificial" geothermal works well enough to store energy from sunlight months for use during colder months.
Artificial in the sense of using solar energy (direct or electric) to heat mass insulated by earth and later extracting that heat to use (directly in district heating, or indirectly via heat -> electric conversion).
I'm obviously going to ignore the conditional goal posts at scale and cost effective ... burgeoning technology does not typically land with all the problems ironed out or have economy of scale.
I used my searchfoo and Sage Industries lands in more of the top results [1] [2] (may require careful attention to distinguish between natural and artificial geothermal) As well as an interview [youtube]
There's obviously different methods that have been employed / tried by other companies given [3] which outlines different methods of storage also includes some simple graphics ...
from [2015 - now( ... (still operating) for one example.
> Water has a greater capacity to store heat than rocks and dirt.
Weirdly all three fall under the description used ( "mass" ) and yet none of the three you mentioned are molten salt or silicon which perform even better than water.
If the point you're making is that you've made little effort to think this through or look to where this has been used, is being used, or at pilot plants going to longer time scales then congratulations, you've convinced me.
While I do not know if the following is relevant for the Carolina Long Bay area, and while neither Republicans nor Democrats can be trusted, it is not without precedent for offshore wind turbine projects to be disallowed due to radar concerns.
> Why Sweden nixed new wind farms for fear of missing Russian missiles
> BERLIN — Sweden’s government this month blocked the construction of 13 offshore wind farms over concerns that they would shorten the country’s early-warning window for a Russian missile attack.
> ...
> That is because wind farms can interact with radar signals, reducing the quality of the situational air picture or even outright blocking out parts of the sky.
Other possibilities than radar concerns is that the stopping of the project here hinders corruption, or is corrupt itself, or it moves corruption around (as in both the old project and new project was corrupt). Whatever the case, a way to avoid corruption would be helpful. Perhaps like making it market-driven and contest-driven as much as possible. Solar and wind is already significantly cost-efficient and market-driven despite their significant drawbacks like not producing energy consistently and on demand. If the main challenge is creating domestic production of wind turbines and solar cells instead of being reliant on other countries and without state support ending up being mired in corruption, perhaps some bidding and contract process that moves the financial risk onto private companies, such that the government never pays in advance, could work.
I agree with posts here saying that a mosaic or plethora of energy sources should be used. Wind, solar, fossile, nuclear (for big countries like the USA at least), geothermal, etc. In general, energy companies should not be focused on just one kind, but lots of kinds.
Wind power is a purely commercial enterprise which only requires state support for permissions to build and permissions to connect to the grid. There is no issue about state support for manufacturing of equipment.
Living here where this happens. They are stopping it for two reasons:
Second, on a local level, the far-right party "SD" is voting agaisnt wind power in 96% of the cases.
As presented here, the national government is declining 84% of all requests of requests to build wind power, ad on the local level the right wing parties vetoed wind power at a rate of 64-92%: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/?created=true&id=09...
That is not correct (https://finansnytt.se/vattenfall-pausar-havsbaserad-vindkraf...). They don't just need permission to connect. Wattenfall (the main producer of energy in Sweden) demanded to get subsidizes to construct the connection to the grid and transmitting the energy back from the wind farm to the main land and the grid. They canceled the project when the government denied those subsidies. They have all the required permissions, and still it was not economical to build.
In optimal weather, wind power already produce more or less all current demand in the grid if we include wind energy produced in nearby countries. The nordpool price (electricity market in the northern Europe) already goes below zero several times over the year. Shortages in production do not occur during periods of windy weather, which is especially true for the south part of Sweden where the energy price is highest and which is connected to the wind farms of Denmark and Germany. The reason that south of Sweden, Denmark and northern Germany has so expensive energy prices is that when the wind is not blowing there is nothing else to really support it beyond solar, and solar is neither reliable nor effective enough during the winter months where output of solar on average reaches around 10% of capacity in Sweden. The only other producer of energy in that region is thermal power plants that mostly burns fossil fuels, like natural gas (https://www.uniper.energy/sv/sverige/kraftverk-i-sverige/ore...) and oil (https://www.uniper.energy/sv/sverige/kraftverk-i-sverige/kar...). Those two are naturally the single largest sources of carbon emissions in those regions.
They may be talking about building nuclear power, but what local government in south of Sweden is actually building right now is more thermal power plants (https://hallbartbyggande.com/bygget-av-kraftringens-nya-kraf...). That one is supposed to be burning wood but time will tell what happens if they can't find wood to burn.
Nope. I don’t claim it to be undemocractic, I only insinuate that it is very stupid. And to be fully clear: I also think these people are hypocrites because they loudly proclaim in debates and public discourse to be pro wind energy, but once they vote it is against it. I also think they are hypocrites about energy independence, because that they also want, but they have cumulatively during the past five years declined wind power equal to about 18 full nuclear reactors.
Does your 18 full reactors count name plate capacity only, or does it take in to consideration that wind needs to be massively over built or also come with gas peaked plants?
The number is based on expected actual annual output in GWh, not theoretical maximum. We don’t really do gas peaker plants because they are so expensive and seldom needed here.
Sorry your argument for something being renewal able or not is based on if it grows on trees? You realize modern infrastructure is generally not growing out the ground or we would not have taken thousands or years to get to this point?
Show me anywhere that is recycling wind tubing blades.
Or solar panels.
Steel is infinitely recyclable and valuable enough as scrap to largely be recycled at a high rate.
Solar panels are so cheap new because there’s bigger all of anything worth recovering in them.
The secondhand market is littered with stacks of panels that don’t move.
The glass isn’t worth anything as scrap, we literally throw it in the recycling bin and it costs councils and governments to recover it and manage the waste streams, largely done as a vanity project.
Aluminium is so light and there is so little of it wrapped around a solar panel it’s not worth the labour and machine capability to recover it.
But at the scale of a city or state one home uses close enough to zero power that it being a net user or net producer of electricity is irrelevant.
Scale up to tens of thousands of homes and suddenly you need an organising body approximating government to manage those homes being net users or net producers from moment to moment.
Additionally most cities tend to want to have commercial and industrial users of electricity, and energy more broadly. Your home solar & battery does approximately nothing to help them, and if any of the data is to be believed has resulted in electricity prices increasing for everyone.
Right. Gentle reminder that tuna has dangerous amounts of mercury in it specifically because of humans burning coal, not because the ocean was always so polluted.
Every time they do that you just redefine wrecking.
First it was the fish ladders. Then it was a bunch of whining about how reducing the water level variation on the river is bad (particularly illustrative because this is the exact opposite logic your ilk uses when talking stormwater). Lord knows what the complaint is these days.
Renewables are great, but they cannot sustain current power needs alone. Both solar and wind also have the problem that they cannot generate power 24/7. So at times where they are able they generate a lot of excess power that cannot be stored at that scale and at times where they cannot generate power there are shortages.
Even if they could operate 24/7 it would still not be enough power to satisfy current demand. Then there's the waste they create once parts need to be replaced, which is much more frequent than non renewables.
It's all very messy and there is no silver bullet.
> The only common sense I can think of is solar+storage
Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. Solar+storage requires massive overprovisioning, to the level that it's cheaper to burn literal money.
Windmill farm outputs tend to dip during summer and peak over winter. With a given minimum power output windmills + photovoltaics + storage is massively cheaper per unit of yearly energy. Of course, if you value any semblance of network stability.
Solar+storage is clear path towards either guaranteeing reliance on fossils or brownouts. The smart energy meter you got that encourages running the washing machine during cheap hours will ensure that you voluntarily go dark during undersupply as the cost will skyrocket.
> Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent.
The northernmost point in Texas would be at the extreme southern edge of Europe. The northernmost point of California is level with the sunny French Riviera. Hell, even frozen Minnesota has about the same solar potential as northern Spain...
If Europe can make solar work, so can the states (assuming a similar level of investment)
Can you cite a region in Europe that physically independently covers its energy needs with solar+storage alone? </snark>
Stress on physical. Even if some regions claim renewables fully covering energy needs, that's at best on accounting level, those regions are still fully dependent on power import/export and simply could not function in an island mode for any extended period of time without at the very least brownouts. Quite importantly, it's always renewables, not solar.
The dispatchability problem is a real pain. Pool together wind + solar + hydro and the variability in power (!) output drops to levels possible to tame with realistic grid-scale storage sizes.
I am not talking about intra-day balancing here. It's the yearly cycle that comes to bite you. In my corner of Europe, if I wanted to go completely off-grid with solar+storage I would need storage well into the mid single-digit MEGA watt-hours, for the house needs (HVAC and DHW taking the lion's share) alone. That's laughably unrealistic.
> The northernmost point of California is level with the sunny French Riviera. Hell, even frozen Minnesota has about the same solar potential as northern Spain...
Yes, the southern states could probably make do with something like 3-4x overprovisioning, but that's still massive. So massive that any sort of windmill capability will outcompete any sort of COTS storage.
In my corner of Europe, I have vacationed in a house that’s completely off-grid with solar and a bit over 20 kWh of storage (it does use about half a ton of wood pellets for heating during the coldest months of winter). Link in Czech: https://www.csdum.cz/jak-jsme-postavili-cesky-sobestacny-dum...
I wonder how it would fare with just 100 kWh of storage, something you can still easily put together.
Plus stored power, plus biomass, plus nuclear, plus gas.
90% renewables is better than 80% renewables. Throwing up our hands and saying "we'll never reach 100%, lets pack the whole thing in" isn't a sensible approach.
> Can you cite a region in Europe that physically independently covers its energy needs with solar+storage alone?
That is substantially moving the goalposts - nowhere in the world has built out sufficient solar to make that claim yet. The question is whether they can get there.
If you look at the table[1] for installed solar per capita, 9 of the top 10 countries are in Europe (the odd one out is Australia), so they are definitely giving it the old college try
> Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. Solar+storage requires massive overprovisioning, to the level that it's cheaper to burn literal money.
My rooftop solar disagrees. It generates my whole house load in the winter, spring and summer I run a pretty healthy surplus.
Thats with all my appliances being electric and superfluous crap running like a 24/7 file server running. Because my power is so cheap I don't have any problems running that kind of stuff.
Indeed. Energy is at the core of everything we do. Make it more expensive, you immediately make some people go hungry, and then you also make everything else in the economy a tad more expensive, slowing things down, and as market readjusts and contracts, this makes even more people go hungry.
There's a really strong incentive to keep energy generation cheap, because pretty much every social and political issue is downstream of it.
Yes. "The economy is energy, energy is the economy".
China understood this and is not just betting on both solar and nuclear like mad, they're also burning coal (so that the EU btw can cosplay being green, while offloading the production of many things it consumes to China).
As a result energy prices in China are something like 7x cheaper than in Germany.
Those with lots of energy saw their GDP growth in the 21st century while those like the EU, with ultra pricey energy (due to stupid decisions like closing nuclear power plants only to then reopen them) saw hardly any GDP growth, inflation-adjusted in USD, in the 21st century.
No GDP growth means ever more poor people and ever more indebted governments.
I'm all for transitioning away from fuel and coal, but do it pragmatically. We don't need communists (that'd be the "green" parties [1]) who want to make the lives of everybody miserable taking decisions related to energy.
[1] green people who, like watermelons, are only green on the outside and then bright extremist red on the inside
> [1] green people who, like watermelons, are only green on the outside and then bright extremist red on the inside
I hate political labels on principle, but I admit I'd find it fitting if some green parties started to be called "watermelon parties" for the reason you described.
This is just another area where the Chinese, Japanese, Korean will move ahead and stay ahead? Is this what it means when you have more engineers in your government than lawyers? They seem to be open towards any good idea if it works they don’t dismiss it out of hand because some existing industry might have to compete against the new technology coming in.
Going into the future, multiple energy sources will power future civilizations, multiple battery technologies will store energy what is wrong with multiple solutions as long as you make provisions not to completely destroy the environment you live in.
That’s a perverse incentive against ecology, case in point. Hear me out. We take citizen’s money to subsidize energy so they can get their energy for cheaper (at marginal level - while still paying the subsidy’s taxes) so they can undertake industrial/residential projects that we wouldn’t do with less energy. In a word, we incentive people to consume more (in a consumerist sense), which is bad for ecology, because we can’t afford them, and neither can the Earth.
Of course, leaving aside how petroleum is subsidized [through the department of defense].
While ecologists usually are in favor of subsidies, subsidies incentive people to consume more, which exhausts our Earth. We should develop less, i.e. we should develop in accordance with a higher facial cost of energy, which sometimes implies having a smaller home and fewer industries, which is what would happen if we didn’t sponsor solar or wind energy [or coal or fossil].
Economic growth also comes from getting more for less.
A company can increase their profits by growing and increasing both what they spend and what they earn. But a company can also increase their profits by reducing what they spend without decreasing what they earn. Almost all companies are constantly trying to do this.
Often (usually?) by requiring workers to do more for less pay. Automation will eventually solve this problem, but because of the need to increase profits, finding an alternative way for companies to economically support human life the way they traditionally have through employment will be a tough nut to crack.
That’s an error. Most capitalists are against government intervention.
It’s EU socialists who want to raise poor people to the level of consumerism of rich ones. Not capitalists. Capitalists would be happy to let them be poor.
In the EU, it’s trying to help-and-attract poor people by millions which strains the Earth. In the US it’s a special breed of capitalism where the state colludes with rich people to subsidize the big corporations at the detriment of nature and citizen.
Does the env work better in a communist country like North Korea? Or in the Soviet Union? Or are we gonna do no true Scotsman and say Soviet was always capitalist and had no connection to communism?
Subsidies (via tax or lack thereof) on aeroplane fuel is one that really does get overlooked. Yet on the other hand, use a few gallons in a car and you're demonised as a climate villain in name and taxes. Nobody factors in life of the car, the cost to dispose and replace the batteries in electric cars, or the whole aspect that cars made today are less serviceable than cars of old that its gone from being able to rebuild the car in your garage to waiting for spare parts from a dealer as it's all just replace or scrap today. So much focus on the short term, without focus on the larger picture and impact.
This is more true in the US due to costs of labor vs. parts and a whole culture of profitability at all costs.
Compared to other countries, repairability is higher where labor is cheaper and people are more price conscious. We're at late stage capitalism where any chance of lost profits is seen as criminal.
It probably comes from the recognition that energy access being a common good, a tax-collecting government should work for its constituents in helping provide energy at a reasonable cost, especially if the subsidies support an improvement to the technology behind it.
Subsidies aren't universally a bad thing. This is silly thinking.
- calculate in all building cost, side cost, post-lifetime cost, accident risk cost etc. i.e. "all cost"
- calculate expected total produced electricity which can be used
- divide one by another
- if one if majorly cheaper and chose it then that is the "common sense" strategy of choosing what works best
yes the "all cost" part is tricky to estimate.
yes you don't choose a "single technology and only use it", resilience always works best with redundancy and diversity.
still you can run the number, you can estimate error bars, and sometimes this gives already clear answers. Like a technology being quite expensive even if you lose the lowest (unrealistic cheap) bar for all costs? Then that is a bad technology and it doesn't matter that you have very wide error bars as you are already looking at the optimal choice.
----
EDIT: Me going of on a tangent, maybe ignore :/
Some technologies complement each other well (like most like solar + wind + some gravity storage, as both can have uneven output, but (at live where I live) extremely windy days are often reduced sunny and extremely sunny days often not so windy, and gravity storage can handle "dunkelflauten" sufficiently (and is has already been build and is in use(!), not some hypothetical tech like some people pretend it is)).
But also some technology works against each other, e.g. non _fully_ subsidized nuclear sells a roughly constant power output at a constant (and quite high! if not highly subsidized) cost. But if other electricity can "sometimes" produce supper cheap electricity for some hours, days or even weeks then nuclear can not compete _at all_ during this times, makes losses and need to increase the yearly average price to compensate. Which makes it even less competitive. Hence in a actual "dynamic/free" energy market nuclear makes no sense even if you ignore long term waste storage or risk for contaminating essential parts of your country risks. Still a _fully_ subsidized nuclear base power level might work if you can't generate enough electricity in average through other means. Still this IMHO makes it somewhat of a "only if there is no other solution, not competing on the free marked" choice, i.e. a bad choice you might have to do but might be able to fully avoid (e.g. by using hydro power).
Oh and please stop brown coal, especially low quality brown coal. In all categories of health damage, environmental damage, climate damage it has _horrible_ scores both during mining and usage even for modern versions with filters etc. Sure it looks cheap on paper, but it's maybe THE worst kind of power source there is. Especially if run on low quality coal and without modern filter technology. Brown coal should be a "never choose this no matter what" choice.
I know it's not what you wanted to start here with this comment. But the silly, tangential, petty bickering in this thread goes a very long way to explain our failure to act to stop the catastrophe we've known was coming since the 80s.
Please do not forget the /s since there are young people here or those people who arent native English speakers and they might not catch the sarcasm given its an important topic, esp for the wellbeing of our future generations.
Young people who aren't native English speakers should realize that /s isn't English, but a convention among some very specific sites. Of which hacker news isn't included.
It's even dumber than that. Someone built a wind farm near Trump's golf course in Scotland and now he hates wind farms: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo. He thinks they're ugly and noisy.
If this is true, this is the person some folks think is fit to lead a nation. One little thing not suiting his whim of the day? Lets hate something that helps with energy production.
This is absolutely true. He has been angrily obsessed about this for years, and since he is a malignant narcissist with an ever greater need for narcissistic supply, his irritation has been manipulated by powerful lobbyists that tell him his instincts are brilliant and correct.
This site only recently (a few years ago) got multithreading. I'm pretty sure it could run off a second-hand laptop. It doesn't require a datacentre: just the two(?) moderators' salaries, and some rounding-error electricity and ISP costs.
Wouldn't need datacentres if we had IP multicast routing. And actually, Netflix doesn't need that anyway: anycast and telco CDNs get most of the advantages, albeit at the cost of only being available to established players. Netflix uses AWS because it's cheaper and easier for them, not because it's technically necessary: if AWS shut down (with enough notice), Netflix would migrate to an alternative system, and nothing much would change.
You have no clue what you're talking about while trying to act smug and talking down to someone who knows at least a little bit more than you. Netflix cannot run without massive DCs, whether that be theirs or Amazon's.
I'm not trying to act smug. Open Connect (Netflix's telco CDN system) doesn't seem like it'd take "massive DCs" to maintain: per [DG], each Open Connect Appliance (OCA) draws between 350W and 750W (depending on model) at peak use, plus cooling to keep it below 26°C (with peaks up to 40°C permitted). By its nature, the OCAs should be geographically distributed, not centralised. With the Open Connect network handling the most popular shows (i.e., the peak load), you'd only need to serve the long tail of the back-catalogue from elsewhere.
I don't know the true numbers, because I'm lazy, but [DG] says that storage OCAs can take 6.5 TB of traffic for a fill window, so we can take this as a lower bound for the storage. I'll use my earlier 1 PB overestimate for the total catalogue. Assuming that every OCA has the same data on it, this is (at least) 0.65% of the catalogue. Assuming a Zipf's law distribution of popularity for 20k titles, this means the Open Connect network can serve the top 130 titles:
>>> range1 = lambda i: range(1, i+1)
>>> sum(1/i for i in range1(130)) / sum(1/i for i in range1(20000))
0.5198676299332914
which is over half of all Netflix traffic. In reality, this number is surely higher: different parts of the Open Connect network hold different titles depending on regional popularity, storage isn't 100% redundant, and so on: I wouldn't be surprised if it were closer to 70% or 80%.
Modify Netflix so you have to request an item from the back-catalogue a day in advance, or something, and the cost to serve the long tail of Netflix goes waaaay down. (Considering that Netflix used to work by sending you physical DVDs, which have more than a day's delay to them, I don't think this is unreasonable.) If you want to get costs down even further, combine this with some custom UDP-ish torrent protocol, and make it peer-to-peer among users (not just the Open Connect network).
But if you go too far in this direction, people will start asking why they're even paying Netflix in the first place. Netflix has to remain an infrastructure provider, not just a rentier, if they want to preserve their business model.
Or, pie-in-the-sky, if we implemented a worldwide pubsub multicast system, then the top 200 90-minute titles multicasted at 30-second intervals would cost Netflix the bandwidth of just 36000 simultaneous streams, and they could run all of Netflix off the hardware of 200 OCAs… which would fit in one (1) datacentre. Or I could assemble a custom rig that would fit in… ten racks, ballpark estimate, given generous application of duct tape: which probably means I've way underestimated the capacity of each OCA. (Serving unpopular titles on demand would be cheaper than sending out multicast broadcasts that nobody's subscribed to: it would actually be even cheaper than this estimate.) It's such a shame that the only internet-routeable protocols are TCP, unicast UDP, and ICMP.
Let’s go with what this is actually about, windmills. I lived next door to a farm with windmills on it and I actually found them mesmerizing and nice to look at. Also a fun talking point with people visiting, but if we all had them in our backyard I suppose that novelty would wear off.
So tl;dr: I would absolutely want to have windmills as my neighbours again. Datacenter not so much, but they are also substantially bigger, though not taller, than windmills.
Ah, sometimes it can look quite nice, or at least striking. Though usually after end of life. The Tate Modern in London is an old power station, and a disused oil power plant in Dublin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poolbeg_Generating_Station#Poo...) has become sufficiently iconic that its operator was refused permission to demolish its chimneys; they're now protected structures.
To undermine my own point further, Battersea Power Station in London is iconic. In particular the control rooms were very well-styled with lots of art deco ornamentation, anyone who's listened to Quark, Strangeness and Charm by Hawkwind will have seen it as it's the source of the album art. To be honest I think the idea that ornament in general is bad did a lot of visual damage to the world.
A huge coal power plant belching smoke probably looked pretty cool, maybe even majestic, the first time you saw London back in the Victorian Era. That's before the entire city became saturated in soot, you developed respiratory problems, and you'd seen the same stinky monstrosity every day for most of your short difficult life.
I like wind farms, but I think it's fair to observe that they're often built in nice places, whereas fossil fuel infrastructure is built in places you'd never go to voluntarily.
Drive around Southern California and you’ll see everything from oil derricks to refineries in places which would otherwise be full of housing if they weren’t so polluting.
Some of them are right next to housing. Huntington beach has wells adjoining homes near the beach. Look up the prices of the houses if you want to really go crazy
They're certainly not silent, but unless you're actually standing right under one they're rarely particularly noisy. Modern ones should be about 35 decibels at 300 meters distance. You're never going to hear an offshore one, really.
Yeah, under most circumstances you're really going to struggle to hear much, because if they're going fast, well, there's a lot of wind, and _wind_ is noisy, too. They make _detectable_ noise, but under normal conditions it's not really going to be human noticeable noise.
They're most certainly not silent! If you're standing right under one, you can hear it over car traffic and the breeze! (Well, unless the wind is blowing really hard: then the wind might be louder than either, considering the usual minimum distance between wind turbines and roads.) Whatever will you claim is silent next? Refrigerators? Lightbulbs?
These people are not interested in coherent policy. They say whatever they want to justify it, we know it, and they know we know it. It’s an intentional expression of domination.
At least they’ll be out of office or age out eventually, we’ll just collectively as US taxpayers with a federal income tax burden (top ~40% of income earners, bottom ~60% have no federal income tax liability) have to pay back hundreds of billions of dollars in excess debt incurred because of this governance failure mode we experienced (or default on the debt, which is also an option).
My hot take is: be ready to move fast when the winds shift and we can get back to building instead of harm reduction.
("Progress occurs one funeral at a time." -- Max Planck)
I’m not endorsing the current administration’s policy, nor do I think it would succeed, but I find this comment really perplexing since this action is PRECISELY in line with the 2025 National Security Strategy. [1]
Also, for further insights on some of the unstated policy, I recommend reading the project 2025 document as well. [2]
Perhaps by “coherent policy” you meant “sound” or “effective”? But as it stands it certainly is coherent.
It's even more hilarious than that because all nuclear energy is heavily subsidized by taxpayers already. People such as Doug just lie strategically. No surprise in that current government of liars.
All forms of power generation are heavily subsidized. Anyone complaining about a particular form being subsidzed is a dishonest liar.
I am personally for building nuclear and compulimenting it with some wind and hydro, but that is not related to what things are subsidized but because nuclear and hydro has worked really well here in Sweden providing reliable power and while wind has a spottier record I think diversification is good.
I’m for Thorium research and development. The Chinese again seem to be moving ahead once again, they seem to be open to ideas that work. In the past when America was more of a can-do country the Chinese or Russian development of Thorium reactors (Oak Ridge tech) would have been a Sputnik moment.
Today the reaction is pretty much silence and the same goes for useful infrastructure ie the rail system is pretty much 1950s technology across the United States.
I wish there was more context as to what the deal actually was instead of a highlight reel of late 2000s era right wing slogans like "drill baby drill".
It's framed as US government giving $1.2b to German company not to build something (which is weird in its own right). But after drilling into it (correct me if I'm wrong):
RWE is a large German utility
It paid $1.2b for development rights and invested a bunch of money.
The US passed policies that made it impossible to develop the plan.
So it's essentially a negotiated unwind of government-issued property/development rights. US changed the rules, made the lease ineffective and compensated the leasee. But the deal was that instead of RWE just taking the money they agreed to other development projects related to natural gas (better in my opinion).
You might disagree with the policies that made these wind farms impossible or whether the buy out of federal leased land is fair to one party or another. But I wish articles actually cared enough to describe the situation clearly.
Questions I would like mentioned in the article in place of Trumps rhetoric about "big ugly windmills" is details about the actual restrictions that made it impossible, history of it, impact, etc.
To be fair offshore wind is relatively expensive. A brand new wind farm is probably cheaper than burning methane because Trump started another pointless war, but it's closer than for like Solar PV.
Of course "common sense" ought to probably include "Not cooking ourselves".
It’s disappointing to see Redditesque room temp iq discourse in the comments.
Has anyone mentioned the expected cost per Mwh of this project to get a sense whether this made economic sense, or are we talking Biden admin adjacent vanity political project paid by rate payers?
Just for reference, the hopefully-cancelled Empire wind near me had a 20yr PPA of $155mwh, which makes Vogtle (-~$170mwh) look like a steal.
More numbers and less foaming at the mouth, please.
I read up recently on the history of the fall of the roman empire and it was fascinating how eerily similar it was to the current state of the US. Overwhelmed by corruption and wars they make stupider and stupider decisions on ever larger scales, ever more frequently. And the population grows ever more cynical, eventually opting for authoritarianism before eventually the center can't hold any more and it all collapses in on itself.
Funnily enough, the most striking part was the pure stupidity of a lot of it - seems so strange, but every day it seems I hear another really stupid story and think ... huh, maybe it really can be like that.
Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest. It sure looks stupid when you look at America or the Roman Empire as a whole. But when you look at the specific individuals doing these "stupid" things, and the individuals enabling them, it is perfectly aligned with their own best interests.
It’s going to be very hard to turn around over 60 years of behavior, particularly the part of interfering and spending money like a drunken sailor on special interests oil and military, the complex is coming to an end and the piggy bank is running out of money. Without useful internal infrastructure building within the country and I don’t mean data-centers, a restructure, a rethink, the decline will just accelerate.
> Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest.
Sure, but in cases like the new Navy battleships... it's just plain dumb, no two ways about it. Aside from the new ship class name, I see no way that it could be attributed to self-interest.
Wait, it is all about the name and that it's big, isn't it. That is self-interest I suppose, but it's just vanity, which is the stupid form of self-interest.
> Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest.
Interesting. Sounds like a counter-point to Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
I use Hanlon's quite a bit to explain nonsense I see day to day, but this is a better one in some ways. It shift the conclusion of "but if only they were shown the right way" to "they know what they are doing and are looking out for number 1".
The current administration has taken the edge off Hanlon's razor. Now I prefer saying "Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
Interesting. I had not considered how scale affects these mental model.
Now I wonder if depending on the scale, one model is better suited. Or maybe they both can be modified based on the scale.
Maybe self-interest is easier to reason about than the interests of a group. Conflicting self-interests can lead to compromises that result in what looks stupid in the end.
If an empire is subject to the whim of individuals acting in their own self interest, which causes damage and destruction to the empire, I think this is the definition of dying? It has no recourse against the looters so it gets looted to death.
Ultimately the strings are being pulled by someone who stands to gain, but it's not like Trump, Hegseth, Rubio, &co are playing 5D chess here. There are a lot of stupid blundering narcissists running things right now. The actual string-pullers know that, and as long as the stupid blundering narcissism doesn't get in the way of the string-pulling then it doesn't matter to the string-pullers, because stupid blundering narcissists are ultimately the right people for the job (easily manipulated themselves, and effective manipulators of the public). But that doesn't make them or their decisions or their statements less stupid.
Not to mention this all rides on the stupidity and emotional fragility of literally tens or hundreds of millions of voters; anything less and the project would never be possible. That's one reason debilitating the education system at all levels has become a top priority of the current administration (the other being suppression of the free thinking and often liberal or left-wing politics that historically exist at universities).
It’s the lack of coherent leadership at the top, the lawyers, junk bond, equity bankers, oil-men, and the military have had their chance, it’s time for the engineers, science, medical, builders, local bankers and internal infrastructure people to run things. And when I say run things I mean, stop accepting their word as the truth.
You're not going to build a long-term stable system that doesn't limit wealth accumulation, because it doesn't take long until all the power is back with everyone you mentioned.
Does our evolutionary fitness function count as self-interest? Climate change is on a runaway trajectory. We're in line for Darwin's top honour, but no one will be around to receive the award.
I like these comparison with Roman Empire but it seems too simplsitic and Ive learned that usually means "its not so right actually".
Meaning for example, what about empires that actually survived or adapted? What did they do that we know exactly didnt the Roman Empire do that saved them? How does zeitgeist impact this in the sense that what ruined Roman Empire might save a nation today?
Not trying to be negative, Im jsut geniunley curios because then if I was in government, Id be "yeah I see the same. I mscared as fuck were messing it up, but then what should we do?" because you see, everybody is giving at advice with very diverse and extreme ideas on what should happen. Probably with most of them you and I wouldnt be OK with (do Dictatorships work? ...).
Or simpler, we all agree on the problem. What are all the solutions and how do we know theyre the correct ones? Thats what Im thinking about the last years.
"Empire" is really just a large hereditary monarchy with the ability to subordinate nearby ethnic groups into a unified political/military command. They can be remarkably stable. China managed two to three thousand years, depending on whether you want to count Zhou (pre-Qin unification) or not. I suspect in another millenium the Chinese empire historians will gloss over the discontinuous period of the 20th century ("nuclear glass layer era") and claim four thousand years.
Well, the Holy Roman Empire inherited the name but, as Voltaire said, "was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire"...
And the Byzantine Empire shrunk greatly after the first few hundred years. Most of its life it was more like a Greek nation that sometimes managed to expand to control parts of the old empire.
Eh, inheritance implies the predecessor willed it to you upon death. In the case of the "Holy Roman Empire" the predecessor died 334 years earlier with no successor. This isn't a case of inheritance, it's a case of just making shit up.
The "byzantine" empire did inherit the name though. They continuously used and claimed the name "roman" from when the roman empire split (and called both halves roman) right up until 1453, even their language was called romaic. That we don't refer to them as roman to this day is really a strange success of propaganda.
> And the Byzantine Empire shrunk greatly after the first few hundred years.
Which by itself sort of contradicts the claim that empires historically fall quickly? The roman empire began in 27 and in 565 it controlled almost the entire Mediterranean. Sure a few hundred years after the split (which itself is a few hundred years after the beginning of being an empire) it shrank but that's a long time.
This is like saying that all the countries in the world that speak English are England, that's not how it works. Countries are not defined by the language they speak, and the language they speak most definitely varies over time.
Moreover you're picking a date hundreds of years into the eastern empire's existence and declaring "because they switched official languages hundreds of years later, they were always Greek". Time doesn't flow like that.
Moreover the roman empire, pre-split, spoke quite a bit of this language (well, Koine Greek, the predecessor to Romaic). Including in official communications (particularly in the east), and at least one emperor's private diaries [1].
No 27 BC – AD 476 the Roman Empire the one that everyone thinks about at maximum strength lasted 503 years basically Augustus Caesar to AD 476. The eastern empire was but a shadow of the Roman empire ruled from Rome.
> what about empires that actually survived or adapted?
Really the Roman Empire did very well on this one, depending on when you date its final end to. But the pattern is there, especially if you look at the more rapid and more recent collapse of the Chinese empire, with the result of the Imperial line extinct and the successor state stuck on a relatively small island.
All administration exists on a spectrum from bureaucracy to personal intervention. You can break out Max Weber here, but it is generally agreed that a state needs a bureaucracy to be effective on a large scale. This machine "works" when it is functioning uniformly and according to process in order to achieve goals, and it breaks down when it is disrupted by a system of personal grift, favor, corruption and favouritism.
So the collapse of China runs roughly: poor leader (dowager Empress Cixi) -> ineffective state -> pushed over by foreign powers (European states vs Boxer rebellion) -> even worse leader (Puyi, last Emperor of China, took the throne at age 2) -> pushed over by foreign powers again (Japan) -> internal collapse of remaining China (Maoist rebellion).
Edit: forgot the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion, which belongs on the front of that list at about 1850, which is yet another civil war that killed somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population of China!
It would be a fun alternative history to swap the Japanese and Chinese leadership of the 1850-1950 era, such that Japan remains a feudal agricultural state and China got the Meiji restoration. How many carriers do they arrive at Pearl Harbor with?
> we all agree on the problem. What are all the solutions and how do we know they're the correct ones?
That is not at all how the last few years have worked, because an astonishing amount of lying about everything from basic facts to obvious outcomes is polluting the discourse.
The concerning part is that peak lead exposure was with Gen X. We're still being led by boomers and silent generation. So any contribution from lead stands to get worse before it gets better.
It's entirely possible that things don't get better (or continue to get worse) for reasons unrelated to lead. The addition of the internet is way too big of a confounding factor to say that lead was actually good though, IMO it's more likely that we haven't learned how to parent children in the modern world yet (though arguably that has always been true).
And "cognitively [un]developed" is a weird way to say it; I wouldn't call that a "bland" term at all.
I hate this theory. It is extremely condescending, offers nothing, has no proof, but sounds plausible enough that many people believe it.
It is much more likely that our economic system rewards hostile behavior and that money has outsized influence in politics and a criminal justice system which lets rich people get away with crimes. That money correlates more with hostile behavior then lead, Instead of blaming lead, blame capitalism.
Just think about all the people who put lead in the gasoline in the first place, did they go to prison for their crimes, or did they make a bunch of money and retire in luxury.
It's spelled lead, and it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to cause brain damage. There is no safe level of lead exposure, it causes neurological damage at any level of exposure and it stays in your body permanently.
You're wrong on every count and simply spreading disinformation. Please don't do that.
I think we all understood the comment implied it’s been a factor, not THE driver. I’d be a little more generous in your interpretation of their comment, even if it is a bit flippant.
Wow I never knew about this theory! But I like your comment because ... idk, if its true at least its as simple as "Lets avoid that, and we ensure each Empire of today exists forever." I wish that was true! So how can we be sure, as somewhat smart people, that this is true and responsibly communicate it? Because everything else is dishonest and hurts our society.
Im no history expert but I know there were other Empires thru different times and sizes and places, and since now they're not the same, they "Failed"? Did they fail exactly due to the same problem or others? Are we treating those too? What is our method and how strong did we criticize it and see and understand it flaws?
At a time with fake news, AI slop and whatever the Internet has become today, its our job to treat every statement with the highest from of critical thinking at our disposal.
It seems like checks and balances are collapsing so the corruption gets worse, just selling out nature, our health more and more for personal gain until something breaks.
It feels like the rate of stupid we have achieved in the last (checks watch) ~18 months has surely eclipsed anything that may have occurred during the roman empire. By sheer volume alone?
I mean no disrespect, but if you're seeing a deep parallel between the Roman Empire's final days and what's going on in the US today, I would say you need to study Roman history more. It was in deep chaos that most people in the world today can't even imagine.
The Empire was relentlessly invaded by tribes like the Visigoths and the Vandals, and they even sacked Rome multiple times in the 400s CE. There was a huge amount of political corruption, and no, I don't mean anything like what's going on in the US. Military leaders and royal guards fought each other for power, leading to frequent civil wars and leaders who didn't last long. No one wanted to join the military and so it had to hire foreign mercenaries who didn't really have any loyalty. The Roman Empire eventually split right in half because a single ruler could not project power over the entire territory. The Western Roman Empire spoke an entirely different language from the Eastern Roman Empire (Latin vs Greek)!
I'm sorry, but I keep hearing these comparisons from people who seem to have a very shallow understanding of history and are looking for patterns because they read online that the US is crumbling. Maybe, maybe not, but it is not the same thing or even similar. The differences are far more than the similarities.
A better parallel is the fall of the republic with the rise of strong men using populism and power to dismantle its form of democracy in favor of authoritarianism.
The Romans pretty much had their way (peak) for 300 years. Yes decline was not instantaneous, but no one can complain about having 300 years of relative success/dominance, which they did once they defeated the Carthaginians all the way to about 200 A.D.
The Romans pretty much had their way. Their decline happened pretty much in the same way all civilizations end the elite’s participation in defending the empire or their civilization became less and less in short decadence sound familiar? Arguably the Civil War was probably the last war where the largest percentage of the elite actually participated in fighting the war and that percentage has gone down in every war since.
The United States from its founding until about 1990 had its way but now the shine appears to be coming off slowly. The way it currently looks 2100 is probably going to have a new number 1.
> The way it currently looks 2100 is probably going to have a new number 1.
I'm sure 2050 will already have a new number 1. Which will probably be China, all things considered.
Whatever America is doing to perpetuate its hold on the world e.g. the petrodollar is only making it slip away faster, because it is based in a world that no longer exists.
If America would embrace the future it actually could change. But the ruling conservatives only look towards the past.
