It's a tenet of MAGA membership, culturally reinforced by the likes of Taylor Sheridan productions like 'Landman' - conservative machismo power-fantasies where the environmental strawmen are setup to be 'destroyed' by Billy Bob Thornton in a snappy youtube-shorts length monologue.
Unfortunately, similar to 'Yellowstone', much of the rabid viewing audience take this conservative land-right pornography at face-value as a source of truth for the state of the nation.
It isn't sudden, it was always there. 15 years ago I drove from iowa to minnesota. In iowa there were wind turbines eveywhere, in mn billboards saying wind is not the answer. Today iowa des moines is 100% wind powered (i can only find press releases stating that, official numbers for the whole state are around 50%)
I recently had a dumb argument with actually a bunch of folks on Nextdoor who claimed unironically that coal power plants were more eco friendly than wind and solar farms.
I ran the numbers like a good nerd. It is mind-bogglingly inane how wrong that idea is. I also learned new things about how ridiculously polluting coal plants are.
These bad ideas come from somewhere (presumably cable news). Or they were bots.
For coal, a good example of how bad it is, is the recommendation that pregnant women limit tuna consumption because of its mercury content.
There is no farmed tuna, its all wild caught from the big blue oceans.
Why does tuna have mercury? Because it eats things that have mercury in them. Where did they get the mercury from? Rain. Where did the rain get it? Coal emissions! Coal has mercury and when you burn coal, it goes into the atmosphere and then, eventually, into the ocean. So much mercury has been released by coal burning that the ALL THE OCEANS are contaminated to the point where predator fish have levels in their flesh high enough to warrant health warnings.
I have tried this tack. All fish everywhere are tainted by mercury to some extent. They seem not to care.
The thing which seemed to make them shut up was doing the math showing that the total weight of just coal ash from a coal plant running for a year is comparable to the entire weight of materials for a similar capacity wind farm (which is rated for ~20 years of use). I assume similar or less for solar (numbers harder to find).
I feel you, I've had similar 'discourses" on local news sites in the comments. I assume the accounts are regular people, but they genuinely just believe whatever bad thing they hear about renewable energy and look no further.
There's always of course the bad faith accounts that spit out cherry picked facts and half truths, but they also don't seem interested in doing any actual discussion other than arguing.
Likely explanation for those numbers is that if it's windy 100% of the power needs are fulfilled by wind and statistically the local wind turbines make enough power that if somehow Des Moines could store that and sip from it, they could run all the time on pure wind power. But in practice what happens is when it's windy Des Moines exports power and gets money, and when it's calm Des Moines buys power that wasn't from a wind turbine.
One political idea in the UK is to give people locality based energy pricing, so, if there's a wind turbine right near your community, sure, that's a bit annoying (they're loud because that wind is moving huge spinning blades, and maybe you like horizons, which are horizontal, the wind farm breaks that up) but hey, your electricity is super cheap. The idea being that's a direct incentive to welcome on-shore turbines and it's an effective subsidy to move electrical load nearer to production.
Today with national pricing that Wind Farm wants to be on the Scottish coast where it's windy, and the Energy Intensive industry wants to be in England where there are loads of people already, and then you have to move all that power across half a country to make it work, which is further expense and delay. Why not just move the industrial users, and to nudge them offer lower prices ?
I listened to the press conference the other day with Trumps cabinet meeting.
It is bizar to listen to.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that windmills had killed 100+ whales. I tried to find out what he referred to, but couldn't find anything but articles debunking any claim that windmills affect whales (after construction).
He also claimed that the price per kWh of wind energy is above $0.30, which is quite a bit from the $0.03 ($0.12 offshore) price per kWh listed in Wikipedia [1] for United States.
At the same meeting Trump stated that the only viable solution is fossil fuel."... and maybe a little nuclear, but mostly fossil fuel.". And that wind is about 10x more expensive than natural gas (again contradicting the prices listed in the Wikipedia reference where the prices for onshore wind and natural gas are almost identical).
A country can commit to 300 years of wind energy, temporarily harming a bit of nature.
Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nature to take over again.
We have no issues with stealing a couple of square miles of nature in order to pave it for our cities or to use it for farming.
Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal: production of the turbines, used area and generated noise, minimal pollution of the area, the troubles of recycling them. That's mostly it.
You don't have this with oil, nor with current-age nuclear.
Also, we've already accepted the noise of cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes.
So I really don't get what they are protesting about, specially in Germany.
The opposition to the construction of wind farms are mostly silly except in a very specific situation. We should not construct those in nature reservation. If a place is worth designating as a nature reserve then we have decided that such place is worth protecting even if the area could be later freed (common reason is keeping certain species from going extinct, which makes the threat nontemporarily). Ocean based wind farms has a tendency to want to be built in the shallows, which happens to correlate where we tend to designate as nature reservations.
Wind power is however not comparable to fossil fuels or nuclear power. Denmark is a prime example of a country that did commit fully to wind power in a very strong and consistent way, and do produce more total energy through wind that they consume. That energy however is not produced when people want to consume it, so as a practical matter, they import around 50% of their energy that they do consume, energy which is not wind since when the wind blow they export the excess energy. They could produce 500% or even 1000% more wind energy, and they would still need to import a large portion of their consumption from non-wind power. Producing that much excess power would mostly just effect exports and not in a good way for the producers since overproduction mostly just lead to lower prices. 50% consumption seems to be around the maximum of what you can do with wind (for now), and when the wind do not blow you still need 100% of the capacity from other sources in order to fill in the gap. Overproduction of nuclear or thermal energy does not have this issue, but rather carries completely different problems.
Unless the change is shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants[1]. The energy transition in Germany has been handled horribly for reasons I can't understand.
They were scared after Fukushima, a nuclear disaster that if anything showed how resilient nukes can be compared to coal, which just gets away with killing thousands of people quietly. Perhaps they’re better at vibes than they are at maths.
The nuclear exit was started 10 years before that - mostly also because of vibes: the Green Party became junior coalition partner in the government for the first time, and the greens had a longstanding anti-nuclear stance from their roots in the 1970s anti-nuclear weapons movement… They pushed for the nuclear exit.
When the conservatives regained power, they vowed to cancel and stop the exit timeline, but then came Fukushima and an irrational media panic - and Merkel did what she does best.
You mean f_ck up safety and security of whole Old continent for decades to come, for some ego polishing, personal weaknesses or similar noble reasons?
She still admits no failures nor missteps during her reign in many topics where she clearly failed badly, despite journalists asking very direct questions about this. I wonder when will German population realize how much long term damage she has done, if ever.
Vibes, chernobyl and also the absurd cost of nuclear power.
Poland is building nuclear power now though, after decades of burning epic amounts of coal (~85% of their electricity output).
This is most likely coz it provides a route to creating a nuclear weapon in a hurry "just in case". It isnt cost effective for them for any other purpose.
They keep putting their nuclear switch on date backwards (2040 now I think?) but renewables have been taking big chunks out of the problem and will continue to do so.
Hey, it was West Germany's idea to bring all these people. Now they cannot complain about this obvious and natural result. It is irrational to think that everyone there has the obligation to hate Russia just as the West does.
Germany and piss poor energy policy - name a more iconic duo.
The way I understand it, Germany had a horrid mix of anti-nuclear eco-activists, local coal lobbyists and Gazprom's natural gas lobbyists. The politicians not included in any of the above were too toothless, and couldn't fight through this bullshit and secure good outcomes regardless.
The problem was "compromise" - essentially as part of forming government the Greens and the CDU (Angela Merkel's party) agreed to an energy policy where they would phase out nuclear and replace it with a fuckton of renewables. But the actual govt did only the former without the latter (despite the previous agreement and the Greens' protest of Where Are The Fucking Renewables), thus leaving only coal and gas.
Leaving nuclear in place would be good, going heavily into renewables would also be good, but doing neither would be idiotic, and somehow that's what they did.
This is very much wrong. The Greens were never in a coalition with CDU/Merkel. (Merkel was in coalitions with the SPD/Social Democrats and FDP/Liberals.)
Greens were in a coalition with the Social Democrats led by Chancellor Schroeder; Schroeder agreed to the Greens’ demands for nuclear exit and negotiated a board role at Gazprom for himself after his political career.
Merkel initially wanted to reverse or freeze the exit timeline but bowed to public opinion to continue it once the tsunami hit Japan.
And yet, despite multiple attempts by those on the political right to slow it down, they've powered ahead with reducing coal and gas usage.
Some of those critics focus on nuclear
(Like AfD: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/populist-afd-sand-gears...) and some of those pretend to be angry about the slowness of Germanys transition but it doesn't really add up to anyone who pays attention to the local facts. It's just a meme to get people angry at the left and/or environmentalists, while the right openly and continually sabotage progress.
Opposition to nuclear is 90% a "left" wing problem. Blaming the boogeyman "right" is silly in general, as left-right is a thought-terminating scale, but really silly in this case where it actually is pretty clear-cut.
Greenpeace did great work on the peace front, but wrecked 50 years of carbon progress on the nuclear power front.
It's wild how much shit Germany got for turning off gas, coal and nuclear power plants (which comprised about ~8% of their power) while Poland running on ~80-90% coal for decades without changing anything was nbd.
It's almost as if the outrage was astroturfed into existence by the nuclear lobby using similar tactics to the oil lobby.
That denial of change, results in a build up of "change-debt", which then unloads in uncontrolled, dangerous events in leaps and bounds. All that autistic attempt to control reality to run on a rail, results on reality lashing ut to the systems opposed to it.
You can't have civilization without roads, so people naturally accept them. Large buildings and factories are not common in the countryside, and people do protest when you try building them in their backyards. No different than wind farms.
Giant metal towers make a dead tall tree look harmless by comparison. If that topples - and eventually it will - it will kill everybody in its path. So, we're probably not going to just leave on-shore wind turbines to rot.
Off-shore definitely. The UK already had a bunch of decaying archaic man-made structures off shore because of World War II, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts which I went to look at a few weeks back. Pieces of the forts clearly break off and disappear into the sea without incident.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy - they listen to propaganda saying that the value of houses near wind farms drops, that itself causes the price to drop.
Isn't the idea of npp decommissioning to leave the area as it was before npp?
Environmental impact of different techs was described in UNECE report I think
Uneconomical. The best way to dispose of things like the weakly radioactive reactor hulls is often to simply leave them when they are.
They aren't particularly dangerous, and they don't leach contaminants. So you just bury them so no one can access them too easily. But it does require leaving the sealed reactor buildings in place - even if you can reuse the rest of the land and the exclusion area.
I think it's still done as full dismantling (but maybe not all countries?). French superphenix will be basically erased. Something similar is happening to german plants like Isar 2
Some countries may have postponed decommissioning because it's cheaper to wait a bit
Some countries allow recycling of some stuff, even concrete, like Italy
"Weaponized activists" was an instrument of non-market competition for a long while now.
It's kind of a more modern, more legal take on "send some mobsters to mess them up". You find (or make) an activist group opposing a certain development - and then covertly funnel funding and support to them so that they can do as much damage as possible and stall your competition for as long as possible.
Yup, and George Soros does actually funds pro-wind groups. Open Society Foundation gives $400 million over 8 years to green economic development. That said, I think that's a bullshit argument for not supporting wind, and I'd much rather have an argument with data about the long-term economics.
