> 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?
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].
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?
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.
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
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.
> [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.
"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.
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.)
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.
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".
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
As you can see from the data, doing away with nuclear has resulted in an over reliance on LNG because, surprise surprise, solar and window aren’t the solution, LNG is.
LNG is everything solar and wind isn’t: dispatchable, reliable, cheap. So cheap Japan makes more off reselling Australian LNG than Australia does.
When you have lots of wind and solar you also need gas peaker plants because, this might be news to you, it’s dark or cloudy more often than not and wind is inconsistent.
Electricity prices are high in Germany not because of LNG, but because almost every Western country is run by nutjobs.
But don’t worry about facts and data. Stick to your completely factual preconceived notions.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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).
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
Burning natural gas instead of coal should result in about half as much carbon emissions theoretically, although methane leaks will narrow the advantage.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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").
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 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.
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.
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".
...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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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????
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
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.
The current administration has taken the edge off Hanlon's razor. Now I prefer saying "Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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'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.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
> 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.
yablak | 18 hours ago
dgellow | 18 hours ago
saagarjha | 18 hours ago
I agree. This is why we are building offshore wind and not subsidizing fossil fuels, right?
jeltz | 17 hours ago
eastbound | 17 hours ago
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].
master-lincoln | 17 hours ago
victorbjorklund | 17 hours ago
master-lincoln | 17 hours ago
carlosjobim | 17 hours ago
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.
giglamesh | 15 hours ago
carlosjobim | 15 hours ago
DANmode | 4 hours ago
(Hint: it actually happened in ‘61…)
eastbound | 13 hours ago
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.
TeMPOraL | 17 hours ago
There's a really strong incentive to keep energy generation cheap, because pretty much every social and political issue is downstream of it.
TacticalCoder | 15 hours ago
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
Danox | 14 hours ago
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.
triceratops | 14 hours ago
Source?
TeMPOraL | 7 hours ago
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.
i5heu | 17 hours ago
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.
scotty79 | 17 hours ago
In Poland the closest phrase to "common sense" is "na chłopski rozum" which means "according to villager's mind/smarts".
dspillett | 16 hours ago
teamonkey | 16 hours ago
There are also a lot of folk remedies that have been disproven as medicine. They too were ‘common sense.’
ToucanLoucan | 15 hours ago
"You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine." - Tim Minchin
perpetuallunch | 14 hours ago
Gene therapies, targeted cancer treatments, blood pressure medication, antibiotics, surgery, joint replacements, sterile practices, vaccines, hormone replacement therapies.
wavemode | 14 hours ago
(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.)
latch | 17 hours ago
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
LodeOfCode | 16 hours ago
XorNot | 16 hours ago
fuzzfactor | 15 hours ago
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 :\
StilesCrisis | 17 hours ago
einpoklum | 17 hours ago
Oh, but the ju$tifi¢ation is all too real for having that kind of "common sense".
jp191919 | 11 hours ago
StilesCrisis | 9 hours ago
bs38 | 17 hours ago
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.
PurpleRamen | 16 hours ago
Grandma doesn't bake with "common sense", she is using the specialized knowledge of cooking & baking.
ToucanLoucan | 16 hours ago
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.
Eldt | 16 hours ago
halostatue | 14 hours ago
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".
polytely | 15 hours ago
blaze33 | 16 hours ago
bitmasher9 | 16 hours ago
RobotToaster | 16 hours ago
icantevenhold | 16 hours ago
jakeydus | 10 hours ago
reactordev | 16 hours ago
ben_w | 16 hours ago
throwaway27448 | 15 hours ago
smolder | 16 hours ago
Don't pretend the current US admin is anything but corrupt and stupid.
throwaway173738 | 15 hours ago
perpetuallunch | 15 hours ago
And what of the night?
Freeze in the dark.
andrecarini | 15 hours ago
Nuclear.
bryanlarsen | 14 hours ago
benj111 | 14 hours ago
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?
freeone3000 | 14 hours ago
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.
perpetuallunch | 5 hours ago
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.
[OP] defrost | 5 hours ago
eg: (old page, project is now complete and working as planned): https://www.westernpower.com.au/resources-education/network-...
raisedbyninjas | 11 hours ago
xtiansimon | 15 hours ago
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
u02sgb | 15 hours ago
It'll provide power for decades with little maintenance and not much further in the way of environmental issues now that it's built.
perpetuallunch | 14 hours ago
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.
perpetuallunch | 14 hours ago
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?
dathinab | 13 hours ago
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.
perpetuallunch | 7 hours ago
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.
anenefan | 4 hours ago
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.
gadders | 15 hours ago
You also need to distinguish between expert opinion and elite opinion. The two are not the same.
pibaker | 10 hours ago
kklisura | 17 hours ago
PowerElectronix | 17 hours ago
But that leaves out the government and all those interested parties so we're never ever getting that.
jtbayly | 17 hours ago
WillAdams | 17 hours ago
seb1204 | 16 hours ago
perpetuallunch | 12 hours ago
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.