The idea about conservatism is all wrong though. They look at a changed world and the time that came before. And they think that if they recreate some of the conditions from that time, the whole world will rewind somehow. That's obviously false, the world has moved on.
Also, they look at that time with rose-coloured glasses. Like with MAGA, America never really was great. The time that MAGA seems to idolise had devastating wars for zero reason like Vietnam, despicable leaders like Nixon, and a population that was constantly afraid of a nuclear attack. But it's the time when boomers were young and had their entire future ahead of them.
If anything the 90s were pretty much the peak of the Western world in my opinion. The Soviet threat was suddenly gone, economy was booming, global warming wasn't really recognised yet and 9/11 hadn't happened.
Your comment is shockingly low in the rankings. Anyone who upvoted the parent is being absolutely ravished by confirmation bias. Yes the US has big problems, but that doesn't mean anyone should unthinkingly approve of any thought that's critical of it.
HS history is more than enough dispel any notion that this is anything like the Roman Empire.
Very dissapointed in the HN community in this moment.
> opting for authoritarianism before eventually the center can't hold any more and it all collapses in on itself
It all depends on what you define as the collapse of the Roman Empire, but the earliest sensible candidate date would be about four and a half centuries after the population 'opted' for authoritarianism (which wasn't much of a choice for anyone btw).
People need to stop making senseless historical comparisons.
But then it's also true the real arc of these things is only properly visible in retrospect. For example I'm sure historians looking back would include the Iraq war as one of the data points on stupidity even though in the moment, people would feel it is totally disconnected from current circumstances. So we are still talking decades.
Also the Roman culture towards the end was increasingly concerned with recycling old works and turning them into ever more ridiculous and derivative new works. Sound familiar?
> I read up recently on the history of the fall of the roman empire
> eventually opting for authoritarianism
The Roman Empire was always authoritarian. You might be interested in the collapse of the Roman Republic, where the abuse of slaves and farmers for the indulgence of the middle class and elites led to a popular clamoring for the strongman general Julius Caesar to impose justice (through dictatorship) on their "republic" by force, because their republic had never represented the demos.
I'm reading two books right now: Stefan Zweig's World of Yesterday and Ulrich Gutmair's First Days of Berlin. The similarities to the current state of US are eerie as hell.
Yes, Britain pretty much went the same way after World War I, and went into acceleration downward after World War II. The final cap may have been Brexit.
The end is usually considered to have been the Suez crisis; after exiting India, the UK failed to invade a Middle Eastern country in order to control a narrow waterway. If you want parallels to the present.
Brexit is a particularly 21st century phenomenon, a failed attempt to retreat to autarky.
That redux of "Rise and Fall of Roman Empire" suggests a policy shift, and a media shift, for USA and globally.
* Smart Decisions can be celebrated
* Stupid Decisions can be "5-whys" root-cause analyzed
Shaming, and all that, can be left aside. And instead focusing on the possible Wins.
A success-oriented approach, of applauding and ranking The Most Smart Policies, could be a way forward. It's innately motivating.
Democratic Decline is real. Voter apathy is real. Gaslighting by power-focused politicians is real, and lack of a "service" mindset by those politicians, too. This is compelling stuff, obsessing over doom, and it's demotivating.
Celebrating The Most Smart policies is something I enjoy. E.g. on YouTube there is a Good News channel which lists "top 10 good pro-environmental / pro-social actions":
I started with the Lex Fridman podcast [0] and then I went from there exploring further with reading mostly online material interweaved with discussions with ChatGPT. It is actually a fascinating way to read about history. Admittedly, it is hardly a way to gain a proper comprehensive understanding.
I didn't think this comment would get so many replies!
Not OP but the book ”The storm before the storm” covers what sets in motion the fall of the republic. I think the foreword or opening chapter notes the similarities with the state of the US (Trumps first presidency at the time of writing).
The author is the podcast host of ”History of Rome”, which is also great, and he does the audiobook narration perfectly.
He's also the podcast host and narrator of Revolutions, a deep dive into major revolutions starting in Britain with Charles Stuart and ending with Stalin (well, technically ending with a science fiction revolution on Mars), with stops in Haiti, Mexico, France, Germany. It ran weekly from 2013 to 2025. Absolutely recommend.
This is the endgame of encouraging everyone to vote. The theory was representatives would be motivated to address the interests of everyone as a whole. The reality is politicians are motivated to take advantage of the stupid and the fearful in order to gain and exploit power.
Republicans are in a personality cult and establishment democrats are stuck in the midpoint between expoliting people the same way and expecting to win because they're "right" and "deserve" victory without the real consent of the people, equally as self interested but worse at it. The quiet racism of establishment democrats might save us by marginalizing muslim democrats -- there are a few of them like Mamdani who aren't allowed in the club and are thus actually thinking for themselves beyond self-interest and the corruption of the establishment. They as a group might save us.
If you want someone to blame, target the DNC. In a time of dangerous foolishness they utterly failed to and are continuing to fail to provide an attractive alternative.
Blaming the people who aren't quite as good at politics for the actions of the people who actually won the last election and are fucking this country seems... Insane?
Yes. Their whole job is defending the republic and in the easiest to win election they succumbed to the ego of a bumbling old man and failed to lead on anything at all. Those fools couldn't sell bottled water in a desert.
You absolutely can blame the goalie for failing to defend the goal.
The issue will be "out of sight, out of mind" (or rather knowingly ignored) until the issue appears at scales as small as the home village, which in terms of the US government means the front and back yard of the white house or similar.
These people are living in parallel societies, where they are completely detached from the reality for many people living in the country. And that is not merely a problem in the US.
Nearly all of those are forests that are supposed to burn every year or two. Check with a forester knowledgeable in your specific area because there is no universal truth here. However the generalization that all forests in North America need to burn regularly for good health is true even though there are exceptions.
I am a small scale forester (hundreds to thousands of acres). Supposed to burn is ... complicated and not necessarily true. Many forests in the PNW have had indigenous Americans burn them regularly because it improves forest health. These fires were typically kept small and well maintained to avoid damage to the trees. White settlers put a stop to this practice, and natural fires were considerably less common than anthropogenic ones in some regions.
So it might be correct to say that fires can be healthy for forests, but "supposed to" is more difficult to assert.
I just finished limbing, brush clearing, and preparing burn piles from a section of my forest because removing fuel is good, but most forests in America are young planted forests. They have smaller trees, less diversity, higher than typical density, and small trees that can cause fires to climb to crowns (where they then become deleterious rather than helpful.)
If we were to return to indigenous practices of regular burning, we would likely see healthier forests. But I'm not sure we'd see as much timber production from them. Since that's what most forests are held for... I don't see practices moving away from trying to maximize timber while minimizing cost any time soon.
Thanks for that complexity. I've posted brought the same thing and all the responses have been "no, fire is bad" from people who obviously have no idea what they are talking about.
I'm standing by my claims. However understand that I am in no way contradicting anything you said.
All forests in the American west, barring a few relatively small parks, are new growth. Predominantly from settlers cutting them down.
Indigenous practices changed which trees grew, for instance the Gary oak was much more prevalent in areas they tended. But old growth was predominantly removed by settlers.
Nope. The woods in Oregon (Willamette Valley) and WA were planted and/or allowed to grow by settlers. There are true old growths along the coast and higher up the mountains.
If you want to specifically hike through the old-growth forests, Olympic Peninsula in WA is the best option.
Humans were modifying the Earth on the continent-wide scale long before the industrial age.
Yes, in the Wilamette Valley the indigenous folks maintained Gary Oaks and prevented other trees from growing there. This was open oak savannah, and when the settlers came in they took the land and turned it to agricultural land. What they couldn't plant on, they ignored, and other tree species moved in to land that was previously managed to grow Gary oaks.
I'm a PNW native, you don't need to tell me about the small sliver of old growth we still have in the Olympics.
> Yes, in the Wilamette Valley the indigenous folks maintained Gary Oaks and prevented other trees from growing there.
Yes, and that's a fancy way of saying "used periodic burns" to remove the vegetation to make the land more hospitable for grazers. Meaning more animals to hunt, this was arguably a form of agriculture and also served to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
> I'm a PNW native, you don't need to tell me about the small sliver of old growth we still have in the Olympics.
Then you should actually learn about the history, and not its Disneyified version.
I'm saying it doesn't matter. If the forest is getting the regular burning it needs anyway someone lighting an additional fire at a different time isn't going to make any difference.
Not that you shouldn't be careful, you can get yourself hurt in a natural fire (but it shouldn't be such a large fire that it kills you). Leave no trace should be your goal. Even if fire itself is something that doesn't matter, there are lots of other parts of leave no trace that that will also result in less fires.
It's pretty reasonable to think that a person-caused fire will be way worse than a natural fire, since the people ones will be distributed far closer to other people-things, like houses and other people.
It is important to keep the main issue clear. Failing to invest in renewables is an existential risk to humanity's future.
Permanently shutting all Datacenters (not just AI) saves us about 1 year.
also - 1 year is a lot, if we actually act diligently to stave the warming crisis and to prepare for some of the effects through changes to construction & infrastructure.
Still, I would agree that Data Centers are just one particular aspect of the struggle against global warming.
Ironically, we are also moving to more capable / faster models that use less power. DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is so extreme capable and comparability to a lot of models cheap to run.
We are seeing stuff like AMD buying Taalas, with their Llama 3 8B on a chip, being able to push 17.000 tokens / second.
People need to understand, that even AI companies do not like to build datacenters and the high energy needs. It cost them money and they are also looking at ways to develop better hardware / solutions that gives them more inference for cheaper (what means less power draw / heat generated).
Unfortunately, "more capable / faster models that use less power" will likely mean those models will be used in more places than ever before. LLMs on laptops, on tablets, on phones, on fridges, in your web browser. See the Jevons paradox.
I just tested out chatjimmy and a bit and it did some misinterpretation of my prompts, E.g. "write me a python script to generate insults for a name given by command line" had multiple of the same insult in the insult list, and it had a list of names like John and Jane instead of doing the obvious thing and making the name a variable. Not good code.
Climate change is real, caused by humans, and the fires were seeing are absolutely exacerbated by the effects of the climate.
However this is the _least_ on fire the world has been for a while because it's usually Asian and Africa that are rampantly burning and they're improving land management techniques enough that it's tamping down on the worst of the burns.
The statistics for the number of deaths from climate-based disasters is clear: fewer and fewer people are dying the richer the world becomes. In fact the decrease in deaths is very significant:
"Annual climate-disaster deaths averaged around 77,000 per year in the 1960s–70s, dropped to about 33,000/year in the 1980s–90s, and fell further to roughly 27,000/year in 2000–2019 even as the number of recorded climate disasters rose from about 1,171 to 3,656 to 6,641 across those same periods."
If you're optimising for human life, then "drill baby drill", as more energy = more wealth. More wealth = better infrastructure, health care, dealing with extreme weather conditions.
If you think about this in terms of systems... it's unsustainable. You'll eventually get to a point where the damage you've done requires a flow of wealth/energy that cannot be generated for everyone.
I'm assuming that we can drive our environment to that kind of state, maybe there's an upper limit on how bad the environment can get. I'm not a climate scientist and don't have the curiosity to look into if there's a limit to climate change.
1. Of course it is. That is how models are built. They are not always correct of course, but it's the best we have.
2. We need to choose the cheapest energy option at the time. If renewables are cheaper then great, but making the poor even poorer to make is rich people feel better is not a good solution.
3. The consequences of making the world poorer is more people will die from climate related disasters.
When you say that the Greens provide subsidies to coal, but this can be found on a quick search…
> The next fight is already brewing, over a Green push to accelerate the phase-out of coal-fired power generation in eastern Germany. In a draft resolution, seen by POLITICO, the party wants to bring the coal exit forward from 2038 to 2030, as is already the case for mining regions in the west of the country.
Like all such articles they present a LONG list of politicians with "we're committed to/promising to/... phase out coal". And then a statement or two by the executive that they're increasing coal usage because they have no choice.
The problem is that there is no option left BUT coal.
This mixes several different things into one causal puddle.
Yes, keeping the remaining nuclear plants running would have reduced emissions and electricity prices somewhat. A 2024 Energy Policy study estimates the 2022/23 extension lowered German wholesale prices by about €9/MWh. That's a real effect, but nowhere remotely close to "the nuclear phase-out doubled electricity prices." The huge price spike was primarily the European gas crisis. You know, the one for which LNG terminals had been built.
Nor did Germany replace nuclear with coal. Coal generation subsequently fell to levels not seen in decades, while renewables grew substantially, so German emissions fell as well.
Attributing the nuclear exit simply to "the Greens" is rather selective history. The original exit was SPD/Greens, but after reversing it in 2010, Merkel's CDU/FDP government legislated essentially the final phase-out schedule again in 2011. So basically: every party that was at the levers of power.
You could make a perfectly reasonable argument that shutting existing nuclear before coal was bad climate policy in hindsight, because of the gas crisis. But I don't think you need to resort to the rather dubious claim that it doubled electricity prices as a singular cause.
A better question is why Germany invested in gas power plants in the first place. Gas has always been the most expensive source of electricity, even before "the gas crisis" (how many of those have we had already?):
I get the idea that Germany would buy Russian gas in exchange for not having to spend on the military, but 2014 clearly showed that it didn't work. And Germany still doubled down on gas after 2022.
Now the argument seems to be that Germany will buy American gas so that it can get lower tariffs.
I don't see how Germany can compete with a China that refuses to reject the cheapest forms of energy, whatever that is (both nuclear and coal are cheaper than imported gas).
On July 9, 2026, the Bundestag passed Germany's new electricity-capacity law, which subsidizes reserve/dispatchable power capacity as coal is phased out. SPD and CDU/CSU voted for it; the Greens and Die Linke voted against it.
The Greens specifically argued against a long-term fossil-fuel lock-in, while Die Linke argued for renewables and batteries instead of subsidizing new fossil gas plants.
The law itself is primarily about new hydrogen-ready/gas-capable reserve plants, not coal plants.
The argument I think is that the share could be lower if the nuclear plants were kept running (broadly, based on your numbers, it could be less than 20% in 2025). Whether that would have made economic sense (especially in terms of redirections funds away from renewables), I am not so sure of.
“midwit-pilled”? Is this a “How do you do, fellow kids” rhetorical ploy? You’ve got it backwards. The average American and European thinks the Earth will be destroyed in current year + 5 years, and modern sumptuary laws or ersatz-religious rituals around recycling or performative bicycling have a material impact on climatic fluctuations that take thousands of years.
If XKCD is your source, you’re not on the right side of the bell curve. Sorry, friend. It’s not your fault. It’s just cruel statistics to be average. We can smugly scoff at how religions exploited the gullible for their own empowerment, and yet be oblivious to how it’s happening to them. Wow, an eschatological crisis? Guess I better vote how I’m told and self-flagellate.
> The average American and European thinks the Earth will be destroyed in current year + 5 years
Midwit take, not evidenced whatsoever. Please cite a single source showing any substantial number of people who believe "the earth will be destroyed" within 5 years. Less than 20% of Americans even believe climate change will seriously negatively affect them personally within 50 years.
Or is this just lazy and dishonest shorthand for something like "believe we will encounter a higher rate of catastrophes?"
If so, you should be sure to lump in all those stupid emotional insurers who are also apparently under some eschatological spell that you're just too brilliant to be taken in by.
You could make an absolute fuck ton of money by insuring the areas that the stupid midwit cultist insurers think are uninsurable due to climate risk, you know. Literally just mountains of cash waiting to reward your brilliant contrarianism.
> If XKCD is your source
One little trick to claw your way up the curve of midwittery: when you encounter new information, look for the string "Source: " and then look up the text immediately following that. I provided the nearest thing to a picture-book that I could find, because exactly 0 people I've ever met with this attitude actually have the attention span to read even a single scientific paper, never mind a couple dozen or couple hundred. You are invited to defy the odds, find the backing sources, and dispute them directly.
It's kind of lucky for everyone that climate is mostly a perfect sliding scale, the more CO2 you avoid putting into the atmosphere the more heat capacity you'd avoid. So every bit helps. Many negative impacts of heat, like changing intense weather, biodiversity loss, and deaths to high heat also correspondingly change linearly with heat. So every bit is a literal victory, there's no major cutoff that we know of until things get really bad (which they might). What's your point?
Do you get angry at people for calling sea stars starfish? "They aren't fish they are echinoderms!"
Or perhaps you get angry at people who call light utility vehicles "trucks"?
Language evolves. People accept colloquial definitions. Wait until you learn about pencil lead, koala bears, dry cleaning, and peanuts. Windmill is absolutely acceptable if it's understood by people to mean wind turbine, which it is.
Over the last year, wind - mostly offshore - has generated more than 35% of electricity here. Gas is down to 27%. It's really, really good. And it looks cool.
This is the exact reason it's happening. Offshore wind is cheaper than gas /kWh and would therefore kill Trump's fossil fuel donor's profits. So kill offshore wind and the grid is forced to go to more expensive fossil fuel sources, which increased the grid price and means extra profits go to those companies. All this raises energy prices.
The oil industry is full of really smart people, but this all appears to be so stupid. Why don't the fossil fuel companies just expand their investment portfolios to include off-shore wind?
This is all in their wheelhouse: mega-scale construction, off-shore ops, dealing with the government in favorable ways, and such a simpler and lower-risk business!
It must be that they are just afraid of the entire idea of a competing sector? Or, they are addicted to the power they have controlling a more centralized energy distribution system? Or, what could it be? Again, I know these are not dumb people.
What's insane is that one person will cite something this in one place, but the rest of the people in the thread say "why aren't we building wind and solar????"
"We" is referring to the US federal government, elected by the US population, and which has (and is using) massive levers to kneecap development of renewable energy sources.
Some internet commentators may wish to unhelpfully point out that no matter the US federal efforts, renewable development will always be above literal zero, and so "we haven't stopped." But it's not a very useful contribution to the conversation.
There are dozens of similar articles about dozens of different projects and mechanisms used to stall those projects. Yes, I concede the level will almost certainly remain above zero and so "we haven't stopped." Good-faith adults know what the conversation is about and can either engage in it or opt out of it instead of resorting to excessive pedantry.
Yeah it's a good question, but unfortunately large infrastructure projects require a lot more than just formal legal protections of their funding and permitting.
If it takes just one retard at the top to disrupt a massive decades-long project, even in a way that eventually gets negated by a court, then ta-da, we just don't get any more big projects.
The courts, eventually-probably. What this does to the business environment and future endeavours regarding clean energy, however, is an exercise left to the reader
I implore you to think a little bit about what degree of political, policy, and economic stability is actually required for anyone to embark on decades-long, multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects, instead of resorting to "hurrr durrrr it's above zero amirite?"
Aloofness is not the sign of intelligence you wish it to be.
I suspect wind investment is going to take a decade to recover. Nobody wants to deal with a legal fight if they can avoid it. Offshore wind takes a lot of planning and engineering to deploy. These projects were halted midway, forcing the companies to eat a ton of costs while the construction was sitting idle.
Utterly Insane. I mean the saying "Truth is stranger than fiction" is proven true by this US administration again, again and again. If you put this as a plot point in a novel, you would get a 1-star rating with readers complaining about lack of realism.
People were for years joking about us approaching Idiocracy but I think this reality is already dumber than that in some regards. Trump & co really turbocharged the idiotification
In Idiocracy, President Camacho recognizes that someone has scientific skills and expertise* he doesn't and puts them in charge to help his people.
* even if it's just "feed plants water, not Gatorade."
From that angle, Idiocracy is notably BETTER than our current situation.
They even look like Captain Planet baddies. Trump with his orange skin, purple sores and ridiculous hair, RFK jr. walking around barefoot looking like a scrotum on steroids, Pete Kegsbreath answering the question "What if a mob boss fucked a frat bro", etc.
Is the game you're playing "see if I can be subtle enough to get away with undermining renewables through misleading statements on social media without people calling me out on it"? If so I think you're down 1 - 0 so far in this thread.
Best of luck on the next round though, really cool and awesome game!
Thank you comrade for your alert senses! You correctly identified that anybody who pretends to be a "moderate" voice or utters any kind of even light criticism towards the Party program is always a detractor or enemy spy which is trying to sabotage and undermine our internal cohesion.
The individual has promptly been dealt with and put in a reeducation camp. I will talk to your local commissar so that your brave act of psychological self defence in this message board is rewarded with +50 extra social credits.
No energy source producing the required amounts to run civilization will be non-disruptive to wildlife and the environment. But perfect is the enemy of good.
Renewable energy sources heavily reduce this factor, make countries more independent from imports (other countries) and slow down the catastrophic effects of increased atmospheric energy due to greenhouse effect of carbon-based energy sources.
Conservatives should be the top number one supporters of renewable energy because of more independence from other governments and better conservation of the environment.
But alas, the only thing they like to preserve is their personal greed.
It doesn't look cool. We should use less energy. But the turbines make the cost of the energy too obvious, we'd rather keep pretending there is no cost.
What's more mental you talk to any Germans about deprecating their Nuclear power stations they will bang on about their plan for renewables and then you read these sorts of headlines.
What the hell is happening over there? Why can't they get 'energy' despite being a scientifically literate nation. France has a far superior energy policy so it's not like you even have to travel beyond a few miles to see a wildly different price for electricity. At this rate French electricity will be half the price in a few years compared to German electricity. Germany is making mistake after mistake on energy. From Russian dependence to Nuclear scepticism to now accepting money to not build renewables.
Germany is already way ahead of the US in switching away from fossil electricity (also ahead of China).
Sure, keeping the entire nuclear fleet from ~2000 would have maybe helped, but would have required very costly (economically and politically!) investments over the last few decades, and those basically went into renewables instead which turned out fine.
I definitely wouldn't say that it turned out fine. The push against nuclear transcended into a larger push against electricity, making Germany a laggard in electrification. The car sector certainly isn't doing fine.
It's also funny how air conditioning powered by electricity is discouraged, while air conditioning in ICE cars or gas heating in buildings are at the very least tolerated. It's crazy if you think about it.
Nuclear scepticism… did you know that nuclear power plants need cooling? Germany is learning that lesson the hard way right now, just check the news, it really speaks for reducing their dependency on nuclear as having been a very very good idea.
No wait, they’re not learning it the hard way because they’ve already got rid of them. Phew…
There are indeed bidding zones in Europe. France is one bidding zone and Germany and Luxembourg is another one. Market prices are indeed pretty comparable.
Taxation and cost for the net are very different with a higher price for the connection in France and a higher price per kWh in Germany. In the end for a normal use of electricity the prices are very comparable.
I've never seen one here, which makes sense because we don't use much coal. I suppose if they were 200m high and scattered across half the state I'd have a similar opinion.
Coal mines are often associated with massive slag heaps and they can be over 200m in height.
They are not pretty but what they lack in beauty they make up for with danger to the local community from leached chemicals, underground fires and landslides.
Europe? The entire continent? The continent that includes large swaths of Russia?
I give up, I don't even know what you're trying to imply here. That somehow Texas (a state, in a country, in a continent) burns less coal than an entire continent? And...?
Meanwhile China is becoming entirely energy independent and electrifying their economy. I don't understand how the US doesn't see that they won't be top dog forever especially in this multipolar age.
As a proportion of total energy use, the US is ahead of China in moving away from fossil fuels by about 5 full percentage points. Most of the "energy independence" that China has is just based on burning coal.
This is the second time this week I have seen this website misrepresenting data using this same trick.
Primary energy is not total energy generated its total energy in the fuel used.
On average coal / gas plants are only ~35% efficient so the graph does not correctly represent the useful energy generated as percentage.
The graph is basically putting actual energy generation of solar and wind next to actual energy generated by coal and gas multiplied by 3.
If they want to be even close to representative of reality they should multiply the solar power generated by 4. The same has to be done for the wind energy but I am not sure what the efficiency of that is.
From their page:
> Each source is measured by its physical energy content: fossil fuels and biomass by the heat released when they are burned; nuclear and geothermal by the heat they produce; and wind, solar, and hydropower by the electricity they generate.
We see a lot of competing views on the modern right and the most dominant one is the sort of peace through strength dominate the world stance, but I think one that doesn’t get talked about as much is that actually being the global hegemon and competitive in the world shifts power away from traditional power structures like the church.
So losing to China is a feature not a bug. I think This explains Republican obsession with countries like Russia and Hungary that are certainly a few steps down the economic ladder from us.
They still mostly rely on coal. Slightly more than half of electricity is generated by burning coal, whereas in the US, it's only 15%. The renewable energy share in generation is roughly the same in the US and China, but not for capacity.
You can look at current levels, or look at trends. China has stopped increasing coal. They're building a small number of new coal plants, but this is outstripped by the coal plants being underutilized or decommissioned
China is really only building new renewables, almost 100x as much net renewable capacity per year compared to nuclear.
Only as recently as last year did China stop increasing its net electric generation from coal. And if you look at all primary energy (not just electricity), their dependence on fossil fuels is something like 90%.
That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, coal plants take at least 10 hours (but can take up to 48 hours) to start, warm up and synchronise from cold. That’s why hydro, gas, and increasingly large batteries are generally used for peaking.
Burning natural gas instead of coal should result in about half as much carbon emissions theoretically, although methane leaks will narrow the advantage.
German Climate scientists are claiming with 98% statistical certainty that warming has accelerated significantly since 2015, and believe we are looking at 3°C of warming by 2050, 5°C by the end of the century. That does not bode well for the future of anything.
The direction of travel is clear though. China is making massive investments in renewable energy (and dominating sectors like solar in the process) while the US seems hell bent on going the other way.
I'd be interested to see some sources. My understanding is that they're aiming to peak greenhouse gas emissions before 2030 and be carbon neutral by 2060.
> That [coal] share was well down from 65.5% in 2016, previous NEA figures showed.
> Renewable energy's share grew to 41.2% — topping 40% for the first time — and of that wind and solar accounted for 24.6%, Xing added. Wind and solar's share was up from 9.7% in 2020.
On the other hand only 3% of China's electricity comes from natural gas whereas 43% of US electricity does.
When combined coal and gas provide about 62% of China's electricity and 58% of US electricity. (Sources differ slightly on percentages. When you add in all fossil fuel electricity sources, China and the US get about the same percentage of electricity from them).
It is this way because China has plenty of coal and very little natural gas, whereas the US thanks to fracking has a lot of natural gas and it is much cheaper than coal so since then gas has rapidly replace coal.
That's the static picture. Now look at the first derivative. China is not just massively ahead at building renewables, they are massively ahead at building support infrastructure.
Look at UHV transmission lines for example: China has 60 000 km, quite a bit ahead of the 0 km in the US.
The US is the biggest oil producer in the world. Consumption does exceed production, but obviously this changes the calculus around energy independence.
It is the third largest coal producer, behind India and China.
The people running the government literally do not care. They only care about evading responsibility for decades of crimes by smashing all accountability mechanisms, disabling all oversight so they can loot the government, increasing dysfunction, feeding the culture war to keep us fighting each other over wedge issues instead of rising up, and flattering some utterly insane religious freaks so they have an immutable core of cult members. They're financed by America's arch enemies, easily manipulated, vain, and stupid. To them, America is a golden opportunity for naked theft of power and money.
Someone who is "rich" in a consumable asset and therefore chooses to just consume that instead of investing in a renewable or compounding asset is colloquially known as "a dumbass."
You are commenting on an article in which the US is deciding (and paying immense costs) in order not to do everything. The current administration is actively trying to squash several proven-valuable ways of converting non-renewable resources into renewable ones.
Your initial comment seemed to imply that these actions are the rational downstream consequences of the US's incentives. Now you seem to be suggesting that maybe it's not, but it's just the actions of the current administration?
Not sure what policy stability has to do with anything. If anything it's a further indictment of your point. A successful energy project will span multiple administrations to come to fruition. It takes just one administration to kill a project... as illustrated by TFA. This is not in fact explainable as a rational response to the US's incentives.
> US is rich in fossil energy so it doesn't have the same incentives as China does obviously.
China isn't rich in fossil energy? That's news to me.
They are the world's largest coal producer and still create over half of their electricity from coal. The difference to the US is that China seems to realize that this strategy isn't a long term solution.
Oh great. You've summoned the Sinophobes. You literally cannot say anything positive about China without these people coming out of the woodwork with their tired talking points.
No, we're not expecting someone else to stop it. We voted for this. The evil is not imposed on us. It is us.
Not everyone, but a majority. The minority is looking for ways to stop it, but it requires getting literally everyone else to work together. Which means any disagreement among them results in a loss, and more of the same evil.
I don't think "manipulating" is valid. A bit over a third voted one way, a bit under a third voted another, and a third didn't vote. The third that didn't vote was saying "sure, whatever".
I'm not sure it's fair to say it's "sure, whatever" on a national scale. The electoral college means you're most likely saying "sure, whatever" to the majority in your state. My vote in TN was the same outcome as if I sat home, and even if a third didn't show up there either, I imagine many knew Trump would win the state regardless and wanted that outcome.
The third that didn't vote does not exist. The net result was roughly 50/50.
Now, maybe this third will start to exist and vote if they either wake up, are seriously hit financially or someone annoys them enough.
Until then they decided to erase themselves from any decision making and if the world was fair they , would not have the right to any comment regarding whatever is related to their country.
> I'm not sure what nitpick you're trying to make.
The non voters are routinely used in discussions to lower the results of various parties. The message is "in reality only (a small) percentage supports them" (and then a ratio voters for that party / total population is taken).
What I am trying to say is that the people who did not vote do not exist in these statistics. Taking them into account is just a tactic to lower the results of competitors.
Additionally (but this is utopia) these people should not be allowed to comment in any form about the situation of the country (but again - this is utopia of course)
I also see examples of "he only got 1/3 of the vote", but that's not what I was trying to do. I was pointing out non-voters as effectively voting "either is fine", in which case effectively they both got 2/3 of the vote.
Interestingly enough, I noticed, at least in Europe, that a low participation is usually a sign of a country going well. People are more of less unaffected by the changes in politics so "either is fine".
And then when there are serious thigs at stake, the participation raises significantly. This was the case for instance in France in 2002 during the second round of the presidential election (Chirac vs. Le Pen) or in Poland in 1989 when the first free election was taking place.
Sure buddy. None of those changes to voting are "manipulating".
Counties that used to need federal preclearance closing 1,688 polling places once the Supreme Court said they didn't have to ask permission anymore is "just good fiscal sense".
North Carolina's legislature pulling data on which voting methods black people disproportionately used, then writing a bill restricting exactly those methods, is "election integrity". The Fourth Circuit threw the whole law out and said it targeted "African Americans with almost surgical precision". But sure. To you it's not manipulation.
Alabama passing voter ID and then closing 31 DMV offices, including every single one in counties over 75% nonwhite, is "saving taxpayer money". The federal DOT found it violated Title VI and made them reopen. Budget cuts, though.
Ohio's redistricting commission being told seven times by its own Supreme Court that the maps were unconstitutional, then running out the clock and holding the 2022 election on them anyway, is "federalism".
And then there's the fake electors, which people gloss over because they don't know how the process works. When you vote for president you're not voting for the president. You're voting for a slate of electors. Your state certifies which slate won, sends that certificate to Congress, and on January 6 the Vice President opens the certificates and they get counted. That's the whole election. It's paperwork.
So in 2020, in seven states Biden won, Republicans got a second set of people together, had them sign certificates declaring themselves the real electors and Trump the winner, and sent those to Congress and the National Archives. 84 people signed. Ron Johnson's office tried to hand-deliver the Michigan and Wisconsin ones to Pence on the floor on January 6. The plan, written down in a memo a month beforehand, was for Pence to count those and reject the real ones. That's "pragmatism".
Louisiana's governor suspending a congressional primary that was already underway so the legislature could delete a majority black district is just... I don't know. I'm out of ridiculous fucking excuses anymore.
And the third that didn't vote "said sure, whatever"? Some of them did. Some of them got purged off the rolls, or showed up to a precinct that isn't there anymore, or needed an ID from a DMV their county no longer has. Those are not the same group of people. Keeping the second group home is the point of everything above. Republicans have spent a decade making it harder for specific people to vote, and then pointing at the resulting turnout as proof nobody cares. Well it worked on you at least.
If you include all of the non-voters as tacitly consenting to it, then it's an overwhelming majority.
That's not entirely accurate; quite a few non-voters were prevented from voting in one way or another. But most non-voters chose not to vote. Quite a few were explicit about having some disagreement with the primary opponent and concluded that the two sides are equivalent.
...and this inability to get people to work together is architected, designed, and reinforced constantly. Fact: no where in any general education within the United States are people taught how to discuss issues with disagreement. This is strategic: the lack of this education creates easily emotionally swayed non-intellects that fall for cons over and over. The US is a conman paradise.
Do any other countries teach it? I'd be curious to know how such a curriculum works.
I have dark suspicions that it would be difficult to implement in the US, because of existing divisiveness. One side or the other would likely see such a course as biased against them, and step in to prevent it (or bias it for them). Even if it studiously avoids discussing politics, it will be easy to step into something easily analogized to politics.
It used to be taught, every high school and many early junior high and elementary schools had debate clubs, and the ability to hold complex and nuanced debate used to be intellectual entertainment for many. however, then the 60's youth rebellion saw the "debate stars" all on the youth side and arguing against the hypocrisy of the status quo. Soon, debate clubs were disbanded, and the formal rules of debate changed to allow for "cheap tactics" that destroyed the intellectual purity and allowed literal stunts, information overflow and diversion tactics to be allowed. That set the stage for debate and a pop culture intellectualism to die a quick death. Within a decade, the ability to discuss controversial topics without emotional outrage was lost. Now we are bereft.
Democracy is only ever choosing between two evils. You will never agree entirely with either candidate. In order to reach a majority, you will have to reach some kind of compromise with people with goals you hate.
As has been famously stated, democracy is the worst system, except for all of the others. I think people often underestimate just how bad it is.
You should never need to pick between just two candidates though.
The need for any sort of alternative system to first-past-the-post should've been plainly obvious in the '00 election. The problem is the people that could change that were elected under a first-past-the-post system and don't want to lose their current advantage.
Sadly, the biggest group pushing for an alternative is FairVote, who exclusively push RCV/IRV, which doesn't fix most of the issues of FPTP and introduces new ones. I'm bombarded by their ads, where they outright lie about its properties ("RCV ends the spoiler effect", "RCV means no more voting for the lesser evil").
It doesn't fix the spoiler effect (it makes its own version of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze ), and it removes monotonicity. The second one is a big deal for me, at least in FPTP a vote for a candidate always helps them. With RCV, a vote for a candidate can hurt them, and sometimes not voting makes the outcome you want more likely than if you did vote for it.
The 2022 Alaska election was a great example of it failing: https://realrcv.equal.vote/alaska22/ FairVote called that election a success because people managed to fill in their ballots, even if they didn't get the outcome they thought they were voting for.
That's been the system for over 200 years and Americans have never changed it, even though it only exists as it does to keep slaveowning states in the union and prevent a civil war (which it failed to do.)
If it isn't democracy now, it's never been democracy.
Democracy is people's power and the people in the US (and frankly most of the western world) are refusing to exercise it.
Democracy is not a legal framework but a cultural outlook that requires a sense of civitas. Which is mostly lost in the west (and in most other places, too) where deference to individual power has been allowed to become fully ascendant.
We rightfully decry the state authoritarianism in places like China, but their current seemingly superior ability to accomplish broader community betterment goals seems less to do with their political structure and more to do with still having some sense and confidence and optimism that people can in fact work together.
Meanwhile official small-l liberal ideology in North America fundamentally does not believe in this at all, and the ascendant far right is openly aggressive against this concept and an explicit "might makes right" ethos is becoming more and more triumphant and embodied in Trump.
Trump will eventually die and rot but the Stephen Millers of the world will still snake around in the background looking for the next pseudo-strong man to stand up and smirk all over a compliant population that has lost its desire to work together and just wants to submit to the loudest asshole in the room.
No constitution or election or political party saves the country from this. People's power does.
Can't help but roll my eyes every time an election between a guy who campaigned on locking up his political enemies and throwing out all the Mexicans, and an awkward black woman, is described as choosing "between two evils." Give me a break.
A lot of people cited Gaza as an example of "evil" by the last administration.
I can have a small amount of sympathy for that. What was happening there was indeed harrowing.
But only a small amount. It's one issue of many, and the other party was even more against Gaza. I'm hard pressed to see it as sincere to present that single issue as the only one that mattered, and overwhelmed all else.
Not voting against evil is indeed voting for evil and that is what the net majority did.
The minority doesn't have a charismatic leader to rally around so we don't have a "movement" that can fight back against the corruption at scale. Democrats need to stop taking the high road and start thinking "WWRD?" and out do them.
You don't really have a choice here. As a "conservative" (what ever that means...) I got two different evils that I couldn't stand. I voted third party, but even that party wasn't very close to what I really believe.
The parties are not nearly symmetrical and if Harris with democrats are as evil to you ... then you are literally the problem. And you contributed to everything Trump does.
I mean it. This both are same evil is either bullshit or completely wrapped non existent morality.
Not many. And even fewer would make a different choice, given the opportunity.
Change will rely entirely on people who sat out 2024. The question is how much regret they feel. Cynically, I assume most people would rather alter their world-views to justify their choice, than admit that they had made a mistake.
In a two-party system, not voting (no matter what your stated rationale for it is) is functionally going "I support whatever everyone else picks, whatever they decide is fine with me." Under any reasonable consequentialist ethical system, I would say that is "choosing this".
People didn't vote against Biden/Harris, they voted against incumbents in almost every major election across the world. They were unhappy with the economic situation after Covid – Biden just happened to be president at the time.
> People really did not like Trump they just didn't like incumbents more.
In 2016 Trump got 63M votes. Clinton got 66M.
In 2020 Trump got 74M votes. Biden got 81M.
In 2024 Trump got 77M votes. Harris got 75M.
Trump's popularity increased with each election. Turnout for Harris was definitely lower than the previous election, but the dip was not exceptional. Trump won because of his popularity - not despite it.
Right, his popularity increased in the US election because people did not like the incumbent (Biden / Harris).