I read the article but it's still unclear what argument the anti-wind groups use to say _why_ "wind is bad for environment/our children/the economy/greater good"?
Ruins the view, kills birds, noisy is the usual trifecta. Or to quote one site I won't deign to link to, "Protecting the marine environment and ecosystems from the industrialisation of our oceans."
Of course, the same folks have no objections whatsoever to offshore drilling.
Those are the weaker arguments. In the UK, I've heard many more convincing arguments against wind power.
e.g.
- Often wind typically need to be subsidised heavily by the government and are not cost effective over its lifetime.
- Typically wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear power generators as it is unreliable or you need to buy capacity from elsewhere.
I won't pretend to know enough to state whether they are valid arguments or not. But they are potentially much stronger arguments against wind power than the others frequently made.
> Often wind typically need to be subsidised heavily by the government and are not cost effective over its lifetime.
Have you looked at the government subsidies for nuclear in the UK and the massive lifetime cost? In terms of offshore wind - initially it was subsidized to get it up and running - but now it's established those have dropped and dropped.
> Typically wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear power generators as it is unreliable or you need to buy capacity from elsewhere.
Sure - but no-one is claiming 100% wind is the target - total strawman argument.
The UK goverments own net zero plan actually still includes gas generation!
One of the more bonkers arguments in the UK was when there was a massive fossil fuel price shock a couple of years ago due to wars and rising global demand - the fossil fuel lobby blamed rewnewables for the high prices!
It is still subsidised and costs (as reflected in CFD bids) have stopped decreasing.
The need for backup is not an argument against wind in itself. But it is important to consider the full system costs of wind generation, which includes the backup costs as well as the additional transmission infrastructure.
The unfortunate reality is that possibly the biggest contributor to higher prices is the phasing out of coal. Without coal there is no cheap base load - unless you happen to be somewhere blessed with hydro - and the market ends up swinging between feast and famine based on the availability of renewables.
Obviously there are very good reasons to get rid of coal, but it leads to higher prices. Reducing fossil fuels in the grid will be expensive and I worry that the lack of candor from politicians on this will end up making the transition more difficult politically.
> Have you looked at the government subsidies for nuclear in the UK and the massive lifetime cost? In terms of offshore wind - initially it was subsidized to get it up and running - but now it's established those have dropped and dropped.
I said I don't know. I said had heard the argument and these are examples of better arguments against wind IMO if they are true.
I don't know what to believe. I am dubious of any reporting on these issues.
> Sure - but no-one is claiming 100% wind is the target - total strawman argument. The UK goverments own net zero plan actually still includes gas generation!
Neither are they claiming wind is 100% the target.
> One of the more bonkers arguments in the UK was when there was a massive fossil fuel price shock a couple of years ago due to wars and rising global demand - the fossil fuel lobby blamed rewnewables for the high prices!
I don't remember this. I am sure people will point the finger elsewhere rather than themselves.
I blame the high prices on fuel duty and taxes. Fuel Duty is 52.95 pence per litre and then you have to add VAT. The current diesel price is ~£1.40 per litre at the local Tesco filling station. So that is ~50% of the cost if I am understanding this correctly.
> I said I don't know. I said had heard the argument and these are better arguments against wind IMO if they are true.
> I don't know what to believe. I am dubious of any reporting on these issues.
The person didn’t ask if you know, they asked if you had looked at reports. You cannot for once believe there weren’t subsidies as these endeavors are very time consuming with hundreds of regulations that need to be met.
> Neither are they claiming wind is 100% the target.
What do you perceive when they say wind is not reliable and increase electricity costs? I mean, it is free electricity, with minimal impact.
The way you understand about gas prices, while dismissing some arguments in favor of renewables is a bit telling.
> The person didn’t ask if you know, they asked if you had looked at reports.
Obviously not. I said as much. I've listened to good arguments for and against it and I don't know what to believe.
My comments were simply about the fact that you could make better arguments than the ones that were presented.
> What do you perceive when they say wind is not reliable and increase electricity costs? I mean, it is free electricity, with minimal impact.
It isn't free electricity. There is a cost to constructing them, maintaining them and decommissioning them when they become EOL.
If the wind doesn't blow, they don't generate electricity. This means that there is more demand on other sources. So price is driven by supply and demand. All of this the energy company will factor into your tariff. So obviously it is going to affect the price of electricity.
> The way you understand about gas prices, while dismissing some arguments in favor of renewables is a bit telling.
Understanding a basic tax calculation that is listed on a government website is relatively easy and took a few seconds for me to guestimate. It is much more difficult for layman (like myself) to understand the Total Cost of Ownership of a Wind Turbine, it ROI and understanding whether that maybe a good investment.
I wasn't arguing for or against wind. I was saying there are arguments against wind that might be better than the ones are often highlighted. You are mistaking me highlighting there are potentially better arguments, with agreeing with those arguments.
> Typically wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear power generators as it is unreliable or you need to buy capacity from elsewhere.
I have never understood this complaint about solar and wind. If we could have our electricity 100% generated by green sources most of the time and then rely on other sources (even natural gas) to supplement when there isn't enough being generated by solar and wind I would weep with joy. That'd be an astonishingly huge victory in the fight against climate change. I wouldn't even care if we needed significant government subsidies to ensure that the gas plants stay profitable while their demand is unpredictable.
If you need to get your power from elsewhere. This raises several issues:
- This increases demand on other sources of energy. If there is a sudden change in demand you have a price spike. This leads to an increase in price to consumers.
- If the grid also has to be re-balanced. This has a financial cost in of itself. If the grid can't be re-balanced you can have blackouts. Blackout can potentially kill people, it effects business etc.
- If you are getting it from other countries, this means you are reliant on another nation for your energy needs. This is a security issue. e.g. Norway threatened to ration energy exports back in 2022. This would of course increase the price.
- Energy prices have a knock affect to everything in the economy and are a significant driver of price inflation. This obvious has an adverse affect on the economy.
Subsidies are paid for via taxation. At the moment the UK is likely to increase taxation again in October as they were unable to cut benefits earlier this year. The larger the subsidies a government are paying the more money they need collect in taxation, or you have to borrow. The UK is unlikely to be able to collect much more tax, and we are borrowing a huge amount of money as it is.
The UK used to have very high subsidies for offshore wind for some reason. The last I've heard, subsidies for new plants are much lower today.
As for being cost effective, onshore wind is probably the cheapest option, and I think it's hoped that offshore will come close to that once more of the learning curve has been traversed. Perhaps fossil gas from the North sea is still cheaper for now, if you ignore the external cost.
I think solar power is even cheaper, but doesn't deliver much in the winter so far up north.
Backup: Batteries are cost effective for short term shortages. For long term shortages, you'd fire up thermal plants, either biomass or biogas (fossil gas for now).
It doesn't make sense to back up wind with nuclear. Nuclear has a high capital cost and relatively low running costs, so you don't save much from being standby but you still need to pay back the loans.
Offshore wind is indeed expensive and requires high CFD's. For onshore it's still manageable (yet). The reason is solar eats part of their profits and payoff becomes too long
Firming argument is valid, but UK deploys nuclear/gas anyway. You can start feeling real challenges past ~70% ren generation - firming becomes more expensive due to opex but you still need it and gas opex is smaller vs nuclear in this low utilization area. So now you are in a moral dilema- ditch nuclear and build gas firming or reorganize capacity market so that nuclear has some CFD or is compensated for firming&grid stabilization (not all nuclear can operate in island mode so that's another factor)
Germany choose the path of gas expansion if you read Fraunhofer. UK is still in a mix. Nordics are lucky with hydro so they can expand basically all low carbon tech
The reason is peak demand.
If your demand is say 5GW and hydro can provide max 3GW, unless you overbuild ren, it's 'easier' to have some more firm power while ren will act as water savers for hydro (especially considering droughts).
For now they have sufficient power, but considering nuclear timelines, you better start now
Enhanced geothermal could play a role here, but for now it's debatable.
They have lots potential for wind (~20%) and hydro. Peak demand is increasing, but lasts for very specific amounts of time during a day, it doesn’t justify the increases in base load. These peaks could be certainly fulfilled by smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification before new building new power plants. Yet, many of these will be needed despite nuclear, but since nuclear is the elephant in the room, they are going with it first, while stalling everything else. They are even trying to convince Germany to do the same.
"smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification" - electrification increases the demand, maybe you meant efficiency?
Demand response is basically - please don't use power because we don't have enough or because it's expensive. That's not an appealing option.
Smart grid management is good but it'll take years to reach good condition - you need to expand/upgrade transmission and distribution systems with proper equipment.
Germany has it's own path that's more or less stable for a long time- coal+gas firming, tons of ren and major transmission expenses, to the point govt will start subsidizing them
The problem is the cost of oil is downstream. The reasons why citizens want an alternative is because of those costs. If you added on all the environmental and health costs — all of them — you'd find oil is being subsidized in a different way.
I'm not even antioil in general but I am pro diversification, and think it's absurd to bring up government in that way when a major point of government should be to represent value for the citizens, that might not be represented in the market otherwise.
Same reason why agriculture is - too vital of an industry. Which might make sense from a national security standpoint - but it also gives the oil industry yet another reason to fight tooth and nail against anything that can diminish the importance of oil.
If oil ever became non-vital to the country's infrastructure and economy, those subsidies would stop, and the entire industry might go the way of British coal.
> Of course, the same folks have no objections whatsoever to offshore drilling.
Well, if they were entirely sincere in their concern for the view, the birds, and the noise, only one of those concerns would apply to offshore drilling.
Considering "preventing industrialization" to be an end in itself is something different, usually associated with being pro-wind-power.
I don't know about those groups, but the arguments I saw so far are these:
- Unclear maintenance - there's no clear way what to do with dysfunctional mills on land.
Just letting them rot seems to be a thing. Offshore maintenance is surely no fun, too. How long do they last?
- Pollution - there's a lot of abrasion and this stuff is pretty unclear,
it's even going into places where clean water is collected. Does anybody care about this?
- Ecology - there are a lot of trees that get cut down for wind. Maybe keeping those trees would be better.
Kills birds and bats is also part of the argument
- Economy - a lot of energy is produced at the wrong time. So much that it's even expensive to dump.
How much energy goes into producing the mill, and how long will it last?
Does this break even if you subtract subsidies, maintenance and value the dumped excess-energy realistically?
Is there any good storage solution coming - or will this remain to be a myth?
In the end Economy is most likely the only thing that matters. But I guess this is not looking so good - if it would be looking good you'd see more logos of big energy companies on all these mills...
From what I understand the point is precisely not having to straight up say out loud why, "attacking renewable energy solutions without necessarily questioning the science that the climate is changing due to human activity".
Two argument seem to be to "claim damages from the visual impact of offshore with projects located off their coasts" and "invoking the federal environment legislation such as the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act".
I recommend you put that one on your list instead because Instagram is very hostile to people trying to see anything without an account. The one on The New Yorker website is open to all and on the Internet Archive.
Not for anyone without an Instagram account, which is most people on social media. But sure, here are several alternatives as single images for you to share on social media. Took me no time at all to take a screenshot and upload to a bunch of websites. Take your pick.
This is a lie - I have never had an instagram account and I was able to hop on there and copy the image.