[OP] defrost | 5 hours ago
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).
PowerElectronix | 17 hours ago
eigenspace | 15 hours ago
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.
cycomanic | 14 hours ago
perpetuallunch | 14 hours ago
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?
bryanlarsen | 13 hours ago
perpetuallunch | 7 hours ago
And why is that?
Nothing to do with shutting down unclear and going from no solar to 15% of generation?
Germany would be much less reliant on LNG imports if it had made better decisions.
Look, if we’ve got data let’s go with the data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany
https://euenergyprices.eu/en/electricity/de
As you can see from the data, doing away with nuclear has resulted in an over reliance on LNG because, surprise surprise, solar and window aren’t the solution, LNG is.
LNG is everything solar and wind isn’t: dispatchable, reliable, cheap. So cheap Japan makes more off reselling Australian LNG than Australia does.
When you have lots of wind and solar you also need gas peaker plants because, this might be news to you, it’s dark or cloudy more often than not and wind is inconsistent.
Electricity prices are high in Germany not because of LNG, but because almost every Western country is run by nutjobs.
But don’t worry about facts and data. Stick to your completely factual preconceived notions.
Factual completeness be dammed.
bryanlarsen | 3 hours ago
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.
whizzter | 16 hours ago
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).
mapontosevenths | 16 hours ago
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.
ricardobayes | 15 hours ago
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
actionfromafar | 15 hours ago
nicoburns | 15 hours ago
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.
ricardobayes | 15 hours ago
namdnay | 14 hours ago
ricardobayes | 14 hours ago
perpetuallunch | 13 hours ago
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.
ricardobayes | 11 hours ago
perpetuallunch | 5 hours ago
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.
perpetuallunch | 13 hours ago
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.
perpetuallunch | 13 hours ago
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.
nicoburns | 13 hours ago
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).
igl | 15 hours ago
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.
ricardobayes | 14 hours ago
carlosjobim | 17 hours ago
PowerElectronix | 17 hours ago
rob74 | 16 hours ago
smolder | 16 hours ago
happosai | 16 hours ago
realreality | 16 hours ago
cucumber3732842 | 15 hours ago
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"
triceratops | 14 hours ago
windyoil | 17 hours ago
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.
Y-bar | 16 hours ago
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...
belorn | 9 hours ago
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.
friendzis | 16 hours ago
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.
swiftcoder | 16 hours ago
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)
friendzis | 15 hours ago
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.
Toutouxc | 15 hours ago
I wonder how it would fare with just 100 kWh of storage, something you can still easily put together.
flir | 14 hours ago
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.
swiftcoder | 14 hours ago
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
cycomanic | 14 hours ago
Citation needed
giantrobot | 13 hours ago
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.
NuclearPM | 15 hours ago
sdellis | 15 hours ago
OroPla | 13 hours ago
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.
perpetuallunch | 14 hours ago
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.
verandaguy | 16 hours ago
Subsidies aren't universally a bad thing. This is silly thinking.
Zenst | 14 hours ago
basilgohar | 14 hours ago
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.
dathinab | 14 hours ago
- 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.
louiereederson | 17 hours ago
rayiner | 17 hours ago
prox | 17 hours ago
Welcome the world of transactional opportunism.
dofm | 16 hours ago
deepsquirrelnet | 13 hours ago
1234letshaveatw | 16 hours ago
wizzwizz4 | 15 hours ago
1234letshaveatw | 15 hours ago
wizzwizz4 | 15 hours ago
1234letshaveatw | 15 hours ago
wizzwizz4 | 14 hours ago
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.)
Anon1096 | 14 hours ago
wizzwizz4 | 12 hours ago
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
scott_w | 15 hours ago
The sea is not part of Donald Trump’s property.
1234letshaveatw | 15 hours ago
justsid | 13 hours ago
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.
scott_w | 5 hours ago
whazor | 17 hours ago
BoxOfRain | 16 hours ago
rayiner | 16 hours ago
stevesimmons | 16 hours ago
acdha | 16 hours ago
ctkhn | 15 hours ago
ben_w | 16 hours ago
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.
rsynnott | 15 hours ago
BoxOfRain | 13 hours ago
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.
dguest | 15 hours ago
mafuy | 15 hours ago
specialist | 14 hours ago
iso1631 | 17 hours ago
The feeling is mutual
moritzruth | 16 hours ago
iso1631 | 12 hours ago
vincnetas | 16 hours ago
pornel | 16 hours ago
I don't know where Trump got the idea from. Perhaps he thinks they work like fans?
wizzwizz4 | 15 hours ago
rsynnott | 15 hours ago
pornel | 13 hours ago
Light car traffic is ~50dB.
rsynnott | 13 hours ago
lepton | 15 hours ago
@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.