Take a look at other world wide elections that happened in 2024.
Like France (parliamentary system so no presidential election); The incumbents lost 33% of their seats [1].
Or UK; The incumbents lost 67% of their seats [2]
And yet, Trump didn't even make it to 50% of US votes. People really did not like him. People really hated incumbents. Your numbers even show this, Biden 1 has more votes than Trump 2; they just didn't support the incumbent anymore.
Sentiments like this are why things will not improve. Neither side needs to practice any introspection because they're the good side and when the bad side wins it's just unavoidable because voters are dumb. Keep doubling down. Surely that will make things better.
Pretending we have issues we don't have also sure to make things better, right? No one who sincerely frames Biden as a problem worth mentioning in a discussion of leadership decline is worth listening to, especially given that he was sandwiched between Trump 1 and 2. A lifetime of patience has been exhausted in one decade.
Honestly, despite having a wife from the US (not an US citizen anymore), I agree with you.
It is really weird to me that such a thing as lobbying can be legal. Or the fact that you can donate to an election campaign so that they have more money to influence people.
And it is even more surprising that the vast majority of US people don't even question these things. I have the theory that American exceptionalism hinders their critical thinking when it comes to these kind of subjects. Ie "If we decided to do it like this, it means is the best way possible".
If you watch the news coverage for any kind of elections in the US, you would assume they are not determined by votes, but instead they are fundraising competitions: The one that raises the most money gets elected.
I can't recall any situation where the news report that someone is bound to win because people view their platform as superior, and not because they raised the most money.
I believe that such cases do exist (Mamdani would be one), but it seems that the traditional media intentionally insist on only reporting the money raised (i.e. promote the establishment-sponsored candidate) to make people give up on their vote.
A lot of people question them. But the supreme Court has decided that giving money is equivalent to free speech, and can't be touched. I don't know how we will ever get out of that problem.
This is something that is extremely hard to accomplish in the US. It would be akin to all of Europe voting on the same day and trying to falsify an election in each country. The logistics of this means that you need a lot of participants, and someone is going to blow it (and the whole thing unravels).
That is not the same as interfering: Jackboots at the polls, screwing with the mail, ID requirements.
Falsifying votes is different from falsifying election results. All of the misinformation being thrown around exists to cast doubt on the voting system to not trust the results. So you vote, it gets tallied up, and if the result is not what you want, blame it on the supposed flaws in the voting system. The people who believe that misinformation come to your defense.
It's because everything Republicans say is projection. They want to cheat, so accuse the Democrats of doing it first. In actuality it's the current admin that's laying gound-work for election fraud in November.
Not sure what you intend by this, but yes, that’s their goal. The same people put on a “Trump was robbed” act for the Trump voters and a “Trump is robbing you” act for the Democrats, and with both they accomplish their true goal: get Americans to stop believing in democracy.
Time passes. Trump is literally doing his utmost to disenfranchise voters, called electors to personally harass them, and has spent years "investigating the fraud" to setup groundwork for violating people's voting rights.
One side says bullshit, the other side says "look at all of the fucking evidence of your eyes"
Even if the Republican party loses this time, what makes you think they won't find someone even worse than Trump next time? That seems to be the pattern over the last decades.
I don't see myself ever being able to trust the US again. Maybe if they manage 2-3 decades without conservative idiocy, but the Epstein class would never allow that.
Which I don’t think it’s healthy either. Any ruling party can become corrupt especially on a longer scale. So the question is what happens if you have another madman in charge?
I think the bigger issue is a two party system. The checks and balances can clearly be gamed as this administration has proven.
I'm baffled why Germany would allow this, you'd think they and the rest of Europe would understand the importance of energy independence at this point.
Using the HN homework from earlier about multi-objective optimization... perhaps a Pareto optimal trade space of evil and dumb, to the maximum extent the two can coexist
Hehe, I think evil often stems from dumb in the sense that rarely is evil the choice that leads to good long term outcomes. For example the famous prisoners dilemma where the best strategy is tit for tat with occasional forgiveness.
ofc smart/evil/dumb are all simplifying things way too much since its not like humans have video game like attribute sliders. Im very aware of that, this is not meant to be taken that seriously.
>RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana.
Yeah, they say that, but I wonder how much of it is just to make the Trump admin happy.
Like, I don't doubt that they will go and build gas projects, and might even use some of this money to kickstart it, but presumably RWE was already pretty far along the pipeline of preparing this offshore buildout, and there's likely a lot equipment orders, staff, ships, etc that they'd rather not cancel, and would rather redirect into another project if they can.
Maybe that's copium from me though, just sad to see a big wind project go to waste.
Situation is quite different than the article paints it. The venture was risky to begin with, and already dead in 2026. Subsidies are gone, GE didn't produce their new 18MW turbine, interest rates and construction costs went up etc. State bureaucracy is its own quagmire, the fact that federal admin turned hostile was just the cherry on top.
Current deal is pretty clean and a win for both parties. US gov won't be drawn into a lengthy trial, RWE gets their money back, US gets a similar value investment, RWE gets a safer investment and a likely friendly government. US made some 40mil from the deal, or more likely 1-200 mil considering inflation; on the other hand RWE didn't lose their whole investment.
Trump holds a grudge against wind turbines, for no other reason than that they "ruined" the view at a golf course / club he owns in Scotland. He tried to get them removed, but lost that case in court.
That's mostly it. Another factor would be Trump getting donations from the oil & gas industry.
I wish I had not read this. I am not kidding when I say this is ruining my day thinking about. One thing is they ruin our times. But they are in the game of ruining the rest of time for humankind, too.
Yes as everyone loves to retort, the planet will survive! We might not, the current ecosystem wont, no one and nothing we love or care about or cherish is likely to.
But a very lovely species of bug may at some point look down and marvel at the beautiful new world they've conquered. And I guess we've collectively decided we're happy to give them that.
Isn’t everyone and everything we love or care about gonna die or go away in 100-500 years anyways?
Also hasn’t earth already survived many mass extinctions and came back stronger? Maybe this is just the next mass extinction event and the cycle repeats.
It’s quite arrogant to think that everything on earth revolves around humans don’t you think?
Individually for sure, as a People I like to think we could do more than another 500 years if we don't fuck it up too bad.
Selfishly, as a human, I do kinda hope humans get to exist longer than only 500 more years too. I also like cats, so I hope cats get to live longer than that. Maybe whales, they seem chill.
I like the Sagan passage that "the cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."
And to star-stuff I'll happily return, but like.... Lemme use these atoms for a minute, and let a few generations of cats, plants and other people form from the recycled atoms after I'm done. "For Those Who Come After."
Let this phase of life on Earth enjoy it's time for a little. Why rush it? The bugs will get their turn eventually. They can wait.
I bet we're gonna end up with so many cool ant species. It totally isn't going to end up with just a few trillion fire ants ruling the planet, right? Right????
No, it's compensation for backing out of a deal. In contract law, once a deal is signed, you're entitled to the "benefit of the bargain" if you perform your end of the deal. A breakup fee allows one side to get out of the deal, while compensating the other side for sunk cost into the project, opportunity costs from not having pursued other deals, etc.
I don’t understand what pot of money this is coming out of. Has Congress authorized taxpayer money be used for paying energy companies to halt projects?
I have either learned to tune it all out or have been worn down of all the terrible news. But of all the terriblew news to come from this administration, this kind of thing guts me the most :(
There is really no way around this, no silver lining. After years of working to get these programs implemented, to have the admin just willy-nilly spend money (what money!?!) to have them STOP. It hurts man.
> The administration signed a similar $129bn (£96bn) agreement with Charlotte-based Duke Energy last month in exchange for the termination of the company's offshore wind lease in the Carolina Long Bay area.
Putting aside the sycophantic wording around the orange leader and the total lack of details of how it's going to achieve what they are promising and what is actually going to happen, it's funny to see the distinction between gov officials and the Duke exec:
Gov: valued at $129 million and reinvest that same amount in additional generating capacity
Duke: will reinvest nearly $129 million in additional generating capacity, which may include
RWE is the biggest producer of energy from lignite in Germany, which causes massive emissions even when compared to burning black coal, oil and gas. Lignite used to be really important for Germany because it has almost no reserves of oil and gas that can be accessed with traditional methods, but Germany has huge natural gas reserves that can be accessed with hydraulic fracturing. Of course, fracking is illegal in Germany, so we keep burning lignite instead, which is so much worse. Mind you, I'm not arguing that fracking is the future, we need to decarbonize the entire energy sector, but we could do so much better with the cards that we were dealt.
So the lignite-burning energy dinosaur from Germany accepting a billion dollar bribe to divest resources from clean energy into fossil fuels is totally in character for that company. Shame on them.
That lets Trump off the hook by suggesting it's just run-of-the-mill corruption. It's not. He has a personal vendetta against wind power ever since a bust-up with Scotland about the views from his golf course getting "ruined". Today that cost Americans $4 each.
> Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement posted on X that Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense and not one dependent on "costly subsidies".
Isn't the $1.2B deal a subsidy for conventional gas?
Building new infra will extend beyond trumps term, so it's possible they do "planning" for 2 years, new admin comes in, and they abandon the plan and go back to putting the money in wind.
Why are we spending billions of taxpayer dollars to appease the aesthetic whims of this dysfunctional moron? It takes years of planning and investment to build something like a new power plant, but we're giving this up because the President is still seething over the perceived insult of having to see wind turbine from the slopes of one of his golf courses? Does this sound rational to anyone besides our resident conservative apologist?
Just “voting” is not sufficient. In fact, voting for the “wrong” people got us here. This guy won because people voted for him. Twice! How about: please always vote for the person who seems the least likely to fuck up the present and the future for all of us
Nah the people voting for the orange fuhrer are beyond reason. It's the third that doesn't vote that needs to decide which road they want us all to take.
>30% of people usually just don't vote, even in the presidential elections that happen every 4 years.
It's of primary importance to motivate these folks to vote at all. Getting them to favor for a candidate who isn't batshit crazy is a secondary function.
A person who doesn't vote can't be meaningfully swayed one way or another to begin with.
Many such cases..... this is up there. But I gotta say, the one that really got to me was watching videos of people from my old neighborhood getting dragged into the street, disappeared and murdered, by government agents paid from my taxes.
But there are truly so many options to choose from which add up to more and worse still. Maybe we'll put our heads together and discover something to stop it eventually.
We have totally not communism sending money to every other country in existence, but spending a single cent towards the betterment of your citizens is super duper evil communism.
I would love to know the thought process of this administration because it feels like a fever dream.
Or, you know, the future bottom line. I wonder how much these people understand that if you kill everyone or put them under serious resource strain because of environmental collapse, there's no one left to pay anything to you. How hard is that to understand? Don't pull the trigger, because yes, right now you don't have a bullet in your foot, but in a few milliseconds...
Nah, this gets you the "How do I keep my bodyguards loyal?" problem.
Of course they're typically not smart enough to have realised that first, but "I was too stupid to understand that I've doomed myself" doesn't mean you haven't doomed yourself.
I can't believe how stupid the world has become. At least my young niece and nephew will have terrible air to breathe after I'm gone. Next, let's pay people to detonate nuclear bombs next to our homes.
Wait halting energy projects when energy is so scares for data centers? Couldn't US just have handed it over to some US Big Tech? I am not in US but why pay to "not" do something like building infra.
"RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana."
"Trump has sought to boost government support for fossil fuels after campaigning for the presidency under the slogan "drill, baby, drill"."
That's insane, even though half of Republican supporters believe in climate change, and almost all Democratic voters do too. I can understand cutting government spending on the transition to green energy when projects are unprofitable, but what is the point of cutting it for profitable ones? If I'm not mistaken, energy firms like RWE are even threatened with lawsuits if they continue building wind turbines. Other coal investments are even more insane.
If you are in the US make sure you write your congressman about this. Elections are coming up in a couple months and if they see this as an issue they will ensure something happens. There is already suspicion that the Democrats will win the house (which doesn't take too many districts to turn - this commonly would happen anyway), even a republican in a "safe seat" is scared.
Is there any way to view our consistent destruction of green energy products in the last few years as anything other than hostile towards the majority of people purely to have a handful of people profit on cost of gas?
This is so colossally stupid, even by MAGA standards. We're literally spending billions to make things worse, because apparently any form of renewable energy makes the frogs gay or some stupid shit.
You can't make this ish up. In the era of AI when we need as much energy as possible, this admin is pulling this ridiculous stunt. Yeah, I'm not wagering that USA wins the AI race.
Why are they scared shitless of wind power? What's the deal? I don't get it. Like, they seem to be more determined to stop wind power than solar power. Why?
We are outraged. We know we are nearly the climate abyss. We see the changes all around us. What are we going to do to collectively to change course? To right the ship?
I wrote a book on the issue. I think the next best thing we can do is work together to amplify our voices to the point ignoring us is no longer politically convenient.
Tens of millions of Americans, including republican leaning voters who claim to believe in climate change, demonstrably reject the reality in front of their eyes.
The same generation who groused about how bad snow used to be (Up to rooftops!) and make fun of people who struggle in what little snow we get right now are the same people who are posting in comments sections "Earth has always changed temperature"
So in short a company was servicing power demand in a low pollution way. Then American government gave them money so they can instead service the same demand while causing more pollution.
Just... Why? To protect a few hundred jobs in America? They could have just given a small portion of that money to these workers and they would stop complaining about job loss. 1.2 Billion is a big number.
I think I don't want to believe this. I believe it in my brain but not in my heart. This kind of power just cannot be in such irresponsible hands. It makes me wanna scream.
Offshore wind projects when you have tons and tons of empty land always seemed weird to me. The cost, logistics, reduced life of the installations, disruptions to the ecosystems and potential production issues with winter storms and other extreme weather events.
The empty land doesn't produce power, wind does, and offshore it's stronger and more reliable, and it's in a location near big demand. All of the environmental issues are considerations for any power plant. Offshore wind would have been better in many aspects than alternatives, and profitable.
As a German I am highly confused by US actions. America is sabotaging its own economic future, demonizing independent renewable natural energy sources (you don’t need to import wind or sun) and Mr. „art of the deal“ is even paying us for it.
Where is this money coming from?
They can strike a deal, but the money has to come from somewhere and if it came from money directed at wind energy, then this will be illegal, I'd venture to guess.
In most locations, unless you have extremely stable weather, it's ideal to have a nearly even mix of wind and solar capacity, since wind is rather strongly anticorrelated with sunshine.
That number directly correlates with life quality in almost every country on earth. More energy per capita means higher life quality, without a doubt in every high quality place.
What about quality of life per watt and just making having a certain standard of living more energy efficient?
Simple examples: energy efficient lights seem to have no downsides, better insulation helps my apartment building retain heat, more efficient electronics mean that my homelab servers pull like 100 W total and public transport probably removes a bunch of cars from the road and increases air quality and decreases traffic jams (I can get everywhere I need that way, there’s literally train, tram and bus stops like 5-15 minutes away).
> energy efficient lights seem to have no downsides
Efficiency is good, but this isn't true. Decades into LED-ification we still suffer shit-tier PWM strobing, poor dimming, disruption to wildlife and human life, and streetlights turning purple en masse.
(The last two are installation and quality issues, but when driven by lowest-bidder compliance with simplistic "efficiency" mandates that's what you get).
Lower color rendering index than incandescent lights too. High CRI LEDs are available, but they're still worse than incandescents and less efficient than the conventional LEDs.
There must be a cap where quality of life is good enough though, right? Or do you propose it should go up indefinitely?
Air conditioning is quite nice if you find yourself living in a hot environment, for example. But do we really all need smart watches? Or cameras everywhere? Or LLMs, for that matter?
That depends entirely on how you measure quality of life. Though I'd argue that if quality of life measures didn't noticeably increase after those products were released, then I'd say no.
I'd argue quality of life is down since the invention of smartphones
> There must be a cap where quality of life is good enough though, right?
Maybe in some hypothetical future, but even the fantastical world Star Trek TNG has improvements on quality of life that could be made.
I think part of the problem of today lands on the post-cold war and certainly post-911 media landscape. There just aren't optimistic future. Distopia is more popular and certainly more numerous than Utopia.
I'd argue that we have to find some level of "enough" when it comes to quality of life, likely a balance between incremental improvements vs the costs to get there.
Effectively all history of life was focused entirely on finding food, water, maybe shelter and safety, and breeding. Where do we draw the line and stop making new things just because we can?
I have nothing to base this on so its just a hunch, but I'd expect quality of life would increase for many people today by removing, rather than adding. Work a little less, buy a little less, have fewer distractions, etc.
You can do more with less energy, if you use it more efficiently, which sometimes may be more cost effective compared to producing more. Electricity consumption peaked in Germany in 2007 and is down 15% since then while GDP grew by 50%.
Also energy consumption per capita is more than 2x higher in the US compared to Germany, while quality of life should be roughly similar. (In my personal opionion quality of life is better in Germany).
In rich countries, energy usage for a middle-class lifestyle isn't really rising anymore, and in some places is falling significantly (homes are _way_ more thermally efficient than they used to be, all appliances are more efficient, cars are more efficient, and so on).
Energy use per capita will continue to rise in the medium term globally, but it's stable to slightly down over the last few decades in the US, say.
In medieval times we used tiny amounts of energy on lighting and everyone sat around in the dark, however the energy used per lumen and indeed the carbon impact per lumen was far higher than it is today
Do you think we should return to medieval heat and light?
You're not wrong, but it simply isn't politically viable, which has been illustrated quite obviously by now. The "use less" strategy is a complete (and predictable) failure.
It is absolutely the government's job to regulate externalities. Otherwise, personal virtue is just subsidizing third party vice. Energy is fungible. Every joule you save lowers the cost for people who don't care.
Regulate externalities sounds like a nice way of phrasing what would amount to authoritarianism.
It seems reasonable to want a government to help ensure externalities aren't being ignored in prices, but not to regulate them by saying how much and what types of things people can use. I don't want my government allocated a set amount of energy I use, for example, but I would be fine with them ensuring prices accurately reflect the true cost.
Ironically they often do the opposite, subsidizing energy and food costs which make things cheaper and hide externalities.
Coal rolling is done to spite the holier-than-thou sanctamonious bullshit that people who say "we need to eat lentils and live in a cave" come out with. It's an illogical reaction, but it's human.
We need answers, not revert to a world of catholic sin
Change your car to run off electric, great
Change your city to transport 1000 people by train rahter than 1000 separate cars, great
Power your AC from your off-grid rooftop solar, great
Whine that people need to stop using AC, stop eating meat, stop watching TV, it's just harmful.
I haven't seen any whining in the thread, though maybe you're referring to me since I started the thread here?
I didn't say people need to stop using AC, I don't even agree that eating less meat would help, and my only mention of TV above was in reference to people deciding to turn it off when they leave the house, not to watch less of it.
My main point, though, was that moving around how we use energy, and of what type, will do a lot less good than finding ways to use less.
There are only two routes to preventing the climate disaster we've already set in motion:
Risky geoengineering projects like stratospheric aerosol injection.
Direct atmospheric capture of CO2.
The latter is the safer option because it's just restoring the atmosphere to a known good state. Direct atmospheric capture of billions of tons of CO2 per year will take enormous amounts of energy. We're going to need a lot more nuclear power plants if there's any hope of pulling this off.
Alternative is World War Three when large parts of the planet become uninhabitable.
I've never been particularly intrigued by the climate disaster angle. Not that it isn't an issue, but that it shouldn't be a prerequisite for a person to consume less by choice.
If I have to convince someone that 1) the climate is changing beyond historical patterns 2) I know the chemical/mechanical processes at play and 3) we caused it just so they turn off the TV when they leave the house or enjoy their current car a few years longer, its a situation that will never be resolved.
Atmospheric capture of CO2 seems to me to be one of the things pushed by the fossil fuel industry.
It is clearly not really feasable (at least not now). To me it just seems like the fossil fuel industry is doing the tobacco industry playbook of pushing stuff that doesn't actually work so people don't even try the stuff that does work: using less energy, and using less carbon intensive energy.
We really can move to less carbon intensive energy, there's lots of options all around us. Yes it means a systemic change - which is exactly what the fossil fuel industry doesn't want.
Donald Trump continues to battle Scottish offshore windfarm plans. In his second letter to Alex Salmond, the businessman said the turbines would have a negative impact on Scottish tourism: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/sep/28/donald-t...
Let's start a $1.3bn goFundMe, and invite all billionnaires with a conscience (do they even exist?) to put some money in. + an extra $20 in postage to mail a turd to donny
> Days after his return to office, he said "we're not going to do the wind thing" and called them "big, ugly windmills" that were dangerous to wildlife.
We shouldn't pretend that he's making a real point. I would like to see 1.2B invested to save wildlife, but that's not happening, so that's almost like a "figure of speech".
Fascinating how a country can dismantle itself. Historians will have a field trip in analyzing this. Just sad that the current population will suffer from this.
my guess is that this project will be quickly relocated somewhere else in a double loose for the US, but then may very well prove to illegal in any number of violations of US law, triggering further confusion and unplanned costs for US tax payers.
it's a triumphalist celebration of anti logic
It's year 2005, and you're an AI on an alien planet. you get a piece of news from the future from a planet called Earth. Tell me what you understand from the text and what you think about it: (then pasted the article text)
> German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the US after reaching a $1.2bn (£892m) payout deal with President Donald Trump's Department of the Interior (DoI).
>
> RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana.
Why not just give that 1.2bn to those "conventional gas" projects they want in Louisiana so bad?
Not that I agree with creating mroe "conventional gas" projects, I don't. Even just the idea of paying a company NOT to do a green energy project is completely stupid. We need more energy period.
Maybe. Check with a lawyer. I would for starters be looking at the angle that Congress needs to approve spending money, and I doubt this was in any budget.
There also needs to be a conversation of if the executive branch should even have the powers to stop this. A a YIMBY person I believe their power should be limited to verifying the permits were filled out correctly (and I believe in reducing paperwork for them), that is they cannot say no to this if the process was followed.
Yes, if a turbine breaks it's possible it may hit the water and kill some fishes.
If a flock of flamingos or geese are doing a low pass it's possible they get shredded by them.
If Godzilla tries to get out of the water near them it's possible it gets hit in the head. Also he may destroy them since Godzilla is, as we all know, a nuclear energy proponent.
One of my guiltier pleasures is reading r/Conservative to see which knots they're tying themselves in today defending some of his more insance ideas. In the unlikely event this surfaces up beyond some rage-bait culture war story they've found on Breitbart, I will enjoy reading their thoughts on why this is 4d chess†
†: in fairness to them, they are almost uniformly opposed to Trump's adventurism in Iran and mostly not supportive of the Jan 7th slush-fund, and will call out both when pressed
To be clear, this isn’t wind power currently under construction. It’s proposed future wind power with leases being planned. Trump has largely failed to stop the nearly complete projects in New England, New York, and Virginia.
Trump was elected because of rural/exurban white insecurity and white cultural decline. An election wasn't the cause of all this--it was more of an effect.
In other words, even if there's a feedback loop, an election won't magically fix everything.
On the other hand, the economical support of US politicians to some ideological groups in Germany is concerning. How do we know that this is not just laundering and justifying to move billions from US to the "right (far right) people" in Germany?
Idiot president of a country where over 10% of power generated in 2025 was with wind says any country with wind turbines (he calls them windmills) is a loser country. Film at 11.
It's just so blatantly and absurdly evil for literally no reason. It's a cartoon villain type of plan, the absurdity of it leaves me at a true loss for words
Now people understand why Merz is so obedient to Trump: USA always pays Germany handsomely. Canadians understood Trump being a problem. German taxpayers also understand this. It is german politicians who consistently act against the people in Germany here; Merz is just doing this very shamelessly and obviously, while also insulting germans as "lazy bums" (https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-07/friedrich-me... - here he claims to never have insulted Germans as that, but prior statements contradict this). There is a reason why more than 70% (!!!!) of germans oppose Merz now. https://ip-quarterly.com/en/troubled-merz-faces-crucial-elec...
Being so obedient to Mr. Trump, who in turn now faces allegation of being more involved than was previously already known with regards to Epstein's sexy islands, is a lose-lose situation Mr. Merz. USA paying german companies to abandon green energy plans, also ties into that. If Merz would have something called a spine he would not be so addicted to the money and instead reject the USA trying to influence Europeans and Germans negatively here. Because that money is ultimately bribery money for RWE. Shame on RWE as well.
German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the US after reaching a $1.2bn (£892m) payout deal with President Donald Trump's Department of the Interior (DoI).
RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana.
They are not paying Germany to prevent a German firm from building offshore wind projects on German shores. They are paying so that the German firm does not do it on US shores.
Terrible either way, but I think a lot of comments here are simply commenting after reading only the terrible title.
Literally setting fire to the world because the US government is rammed full of corruption and oil cronies. Meanwhile everything is fine for the handful of billionaires who benefit from this shit. Absolutely sickening.
The next time, your libertarian friend mutters “Solyndra”, tell him at the most Solyndra cost the federal government 1/2 billion dollars, not the many billions Trump is spending to cancel wind projects.
The challenge is that you're not dealing with rational people. The big dog in the White House is a imbecile of the highest order, and everyone is doing everything in their power to appease him. It is a unwinnable situation as long as Trump is POTUS.
is it just me or does that seems to be a decision driven fully by a personal dislike of wind energy without having actually run the numbers, or in other words the art of a deal isn't that
like yes there was binding commitment to RWE getting some level of subsidies, hence he had to "pay them of" around the amount of profit they have likely list, and probably more
but... compared to not paying that much more in subsidies _and_ getting more electricity out of it which the US seem to currently be quite tight one this seems to be a terrible bad deal
---
EDIT: Sorry for the rant below, it's just pretty annoying how dishonest non fact based politics has been becoming where I live:
furthermore you can stop future subsidies, so if wind energy is as "fake" as he claims this is something RWE would be stuck with not them, even if it drive them bankrupt it wouldn't be a USA problem (and more a German one)
so the only way this deal makes sense is if you a) hate wind energy and want it cone irrationally b) know it actually works and as such would "stay around" for sure (or if you really really really care about birds, no way this is true for Trump)
(And also practically it already has proven that off shore wind farms can work profitable, so b, isn't really a question. But I guess if you have a president who says all the wind farms in China are fake for show while China produce roughly as much wind energy as all of the EU together then sure you can't except logic).
In general the amount of nonsense you hear when it comes to the topic of renewable energies is pretty crazy both in how people "proof how bad it is" .. based on early technology from well over 20+ years ago, systematically ignoring relevant components of a complete solution, pretending certain already in-use technologies don't exist and don't make sense etc. To ignoring issues with whatever technology they favor and often comparing wrongly calculated "non subsidized" renewable prices with "highly subsidized" non renewable prices. Don't get me wrong it also is done the other way around. But at least where I live, that direction of propaganda isn't really relevantly used while the other direction is spread everywhere non stop (while also pretending that any honest calculation is supposedly "faked" because it doesn't fit their world view).
A refresh related to one of your points: Statista says for the US: Birds killed by wind turbines: about 140,000 to 680,000 birds per year. Bats ~ over 1 million bats killed per year in North America (~926,856 bats in the U.S. in 2023 and ~85,841.6 bats in Canada in 2020, totaling ~1,012,697 bats). Europe: ~780,000 total bat deaths per year across the USA, Germany, Canada, and the UK. And finally: ~7 bats per year per MW of installed capacity. This is one of the prices for collecting an extremely dilute form of energy. The latter statement is not put forward as an argument at all; merely a statement of fact. We shrug our shoulders and say - 'we'll live with that'. Others can detail the immense contribution of bats to the Agricultural Industry.
yes, worth adding: Various changes/improvements in the way wind mills are build, have marking & lights on them are expected to reduce the number by quite a bit. Through a lot of already build existing wind mill and limited pressure to apply such changes means we will have to see how much of this actually will help iff even relevantly used at all.
Another problem is that the actual impact on bats for _offshore_ wind seems unclear. Yes it happens, bats do migrate across sea areas in some places. But we have very little knowledge about bat migration routes and amounts in such cases AFIK.
No, it's merely a separate decision. Given that they have decided to cancel the lease, for good reasons or bad, the question then is what they do with the lease payments. I am pretty sure that you would not be happy if your landlord wanted to evict you and also wanted you to keep paying rent.
I posit that "to halt operations" is actually related to "$1.2B deal to pay", in TFA.
In similar manner to how "Hacker" and "News" are fantastically separate utterances, but when we're talking on Hacker News it's pretty regularly a package deal, not an exercise in Levenshtein distance from "Hacker" to "News".
Yes, I am quite certain that the contract was quite explicit about the terms of cancellation. That’s certainly relevant, but we still had the opportunity to refuse to return the money even though it would certainly have ended up in a lawsuit. Would that have been better? No, I do not think that it would have been. In fact, it would have been unethical, possibly even fraud. Articles that phrase this as additional money being paid rather than money being returned are deliberately misleading.
So what you're saying is instead of spending 1.2B to stop a firm from building wind, the government should leave the firm be so they can keep building wind and invest the 1.2B into building a nuclear power plant which will come online when the German firm has built roughly 1,000x the same capacity in wind turbines.
Nuclear isn't as cheap as you present it. It needs heavy subsidies for insurance and waste disposal.
Most nuclear power proposals are just LARPing as "cheap" as they pretend subsidies don't exist.
In addition you have to shut nuclear power plants down in summers due to lack of sufficient cooling. That means you need to plan alternative replacement power generation.
Er... That seems optimistic. Even in China, which is the current world leader and has significant advantages of scale, nuclear capacity costs $2-3bn per GW. The most recent US construction (Vogtle 3 and 4) took 14 years and cost $36bn for two reactors of 1.1GW each.
Not the North Sea, nothing to do with transmission in Germany. Bad summary, bot(?).
German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the US after reaching a $1.2bn (£892m) payout deal with President Donald Trump's Department of the Interior (DoI).
Turbines are all but invisible at 21 miles out, the minimum distance the california RWE project would have been installed at. Beyond that, they are hidden by the earths curvature.
Nice goalpost shift. Wonder what source provides your propaganda. If you look at the entire picture, you’re doing far far more benefit for the environment by reducing fossil fuel dependency. But go ahead and cry for the birds.
Exactly this. I know HN is obviously a very pro tech, pro science demographic, but I can't believe there's so little opposition to having our coasts littered with wind turbines.
I don't care how energy efficient it is. It's dystopian and depressing.
It's occasionally mentioned, but the answer appears to be "roughly 1000x current global electricity production", so we don't worry about it too much. Energy is much higher than electricity, of course, but we're not planning on replacing all energy [or all electricity] with just wind.
We'll hit other constraints long before that happens.
There may be some local effects. I think the main one is one cluster of wind turbines effecting the output of nearby clusters (and effects within a cluster). Pretty sure they account for this when engineering wind farms, with the effects actively being studied.
I fully understand why power generation is subsidised - however honesty I feel if the govt is subsidising it, they should get a cut of the profits too.
I also believe in a free market, and power should be subsidised equally per MW (MWh maybe?) this takes the politics out of a structural necessity. If you want to push a political agenda - great - but do it on political topics.
But selective subsidising still doesn't really help that. Subsidise household rooftop solar, home batteries, EVs and a whole host of other ways that directly benefit the more average person.
We need to be careful in not throwing the babies out with the bath water - the fees paid for the leases for these projects were so high that the projects would not be economically viable in the first place. The developers are probably doing back flips behind closed doors that they have exited these positions without major financial impairments.
This does not mean that renewables or offshore wind should not be built it just means that the regime around how sites are awarded, and how power purchase contracts are made need to be reworked.
A lot of the world is struggling with this (recently UK re-tendered for Mona lease area with much more favourable conditions than r4 initial lease).
Generally speaking I think the best approach would be to have almost zero / nominal lease fee, then have a competitive auction around a two sided CFD - if the market price is below the strike price the state makes up the difference, if the market price is above the strike price the excess goes back to the state.
I’m not sure what I need to cite but logically when you’ve paid 1B for a lease up front, you’ll want to recoup that through the money you get paid for the electricity you generate. The project accounting probably includes a return on that similar to CAPEX (could be as high as 10%), so its impact grows every year as well.
My feeling is that these projects would require offtake costs so high to be viable that they would not be appealing to the states that awarded the leases. The blockade from trump is a very appealing exit ramp for projects that are dead in the water.
You can see in Germany / UK projects awarded with high lease costs failing (Mona already went pop in uk, I imagine any r4 lease not awarded cfd in AR8 will be returned, Total not moving forward with German portfolio…)
I’ve worked on debt financed offshore wind projects for the last decade, the whole project viability hinges on devex/capex balanced against offtake and resource.
> the fees paid for the leases for these projects were so high that the projects would not be economically viable in the first place.
> I’m not sure what I need to cite but logically when you’ve paid 1B for a lease up front, you’ll want to recoup that through the money you get paid for the electricity you generate.
I agree. This is why I take issue with your initial claim.
~6.6tw (aggregate for the 3 sites) -> for $30b (middle range to develop)
1 TWh/year = 1,000,000 MWh/year.
That works out to roughly $4.5k of initial capital per MW, initially.
Based on a realized electricity price on the eastern seaboard, let's say $100m/tw/yr in profit - roughly $100 per mw/hour, after subsidy, operational cost and based (very conservatively) on a fixed midrange electricity demand.
After 4500 hours (just over 6 months of operation) you're in the black.
All that being said, if the books were cooked or construction was stalled, there could be outside incentives, but this is incidental to saying something akin to "it's unprofitable on paper" when the math does not bear this out.
Wind turbines were never meant to produce electricity but to bankrupt the world economy.
Back in 2K one turbine installation cost was 2 million euros.
That one turbine can never generate that much electricity so to pay your investment. Not counting the maintenance astronomical costs.
US has absurdly large domestic energy resources like gas reserves, coal reserves, uranium, and thermal energy infrastructure.
Then, there is the supply chain argument: the specialized turbines, components, vessels and manufacturing chains are manufactured overseas and imported to support Wind. RWE is itself German. It’s good to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains.
Fishing and maritime was also cited as a concern.
Onshore Wind is used (see New Mexico). Offshore Wind is a harder sell.
Gas/nuclear/geothermal is a better investment for the US than Offshore Wind.
While these arguments are valid, you’re missing the forrest for the trees. Renewable energy has better long-term ROI because it doesn’t require constant purchase of fuel. Renewable energy plants also produce far, far less CO2 that goes into the atmosphere and endangers our biosphere (yours and mine).
>It’s good to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains
The fact that we're still basically entirely reliant on the middle east and other foreign producers for our domestic fuel supply suggests this isn't really that big of a deal. Even in the middle of a war that is generating massive profits for the oil industry, no one is suggesting they should add refinery capacity or convert existing ones to use domestic oil.
This move is about the president's personal vendetta against offshore wind and satisfying his financial backers in the fossil fuel industry.
We are indeed the largest producer of oil and natural gas. In this case, "some" is like 70%. Maybe that's not "entirely reliant", but it's far from independence. If other countries stopped selling us oil, our car-centric society would be FUBAR for some time.
Do you know if it would be easier to get fully domestic supply and manufacturing chains for solar or for wind, if a way is found to prevent corruption undermining setting up fully domestic production?
Forgive the ignorance, what drives the demand for offshore wind instead of on land anyway? Shorter power run to coastal cities vs longer transmission loss from exurban environments?
And with solar, I can't imagine that would be fast to stand up production for... but we're attempting the Herculean task with modern chip fabs. Would panels be harder than that? They both seem existential needs for the future of the country.
Offshore wind is far more reliable than onshore wind. Geography ensures that some ocean locations pretty much always have wind blowing. North Sea wind turbines have a capacity factor of about 60%, approximately double that of onshore wind turbines.
The other advantage of offshore is that it can support the truly massive wind turbines. Onshore wind turbines are a lot smaller.
> Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement posted on X that Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense and not one dependent on "costly subsidies".
I agree. This is why we are building offshore wind and not subsidizing fossil fuels, right?
> not one dependent on "costly subsidies".
While paying out 1.2 billion dollars.
Mostly this is just about giving back the money RWE paid for the leases from the US government to build those turbines. Plus various fees. They could have went for suing for total profits too.
> RWE U.S. Offshore secured these leases from the U.S. government with a long-term commitment to develop offshore wind capacity in American waters and invested more than $1 billion toward the leases and the development of these projects. These leases provided legal rights to develop offshore projects and represented years of planning, investment, and partnership with federal agencies.
> After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. The settlement resolves RWE U.S. Offshore’s legal claims and provides $1.22 billion in settlement funds.
https://www.rwe.com/en/investor-relations/financial-calendar...
Out country is ran by bunch of Lionel Hutz clones
America voted for this.
What would you have tried to mean? "The system in place allowed what happened to happen"? What you wrote can mean everything and nothing.
Lionel would be spinning in his grave, he at least appeared to feel guilt.
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What "world order" is this? One where cheap energy generation is seen as a good thing? Bizarre that anyone would be against a private company building solar or wind farms in this day and age.
For a guy in the ai and cybersecurity industry you seem to have incredibly poor judgement Gyan.
His "AI" company is about weaponizing deepfakes. This guy is nuts and should be banned from HN.
this seem disingenuous, seems like his company just is the natural evolution of companies having phising attack simulation training.
Thanks for clarifying that for the ill read :)
I’ll take the solar. Its efficiencies and maintenance costs are improving way faster.
Yes but solar doesn't work at night and wind often does.
You can't put all your eggs in the same basket.
> Yes but solar doesn't work at night
Must be joking, right?
i actually like solar SK .. I’m with Elon on that, which I suspect may already bother you. :) .. but wind is different .. it’s flakey .. harms birds .. creates noise pollution in rural areas .. and industrialises landscapes that shouldn’t be industrialised.
As for my “poor judgment,” kind sir .. this is not true .. see, what i like about startups (which is also how i found HN) .. is that there is no place to hide .. your judgement will either kill you or make you fabilously rich (this is even more true when all your startups are boot strapped, with no sales team .. and you end up exiting 3 times ..another way to look at it SK is that in my world, if mess up my judgement, i dont get to eat .. curious what you do for a living ?