(it might be of interest to some that the image shared by the artist on Instagram has the text justified how the artist intended and the New Yorker's text caption can look different depending on the device, but I can't pretend that I care too much about that...)
> Take your pick.
Why did you bother? I'm fully capable of googling a famous image and I'm sure everyone else reading this stuff is.
> I have never had an instagram account and I was able to hop on there and copy the image.
This time you were. I get sent Instagram links semi-regularly and it’s a gamble when they’ll work. And there are two other people on this thread who replied directly to you, before your comment, saying they wouldn’t have bothered to even try.
> it might be of interest to some that the image shared by the artist on Instagram has the text justified how the artist intended
Is it, now? Then why is the text justified entirely differently on their own website, their Etsy store, and their official link on Cartoon Collections?
And look at that, it’s the exact same crop I chose for my screenshot. Almost as if I tried to respect the author’s choice, even though I very much doubt they are anal-retentive about how the text is laid out. They likely changed it for Instagram to fit better into the obligatory square.
> Why did you bother?
Perhaps cut it a bit with the hostility? It’s not like my screenshot harmed you in any way.
> Is it, now? Then why is the text justified entirely differently on their own website, their Etsy store, and their official link on Cartoon Collections?
You have posed a potentially interesting (and well researched!) question that would probably be more fruitfully targeted at someone who did not make the effort to state "but I can't pretend that I care too much about that..."
I found it quite truthful, but I also blacklist social media in my host file.
I recommend blacklisting social media, it makes the world a better place.
I (and I assume I'm not alone in this) rarely even bother clicking on Instagram or "X" posts because I can't be bothered with all the hassle when all I want to do is quickly view the content, and I'm not willing to gamble on whether or not it's going to work.
"Creating value for shareholders" has done more for sustainability than eco-activists could ever hope to.
Industrial capitalists make mass produced LED lights and cheap solar panels. Eco-activists push for anti-nuclear laws and plastic straw bans.
It's pretty telling that oil lobbyists resort to non-market methods like bribing politicians to stall renewables. They know the time is running out - with all the new power generation and storage tech that's in the pipeline, fossil fuels just aren't going to be economically viable forever. Renewables are rising, and there is no moat - all the existing oil assets those companies hold are going to be increasingly useless as more and more of the world's power comes from non-fossil sources.
"Stall" is about the extent of it though. You can't fight economic forces off forever.
Industrial capitalists irrevocably destroy large tracts of public and private land. Eco-activists lobby to at least have them cover the clean-up bill, if not incurr punitive fines. This goes back to 1969 when the EPA was set up when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught fire due to pollution from industrial waste. Some other highlights of "Creating value for shareholders"
Deepwater Horizon oil spill: Largest marine oil spill in U.S. history. BP paid over $20 billion in fines and compensation.
Love Canal: Occidental Petroleum dumped toxic waste into the Love Canal in Niagara Falls, resulting in pollution causing birth defects. $130 million in settlements.
Exxon Valdez oil spill: Alaska’s Prince William Sound contaminated with 11 million gallons of crude oil. Exxon paid over $1 billion in cleanup and compensation.
DuPont Chemical leak: DuPont contaminated the drinking water of over 300,000 people. $670 million in settlements.
Hinkley Groundwater Contamination: PG&E contaminated groundwater with chromium-6 in California. $333 million in settlements.
Volkswagen Emissions Scandal: Volkswagen cheated on emissions tests. $25 billion in settlements.
Kingston Fossil Plant Coal Ash Spill: A retention pond breached, releasing over 1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge into the surrounding area. Cleanup cost over $1 billion.
> Eco-activists push for anti-nuclear laws and plastic straw bans.
Seems like a myopic strawman to me. The main eco-activism that I remember for the last couple of decades has been for reduced fossil-fuel use. This is now being translated into policy in Europe especially, which has massively increased the market for renewables that the "industrial capitalists" can take advantage of.
Today, the best alternative to fossil fuels is renewables - but 40 years ago, it was nuclear. If eco-activists made sensible decisions, fossil fuel power could have been curbed back then.
Instead, we got what we got. Eco-activists, being what they are, made vibe-based policy decisions, and the vibe of nuclear power was Very Bad and Glowing Acid Green and Way Too Industrial. So nuclear power was strangled with activism and overregulation in many countries, if not banned outright.
So we had to sit on fossil fuel power for those 40 years - until the economics of renewables finally became more favorable. Which, again, happened not because eco-activists willed it into existence - but because industrial capitalists developed the relevant technologies and pushed them into mass production.
What would have happened in an alternate world where renewables just weren't economical? Would the world sit on fossil fuels for another 40 years, until fusion power actually materialized?
> If eco-activists made sensible decisions, fossil fuel power could have been curbed back then.
It's about the money. "Eco-activists" can't achieve shit if there's no money in it. Think about all the other things they've been trying to kill - meat, fossil fuels, jet travel - and are nowhere near succeeding. Why do you think that is?
Fossil fuel interests killed nuclear. "Eco-activists" took the rap. And everyone else fell for it.
The only reason the economics of renewables became favorable is because of German subsidies. They created the market conditions to incentivize the Chinese ramp up of solar manufacturing and the blooming of the European wind turbine industry. It wasn't a case of happenstance. Humanity owes a debt to the German taxpayer.
No. The economics of renewables were trending that way before Germany took notice. That was why renewables were considered a promising technology in the first place.
At best, you can make a claim that because of Germany's push, renewables got to today's price point a few years sooner. Which is quite valuable, but not a make-it-or-break-it difference.
>Industrial capitalists make mass produced LED lights and cheap solar panels.
Wow, those cheap solar panels were done entirely by the private sector? Without decades of government-backed research on how to make solar panels viable to mass-produce?
Without eco-activists lobbying for government-funded research on solar panels, there would be no mass production, because nobody is paying $100k/kW.
And making cheap LEDs doesn't necessarily reduce energy use, thanks to the rebound effect - we've known this since Lord Jevon noted that James Watt's new ultra-efficient steam engine increased demand for coal instead of reducing it, because it made steam engines cheaper to run. If you look at car headlights, you'll find that instead of using LEDs to reduce power use, car-makers instead used them to crank up the lumens as far as humanly possible. They only save power on paper, when underwritten by implicit environmental optimism.
Note that I'm not opposed to "creating value for shareholders"; they made cheap solar panels possible. I'm saying that powerful economic forces require far more precise alignment than you'd think for them to be useful, and they are almost never conveniently placed in the right spot by chance.
If you look at car headlights or flashlights, then yes, because more brightness is very desirable there. If you look at the average lightbulb though?
It's pretty clear that people didn't replace their 100W incandescent bulbs with 200W worth of LEDs. Modern LED lights sit in a range of 6W to 20W - which is a factor of 5 reduction in power draw no matter how you cut it.
Wind is only useful up to a point, once it gets above 20% of generation capacity ensuing grid stability becomes expensive either through huge price swings or grid level energy storage.
> For the first time ever, California's batteries took over gas as the primary source for supplying evening power demand in April, providing "akin to the output from seven large nuclear reactors" one evening, according to the New York Times.
These batteries last a few minutes when they are fully charged. In the winter it's not unusual to have close to zero wind power for a few days and it could come after a few weeks of lower output, so they aren't fully charged.
You'll notice in your article they are almost always talking about power instead of energy because energy is the problem.
We still need about 100 - 1000x improvements to rely on batteries without reliable power plants, depending on how much the generation capacity is overbuilt.
The recent full blackout in Iberia was caused by renewables destabilizing the grid, and the fossil plants were cold so couldn't save the day. Having fossil plants is of no use if they were mandated by the government to turn themselves off.
The grid operator did release a report, and it stated that the problem was desynchronization of a solar farm, followed by more frequency destabilization as they tried to combat the first problem, followed by a panicked attempt to bring gas plants back online but they weren't available. They'd been switched off to make way for solar and would have taken hours to warm up.
The only sense in which there are conflicting arguments, is that the leftist Spanish government read the above report and concluded that it was the fault of the gas plants for not being available when they were needed. Because they were switched off. Because of their own policies. This is not an argument that deserves genuine consideration.
It's not out of date. BESS has different utility in different weather areas. Germany would need the equivalent of 20-30y of global bess deployments to ditch fossils, not considering realistic power transfer or weather forecast. That's why even their pro ren Fraunhofer ISE recommended gas expansion
So seems it's possible. Swings in generation are dealt with via inter-country interconnects, pumped storage and gas turbine generation. Nuclear adds a steady base.
The argument was about the cost, UK having highest prices on the continent (depending how you count subsidies for others) but 20% seems too low anyway. Normal plants are still fine at 60% cf
The UK has insane prices because of their refusal to do regional pricing to accommodate grid constraints. They'd rather pay wind farms to park their turbines, than to segment their grid pricing (i.e. make energy prices cheaper where there is a surplus of wind generation).
The UK's prices are a political choice due to the mapping of voters over the energy generation distribution.
We also have this rather unusual energy market where the price for energy is set by the supplier with the highest price necessary to meet demand at any particular time, and all the suppliers get paid that price. Most countries use a system where the suppliers get paid how much it costs for them to generate individually, and the users pay an average of that all.
No, most countries use the same merit order mechanism like UK.
The difference is that in those countries gas peakers are competing with cheaper hydro (nordics), coal(Germany) or nuclear (france). UK nuclear is pretty small, so gas competes only with itself for setting the price.
Curtailing renewbles due to grid constraints is usually a perfectly rational decision. New generation, new storage, new demand and new grid connections don't always happen on the same schedule.
Now, banning onshore wind in England for a decade when it was the cheapest source of energy available. That's just plain stupid (or a corrupt gift to your mates in gas companies).
But it followed economics. What you are saying is that now you want to screw it, because moving industry/trained labor to other areas isn't a plug and play option- it's a huge investment which could lead to closures
The government, by saying that there was a single zone, despite the electricity not actually working that way (because interconnectors don't have infinite capacity), were defying economics.
By breaking the country in to zones, where the electricity that's bought can actually reach the users they then apply the actual economics of the system properly, and encourage suppliers to build where the demand can be satisfied by them.
But in the past it made sense to have a single zone- prices were similar. So industry developed where possible. Now what you ask is that due to the ren generation, the pricing should change, so that industry that was formed long before current ren push needs to restructure/move to more advantageous locations because otherwise it'll use competitiveness. If you are fine with such development and it's consequences, you could ask for such reforms.
Situation is very similar in Germany - most industry is concentrated in the south while most productive wind in the north. In the past it didn't matter since prices were similar with coal. But now, since you can't magically create wind in low wind/unproductive areas, the options are either split zones and kill part of industry, which Germany doesn't want, or to keep a single zone and build expensive transmission like sudlink.
Not true. 100% variable renewable energy (VRE) grids are found to be economically viable almost anywhere on the planet.[1] These are grids which don't require any fossil fuel "firming".
From the IEA report: "Substantiated by in-depth case studies, this report infers that, almost anywhere on the planet, nearly 100% VRE power grids firmly supplying clean power and meeting demand 24/365 are not only possible but would be economically viable, provided that VRE resources are optimally transformed from unconstrained run-of-the weather generation into firm generation."[1]
However, propagandists routinely spread misinformation on firming. For example, they might cite the absolutely absurd LFSCOE which is funded by the energy sector's equivalent of the Center for Indoor Air Research[2][3][4].