JumpCrisscross | 15 hours ago
TitaRusell | 13 hours ago
shevy-java | 17 hours ago
jeltz | 17 hours ago
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.
Danox | 13 hours ago
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?
ghtbircshotbe | 17 hours ago
usrnm | 17 hours ago
ghtbircshotbe | 17 hours ago
rob74 | 16 hours ago
qingcharles | 14 hours ago
JohnTHaller | 8 hours ago
Marciplan | 16 hours ago
Kim_Bruning | 16 hours ago
While paying out 1.2 billion dollars.
timacles | 16 hours ago
imglorp | 15 hours ago
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/09/fossil-f...
TheOtherHobbes | 15 hours ago
The entire sector is a catastrophic, institutionally corrupt scam.
https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
winter_blue | 14 hours ago
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.
basilgohar | 14 hours ago
winter_blue | 14 hours ago
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.
dzhiurgis | 14 hours ago
TitaRusell | 13 hours ago
parineum | 13 hours ago
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.
prmoustache | 7 hours ago
OroPla | 14 hours ago
parineum | 13 hours ago
waffletower | 13 hours ago
imglorp | 13 hours ago
nomel | 11 hours ago
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.
dathinab | 12 hours ago
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.
throw1234567891 | 14 hours ago
That communist country also likes the current war in Iran. They get all that oil cheap for their reserves stockpile.
kelseyfrog | 13 hours ago
pineaux | 14 hours ago
DANmode | 13 hours ago
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.
bryanlarsen | 13 hours ago
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.
tedggh | 13 hours ago
dathinab | 13 hours ago
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.
Animats | 10 hours ago
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...
newyankee | 12 hours ago
jhoechtl | 12 hours ago
The current US administration calls such things comunism.
winter_blue | an hour ago
This would be perfect.
WalterBright | 12 hours ago
Consider the taxes on gasoline.
jsiepkes | 12 hours ago
fatnoah | 13 hours ago
est31 | 13 hours ago
> 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...
ratelimitsteve | 13 hours ago
> While paying out 1.2 billion dollars.
for nothing. to literally replace some energy with no energy.
andrei_says_ | 9 hours ago
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.
tialaramex | 16 hours ago
Of course "common sense" ought to probably include "Not cooking ourselves".
kwanbix | 14 hours ago
SlightlyLeftPad | 15 hours ago
I mean it’s common sense
[1]: https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-trum...
montagg | 15 hours ago
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.
toomuchtodo | 15 hours ago
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)
Enginerrrd | 14 hours ago
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...
1dontknow_ | 15 hours ago
kwanbix | 14 hours ago
casey2 | 7 hours ago
pxmpxm | 14 hours ago
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.
mandeepj | 14 hours ago
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.
renegade-otter | 14 hours ago
epihelix | 14 hours ago
newfriend | 13 hours ago
ShinyLeftPad | 13 hours ago
bko | 13 hours ago
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.
ssl-3 | 18 hours ago
Thank you. :)
iammjm | 17 hours ago
exe34 | 17 hours ago
ssl-3 | 11 hours ago
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.
hollow-moe | 10 hours ago
Thank you. :)
xkcd1963 | 18 hours ago
iammjm | 18 hours ago
inigyou | 18 hours ago
londons_explore | 18 hours ago
Avicebron | 18 hours ago
rayiner | 17 hours ago
Avicebron | 17 hours ago
jaapz | 17 hours ago
rayiner | 16 hours ago
cmrdporcupine | 15 hours ago
thrance | 17 hours ago
jacknews | 17 hours ago
jazzyjackson | 17 hours ago
inigyou | 17 hours ago
mrguyorama | 15 hours ago
b3lvedere | 16 hours ago
hooo | 18 hours ago
_heimdall | 18 hours ago
kingleopold | 18 hours ago
parkersweb | 17 hours ago
KronisLV | 17 hours ago
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).
antsar | 17 hours ago
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).
mrob | 17 hours ago
backscratches | 17 hours ago
_heimdall | 17 hours ago
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?
iso1631 | 16 hours ago
_heimdall | 16 hours ago
iso1631 | 15 hours ago
> 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.