Provide one example where solar and / or wind generation have penetrated a market to a level worth mentioning and electricity prices have come down or remained stable adjusted for inflation.
South Australia is a good example. In 2023–24, wind supplied 45.2% of South Australia’s electricity generation, rooftop solar supplied 18.3%, and large-scale solar another 10.7%. In other words, roughly 74% of the state’s electricity generation came from wind and solar. [1]
And this isn’t a comparison that ignores inflation. AEMO publishes its historical wholesale electricity prices in real June 2024 dollars. South Australia’s average wholesale price in 2023–24 was A$79.53/MWh, compared with roughly A$95/MWh in 2012–13. It was also 40% lower than the previous year’s A$131.90/MWh. [1]
AEMO also specifically identifies increased rooftop and grid-scale solar output as one of the factors contributing to lower wholesale prices. [1]
So there’s a fairly straightforward example: South Australia reached roughly 74% wind and solar generation while its inflation-adjusted wholesale electricity price was lower than it had been around a decade earlier.
That obviously doesn’t mean renewables were the only factor affecting prices - electricity markets are influenced by fuel prices, interconnectors, demand, storage and plenty of other things. But it does disprove the claim that high penetration of wind and solar necessarily results in higher inflation-adjusted electricity prices.
[1] https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/electricity/nem/planni...
I'm sure this wont be enough or acceptable though will it. It never is.
California has the lowest wholesale electricity rate in the country. It's retail electricity rate is the second-highest but that's a problem independent of electricity source.
It's almost like having a quasi-public utility instead of just, I don't know, a public utility? is a bad idea!
Solar and wind account for a significant portion of electric generation in Texas.
We could collectively provide a long list of examples across several US states, Europe, and Australia. Is that going to change the minds of people who don't believe it? It will not, the discussion is irrelevant and wasted energy (mental models are rigid, people are irrational and emotion driven broadly speaking), all that matters is the economics.
Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy+ 2026 - https://www.lazard.com/media/kcfconhf/lazards-lcoeplus_vf.pd... [pdf]
> Renewables Remain Lowest Cost New-Build Generation; All Generation Faces Increasing Cost Pressure: Despite rising and inflationary cost pressures across all generation technologies, renewables remain the most cost-competitive form of new-build generation on an unsubsidized basis and will account for the majority of near-term capacity additions in the U.S. Continuous upward revisions to demand projections have driven a sharp increase in announced new-build gas generation despite a 15-year high LCOE, which is expected to continue to rise, and historically long development and equipment delivery timelines.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone [3TW] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151977 - August 2026
> The world has reached the 3-terawatt threshold of solar power, with the first terawatt taking 10 years to deploy and the next two terawatts taking less than five years.
> Forecasters expect the world to deploy more than 9 terawatts of solar by 2036, with poor countries' share of solar deployment expected to start growing again from this year onward.
> The main constraint for developing countries to adopt solar power is the lack of accessible financing, and the growth of solar power is also limited by the need for energy storage, such as lithium-ion batteries, to absorb excess power.
The global clean tech supply chain will still be around when the US comes around.
Ember Energy: China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer - https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... (Updated monthly)
“People are irrational, emotion-driven, and trapped by rigid mental models.” ... of course they are ... everyone except you toomuchtodo :) ..
The drugs I take inhibit most, if not all, of any emotions I might have, leaving me aggressively data driven by evidence, observations, data, and facts. I am a complex expert system with a pulse.
weird flex but cool
World order? I don't think a shift from being dependent on a resource that's not unlimited isn't unreasonable and may even be proactive.
This specific policy is because one thin-skinned narcissist lost a legal case in Scotland over wind turbine aesthetics. His personality disorder makes him hold grudges forever and lash out and punish unrelated parties. I bet the two of you would get along well!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_International_Golf_Club_...
This is exactly correct ^ and I’m not even aligned with Democrats. There’s no end to the ego and butt-hurt of that man, and conversely, he’s the easiest to exploit via flattery of anyone I’ve ever heard of.
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My guy, your account is nearly 10 years old, but your karma is only 36, and you are active on here... there is a reason. You are derisive, and abrasive, and your comments (specifically the ones that get downvoted to hell) are low-effort, and "troll-y".
You seem like you've been successful in life, you didn't get that way being low-effort, so let's apply that level of effort toward this community that has brought so many people together for their love of technology.
you make some fair points .. and I respect you for making them openly (and taking the time to do so!) .. also that ur a real person standing behind your words .. and that carries more weight with me than karma ever will :)
I can be abrasive .. but Id rather own my words including the unpopular ones .. than hide behind a pseudonym or tailor them for approval ..
either way .. you seem like a good human. respect!
Art of the deal: Pay $1.2B in exchange for a $900M investment elsewhere.
> > not one dependent on "costly subsidies".
> While paying out 1.2 billion dollars.
for nothing. to literally replace some energy with no energy.
Narrative is defined by ideology and the media machinery able to sustain it. Facts are woven in only when serving the desired reality.
If you and I listened to the propaganda on the regular basis, our intuitive knowledge would associate clean energy with isolated from reality snowflake liberals, hippies, abortion, subsidies, as opposed to fossil fuel energy associated with manliness, strength, common sense, “good old values”, military strength, and freedom.
Just like beef (“it’s what’s for dinner”) and a delicious juicy rare steak. See?
I recommend checking out George Lakoff’s work on the power of identity and metaphors. Look up his “moral politics” lecture on YouTube.
Oh that's not nearly the amount of fossil subsidies. Some say it's $31b/yr direct. If you factor in indirect costs like climate damage, health expenses, oil wars, etc, it's much higher. Renewables are much, much cheaper regardless of a little incentive, if there are any left.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/09/fossil-f...
Globally, fossil tax breaks and implicit subsidies are at least $6tn.
The entire sector is a catastrophic, institutionally corrupt scam.
https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
It’s kind of amazing and horrifying at the same time that a democratic country like the U.S. is doing all these shenanigans like blocking clean zero carbon energy, while a communist authoritarian country is massively moving towards clean energy.
Based on what our media and our education system teaches us, one would have assumed that common sense and sound logic would prevail in a democracy, but rather what we see is insane nonsense, paranoia, and misinformation (including about vaccines) prevail in the U.S., to the point of burning piles of money (including the 1.2B in this case) just to satisfy a childish and bully like need to spite and trigger the progressive side (like talking about causing more pollution with the goal of “owning the libs” or triggering “delicious liberal tears”). And we’re talking about massive negative externalities with increased pollution. This kind of childish bully behavior is as though you had a neighbor who cared about not littering in public and the streets being clean, and you just threw garbage on the streets to upset her. A ridiculous level of immaturity, truly.
Meanwhile, we have totalitarian dictatorships (like the Emirates which has heavily moved toward zero carbon electricity sources like solar and nuclear) behaving far more logically, rationally, and soundly with a view towards the long-term rather than the short-term.
I work in renewables in the US. The current picture is actually a lot more positive than people believe. But good news are usually boring at not good for click bait, so they aren’t covered by the media. There’s a lot of work on solar energy currently and the forecast is VERY good. We do have some issues like grid connectivity and shifting policies but the market economics are working extremely well. The fact is solar is too cheap and, unlike wind, very easy to deploy, so it doesn’t matter what your political views are, you will eventually support it. Texas for example, the conservative oil and gas hub of the US, is already outpacing California in total capacity additions because 1) they have tons of land and 2) no BS, quick local permits. So if you are a solar builder, you go to Texas not California. And yes, Texas is still pro fossil fuels, but the laws of supply and demand will continue favoring solar so that’s where the money will flow to.
> fact is solar is too cheap and, unlike wind, very easy to deploy, so it doesn’t matter what your political views are, you will eventually support it
this is my point, too
renewables, especially solar, just have gotten very competitive to a point they will gain ground even if not subsidized
and I believe we will see (and in some niches have already seen) this happening for electric cars, too. They are plain simple just better technology which for now is still in the earlier stages.
How much relevance wind will have we have to see, it's less advantages then solar and less easy to deploy. It's pretty good in some very windy northern (i.e. also less solar efficient) places and often iff it's extremely windy it's not extremely sunny and if extremely sunny it's often not extremely windy. This makes them complement each other quite nicely. So I still see a future for it even outside of the more northern regions.
California has only four really good wind sites, and they already have wind farms on them. The real US wind belt is from the Texas panhandle northward to Canada. Look at a wind map of the US.[1]
Grid-scale battery storage just keeps getting installed at an increasing rate.[1] 9.7 gigawatt-hours installed in Q1 2026.[2] It's not very visible. It's just shipping containers laid out on cement pads. It doesn't take up that much space. It can be placed anywhere there's good access to transmission lines. It's profitable if you can buy cheap solar power in the daytime and sell it at night. It's safe now that it uses lithium-iron phosphate batteries.
88 days to the midterm elections. Trump will still be in office for a while longer, but with less power to make trouble.
[1] https://energy.maryland.gov/SiteAssets/Pages/Info/renewable/...
[2] https://gcn.com/america-s-grid-batteries-strongest-first/204...
all the US needs is Australia like pricing and combine it with individual energy independence branding + clean long term financing like mortgage and there is no better place in the world to harness the urban sprawl and single family homes for rooftop solar. This assumes utilities and their business models can be quietly upended which is probably the biggest bottleneck
I do perfectly believe that there's a lot of progress in renewables and am happy about it. I also think of how much farther we would have come if it wasn't in spite of 40-50 years of obstruction by governments to satisfy coporate entities stuck in the old world.
So I still appreciate knowing the bad news.
The sweet spot is representative democracy with a tendency of socialism, to mildly distribute welath and assure social coherence. A voting system which results in a division of force, representing the voters will.
The current US administration calls such things comunism.
> The sweet spot is representative democracy with a tendency of socialism, to mildly distribute wealth and assure social coherence.
This would be perfect.
The thing we have called "democracy" for the past three hundred or so years is basically just shadow government by whoever has the deepest pockets to influence public opinion with propaganda and pay politicians to do what they want. The politicians get blamed and cycled out while everything continues as before.
no
this way of thinking, is not very useful and can be pretty harmful, just because something is imperfect doesn't mean it's fully broken. Just because people have always manipulated democracy doesn't mean it "basically just shadow government".
And sure, the US is a very bad case, _especially_ in recent years. But also let's not forgot that for most of it's history just one of the countless scandals of Trump would have been enough to highly risk impeachment for a president and be equal to political suicide. I.e. there has been quite a bit of limits on corruption and influences from behind the scene. It's just that the US went and broke itself. And yes a two party system was never truly democratic, it's still better then a one party system nor the same as a full shadow government.
Which brings us to another point, there never was "the" shadow government, just many different people which had way to much influence behind the scene in not so democratic ways. A shadow government implies some form of organization/structure which actually governs and then puppets in front, but that was never really the case in the US AFIK. Even today it isn't as a lot of the escalating corruption is just pretty much out in the open by the governing people, instead of in any shadow, by people not in a official position.
If that were true Hillary Clinton would have been president.
Money is deep on both "sides". It didn't help Harris to have the most either. But you can't deny that some political steerage toward donor agendas occurs.
She won the popular vote by a mile, he won the electoral vote. Some would say she should have been.
Nobody with cursory knowledge of the US voting system would though.
Edit: to the downvotes, our system doesn't care about popular vote, and neither do the most democratic/left left leaning states, who don't care to use proportional voting.
Its because democracies werent and arent really democracies. But that aside. Corruption is rampant, the oil sector has politians in their pocket for a long long time and since the cold war, a counter narrative doesnt really put any weight in the scale. The billionaires arent afraid anymore.
> Meanwhile, we have totalitarian dictatorships (like the Emirates which has heavily moved toward zero carbon electricity sources like solar and nuclear) behaving far more logically, rationally, and soundly with a view towards the long-term rather than the short-term.
The difference you’re spotting is the leaders of those nations have some remaining incentive to care about the wealth and wellbeing of the country they’re leading beyond the expiration date of a 4 or 8 year term.
For better and for worse, they have that, the US doesn’t.
It's been a common saying for a long time that a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government and a tyrannical dictatorship the worst. Democracy exists primarily to avoid the latter, not that it's better than the former.
Neither China nor the UAE can be said to have a purely benevolent dictatorship but it's not purely tyrannical either. So not surprisingly they're better than democracies in some aspects and worse in others.
It's almost like we've been sold a lie about good guys and bad guys, us vs them, and so on.
It has always been about where you lived and not how the guys really were.
I do think authoritarianism on its own is bad. I want the freedom to criticize my government, and I want the freedom to run for elections or to advocate for changes I want to see. I think democracy and logical long-term thinking shouldn't be mutually exclusive. I feel democracy and sensible behavior are two not connected things.
You can have idiotic authoritarian governments that ruin the economy. China and Vietnam were exceptions among communist countries, who switched to a form of market economy, when they saw that central planning was poverty-inducing and nigh impossible to do.
The problems we're seeing in democracies might lie with the level of disinformation for electioneering purposes that is permitted under free speech today.
Oh please. You wouldn’t survive in the regime 15seconds.
As an atheist I wouldn't survive in Texas for 15 seconds lol. I think I'll stick to my little Euro socialist country where politicians don't swear on a bible.
That's a funny thing to say about a place you've obviously not been for 15 seconds.
Also, you can swear on whatever you want here. It's the person's choice. You could swear on a copy of hitchiker's guide to the galaxy if you wanted.
That communist country is sitting on a year’s worth of oil reserves, and rolls out a ton of coal for when they run out of oil. Makes you wonder why… almost looks like they know they’re going to be under complete sanctions sometime soon!
That communist country also likes the current war in Iran. They get all that oil cheap for their reserves stockpile.
The enemy is both weak and powerful.
> Oh that's not nearly the amount of fossil subsidies.
Consider the taxes on gasoline.
Since this is about energy; Power companies don't pay taxes on gas and diesel used in power plants.
All kinds of power generation are typically heavily subdized in some way. I do not think this "common sense" strategy exists.
"common sense" is common sense because it is not "specialised sense" or "expert sense"
So if politicians base their decisions on "common sense", they confess to not being able to use experts that refine their knowledge and position about a topic.
A "common sense" strategy is therefore what is most popular and on the basis of the understanding of laymen without deeper understanding or knowledge.
For at least a few years, "common sense" has been hijacked by populist politicians, now it just means whatever simplistic idea that fits their worldview, even when it's not complicated to see that said idea is clearly misguided. The original meaning seems lost to me.
Furthermore, using the phrase “common sense” to describe an idea inherently dismisses any individual that will argue against it. They either are too dumb to have common sense, or too much of an elite to have common sense.
This is the word smithing they are known for. By labeling “common sense” means anyone who argues against it is against “common sense” because every argument is a strawman argument.
It's basically become a thought terminating cliche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
It is what it is
I think you care way too much about this topic.
That was the original meaning dating back at least to thomas paine (bless his heart). It is a term impossible to deploy in good faith.
Always meant that, so far as I can see.
"Common sense" might also mean "do the simple thing" which, given how cheap it is to invest in renewable energy sources like solar farms, and how much room we have to build daytime capacity that way without large scale storage, might mean installing a lot more solar.
Don't pretend the current US admin is anything but corrupt and stupid.
Don’t overthink it. Burgum means “don’t disagree with me I’m always right” when he says it.
Day time.
And what of the night?
Freeze in the dark.
Batteries.
Or pumped storage. Or lifting a really heavy thing and letting it fall slowly.
Or retaining an amount of fossil fuel capacity to be turned on during peak consumption and sun and wind dips while still focusing on renewables and storage with the goal to reduce the duty cycle of peaker plants to zero.
> Or lifting a really heavy thing and letting it fall slowly.
I challenge you to run the numbers on this.
Or at least read or watch someone who has.
Whenever you’re certain you know the answer, it behooves to try to prove yourself wrong.
Unsurprisingly, gravity is an extraordinarily weak force. It merely appears otherwise because the total mass of the Earth is literally astronomical at around the 5.9722×10^24 kg mark. Concrete blocks hanging from a crane, much less so.
Don’t believe me.
BIY - Believe It Yourself here:
https://youtu.be/iGGOjD_OtAM?si=FXjjxz4NLbA-oj7U
Pumped hydro is a nonstarter: do you see any suitable geography anywhere? Yep, they’ve already been dammed damn it. So approximately no one^ can have their existing hydro upgraded to pumped hydro retro fitted to pumped, and have the surrounding landscape covered in solar and wind.
How helpful!
Chemical batteries? South Australia has a decent sized one. I think it can power some of the state for about 12 seconds.^^
^okay, not no one: Hydropower accounts for approximately 15%, but you have to choose pumped hydro sites where it also makes sense for wind and / or solar, so it’s clearly not an answer for everyone everywhere. Not even close.
^^hyperbole! I know. Look, it’s actually around 1–1.5 hours, which is statistically closer to my estimate of 12 seconds than anything actually useful like a day or a week.
Mini hydropower on gentle farm hills are sufficient to store and stabilise small town power - such topography is relatively widespread.
eg: (old page, project is now complete and working as planned): https://www.westernpower.com.au/resources-education/network-...
Wind, hydro, some kind of storage?
Nuclear? Gas and coal peaked plants?
We can at least plan for an eventuality that is likely to happen. How much planning is/was there when gas suddenly gets cut off?
Wind or solar + batteries have similar cost to natural gas and hydro. They are much cheaper than coal or nuclear.
Night can be handled by whatever currently handles day time generation, be it nuclear, natural gas, hydro, whatever.
> And what of the night?
Nuclear.
"common sense" is common sense because it is the "sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts" (1).
Maybe what you meant to say is that the position isn't, in fact, "common sense", that it is neither sound or prudent?
(1) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/common%20sense
Keyword being "simple". The common sense solution often turns out to be unsound based on a more detailed perception of the situation
i.e. "every complicated problem has a solution which is simple, elegant and wrong"
Oh yes, "sound" and "prudent" haven't been in the ballpark nearly as often as they used to be :(
The dictionary definition is in spite of the fact that the phrase "common sense" is more often than ever being used to rebrand what was formerly known as "common lack of sense".
They wouldn't say it if it wasn't false :\
In politics, "common sense" just means that they don't have a real justification. You can just apply it to anything and your base will accept it.
I see this all the time with "common sense" gun control.
Anytime I see "common sense" adjacent to politics, it's a dodge. It's for issues that pander to their base or where they're just getting bribed. If there's a better reason, they'd say it.
> don't have a real justification.
Oh, but the ju$tifi¢ation is all too real for having that kind of "common sense".
There will always be a place for common sense - the Greeks used to call it phronesis or "practical wisdom".
You also need to distinguish between expert opinion and elite opinion. The two are not the same.
Common sense is the sense of commoners. The entirity of science if a fight against common sense.
In Poland the closest phrase to "common sense" is "na chłopski rozum" which means "according to villager's mind/smarts".
A significant part of science is plucking the true bits from common sense. A fair chunk of what we call medicine is folk remedies that stood up to rigorous testing.
Yes, but the testing bit is what makes it a scientifically-proven method and not a folk remedy.
There are also a lot of folk remedies that have been disproven as medicine. They too were ‘common sense.’
> There are also a lot of folk remedies that have been disproven as medicine. They too were ‘common sense.’
"You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine." - Tim Minchin
Curious what you mean by this. There is very, very little medical knowledge today that aligns with historical folk wisdom.
(Even simple things like "an apple a day" - apples are fine, but foods like berries, kiwis and avocados tend to have both lower sugar and much higher nutritional content.)
Modern medicine is dominated by very new ideas and technologies.
Gene therapies, targeted cancer treatments, blood pressure medication, antibiotics, surgery, joint replacements, sterile practices, vaccines, hormone replacement therapies.
In practice "common sense" just means "things I learned from public TV when I was ten and never bothered to learn more about." Renewable used to be more expensive but that hasn't been the case for almost a decade. But you still see people, even on this "news" site for technologically curious people, claim that fossil fuel is the "obvious" cheap option.
> “… without deeper understanding or knowledge.”
Ha! Like the common sense to dam migratory river systems to make hydroelectric power. Good idea at the time, and who cares about salmon. I have a toaster, and a percolator, and a new fangled “ice” box (formerly chilled by ice, now a maker of ice).
S/ My common sense says 1.2B compensation to not do something we otherwise need is bananas as opposed to the common sense—pound salt response. Good thing I’m not in government, yeah. /s
We have a hydroelectric dam near us with a salmon leap next to it. Good visitor attraction too.
It'll provide power for decades with little maintenance and not much further in the way of environmental issues now that it's built.
Dams are subject to silt buildup up, which requires maintenance.
They’re so destructive to local ecosystems that environmental groups have blocked any new hydroelectric dams being built in Australia for over 40 years.
All modern concrete eventually fails, and dams are notoriously difficult to remove and replace.
Fortunately they last long enough that if you paint them pink and plug a torch battery in to them they can remain somebody else’s problem for quite some time.
But it’s not $1.2 billion people to do the thing.
It’s only $1.2 billion to not do the thing.
To do the thing would require paying the original contracted amount.
Whatever that might have been.
Melbourne, well Victoria the whole state, is looking at a similar scenario for rail tunnels many believe serve little purpose.
Around $1.2 billion to stop the work now and pay the early termination penalty. Plus maybe another billion (estimated, who really knows) to bury the tunnel boring machines and remediation work.
Or something like $200 billion to complete the work and operate the rail network over some number of probably too many decades. Although this number seems to increase at a regular cadence.
A new road tunnel was recently completed and people who use it often report they are the only vehicle in the tunnel.
Meanwhile our roads haven’t been maintained in a decade and are literally falling apart. It’s not uncommon to hear reports of multiple cars being recovered after suspension and wheel damage from the same section of poorly maintained road in one day.
All of this in a political and economic setting so corrupt the now former state Labor Premier came out and admitted knowledge of a criminal element having infiltrated the union that represents the workers on the projects. She was recently replaced with her deputy. As if that helps.
Electricity prices have also increased by something like 150 to 200 percent more than inflation over the past 20 years but mostly the past 6 years (so this decade) because state and federal governments seem to want to insist on ramming Net Zero down our power lines, yet we export around the same amount of gas as Qatar. And we have the worlds largest know uranium deposit and yet we have a ban on nuclear power reactors.
Please explain?
> on ramming Net Zero down our power lines
except this is AFIK just plain wrong
much more relevant factors seem
- spikes in energy need, mainly AI in recent years
- extremely badly handling of power grids in a high multitude of ways not related to net zero (like seriously, the German grid is pretty bad compared to an optimal grid. But compared to the nonsense many parts of the US have, it looks like a pristine optimal solution.)
- health/environmental protections _not to be confused with climate protection_!! Not wanting your citizens to have massive health issues due to air pollution, acid rains etc. has _nothing_ to do with net zero. People tend to somehow always conflate it. But a lot of the policies the US ended up doing (compared to the ones they say they want to do) where more about that then anything climate related.
- inflation statistics being... badly done. Like if most relevant daily use products have price increases noticeable above inflation then your way to measure inflation is the problem.
And a lot of the net zero things, tend to actually produce relatively cheap energy, even if you include cost for e.g. some gravity energy store and similar buffers. Just if you don't properly modernize, then you can run into troubles. As part of the US has never been in favor of renewables at all you can guess what happens there wrt. making decisions to which make things work compared to decisions which hinder things and then blame the technology instead of your bad politics.
Modern coal fired power plants are much cleaner than those that contributed to acid rain.
You seriously believe coal fired power hasn’t evolved in the last 40 years?
You’re saying that renewables are cheap but only if you include gravity storage.
What gravity storage? The only useful one is pumped hydro, and that works approximately nowhere because of a lack of suitable geography.
Australia’s Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro is on track to cost an infinite amount and / or be finished never.
> You seriously believe coal fired power hasn’t evolved in the last 40 years?
no but even with evolution it still is way worse then literally every other (practical used/usable) alternative
e.g. the quality of German brown coal is so bad that there is a saying that burning plastic wast gives you both more and cleaner energy
> approximately nowhere
you mean no where except everywhere where you have decent sized hills or mountains (and even in flat land under some circumstances) and is already build and in use in Germany in multiple case (and also not just Germany)
> "Electricity prices have also increased by something like 150 to 200 percent more than inflation over the past 20 years but mostly the past 6 years (so this decade) because state and federal governments seem to want ... "
There's a few factors.
The main one from what I hear / read from those I know down that way was private industry getting their hands on the energy grid ... from what I have heard read it's a royal shit show at times and pricing just kept on leaping upwards with what looks like fly by night to the public retailers that aim to just maximise the amount people are willing to pay. Pricing is my locale is spared electricity customers somewhat, from dealing with the same profit based clowns [1] down southern end of Australia getting any sort of market share here.
Almost getting the top spot for higher jump in costs, is the increase of infrastructure spending on the network. Some of that has to do with population growth and increase of grid demand due to urban sprawl and higher energy demands from the average customer. But the jump you see down in your state has been that much of the network down that way has not seen much investment in its upkeep and the rise of weather events affecting the various electricity grids that were not specifically designed for high winds in mind. The southern states high winds especially during dry periods is linked to wild fire events, so there's additional pressure to perform. This costs money and private companies are once again going to recoup that cost harder than what a govt governed entity would do, but then again in my locale being without power for half a day to days while a transmission line is repaired that failed isn't that uncommon.
>" And we have the worlds largest know uranium deposit and yet we have a ban on nuclear power reactors."
The public indirectly voted three or so decades ago, it from that assumed a mandate against uranium ... the dolts tried again last election, again no dice. Done and dusted, public no want. Some people will persist it's a good idea, thorium is with its safe waste is, uranium is not. The uranium nuclear path involves not millions but billions for studies, the companies like Deloitte are waiting in the wings. Soil studies, site locations, blah blah paid think tanks - lots of tax payer money. Going forward then there's design - Australia will pay again billions to some international company that's part of the old uranium crowd ... building I'd guess once more another international company will get the cream though yes some local employment will be touted and finally a waste facility and where to put it. If and when it got that far it might finally occur that uranium waste makes for good dirty bombs and the security around moving the waste each year will cost millions along with storage security, which isn't going to be some small depot with a six foot fence around it and a couple of security guards ... people that would want to make dirty bombs are not going to be waiting for it to fall into their laps. Of course at the end, it such a plant ever got up and running, the power is now centralised around one or more nuclear power plants and rather than resilience, this future grid had introduced large points of failure.
[1] cheapfwits Co with typically no phone support
Edit on last sentence for clarity.
You dont need deeper understanding of knowledge for everything. Ask Grandma whether she needs a chemical engineering degree to bake apple pie.
Then there is the Theory of Bounded Rationality which tells us expertise may exist but resources, time, energy, info, attention etc etc may not therefore bounds and limits of expertise alone must be recognized and solutions reached are satisficable rather than optimal. Aiming for optima when other factors havent been sorted just creates new problems.
> Ask Grandma whether she needs a chemical engineering degree to bake apple pie.
Grandma doesn't bake with "common sense", she is using the specialized knowledge of cooking & baking.
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> You dont need deeper understanding of knowledge for everything. Ask Grandma whether she needs a chemical engineering degree to bake apple pie.
You've clearly never baked before. Baking is a chemical science. You have to adjust temperatures for your freaking elevation relative to sea level. Granted some recipes are pretty forgiving, sure, but far from all, and some are downright merciless in terms of complexity and effort required.
Even people who do it constantly have items that just don't turn out because it's legitimately hard shit.
You seem to have conflated a chemical engineering degree with the concept of baking being a chemical process
No, but baking is still a process that requires skill — and that skill is not 'common sense'.
If making sourdough were 'common sense' then _everyone could do it correctly on their first try_. They don't. Most fail and never try again because the skill level required for sourdough is too high.
I'm an _expert_ cook, but I'm still having to go through the frequent failures of learning how to pickle with brine (fortunately, my failures have been mostly edible and have not turned moldy). Even vinegar pickling requires a certain level of expertise before you can do it successfully, even though that level of expertise is _roughly_ "knowing how to boil water".
grandma's baking knowledge isn't common sense but expertise.
There are too many interested parties involved in the energy sector. The only common sense I can think of is solar+storage at the single building level and interconnected through smart grids with neighbours.
But that leaves out the government and all those interested parties so we're never ever getting that.
And in the winter in the North people are just supposed to freeze?
The energy mix for electricity in Sweden, Norway and Finland is mostly made up of hydro+nuclear+wind, especially wind and hydro complements each other very well since hydro is very much on-demand and can cover for most temporary wind shortfalls.
Driving through my childhood area up north a few weeks back I was also surprised by the amount of solar going up, for comparison this is an area _north of_ Anchorage/Alaska with less than 3 hours of sun around Christmas, but already by late January (usually the coldest period of the year) there is over 6 hours of sun a day (so with high pressure cold peaks with less wind, the 6 hours probably eases the power bill quite a bit).
An interesting fact about those solar installations was that the panels were mounted almost vertically (probably to avoid being snowed over but also useful in the winter since the sun mostly just shines from the south anyhow).
Solar would produce enough power in winter. Germany is europe's top solar energy producer and is at a latitude similar to Alaska.
The very very northern tip of Germany reaches almost as far north as the southernmost tip of the Alaskan panhandle, but most of Germany is more like mid-south Canada on a latitude basis.
Northern Germany is much more specialized into wind power, and the south is more solar intensive (though solar is more evenly spread throughout the country than Wind, thanks to ease of installation, and the fact that it still produces tonnes of electricity in the summer).
Solar should be built in Alaska, but wind and hydro is what should be actively subsidized and supported by the government. The market can take care of solar penetration in Alaska if you let it.
One additional tidbit of info. While the northern coast in Germany has certainly more wind, a reason why wind falls off so strongly towards the south, are the policies of the CSU party in Bavaria, which though not quite as bad as trump has been running Anti-Wind policies and making wind installations extremely difficult to build.
At what cost?
Doesn’t Germany now have some of the most costly electricity in the OECD?
For a while there we kept hearing about plug in balcony solar in Germany.
Electricity generation used to be a solved problem, now it’s so bad people want to connect solar on their apartment balcony.
And we’re supposed to believe this is progress?
Germany's high electricity prices are set by the cost of imported LNG.
[dead]
Even if they hadn't shut down nuclear, they still would be reliant on LNG imports, and being the most expensive power, LNG would be the price-setter in Germany.
LNG is NOT cheap. piped non-liquid natural gas is cheap, but once you liquify it, store it and ship it, it's very expensive.
North Americans mostly do not use electricity for heat in the winter. Around 60% use natural gas with forced air furnaces. Something closer to 80% have the option, but 20% don't bother to use it.
Some of the deep south get by with electric heat, but they aren't in places where the cold is a typically a legitimate danger to health and safety.
I find something very refreshing in this, reading from Europe where we get told "gas" is the big bad, even threatening to make condensing gas boilers illegal from time to time [0], despite over 95% of homes (in the UK) being heated by this method.
That said most of Europe doesn't heat or cool adequately, Spain and Portugal barely heat their homes in winter and boy it gets cold with 41F/5C nights. Then Germany/Switzerland refuse to use A/C even though the summers get to 95F/35C. Just a few days ago a friend told me he went to the doctor and the doctor passed out during examination from the heat.
ps. Not sure why it's downvoted, I think people read something into my comment that I didn't want to express.
[0]: https://www.edfenergy.com/heating/advice/uk-boiler-ban
> Reading from Europe where we get told "gas" is the big bad, even threatening to make condensing gas boilers illegal from time to time
Long-term this is true, and it makes sense to ban gas boilers (potentially with some exceptions): electric heat is significantly more efficient, and can run on renewable energy. But that requires a big investment in infrastructure build-out (heat pumps) which will take decades, and we definitely need to be careful that we handle the transition without screwing people over.
Yes, most households don't have the 25-30k available to switch to heat pumps. If we dig deep I think we partially solved why people don't have kids anymore in Europe: for that you need optimism, and to be told every few years even something basic as your heating system is due to be illegal (!) doesn't really fill people with optimism. Same thing with banning internal combustion engined-cars, which was reversed too... Europe as a whole needs to manage these tech transitions very differently in my opinion.
Where are you getting 25-30k from? A standard split that can handle 25m2 is 1-2k, with one in each bedroom you’re fine
Yes that is a split A/C, which is also a form of heat pump, that's not really what people refer to as heat pumps by default in Europe. A heat pump is normally an air-to-water system here, which drives either radiators or heated floors. Heating with an A/C is practically unknown in most of Europe and definitely not the desired choice for most people here (even though it would make sense).
And you’d still need five or six split systems to properly heat a home.
Kitchen, dining, bathroom, three or four bedrooms.
I’ve never seen a split system in a bathroom, but I’ve definitely seen freezing cold bathrooms, or bathrooms with a radiant heater on the wall or heat lamps on the ceiling, which occasionally get left on all day and destroy electricity bills.
Ducted systems almost always extend to the bathroom, and almost always cost AU$15,000 or more to install.
Ortogonal to the discussion, but I think in an odd way, Australia is one of the most similar countries to Spain in this aspect. Very limited to no natural gas proliferation, electric heating, if any, but houses made rather cheaply but somehow still ending very expensive. I've seen houses near Melbourne resembling a tin hut costing AU1.5M. According to weatherspark, some Spanish locations have their climate counterparts in Australia, e.g. Perth is most similar to Malaga.
True true. The old housing stock is poorly insulated. I mean: not at all insulated, and retro fitting insulation is painfully expensive.
Sure, insulation in ceilings is relatively easy to do, but swapping windows out for double glazed windows with solar thermal reflective film, very expensive.
New homes are much better designed, requiring wall and ceiling insulation and double glazed windows or better.
And yeah, the state of Victoria is still prompting banning new homes even connect to gas. Seems strange when we export around the same volume of LNG as Qatar.
The people who need heat pumps the most don’t have $6000+ to blow on heat pumps.
So now we’re back to government subsidies, which routinely prove to drive up the price of whatever is being subsidised, especially at the scale of residential homes.
And your solution still results in the living room / dining room and other shared spaces being inhospitable in winter / summer, so you’ve underestimated the cost at least significantly.
> and we definitely need to be careful that we handle the transition without screwing people over.
Well we’re certifiably not going that.
No need to wait decades to look at the recent data.
London can’t even work out how to properly ventilate their underground rail network.
The solution is obvious: built nuclear power and refrigeration (heat pumps).
Where it’s too cold either nuclear and heat pumps and / or district heating, or burn gas.
Or people can melt in the summers and freeze in the winters. Because that is exactly what “renewables” have been delivering.
> Well we’re certifiably not doing that.
Don't disagree with you there.
> London can’t even work out how to properly ventilate their underground rail network.
This seems unrelated. It's not an energy problem: it's a problem with lack of space in the tunnels and lack of places to build ventilation shafts due to the issue not being considered 100 years ago when the tunnels were built.
> Or people can melt in the summers and freeze in the winters. Because that is exactly what “renewables” have been delivering.
I think this has very little to do with renewables. In particular, solar is perfect for reducing "melt in summer" cases (it's almost always sunny when it's hot) (and I'm not sure where has freeze in winter problems).
The issue seems to be more that weather has gotten hotter, and infrastructure needs to change in response to that (inevitably slow and expensive).
London’s tube system had an eminent domain, technology, political will problem. It’s entirely fixable.
Cold weather kills more people than hot weather. By a huge margin.
People frequently move from cooler areas to areas that have comparatively hotter climates than even the worst (completely fabricated) global warming predictions.
But they rarely do the opposite.
I live in northern Spain and it really doesn't get that cold. There's about a month during which I need a little plug in heater to stay above 18 degrees C. Then after a few weeks I find myself using it less and less. Honestly I wouldn't bother investing in a central heating system for how little I need it. There's only a few days a year the temperature actually drops to around 5C and that's only in the deep of night when I'm in bed anyway, and of course the indoor temp doesn't drop much.
Aircon I need a lot more. If anything I'd invest in more of that and more insulation. But a heating installation is just wasted money really.
That's kind of my point. It's not cold - to you - because you are used to it. In Hungary or Romania since energy is (or was) cheap, due to residual/waste heat from power plants everyone heats their homes to 23-24C. Because if you have "free" energy, why not? That's what people feel comfortable at home. If you would drop a Hungarian to your 18C northern Spanish home they would be incredibly uncomfortable, but the same for an American. I'm not saying this for you to feel bad, or question your cultural heating standards - just pointing out in Europe we have an incredible energy poverty for the most part - and even Spain wasn't like this pre-Franco. People have heated their homes much more, same with coffee etc. That terrible torrefacto was not a thing before, but that's a whole another conversation. Re-reading what I wrote I don't think you will really grasp my point due to me not being to articulate it well enough and I hope I don't come across combative. Spain does a million things perfectly and I don't mean to criticize...
My point is I think somehow, to create and foster policy that focuses on the well-being of people, using a long-term plan that includes an abundance of everything, including energy. In an ideal scenario you could have your apartment at 18C if you wanted to, but since energy would be near-free and abundant, you could turn it up to whatever you want, guilt-free.
Hmm no, 23-24 in winter is not comfortable for me. It's incredibly uncomfortable. I'm much happier in 18 degrees.
But I'm not from Spain. I have been to Romania a lot and I really hated how much they heated the office during winter. I'd go outside in the -15C in my shirt just to cool off during meeting breaks.
Honestly I'm super comfortable in Spain most of the year. Just 1 month I need a little extra heating and 3 months I need aircon, and a lot of it. But summer is also peak time for solar so energy wise it's not bad.
But I don't consider it poverty at all, really. It's also important not to have too much of a temperature mismatch with the outside because we spend a lot of time outdoors here. And not in airconditioned cars because I don't have (nor want) a car. I'm a lot happier with the freedom that public transport offers.