Not necessarily disagreeing, but Denmark's grid is integrated with europe. If the rest of europe catches up with Denmark in wind power, that will definitely be a challenge, since wind speeds are correlated across the continent. Not unsolvable, but it's an issue for sure.
It's fairly rare that there is no wind at all, especially at wind turbine height, and if you have 100 different wind farms spread out across different regions you'll usually have a decent amount of them producing at any given moment. We can also use batteries of various kinds to handle peaks and valleys, not to mention solar, hydro, nuclear and some gas to pick up slack when necessary.
I don't think anyone is expecting wind farms to supply anywhere near 100% of energy production. Probably not even 50%.
As I'm fond of saying, if you want to find True Bird Lovers, try constructing some windmills. They stay silent for oil spills and habitat destruction for fossil fuel exploration but they come out of the woodwork the minute they sense a wind turbine.
Surprised Pikachu face. There is an entire well-funded ecosystem of "academic" research, think tanks, policy groups and so on that exist solely to propagandize the status quo.
It goes well beyond that though. I always like to tell the story of Steven Donziger to show just how corrupt this system is.
Ecuador of course has less regulation than the US and oil company went down there and made a total mess. Steven Donziger, an American lawyer, went down there and helped the people and the governemnt sue Chevron and won a $9.5 billion judgement in 2011 to clean this up.
Chevron didn't like this, withdrew their assets from Ecuador and went back to the US and sued Donziger in federal court. The judgement was deemed to be fraudulent (based pretty much on a video tape where Donziger and a minister were at the same event years earlier).
But it didn't end there. Donziger was disbarred for this. Chevron made a complaint to the Department of Justice to criminally prosecute Donziger. The DoJ declined.
But it didn't end there. The federal judge appointed a private law firm that served Chevron to criminally prosecute Donziger for not turning over a computer and other work products that were absolutely covered by attorney-client privilege. This is a little-known and little-used law for private prosecution.
Donziger was placed on house arrest with an $800,000 bail for years for contempt of court.
Donziger claims Chevron has spent in excess of $2 billion in legal fees on all this.
Don't doubt for a second that the courts don't work directly for the interests of corporations and capital owners. In fact, this is about the best way to determine how the Supreme Court will rule on key matters: what benefits the wealthy. It's not strictly true. There are exceptions but it's amazing how often it's correct.
The courts have now been packed with Christian Nationalists who will absolutely weaponize the bench in future years against climate activists and probably get them declared terrorist organizations. That's just the reality we live in now.
Not saying this isn't a real issue, but the degree of bias in this reporting (and indeed in the original article) is not the most comfortable here either.
I mean, is it really surprising that a law company with expertise in the energy sector would handle energy clients? And is it really surprising that a publication with clear bias harming the reputation of its clients would elicit a legal response?
How did the publication even get through peer review in the first place without a reviewer requesting the equivalent links for other energy sources to ensure this wasn't effectively p-hacking?
A major reason I don't treat conspiracy theorists seriously is that with all their paranoia they have a huge blind spot for the Captain-Planet-cartoon-villainy the oil industry is engaging in.
Just the stuff the Heartland Institute does is enough to write a book about and still not a peep from the usual crowd.
It is more likely they just don't care about the oil industry and focus their attention elsewhere. I would wager that most people assume that large corporations have dirty secrets.
e.g. I listen to a guy that goes exposes the conmen in the UFO community. The reason the guy focuses on UFOs is because he believes that when he was younger he saw a UFO. Over time he slowly realised over time that he had been lied to by these conmen. He isn't interested in the truth about the oil industry, he cares about the truth around UFO encounters because that is what he cares about.
You can learn about a scene without thinking they're competent.
It doesn't really prove war for oil, war tends to mess up production and also we have a huge amount of domestic production. But that depends on what exactly the claims are.
"Free energy" doesn't exist so that just goes back to them barking up the wrong tree. It's taking a real villain and blaming them for nonsense instead of something they actually do.
> how would you know if the conspiracy theory scene has already addressed oil industry corruption?
Because it hasn't. The "free energy" stuff is way off the mark and pales in comparison to absolute kookery of weather machines being responsible for things climate change is actually doing.
They don't have a solid grasp of reality and it shows in how they're unaware about the specific things the oil industry is doing. Much of their rhetoric is big oil propaganda being repeated anyway.
War for oil isn't a conspiracy - it's such obvious public knowledge that there are memes about it. Yes, the country that is a major oil producer and in the currency of which most if not all oil transactions are done uses its military might to preserve the status quo - that's hardly a secret.
War for oil is a conspiracy, but an unprosecuted one.
Your disdain for the conspiracy theorist scene is mirrored in that scenes disdain for justice.
In the case where there is actionable justice that can be achieved, the conspiracy theory is no longer a theory - the conspiracy is prosecuted in the courts of our proud nations' democratic institutions.
Plenty of conspiracy theorists have conspiracies about the oil industry being evil, it's just harder to spot them when so many of them turn out to be true. Fracking, OPEC, exxon, BP, government deals with "suspicious" Saudis, and oil spills are common targets. The wild stuff is pretty much the usual though. Depopulation, psychic attacks, secret global government stuff, UFOs, etc.
This is a systematic problem, the exact same thing happened with leaded gas already (industry sponsored scientists spreading misinformation on toxicity, lawfare against scientists that uncover/publish inconvenient truths) but there were zero consequences.
Our current system makes it much too easy to hold on to profits even when direct negative externalitites cost millions of human life-years.
Also write them a very stern letter, That'll show'em.
The only way to stop those people is boots-on-the-ground political, social, and cultural activism. No, writing mean tweets and just taking part to that fancy "guess your next leader" powerball variant you do once every four years is not remotely enough.
Cute that you think there will be an election. Why do you think have all controlling and independent agencies that are part of the election process or cybersecurity been removed in the first week via executive orders?
I would love to obtain a handbook on how to convince moronic far-right leaning neighbors to change or at least soften their stance. I usually just tell them to fuck off, which apparently is not that much effective.
> love to obtain a handbook on how to convince moronic far-right leaning neighbors to change or at least soften their stance
Real answer? Pick a battle and commit to it. That means allying with folks who agree with you—or have an incentive to agree—on your one issue with whom you may strongly disagree on other policy or even moral positions. This doesn’t need to be a permanent alliance, after all, just a transactional one to achieve a goal.
Just be careful not to turn into a 1-issue voter. There's a lot of people out there that vote for the candidate that agrees with them on the one issue they consider the most important... and they ignore the substantial amount of evil that candidate does that's _not_ that one issue.
Dont call them moronic. Don't tell them to fuck off.
If you HONESTLY want to try to convince people that these politicians and industries are a net negative you can not just sit there and call people fucking idiots. It makes a person retreat into their view that much more. You have to just calmly explain things. Sometimes you have to explain that thing a lot.
A lot of people who voted right wing are looking for reasons to re-evaluate their decisions. Dont give them a reason to double down by calling them fucking mornons. Soft language will win this fight.
Sometimes I think I want people to change their minds extremely and instantaneously. When I look at the micro-changes they make, and have the endurance to see these changes over time, they can actually make extreme changes and in a short period of time. It's just rarely instantaneously extreme.
> A lot of people who voted right wing are looking for reasons to re-evaluate their decisions
i dont believe this to be the case. If they have such a reason, then surely they would've already examined it much earlier and came to a conclusion under which they won't have been a right wing voter in the first place.
So there's something else at play, such as preconceived notions, or the inability to sort out facts from fiction (being presented as fact on TV), that makes them behave the way they did.
The problem is, what you're talking about is essentially cult deprogramming. And (AFAIK) that's a) very, very hard, b) something one does one person or small family group at a time, and c) a process that requires some kind of personal bond with the people you're deprogramming (so if you don't have one going in, you have to be willing and able to form one).
The far, far easier (at that end of things) way to solve our problems would be to shift our economic policies to favor the poor at the expense of the very wealthy, because a huge share of the cause of their stubborn stances is economic insecurity. But unfortunately, that...probably requires getting them on board, at least to some extent. (Not to mention actually having a free and fair election again, which...looks pretty dodgy at the moment.)
I agree although I think the value of the piece is in literally mapping out the relationships, and in explaining the extent of the problems, such as in ties to defunding an entire university's research budget over it.
It’s not a coincidence that the weird red carpet summit in Alaska for Putin apparently focused on joint energy projects with this shambolic administration.
Shell at one point started doing that in the UK, they installed a number of offshore wind turbines. Then they sold them and doubled down on oil.
What I think is really weird in the world today is the power companies don't seem interested in selling more power. A parallel branch of Wind and Solar companies are doing all the installations and running the power but not to the extent of bringing new capacity online, its all purely for replacing the old coal and gas systems. Quite a lot of companies are having to buy their own installations and run them so they can have their new data centre.
What I think is really weird in the world today is the power companies don't seem interested in selling more power.
They do. It's just not as lucrative as oil so they sell the business and go back to oil. Say an oil company has $100 to spend on new energy. A new oil field nets them back $500 over 5 years. Wind nets them $200 over 5 years. Why would they invest in wind other than for PR?
China has to import 70% of its oil so it needs to focus on renewables. If the US doesn't produce enough oil for its own needs, it too would be building solar and wind at scale I presume. But the US is a net oil exporter.
oil is a huge mistake at this point, as any country that is investing in a solar/wind/renewables GRID, is watching there costs go into freefall, not just freefall, but costs that are disconected from energy markets built on consumable fuels and therefor stable and predictable.
many countrys are figuring out that
energy stability = societal/cultural stability and are slowly backing away from the chaos and ongoing disaster of oil/carbon
It's because renewables aren't what customers naturally want, that's why grids have to be forced to take their output using preference schemes and subsidies.
The financial modeling also relies heavily on the assumption of government preference (hard if there is a huge lobby who hates your guts) and wind speeds holding constant (wind speeds are falling and this is blowing holes in wind farm finances).
electricity customers want one thing - cheap, reliable power. Where it comes from does not matter unless there is a price on carbon emissions.
The electricity grid is not "forced" to accept anything. Places like Texas show that economic incentives work for renewable energy. In fact, economic incentives are stronger than disinformation.
Fossil fuel companies and investors control massive oil assets that won't ever be exploited in a world that doesn't use oil at the rate we do. The value of these stranded assets make up a huge fraction of their valuation. To some extent that world is already inevitable, thanks to the huge renewable buildouts happening in China. But the revaluation hasn't come yet, and what the fossil companies are doing now is trying to push it out just a few more years (even a decade) so they can unload. The cost of this is terrible, and it's still doomed to failure, but there's a lot of money on the line.
Also most of the value capture in solar and batteries like literally 70%+ is happening in China, while this could've been a win-win situation it has disturbed a lot of existing equations of the system.
As an example I feel even Gas electricity LCOE equivalent is calculated as Capex + Opex where Capex amortisation over lifetime depends on capacity factor of Gas turbine plant. With more renewable penetration even in a competitive market like ERCOT the LCOE equivalent costs for Gas increases although technically this should drive overall electricity lower and should work for everyone.
This completely creates a significant issue for Natural Gas future too which I think was unthinkable for US Gas producers as it was the safest bet decades into the future.
Not too talk about what even a 3-4% Oil demand destruction in Oil for transportation due to EVs can do to the oil markets.