_heimdall | 15 hours ago
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.
uecker | 17 hours ago
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).
rsynnott | 15 hours ago
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.
rapind | 17 hours ago
_heimdall | 17 hours ago
rapind | 17 hours ago
iso1631 | 16 hours ago
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.
_heimdall | 15 hours ago
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.
glaslong | 12 hours ago
mrob | 17 hours ago
_heimdall | 15 hours ago
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.
mrob | 17 hours ago
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.
jaapz | 17 hours ago
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.
_heimdall | 16 hours ago
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.
iso1631 | 16 hours ago
Do you think we should return to medieval heat and light?
ZeroGravitas | 16 hours ago
Fossil fuels are very inefficient compared with alternatives like EVs and heat pumps and renewables.
eigenspace | 18 hours ago
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.
raincole | 17 hours ago
It'd be very reasonable to assume "this" means wind here.
eigenspace | 17 hours ago
juntoalaluna | 18 hours ago
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.
_joel | 18 hours ago
dschu | 17 hours ago
yxhuvud | 17 hours ago
mrguyorama | 15 hours ago
TeMPOraL | 17 hours ago
josh-wrale | 17 hours ago
neuronic | 16 hours ago
neuronic | 16 hours ago
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.
mrits | 18 hours ago
DFHippie | 17 hours ago
Is "Texas" the plural of "Texa"?
mrits | 17 hours ago
jacknews | 17 hours ago
[OP] defrost | 17 hours ago
InsideOutSanta | 17 hours ago
thatwasunusual | 17 hours ago
Compared to coal plants, which are _extremely_ cool-looking. /s
mrits | 16 hours ago
ZeroGravitas | 15 hours ago
mrits | 13 hours ago
baudehlo | 7 hours ago
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...?
Lio | 15 hours ago
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.
rsynnott | 15 hours ago
layer8 | 17 hours ago
bryanlarsen | 14 hours ago
nielsbot | 13 hours ago
lenkite | 17 hours ago
iammjm | 17 hours ago
ZeroGravitas | 17 hours ago
We're now onto Captain Planet baddies. Ridiculously childish cartoon carictatures of greed and evil are now in charge
CuriouslyC | 16 hours ago
b3lvedere | 16 hours ago
glaslong | 17 hours ago
From that angle, Idiocracy is notably BETTER than our current situation.
budsniffer952 | 17 hours ago
We are building lots. Of everything.
estearum | 17 hours ago
sbarre | 16 hours ago
This is about one company bending the knee, not an entire industry or population.
estearum | 15 hours ago
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.
SubiculumCode | 13 hours ago
nielsbot | 13 hours ago
xethos | 11 hours ago
estearum | 10 hours ago
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.
wackget | 14 hours ago
Did you read the headline?
Do you know what article you're commenting on?
s_dev | 17 hours ago
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.
mcintyre1994 | 16 hours ago
Germany itself has a huge offshore wind industry, which is probably how they have companies that planned to do the same in the US.
myrmidon | 16 hours ago
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...
1234letshaveatw | 16 hours ago
Kelteseth | 16 hours ago
legulere | 16 hours ago
Toutouxc | 14 hours ago
throwaway473825 | 15 hours ago
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.
smmeis | 16 hours ago
legulere | 16 hours ago
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.
quink | 14 hours ago
No wait, they’re not learning it the hard way because they’ve already got rid of them. Phew…
triceratops | 8 hours ago
gman83 | 17 hours ago
globular-toast | 14 hours ago
4ndrewl | 13 hours ago
0cf8612b2e1e | 13 hours ago
iammjm | 18 hours ago
theyeenzbeanz | 17 hours ago
I would love to know the thought process of this administration because it feels like a fever dream.
baggachipz | 16 hours ago
chewbacha | 18 hours ago
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.
ZiiS | 17 hours ago
einpoklum | 17 hours ago
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.
benjiro29 | 16 hours ago
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).
niek_pas | 16 hours ago
smolder | 16 hours ago
kgeist | 15 hours ago
throw0101d | 17 hours ago
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
zelphirkalt | 16 hours ago
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.
dolmen | 16 hours ago
... while an offshore wind farm was once in DT's sight in Scotland.