Yes, for what it's worth, solar is an incredibly good start (for Spain at least) for said energy abundance. Approaching from the other way, there are actually quite a few Spanish who say using the aircon is wasteful, expensive or even claim that it's unhealthy. Most of these beliefs stem from the fact it's considered something exotic, expensive, consumerist and foreign. If energy was so cheap it costed basically nothing to run the AC, these beliefs would fade soon (as they had in the US, or China). My dream is to see a well-heated (to your personal preference), and well-climatized Europe where anyone can easily afford to do both.
Europe has unlimited wind, not unlimited gas. Electrification of most things is just a matter of time. Gas for heating is wasteful. I think AC will get very popular eventually once the stragglers realize that these are not unusual one-off warm summers, but is a result of global warming.
So we should only address the symptoms and not the cause. What are you saying?
Modern AC units are heat pumps the same box cools in summer and heats in winter, more efficiently than a gas boiler.
What is your stance on heat pumps? Conservatives here, who use the same talking points as you, are against them and they prefer to use oil and gas.
And is 5c a extreme night temperature? Where are you from? I'm not from Europe I think.
I love heat pumps, but they are well out of reach for most people at 25-30k for a full system with insulation and radiator change. 5C is indeed a cold night, for Spain, in an uninsulated house which most are, and 13C/55F daily high, it's teeth-chatteringly cold without heating, yet most Spanish just brace it, for similar reasons they don't have AC in Germany: "it's survivable, and it only lasts around 3 months". This is why I refer to this as "energy poverty".
Supplement w/ geothermal?
Geothermal works in enough areas (geographies) for it to be an entertaining talking point in niche forums like this one.
But not much else.
Earth is an incredibly poor heat conductor, as evidenced by the fact that you don’t have to dig very far, maybe a foot or four, and it’s a fairly constant 14 degrees C, and yet the core is molten lava (rock) and has been that way for billions of years predominantly from latent heat from the planets formation.
So you have to be very careful with heat exchange, lest you exceed the ability of the earth to conduct heat through the rock surrounding the boreholes.
Drilling deep boreholes is difficult as the rock becomes more like plasticine as it approaches temperatures where usefully higher temperatures occur.
"Artificial" geothermal works well enough to store energy from sunlight months for use during colder months.
Artificial in the sense of using solar energy (direct or electric) to heat mass insulated by earth and later extracting that heat to use (directly in district heating, or indirectly via heat -> electric conversion).
Show me an example where this is being used in the real word, at scale, in a cost effective manner.
It’s not even a good idea. Water has a greater capacity to store heat than rocks and dirt.
I'm obviously going to ignore the conditional goal posts at scale and cost effective ... burgeoning technology does not typically land with all the problems ironed out or have economy of scale.
I used my searchfoo and Sage Industries lands in more of the top results [1] [2] (may require careful attention to distinguish between natural and artificial geothermal) As well as an interview [youtube]
There's obviously different methods that have been employed / tried by other companies given [3] which outlines different methods of storage also includes some simple graphics ...
[1] https://www.aveva.com/en/our-industrial-life/type/article/tu...
[2] https://new.abb.com/news/detail/123160/abb-and-sage-geosyste...
[youtube] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSt-MiiX0Fg (Transmission 43 mins Geothermal: Turning Oil Wells Into Energy Storage - Sage Geosystems) [podcast]
[3] https://www.energy.gov/hgeo/geothermal/geothermal-energy-sto...
> real word, at scale, in a cost effective manner.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20151208232728/http://ing.dk/art...
from [2015 - now( ... (still operating) for one example.
> Water has a greater capacity to store heat than rocks and dirt.
Weirdly all three fall under the description used ( "mass" ) and yet none of the three you mentioned are molten salt or silicon which perform even better than water.
If the point you're making is that you've made little effort to think this through or look to where this has been used, is being used, or at pilot plants going to longer time scales then congratulations, you've convinced me.
Yes, this
While I do not know if the following is relevant for the Carolina Long Bay area, and while neither Republicans nor Democrats can be trusted, it is not without precedent for offshore wind turbine projects to be disallowed due to radar concerns.
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/11/11/why-swe...
> Why Sweden nixed new wind farms for fear of missing Russian missiles
> BERLIN — Sweden’s government this month blocked the construction of 13 offshore wind farms over concerns that they would shorten the country’s early-warning window for a Russian missile attack.
> ...
> That is because wind farms can interact with radar signals, reducing the quality of the situational air picture or even outright blocking out parts of the sky.
Other possibilities than radar concerns is that the stopping of the project here hinders corruption, or is corrupt itself, or it moves corruption around (as in both the old project and new project was corrupt). Whatever the case, a way to avoid corruption would be helpful. Perhaps like making it market-driven and contest-driven as much as possible. Solar and wind is already significantly cost-efficient and market-driven despite their significant drawbacks like not producing energy consistently and on demand. If the main challenge is creating domestic production of wind turbines and solar cells instead of being reliant on other countries and without state support ending up being mired in corruption, perhaps some bidding and contract process that moves the financial risk onto private companies, such that the government never pays in advance, could work.
I agree with posts here saying that a mosaic or plethora of energy sources should be used. Wind, solar, fossile, nuclear (for big countries like the USA at least), geothermal, etc. In general, energy companies should not be focused on just one kind, but lots of kinds.
Wind power is a purely commercial enterprise which only requires state support for permissions to build and permissions to connect to the grid. There is no issue about state support for manufacturing of equipment.
Living here where this happens. They are stopping it for two reasons:
First on a national level they want to concentrate on their renewed push towards building new nuclear power reactors, means wind has to take second fiddle: https://www.government.se/press-releases/2026/06/sweden-take...
Second, on a local level, the far-right party "SD" is voting agaisnt wind power in 96% of the cases.
As presented here, the national government is declining 84% of all requests of requests to build wind power, ad on the local level the right wing parties vetoed wind power at a rate of 64-92%: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/?created=true&id=09...
That is not correct (https://finansnytt.se/vattenfall-pausar-havsbaserad-vindkraf...). They don't just need permission to connect. Wattenfall (the main producer of energy in Sweden) demanded to get subsidizes to construct the connection to the grid and transmitting the energy back from the wind farm to the main land and the grid. They canceled the project when the government denied those subsidies. They have all the required permissions, and still it was not economical to build.
In optimal weather, wind power already produce more or less all current demand in the grid if we include wind energy produced in nearby countries. The nordpool price (electricity market in the northern Europe) already goes below zero several times over the year. Shortages in production do not occur during periods of windy weather, which is especially true for the south part of Sweden where the energy price is highest and which is connected to the wind farms of Denmark and Germany. The reason that south of Sweden, Denmark and northern Germany has so expensive energy prices is that when the wind is not blowing there is nothing else to really support it beyond solar, and solar is neither reliable nor effective enough during the winter months where output of solar on average reaches around 10% of capacity in Sweden. The only other producer of energy in that region is thermal power plants that mostly burns fossil fuels, like natural gas (https://www.uniper.energy/sv/sverige/kraftverk-i-sverige/ore...) and oil (https://www.uniper.energy/sv/sverige/kraftverk-i-sverige/kar...). Those two are naturally the single largest sources of carbon emissions in those regions.
They may be talking about building nuclear power, but what local government in south of Sweden is actually building right now is more thermal power plants (https://hallbartbyggande.com/bygget-av-kraftringens-nya-kraf...). That one is supposed to be burning wood but time will tell what happens if they can't find wood to burn.
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Nope. I don’t claim it to be undemocractic, I only insinuate that it is very stupid. And to be fully clear: I also think these people are hypocrites because they loudly proclaim in debates and public discourse to be pro wind energy, but once they vote it is against it. I also think they are hypocrites about energy independence, because that they also want, but they have cumulatively during the past five years declined wind power equal to about 18 full nuclear reactors.
Does your 18 full reactors count name plate capacity only, or does it take in to consideration that wind needs to be massively over built or also come with gas peaked plants?
This is important.
The number is based on expected actual annual output in GWh, not theoretical maximum. We don’t really do gas peaker plants because they are so expensive and seldom needed here.
https://www.energimyndigheten.se/energiberedskap/om-el-fjarr...
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Sorry your argument for something being renewal able or not is based on if it grows on trees? You realize modern infrastructure is generally not growing out the ground or we would not have taken thousands or years to get to this point?
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Blade recycling is only becoming mainstream now as 15 year old farms start to change out blades in bulk:
eg: (2026)
~ https://www.acciona.com.au/turbine-madeWhich explains the current low numbers of companies taking GFRP (primary component of wind turbine blades) down to particle size for reuse.
See: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213... (2024) and companies such as Acciona.
Show me anywhere that is recycling wind tubing blades.
Or solar panels.
Steel is infinitely recyclable and valuable enough as scrap to largely be recycled at a high rate.
Solar panels are so cheap new because there’s bigger all of anything worth recovering in them.
The secondhand market is littered with stacks of panels that don’t move.
The glass isn’t worth anything as scrap, we literally throw it in the recycling bin and it costs councils and governments to recover it and manage the waste streams, largely done as a vanity project.
Aluminium is so light and there is so little of it wrapped around a solar panel it’s not worth the labour and machine capability to recover it.
Sure.
But at the scale of a city or state one home uses close enough to zero power that it being a net user or net producer of electricity is irrelevant.
Scale up to tens of thousands of homes and suddenly you need an organising body approximating government to manage those homes being net users or net producers from moment to moment.
Additionally most cities tend to want to have commercial and industrial users of electricity, and energy more broadly. Your home solar & battery does approximately nothing to help them, and if any of the data is to be believed has resulted in electricity prices increasing for everyone.
That leaves a lot of free energy sources untapped - especially hydro.
If you can set up a hydro/pump dam without wrecking the ecosystem and don't need handouts to function, I'm all for it.
People complaining about renewal electricity production with hydro/pump dams while ignoring mountaintop removal of Appalachian mountains for coal...
Why not complain about both? Industrial civilization is inherently unsustainable, no matter how you try to power it.
As opposed to fossil fuels, which are great for ecosystems, both locally and globally?
Right. Gentle reminder that tuna has dangerous amounts of mercury in it specifically because of humans burning coal, not because the ocean was always so polluted.
Every time they do that you just redefine wrecking.
First it was the fish ladders. Then it was a bunch of whining about how reducing the water level variation on the river is bad (particularly illustrative because this is the exact opposite logic your ilk uses when talking stormwater). Lord knows what the complaint is these days.
Why don't you just be honest and say "no"
If you can drill oil and gas without wrecking the ecosystem I'm all for it.
That’s not a good idea. Millions would be left without electricity.
It's a great idea if we subsidize it the way that fossil fuels are subsidized.
Renewables are great, but they cannot sustain current power needs alone. Both solar and wind also have the problem that they cannot generate power 24/7. So at times where they are able they generate a lot of excess power that cannot be stored at that scale and at times where they cannot generate power there are shortages.
Even if they could operate 24/7 it would still not be enough power to satisfy current demand. Then there's the waste they create once parts need to be replaced, which is much more frequent than non renewables.
It's all very messy and there is no silver bullet.
> The only common sense I can think of is solar+storage
Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. Solar+storage requires massive overprovisioning, to the level that it's cheaper to burn literal money.
Windmill farm outputs tend to dip during summer and peak over winter. With a given minimum power output windmills + photovoltaics + storage is massively cheaper per unit of yearly energy. Of course, if you value any semblance of network stability.
Solar+storage is clear path towards either guaranteeing reliance on fossils or brownouts. The smart energy meter you got that encourages running the washing machine during cheap hours will ensure that you voluntarily go dark during undersupply as the cost will skyrocket.
> Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent.
The northernmost point in Texas would be at the extreme southern edge of Europe. The northernmost point of California is level with the sunny French Riviera. Hell, even frozen Minnesota has about the same solar potential as northern Spain...
If Europe can make solar work, so can the states (assuming a similar level of investment)
> If Europe can make solar work
Can you cite a region in Europe that physically independently covers its energy needs with solar+storage alone? </snark>
Stress on physical. Even if some regions claim renewables fully covering energy needs, that's at best on accounting level, those regions are still fully dependent on power import/export and simply could not function in an island mode for any extended period of time without at the very least brownouts. Quite importantly, it's always renewables, not solar.
The dispatchability problem is a real pain. Pool together wind + solar + hydro and the variability in power (!) output drops to levels possible to tame with realistic grid-scale storage sizes.
I am not talking about intra-day balancing here. It's the yearly cycle that comes to bite you. In my corner of Europe, if I wanted to go completely off-grid with solar+storage I would need storage well into the mid single-digit MEGA watt-hours, for the house needs (HVAC and DHW taking the lion's share) alone. That's laughably unrealistic.
> The northernmost point of California is level with the sunny French Riviera. Hell, even frozen Minnesota has about the same solar potential as northern Spain...
Yes, the southern states could probably make do with something like 3-4x overprovisioning, but that's still massive. So massive that any sort of windmill capability will outcompete any sort of COTS storage.
In my corner of Europe, I have vacationed in a house that’s completely off-grid with solar and a bit over 20 kWh of storage (it does use about half a ton of wood pellets for heating during the coldest months of winter). Link in Czech: https://www.csdum.cz/jak-jsme-postavili-cesky-sobestacny-dum...
I wonder how it would fare with just 100 kWh of storage, something you can still easily put together.
> Pool together wind + solar + hydro
Plus stored power, plus biomass, plus nuclear, plus gas.
90% renewables is better than 80% renewables. Throwing up our hands and saying "we'll never reach 100%, lets pack the whole thing in" isn't a sensible approach.
> Can you cite a region in Europe that physically independently covers its energy needs with solar+storage alone?
That is substantially moving the goalposts - nowhere in the world has built out sufficient solar to make that claim yet. The question is whether they can get there.
If you look at the table[1] for installed solar per capita, 9 of the top 10 countries are in Europe (the odd one out is Australia), so they are definitely giving it the old college try
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
> Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. Solar+storage requires massive overprovisioning, to the level that it's cheaper to burn literal money.
Citation needed
My rooftop solar disagrees. It generates my whole house load in the winter, spring and summer I run a pretty healthy surplus.
Thats with all my appliances being electric and superfluous crap running like a 24/7 file server running. Because my power is so cheap I don't have any problems running that kind of stuff.
Indeed. Energy is at the core of everything we do. Make it more expensive, you immediately make some people go hungry, and then you also make everything else in the economy a tad more expensive, slowing things down, and as market readjusts and contracts, this makes even more people go hungry.
There's a really strong incentive to keep energy generation cheap, because pretty much every social and political issue is downstream of it.
Yes. "The economy is energy, energy is the economy".
China understood this and is not just betting on both solar and nuclear like mad, they're also burning coal (so that the EU btw can cosplay being green, while offloading the production of many things it consumes to China).
As a result energy prices in China are something like 7x cheaper than in Germany.
Those with lots of energy saw their GDP growth in the 21st century while those like the EU, with ultra pricey energy (due to stupid decisions like closing nuclear power plants only to then reopen them) saw hardly any GDP growth, inflation-adjusted in USD, in the 21st century.
No GDP growth means ever more poor people and ever more indebted governments.
I'm all for transitioning away from fuel and coal, but do it pragmatically. We don't need communists (that'd be the "green" parties [1]) who want to make the lives of everybody miserable taking decisions related to energy.
[1] green people who, like watermelons, are only green on the outside and then bright extremist red on the inside
> As a result energy prices in China are something like 7x cheaper than in Germany.
Source?
> [1] green people who, like watermelons, are only green on the outside and then bright extremist red on the inside
I hate political labels on principle, but I admit I'd find it fitting if some green parties started to be called "watermelon parties" for the reason you described.
This is just another area where the Chinese, Japanese, Korean will move ahead and stay ahead? Is this what it means when you have more engineers in your government than lawyers? They seem to be open towards any good idea if it works they don’t dismiss it out of hand because some existing industry might have to compete against the new technology coming in.
Going into the future, multiple energy sources will power future civilizations, multiple battery technologies will store energy what is wrong with multiple solutions as long as you make provisions not to completely destroy the environment you live in.
That’s a perverse incentive against ecology, case in point. Hear me out. We take citizen’s money to subsidize energy so they can get their energy for cheaper (at marginal level - while still paying the subsidy’s taxes) so they can undertake industrial/residential projects that we wouldn’t do with less energy. In a word, we incentive people to consume more (in a consumerist sense), which is bad for ecology, because we can’t afford them, and neither can the Earth.
Of course, leaving aside how petroleum is subsidized [through the department of defense].
While ecologists usually are in favor of subsidies, subsidies incentive people to consume more, which exhausts our Earth. We should develop less, i.e. we should develop in accordance with a higher facial cost of energy, which sometimes implies having a smaller home and fewer industries, which is what would happen if we didn’t sponsor solar or wind energy [or coal or fossil].
won't happen with capitalism which has an emphasis on economic growth forever...
Economic growth also comes from getting more for less.
A company can increase their profits by growing and increasing both what they spend and what they earn. But a company can also increase their profits by reducing what they spend without decreasing what they earn. Almost all companies are constantly trying to do this.
Often (usually?) by requiring workers to do more for less pay. Automation will eventually solve this problem, but because of the need to increase profits, finding an alternative way for companies to economically support human life the way they traditionally have through employment will be a tough nut to crack.
By any and every means available, but not mostly by whipping workers harder.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
(Hint: it actually happened in ‘61…)
That’s an error. Most capitalists are against government intervention.
It’s EU socialists who want to raise poor people to the level of consumerism of rich ones. Not capitalists. Capitalists would be happy to let them be poor.
In the EU, it’s trying to help-and-attract poor people by millions which strains the Earth. In the US it’s a special breed of capitalism where the state colludes with rich people to subsidize the big corporations at the detriment of nature and citizen.
Does the env work better in a communist country like North Korea? Or in the Soviet Union? Or are we gonna do no true Scotsman and say Soviet was always capitalist and had no connection to communism?
Absolutely irrelevant derailing. No claim was made about communist countries...
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Subsidies (via tax or lack thereof) on aeroplane fuel is one that really does get overlooked. Yet on the other hand, use a few gallons in a car and you're demonised as a climate villain in name and taxes. Nobody factors in life of the car, the cost to dispose and replace the batteries in electric cars, or the whole aspect that cars made today are less serviceable than cars of old that its gone from being able to rebuild the car in your garage to waiting for spare parts from a dealer as it's all just replace or scrap today. So much focus on the short term, without focus on the larger picture and impact.
This is more true in the US due to costs of labor vs. parts and a whole culture of profitability at all costs.
Compared to other countries, repairability is higher where labor is cheaper and people are more price conscious. We're at late stage capitalism where any chance of lost profits is seen as criminal.
Just like "first principles", "common sense" differs from man to man.
It probably comes from the recognition that energy access being a common good, a tax-collecting government should work for its constituents in helping provide energy at a reasonable cost, especially if the subsidies support an improvement to the technology behind it.
Subsidies aren't universally a bad thing. This is silly thinking.
- calculate in all building cost, side cost, post-lifetime cost, accident risk cost etc. i.e. "all cost"
- calculate expected total produced electricity which can be used
- divide one by another
- if one if majorly cheaper and chose it then that is the "common sense" strategy of choosing what works best
yes the "all cost" part is tricky to estimate.
yes you don't choose a "single technology and only use it", resilience always works best with redundancy and diversity.
still you can run the number, you can estimate error bars, and sometimes this gives already clear answers. Like a technology being quite expensive even if you lose the lowest (unrealistic cheap) bar for all costs? Then that is a bad technology and it doesn't matter that you have very wide error bars as you are already looking at the optimal choice.
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EDIT: Me going of on a tangent, maybe ignore :/
Some technologies complement each other well (like most like solar + wind + some gravity storage, as both can have uneven output, but (at live where I live) extremely windy days are often reduced sunny and extremely sunny days often not so windy, and gravity storage can handle "dunkelflauten" sufficiently (and is has already been build and is in use(!), not some hypothetical tech like some people pretend it is)).
But also some technology works against each other, e.g. non _fully_ subsidized nuclear sells a roughly constant power output at a constant (and quite high! if not highly subsidized) cost. But if other electricity can "sometimes" produce supper cheap electricity for some hours, days or even weeks then nuclear can not compete _at all_ during this times, makes losses and need to increase the yearly average price to compensate. Which makes it even less competitive. Hence in a actual "dynamic/free" energy market nuclear makes no sense even if you ignore long term waste storage or risk for contaminating essential parts of your country risks. Still a _fully_ subsidized nuclear base power level might work if you can't generate enough electricity in average through other means. Still this IMHO makes it somewhat of a "only if there is no other solution, not competing on the free marked" choice, i.e. a bad choice you might have to do but might be able to fully avoid (e.g. by using hydro power).
Oh and please stop brown coal, especially low quality brown coal. In all categories of health damage, environmental damage, climate damage it has _horrible_ scores both during mining and usage even for modern versions with filters etc. Sure it looks cheap on paper, but it's maybe THE worst kind of power source there is. Especially if run on low quality coal and without modern filter technology. Brown coal should be a "never choose this no matter what" choice.
I know it's not what you wanted to start here with this comment. But the silly, tangential, petty bickering in this thread goes a very long way to explain our failure to act to stop the catastrophe we've known was coming since the 80s.
To me it's a reasonable point. We tend to forget that subsidies go both ways. Maybe it's a bit too sarcastic but that's about it
That's exactly what this person wanted to start.
And don't forget ethanol, probably the least efficient form of energy ever discovered
What are you talking about, it powers a lot of people I know
Does it do it efficiently though?
It saves energy by making them feel warmer in the winter. If they overdo it and freeze to death, it saves even more energy.
It's an anti-freeze. Ask the people that survived the Titanic in the water :)
And is a horrible use of land compared to solar.
Please do not forget the /s since there are young people here or those people who arent native English speakers and they might not catch the sarcasm given its an important topic, esp for the wellbeing of our future generations.
Upvoted because you are right.
Young people who aren't native English speakers should realize that /s isn't English, but a convention among some very specific sites. Of which hacker news isn't included.
It's even dumber than that. Someone built a wind farm near Trump's golf course in Scotland and now he hates wind farms: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo. He thinks they're ugly and noisy.
If this is true, this is the person some folks think is fit to lead a nation. One little thing not suiting his whim of the day? Lets hate something that helps with energy production.
Welcome the world of transactional opportunism.
This is absolutely true. He has been angrily obsessed about this for years, and since he is a malignant narcissist with an ever greater need for narcissistic supply, his irritation has been manipulated by powerful lobbyists that tell him his instincts are brilliant and correct.
People called Don and irrational hate of windmills. Name a more iconic duo...
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Hmm does this "aesthetic" include shrinking national parks?
Birds get confused when they have to much greenery, you need more land strip-mined for coal to keep them safe while migrating.
I'm sure you would welcome a data center in your backyard
Datacentres are a resource sink that serves private interests, not a resource source that serves public interests.
does this site not serve the public interest? I hope you didn't hurt anyone's feelings
This site only recently (a few years ago) got multithreading. I'm pretty sure it could run off a second-hand laptop. It doesn't require a datacentre: just the two(?) moderators' salaries, and some rounding-error electricity and ISP costs.
I'm fond of Netflix?
Wouldn't need datacentres if we had IP multicast routing. And actually, Netflix doesn't need that anyway: anycast and telco CDNs get most of the advantages, albeit at the cost of only being available to established players. Netflix uses AWS because it's cheaper and easier for them, not because it's technically necessary: if AWS shut down (with enough notice), Netflix would migrate to an alternative system, and nothing much would change.
I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of Netflix's true overhead were actually DRM and account management, rather than the international distribution of perhaps a petabyte of multimedia data, most of which doesn't change. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33456782 estimates half that; https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/6mf... estimates a tenth of that.)
You have no clue what you're talking about while trying to act smug and talking down to someone who knows at least a little bit more than you. Netflix cannot run without massive DCs, whether that be theirs or Amazon's.
I'm not trying to act smug. Open Connect (Netflix's telco CDN system) doesn't seem like it'd take "massive DCs" to maintain: per [DG], each Open Connect Appliance (OCA) draws between 350W and 750W (depending on model) at peak use, plus cooling to keep it below 26°C (with peaks up to 40°C permitted). By its nature, the OCAs should be geographically distributed, not centralised. With the Open Connect network handling the most popular shows (i.e., the peak load), you'd only need to serve the long tail of the back-catalogue from elsewhere.
I don't know the true numbers, because I'm lazy, but [DG] says that storage OCAs can take 6.5 TB of traffic for a fill window, so we can take this as a lower bound for the storage. I'll use my earlier 1 PB overestimate for the total catalogue. Assuming that every OCA has the same data on it, this is (at least) 0.65% of the catalogue. Assuming a Zipf's law distribution of popularity for 20k titles, this means the Open Connect network can serve the top 130 titles:
which is over half of all Netflix traffic. In reality, this number is surely higher: different parts of the Open Connect network hold different titles depending on regional popularity, storage isn't 100% redundant, and so on: I wouldn't be surprised if it were closer to 70% or 80%.Modify Netflix so you have to request an item from the back-catalogue a day in advance, or something, and the cost to serve the long tail of Netflix goes waaaay down. (Considering that Netflix used to work by sending you physical DVDs, which have more than a day's delay to them, I don't think this is unreasonable.) If you want to get costs down even further, combine this with some custom UDP-ish torrent protocol, and make it peer-to-peer among users (not just the Open Connect network).
But if you go too far in this direction, people will start asking why they're even paying Netflix in the first place. Netflix has to remain an infrastructure provider, not just a rentier, if they want to preserve their business model.
Or, pie-in-the-sky, if we implemented a worldwide pubsub multicast system, then the top 200 90-minute titles multicasted at 30-second intervals would cost Netflix the bandwidth of just 36000 simultaneous streams, and they could run all of Netflix off the hardware of 200 OCAs… which would fit in one (1) datacentre. Or I could assemble a custom rig that would fit in… ten racks, ballpark estimate, given generous application of duct tape: which probably means I've way underestimated the capacity of each OCA. (Serving unpopular titles on demand would be cheaper than sending out multicast broadcasts that nobody's subscribed to: it would actually be even cheaper than this estimate.) It's such a shame that the only internet-routeable protocols are TCP, unicast UDP, and ICMP.
[DG]: https://openconnect.netflix.com/deploymentguide.pdf
Wind turbines are not data centres.
The sea is not part of Donald Trump’s property.
your neighbors property is not yours either, and hmm, I wonder if datacenters and wind turbines have anything in common?
Let’s go with what this is actually about, windmills. I lived next door to a farm with windmills on it and I actually found them mesmerizing and nice to look at. Also a fun talking point with people visiting, but if we all had them in our backyard I suppose that novelty would wear off.
So tl;dr: I would absolutely want to have windmills as my neighbours again. Datacenter not so much, but they are also substantially bigger, though not taller, than windmills.
Speak plainly. You’re making no sense whatsoever.
I think wind farms on sea look really cool, especially if the turbines are huge. It gives some majestic feelings
I'm not a huge fan of their aesthetic in its own right, but it beats the aesthetic of fossil fuel infrastructure any day in my view.
Ah, sometimes it can look quite nice, or at least striking. Though usually after end of life. The Tate Modern in London is an old power station, and a disused oil power plant in Dublin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poolbeg_Generating_Station#Poo...) has become sufficiently iconic that its operator was refused permission to demolish its chimneys; they're now protected structures.
That's fair actually!
To undermine my own point further, Battersea Power Station in London is iconic. In particular the control rooms were very well-styled with lots of art deco ornamentation, anyone who's listened to Quark, Strangeness and Charm by Hawkwind will have seen it as it's the source of the album art. To be honest I think the idea that ornament in general is bad did a lot of visual damage to the world.
A huge coal power plant belching smoke probably looked pretty cool, maybe even majestic, the first time you saw London back in the Victorian Era. That's before the entire city became saturated in soot, you developed respiratory problems, and you'd seen the same stinky monstrosity every day for most of your short difficult life.
I like wind farms, but I think it's fair to observe that they're often built in nice places, whereas fossil fuel infrastructure is built in places you'd never go to voluntarily.
> whereas fossil fuel infrastructure is built in places you'd never go to voluntarily.
IMO that's the consequence, not the cause, of the infrastructure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine
Or sometimes the consequence of the closure of that infrastructure with no transitional plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merthyr_Tydfil
The latter is absolutely worth caring about even for the greenest of green energy. Even just PV on rooftops, when a town becomes a ghost town.
Lots of fossil fuel infrastructure was built in formerly nice places that now you'd never go to voluntarily...
Drive around Southern California and you’ll see everything from oil derricks to refineries in places which would otherwise be full of housing if they weren’t so polluting.
Some of them are right next to housing. Huntington beach has wells adjoining homes near the beach. Look up the prices of the houses if you want to really go crazy
That's the problem. It diminishes His Majesty Trump I.
It's mesmerizing. Akin to dance. I love it.
I really hope someone in a future administration green lights a bunch of these right off Mar-a-Lago.
I would actually miss the windturbines they have become a part of the landscape. Besides oil refineries are hardly pretty either.
> He thinks they're ugly and noisy
The feeling is mutual
Are you saying that wind farms think you are ugly and noisy?
Trump is ugly and noisy
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We don't need to "think" if they are noisy. We can measure that. So how noisy are they?
They're silent.
I don't know where Trump got the idea from. Perhaps he thinks they work like fans?
They're certainly not silent, but unless you're actually standing right under one they're rarely particularly noisy. Modern ones should be about 35 decibels at 300 meters distance. You're never going to hear an offshore one, really.
I have some wind turbines near my town. I can walk right up to the pole, and I can't hear any noise from the turbine.
Light car traffic is ~50dB.
Yeah, under most circumstances you're really going to struggle to hear much, because if they're going fast, well, there's a lot of wind, and _wind_ is noisy, too. They make _detectable_ noise, but under normal conditions it's not really going to be human noticeable noise.
They're most certainly not silent! If you're standing right under one, you can hear it over car traffic and the breeze! (Well, unless the wind is blowing really hard: then the wind might be louder than either, considering the usual minimum distance between wind turbines and roads.) Whatever will you claim is silent next? Refrigerators? Lightbulbs?
Evidently this cute comment was not understood by some.
@iso1631 is saying that wind farms (and by extension, their supporters) think Trump is ugly and noisy. So, they mutually think this of each other.
Lying bullshitters all.
These people are not interested in coherent policy. They say whatever they want to justify it, we know it, and they know we know it. It’s an intentional expression of domination.
Just another thing to prosecute and rebuild.
At least they’ll be out of office or age out eventually, we’ll just collectively as US taxpayers with a federal income tax burden (top ~40% of income earners, bottom ~60% have no federal income tax liability) have to pay back hundreds of billions of dollars in excess debt incurred because of this governance failure mode we experienced (or default on the debt, which is also an option).
My hot take is: be ready to move fast when the winds shift and we can get back to building instead of harm reduction.
("Progress occurs one funeral at a time." -- Max Planck)
I’m not endorsing the current administration’s policy, nor do I think it would succeed, but I find this comment really perplexing since this action is PRECISELY in line with the 2025 National Security Strategy. [1]
Also, for further insights on some of the unstated policy, I recommend reading the project 2025 document as well. [2]
Perhaps by “coherent policy” you meant “sound” or “effective”? But as it stands it certainly is coherent.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-N...
[2] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042-project-202...
> they say the noise causes cancer [1]
I mean it’s common sense
[1]: https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-trum...
While they pay a subsidy: > RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum
It's even more hilarious than that because all nuclear energy is heavily subsidized by taxpayers already. People such as Doug just lie strategically. No surprise in that current government of liars.
All forms of power generation are heavily subsidized. Anyone complaining about a particular form being subsidzed is a dishonest liar.
I am personally for building nuclear and compulimenting it with some wind and hydro, but that is not related to what things are subsidized but because nuclear and hydro has worked really well here in Sweden providing reliable power and while wind has a spottier record I think diversification is good.
I’m for Thorium research and development. The Chinese again seem to be moving ahead once again, they seem to be open to ideas that work. In the past when America was more of a can-do country the Chinese or Russian development of Thorium reactors (Oak Ridge tech) would have been a Sputnik moment.
Today the reaction is pretty much silence and the same goes for useful infrastructure ie the rail system is pretty much 1950s technology across the United States.
Is this the result of government by lobby?
Okay then - let's stop subsidizing gasoline, yeah?
I wish there was more context as to what the deal actually was instead of a highlight reel of late 2000s era right wing slogans like "drill baby drill".
It's framed as US government giving $1.2b to German company not to build something (which is weird in its own right). But after drilling into it (correct me if I'm wrong):
RWE is a large German utility
It paid $1.2b for development rights and invested a bunch of money.
The US passed policies that made it impossible to develop the plan.
So it's essentially a negotiated unwind of government-issued property/development rights. US changed the rules, made the lease ineffective and compensated the leasee. But the deal was that instead of RWE just taking the money they agreed to other development projects related to natural gas (better in my opinion).
You might disagree with the policies that made these wind farms impossible or whether the buy out of federal leased land is fair to one party or another. But I wish articles actually cared enough to describe the situation clearly.
Questions I would like mentioned in the article in place of Trumps rhetoric about "big ugly windmills" is details about the actual restrictions that made it impossible, history of it, impact, etc.
To be fair offshore wind is relatively expensive. A brand new wind farm is probably cheaper than burning methane because Trump started another pointless war, but it's closer than for like Solar PV.
Of course "common sense" ought to probably include "Not cooking ourselves".
It might be more expensive to build/run, but is cheaper on the environment.
[dead]
It’s disappointing to see Redditesque room temp iq discourse in the comments.
Has anyone mentioned the expected cost per Mwh of this project to get a sense whether this made economic sense, or are we talking Biden admin adjacent vanity political project paid by rate payers?
Just for reference, the hopefully-cancelled Empire wind near me had a 20yr PPA of $155mwh, which makes Vogtle (-~$170mwh) look like a steal.
More numbers and less foaming at the mouth, please.
> common sense and not one dependent on "costly subsidies".
They say one thing and do another!
Edit: I meant to say wrapping their stupid acts under the disguise of 'common sense' is a stupid act in itself.
Inferior Secretary
I read up recently on the history of the fall of the roman empire and it was fascinating how eerily similar it was to the current state of the US. Overwhelmed by corruption and wars they make stupider and stupider decisions on ever larger scales, ever more frequently. And the population grows ever more cynical, eventually opting for authoritarianism before eventually the center can't hold any more and it all collapses in on itself.
Funnily enough, the most striking part was the pure stupidity of a lot of it - seems so strange, but every day it seems I hear another really stupid story and think ... huh, maybe it really can be like that.
Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest. It sure looks stupid when you look at America or the Roman Empire as a whole. But when you look at the specific individuals doing these "stupid" things, and the individuals enabling them, it is perfectly aligned with their own best interests.
Yes, but as a nation, we are stupid to go along with it.
It’s going to be very hard to turn around over 60 years of behavior, particularly the part of interfering and spending money like a drunken sailor on special interests oil and military, the complex is coming to an end and the piggy bank is running out of money. Without useful internal infrastructure building within the country and I don’t mean data-centers, a restructure, a rethink, the decline will just accelerate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control
What is a nation but the people?
Any worldview that calls destroying your own civilization self-interest deserves to fall
> Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest.
Sure, but in cases like the new Navy battleships... it's just plain dumb, no two ways about it. Aside from the new ship class name, I see no way that it could be attributed to self-interest.
Wait, it is all about the name and that it's big, isn't it. That is self-interest I suppose, but it's just vanity, which is the stupid form of self-interest.
> Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest.
Interesting. Sounds like a counter-point to Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
I use Hanlon's quite a bit to explain nonsense I see day to day, but this is a better one in some ways. It shift the conclusion of "but if only they were shown the right way" to "they know what they are doing and are looking out for number 1".
The current administration has taken the edge off Hanlon's razor. Now I prefer saying "Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
I enjoy your thinking! Reflecting further...
Hanlons razor is about motive and "size of mental models". Stupidly small, or comprehensively large.
This other thing you note seems to be about scale being low or high. Individually fine-grained, or collectively coarse-grained.
I suspect mistaking either dimension can result in grossly misinterpreting a situation.
The lowest, most fine-grained level of individual self-interest looks a lot collective stupidity and failure to meet the collective's interests.
Democracy supposely recalibrates from these mismatches. But so do more drastic and unruly options, when democracy has failed.
Interesting. I had not considered how scale affects these mental model.
Now I wonder if depending on the scale, one model is better suited. Or maybe they both can be modified based on the scale.
Maybe self-interest is easier to reason about than the interests of a group. Conflicting self-interests can lead to compromises that result in what looks stupid in the end.
If an empire is subject to the whim of individuals acting in their own self interest, which causes damage and destruction to the empire, I think this is the definition of dying? It has no recourse against the looters so it gets looted to death.
Much of the stupidity stems from the impulse to coddle Trump’s ego. Both from Trump himself and anyone who interacts with him.
It becomes self-interest only because this man with a terrifically fragile holds so much power, so there is a strong incentive to appease him.
But the root problem is a powerful man beholden to a very fragile ego.
So we're dying to selfishness?
Ultimately the strings are being pulled by someone who stands to gain, but it's not like Trump, Hegseth, Rubio, &co are playing 5D chess here. There are a lot of stupid blundering narcissists running things right now. The actual string-pullers know that, and as long as the stupid blundering narcissism doesn't get in the way of the string-pulling then it doesn't matter to the string-pullers, because stupid blundering narcissists are ultimately the right people for the job (easily manipulated themselves, and effective manipulators of the public). But that doesn't make them or their decisions or their statements less stupid.
Not to mention this all rides on the stupidity and emotional fragility of literally tens or hundreds of millions of voters; anything less and the project would never be possible. That's one reason debilitating the education system at all levels has become a top priority of the current administration (the other being suppression of the free thinking and often liberal or left-wing politics that historically exist at universities).
and your point?
perhaps their point is 'cui bono'
It's almost as if acting solely in one's own self-interest is stupid.
More like acting without a sense of civic duty is stupid. Or acting without a basis in evidence is stupid.
It’s the lack of coherent leadership at the top, the lawyers, junk bond, equity bankers, oil-men, and the military have had their chance, it’s time for the engineers, science, medical, builders, local bankers and internal infrastructure people to run things. And when I say run things I mean, stop accepting their word as the truth.