All this seemed theoretical before but now the tides are finally changing led by China and most of the world has a vested interest in reducing Oil and Gas dependency as most of the world are net importers too.
So all these plays are essentially trying to maximise the cash producing life of the current assets whether it can be achieved by FUD or whatever other means necessary.
You can argue both sides right? It makes business sense for oil money to do that.
However, there's also a trend that giant corporations are kind of like giant oil tankers (no pun intended). It takes a humongous amount of energy to change a company's fundamental core business. Oil companies are in the business of oil. Even if they expand to becoming an energy company, it takes a long time for them to change their "oil DNA". Based on that, I can imagine that certain oil companies - though not all oil companies - elect to maintain the status quo.
I don't think this is unique to big oil. It's unique to big {pharma, tech, oil, *}. What I find harder to find out is what the "weights" are for both sides and how they are influenced.
not while there's still oil to be extracted. Rigs (esp. offshore ones) take a lot of initial investment, and takes several decades to fully pay out. It's not hard to imagine that those investments hadn't fully matured and so they'd want the demand for oil to continue.
Even when going full renewable and nuclear, demand for existing infrastructure is unlikely to make these rigs unprofitable over the long term. Moving all the economy will take time.
The demand for oil as hydrogen base, plastic and other derivatives will keep those platforms profitable for a long time. Maybe not as massively profitable as now but more than a reasonable ROI. Oh wait, more profits above everything no matter what because the plebs are the only ones affected by it so they don't care.
My very limited understanding is that many of those assets require a certain timeline and rate of oil consumption for the investment to make sense financially. If global oil consumption goes down by say 50%, lots of assets just become worthless (even if someday we use them.)
And renewables are quick money. We need all sort of generation, it's not like renewables are going to replace all oil in near future. Every generation is being swollen up.
The whole point for them is ownership and while you can in effect own oil fields and these companies do, you don't own the wind -- the oil companies weren't smart enough/ early enough to persuade major governments to say oh, actually the wind belongs to BP and Exon.
So Hill Farmer Bob can just put a turbine up on the big hill and get "free" electricity. If there was magically Oil everywhere, and Bob was legally allowed to just drill for it, that's what he would obviously do, but in most places there is no oil and oil companies ensured they control the rights so Bob couldn't drill.
This is what capitalism is about, you own stuff therefore you get free money forever. But you don't own the sun or wind.
Which is weird, because there's precedent for companies owning water rights. The step to owning wind rigths doesn't feel that far.
I'm wondering if the current governmental backlash to wind is just a prelude to getting "wind rights" of vast geographical areas sold to some properly bribing oil corporation.
Then the company can totally control the transition from oil to wind in such a fashion as to extract maximum revenue without having to care about any external competition.
How and why would “Scientists” be doing any kind of “exposing” in the first place (“scientists” are now some kind of detectives?) and why all the biased language; “anti-wind”, “oil-funded”?
Also why does this feel like cult-like conditioning of, “we the righteous ones against the evil anti-us false opposition”? It is “they hate you, but I love you, and they want to use the state to take your babies away from you so you better come live in my compound” vibes.
That’s propaganda and abuse, especially when “scientists” is used like some kind of omnipotent deity. “The great and wonderful scientists have revealed the truth to us!”
If they are supporting “anti-wind”, who wouldn’t expect oil companies to support opposition? Are people not allowed to oppose your thing? It’s being treated like some kind of heresy against the corrupt church, and only if you support the subsidized, corrupt wind turbine industry that has politicians on the payroll to push selling wind turbines at public expense, are you righteous believers.
The problem is that all industries and all of our governments are massively corrupted and rotten, and everyone wants to get the other-peoples-money the corrupt politicians have to hand out like the despotic kings or lords they effectively have become.
“Oh yes, lord, you are the most gracious lord of all lords for bestowing upon me the lands and peasants that work them”
In the case of America, where do you think much of that $32 Trillion dollars in national debt deficit spending went in the last 25 years?? If you spend any time in the circles of the 0.1% it will become apparent where that money went, even if you can’t understand that it also went into your 1% pockets.
If you’re having a hard time or will never get access to the top 0.1%, reference the graph of the wealth of the richest people.
In the case of Europe and Germany especially now, they’ve been trying to get at the national “savings” of the German people for decades now, and it seems that BlackRock Merz has finally cracked the vault and he’s going to let the thieves plunder Germany and Europe, as he commits $9 billion annually to the Ukraine for absolutely no rational reason and funding the whole EU project to plunder the German savings, while he tells German pensioners that they can’t get what they worked for all their lives because foreigners that have invaded their country need to be prioritized.
I know regular, grounded people who are in “anti wind” groups they themselves founded, who are clearly not “oil funded” and simply oppose “wind” in their local community because they have heard from others about the impacts. They just don’t like deforesting tracts of woodland and natural habitat, putting in massive concrete foundations, digging up orchards, killing thousands of birds, the noise pollution of the turbines son at all, and the massive corruption due to kickbacks, subsidies, and political aspirations; to build wind turbines where there is basically no wind at all and the turbines won’t pay for themselves even with massive price distorting subsidies. They’re not opposed to “wind” in general, just not the corrupted kind that makes no ecological or business sense, to enrich individuals at the public expense.
I personally think the best solution to these things is that supporters not only get signed up to pay for what they support, but they also get bonded to the projects doing what they promised they would do. You support “wind”; ok, great, you get taxed another 10% to pay for the cost and compensation to anyone affected, and if the turbines don’t produce what you said they would, then you pay for full removal, ecologically sound disposal, and ecological restoration.
But it’s always so allowing to be con artists to trick others out of their money instead.
Anthropomorphizing big industries is always fraught, but looking at their actions, I'd concede it means something that the American Gas Association is doing things like hiring influencers to promote gas cooking over induction ranges.
With induction, heating faster is just a matter of getting a high enough wattage stovetop. So maybe don't compare a low-end induction stove to a gas one? Low-end gas stoves have different problems (reliability, ease of cleaning, etc).
With gas you also have to worry about proper ventilation, and most homes don't actually have that. Not to mention that gas leaks are a risk as well.
The sudden US pivot towards actively suppressing wind energy is absolutely wild.
There are farms that are nearing completion and now are just in limbo.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/26/business/wind-project-can...
It's a tenet of MAGA membership, culturally reinforced by the likes of Taylor Sheridan productions like 'Landman' - conservative machismo power-fantasies where the environmental strawmen are setup to be 'destroyed' by Billy Bob Thornton in a snappy youtube-shorts length monologue.
Unfortunately, similar to 'Yellowstone', much of the rabid viewing audience take this conservative land-right pornography at face-value as a source of truth for the state of the nation.
It isn't sudden, it was always there. 15 years ago I drove from iowa to minnesota. In iowa there were wind turbines eveywhere, in mn billboards saying wind is not the answer. Today iowa des moines is 100% wind powered (i can only find press releases stating that, official numbers for the whole state are around 50%)
I recently had a dumb argument with actually a bunch of folks on Nextdoor who claimed unironically that coal power plants were more eco friendly than wind and solar farms.
I ran the numbers like a good nerd. It is mind-bogglingly inane how wrong that idea is. I also learned new things about how ridiculously polluting coal plants are.
These bad ideas come from somewhere (presumably cable news). Or they were bots.
For coal, a good example of how bad it is, is the recommendation that pregnant women limit tuna consumption because of its mercury content.
There is no farmed tuna, its all wild caught from the big blue oceans. Why does tuna have mercury? Because it eats things that have mercury in them. Where did they get the mercury from? Rain. Where did the rain get it? Coal emissions! Coal has mercury and when you burn coal, it goes into the atmosphere and then, eventually, into the ocean. So much mercury has been released by coal burning that the ALL THE OCEANS are contaminated to the point where predator fish have levels in their flesh high enough to warrant health warnings.
I have tried this tack. All fish everywhere are tainted by mercury to some extent. They seem not to care.
The thing which seemed to make them shut up was doing the math showing that the total weight of just coal ash from a coal plant running for a year is comparable to the entire weight of materials for a similar capacity wind farm (which is rated for ~20 years of use). I assume similar or less for solar (numbers harder to find).
I feel you, I've had similar 'discourses" on local news sites in the comments. I assume the accounts are regular people, but they genuinely just believe whatever bad thing they hear about renewable energy and look no further.
There's always of course the bad faith accounts that spit out cherry picked facts and half truths, but they also don't seem interested in doing any actual discussion other than arguing.
> These bad ideas come from somewhere (presumably cable news).
The featured article states where they come from - the oil lobby (unsurprisingly).
Likely explanation for those numbers is that if it's windy 100% of the power needs are fulfilled by wind and statistically the local wind turbines make enough power that if somehow Des Moines could store that and sip from it, they could run all the time on pure wind power. But in practice what happens is when it's windy Des Moines exports power and gets money, and when it's calm Des Moines buys power that wasn't from a wind turbine.
One political idea in the UK is to give people locality based energy pricing, so, if there's a wind turbine right near your community, sure, that's a bit annoying (they're loud because that wind is moving huge spinning blades, and maybe you like horizons, which are horizontal, the wind farm breaks that up) but hey, your electricity is super cheap. The idea being that's a direct incentive to welcome on-shore turbines and it's an effective subsidy to move electrical load nearer to production.
Today with national pricing that Wind Farm wants to be on the Scottish coast where it's windy, and the Energy Intensive industry wants to be in England where there are loads of people already, and then you have to move all that power across half a country to make it work, which is further expense and delay. Why not just move the industrial users, and to nudge them offer lower prices ?
Don't worry, the next administration will complain that the Chinese stole wind technology from the US and demand that it be returned.
I listened to the press conference the other day with Trumps cabinet meeting.
It is bizar to listen to.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that windmills had killed 100+ whales. I tried to find out what he referred to, but couldn't find anything but articles debunking any claim that windmills affect whales (after construction).
He also claimed that the price per kWh of wind energy is above $0.30, which is quite a bit from the $0.03 ($0.12 offshore) price per kWh listed in Wikipedia [1] for United States.
At the same meeting Trump stated that the only viable solution is fossil fuel."... and maybe a little nuclear, but mostly fossil fuel.". And that wind is about 10x more expensive than natural gas (again contradicting the prices listed in the Wikipedia reference where the prices for onshore wind and natural gas are almost identical).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
A country can commit to 300 years of wind energy, temporarily harming a bit of nature.
Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nature to take over again.
We have no issues with stealing a couple of square miles of nature in order to pave it for our cities or to use it for farming.
Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal: production of the turbines, used area and generated noise, minimal pollution of the area, the troubles of recycling them. That's mostly it.
You don't have this with oil, nor with current-age nuclear.
Also, we've already accepted the noise of cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes.
So I really don't get what they are protesting about, specially in Germany.
The opposition to the construction of wind farms are mostly silly except in a very specific situation. We should not construct those in nature reservation. If a place is worth designating as a nature reserve then we have decided that such place is worth protecting even if the area could be later freed (common reason is keeping certain species from going extinct, which makes the threat nontemporarily). Ocean based wind farms has a tendency to want to be built in the shallows, which happens to correlate where we tend to designate as nature reservations.