RobotToaster | 16 hours ago
smallerize | 15 hours ago
bluerooibos | 15 hours ago
The coordination between them is amazing - being able to pull this off in multiple European countries, the US and Canada at the same time.
bluGill | 15 hours ago
forestrywat | 14 hours ago
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.
bluGill | 13 hours ago
I'm standing by my claims. However understand that I am in no way contradicting anything you said.
cyberax | 7 hours ago
forestrywat | 2 hours ago
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.
cyberax | 2 hours ago
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.
forestrywat | 56 minutes ago
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.
cyberax | 41 minutes ago
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.
pkulak | 14 hours ago
bluGill | 14 hours ago
triceratops | 13 hours ago
bluGill | 13 hours ago
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.
pkulak | 9 hours ago
hamdingers | 13 hours ago
pkulak | 9 hours ago
crowbahr | 16 hours ago
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
bjackman | 15 hours ago
greenleafone7 | 15 hours ago
throw-the-towel | 13 hours ago
greenleafone7 | 11 hours ago
ChoGGi | 15 hours ago
Flere-Imsaho | 12 hours ago
"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.
dsauerbrun | 10 hours ago
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.
Mawr | 3 hours ago
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.
MariusGjerd | 18 hours ago
firtoz | 18 hours ago
rf15 | 17 hours ago
whatevaa | 17 hours ago
soco | 16 hours ago
tialaramex | 14 hours ago
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.
danans | 13 hours ago
Given the degree of corruption and criminality, a more appropriate metaphor might be "smash and grab".
kingleopold | 18 hours ago
petesergeant | 17 hours ago
johnea | 18 hours ago
Nobody else ever spent this much money to NOT have cheap power 8-/
thelastgallon | 18 hours ago
> 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.
robbiep | 17 hours ago
mark_something | 17 hours ago
wiether | 17 hours ago
eigenspace | 17 hours ago
Absolutely shameful what the USA has become.
evan_a_a | 17 hours ago
morkalork | 17 hours ago
ambicapter | 15 hours ago
morkalork | 14 hours ago
eigenspace | 17 hours ago
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.
evan_a_a | 17 hours ago
eigenspace | 17 hours ago
evan_a_a | 17 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/rwe-ha...
phplovesong | 17 hours ago
dudefeliciano | 16 hours ago
phplovesong | 14 hours ago
Afaiac MAGA is just a the white/dumb/uneducated version of jihad.
satvikpendem | 17 hours ago
0xfedcafe | 17 hours ago
raverbashing | 17 hours ago
So this means, slightly less than half is other sources (hydro, solar, etc)
MSFT_Edging | 17 hours ago
The scale is so crazy that these numbers rarely make sense on their own.
contingencies | 17 hours ago
arcbyte | 16 hours ago
CuriouslyC | 16 hours ago
Fricken | 15 hours ago
https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...
nielsbot | 13 hours ago
remus | 17 hours ago
WarmWash | 14 hours ago
China is concerned with not having to import energy. They don't care much about climate change.
remus | 8 hours ago
arrrg | 17 hours ago
That said, renewable sources are so cheap and consequently economically appealing that not even the incredibly dumb Trump admin can stop them.
energy123 | 17 hours ago
China is really only building new renewables, almost 100x as much net renewable capacity per year compared to nuclear.
cobbaut | 16 hours ago
stephen_g | 3 hours ago
nixon_why69 | 15 hours ago
rsanek | 15 hours ago
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?stackMode=rela...
myrmidon | 17 hours ago
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...
skybrian | 16 hours ago
myrmidon | 15 hours ago
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).
skybrian | 12 hours ago
ZeroGravitas | 16 hours ago
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.
kccqzy | 16 hours ago
tzs | 12 hours ago
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.
OtomotO | 17 hours ago
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...
ant6n | 16 hours ago
Amezarak | 17 hours ago
It is the third largest coal producer, behind India and China.
epolanski | 17 hours ago
flohofwoe | 17 hours ago
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.
epolanski | 15 hours ago
estearum | 16 hours ago
navane | 16 hours ago
We did it with gas. Now look at Norway. We could've been like Norway.
epolanski | 15 hours ago
But of course it doesn't have the same incentives of China.
estearum | 15 hours ago
epolanski | 15 hours ago
In any case, you can't expect stable policies in a country with a winner-takes-all democracy.
estearum | 15 hours ago
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.
titzer | 15 hours ago
SubiculumCode | 13 hours ago
techblueberry | 15 hours ago
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.
rsanek | 15 hours ago
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=stacked-di...
jvergeldedios | 14 hours ago
dorianmariewo | 14 hours ago
sarthaksingh99 | 11 hours ago
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%
randusername | 11 hours ago
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.
tstrimple | an hour ago
0xfedcafe | 17 hours ago
"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.