You're not going to build a long-term stable system that doesn't limit wealth accumulation, because it doesn't take long until all the power is back with everyone you mentioned.
Those that acted in their own self-interest thrived, and others died.
Only if it hurts you long-term.
Does our evolutionary fitness function count as self-interest? Climate change is on a runaway trajectory. We're in line for Darwin's top honour, but no one will be around to receive the award.
I like these comparison with Roman Empire but it seems too simplsitic and Ive learned that usually means "its not so right actually".
Meaning for example, what about empires that actually survived or adapted? What did they do that we know exactly didnt the Roman Empire do that saved them? How does zeitgeist impact this in the sense that what ruined Roman Empire might save a nation today?
Not trying to be negative, Im jsut geniunley curios because then if I was in government, Id be "yeah I see the same. I mscared as fuck were messing it up, but then what should we do?" because you see, everybody is giving at advice with very diverse and extreme ideas on what should happen. Probably with most of them you and I wouldnt be OK with (do Dictatorships work? ...).
Or simpler, we all agree on the problem. What are all the solutions and how do we know theyre the correct ones? Thats what Im thinking about the last years.
"what about empires that actually survived or adapted" — which ones exactly?
Empires are pathological developments of nations. They don't tend to survive all that long.
"Empire" is really just a large hereditary monarchy with the ability to subordinate nearby ethnic groups into a unified political/military command. They can be remarkably stable. China managed two to three thousand years, depending on whether you want to count Zhou (pre-Qin unification) or not. I suspect in another millenium the Chinese empire historians will gloss over the discontinuous period of the 20th century ("nuclear glass layer era") and claim four thousand years.
Didn't the Roman Empire last nearly 1,500 years in one form or another?
Well, the Holy Roman Empire inherited the name but, as Voltaire said, "was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire"...
And the Byzantine Empire shrunk greatly after the first few hundred years. Most of its life it was more like a Greek nation that sometimes managed to expand to control parts of the old empire.
> the Holy Roman Empire inherited the name
Eh, inheritance implies the predecessor willed it to you upon death. In the case of the "Holy Roman Empire" the predecessor died 334 years earlier with no successor. This isn't a case of inheritance, it's a case of just making shit up.
The "byzantine" empire did inherit the name though. They continuously used and claimed the name "roman" from when the roman empire split (and called both halves roman) right up until 1453, even their language was called romaic. That we don't refer to them as roman to this day is really a strange success of propaganda.
> And the Byzantine Empire shrunk greatly after the first few hundred years.
Which by itself sort of contradicts the claim that empires historically fall quickly? The roman empire began in 27 and in 565 it controlled almost the entire Mediterranean. Sure a few hundred years after the split (which itself is a few hundred years after the beginning of being an empire) it shrank but that's a long time.
The Byzantine Empire was Greek. Heraclius changed the official language to Greek already in the 7th century because that’s what everyone spoke.
They kept calling themselves Romans, but they spoke, wrote, and governed in Greek.
This is like saying that all the countries in the world that speak English are England, that's not how it works. Countries are not defined by the language they speak, and the language they speak most definitely varies over time.
Moreover you're picking a date hundreds of years into the eastern empire's existence and declaring "because they switched official languages hundreds of years later, they were always Greek". Time doesn't flow like that.
Moreover the roman empire, pre-split, spoke quite a bit of this language (well, Koine Greek, the predecessor to Romaic). Including in official communications (particularly in the east), and at least one emperor's private diaries [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations
As if the Romans didn't worship rebranded Greek gods, pray in bootleg Greek temples and had educated Greek slaves be their teachers…
No 27 BC – AD 476 the Roman Empire the one that everyone thinks about at maximum strength lasted 503 years basically Augustus Caesar to AD 476. The eastern empire was but a shadow of the Roman empire ruled from Rome.
If you count the eastern empire, but most people only think of the western empire.
> what about empires that actually survived or adapted?
Really the Roman Empire did very well on this one, depending on when you date its final end to. But the pattern is there, especially if you look at the more rapid and more recent collapse of the Chinese empire, with the result of the Imperial line extinct and the successor state stuck on a relatively small island.
All administration exists on a spectrum from bureaucracy to personal intervention. You can break out Max Weber here, but it is generally agreed that a state needs a bureaucracy to be effective on a large scale. This machine "works" when it is functioning uniformly and according to process in order to achieve goals, and it breaks down when it is disrupted by a system of personal grift, favor, corruption and favouritism.
So the collapse of China runs roughly: poor leader (dowager Empress Cixi) -> ineffective state -> pushed over by foreign powers (European states vs Boxer rebellion) -> even worse leader (Puyi, last Emperor of China, took the throne at age 2) -> pushed over by foreign powers again (Japan) -> internal collapse of remaining China (Maoist rebellion).
Edit: forgot the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion, which belongs on the front of that list at about 1850, which is yet another civil war that killed somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population of China!
It would be a fun alternative history to swap the Japanese and Chinese leadership of the 1850-1950 era, such that Japan remains a feudal agricultural state and China got the Meiji restoration. How many carriers do they arrive at Pearl Harbor with?
> we all agree on the problem. What are all the solutions and how do we know they're the correct ones?
That is not at all how the last few years have worked, because an astonishing amount of lying about everything from basic facts to obvious outcomes is polluting the discourse.
Older generation has lead poisoning from all the leaded gasoline burned
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_lead_poisoning_theory
Funny you should say that
The concerning part is that peak lead exposure was with Gen X. We're still being led by boomers and silent generation. So any contribution from lead stands to get worse before it gets better.
The younger generation is way less cognitively developed, to use a bland term. What we find find next, that lead was actually good?
It's entirely possible that things don't get better (or continue to get worse) for reasons unrelated to lead. The addition of the internet is way too big of a confounding factor to say that lead was actually good though, IMO it's more likely that we haven't learned how to parent children in the modern world yet (though arguably that has always been true).
And "cognitively [un]developed" is a weird way to say it; I wouldn't call that a "bland" term at all.
> The younger generation is way less cognitively developed
Interesting premise, do you have a source to back it up?
Edit: or is this a creative way to say "younger" that sailed over my head on first read
I hate this theory. It is extremely condescending, offers nothing, has no proof, but sounds plausible enough that many people believe it.
It is much more likely that our economic system rewards hostile behavior and that money has outsized influence in politics and a criminal justice system which lets rich people get away with crimes. That money correlates more with hostile behavior then lead, Instead of blaming lead, blame capitalism.
Just think about all the people who put lead in the gasoline in the first place, did they go to prison for their crimes, or did they make a bunch of money and retire in luxury.
It's spelled lead, and it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to cause brain damage. There is no safe level of lead exposure, it causes neurological damage at any level of exposure and it stays in your body permanently.
You're wrong on every count and simply spreading disinformation. Please don't do that.
I never claimed lead does not cause damage, it does. I dispute it is the primary fault in bad politics, and I offered an alternative theory.
It's probably more than one thing but it would be shocking if the lead had no impact.
Seeing how much influence money has, I think that impact is negligible.
Perhaps you just dislike facts then
I think we all understood the comment implied it’s been a factor, not THE driver. I’d be a little more generous in your interpretation of their comment, even if it is a bit flippant.
Wow I never knew about this theory! But I like your comment because ... idk, if its true at least its as simple as "Lets avoid that, and we ensure each Empire of today exists forever." I wish that was true! So how can we be sure, as somewhat smart people, that this is true and responsibly communicate it? Because everything else is dishonest and hurts our society.
Im no history expert but I know there were other Empires thru different times and sizes and places, and since now they're not the same, they "Failed"? Did they fail exactly due to the same problem or others? Are we treating those too? What is our method and how strong did we criticize it and see and understand it flaws?
At a time with fake news, AI slop and whatever the Internet has become today, its our job to treat every statement with the highest from of critical thinking at our disposal.
It seems like checks and balances are collapsing so the corruption gets worse, just selling out nature, our health more and more for personal gain until something breaks.
It feels like the rate of stupid we have achieved in the last (checks watch) ~18 months has surely eclipsed anything that may have occurred during the roman empire. By sheer volume alone?
Also, two other characteristics of the fall of roman empire:
1. It struggled to remain "solvent" because it lost taxable provinces relative to the costs of wars, administration, etc.
2. It took years for it to eventually "fall". It didn't just magically disappear overnight.
I mean no disrespect, but if you're seeing a deep parallel between the Roman Empire's final days and what's going on in the US today, I would say you need to study Roman history more. It was in deep chaos that most people in the world today can't even imagine.
The Empire was relentlessly invaded by tribes like the Visigoths and the Vandals, and they even sacked Rome multiple times in the 400s CE. There was a huge amount of political corruption, and no, I don't mean anything like what's going on in the US. Military leaders and royal guards fought each other for power, leading to frequent civil wars and leaders who didn't last long. No one wanted to join the military and so it had to hire foreign mercenaries who didn't really have any loyalty. The Roman Empire eventually split right in half because a single ruler could not project power over the entire territory. The Western Roman Empire spoke an entirely different language from the Eastern Roman Empire (Latin vs Greek)!
I'm sorry, but I keep hearing these comparisons from people who seem to have a very shallow understanding of history and are looking for patterns because they read online that the US is crumbling. Maybe, maybe not, but it is not the same thing or even similar. The differences are far more than the similarities.
A better parallel is the fall of the republic with the rise of strong men using populism and power to dismantle its form of democracy in favor of authoritarianism.
The Romans pretty much had their way (peak) for 300 years. Yes decline was not instantaneous, but no one can complain about having 300 years of relative success/dominance, which they did once they defeated the Carthaginians all the way to about 200 A.D.
The Romans pretty much had their way. Their decline happened pretty much in the same way all civilizations end the elite’s participation in defending the empire or their civilization became less and less in short decadence sound familiar? Arguably the Civil War was probably the last war where the largest percentage of the elite actually participated in fighting the war and that percentage has gone down in every war since.
The United States from its founding until about 1990 had its way but now the shine appears to be coming off slowly. The way it currently looks 2100 is probably going to have a new number 1.
> The way it currently looks 2100 is probably going to have a new number 1.
I'm sure 2050 will already have a new number 1. Which will probably be China, all things considered.
Whatever America is doing to perpetuate its hold on the world e.g. the petrodollar is only making it slip away faster, because it is based in a world that no longer exists.
If America would embrace the future it actually could change. But the ruling conservatives only look towards the past.
The idea about conservatism is all wrong though. They look at a changed world and the time that came before. And they think that if they recreate some of the conditions from that time, the whole world will rewind somehow. That's obviously false, the world has moved on.
Also, they look at that time with rose-coloured glasses. Like with MAGA, America never really was great. The time that MAGA seems to idolise had devastating wars for zero reason like Vietnam, despicable leaders like Nixon, and a population that was constantly afraid of a nuclear attack. But it's the time when boomers were young and had their entire future ahead of them.
If anything the 90s were pretty much the peak of the Western world in my opinion. The Soviet threat was suddenly gone, economy was booming, global warming wasn't really recognised yet and 9/11 hadn't happened.
Your comment is shockingly low in the rankings. Anyone who upvoted the parent is being absolutely ravished by confirmation bias. Yes the US has big problems, but that doesn't mean anyone should unthinkingly approve of any thought that's critical of it.
HS history is more than enough dispel any notion that this is anything like the Roman Empire.
Very dissapointed in the HN community in this moment.
> opting for authoritarianism before eventually the center can't hold any more and it all collapses in on itself
It all depends on what you define as the collapse of the Roman Empire, but the earliest sensible candidate date would be about four and a half centuries after the population 'opted' for authoritarianism (which wasn't much of a choice for anyone btw).
People need to stop making senseless historical comparisons.
The US sure seems to be speedrunning the collapse though.
That's what I was thinking.
>Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest.
¿Por Qué No Los Dos? Really seems to speed up the process more so than I've seen since the Nixon malfeasance.
definitely
But then it's also true the real arc of these things is only properly visible in retrospect. For example I'm sure historians looking back would include the Iraq war as one of the data points on stupidity even though in the moment, people would feel it is totally disconnected from current circumstances. So we are still talking decades.
The collapse did take about 1,000 years.
Also the Roman culture towards the end was increasingly concerned with recycling old works and turning them into ever more ridiculous and derivative new works. Sound familiar?
> I read up recently on the history of the fall of the roman empire
> eventually opting for authoritarianism
The Roman Empire was always authoritarian. You might be interested in the collapse of the Roman Republic, where the abuse of slaves and farmers for the indulgence of the middle class and elites led to a popular clamoring for the strongman general Julius Caesar to impose justice (through dictatorship) on their "republic" by force, because their republic had never represented the demos.
I'm reading two books right now: Stefan Zweig's World of Yesterday and Ulrich Gutmair's First Days of Berlin. The similarities to the current state of US are eerie as hell.
Yes, Britain pretty much went the same way after World War I, and went into acceleration downward after World War II. The final cap may have been Brexit.
The end is usually considered to have been the Suez crisis; after exiting India, the UK failed to invade a Middle Eastern country in order to control a narrow waterway. If you want parallels to the present.
Brexit is a particularly 21st century phenomenon, a failed attempt to retreat to autarky.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
That redux of "Rise and Fall of Roman Empire" suggests a policy shift, and a media shift, for USA and globally.
* Smart Decisions can be celebrated
* Stupid Decisions can be "5-whys" root-cause analyzed
Shaming, and all that, can be left aside. And instead focusing on the possible Wins.
A success-oriented approach, of applauding and ranking The Most Smart Policies, could be a way forward. It's innately motivating.
Democratic Decline is real. Voter apathy is real. Gaslighting by power-focused politicians is real, and lack of a "service" mindset by those politicians, too. This is compelling stuff, obsessing over doom, and it's demotivating.
Celebrating The Most Smart policies is something I enjoy. E.g. on YouTube there is a Good News channel which lists "top 10 good pro-environmental / pro-social actions":
- https://www.youtube.com/@itsSamBentley
> make stupider and stupider decisions on ever larger scales
They found the right man for it. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
Was it a book you read? In interested.
I started with the Lex Fridman podcast [0] and then I went from there exploring further with reading mostly online material interweaved with discussions with ChatGPT. It is actually a fascinating way to read about history. Admittedly, it is hardly a way to gain a proper comprehensive understanding.
I didn't think this comment would get so many replies!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv1TUJSEM2k
Not OP but the book ”The storm before the storm” covers what sets in motion the fall of the republic. I think the foreword or opening chapter notes the similarities with the state of the US (Trumps first presidency at the time of writing).
The author is the podcast host of ”History of Rome”, which is also great, and he does the audiobook narration perfectly.
He's also the podcast host and narrator of Revolutions, a deep dive into major revolutions starting in Britain with Charles Stuart and ending with Stalin (well, technically ending with a science fiction revolution on Mars), with stops in Haiti, Mexico, France, Germany. It ran weekly from 2013 to 2025. Absolutely recommend.
I think you are over centering on recency rather than reality. The stuff that killed the roman empire went on for centuries.
This is the endgame of encouraging everyone to vote. The theory was representatives would be motivated to address the interests of everyone as a whole. The reality is politicians are motivated to take advantage of the stupid and the fearful in order to gain and exploit power.
Republicans are in a personality cult and establishment democrats are stuck in the midpoint between expoliting people the same way and expecting to win because they're "right" and "deserve" victory without the real consent of the people, equally as self interested but worse at it. The quiet racism of establishment democrats might save us by marginalizing muslim democrats -- there are a few of them like Mamdani who aren't allowed in the club and are thus actually thinking for themselves beyond self-interest and the corruption of the establishment. They as a group might save us.
If you want someone to blame, target the DNC. In a time of dangerous foolishness they utterly failed to and are continuing to fail to provide an attractive alternative.
If you want to help, give money to David Hogg.
Blaming the people who aren't quite as good at politics for the actions of the people who actually won the last election and are fucking this country seems... Insane?
Yes. Their whole job is defending the republic and in the easiest to win election they succumbed to the ego of a bumbling old man and failed to lead on anything at all. Those fools couldn't sell bottled water in a desert.
You absolutely can blame the goalie for failing to defend the goal.
Sounds like blaming the abolitionists for slavery. Or blaming the police for murder since they didn't prevent it.
Every terrible thing Trump does is really somebody else's fault.
Yes if firefighters sit watching a fire burn whining about it, they are indeed to blame for not putting out the fire.
I'm tired of people in power whining about being victims.
which book was that ?
Where did you read up on it? Any good sources you can recommend?
Not OP. The Storm before the Storm, Mike Duncan.
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Parts of the world are literally on fire but the US is redirecting money to halt renewables and towards gas.
The demand for energy is higher than ever due to AI data centers, but I guess the next model is more important than a habitable environment.
> Parts of the world are literally on fire but the US is redirecting money to halt renewables and towards gas.
Parts of the US are literally on fire.
* https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/usfs/map/#d:24hrs;@-100...
* https://wfca.com/fire-map
* https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/maps
The issue will be "out of sight, out of mind" (or rather knowingly ignored) until the issue appears at scales as small as the home village, which in terms of the US government means the front and back yard of the white house or similar.
These people are living in parallel societies, where they are completely detached from the reality for many people living in the country. And that is not merely a problem in the US.
> The issue will be "out of sight, out of mind" [...]
... while an offshore wind farm was once in DT's sight in Scotland.
These damn arsonists are really going for it this year, huh?
The coordination between them is amazing - being able to pull this off in multiple European countries, the US and Canada at the same time.
Nobody will care until the white house burns down (again)
That will not change their minds. They already demolished a bunch of the White House.
Nearly all of those are forests that are supposed to burn every year or two. Check with a forester knowledgeable in your specific area because there is no universal truth here. However the generalization that all forests in North America need to burn regularly for good health is true even though there are exceptions.
I am a small scale forester (hundreds to thousands of acres). Supposed to burn is ... complicated and not necessarily true. Many forests in the PNW have had indigenous Americans burn them regularly because it improves forest health. These fires were typically kept small and well maintained to avoid damage to the trees. White settlers put a stop to this practice, and natural fires were considerably less common than anthropogenic ones in some regions.
So it might be correct to say that fires can be healthy for forests, but "supposed to" is more difficult to assert.
I just finished limbing, brush clearing, and preparing burn piles from a section of my forest because removing fuel is good, but most forests in America are young planted forests. They have smaller trees, less diversity, higher than typical density, and small trees that can cause fires to climb to crowns (where they then become deleterious rather than helpful.)
If we were to return to indigenous practices of regular burning, we would likely see healthier forests. But I'm not sure we'd see as much timber production from them. Since that's what most forests are held for... I don't see practices moving away from trying to maximize timber while minimizing cost any time soon.
Thanks for that complexity. I've posted brought the same thing and all the responses have been "no, fire is bad" from people who obviously have no idea what they are talking about.
I'm standing by my claims. However understand that I am in no way contradicting anything you said.
Indigenous practice resulted in the deforestation of the American West so a lot of forests in Oregon and Washington are new growth.
All forests in the American west, barring a few relatively small parks, are new growth. Predominantly from settlers cutting them down.
Indigenous practices changed which trees grew, for instance the Gary oak was much more prevalent in areas they tended. But old growth was predominantly removed by settlers.
Nope. The woods in Oregon (Willamette Valley) and WA were planted and/or allowed to grow by settlers. There are true old growths along the coast and higher up the mountains.
If you want to specifically hike through the old-growth forests, Olympic Peninsula in WA is the best option.
Humans were modifying the Earth on the continent-wide scale long before the industrial age.
Yes, in the Wilamette Valley the indigenous folks maintained Gary Oaks and prevented other trees from growing there. This was open oak savannah, and when the settlers came in they took the land and turned it to agricultural land. What they couldn't plant on, they ignored, and other tree species moved in to land that was previously managed to grow Gary oaks.
I'm a PNW native, you don't need to tell me about the small sliver of old growth we still have in the Olympics.
> Yes, in the Wilamette Valley the indigenous folks maintained Gary Oaks and prevented other trees from growing there.
Yes, and that's a fancy way of saying "used periodic burns" to remove the vegetation to make the land more hospitable for grazers. Meaning more animals to hunt, this was arguably a form of agriculture and also served to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
> I'm a PNW native, you don't need to tell me about the small sliver of old growth we still have in the Olympics.
Then you should actually learn about the history, and not its Disneyified version.
You keep saying things that agree with me, smugly insisting I don't understand. You are very confusing to converse with.
You’re arguing against someone who said “there should never be forrest fires”, but that person doesn’t exist.
Not only do those people exist, they have successfully passed policy in California and elsewhere hamstringing their ability to do prescribed burns.
Well, at the very least, they don't exist in this thread.
There are a lot of such people. The whole Smokey the bear thing was trying to teach people that for decades.
Even if we agree that natural forest fires are good, Smokey the bear is entirely reasonable. Nobody needs to go starting more fires due to negligence.
I'm saying it doesn't matter. If the forest is getting the regular burning it needs anyway someone lighting an additional fire at a different time isn't going to make any difference.
Not that you shouldn't be careful, you can get yourself hurt in a natural fire (but it shouldn't be such a large fire that it kills you). Leave no trace should be your goal. Even if fire itself is something that doesn't matter, there are lots of other parts of leave no trace that that will also result in less fires.
It's pretty reasonable to think that a person-caused fire will be way worse than a natural fire, since the people ones will be distributed far closer to other people-things, like houses and other people.
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It is important to keep the main issue clear. Failing to invest in renewables is an existential risk to humanity's future. Permanently shutting all Datacenters (not just AI) saves us about 1 year.
I believe you may be basing your figure on current Data Center power consumption. But - it's estimately to grow significantly:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/doe-data-centers-...
also - 1 year is a lot, if we actually act diligently to stave the warming crisis and to prepare for some of the effects through changes to construction & infrastructure.
Still, I would agree that Data Centers are just one particular aspect of the struggle against global warming.
Ironically, we are also moving to more capable / faster models that use less power. DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is so extreme capable and comparability to a lot of models cheap to run.
We are seeing stuff like AMD buying Taalas, with their Llama 3 8B on a chip, being able to push 17.000 tokens / second.
https://chatjimmy.ai/
Generated in 0,033s • 14.212 tok/s ...
People need to understand, that even AI companies do not like to build datacenters and the high energy needs. It cost them money and they are also looking at ways to develop better hardware / solutions that gives them more inference for cheaper (what means less power draw / heat generated).
Unfortunately, "more capable / faster models that use less power" will likely mean those models will be used in more places than ever before. LLMs on laptops, on tablets, on phones, on fridges, in your web browser. See the Jevons paradox.
I just tested out chatjimmy and a bit and it did some misinterpretation of my prompts, E.g. "write me a python script to generate insults for a name given by command line" had multiple of the same insult in the insult list, and it had a list of names like John and Jane instead of doing the obvious thing and making the name a variable. Not good code.
It's an old, small model, so that's expected. It's more of a prototype.
Energy usage is not the problem, method of consumption is. Growing data center power usage is not the problem.
Fun tidbit:
Climate change is real, caused by humans, and the fires were seeing are absolutely exacerbated by the effects of the climate.
However this is the _least_ on fire the world has been for a while because it's usually Asian and Africa that are rampantly burning and they're improving land management techniques enough that it's tamping down on the worst of the burns.
Progress isn't evenly distributed
For anyone who wants to learn more about this claim, I thought this video was cool: https://youtu.be/M9Hoy9Kn1u0?is=1O5AJPEziihH1MSJ
The statistics for the number of deaths from climate-based disasters is clear: fewer and fewer people are dying the richer the world becomes. In fact the decrease in deaths is very significant:
"Annual climate-disaster deaths averaged around 77,000 per year in the 1960s–70s, dropped to about 33,000/year in the 1980s–90s, and fell further to roughly 27,000/year in 2000–2019 even as the number of recorded climate disasters rose from about 1,171 to 3,656 to 6,641 across those same periods."
If you're optimising for human life, then "drill baby drill", as more energy = more wealth. More wealth = better infrastructure, health care, dealing with extreme weather conditions.
If you think about this in terms of systems... it's unsustainable. You'll eventually get to a point where the damage you've done requires a flow of wealth/energy that cannot be generated for everyone.
I'm assuming that we can drive our environment to that kind of state, maybe there's an upper limit on how bad the environment can get. I'm not a climate scientist and don't have the curiosity to look into if there's a limit to climate change.
1. The past is not a predictor of the future. Driving towards a cliff has very positive results right up until a sharply negative one.
2. Energy does not require damaging the environment through drilling. We can get it straight from our star, for example.
3. Dealing with the consequences of something is always more expensive than preventing it in the first place.
1. Of course it is. That is how models are built. They are not always correct of course, but it's the best we have.
2. We need to choose the cheapest energy option at the time. If renewables are cheaper then great, but making the poor even poorer to make is rich people feel better is not a good solution.
3. The consequences of making the world poorer is more people will die from climate related disasters.
And coal, he loves coal; same as our idiot Premier.
Offshore wind can power the data center too. Your dichotomy is not relevant
If we all die, whom will they charge 100 Euros per 1M tokens I wonder. True dilemma right here.
I think there is progress on allowing agents to pay?
A fully agentified economy. I'm sure some tech-overlord will love the idea. Let's hope they don't frequent HN.
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When you say that the Greens provide subsidies to coal, but this can be found on a quick search…
> The next fight is already brewing, over a Green push to accelerate the phase-out of coal-fired power generation in eastern Germany. In a draft resolution, seen by POLITICO, the party wants to bring the coal exit forward from 2038 to 2030, as is already the case for mining regions in the west of the country.
https://www.politico.eu/article/german-government-coalition-...
… Are you sure you are talking about the Greens and not CDU or CSU which they occasionality form government coalitions with?
And yet ... read the articles. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy04ykxrj5eo
Like all such articles they present a LONG list of politicians with "we're committed to/promising to/... phase out coal". And then a statement or two by the executive that they're increasing coal usage because they have no choice.
The problem is that there is no option left BUT coal.
Crazy the sorts of lies people make up here.
This mixes several different things into one causal puddle.
Yes, keeping the remaining nuclear plants running would have reduced emissions and electricity prices somewhat. A 2024 Energy Policy study estimates the 2022/23 extension lowered German wholesale prices by about €9/MWh. That's a real effect, but nowhere remotely close to "the nuclear phase-out doubled electricity prices." The huge price spike was primarily the European gas crisis. You know, the one for which LNG terminals had been built.
Nor did Germany replace nuclear with coal. Coal generation subsequently fell to levels not seen in decades, while renewables grew substantially, so German emissions fell as well.
Attributing the nuclear exit simply to "the Greens" is rather selective history. The original exit was SPD/Greens, but after reversing it in 2010, Merkel's CDU/FDP government legislated essentially the final phase-out schedule again in 2011. So basically: every party that was at the levers of power.
You could make a perfectly reasonable argument that shutting existing nuclear before coal was bad climate policy in hindsight, because of the gas crisis. But I don't think you need to resort to the rather dubious claim that it doubled electricity prices as a singular cause.
A better question is why Germany invested in gas power plants in the first place. Gas has always been the most expensive source of electricity, even before "the gas crisis" (how many of those have we had already?):
https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...
China is laughing at the prices Europe agreed to buy Russian gas for:
https://asiatimes.com/2026/07/power-of-siberia-2-deadlock-cr...
I get the idea that Germany would buy Russian gas in exchange for not having to spend on the military, but 2014 clearly showed that it didn't work. And Germany still doubled down on gas after 2022.
Now the argument seems to be that Germany will buy American gas so that it can get lower tariffs.
I don't see how Germany can compete with a China that refuses to reject the cheapest forms of energy, whatever that is (both nuclear and coal are cheaper than imported gas).
This is blatantly untrue: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/Fig2_Gro...
Correct;
On July 9, 2026, the Bundestag passed Germany's new electricity-capacity law, which subsidizes reserve/dispatchable power capacity as coal is phased out. SPD and CDU/CSU voted for it; the Greens and Die Linke voted against it.
The Greens specifically argued against a long-term fossil-fuel lock-in, while Die Linke argued for renewables and batteries instead of subsidizing new fossil gas plants.
The law itself is primarily about new hydrogen-ready/gas-capable reserve plants, not coal plants.
Source: https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-07/kraftwerksge...
What was untrue specifically? I'm not sure what quoting the electricity by general source over the last decades disproves.
Did you read something into spwas comment he didn't actually say?
Seems like you read some misinformation there. Share of coal in the German electricity mix:
2021 30.2%
2022 33.3% (the year that nuclear was shut off)
2023 26.0%
2024 21.2%
2025 22.4%
Complete phase out is scheduled for the 2030s.
The argument I think is that the share could be lower if the nuclear plants were kept running (broadly, based on your numbers, it could be less than 20% in 2025). Whether that would have made economic sense (especially in terms of redirections funds away from renewables), I am not so sure of.
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The threshold isn't measured in windmills, it's measured in co2.
If we emit more than 0, then we're in trouble.
Needless to say, we're in a lot of trouble.
So, your cellular respiration is the problem? Got it. Have you looked into Heavens Gate or Aum Shinrikuo? That might be interesting to you.
The goal is not to "gain better control" over the earth's temperature, it's to stop actively throwing the temperature out of control.
Worth scrolling through this if you have been midwit-pilled into thinking humans have no levers of control on this question: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Please explain your alternative hypothesis.
“midwit-pilled”? Is this a “How do you do, fellow kids” rhetorical ploy? You’ve got it backwards. The average American and European thinks the Earth will be destroyed in current year + 5 years, and modern sumptuary laws or ersatz-religious rituals around recycling or performative bicycling have a material impact on climatic fluctuations that take thousands of years.
If XKCD is your source, you’re not on the right side of the bell curve. Sorry, friend. It’s not your fault. It’s just cruel statistics to be average. We can smugly scoff at how religions exploited the gullible for their own empowerment, and yet be oblivious to how it’s happening to them. Wow, an eschatological crisis? Guess I better vote how I’m told and self-flagellate.
> The average American and European thinks the Earth will be destroyed in current year + 5 years
Midwit take, not evidenced whatsoever. Please cite a single source showing any substantial number of people who believe "the earth will be destroyed" within 5 years. Less than 20% of Americans even believe climate change will seriously negatively affect them personally within 50 years.
Or is this just lazy and dishonest shorthand for something like "believe we will encounter a higher rate of catastrophes?"
If so, you should be sure to lump in all those stupid emotional insurers who are also apparently under some eschatological spell that you're just too brilliant to be taken in by.
You could make an absolute fuck ton of money by insuring the areas that the stupid midwit cultist insurers think are uninsurable due to climate risk, you know. Literally just mountains of cash waiting to reward your brilliant contrarianism.
> If XKCD is your source
One little trick to claw your way up the curve of midwittery: when you encounter new information, look for the string "Source: " and then look up the text immediately following that. I provided the nearest thing to a picture-book that I could find, because exactly 0 people I've ever met with this attitude actually have the attention span to read even a single scientific paper, never mind a couple dozen or couple hundred. You are invited to defy the odds, find the backing sources, and dispute them directly.
It's kind of lucky for everyone that climate is mostly a perfect sliding scale, the more CO2 you avoid putting into the atmosphere the more heat capacity you'd avoid. So every bit helps. Many negative impacts of heat, like changing intense weather, biodiversity loss, and deaths to high heat also correspondingly change linearly with heat. So every bit is a literal victory, there's no major cutoff that we know of until things get really bad (which they might). What's your point?
They're not mills
Yeah, what is it with people calling turbines "windmills"?
They don't grind corn.
Is it supposed to be a some kind of cheesy insult? It just makes you sound stupid if you call them windmills.
Do you get angry at people for calling sea stars starfish? "They aren't fish they are echinoderms!"
Or perhaps you get angry at people who call light utility vehicles "trucks"?
Language evolves. People accept colloquial definitions. Wait until you learn about pencil lead, koala bears, dry cleaning, and peanuts. Windmill is absolutely acceptable if it's understood by people to mean wind turbine, which it is.
This is an interesting response.
I think you know that “windmill” isn’t just a synonym for wind turbine but a politicised insult originating in the fossil fuel lobby.
Why would you think that?
Insane.
Over the last year, wind - mostly offshore - has generated more than 35% of electricity here. Gas is down to 27%. It's really, really good. And it looks cool.
This is the exact reason it's happening. Offshore wind is cheaper than gas /kWh and would therefore kill Trump's fossil fuel donor's profits. So kill offshore wind and the grid is forced to go to more expensive fossil fuel sources, which increased the grid price and means extra profits go to those companies. All this raises energy prices.
The oil industry is full of really smart people, but this all appears to be so stupid. Why don't the fossil fuel companies just expand their investment portfolios to include off-shore wind?
This is all in their wheelhouse: mega-scale construction, off-shore ops, dealing with the government in favorable ways, and such a simpler and lower-risk business!
It must be that they are just afraid of the entire idea of a competing sector? Or, they are addicted to the power they have controlling a more centralized energy distribution system? Or, what could it be? Again, I know these are not dumb people.
What's insane is that one person will cite something this in one place, but the rest of the people in the thread say "why aren't we building wind and solar????"
We are building lots. Of everything.
But... you're commenting on an article in which we are stopping the "we are building" part?
Who is "we" here?
This is about one company bending the knee, not an entire industry or population.
"We" is referring to the US federal government, elected by the US population, and which has (and is using) massive levers to kneecap development of renewable energy sources.
Some internet commentators may wish to unhelpfully point out that no matter the US federal efforts, renewable development will always be above literal zero, and so "we haven't stopped." But it's not a very useful contribution to the conversation.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/stalled-us-permits-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-26/us-renewa...
There are dozens of similar articles about dozens of different projects and mechanisms used to stall those projects. Yes, I concede the level will almost certainly remain above zero and so "we haven't stopped." Good-faith adults know what the conversation is about and can either engage in it or opt out of it instead of resorting to excessive pedantry.
I want to know whether Trump has legal authority to this money for this purpose. If it was money directed by Congress for clean energy, then no.
Yeah it's a good question, but unfortunately large infrastructure projects require a lot more than just formal legal protections of their funding and permitting.
If it takes just one retard at the top to disrupt a massive decades-long project, even in a way that eventually gets negated by a court, then ta-da, we just don't get any more big projects.
“who’s going to stop me?”
The courts, eventually-probably. What this does to the business environment and future endeavours regarding clean energy, however, is an exercise left to the reader
So we are not building solar and wind anywhere, any more?
I know this place has become a political cesspool like reddit, but I implore you to think a little beyond "Trump bad".
Addressed a whole day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209919
I implore you to think a little bit about what degree of political, policy, and economic stability is actually required for anyone to embark on decades-long, multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects, instead of resorting to "hurrr durrrr it's above zero amirite?"
Aloofness is not the sign of intelligence you wish it to be.
> We are building lots. Of everything.
Did you read the headline?
Do you know what article you're commenting on?
They know what they're doing. The next administration will give them 1.2bn to start deploying offshore wind. Money for nothing!
I suspect wind investment is going to take a decade to recover. Nobody wants to deal with a legal fight if they can avoid it. Offshore wind takes a lot of planning and engineering to deploy. These projects were halted midway, forcing the companies to eat a ton of costs while the construction was sitting idle.
Utterly Insane. I mean the saying "Truth is stranger than fiction" is proven true by this US administration again, again and again. If you put this as a plot point in a novel, you would get a 1-star rating with readers complaining about lack of realism.
People were for years joking about us approaching Idiocracy but I think this reality is already dumber than that in some regards. Trump & co really turbocharged the idiotification
In Idiocracy, President Camacho recognizes that someone has scientific skills and expertise* he doesn't and puts them in charge to help his people. * even if it's just "feed plants water, not Gatorade."
From that angle, Idiocracy is notably BETTER than our current situation.
It's a cliche now to say we're past that as in Idiocracy they listened to the smartest person to solve their problem.
We're now onto Captain Planet baddies. Ridiculously childish cartoon carictatures of greed and evil are now in charge
I wonder if the power of heart will save us then.
They even look like Captain Planet baddies. Trump with his orange skin, purple sores and ridiculous hair, RFK jr. walking around barefoot looking like a scrotum on steroids, Pete Kegsbreath answering the question "What if a mob boss fucked a frat bro", etc.
Not great for the wildlife during drilling but it's better than the carbon rich alternatives.
Global warming is also killing wildlife. And by many magnitudes more than drilling some holes for offshore wind parks.
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Is the game you're playing "see if I can be subtle enough to get away with undermining renewables through misleading statements on social media without people calling me out on it"? If so I think you're down 1 - 0 so far in this thread.
Best of luck on the next round though, really cool and awesome game!
I think it was your reading that is faulty, the commenter wasn't subtle and didn't undermine anything.
Can you stop playing the game of owning people with teenager level zingers based on you yourself being too thick?
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Thank you comrade for your alert senses! You correctly identified that anybody who pretends to be a "moderate" voice or utters any kind of even light criticism towards the Party program is always a detractor or enemy spy which is trying to sabotage and undermine our internal cohesion.
The individual has promptly been dealt with and put in a reeducation camp. I will talk to your local commissar so that your brave act of psychological self defence in this message board is rewarded with +50 extra social credits.
You don't seem to understand the meeting of the word 'literally'.
You don't seem to be able to read the "better than carbon rich alternatives" that literally in what I originally wrote.
It is really great for the wildlife after the drilling is done though, as the windmills tend to make the area safer against fishermen.
This is a problem though, because those fishermen vote.
Nothing is great for wildlife, including leaving it alone and undisturbed, because nature doesn't care if animals are happy, or even if they exist.
I’m thinking you mean that nature does not possess the ability to care at all.
Nature does have the ability to care unless you postulate that humans aren’t part of nature.
No energy source producing the required amounts to run civilization will be non-disruptive to wildlife and the environment. But perfect is the enemy of good.
Renewable energy sources heavily reduce this factor, make countries more independent from imports (other countries) and slow down the catastrophic effects of increased atmospheric energy due to greenhouse effect of carbon-based energy sources.