Wind power is however not comparable to fossil fuels or nuclear power. Denmark is a prime example of a country that did commit fully to wind power in a very strong and consistent way, and do produce more total energy through wind that they consume. That energy however is not produced when people want to consume it, so as a practical matter, they import around 50% of their energy that they do consume, energy which is not wind since when the wind blow they export the excess energy. They could produce 500% or even 1000% more wind energy, and they would still need to import a large portion of their consumption from non-wind power. Producing that much excess power would mostly just effect exports and not in a good way for the producers since overproduction mostly just lead to lower prices. 50% consumption seems to be around the maximum of what you can do with wind (for now), and when the wind do not blow you still need 100% of the capacity from other sources in order to fill in the gap. Overproduction of nuclear or thermal energy does not have this issue, but rather carries completely different problems.
Germany is famously abhorrent of change. "We've always done it this way" isn't used ironically.
Unless the change is shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants[1]. The energy transition in Germany has been handled horribly for reasons I can't understand.
[1] https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out...
They were scared after Fukushima, a nuclear disaster that if anything showed how resilient nukes can be compared to coal, which just gets away with killing thousands of people quietly. Perhaps they’re better at vibes than they are at maths.
The nuclear exit was started 10 years before that - mostly also because of vibes: the Green Party became junior coalition partner in the government for the first time, and the greens had a longstanding anti-nuclear stance from their roots in the 1970s anti-nuclear weapons movement… They pushed for the nuclear exit.
When the conservatives regained power, they vowed to cancel and stop the exit timeline, but then came Fukushima and an irrational media panic - and Merkel did what she does best.
> and Merkel did what she does best.
You mean f_ck up safety and security of whole Old continent for decades to come, for some ego polishing, personal weaknesses or similar noble reasons?
She still admits no failures nor missteps during her reign in many topics where she clearly failed badly, despite journalists asking very direct questions about this. I wonder when will German population realize how much long term damage she has done, if ever.
Vibes, chernobyl and also the absurd cost of nuclear power.
Poland is building nuclear power now though, after decades of burning epic amounts of coal (~85% of their electricity output).
This is most likely coz it provides a route to creating a nuclear weapon in a hurry "just in case". It isnt cost effective for them for any other purpose.
> Poland generated 54% of electricity from coal in 2024, down from 70% just 2 years ago
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/poland/
They keep putting their nuclear switch on date backwards (2040 now I think?) but renewables have been taking big chunks out of the problem and will continue to do so.
Well they saw what happened to a nuclear free Ukraine
> The energy transition in Germany has been handled horribly for reasons I can't understand.
Former East German political agents still working for Russia.
Hey, it was West Germany's idea to bring all these people. Now they cannot complain about this obvious and natural result. It is irrational to think that everyone there has the obligation to hate Russia just as the West does.
Germany and piss poor energy policy - name a more iconic duo.
The way I understand it, Germany had a horrid mix of anti-nuclear eco-activists, local coal lobbyists and Gazprom's natural gas lobbyists. The politicians not included in any of the above were too toothless, and couldn't fight through this bullshit and secure good outcomes regardless.
The problem was "compromise" - essentially as part of forming government the Greens and the CDU (Angela Merkel's party) agreed to an energy policy where they would phase out nuclear and replace it with a fuckton of renewables. But the actual govt did only the former without the latter (despite the previous agreement and the Greens' protest of Where Are The Fucking Renewables), thus leaving only coal and gas.
Leaving nuclear in place would be good, going heavily into renewables would also be good, but doing neither would be idiotic, and somehow that's what they did.
This is very much wrong. The Greens were never in a coalition with CDU/Merkel. (Merkel was in coalitions with the SPD/Social Democrats and FDP/Liberals.)
Greens were in a coalition with the Social Democrats led by Chancellor Schroeder; Schroeder agreed to the Greens’ demands for nuclear exit and negotiated a board role at Gazprom for himself after his political career.
Merkel initially wanted to reverse or freeze the exit timeline but bowed to public opinion to continue it once the tsunami hit Japan.
Yep, this is what I meant by "anti-nuclear eco-activists", "Gazprom oil lobbyists" and "toothless politicians" respectively.
And yet, despite multiple attempts by those on the political right to slow it down, they've powered ahead with reducing coal and gas usage.
Some of those critics focus on nuclear (Like AfD: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/populist-afd-sand-gears...) and some of those pretend to be angry about the slowness of Germanys transition but it doesn't really add up to anyone who pays attention to the local facts. It's just a meme to get people angry at the left and/or environmentalists, while the right openly and continually sabotage progress.
Opposition to nuclear is 90% a "left" wing problem. Blaming the boogeyman "right" is silly in general, as left-right is a thought-terminating scale, but really silly in this case where it actually is pretty clear-cut.
Greenpeace did great work on the peace front, but wrecked 50 years of carbon progress on the nuclear power front.
> Opposition to nuclear is 90% a "left" wing problem. Blaming the boogeyman "right" is silly in general
The "left" (by your definition) also opposes fossil fuels but we're nowhere near eliminating those. Why haven't they succeeded?
Surely mere "opposition" isn't enough.
Why all the asinine “atomkraft? Nein danke!” Signs? The policy seems designed by 70 year old hippies.
It's wild how much shit Germany got for turning off gas, coal and nuclear power plants (which comprised about ~8% of their power) while Poland running on ~80-90% coal for decades without changing anything was nbd.
It's almost as if the outrage was astroturfed into existence by the nuclear lobby using similar tactics to the oil lobby.
Poland was much poorer and less significant economically.
No, Germany drew negative attention precisely because it was turning off coal plants - without nuclear power.
That denial of change, results in a build up of "change-debt", which then unloads in uncontrolled, dangerous events in leaps and bounds. All that autistic attempt to control reality to run on a rail, results on reality lashing ut to the systems opposed to it.
We’re talking about a place that can make you wait five months just to change a job.
I assume most protests are driven by a Not In My Backyard attitude.
It's worse than that, its culture war driven in a lot of cases. Doesn't matter if it's anywhere close to their back yard.
Yeah, but those people still have roads, large buildings and factories in their backyard.
You can't have civilization without roads, so people naturally accept them. Large buildings and factories are not common in the countryside, and people do protest when you try building them in their backyards. No different than wind farms.
> Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal
You probably don't even need to remove the turbines if you don't want to? I imagine nature would take over just fine with them left there.
Giant metal towers make a dead tall tree look harmless by comparison. If that topples - and eventually it will - it will kill everybody in its path. So, we're probably not going to just leave on-shore wind turbines to rot.
Off-shore definitely. The UK already had a bunch of decaying archaic man-made structures off shore because of World War II, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts which I went to look at a few weeks back. Pieces of the forts clearly break off and disappear into the sea without incident.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy - they listen to propaganda saying that the value of houses near wind farms drops, that itself causes the price to drop.
Landed gentry complaining that their country estate is not as picturesque as it once was.
> Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nature to take over again.
Deconstructing a wind turbine is far from simple and cheap.
Isn't the idea of npp decommissioning to leave the area as it was before npp? Environmental impact of different techs was described in UNECE report I think
Uneconomical. The best way to dispose of things like the weakly radioactive reactor hulls is often to simply leave them when they are.
They aren't particularly dangerous, and they don't leach contaminants. So you just bury them so no one can access them too easily. But it does require leaving the sealed reactor buildings in place - even if you can reuse the rest of the land and the exclusion area.
I think it's still done as full dismantling (but maybe not all countries?). French superphenix will be basically erased. Something similar is happening to german plants like Isar 2
Some countries may have postponed decommissioning because it's cheaper to wait a bit Some countries allow recycling of some stuff, even concrete, like Italy
> given support to these fake public interest groups in attempts to sue wind projects out of existence.
Remember - that's the core issue. Development of housing or green energy projects or industries with low externalities should be by-right.
"Weaponized activists" was an instrument of non-market competition for a long while now.
It's kind of a more modern, more legal take on "send some mobsters to mess them up". You find (or make) an activist group opposing a certain development - and then covertly funnel funding and support to them so that they can do as much damage as possible and stall your competition for as long as possible.
Yup, and George Soros does actually funds pro-wind groups. Open Society Foundation gives $400 million over 8 years to green economic development. That said, I think that's a bullshit argument for not supporting wind, and I'd much rather have an argument with data about the long-term economics.
You’ll notice these are not at all comparable because Soros does not have an obvious financial interest in wind supplanting oil
I read the article but it's still unclear what argument the anti-wind groups use to say _why_ "wind is bad for environment/our children/the economy/greater good"?
Ruins the view, kills birds, noisy is the usual trifecta. Or to quote one site I won't deign to link to, "Protecting the marine environment and ecosystems from the industrialisation of our oceans."
Of course, the same folks have no objections whatsoever to offshore drilling.
Those are the weaker arguments. In the UK, I've heard many more convincing arguments against wind power.
e.g.
- Often wind typically need to be subsidised heavily by the government and are not cost effective over its lifetime.
- Typically wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear power generators as it is unreliable or you need to buy capacity from elsewhere.
I won't pretend to know enough to state whether they are valid arguments or not. But they are potentially much stronger arguments against wind power than the others frequently made.
> Often wind typically need to be subsidised heavily by the government and are not cost effective over its lifetime.
Have you looked at the government subsidies for nuclear in the UK and the massive lifetime cost? In terms of offshore wind - initially it was subsidized to get it up and running - but now it's established those have dropped and dropped.
> Typically wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear power generators as it is unreliable or you need to buy capacity from elsewhere.
Sure - but no-one is claiming 100% wind is the target - total strawman argument. The UK goverments own net zero plan actually still includes gas generation!
One of the more bonkers arguments in the UK was when there was a massive fossil fuel price shock a couple of years ago due to wars and rising global demand - the fossil fuel lobby blamed rewnewables for the high prices!
It is still subsidised and costs (as reflected in CFD bids) have stopped decreasing.
The need for backup is not an argument against wind in itself. But it is important to consider the full system costs of wind generation, which includes the backup costs as well as the additional transmission infrastructure.
The unfortunate reality is that possibly the biggest contributor to higher prices is the phasing out of coal. Without coal there is no cheap base load - unless you happen to be somewhere blessed with hydro - and the market ends up swinging between feast and famine based on the availability of renewables.
Obviously there are very good reasons to get rid of coal, but it leads to higher prices. Reducing fossil fuels in the grid will be expensive and I worry that the lack of candor from politicians on this will end up making the transition more difficult politically.
Didn't AR6/AR7 actually increased in UK?
> Have you looked at the government subsidies for nuclear in the UK and the massive lifetime cost? In terms of offshore wind - initially it was subsidized to get it up and running - but now it's established those have dropped and dropped.
I said I don't know. I said had heard the argument and these are examples of better arguments against wind IMO if they are true.
I don't know what to believe. I am dubious of any reporting on these issues.
> Sure - but no-one is claiming 100% wind is the target - total strawman argument. The UK goverments own net zero plan actually still includes gas generation!
Neither are they claiming wind is 100% the target.
> One of the more bonkers arguments in the UK was when there was a massive fossil fuel price shock a couple of years ago due to wars and rising global demand - the fossil fuel lobby blamed rewnewables for the high prices!
I don't remember this. I am sure people will point the finger elsewhere rather than themselves.
I blame the high prices on fuel duty and taxes. Fuel Duty is 52.95 pence per litre and then you have to add VAT. The current diesel price is ~£1.40 per litre at the local Tesco filling station. So that is ~50% of the cost if I am understanding this correctly.
https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-shopping/fuel-duty
> I said I don't know. I said had heard the argument and these are better arguments against wind IMO if they are true. > I don't know what to believe. I am dubious of any reporting on these issues.