ChrisRR | 17 hours ago
letmetweakit | 16 hours ago
ulfw | 17 hours ago
seydor | 17 hours ago
mikkom | 17 hours ago
CoastalCoder | 16 hours ago
"SCOOOTTTTT !!!!!!"
glaslong | 17 hours ago
petesergeant | 17 hours ago
†: 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
kibwen | 17 hours ago
bsenftner | 17 hours ago
jfengel | 17 hours ago
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.
zeezer0 | 17 hours ago
doublerabbit | 16 hours ago
burnto | 16 hours ago
jfengel | 15 hours ago
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.
amanaplanacanal | 13 hours ago
delecti | 14 hours ago
gs17 | 12 hours ago
amazingamazing | 13 hours ago
RobotToaster | 16 hours ago
Being allowed to chose between two evils every few years isn't democracy.
krapp | 15 hours ago
If it isn't democracy now, it's never been democracy.
jfengel | 15 hours ago
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.
lesuorac | 14 hours ago
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.
gs17 | 12 hours ago
gusgus01 | 7 hours ago
I've seen discussions around how it can be more confusing than the current system, and can reduce confidence in the election.
senordevnyc | 14 hours ago
American democracy. Other democracies have multiple viable parties and candidates.
cmrdporcupine | 15 hours ago
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.
nozzlegear | 14 hours ago
jfengel | 12 hours ago
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.
triceratops | 13 hours ago
janalsncm | 15 hours ago
A majority did not choose this.
CivBase | 15 hours ago
jfengel | 12 hours ago
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.
snarf21 | 15 hours ago
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.
nozzlegear | 14 hours ago
snarf21 | 14 hours ago
nozzlegear | 13 hours ago
gs17 | 12 hours ago
bluGill | 15 hours ago
watwut | 13 hours ago
I mean it. This both are same evil is either bullshit or completely wrapped non existent morality.
bluGill | 13 hours ago
jakebol | 14 hours ago
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...
Analemma_ | 13 hours ago
bsenftner | 15 hours ago
jfengel | 12 hours ago
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.
bsenftner | 10 hours ago
ourmandave | 17 hours ago
gilrain | 17 hours ago
The ethical US has rolled over already.
wbobeirne | 17 hours ago
hilariously | 16 hours ago
One side says bullshit, the other side says "look at all of the fucking evidence of your eyes"
kqp | 16 hours ago
K0nserv | 15 hours ago
zer00eyz | 17 hours ago
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.
cobbaut | 16 hours ago
> 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...
Timon3 | 15 hours ago
Rohansi | 14 hours ago
Timon3 | 16 hours ago
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.
CuriouslyC | 16 hours ago
swat535 | 15 hours ago
I think the bigger issue is a two party system. The checks and balances can clearly be gamed as this administration has proven.
gilrain | 17 hours ago
marcyb5st | 17 hours ago
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".
amanaplanacanal | 13 hours ago
m000 | 12 hours ago
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.
ghosty141 | 17 hours ago
dudefeliciano | 16 hours ago
bsenftner | 15 hours ago
wookmaster | 15 hours ago
glaslong | 15 hours ago
ghosty141 | 14 hours ago
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.
glaslong | 14 hours ago
cmrdporcupine | 13 hours ago
squidbeak | 16 hours ago
baggachipz | 16 hours ago
CivBase | 15 hours ago
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.
DangitBobby | 15 hours ago
CivBase | 13 hours ago
DangitBobby | 9 hours ago
CivBase | 8 hours ago
nozzlegear | 14 hours ago
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-hate-inflation-more-...
lesuorac | 14 hours ago
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.
amanaplanacanal | 13 hours ago
CivBase | 12 hours ago
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.
pjc50 | 14 hours ago
CivBase | 13 hours ago
wookmaster | 15 hours ago
Lio | 15 hours ago
It's not like the Trump administration is stopping off shore wind projects here... yet.
pjc50 | 14 hours ago
Some of this has the same roots in social media and dodgy money (esp. wirecard), but not all of it.
numbers_guy | 17 hours ago
NortySpock | 17 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208635
shevy-java | 17 hours ago
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.
angry_octet | 14 hours ago
r0b05 | 17 hours ago
TrackerFF | 17 hours ago
That's mostly it. Another factor would be Trump getting donations from the oil & gas industry.
doublerabbit | 16 hours ago
lern_too_spel | 14 hours ago
fnordsensei | 17 hours ago
kuu | 17 hours ago
jfengel | 17 hours ago
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.