Conservatives should be the top number one supporters of renewable energy because of more independence from other governments and better conservation of the environment.
But alas, the only thing they like to preserve is their personal greed.
It doesn't look cool. We should use less energy. But the turbines make the cost of the energy too obvious, we'd rather keep pretending there is no cost.
Where is “here”?
What's more mental you talk to any Germans about deprecating their Nuclear power stations they will bang on about their plan for renewables and then you read these sorts of headlines.
What the hell is happening over there? Why can't they get 'energy' despite being a scientifically literate nation. France has a far superior energy policy so it's not like you even have to travel beyond a few miles to see a wildly different price for electricity. At this rate French electricity will be half the price in a few years compared to German electricity. Germany is making mistake after mistake on energy. From Russian dependence to Nuclear scepticism to now accepting money to not build renewables.
Germany is already way ahead of the US in switching away from fossil electricity (also ahead of China).
Sure, keeping the entire nuclear fleet from ~2000 would have maybe helped, but would have required very costly (economically and politically!) investments over the last few decades, and those basically went into renewables instead which turned out fine.
See: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
I definitely wouldn't say that it turned out fine. The push against nuclear transcended into a larger push against electricity, making Germany a laggard in electrification. The car sector certainly isn't doing fine.
It's also funny how air conditioning powered by electricity is discouraged, while air conditioning in ICE cars or gas heating in buildings are at the very least tolerated. It's crazy if you think about it.
Is all of their energy consumption met by domestic production?
No, Germany imports massive amounts of fossil fuels. Renewables and electrification help reduce that. Electricity-wise Germany is a net exporter again
What is the cost balance from being that net exporter? Are they selling energy for more than they buy?
Its funny that the term "net exporter" is about the volume of energy, not the value of energy.
That’s not how electricity works. The electrons don’t really care about borders, and neither do the suppliers and consumers.
Yes
This is about a German company that was going to make a renewable project in the US.
Germany itself has a huge offshore wind industry, which is probably how they have companies that planned to do the same in the US.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46292341 and now outside Europe too
Nuclear scepticism… did you know that nuclear power plants need cooling? Germany is learning that lesson the hard way right now, just check the news, it really speaks for reducing their dependency on nuclear as having been a very very good idea.
No wait, they’re not learning it the hard way because they’ve already got rid of them. Phew…
There is no french or german electricity price. Its a common market. Price difference is only different taxation
There are indeed bidding zones in Europe. France is one bidding zone and Germany and Luxembourg is another one. Market prices are indeed pretty comparable.
Taxation and cost for the net are very different with a higher price for the connection in France and a higher price per kWh in Germany. In the end for a normal use of electricity the prices are very comparable.
The LNG plant is being built in Texas which are covered with turbines, and they absolutely do not look cool.
There's a reason so many racing games put them on their maps. They look dope.
Chevron’s Gorgon project LNG plants on Barrow Island also absolutely do not look cool.
> Texas which are covered with turbines
Is "Texas" the plural of "Texa"?
They sure aren't
Texae surely
How about pumpjacks? Do you think they look cool? Texas is also covered in those, though much less than it used to be.
do they ever take those things away? I feel like they just let them sit there. That’s what it seems like in California anyway.
> Texas which are covered with turbines, and they absolutely do not look cool.
Compared to coal plants, which are _extremely_ cool-looking. /s
I've never seen one here, which makes sense because we don't use much coal. I suppose if they were 200m high and scattered across half the state I'd have a similar opinion.
Coal mines are often associated with massive slag heaps and they can be over 200m in height.
They are not pretty but what they lack in beauty they make up for with danger to the local community from leached chemicals, underground fires and landslides.
I prefer to live near wind turbines myself.
Texas burns more coal than any other state and has hundreds of premature deaths a year caused by its coal plants.
Europe burns 10x what Texas does. Is this how we think?
Europe? The entire continent? The continent that includes large swaths of Russia?
I give up, I don't even know what you're trying to imply here. That somehow Texas (a state, in a country, in a continent) burns less coal than an entire continent? And...?
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calaveras_Power_Station#J.K._S... - chimneys are 218m tall.
So they look hot?
Meanwhile China is becoming entirely energy independent and electrifying their economy. I don't understand how the US doesn't see that they won't be top dog forever especially in this multipolar age.
As a proportion of total energy use, the US is ahead of China in moving away from fossil fuels by about 5 full percentage points. Most of the "energy independence" that China has is just based on burning coal.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=stacked-di...
This is the second time this week I have seen this website misrepresenting data using this same trick.
Primary energy is not total energy generated its total energy in the fuel used.
On average coal / gas plants are only ~35% efficient so the graph does not correctly represent the useful energy generated as percentage.
The graph is basically putting actual energy generation of solar and wind next to actual energy generated by coal and gas multiplied by 3.
If they want to be even close to representative of reality they should multiply the solar power generated by 4. The same has to be done for the wind energy but I am not sure what the efficiency of that is.
From their page:
> Each source is measured by its physical energy content: fossil fuels and biomass by the heat released when they are burned; nuclear and geothermal by the heat they produce; and wind, solar, and hydropower by the electricity they generate.
This graph is far more representative of reality: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=stack...
China is still behind in percentage but by only 1-3%
Wanna know a great way to lose a race? Check your rear view mirror and see how far ahead you are and then let off the gas. Or worse, start braking.
so we win the race by burning petrol /s
We see a lot of competing views on the modern right and the most dominant one is the sort of peace through strength dominate the world stance, but I think one that doesn’t get talked about as much is that actually being the global hegemon and competitive in the world shifts power away from traditional power structures like the church.
So losing to China is a feature not a bug. I think This explains Republican obsession with countries like Russia and Hungary that are certainly a few steps down the economic ladder from us.
They still mostly rely on coal. Slightly more than half of electricity is generated by burning coal, whereas in the US, it's only 15%. The renewable energy share in generation is roughly the same in the US and China, but not for capacity.
You can look at current levels, or look at trends. China has stopped increasing coal. They're building a small number of new coal plants, but this is outstripped by the coal plants being underutilized or decommissioned
China is really only building new renewables, almost 100x as much net renewable capacity per year compared to nuclear.
China is continuing to build a shitload of coal alongside being the world's leader in renewable. It takes time.
Only as recently as last year did China stop increasing its net electric generation from coal. And if you look at all primary energy (not just electricity), their dependence on fossil fuels is something like 90%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?stackMode=rela...
Plus they are building coal plants as backups for when other sources fail.
That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, coal plants take at least 10 hours (but can take up to 48 hours) to start, warm up and synchronise from cold. That’s why hydro, gas, and increasingly large batteries are generally used for peaking.
It makes sense for China because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malacca_dilemma
The modern coal plants they're building support faster changes, and they have enough indigenous coal but they don't have gas.
That is legacy coal plants. The ones China are building are specifically built to complement renewable while keeping the energy security domestic.
This is misleading, because China has no gas, and they use coal power as dispatchable source with lower capacity factor (similar to gas elsewhere).
Coal+gas electricity is basically the same fraction in China than in the US.
But countries like Germany or Spain are significantly ahead in this regard, with much higher fraction of electrical energy coming from solar/wind.
See: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
Burning natural gas instead of coal should result in about half as much carbon emissions theoretically, although methane leaks will narrow the advantage.
Absolutely. Gas is a lot less problematic than coal.
But my point is that it fills (in China) a very similar role for the electric grid and countries don't get to choose what fossils are in their soil.
The US using relatively more gas than coal is not any kind of laudable achievement, it's simply whats cheaply available.
Norway does not get any credit in my book for being full renewable either (because they have "free" hydro power literally everywhere).
Maybe they should get some credit for taking full advantage of whatever assets they have? It's better than not using them.
China is also ~4x the population of the US and accounts for 30% of the worlds manufacturing and energy production.
The scale is so crazy that these numbers rarely make sense on their own.
ie. China is the future, US is the past.
Well, China is already "the past". They're past the Lewis turning point. We'll have to look somewhere else for "the future".
German Climate scientists are claiming with 98% statistical certainty that warming has accelerated significantly since 2015, and believe we are looking at 3°C of warming by 2050, 5°C by the end of the century. That does not bode well for the future of anything.
https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...
this should be closer to the top. (everywhere)
If China is declining more slowly than the rest of the world, that's still relative progress.
The direction of travel is clear though. China is making massive investments in renewable energy (and dominating sectors like solar in the process) while the US seems hell bent on going the other way.
They're also making massive investments in coal.
China is concerned with not having to import energy. They don't care much about climate change.
I'd be interested to see some sources. My understanding is that they're aiming to peak greenhouse gas emissions before 2030 and be carbon neutral by 2060.
Slightly less than half now as of the most recent figures.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-generates-less...
> That [coal] share was well down from 65.5% in 2016, previous NEA figures showed.
> Renewable energy's share grew to 41.2% — topping 40% for the first time — and of that wind and solar accounted for 24.6%, Xing added. Wind and solar's share was up from 9.7% in 2020.
GP was talking about energy independence. They use domestic coal not imported coal, so the goal of energy independence is still achieved.
On the other hand only 3% of China's electricity comes from natural gas whereas 43% of US electricity does.
When combined coal and gas provide about 62% of China's electricity and 58% of US electricity. (Sources differ slightly on percentages. When you add in all fossil fuel electricity sources, China and the US get about the same percentage of electricity from them).
It is this way because China has plenty of coal and very little natural gas, whereas the US thanks to fracking has a lot of natural gas and it is much cheaper than coal so since then gas has rapidly replace coal.
That's the static picture. Now look at the first derivative. China is not just massively ahead at building renewables, they are massively ahead at building support infrastructure.
Look at UHV transmission lines for example: China has 60 000 km, quite a bit ahead of the 0 km in the US.
Things are changing. Look at starting points and direction, not just things as they currently are.
That said, renewable sources are so cheap and consequently economically appealing that not even the incredibly dumb Trump admin can stop them.
> Slightly more than half of electricity is generated by burning coal,
So this means, slightly less than half is other sources (hydro, solar, etc)
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China thinks long-term, the US administration, especially the current one doesn't.
And who is to blame them (or to hold them accountable)? Some won't live long-term... I mean, being 80 and fat, what are the chances...
China thinks, the US administration doesn’t.
The US is the biggest oil producer in the world. Consumption does exceed production, but obviously this changes the calculus around energy independence.
It is the third largest coal producer, behind India and China.
The people running the government literally do not care. They only care about evading responsibility for decades of crimes by smashing all accountability mechanisms, disabling all oversight so they can loot the government, increasing dysfunction, feeding the culture war to keep us fighting each other over wedge issues instead of rising up, and flattering some utterly insane religious freaks so they have an immutable core of cult members. They're financed by America's arch enemies, easily manipulated, vain, and stupid. To them, America is a golden opportunity for naked theft of power and money.
Yes. Where is this money coming from anyway? If it was from the clean energy legislation, then surely this will be overturned
The US government is undoubtedly aware that renewables are the future.
I assume they're still cooking up a backup plan to the petrodollar system and it will be business as usual until they have one.
Expect the US to double down with weird gestures like this and to find ways to remind the world that oil is relevant for some time.
US is rich in fossil energy so it doesn't have the same incentives as China does obviously.
Someone who is "rich" in a consumable asset and therefore chooses to just consume that instead of investing in a renewable or compounding asset is colloquially known as "a dumbass."
And it's called "dutch disease".
We did it with gas. Now look at Norway. We could've been like Norway.
We couldn't have been like Norway. Norway is super duper rich due to.... Oil rights elsewhere in the world.
They play the best kid in class with electrification but their funding comes directly from contributing to the problem.
And when Holland found the gas reserves in Groningen, global warming was really not known about yet.
Norway invested their oil winnings in a nation wide fund. The Netherlands spent their gas money on hookers and booze.
But US seems to be doing a bit of everything no?
But of course it doesn't have the same incentives of China.
You are commenting on an article in which the US is deciding (and paying immense costs) in order not to do everything. The current administration is actively trying to squash several proven-valuable ways of converting non-renewable resources into renewable ones.
the current administration is the key word.
In any case, you can't expect stable policies in a country with a winner-takes-all democracy.
Not sure how that's relevant to the topic here.
Your initial comment seemed to imply that these actions are the rational downstream consequences of the US's incentives. Now you seem to be suggesting that maybe it's not, but it's just the actions of the current administration?
Not sure what policy stability has to do with anything. If anything it's a further indictment of your point. A successful energy project will span multiple administrations to come to fruition. It takes just one administration to kill a project... as illustrated by TFA. This is not in fact explainable as a rational response to the US's incentives.
> US is rich in fossil energy so it doesn't have the same incentives as China does obviously.
China isn't rich in fossil energy? That's news to me.
They are the world's largest coal producer and still create over half of their electricity from coal. The difference to the US is that China seems to realize that this strategy isn't a long term solution.
US exports energy, China imports it. Not sure what is there to argue.
Oh great. You've summoned the Sinophobes. You literally cannot say anything positive about China without these people coming out of the woodwork with their tired talking points.
The USA is governed by evil people, and the people of the nation are too stupid and expecting someone else to stop them. Plain as day light.
No, we're not expecting someone else to stop it. We voted for this. The evil is not imposed on us. It is us.
Not everyone, but a majority. The minority is looking for ways to stop it, but it requires getting literally everyone else to work together. Which means any disagreement among them results in a loss, and more of the same evil.
It's not a majority at all. it's a manipulating minority.
I don't think "manipulating" is valid. A bit over a third voted one way, a bit under a third voted another, and a third didn't vote. The third that didn't vote was saying "sure, whatever".
I'm not sure it's fair to say it's "sure, whatever" on a national scale. The electoral college means you're most likely saying "sure, whatever" to the majority in your state. My vote in TN was the same outcome as if I sat home, and even if a third didn't show up there either, I imagine many knew Trump would win the state regardless and wanted that outcome.
The third that didn't vote does not exist. The net result was roughly 50/50.
Now, maybe this third will start to exist and vote if they either wake up, are seriously hit financially or someone annoys them enough.
Until then they decided to erase themselves from any decision making and if the world was fair they , would not have the right to any comment regarding whatever is related to their country.
> The third that didn't vote does not exist. The net result was roughly 50/50.
The later does not preclude the former. They exist, and they don't vote. I'm not sure what nitpick you're trying to make.
> I'm not sure what nitpick you're trying to make.
The non voters are routinely used in discussions to lower the results of various parties. The message is "in reality only (a small) percentage supports them" (and then a ratio voters for that party / total population is taken).
What I am trying to say is that the people who did not vote do not exist in these statistics. Taking them into account is just a tactic to lower the results of competitors.
Additionally (but this is utopia) these people should not be allowed to comment in any form about the situation of the country (but again - this is utopia of course)
I don't think we fully disagree then.
I also see examples of "he only got 1/3 of the vote", but that's not what I was trying to do. I was pointing out non-voters as effectively voting "either is fine", in which case effectively they both got 2/3 of the vote.
Yes, we agree then.
Interestingly enough, I noticed, at least in Europe, that a low participation is usually a sign of a country going well. People are more of less unaffected by the changes in politics so "either is fine".
And then when there are serious thigs at stake, the participation raises significantly. This was the case for instance in France in 2002 during the second round of the presidential election (Chirac vs. Le Pen) or in Poland in 1989 when the first free election was taking place.
Sure buddy. None of those changes to voting are "manipulating".
Counties that used to need federal preclearance closing 1,688 polling places once the Supreme Court said they didn't have to ask permission anymore is "just good fiscal sense".
North Carolina's legislature pulling data on which voting methods black people disproportionately used, then writing a bill restricting exactly those methods, is "election integrity". The Fourth Circuit threw the whole law out and said it targeted "African Americans with almost surgical precision". But sure. To you it's not manipulation.
Alabama passing voter ID and then closing 31 DMV offices, including every single one in counties over 75% nonwhite, is "saving taxpayer money". The federal DOT found it violated Title VI and made them reopen. Budget cuts, though.
Ohio's redistricting commission being told seven times by its own Supreme Court that the maps were unconstitutional, then running out the clock and holding the 2022 election on them anyway, is "federalism".
And then there's the fake electors, which people gloss over because they don't know how the process works. When you vote for president you're not voting for the president. You're voting for a slate of electors. Your state certifies which slate won, sends that certificate to Congress, and on January 6 the Vice President opens the certificates and they get counted. That's the whole election. It's paperwork.
So in 2020, in seven states Biden won, Republicans got a second set of people together, had them sign certificates declaring themselves the real electors and Trump the winner, and sent those to Congress and the National Archives. 84 people signed. Ron Johnson's office tried to hand-deliver the Michigan and Wisconsin ones to Pence on the floor on January 6. The plan, written down in a memo a month beforehand, was for Pence to count those and reject the real ones. That's "pragmatism".
Louisiana's governor suspending a congressional primary that was already underway so the legislature could delete a majority black district is just... I don't know. I'm out of ridiculous fucking excuses anymore.
And the third that didn't vote "said sure, whatever"? Some of them did. Some of them got purged off the rolls, or showed up to a precinct that isn't there anymore, or needed an ID from a DMV their county no longer has. Those are not the same group of people. Keeping the second group home is the point of everything above. Republicans have spent a decade making it harder for specific people to vote, and then pointing at the resulting turnout as proof nobody cares. Well it worked on you at least.
Thank you for including these facts.
It was a majority of voters.
If you include all of the non-voters as tacitly consenting to it, then it's an overwhelming majority.
That's not entirely accurate; quite a few non-voters were prevented from voting in one way or another. But most non-voters chose not to vote. Quite a few were explicit about having some disagreement with the primary opponent and concluded that the two sides are equivalent.
It wasn't even a majority of voters, it was a plurality. It was 49.8%.
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And a population that seems content being manipulated.
Either way the metric has been the same
Fraudulent minority too. Let's not forget Elon Musk was paying folk to vote for.
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...and this inability to get people to work together is architected, designed, and reinforced constantly. Fact: no where in any general education within the United States are people taught how to discuss issues with disagreement. This is strategic: the lack of this education creates easily emotionally swayed non-intellects that fall for cons over and over. The US is a conman paradise.
Do any other countries teach it? I'd be curious to know how such a curriculum works.
I have dark suspicions that it would be difficult to implement in the US, because of existing divisiveness. One side or the other would likely see such a course as biased against them, and step in to prevent it (or bias it for them). Even if it studiously avoids discussing politics, it will be easy to step into something easily analogized to politics.
It used to be taught, every high school and many early junior high and elementary schools had debate clubs, and the ability to hold complex and nuanced debate used to be intellectual entertainment for many. however, then the 60's youth rebellion saw the "debate stars" all on the youth side and arguing against the hypocrisy of the status quo. Soon, debate clubs were disbanded, and the formal rules of debate changed to allow for "cheap tactics" that destroyed the intellectual purity and allowed literal stunts, information overflow and diversion tactics to be allowed. That set the stage for debate and a pop culture intellectualism to die a quick death. Within a decade, the ability to discuss controversial topics without emotional outrage was lost. Now we are bereft.
Less than half of people who voted voted for Trump, and turnout was 64%.
Being allowed to chose between two evils every few years isn't democracy.
Democracy is only ever choosing between two evils. You will never agree entirely with either candidate. In order to reach a majority, you will have to reach some kind of compromise with people with goals you hate.
As has been famously stated, democracy is the worst system, except for all of the others. I think people often underestimate just how bad it is.
You should never need to pick between just two candidates though.
The need for any sort of alternative system to first-past-the-post should've been plainly obvious in the '00 election. The problem is the people that could change that were elected under a first-past-the-post system and don't want to lose their current advantage.
Sadly, the biggest group pushing for an alternative is FairVote, who exclusively push RCV/IRV, which doesn't fix most of the issues of FPTP and introduces new ones. I'm bombarded by their ads, where they outright lie about its properties ("RCV ends the spoiler effect", "RCV means no more voting for the lesser evil").
What doesn't RCV fix about FPTP? And what issues does it introduce?
I've seen discussions around how it can be more confusing than the current system, and can reduce confidence in the election.
It doesn't fix the spoiler effect (it makes its own version of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_squeeze ), and it removes monotonicity. The second one is a big deal for me, at least in FPTP a vote for a candidate always helps them. With RCV, a vote for a candidate can hurt them, and sometimes not voting makes the outcome you want more likely than if you did vote for it.
The 2022 Alaska election was a great example of it failing: https://realrcv.equal.vote/alaska22/ FairVote called that election a success because people managed to fill in their ballots, even if they didn't get the outcome they thought they were voting for.
Democracy is only ever choosing between two evils.
American democracy. Other democracies have multiple viable parties and candidates.
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Unless Fred Rogers is a candidate it's always going to be a choice between two evils. Do your best. Sitting out is a half vote for the greater evil.
That's been the system for over 200 years and Americans have never changed it, even though it only exists as it does to keep slaveowning states in the union and prevent a civil war (which it failed to do.)
If it isn't democracy now, it's never been democracy.
Democracy is people's power and the people in the US (and frankly most of the western world) are refusing to exercise it.
Democracy is not a legal framework but a cultural outlook that requires a sense of civitas. Which is mostly lost in the west (and in most other places, too) where deference to individual power has been allowed to become fully ascendant.
We rightfully decry the state authoritarianism in places like China, but their current seemingly superior ability to accomplish broader community betterment goals seems less to do with their political structure and more to do with still having some sense and confidence and optimism that people can in fact work together.
Meanwhile official small-l liberal ideology in North America fundamentally does not believe in this at all, and the ascendant far right is openly aggressive against this concept and an explicit "might makes right" ethos is becoming more and more triumphant and embodied in Trump.
Trump will eventually die and rot but the Stephen Millers of the world will still snake around in the background looking for the next pseudo-strong man to stand up and smirk all over a compliant population that has lost its desire to work together and just wants to submit to the loudest asshole in the room.
No constitution or election or political party saves the country from this. People's power does.
Can't help but roll my eyes every time an election between a guy who campaigned on locking up his political enemies and throwing out all the Mexicans, and an awkward black woman, is described as choosing "between two evils." Give me a break.
A lot of people cited Gaza as an example of "evil" by the last administration.
I can have a small amount of sympathy for that. What was happening there was indeed harrowing.
But only a small amount. It's one issue of many, and the other party was even more against Gaza. I'm hard pressed to see it as sincere to present that single issue as the only one that mattered, and overwhelmed all else.
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Roughly 1/3 voted for the winner, 1/3 for the loser, and the rest didn’t vote.
A majority did not choose this.
Not voting against evil is indeed voting for evil and that is what the net majority did.
The minority doesn't have a charismatic leader to rally around so we don't have a "movement" that can fight back against the corruption at scale. Democrats need to stop taking the high road and start thinking "WWRD?" and out do them.
What Would Reagan Do?
I meant Republicans more broadly. Whatever bad things Reagan did, it is a shadow on current Republican tactics.
Ah gotcha, now that I reread your comment it's obvious what you meant. My bad!
I mean, Reagan won 489 electoral votes and then followed it up with another 525, they could try doing some of that.
You don't really have a choice here. As a "conservative" (what ever that means...) I got two different evils that I couldn't stand. I voted third party, but even that party wasn't very close to what I really believe.
The parties are not nearly symmetrical and if Harris with democrats are as evil to you ... then you are literally the problem. And you contributed to everything Trump does.
I mean it. This both are same evil is either bullshit or completely wrapped non existent morality.
They are not the same evil. They are two very different evils and neither is acceptable.
Many polls were done post election about preferences among non voters.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...
I even wonder how much of the 1/3 who voted for him now regret it.
Not many. And even fewer would make a different choice, given the opportunity.
Change will rely entirely on people who sat out 2024. The question is how much regret they feel. Cynically, I assume most people would rather alter their world-views to justify their choice, than admit that they had made a mistake.
In a two-party system, not voting (no matter what your stated rationale for it is) is functionally going "I support whatever everyone else picks, whatever they decide is fine with me." Under any reasonable consequentialist ethical system, I would say that is "choosing this".
In the USA's defence, the system that put these gangsters in charge also gives it a shot at changing course in a couple of years.
Trump 1 was so bad, people showed up in droves to vote for anything else. That's how we ended up with a dimensia president.
Biden was so bad, people showed up in droves to vote for anything else. That's how we ended up in a war with Iran.
Trump 2 is so bad, people will show up in droves to vote for anything else. The downward spiral continues.
People didn't vote against Biden/Harris, they voted against incumbents in almost every major election across the world. They were unhappy with the economic situation after Covid – Biden just happened to be president at the time.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-hate-inflation-more-...
Not just that but they voted significantly more against the incumbent in the rest of the world than the US.
People really did not like Trump they just didn't like incumbents more.
It's almost like if the Democrats ran a competitive primary this whole situation could've been avoided.
Somebody would have had to convince Biden not to run. I honestly don't know if anybody even tried.
> People really did not like Trump they just didn't like incumbents more.
In 2016 Trump got 63M votes. Clinton got 66M.
In 2020 Trump got 74M votes. Biden got 81M.
In 2024 Trump got 77M votes. Harris got 75M.
Trump's popularity increased with each election. Turnout for Harris was definitely lower than the previous election, but the dip was not exceptional. Trump won because of his popularity - not despite it.
Right, his popularity increased in the US election because people did not like the incumbent (Biden / Harris).
Take a look at other world wide elections that happened in 2024.
Like France (parliamentary system so no presidential election); The incumbents lost 33% of their seats [1].
Or UK; The incumbents lost 67% of their seats [2]
And yet, Trump didn't even make it to 50% of US votes. People really did not like him. People really hated incumbents. Your numbers even show this, Biden 1 has more votes than Trump 2; they just didn't support the incumbent anymore.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_French_legislative_electi...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_general_el...
Trump, not Biden, started the war with Iran.
That's what I said?
Yeah Biden was soooo bad... Give me a fucking break. Americans are just as dumb as everyone says we are, that's how we got Trump 2.
Sentiments like this are why things will not improve. Neither side needs to practice any introspection because they're the good side and when the bad side wins it's just unavoidable because voters are dumb. Keep doubling down. Surely that will make things better.
Pretending we have issues we don't have also sure to make things better, right? No one who sincerely frames Biden as a problem worth mentioning in a discussion of leadership decline is worth listening to, especially given that he was sandwiched between Trump 1 and 2. A lifetime of patience has been exhausted in one decade.
The downward spiral continues.
...unless the gangsters change the rules. Which they have and will.
Honestly, despite having a wife from the US (not an US citizen anymore), I agree with you.
It is really weird to me that such a thing as lobbying can be legal. Or the fact that you can donate to an election campaign so that they have more money to influence people.
And it is even more surprising that the vast majority of US people don't even question these things. I have the theory that American exceptionalism hinders their critical thinking when it comes to these kind of subjects. Ie "If we decided to do it like this, it means is the best way possible".
If you watch the news coverage for any kind of elections in the US, you would assume they are not determined by votes, but instead they are fundraising competitions: The one that raises the most money gets elected.
I can't recall any situation where the news report that someone is bound to win because people view their platform as superior, and not because they raised the most money.
I believe that such cases do exist (Mamdani would be one), but it seems that the traditional media intentionally insist on only reporting the money raised (i.e. promote the establishment-sponsored candidate) to make people give up on their vote.
A lot of people question them. But the supreme Court has decided that giving money is equivalent to free speech, and can't be touched. I don't know how we will ever get out of that problem.
149 days until Jan 3, when new representatives are seated.
What is your contingency plan for if the groundwork that has been laid to falsify election results works? Wait harder?
The ethical US has rolled over already.
> falsify election results
This is something that is extremely hard to accomplish in the US. It would be akin to all of Europe voting on the same day and trying to falsify an election in each country. The logistics of this means that you need a lot of participants, and someone is going to blow it (and the whole thing unravels).
That is not the same as interfering: Jackboots at the polls, screwing with the mail, ID requirements.
These two things are NOT the same.
>> falsify election results
> This is something that is extremely hard to accomplish in the US.
Yet I seem to remember Al Gore winning an election, still Bush became president. Right? EDIT: link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
Falsifying votes is different from falsifying election results. All of the misinformation being thrown around exists to cast doubt on the voting system to not trust the results. So you vote, it gets tallied up, and if the result is not what you want, blame it on the supposed flaws in the voting system. The people who believe that misinformation come to your defense.
Yet it almost happened in 2020, when there was a lot more resistance against Trump in the US government, and no Project 2024.
Funny how at this point election fraud is a bipartisan issue, everyone seems to believe it's happening or will happen!
It's because everything Republicans say is projection. They want to cheat, so accuse the Democrats of doing it first. In actuality it's the current admin that's laying gound-work for election fraud in November.
Not sure what you intend by this, but yes, that’s their goal. The same people put on a “Trump was robbed” act for the Trump voters and a “Trump is robbing you” act for the Democrats, and with both they accomplish their true goal: get Americans to stop believing in democracy.
Time passes. Trump is literally doing his utmost to disenfranchise voters, called electors to personally harass them, and has spent years "investigating the fraud" to setup groundwork for violating people's voting rights.
One side says bullshit, the other side says "look at all of the fucking evidence of your eyes"
Even if the Republican party loses this time, what makes you think they won't find someone even worse than Trump next time? That seems to be the pattern over the last decades.
I don't see myself ever being able to trust the US again. Maybe if they manage 2-3 decades without conservative idiocy, but the Epstein class would never allow that.
Trump is either going to break the US, or the Republican party. Either way, we're in for a long period of one party rule and chaos.
Which I don’t think it’s healthy either. Any ruling party can become corrupt especially on a longer scale. So the question is what happens if you have another madman in charge?
I think the bigger issue is a two party system. The checks and balances can clearly be gamed as this administration has proven.
I'm baffled why Germany would allow this, you'd think they and the rest of Europe would understand the importance of energy independence at this point.
Germany has its own problems of institutional capture by fossil fuels and reluctance to change. Even culture war and a local Nazi problem.
Some of this has the same roots in social media and dodgy money (esp. wirecard), but not all of it.
This is/was a project in the USA. Europe is baffled by this US administration but has no say if the US does something so short-sighted.
It's not like the Trump administration is stopping off shore wind projects here... yet.
It really is. “This is bad. When will someone stop us?”
Not evil, just dumb.
Using the HN homework from earlier about multi-objective optimization... perhaps a Pareto optimal trade space of evil and dumb, to the maximum extent the two can coexist
Hehe, I think evil often stems from dumb in the sense that rarely is evil the choice that leads to good long term outcomes. For example the famous prisoners dilemma where the best strategy is tit for tat with occasional forgiveness.
ofc smart/evil/dumb are all simplifying things way too much since its not like humans have video game like attribute sliders. Im very aware of that, this is not meant to be taken that seriously.
Yeah, it's unfortunately fun to theorycraft the data and over-intellectualize a bit. Sorta takes the sting out of the reality ya kno?
Sorry but greed is evil, this is driven by greed.
you are being too charitable, they are both.
Dumb is evil. Dumb chooses shortcuts every time, even if it harms others, dumb is selfish evil.
Dismissing Trump and his cohorts as merely "dumb" is how we got allllll the way to 2026 from 2016.
Hopefully they take the money and use to to build more wind turbines in Europe I guess.
Absolutely shameful what the USA has become.
>RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana.
That kinda stinks, I wonder if getting the settlement was contingent on the re-investment.
It was.
So RWE gets to save face by "winning a payout" but in actuallity the admin is just indirectly subsidizing O&G development in a red state. Wonderful.
Yeah, they say that, but I wonder how much of it is just to make the Trump admin happy.
Like, I don't doubt that they will go and build gas projects, and might even use some of this money to kickstart it, but presumably RWE was already pretty far along the pipeline of preparing this offshore buildout, and there's likely a lot equipment orders, staff, ships, etc that they'd rather not cancel, and would rather redirect into another project if they can.
Maybe that's copium from me though, just sad to see a big wind project go to waste.
They'll certainly continue wind projects, just not likely in the US and not with this money.
Right, I just mean I wonder how much of the buildup to this project will be wasted.
They've been in a stop work since April 2025 so that buildup is likely all gone or already reallocated.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/rwe-ha...
Situation is quite different than the article paints it. The venture was risky to begin with, and already dead in 2026. Subsidies are gone, GE didn't produce their new 18MW turbine, interest rates and construction costs went up etc. State bureaucracy is its own quagmire, the fact that federal admin turned hostile was just the cherry on top.
Current deal is pretty clean and a win for both parties. US gov won't be drawn into a lengthy trial, RWE gets their money back, US gets a similar value investment, RWE gets a safer investment and a likely friendly government. US made some 40mil from the deal, or more likely 1-200 mil considering inflation; on the other hand RWE didn't lose their whole investment.
What about the several other projects in progress? What about the ones that were completed? They all had risk factors.
why was the venture risky?
This is beyond my understanding. They are actually paying to stop society from advancing.
Because the money they are spending and the money they will be making comes and ends in different pockets.
Trump holds a grudge against wind turbines, for no other reason than that they "ruined" the view at a golf course / club he owns in Scotland. He tried to get them removed, but lost that case in court.
That's mostly it. Another factor would be Trump getting donations from the oil & gas industry.
When I have drive past the course, I always have the urge to pee. One day I'll get out and take a piss on the green.
Pool some money together to build a coal power plant next to Mar-a-Lago.
To be fair, this seems consistent with what they normally do, and arguably consistent with what their voters want.
And because I love the game of explaining direct costs: every single taxpayer just paid $10 for this.
Of course, since our government is flat broke, it's going to be more from interest on the debt.
As Republican commentator Bill Buckley put it, "A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop."
The rest of the quote is actually about how it's meant to give people time to think, but it has clearly become an autonomic action.
The epitome of conservatism.
Welcome to American conservatism.
I wish I had not read this. I am not kidding when I say this is ruining my day thinking about. One thing is they ruin our times. But they are in the game of ruining the rest of time for humankind, too.
As well as all the other species.
More and more it seems like we're trying to do a speed run of killing our planet (or rather a planet worth living on).
Yes as everyone loves to retort, the planet will survive! We might not, the current ecosystem wont, no one and nothing we love or care about or cherish is likely to.
But a very lovely species of bug may at some point look down and marvel at the beautiful new world they've conquered. And I guess we've collectively decided we're happy to give them that.
Isn’t everyone and everything we love or care about gonna die or go away in 100-500 years anyways?
Also hasn’t earth already survived many mass extinctions and came back stronger? Maybe this is just the next mass extinction event and the cycle repeats.
It’s quite arrogant to think that everything on earth revolves around humans don’t you think?
Individually for sure, as a People I like to think we could do more than another 500 years if we don't fuck it up too bad.
Selfishly, as a human, I do kinda hope humans get to exist longer than only 500 more years too. I also like cats, so I hope cats get to live longer than that. Maybe whales, they seem chill.
I like the Sagan passage that "the cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."
And to star-stuff I'll happily return, but like.... Lemme use these atoms for a minute, and let a few generations of cats, plants and other people form from the recycled atoms after I'm done. "For Those Who Come After."
Let this phase of life on Earth enjoy it's time for a little. Why rush it? The bugs will get their turn eventually. They can wait.
I bet we're gonna end up with so many cool ant species. It totally isn't going to end up with just a few trillion fire ants ruling the planet, right? Right????
Can I also threaten to build an offshore wind project if they don't pay me $1.2 billion?
These guys had already signed a deal to build - giving them permission and probably an agreed price - the money was to persuade them to give that up.
So like a subsidy?
No, like a breakup fee in a commercial contract.
So a subsidy to stop building, instead of a subsidy to start building
No, it's compensation for backing out of a deal. In contract law, once a deal is signed, you're entitled to the "benefit of the bargain" if you perform your end of the deal. A breakup fee allows one side to get out of the deal, while compensating the other side for sunk cost into the project, opportunity costs from not having pursued other deals, etc.
I think you're missing the commenter's point.
...the point being the hypocrisy of exercising that option in the name of removing subsidized power, not the literal financial mechanism.
More like a bribe.
Trump literally just paid money (taxpayer money) for nothing
I don’t understand what pot of money this is coming out of. Has Congress authorized taxpayer money be used for paying energy companies to halt projects?
Republicans in congress have decided that Trump should not be stopped. Ever.
Trump is exempt from congressional authorisation
Only if you are willing to be harassed by Trump for as long as he and his sons live.
Quick! Back to the other thread! I've spotted somewhere DOGE could recoup $1.2B
I have either learned to tune it all out or have been worn down of all the terrible news. But of all the terriblew news to come from this administration, this kind of thing guts me the most :(
There is really no way around this, no silver lining. After years of working to get these programs implemented, to have the admin just willy-nilly spend money (what money!?!) to have them STOP. It hurts man.
I have to say, being able to find the silver lining in 6 years of fascist policy before this is impressive.
Also,
> The administration signed a similar $129bn (£96bn) agreement with Charlotte-based Duke Energy last month in exchange for the termination of the company's offshore wind lease in the Carolina Long Bay area.
I had to check that, It is 129 million
Indeed: https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-announces-energy-...
Putting aside the sycophantic wording around the orange leader and the total lack of details of how it's going to achieve what they are promising and what is actually going to happen, it's funny to see the distinction between gov officials and the Duke exec:
RWE is the biggest producer of energy from lignite in Germany, which causes massive emissions even when compared to burning black coal, oil and gas. Lignite used to be really important for Germany because it has almost no reserves of oil and gas that can be accessed with traditional methods, but Germany has huge natural gas reserves that can be accessed with hydraulic fracturing. Of course, fracking is illegal in Germany, so we keep burning lignite instead, which is so much worse. Mind you, I'm not arguing that fracking is the future, we need to decarbonize the entire energy sector, but we could do so much better with the cards that we were dealt.
So the lignite-burning energy dinosaur from Germany accepting a billion dollar bribe to divest resources from clean energy into fossil fuels is totally in character for that company. Shame on them.
Energy lobby in the USA is incredible. Maybe the best one? They have direct power too
That lets Trump off the hook by suggesting it's just run-of-the-mill corruption. It's not. He has a personal vendetta against wind power ever since a bust-up with Scotland about the views from his golf course getting "ruined". Today that cost Americans $4 each.