The person didn’t ask if you know, they asked if you had looked at reports. You cannot for once believe there weren’t subsidies as these endeavors are very time consuming with hundreds of regulations that need to be met.
> Neither are they claiming wind is 100% the target.
What do you perceive when they say wind is not reliable and increase electricity costs? I mean, it is free electricity, with minimal impact.
The way you understand about gas prices, while dismissing some arguments in favor of renewables is a bit telling.
> The person didn’t ask if you know, they asked if you had looked at reports.
Obviously not. I said as much. I've listened to good arguments for and against it and I don't know what to believe.
My comments were simply about the fact that you could make better arguments than the ones that were presented.
> What do you perceive when they say wind is not reliable and increase electricity costs? I mean, it is free electricity, with minimal impact.
It isn't free electricity. There is a cost to constructing them, maintaining them and decommissioning them when they become EOL.
If the wind doesn't blow, they don't generate electricity. This means that there is more demand on other sources. So price is driven by supply and demand. All of this the energy company will factor into your tariff. So obviously it is going to affect the price of electricity.
> The way you understand about gas prices, while dismissing some arguments in favor of renewables is a bit telling.
Understanding a basic tax calculation that is listed on a government website is relatively easy and took a few seconds for me to guestimate. It is much more difficult for layman (like myself) to understand the Total Cost of Ownership of a Wind Turbine, it ROI and understanding whether that maybe a good investment.
I wasn't arguing for or against wind. I was saying there are arguments against wind that might be better than the ones are often highlighted. You are mistaking me highlighting there are potentially better arguments, with agreeing with those arguments.
> Typically wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear power generators as it is unreliable or you need to buy capacity from elsewhere.
I have never understood this complaint about solar and wind. If we could have our electricity 100% generated by green sources most of the time and then rely on other sources (even natural gas) to supplement when there isn't enough being generated by solar and wind I would weep with joy. That'd be an astonishingly huge victory in the fight against climate change. I wouldn't even care if we needed significant government subsidies to ensure that the gas plants stay profitable while their demand is unpredictable.
If you need to get your power from elsewhere. This raises several issues:
- This increases demand on other sources of energy. If there is a sudden change in demand you have a price spike. This leads to an increase in price to consumers.
- If the grid also has to be re-balanced. This has a financial cost in of itself. If the grid can't be re-balanced you can have blackouts. Blackout can potentially kill people, it effects business etc.
- If you are getting it from other countries, this means you are reliant on another nation for your energy needs. This is a security issue. e.g. Norway threatened to ration energy exports back in 2022. This would of course increase the price.
- Energy prices have a knock affect to everything in the economy and are a significant driver of price inflation. This obvious has an adverse affect on the economy.
Subsidies are paid for via taxation. At the moment the UK is likely to increase taxation again in October as they were unable to cut benefits earlier this year. The larger the subsidies a government are paying the more money they need collect in taxation, or you have to borrow. The UK is unlikely to be able to collect much more tax, and we are borrowing a huge amount of money as it is.
The UK used to have very high subsidies for offshore wind for some reason. The last I've heard, subsidies for new plants are much lower today.
As for being cost effective, onshore wind is probably the cheapest option, and I think it's hoped that offshore will come close to that once more of the learning curve has been traversed. Perhaps fossil gas from the North sea is still cheaper for now, if you ignore the external cost.
I think solar power is even cheaper, but doesn't deliver much in the winter so far up north.
Backup: Batteries are cost effective for short term shortages. For long term shortages, you'd fire up thermal plants, either biomass or biogas (fossil gas for now).
It doesn't make sense to back up wind with nuclear. Nuclear has a high capital cost and relatively low running costs, so you don't save much from being standby but you still need to pay back the loans.
Offshore wind is indeed expensive and requires high CFD's. For onshore it's still manageable (yet). The reason is solar eats part of their profits and payoff becomes too long
Firming argument is valid, but UK deploys nuclear/gas anyway. You can start feeling real challenges past ~70% ren generation - firming becomes more expensive due to opex but you still need it and gas opex is smaller vs nuclear in this low utilization area. So now you are in a moral dilema- ditch nuclear and build gas firming or reorganize capacity market so that nuclear has some CFD or is compensated for firming&grid stabilization (not all nuclear can operate in island mode so that's another factor)
Germany choose the path of gas expansion if you read Fraunhofer. UK is still in a mix. Nordics are lucky with hydro so they can expand basically all low carbon tech
Nordics (Sweden, Finland) are expanding nuclear as well. Their energy ministers are very pro-nuclear, for some funny reason.
The reason is peak demand. If your demand is say 5GW and hydro can provide max 3GW, unless you overbuild ren, it's 'easier' to have some more firm power while ren will act as water savers for hydro (especially considering droughts).
For now they have sufficient power, but considering nuclear timelines, you better start now
Enhanced geothermal could play a role here, but for now it's debatable.
They have lots potential for wind (~20%) and hydro. Peak demand is increasing, but lasts for very specific amounts of time during a day, it doesn’t justify the increases in base load. These peaks could be certainly fulfilled by smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification before new building new power plants. Yet, many of these will be needed despite nuclear, but since nuclear is the elephant in the room, they are going with it first, while stalling everything else. They are even trying to convince Germany to do the same.
"smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification" - electrification increases the demand, maybe you meant efficiency?
Demand response is basically - please don't use power because we don't have enough or because it's expensive. That's not an appealing option.
Smart grid management is good but it'll take years to reach good condition - you need to expand/upgrade transmission and distribution systems with proper equipment.
Germany has it's own path that's more or less stable for a long time- coal+gas firming, tons of ren and major transmission expenses, to the point govt will start subsidizing them
The problem is the cost of oil is downstream. The reasons why citizens want an alternative is because of those costs. If you added on all the environmental and health costs — all of them — you'd find oil is being subsidized in a different way.
I'm not even antioil in general but I am pro diversification, and think it's absurd to bring up government in that way when a major point of government should be to represent value for the citizens, that might not be represented in the market otherwise.
Oil is often subsidized directly too.
Same reason why agriculture is - too vital of an industry. Which might make sense from a national security standpoint - but it also gives the oil industry yet another reason to fight tooth and nail against anything that can diminish the importance of oil.
If oil ever became non-vital to the country's infrastructure and economy, those subsidies would stop, and the entire industry might go the way of British coal.
Of course, the UK subsidizes fossil fuels by way of the NHS (asthma and lung disease are no joke) but that is apparently fine.
Different arguments work on different people.
> Of course, the same folks have no objections whatsoever to offshore drilling.
Well, if they were entirely sincere in their concern for the view, the birds, and the noise, only one of those concerns would apply to offshore drilling.
Considering "preventing industrialization" to be an end in itself is something different, usually associated with being pro-wind-power.
I don't know about those groups, but the arguments I saw so far are these:
In the end Economy is most likely the only thing that matters. But I guess this is not looking so good - if it would be looking good you'd see more logos of big energy companies on all these mills...From what I understand the point is precisely not having to straight up say out loud why, "attacking renewable energy solutions without necessarily questioning the science that the climate is changing due to human activity".
Two argument seem to be to "claim damages from the visual impact of offshore with projects located off their coasts" and "invoking the federal environment legislation such as the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act".
One version, frequently bandied about, is the excerpt from Landman, a recent fictional TV drama (5 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmbZwxEnAFc
There is, of course, a debunking video response (14 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKVNFqqzvP4
NIMBYism (destroying the beautiful views from my golf course) and "Think of the birds" also feature high on the list.
Who needs argument in 2025 ? Just say it is "woke".
Always reminded of the Tom Toro (2012) New Yorker cartoon:
> Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
* https://www.instagram.com/tbtoro/p/B_SdEVThgCr/
* https://www.insidehook.com/culture/story-tom-toro-new-yorker...
I too think of that cartoon regularly. Direct link on The New Yorker website:
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
I recommend you put that one on your list instead because Instagram is very hostile to people trying to see anything without an account. The one on The New Yorker website is open to all and on the Internet Archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250808141700/https://www.newyo...
Thank you for sharing the interview. I hadn’t come across it before. The cartoon is more popular than I realised, which makes me glad.
The Instagram one is entirely a single image so people will find it easier to share via social media.
Not for anyone without an Instagram account, which is most people on social media. But sure, here are several alternatives as single images for you to share on social media. Took me no time at all to take a screenshot and upload to a bunch of websites. Take your pick.
https://ibb.co/gMCPwzg5
https://postimg.cc/RNsT6bJJ
https://freeimage.host/i/tomtoroplanet.K2WBfYN
https://imgur.com/a/D4nEijI
> Not for anyone without an Instagram account
This is a lie - I have never had an instagram account and I was able to hop on there and copy the image.
(it might be of interest to some that the image shared by the artist on Instagram has the text justified how the artist intended and the New Yorker's text caption can look different depending on the device, but I can't pretend that I care too much about that...)
> Take your pick.
Why did you bother? I'm fully capable of googling a famous image and I'm sure everyone else reading this stuff is.
> I have never had an instagram account and I was able to hop on there and copy the image.
This time you were. I get sent Instagram links semi-regularly and it’s a gamble when they’ll work. And there are two other people on this thread who replied directly to you, before your comment, saying they wouldn’t have bothered to even try.
> it might be of interest to some that the image shared by the artist on Instagram has the text justified how the artist intended
Is it, now? Then why is the text justified entirely differently on their own website, their Etsy store, and their official link on Cartoon Collections?
https://tomtoro.com/cartoons/
https://www.etsy.com/listing/510225080/signed-print-of-my-ne...
https://www.cartoonstock.com/cartoon?searchID=CC137952
And look at that, it’s the exact same crop I chose for my screenshot. Almost as if I tried to respect the author’s choice, even though I very much doubt they are anal-retentive about how the text is laid out. They likely changed it for Instagram to fit better into the obligatory square.
> Why did you bother?
Perhaps cut it a bit with the hostility? It’s not like my screenshot harmed you in any way.
> Is it, now? Then why is the text justified entirely differently on their own website, their Etsy store, and their official link on Cartoon Collections?
You have posed a potentially interesting (and well researched!) question that would probably be more fruitfully targeted at someone who did not make the effort to state "but I can't pretend that I care too much about that..."
I found it quite truthful, but I also blacklist social media in my host file. I recommend blacklisting social media, it makes the world a better place.
It's not a bad idea.
I (and I assume I'm not alone in this) rarely even bother clicking on Instagram or "X" posts because I can't be bothered with all the hassle when all I want to do is quickly view the content, and I'm not willing to gamble on whether or not it's going to work.
Seconded. I don’t have an Instagram account and never will.
"Creating value for shareholders" has done more for sustainability than eco-activists could ever hope to.
Industrial capitalists make mass produced LED lights and cheap solar panels. Eco-activists push for anti-nuclear laws and plastic straw bans.
It's pretty telling that oil lobbyists resort to non-market methods like bribing politicians to stall renewables. They know the time is running out - with all the new power generation and storage tech that's in the pipeline, fossil fuels just aren't going to be economically viable forever. Renewables are rising, and there is no moat - all the existing oil assets those companies hold are going to be increasingly useless as more and more of the world's power comes from non-fossil sources.