MisterBastahrd | 15 hours ago
Tadpole9181 | 14 hours ago
Of course, since our government is flat broke, it's going to be more from interest on the debt.
sebnukem2 | 12 hours ago
TrackerFF | 17 hours ago
firesteelrain | 17 hours ago
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.
brookst | 17 hours ago
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.
firesteelrain | 17 hours ago
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...
windyoil | 16 hours ago
firesteelrain | 16 hours ago
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.
ceejayoz | 15 hours ago
Maybe we should put the $1.2B into that sort of thing, then?
glaslong | 14 hours ago
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.
bryanlarsen | 14 hours ago
The other advantage of offshore is that it can support the truly massive wind turbines. Onshore wind turbines are a lot smaller.
glaslong | 12 hours ago
m4ck_ | 16 hours ago
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.
firesteelrain | 16 hours ago
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.
m4ck_ | 15 hours ago
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_...
firesteelrain | 15 hours ago
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.
ch_sm | 16 hours ago
Incipient | 17 hours ago
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.
cicko | 17 hours ago
askvictor | 17 hours ago
layer8 | 16 hours ago
Incipient | 10 hours ago
newswasboring | 17 hours ago
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.
phonon | 17 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uyLiON_f5c0
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetl...
newswasboring | 16 hours ago
metalman | 17 hours ago
Havoc | 17 hours ago
dathinab | 17 hours ago
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).
glaslong | 16 hours ago
JohnTHaller | 8 hours ago
vixen99 | 14 hours ago
dathinab | 12 hours ago
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.
davexunit | 17 hours ago
christkv | 17 hours ago
mekdoonggi | 12 hours ago
softwaredoug | 17 hours ago
Still short sighted and stupid, of course.
titaniumrain | 17 hours ago
sensanaty | 17 hours ago
layer8 | 16 hours ago
thelastgallon | 16 hours ago
layer8 | 10 hours ago
whh | 17 hours ago
KSteffensen | 17 hours ago
tiberius_p | 17 hours ago
klamann | 16 hours ago
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.
neuronic | 16 hours ago
dudefeliciano | 16 hours ago
ebri | 16 hours ago
niek_pas | 16 hours ago
flyingjoe | 16 hours ago
glaslong | 15 hours ago
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.
KyleTheDev | 13 hours ago
sajithdilshan | 12 hours ago
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?
glaslong | 12 hours ago
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.
blondie9x | 16 hours ago
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
mrguyorama | 14 hours ago
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"
dmje | 16 hours ago
ck2 | 16 hours ago
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
vehemenz | 14 hours ago
In other words, even if there's a feedback loop, an election won't magically fix everything.
micw | 16 hours ago
baggachipz | 15 hours ago
DangitBobby | 15 hours ago
qsera | 16 hours ago
Is no one worried about this?
niek_pas | 16 hours ago
lkbm | 16 hours ago
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.
jjice | 16 hours ago
ModernMech | 16 hours ago
Oh God, what now, we've finally bombed Cuba?
"...$1.2B deal to pay..."
Oh thank God!
"...halt offshore wind projects"
God damn it.
minraws | 16 hours ago
zmmmmm | 16 hours ago
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.
bakies | 16 hours ago
runarberg | 15 hours ago
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.
graceful6800 | 15 hours ago
You're wrong on every count and simply spreading disinformation. Please don't do that.
runarberg | 15 hours ago
DangitBobby | 15 hours ago
runarberg | 15 hours ago
stevemk14ebr | 14 hours ago
Forgeties79 | 15 hours ago
1dontknow_ | 15 hours ago
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.
sinfulprogeny | 15 hours ago
Funny you should say that
delecti | 15 hours ago
owebmaster | 15 hours ago
delecti | 14 hours ago
And "cognitively [un]developed" is a weird way to say it; I wouldn't call that a "bland" term at all.
hamdingers | 13 hours ago
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
whack | 15 hours ago
segmondy | 15 hours ago
DrDeadCrash | 15 hours ago
thaumaturgy | 15 hours ago
redman25 | 15 hours ago
pessimizer | 14 hours ago
Danox | 13 hours ago
Timon3 | 6 hours ago
fifilura | 8 hours ago
Fricken | 6 hours ago
JKCalhoun | 15 hours ago
pessimizer | 14 hours ago
patakhaguddi | 14 hours ago
Danox | 13 hours ago
oldsklgdfth | 14 hours ago
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".
patcon | 14 hours ago
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.
oldsklgdfth | 13 hours ago
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.
RunSet | 10 hours ago
gwerbin | 14 hours ago
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).
kingkawn | 14 hours ago
Henchman21 | 13 hours ago
dwaltrip | 7 hours ago
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.
elliotto | 3 hours ago
pennomi | 15 hours ago
pydry | 15 hours ago
fuzzfactor | 15 hours ago
>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.
zmmmmm | 7 hours ago
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.