You would think that the US would be all for energy that reduces its reliance on the far east, regardless of the climate change benefit
Except, it's not "the US", just some minority with direct financial ties.
> Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement posted on X that Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense and not one dependent on "costly subsidies".
Isn't the $1.2B deal a subsidy for conventional gas?
Just a hypothetical...
Building new infra will extend beyond trumps term, so it's possible they do "planning" for 2 years, new admin comes in, and they abandon the plan and go back to putting the money in wind.
Thank you for this, I'm going to just accept this theory and close the thread because it makes me so upset, lol
Why are we spending billions of taxpayer dollars to appease the aesthetic whims of this dysfunctional moron? It takes years of planning and investment to build something like a new power plant, but we're giving this up because the President is still seething over the perceived insult of having to see wind turbine from the slopes of one of his golf courses? Does this sound rational to anyone besides our resident conservative apologist?
Please always vote.
Thank you. :)
Just “voting” is not sufficient. In fact, voting for the “wrong” people got us here. This guy won because people voted for him. Twice! How about: please always vote for the person who seems the least likely to fuck up the present and the future for all of us
Nah the people voting for the orange fuhrer are beyond reason. It's the third that doesn't vote that needs to decide which road they want us all to take.
>30% of people usually just don't vote, even in the presidential elections that happen every 4 years.
It's of primary importance to motivate these folks to vote at all. Getting them to favor for a candidate who isn't batshit crazy is a secondary function.
A person who doesn't vote can't be meaningfully swayed one way or another to begin with.
Please don't vote anymore, don't let the farce continue.
Thank you. :)
It's really depressing to know my own taxes are going to shit like this and feel so helpless to stop it.
Many such cases..... this is up there. But I gotta say, the one that really got to me was watching videos of people from my old neighborhood getting dragged into the street, disappeared and murdered, by government agents paid from my taxes.
But there are truly so many options to choose from which add up to more and worse still. Maybe we'll put our heads together and discover something to stop it eventually.
Wow what a great value on those $1.2B for the taxpayers!
We have totally not communism sending money to every other country in existence, but spending a single cent towards the betterment of your citizens is super duper evil communism.
I would love to know the thought process of this administration because it feels like a fever dream.
Thought process is: "me and my buddies get richer, fuck all of you"
Is the policy now to "harvest whatever we can ASAP" without any regard or consideration for the future or the environment?
> s the policy now to "harvest whatever we can ASAP" without any regard
Given the degree of corruption and criminality, a more appropriate metaphor might be "smash and grab".
Or, you know, the future bottom line. I wonder how much these people understand that if you kill everyone or put them under serious resource strain because of environmental collapse, there's no one left to pay anything to you. How hard is that to understand? Don't pull the trigger, because yes, right now you don't have a bullet in your foot, but in a few milliseconds...
Most of those people are old and don't care about the future. Not their problem.
Once you are a trillionaire or getting there, personal safety can be bought even without receiving future payments.
Nah, this gets you the "How do I keep my bodyguards loyal?" problem.
Of course they're typically not smart enough to have realised that first, but "I was too stupid to understand that I've doomed myself" doesn't mean you haven't doomed yourself.
I can't believe how stupid the world has become. At least my young niece and nephew will have terrible air to breathe after I'm gone. Next, let's pay people to detonate nuclear bombs next to our homes.
Wait halting energy projects when energy is so scares for data centers? Couldn't US just have handed it over to some US Big Tech? I am not in US but why pay to "not" do something like building infra.
"RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana."
"Trump has sought to boost government support for fossil fuels after campaigning for the presidency under the slogan "drill, baby, drill"."
That's insane, even though half of Republican supporters believe in climate change, and almost all Democratic voters do too. I can understand cutting government spending on the transition to green energy when projects are unprofitable, but what is the point of cutting it for profitable ones? If I'm not mistaken, energy firms like RWE are even threatened with lawsuits if they continue building wind turbines. Other coal investments are even more insane.
I am available to not build wind turbines at a substantial discount.
> "We welcome RWE's agreement and voluntary investment in projects that strengthen our nation's energy security,".
We do live in a dystopia don't we?
If you are in the US make sure you write your congressman about this. Elections are coming up in a couple months and if they see this as an issue they will ensure something happens. There is already suspicion that the Democrats will win the house (which doesn't take too many districts to turn - this commonly would happen anyway), even a republican in a "safe seat" is scared.
I wonder how Americans feel to see that their elected president takes tax money to forcefully destroy the planet and our kid's future :-(
This one hurts. Lots of bad news flying around here but this one hit a bit different.
Fully one third absolutely love it.
We found trump's achilles heel. I demand a trillion to shut down my solar
Is there any way to view our consistent destruction of green energy products in the last few years as anything other than hostile towards the majority of people purely to have a handful of people profit on cost of gas?
This is so colossally stupid, even by MAGA standards. We're literally spending billions to make things worse, because apparently any form of renewable energy makes the frogs gay or some stupid shit.
You can't make this ish up. In the era of AI when we need as much energy as possible, this admin is pulling this ridiculous stunt. Yeah, I'm not wagering that USA wins the AI race.
Can the US please keep their bad decisions within their borders...
Why are they scared shitless of wind power? What's the deal? I don't get it. Like, they seem to be more determined to stop wind power than solar power. Why?
See this comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208635
We are outraged. We know we are nearly the climate abyss. We see the changes all around us. What are we going to do to collectively to change course? To right the ship?
I wrote a book on the issue. I think the next best thing we can do is work together to amplify our voices to the point ignoring us is no longer politically convenient.
https://sustainedminimalist.com/book
Tens of millions of Americans, including republican leaning voters who claim to believe in climate change, demonstrably reject the reality in front of their eyes.
The same generation who groused about how bad snow used to be (Up to rooftops!) and make fun of people who struggle in what little snow we get right now are the same people who are posting in comments sections "Earth has always changed temperature"
So in short a company was servicing power demand in a low pollution way. Then American government gave them money so they can instead service the same demand while causing more pollution.
Just... Why? To protect a few hundred jobs in America? They could have just given a small portion of that money to these workers and they would stop complaining about job loss. 1.2 Billion is a big number.
Because Trump hates wind power for "ruining the view". That's it.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uyLiON_f5c0
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetl...
I think I don't want to believe this. I believe it in my brain but not in my heart. This kind of power just cannot be in such irresponsible hands. It makes me wanna scream.
This is, I suppose, what you get when you elect a guy who went bust running a casino. So much winning.
Rolling out data centers all over the place and they're paying billions for LESS energy supply.
Geniuses.
Offshore wind projects when you have tons and tons of empty land always seemed weird to me. The cost, logistics, reduced life of the installations, disruptions to the ecosystems and potential production issues with winter storms and other extreme weather events.
The empty land doesn't produce power, wind does, and offshore it's stronger and more reliable, and it's in a location near big demand. All of the environmental issues are considerations for any power plant. Offshore wind would have been better in many aspects than alternatives, and profitable.
"US strikes..."
Oh God, what now, we've finally bombed Cuba?
"...$1.2B deal to pay..."
Oh thank God!
"...halt offshore wind projects"
God damn it.
As a German I am highly confused by US actions. America is sabotaging its own economic future, demonizing independent renewable natural energy sources (you don’t need to import wind or sun) and Mr. „art of the deal“ is even paying us for it.
With Herr Merz at the helm this should hardly be confusing for a German. Let's not take the high ground here, we don't deserve it.
At least we finally answered the Mad Max question "Who killed the world?"
Where is this money coming from? They can strike a deal, but the money has to come from somewhere and if it came from money directed at wind energy, then this will be illegal, I'd venture to guess.
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We need more energy. We should be doing this, gas, nuclear, solar. Not either or.
̶W̶e̶i̶r̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶m̶e̶n̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶w̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶l̶i̶s̶t̶ ̶(̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶s̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶t̶e̶x̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶e̶n̶t̶i̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶w̶i̶n̶d̶)̶.̶ (Edit: apparently I can't read today)
In most locations, unless you have extremely stable weather, it's ideal to have a nearly even mix of wind and solar capacity, since wind is rather strongly anticorrelated with sunshine.
> We should be doing this
It'd be very reasonable to assume "this" means wind here.
I somehow missed the "this", that makes way more sense, thank you for pointing it out.
We also need to use less total energy, regardless of source. That number doesn't have to always go up.
That number directly correlates with life quality in almost every country on earth. More energy per capita means higher life quality, without a doubt in every high quality place.
What about quality of life per watt and just making having a certain standard of living more energy efficient?
Simple examples: energy efficient lights seem to have no downsides, better insulation helps my apartment building retain heat, more efficient electronics mean that my homelab servers pull like 100 W total and public transport probably removes a bunch of cars from the road and increases air quality and decreases traffic jams (I can get everywhere I need that way, there’s literally train, tram and bus stops like 5-15 minutes away).
> energy efficient lights seem to have no downsides
Efficiency is good, but this isn't true. Decades into LED-ification we still suffer shit-tier PWM strobing, poor dimming, disruption to wildlife and human life, and streetlights turning purple en masse.
(The last two are installation and quality issues, but when driven by lowest-bidder compliance with simplistic "efficiency" mandates that's what you get).
Lower color rendering index than incandescent lights too. High CRI LEDs are available, but they're still worse than incandescents and less efficient than the conventional LEDs.
There must be a cap where quality of life is good enough though, right? Or do you propose it should go up indefinitely?
Air conditioning is quite nice if you find yourself living in a hot environment, for example. But do we really all need smart watches? Or cameras everywhere? Or LLMs, for that matter?
Do smart watches and cameras and llms increase quality of life?
That depends entirely on how you measure quality of life. Though I'd argue that if quality of life measures didn't noticeably increase after those products were released, then I'd say no.
I'd argue quality of life is down since the invention of smartphones
> There must be a cap where quality of life is good enough though, right?
Maybe in some hypothetical future, but even the fantastical world Star Trek TNG has improvements on quality of life that could be made.
I think part of the problem of today lands on the post-cold war and certainly post-911 media landscape. There just aren't optimistic future. Distopia is more popular and certainly more numerous than Utopia.
I'd argue that we have to find some level of "enough" when it comes to quality of life, likely a balance between incremental improvements vs the costs to get there.
Effectively all history of life was focused entirely on finding food, water, maybe shelter and safety, and breeding. Where do we draw the line and stop making new things just because we can?
I have nothing to base this on so its just a hunch, but I'd expect quality of life would increase for many people today by removing, rather than adding. Work a little less, buy a little less, have fewer distractions, etc.
You can do more with less energy, if you use it more efficiently, which sometimes may be more cost effective compared to producing more. Electricity consumption peaked in Germany in 2007 and is down 15% since then while GDP grew by 50%.
Also energy consumption per capita is more than 2x higher in the US compared to Germany, while quality of life should be roughly similar. (In my personal opionion quality of life is better in Germany).
In rich countries, energy usage for a middle-class lifestyle isn't really rising anymore, and in some places is falling significantly (homes are _way_ more thermally efficient than they used to be, all appliances are more efficient, cars are more efficient, and so on).
Energy use per capita will continue to rise in the medium term globally, but it's stable to slightly down over the last few decades in the US, say.
OK some people should use less energy
You say that like it’s an infinitely scalable proposition? It really isn’t.
Electrification roughly halves total energy use in an economy.
Fossil fuels are very inefficient compared with alternatives like EVs and heat pumps and renewables.
In medieval times we used tiny amounts of energy on lighting and everyone sat around in the dark, however the energy used per lumen and indeed the carbon impact per lumen was far higher than it is today
Do you think we should return to medieval heat and light?
You're not wrong, but it simply isn't politically viable, which has been illustrated quite obviously by now. The "use less" strategy is a complete (and predictable) failure.
Oh it shouldn't be a political issue at all. We don't need the government forcing us to reduce energy use, we need people to do it for themselves.
It is absolutely the government's job to regulate externalities. Otherwise, personal virtue is just subsidizing third party vice. Energy is fungible. Every joule you save lowers the cost for people who don't care.
Regulate externalities sounds like a nice way of phrasing what would amount to authoritarianism.
It seems reasonable to want a government to help ensure externalities aren't being ignored in prices, but not to regulate them by saying how much and what types of things people can use. I don't want my government allocated a set amount of energy I use, for example, but I would be fine with them ensuring prices accurately reflect the true cost.
Ironically they often do the opposite, subsidizing energy and food costs which make things cheaper and hide externalities.
I wish. Look up "coal rolling".
Coal rolling is done to spite the holier-than-thou sanctamonious bullshit that people who say "we need to eat lentils and live in a cave" come out with. It's an illogical reaction, but it's human.
We need answers, not revert to a world of catholic sin
Change your car to run off electric, great
Change your city to transport 1000 people by train rahter than 1000 separate cars, great
Power your AC from your off-grid rooftop solar, great
Whine that people need to stop using AC, stop eating meat, stop watching TV, it's just harmful.
I haven't seen any whining in the thread, though maybe you're referring to me since I started the thread here?
I didn't say people need to stop using AC, I don't even agree that eating less meat would help, and my only mention of TV above was in reference to people deciding to turn it off when they leave the house, not to watch less of it.
My main point, though, was that moving around how we use energy, and of what type, will do a lot less good than finding ways to use less.
Personally, I'm ok with all of those things. But I draw the line at whining about whining.
There are only two routes to preventing the climate disaster we've already set in motion:
Risky geoengineering projects like stratospheric aerosol injection.
Direct atmospheric capture of CO2.
The latter is the safer option because it's just restoring the atmosphere to a known good state. Direct atmospheric capture of billions of tons of CO2 per year will take enormous amounts of energy. We're going to need a lot more nuclear power plants if there's any hope of pulling this off.
Alternative is World War Three when large parts of the planet become uninhabitable.
I've never been particularly intrigued by the climate disaster angle. Not that it isn't an issue, but that it shouldn't be a prerequisite for a person to consume less by choice.
If I have to convince someone that 1) the climate is changing beyond historical patterns 2) I know the chemical/mechanical processes at play and 3) we caused it just so they turn off the TV when they leave the house or enjoy their current car a few years longer, its a situation that will never be resolved.
Atmospheric capture of CO2 seems to me to be one of the things pushed by the fossil fuel industry.
It is clearly not really feasable (at least not now). To me it just seems like the fossil fuel industry is doing the tobacco industry playbook of pushing stuff that doesn't actually work so people don't even try the stuff that does work: using less energy, and using less carbon intensive energy.
We really can move to less carbon intensive energy, there's lots of options all around us. Yes it means a systemic change - which is exactly what the fossil fuel industry doesn't want.
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Your "growth at all costs" mindset is going to kill everyone, including yourself, so it's not as simple as just moving elsewhere.
At what point is the correct response to just stop paying federal taxes?
been thinking that for awhile now
In case anyone is wondering why he hates wind so much, it stared in 2011:
Donald Trump pledges 'any legal means' fight against windfarm. US tycoon saying proposed offshire turbines will 'compromise' golf resort – and ruin his sea view: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/05/donald-trump-l...
Donald Trump continues to battle Scottish offshore windfarm plans. In his second letter to Alex Salmond, the businessman said the turbines would have a negative impact on Scottish tourism: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/sep/28/donald-t...
Let's start a $1.3bn goFundMe, and invite all billionnaires with a conscience (do they even exist?) to put some money in. + an extra $20 in postage to mail a turd to donny
> Days after his return to office, he said "we're not going to do the wind thing" and called them "big, ugly windmills" that were dangerous to wildlife.
And coal?
We shouldn't pretend that he's making a real point. I would like to see 1.2B invested to save wildlife, but that's not happening, so that's almost like a "figure of speech".
Fascinating how a country can dismantle itself. Historians will have a field trip in analyzing this. Just sad that the current population will suffer from this.
Clown administration, there is nothing else to say. It’s completely captured by grifters at that point
Punishment for US will continue until more jail improves.
They bought back the leases; how much did the lease cost originally, and how much work was done on the project? Those are the only important questions
Take that $1.2bn. Invest it. When this moronic administration is gone, use it to build more renewable energy infrastructure.
I thought I misread the title at first. I assume we're going to pay labs to stop doing cancer research next?
Don't give them any ideas...
Trump administration’s latest buyback of offshore wind leases brings total to nearly $4 billion: https://www.bostonherald.com/2026/08/06/trump-offshore-wind-...
my guess is that this project will be quickly relocated somewhere else in a double loose for the US, but then may very well prove to illegal in any number of violations of US law, triggering further confusion and unplanned costs for US tax payers. it's a triumphalist celebration of anti logic
Why does Doug Burgum need to underscore the fact that the RWE investment is 'voluntary'?
Big Oil getting what they paid for.
If they want to pay me to not build wind farms, I'll not build them for half that.
We have $1.2B to prevent wind power but not to feed starving kids [1]?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/18/trump-admini...
Leave to the idiot cheato to be #1!
Nobody else ever spent this much money to NOT have cheap power 8-/
This administration just flushes taxpayers dollars down the toilet.
take a look at what Spain is doing. diversifying the energy system is needed
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Yes, because comparing it to larger countries with more economic power like China would make the US politics look even dumber.
This is Dr. Evil level stuff
(looks at Secretary of the Treasury...)
"SCOOOTTTTT !!!!!!"
Every single day it's getting stupider and stupider with the NewUSA
everyone on this board - is now aware the US gvt is working against your interest unless you're sama & crew.
invest in your own solar, or other forms of renewable energy - get an ev.
Energy independence still remains a rich mans hobby. Neighborhood sized micro-grids are the future.
I just learnt about Virtual Power Plants using big batteries i.e 40Kwh+ - so yeah that could work.
I conducted a fun experiment.
Prompted an AI this:
It's year 2005, and you're an AI on an alien planet. you get a piece of news from the future from a planet called Earth. Tell me what you understand from the text and what you think about it: (then pasted the article text)
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Great article for April 1st! No, wait. It's August 7th. Wat.
> German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the US after reaching a $1.2bn (£892m) payout deal with President Donald Trump's Department of the Interior (DoI). > > RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana.
Why not just give that 1.2bn to those "conventional gas" projects they want in Louisiana so bad?
Not that I agree with creating mroe "conventional gas" projects, I don't. Even just the idea of paying a company NOT to do a green energy project is completely stupid. We need more energy period.
The US continues to cede the energy revolution to China.
Can a lawsuit stop this absolutely ridiculous deal?
Maybe. Check with a lawyer. I would for starters be looking at the angle that Congress needs to approve spending money, and I doubt this was in any budget.
There also needs to be a conversation of if the executive branch should even have the powers to stop this. A a YIMBY person I believe their power should be limited to verifying the permits were filled out correctly (and I believe in reducing paperwork for them), that is they cannot say no to this if the process was followed.
> dangerous to wildlife
Is this claim substantive at all?
Yes, if a turbine breaks it's possible it may hit the water and kill some fishes.
If a flock of flamingos or geese are doing a low pass it's possible they get shredded by them.
If Godzilla tries to get out of the water near them it's possible it gets hit in the head. Also he may destroy them since Godzilla is, as we all know, a nuclear energy proponent.
Do you think the Trump administration really gives a damn about wildlife?
There is of course some danger to wildlife but compared to things like planes, cars and boats its pretty minimal and can be managed.
Do they hate green energy that much?
One of my guiltier pleasures is reading r/Conservative to see which knots they're tying themselves in today defending some of his more insance ideas. In the unlikely event this surfaces up beyond some rage-bait culture war story they've found on Breitbart, I will enjoy reading their thoughts on why this is 4d chess†
†: in fairness to them, they are almost uniformly opposed to Trump's adventurism in Iran and mostly not supportive of the Jan 7th slush-fund, and will call out both when pressed
Man - What exactly are these people?
America first! Somehow?
2028, everyone. Hang in there.
did the onion just take over the BBC, what's going on right now ?
Can't have wind power. Can't have bike lanes. Can't have trains. Can't have healthcare. Love this country!
To be clear, this isn’t wind power currently under construction. It’s proposed future wind power with leases being planned. Trump has largely failed to stop the nearly complete projects in New England, New York, and Virginia.
Still short sighted and stupid, of course.
Beyond idiocy.
Ha, been there
November can't come soon enough, this administration is beyond disgusting
They are literally a non-stop crime-spree against humanity
But if the Dems don't get 52 in the Senate absolutely nothing will change and might get even worse, likely much worse
Trump was elected because of rural/exurban white insecurity and white cultural decline. An election wasn't the cause of all this--it was more of an effect.
In other words, even if there's a feedback loop, an election won't magically fix everything.
what will replace the wind projects?
> what will replace the wind projects?
Poverty. 1.2B less
On the other hand, the economical support of US politicians to some ideological groups in Germany is concerning. How do we know that this is not just laundering and justifying to move billions from US to the "right (far right) people" in Germany?
Idiot president of a country where over 10% of power generated in 2025 was with wind says any country with wind turbines (he calls them windmills) is a loser country. Film at 11.
Anti wind farm rethoric is common among pro-Russian politicians in Bulgaria too.
It's just so blatantly and absurdly evil for literally no reason. It's a cartoon villain type of plan, the absurdity of it leaves me at a true loss for words
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Its not stupidity though. The admin has a personal vendetta against renewables.
I’d still file that under stupidity.
Barf
The madness continues. No one else is to blame other than the american zeros who made this hell to continue this long.
Don't worry they are now starting to wake up and realize that Trump has been lying to them so they will vote for Tucker Carlson in the next election.
The MAGA crowd is gone and lost. There is little difference to other religious nutjobs, no matter is muslim or christian.
Afaiac MAGA is just a the white/dumb/uneducated version of jihad.
Now people understand why Merz is so obedient to Trump: USA always pays Germany handsomely. Canadians understood Trump being a problem. German taxpayers also understand this. It is german politicians who consistently act against the people in Germany here; Merz is just doing this very shamelessly and obviously, while also insulting germans as "lazy bums" (https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-07/friedrich-me... - here he claims to never have insulted Germans as that, but prior statements contradict this). There is a reason why more than 70% (!!!!) of germans oppose Merz now. https://ip-quarterly.com/en/troubled-merz-faces-crucial-elec...
Being so obedient to Mr. Trump, who in turn now faces allegation of being more involved than was previously already known with regards to Epstein's sexy islands, is a lose-lose situation Mr. Merz. USA paying german companies to abandon green energy plans, also ties into that. If Merz would have something called a spine he would not be so addicted to the money and instead reject the USA trying to influence Europeans and Germans negatively here. Because that money is ultimately bribery money for RWE. Shame on RWE as well.
Maybe read the article before leaping to conclusions.
so as my energy bill is going up 50% we're giving people my tax dollars in exchange for them not making more energy to ease demand?
winning winning winning winning winning winning winning winning
Just so that people are aware. From the article:
German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the US after reaching a $1.2bn (£892m) payout deal with President Donald Trump's Department of the Interior (DoI).
RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900m (£669m) in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana.
They are not paying Germany to prevent a German firm from building offshore wind projects on German shores. They are paying so that the German firm does not do it on US shores.
Terrible either way, but I think a lot of comments here are simply commenting after reading only the terrible title.
this is the stupidest thing ever. literally this administration cancels the contract and compensates german company... omg
Literally setting fire to the world because the US government is rammed full of corruption and oil cronies. Meanwhile everything is fine for the handful of billionaires who benefit from this shit. Absolutely sickening.
The next time, your libertarian friend mutters “Solyndra”, tell him at the most Solyndra cost the federal government 1/2 billion dollars, not the many billions Trump is spending to cancel wind projects.
The challenge is that you're not dealing with rational people. The big dog in the White House is a imbecile of the highest order, and everyone is doing everything in their power to appease him. It is a unwinnable situation as long as Trump is POTUS.
Dumb, Dumb Dumb….
is it just me or does that seems to be a decision driven fully by a personal dislike of wind energy without having actually run the numbers, or in other words the art of a deal isn't that
like yes there was binding commitment to RWE getting some level of subsidies, hence he had to "pay them of" around the amount of profit they have likely list, and probably more
but... compared to not paying that much more in subsidies _and_ getting more electricity out of it which the US seem to currently be quite tight one this seems to be a terrible bad deal
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EDIT: Sorry for the rant below, it's just pretty annoying how dishonest non fact based politics has been becoming where I live:
furthermore you can stop future subsidies, so if wind energy is as "fake" as he claims this is something RWE would be stuck with not them, even if it drive them bankrupt it wouldn't be a USA problem (and more a German one)
so the only way this deal makes sense is if you a) hate wind energy and want it cone irrationally b) know it actually works and as such would "stay around" for sure (or if you really really really care about birds, no way this is true for Trump)
(And also practically it already has proven that off shore wind farms can work profitable, so b, isn't really a question. But I guess if you have a president who says all the wind farms in China are fake for show while China produce roughly as much wind energy as all of the EU together then sure you can't except logic).
In general the amount of nonsense you hear when it comes to the topic of renewable energies is pretty crazy both in how people "proof how bad it is" .. based on early technology from well over 20+ years ago, systematically ignoring relevant components of a complete solution, pretending certain already in-use technologies don't exist and don't make sense etc. To ignoring issues with whatever technology they favor and often comparing wrongly calculated "non subsidized" renewable prices with "highly subsidized" non renewable prices. Don't get me wrong it also is done the other way around. But at least where I live, that direction of propaganda isn't really relevantly used while the other direction is spread everywhere non stop (while also pretending that any honest calculation is supposedly "faked" because it doesn't fit their world view).
A refresh related to one of your points: Statista says for the US: Birds killed by wind turbines: about 140,000 to 680,000 birds per year. Bats ~ over 1 million bats killed per year in North America (~926,856 bats in the U.S. in 2023 and ~85,841.6 bats in Canada in 2020, totaling ~1,012,697 bats). Europe: ~780,000 total bat deaths per year across the USA, Germany, Canada, and the UK. And finally: ~7 bats per year per MW of installed capacity. This is one of the prices for collecting an extremely dilute form of energy. The latter statement is not put forward as an argument at all; merely a statement of fact. We shrug our shoulders and say - 'we'll live with that'. Others can detail the immense contribution of bats to the Agricultural Industry.
yes, worth adding: Various changes/improvements in the way wind mills are build, have marking & lights on them are expected to reduce the number by quite a bit. Through a lot of already build existing wind mill and limited pressure to apply such changes means we will have to see how much of this actually will help iff even relevantly used at all.
Another problem is that the actual impact on bats for _offshore_ wind seems unclear. Yes it happens, bats do migrate across sea areas in some places. But we have very little knowledge about bat migration routes and amounts in such cases AFIK.
The art of the deal is historically mostly losing, flailing and bankruptcies
... along with fraud and sexual predation
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Was there a good reason not to build there?
It seems at a glance like we should have just built the turbines, not paid off or stiffed them.
Since we seem to desperately need more energy, currently expanding with every other short term high polluting source we can.
That’s a separate issue, and irrelevant to the issue of cancelling the lease early.
I'm confused then. Cancelling the lease early is unrelated to the decision to build the turbines or not?
No, it's merely a separate decision. Given that they have decided to cancel the lease, for good reasons or bad, the question then is what they do with the lease payments. I am pretty sure that you would not be happy if your landlord wanted to evict you and also wanted you to keep paying rent.
When and why was the decision to cancel, and how was the money already allocated not part of that though?
I can't say I've ever signed a lease where the terms of payment or deposit return weren't extremely clear and part of my decision to move in.
I posit that "to halt operations" is actually related to "$1.2B deal to pay", in TFA.
In similar manner to how "Hacker" and "News" are fantastically separate utterances, but when we're talking on Hacker News it's pretty regularly a package deal, not an exercise in Levenshtein distance from "Hacker" to "News".
Yes, returning the money is a consequence of terminating the lease. That’s precisely what I said!
Yes, I am quite certain that the contract was quite explicit about the terms of cancellation. That’s certainly relevant, but we still had the opportunity to refuse to return the money even though it would certainly have ended up in a lawsuit. Would that have been better? No, I do not think that it would have been. In fact, it would have been unethical, possibly even fraud. Articles that phrase this as additional money being paid rather than money being returned are deliberately misleading.
You might want to reconsider using "gypped" in that way.
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So what you're saying is instead of spending 1.2B to stop a firm from building wind, the government should leave the firm be so they can keep building wind and invest the 1.2B into building a nuclear power plant which will come online when the German firm has built roughly 1,000x the same capacity in wind turbines.
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Nuclear isn't as cheap as you present it. It needs heavy subsidies for insurance and waste disposal.
Most nuclear power proposals are just LARPing as "cheap" as they pretend subsidies don't exist.
In addition you have to shut nuclear power plants down in summers due to lack of sufficient cooling. That means you need to plan alternative replacement power generation.
> 1.2B gives you a 1-1.5GW nuclear power station
Er... That seems optimistic. Even in China, which is the current world leader and has significant advantages of scale, nuclear capacity costs $2-3bn per GW. The most recent US construction (Vogtle 3 and 4) took 14 years and cost $36bn for two reactors of 1.1GW each.
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Not the North Sea, nothing to do with transmission in Germany. Bad summary, bot(?).
And here I'm saying again NAFO peps live in a bubble
What does NAFO have to do with anything here?
Offshore wind kills the jet stream and creates climate change.
The jetstreams are kilometers above sea level, no WEC is that high
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In my opinion, it was always crazy to build a wind farm in the most scenic part of the Pacific coast.
The neo-industrialist in me thinks it would have been cool to see that driving the 1.
But you can hardly call dredging and filling all that open ocean habitat conservationist.
Don't make excuses for this destructive policy.
A visualization of turbines at different distances: https://archive.nytimes.com/green.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/...
Turbines are all but invisible at 21 miles out, the minimum distance the california RWE project would have been installed at. Beyond that, they are hidden by the earths curvature.
https://www.northcoastoffshorewind.org/post/how-visible-woul...
https://www.boem.gov/renewable-energy/state-activities/humbo...
Nice goalpost shift. Wonder what source provides your propaganda. If you look at the entire picture, you’re doing far far more benefit for the environment by reducing fossil fuel dependency. But go ahead and cry for the birds.
Exactly this. I know HN is obviously a very pro tech, pro science demographic, but I can't believe there's so little opposition to having our coasts littered with wind turbines.
I don't care how energy efficient it is. It's dystopian and depressing.
How much wind power can we extract before we disrupt the global wind circulation and thus the climate regulation by winds?
Is no one worried about this?
It's occasionally mentioned, but the answer appears to be "roughly 1000x current global electricity production", so we don't worry about it too much. Energy is much higher than electricity, of course, but we're not planning on replacing all energy [or all electricity] with just wind.
We'll hit other constraints long before that happens.
There may be some local effects. I think the main one is one cluster of wind turbines effecting the output of nearby clusters (and effects within a cluster). Pretty sure they account for this when engineering wind farms, with the effects actively being studied.
Probably a lot: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC526278/
I fully understand why power generation is subsidised - however honesty I feel if the govt is subsidising it, they should get a cut of the profits too.
I also believe in a free market, and power should be subsidised equally per MW (MWh maybe?) this takes the politics out of a structural necessity. If you want to push a political agenda - great - but do it on political topics.
There is no such thing as a free market, the way you refer to it.
A free market that avoids externalities like climate change?
This might make sense if power companies would bear the environmental costs, but they don’t. That’s one reason why it is a political topic.
But selective subsidising still doesn't really help that. Subsidise household rooftop solar, home batteries, EVs and a whole host of other ways that directly benefit the more average person.
We need to be careful in not throwing the babies out with the bath water - the fees paid for the leases for these projects were so high that the projects would not be economically viable in the first place. The developers are probably doing back flips behind closed doors that they have exited these positions without major financial impairments.
This does not mean that renewables or offshore wind should not be built it just means that the regime around how sites are awarded, and how power purchase contracts are made need to be reworked.
A lot of the world is struggling with this (recently UK re-tendered for Mona lease area with much more favourable conditions than r4 initial lease).
Generally speaking I think the best approach would be to have almost zero / nominal lease fee, then have a competitive auction around a two sided CFD - if the market price is below the strike price the state makes up the difference, if the market price is above the strike price the excess goes back to the state.
> the fees paid for the leases for these projects were so high that the projects would not be economically viable in the first place.
Can you explain where you got your information from?
* The leases were already paid for (in total) in 2022-2023 for $1bn.
* The expected output would have been 7gigawatts annually, which is a 5-7x return per year on paper.
* The sale of the lease is due to a regulatory blockade, not a traditional cost benefit analysis.
I’m not sure what I need to cite but logically when you’ve paid 1B for a lease up front, you’ll want to recoup that through the money you get paid for the electricity you generate. The project accounting probably includes a return on that similar to CAPEX (could be as high as 10%), so its impact grows every year as well.
My feeling is that these projects would require offtake costs so high to be viable that they would not be appealing to the states that awarded the leases. The blockade from trump is a very appealing exit ramp for projects that are dead in the water.
You can see in Germany / UK projects awarded with high lease costs failing (Mona already went pop in uk, I imagine any r4 lease not awarded cfd in AR8 will be returned, Total not moving forward with German portfolio…)
I’ve worked on debt financed offshore wind projects for the last decade, the whole project viability hinges on devex/capex balanced against offtake and resource.
> the fees paid for the leases for these projects were so high that the projects would not be economically viable in the first place.
> I’m not sure what I need to cite but logically when you’ve paid 1B for a lease up front, you’ll want to recoup that through the money you get paid for the electricity you generate.
I agree. This is why I take issue with your initial claim.
~6.6tw (aggregate for the 3 sites) -> for $30b (middle range to develop)
1 TWh/year = 1,000,000 MWh/year.
That works out to roughly $4.5k of initial capital per MW, initially.
Based on a realized electricity price on the eastern seaboard, let's say $100m/tw/yr in profit - roughly $100 per mw/hour, after subsidy, operational cost and based (very conservatively) on a fixed midrange electricity demand.
After 4500 hours (just over 6 months of operation) you're in the black.
All that being said, if the books were cooked or construction was stalled, there could be outside incentives, but this is incidental to saying something akin to "it's unprofitable on paper" when the math does not bear this out.
Wind turbines were never meant to produce electricity but to bankrupt the world economy. Back in 2K one turbine installation cost was 2 million euros. That one turbine can never generate that much electricity so to pay your investment. Not counting the maintenance astronomical costs.
US has absurdly large domestic energy resources like gas reserves, coal reserves, uranium, and thermal energy infrastructure.
Then, there is the supply chain argument: the specialized turbines, components, vessels and manufacturing chains are manufactured overseas and imported to support Wind. RWE is itself German. It’s good to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains.
Fishing and maritime was also cited as a concern.
Onshore Wind is used (see New Mexico). Offshore Wind is a harder sell.
Gas/nuclear/geothermal is a better investment for the US than Offshore Wind.
While these arguments are valid, you’re missing the forrest for the trees. Renewable energy has better long-term ROI because it doesn’t require constant purchase of fuel. Renewable energy plants also produce far, far less CO2 that goes into the atmosphere and endangers our biosphere (yours and mine).
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>It’s good to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains
The fact that we're still basically entirely reliant on the middle east and other foreign producers for our domestic fuel supply suggests this isn't really that big of a deal. Even in the middle of a war that is generating massive profits for the oil industry, no one is suggesting they should add refinery capacity or convert existing ones to use domestic oil.
This move is about the president's personal vendetta against offshore wind and satisfying his financial backers in the fossil fuel industry.
I disagree.
The US is the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world. We’re also a net energy exporter.
We import some crude because our refineries are set up for it. That’s a long way from being “entirely reliant” on foreign fuel.
We are indeed the largest producer of oil and natural gas. In this case, "some" is like 70%. Maybe that's not "entirely reliant", but it's far from independence. If other countries stopped selling us oil, our car-centric society would be FUBAR for some time.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_d_nus_Z00_mbblp...
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_exp_dc_NUS-Z00_mbblpd_...
70% figure isn’t dependence on foreign oil for 70% of our consumption. The US both imports and exports huge amounts of petroleum.
And most US crude imports come from Canada, not the Middle East.
If the Middle East suddenly stopped it would cause a disruption but that’s very different than saying the US is reliant on the Middle East.
Do you know if it would be easier to get fully domestic supply and manufacturing chains for solar or for wind, if a way is found to prevent corruption undermining setting up fully domestic production?
For onshore wind, probably wind.
For offshore wind, not nearly as clear. The US still lacks a lot of the specialized vessels, ports and manufacturing capacity.
Solar has bigger upstream dependence on Asian wafer/cell production.
Forgive the ignorance, what drives the demand for offshore wind instead of on land anyway? Shorter power run to coastal cities vs longer transmission loss from exurban environments?
And with solar, I can't imagine that would be fast to stand up production for... but we're attempting the Herculean task with modern chip fabs. Would panels be harder than that? They both seem existential needs for the future of the country.
Offshore wind is far more reliable than onshore wind. Geography ensures that some ocean locations pretty much always have wind blowing. North Sea wind turbines have a capacity factor of about 60%, approximately double that of onshore wind turbines.
The other advantage of offshore is that it can support the truly massive wind turbines. Onshore wind turbines are a lot smaller.
I have much to learn, thanks!
> The US still lacks a lot of the specialized vessels, ports and manufacturing capacity.
Maybe we should put the $1.2B into that sort of thing, then?
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> one would have to be careful that it does not end up lost in corruption
I think that ship, as it were, has sailed.
> The concerns about radar and wind turbines do not seem fake when private sector military companies try to offer solutions for it.
Contractors - especially military ones! - love to sell solutions to fake problems (or fake solutions to real problems) if they can get away with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
> It’s good to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains.
Huh? That’s quite a whopper to drop as if it’s an obvious truth.
It’s good to diversify supply chains. Eggs-in-one-basket is bad for many reasons, even if it’s your own domestic basket.
Trade interdependence is good for competition, reduces risks from disasters, and creates disincentives for war.
And the market apparently thinks offshore wind is a good investement for the US, to the point where the government has to pay companies not to do it.
See
1. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/securing-us-supply-chain...
2. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/84710.pdf
3. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107769
4. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/wind/articles/report-outlines-su...