AnonymousPlanet | 15 hours ago
wookmaster | 15 hours ago
wolttam | 15 hours ago
raphinou | 15 hours ago
hnra | 13 hours ago
The author is the podcast host of ”History of Rome”, which is also great, and he does the audiobook narration perfectly.
zmmmmm | 7 hours ago
I didn't think this comment would get so many replies!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv1TUJSEM2k
1dontknow_ | 15 hours ago
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.
pavlov | 14 hours ago
Empires are pathological developments of nations. They don't tend to survive all that long.
arethuza | 14 hours ago
amanaplanacanal | 14 hours ago
pavlov | 14 hours ago
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.
gpm | 13 hours ago
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.
pavlov | 12 hours ago
They kept calling themselves Romans, but they spoke, wrote, and governed in Greek.
gpm | 11 hours ago
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
pibaker | 9 hours ago
Danox | 13 hours ago
pjc50 | 13 hours ago
pjc50 | 14 hours ago
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.
inopinatus | 14 hours ago
colechristensen | 14 hours ago
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.
amanaplanacanal | 14 hours ago
colechristensen | 13 hours ago
You absolutely can blame the goalie for failing to defend the goal.
amanaplanacanal | 12 hours ago
Every terrible thing Trump does is really somebody else's fault.
colechristensen | 11 hours ago
I'm tired of people in power whining about being victims.
pessimizer | 14 hours ago
> 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.
dzonga | 14 hours ago
globular-toast | 14 hours ago
mbesto | 13 hours ago
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.
IAmGraydon | 13 hours ago
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.
hnra | 13 hours ago
Danox | 12 hours ago
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.
samspot | 12 hours ago
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.
Danox | 13 hours ago
pjc50 | 13 hours ago
Brexit is a particularly 21st century phenomenon, a failed attempt to retreat to autarky.
ncr100 | 13 hours ago
* 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
nphardon | 11 hours ago
penguin_booze | 8 hours ago
They found the right man for it. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
c7b | 5 hours ago
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.
kashnote | 16 hours ago
mekdoonggi | 12 hours ago
phyzix5761 | 16 hours ago
Isn't the $1.2B deal a subsidy for conventional gas?
shrubble | 16 hours ago
greenleafone7 | 15 hours ago
We do live in a dystopia don't we?
ChoGGi | 15 hours ago
And coal?
lionkor | 15 hours ago
pickleglitch | 15 hours ago
segmondy | 15 hours ago
wg0 | 15 hours ago
jklowden | 15 hours ago
darkstar999 | 15 hours ago
bluGill | 15 hours ago
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.
rsynnott | 15 hours ago
Gabrys1 | 15 hours ago
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)
lorreyfum | 15 hours ago
croes | 15 hours ago
ericyd | 15 hours ago
wookmaster | 15 hours ago
glaslong | 15 hours ago
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.
pvaldes | 15 hours ago
yunwal | 15 hours ago
botanrice | 14 hours ago
sri9s | 15 hours ago
alsetmusic | 15 hours ago
hnd9q09qk4 | 15 hours ago
cestith | 15 hours ago
bluGill | 15 hours ago
gehsty | 14 hours ago
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.
Supermancho | 14 hours ago
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.
gehsty | 8 hours ago
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.
qwertytyyuu | 14 hours ago
addaon | 14 hours ago
linux2647 | 14 hours ago
Is this claim substantive at all?
lgl | 14 hours ago
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.
WarmWash | 14 hours ago
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.
jrflo | 14 hours ago
botanrice | 14 hours ago
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.
dozerly | 14 hours ago
Devasta | 14 hours ago
mike_hock | 14 hours ago
aslkalska | 14 hours ago
neom | 14 hours ago
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...
bekimbacaj | 14 hours ago
ttul | 14 hours ago
Danox | 14 hours ago
dzonga | 14 hours ago
invest in your own solar, or other forms of renewable energy - get an ev.
tencentshill | 13 hours ago
dzonga | 12 hours ago
ThomW | 14 hours ago
IceHegel | 14 hours ago
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.
mrloopex | 13 hours ago
freeplay | 13 hours ago
I don't care how energy efficient it is. It's dystopian and depressing.
tencentshill | 12 hours ago
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...
SubiculumCode | 13 hours ago
jhack | 13 hours ago
Geniuses.
radu_floricica | 13 hours ago
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.
nielsbot | 13 hours ago
tencentshill | 12 hours ago
_ink_ | 13 hours ago
wnevets | 13 hours ago
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/18/trump-admini...
ratelimitsteve | 13 hours ago
winning winning winning winning winning winning winning winning
bigblind | 13 hours ago
darkhorn | 13 hours ago
anigbrowl | 12 hours ago
duxup | 12 hours ago
thraway3837 | 12 hours ago
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.
syspec | 12 hours ago
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.
fuckinpuppers | 2 hours ago
thelastgallon | an hour ago