"Stall" is about the extent of it though. You can't fight economic forces off forever.
Industrial capitalists irrevocably destroy large tracts of public and private land. Eco-activists lobby to at least have them cover the clean-up bill, if not incurr punitive fines. This goes back to 1969 when the EPA was set up when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught fire due to pollution from industrial waste. Some other highlights of "Creating value for shareholders"
Deepwater Horizon oil spill: Largest marine oil spill in U.S. history. BP paid over $20 billion in fines and compensation.
Love Canal: Occidental Petroleum dumped toxic waste into the Love Canal in Niagara Falls, resulting in pollution causing birth defects. $130 million in settlements.
Exxon Valdez oil spill: Alaska’s Prince William Sound contaminated with 11 million gallons of crude oil. Exxon paid over $1 billion in cleanup and compensation.
DuPont Chemical leak: DuPont contaminated the drinking water of over 300,000 people. $670 million in settlements.
Hinkley Groundwater Contamination: PG&E contaminated groundwater with chromium-6 in California. $333 million in settlements.
Volkswagen Emissions Scandal: Volkswagen cheated on emissions tests. $25 billion in settlements.
Kingston Fossil Plant Coal Ash Spill: A retention pond breached, releasing over 1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge into the surrounding area. Cleanup cost over $1 billion.
> Eco-activists push for anti-nuclear laws and plastic straw bans.
Seems like a myopic strawman to me. The main eco-activism that I remember for the last couple of decades has been for reduced fossil-fuel use. This is now being translated into policy in Europe especially, which has massively increased the market for renewables that the "industrial capitalists" can take advantage of.
The damage is done.
Today, the best alternative to fossil fuels is renewables - but 40 years ago, it was nuclear. If eco-activists made sensible decisions, fossil fuel power could have been curbed back then.
Instead, we got what we got. Eco-activists, being what they are, made vibe-based policy decisions, and the vibe of nuclear power was Very Bad and Glowing Acid Green and Way Too Industrial. So nuclear power was strangled with activism and overregulation in many countries, if not banned outright.
So we had to sit on fossil fuel power for those 40 years - until the economics of renewables finally became more favorable. Which, again, happened not because eco-activists willed it into existence - but because industrial capitalists developed the relevant technologies and pushed them into mass production.
What would have happened in an alternate world where renewables just weren't economical? Would the world sit on fossil fuels for another 40 years, until fusion power actually materialized?
> If eco-activists made sensible decisions, fossil fuel power could have been curbed back then.
It's about the money. "Eco-activists" can't achieve shit if there's no money in it. Think about all the other things they've been trying to kill - meat, fossil fuels, jet travel - and are nowhere near succeeding. Why do you think that is?
Fossil fuel interests killed nuclear. "Eco-activists" took the rap. And everyone else fell for it.
The only reason the economics of renewables became favorable is because of German subsidies. They created the market conditions to incentivize the Chinese ramp up of solar manufacturing and the blooming of the European wind turbine industry. It wasn't a case of happenstance. Humanity owes a debt to the German taxpayer.
No. The economics of renewables were trending that way before Germany took notice. That was why renewables were considered a promising technology in the first place.
At best, you can make a claim that because of Germany's push, renewables got to today's price point a few years sooner. Which is quite valuable, but not a make-it-or-break-it difference.
>Industrial capitalists make mass produced LED lights and cheap solar panels.
Wow, those cheap solar panels were done entirely by the private sector? Without decades of government-backed research on how to make solar panels viable to mass-produce?
Without eco-activists lobbying for government-funded research on solar panels, there would be no mass production, because nobody is paying $100k/kW.
And making cheap LEDs doesn't necessarily reduce energy use, thanks to the rebound effect - we've known this since Lord Jevon noted that James Watt's new ultra-efficient steam engine increased demand for coal instead of reducing it, because it made steam engines cheaper to run. If you look at car headlights, you'll find that instead of using LEDs to reduce power use, car-makers instead used them to crank up the lumens as far as humanly possible. They only save power on paper, when underwritten by implicit environmental optimism.
Note that I'm not opposed to "creating value for shareholders"; they made cheap solar panels possible. I'm saying that powerful economic forces require far more precise alignment than you'd think for them to be useful, and they are almost never conveniently placed in the right spot by chance.
If you look at car headlights or flashlights, then yes, because more brightness is very desirable there. If you look at the average lightbulb though?
It's pretty clear that people didn't replace their 100W incandescent bulbs with 200W worth of LEDs. Modern LED lights sit in a range of 6W to 20W - which is a factor of 5 reduction in power draw no matter how you cut it.
Wind is only useful up to a point, once it gets above 20% of generation capacity ensuing grid stability becomes expensive either through huge price swings or grid level energy storage.
This talking point is years out of date. We’re doing grid-level energy storage already. Expect more.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-06/what-australia-can-le...
> For the first time ever, California's batteries took over gas as the primary source for supplying evening power demand in April, providing "akin to the output from seven large nuclear reactors" one evening, according to the New York Times.
These batteries last a few minutes when they are fully charged. In the winter it's not unusual to have close to zero wind power for a few days and it could come after a few weeks of lower output, so they aren't fully charged.
You'll notice in your article they are almost always talking about power instead of energy because energy is the problem.
We still need about 100 - 1000x improvements to rely on batteries without reliable power plants, depending on how much the generation capacity is overbuilt.
If only we could model how frequently there was zero wind and whether that calculates with zero solar. Oh wait, we can, and we do. It's not even hard.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
In reality we will still have a lot of fossil generation which will make it 'easier'.
The recent full blackout in Iberia was caused by renewables destabilizing the grid, and the fossil plants were cold so couldn't save the day. Having fossil plants is of no use if they were mandated by the government to turn themselves off.
The causes were complex interactions and the October report has not yet been released.
There are numerous camps with strong impassioned and conflicting arguments as to cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
The grid operator did release a report, and it stated that the problem was desynchronization of a solar farm, followed by more frequency destabilization as they tried to combat the first problem, followed by a panicked attempt to bring gas plants back online but they weren't available. They'd been switched off to make way for solar and would have taken hours to warm up.
The only sense in which there are conflicting arguments, is that the leftist Spanish government read the above report and concluded that it was the fault of the gas plants for not being available when they were needed. Because they were switched off. Because of their own policies. This is not an argument that deserves genuine consideration.
It's not out of date. BESS has different utility in different weather areas. Germany would need the equivalent of 20-30y of global bess deployments to ditch fossils, not considering realistic power transfer or weather forecast. That's why even their pro ren Fraunhofer ISE recommended gas expansion
Sure you need baseload/storage as part of the mix - however where do you get the 20% figure from?
For the past year in the UK the average is ~30% generation from wind. https://grid.iamkate.com/
So seems it's possible. Swings in generation are dealt with via inter-country interconnects, pumped storage and gas turbine generation. Nuclear adds a steady base.
Finland at 24% and increasing steadily.
The argument was about the cost, UK having highest prices on the continent (depending how you count subsidies for others) but 20% seems too low anyway. Normal plants are still fine at 60% cf
The UK has insane prices because of their refusal to do regional pricing to accommodate grid constraints. They'd rather pay wind farms to park their turbines, than to segment their grid pricing (i.e. make energy prices cheaper where there is a surplus of wind generation).
The UK's prices are a political choice due to the mapping of voters over the energy generation distribution.
We also have this rather unusual energy market where the price for energy is set by the supplier with the highest price necessary to meet demand at any particular time, and all the suppliers get paid that price. Most countries use a system where the suppliers get paid how much it costs for them to generate individually, and the users pay an average of that all.
No, most countries use the same merit order mechanism like UK. The difference is that in those countries gas peakers are competing with cheaper hydro (nordics), coal(Germany) or nuclear (france). UK nuclear is pretty small, so gas competes only with itself for setting the price.
Curtailing renewbles due to grid constraints is usually a perfectly rational decision. New generation, new storage, new demand and new grid connections don't always happen on the same schedule.
Now, banning onshore wind in England for a decade when it was the cheapest source of energy available. That's just plain stupid (or a corrupt gift to your mates in gas companies).
Isn't regional pricing dangerous for industry if it's concentrated in wrong areas and moving it isn't easy?
It means that the industry has to actually follow economics, and build supply where the demand is.
But it followed economics. What you are saying is that now you want to screw it, because moving industry/trained labor to other areas isn't a plug and play option- it's a huge investment which could lead to closures
The government, by saying that there was a single zone, despite the electricity not actually working that way (because interconnectors don't have infinite capacity), were defying economics.
By breaking the country in to zones, where the electricity that's bought can actually reach the users they then apply the actual economics of the system properly, and encourage suppliers to build where the demand can be satisfied by them.
But in the past it made sense to have a single zone- prices were similar. So industry developed where possible. Now what you ask is that due to the ren generation, the pricing should change, so that industry that was formed long before current ren push needs to restructure/move to more advantageous locations because otherwise it'll use competitiveness. If you are fine with such development and it's consequences, you could ask for such reforms.
Situation is very similar in Germany - most industry is concentrated in the south while most productive wind in the north. In the past it didn't matter since prices were similar with coal. But now, since you can't magically create wind in low wind/unproductive areas, the options are either split zones and kill part of industry, which Germany doesn't want, or to keep a single zone and build expensive transmission like sudlink.
Oil is only useful up to a point, once your planetary ecosystem starts to collapse it gets a lot more expensive
The oil stays cheap. It’s everything else that gets expensive.
Not true. 100% variable renewable energy (VRE) grids are found to be economically viable almost anywhere on the planet.[1] These are grids which don't require any fossil fuel "firming".
From the IEA report: "Substantiated by in-depth case studies, this report infers that, almost anywhere on the planet, nearly 100% VRE power grids firmly supplying clean power and meeting demand 24/365 are not only possible but would be economically viable, provided that VRE resources are optimally transformed from unconstrained run-of-the weather generation into firm generation."[1]
However, propagandists routinely spread misinformation on firming. For example, they might cite the absolutely absurd LFSCOE which is funded by the energy sector's equivalent of the Center for Indoor Air Research[2][3][4].
[1] https://iea-pvps.org/key-topics/firm-power-generation/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
[3] https://www.desmog.com/2016/01/10/rice-university-s-baker-in...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Indoor_Air_Research
This is false. Take a look at Denmark. This argument was repeated there in the past for "above X", with X being 15%, 20%, 30%, 50%.
Not necessarily disagreeing, but Denmark's grid is integrated with europe. If the rest of europe catches up with Denmark in wind power, that will definitely be a challenge, since wind speeds are correlated across the continent. Not unsolvable, but it's an issue for sure.
That's true of all renewable energy sources. So we should take advantage of all of them, as much as is feasible.
It's fairly rare that there is no wind at all, especially at wind turbine height, and if you have 100 different wind farms spread out across different regions you'll usually have a decent amount of them producing at any given moment. We can also use batteries of various kinds to handle peaks and valleys, not to mention solar, hydro, nuclear and some gas to pick up slack when necessary.
I don't think anyone is expecting wind farms to supply anywhere near 100% of energy production. Probably not even 50%.
As I'm fond of saying, if you want to find True Bird Lovers, try constructing some windmills. They stay silent for oil spills and habitat destruction for fossil fuel exploration but they come out of the woodwork the minute they sense a wind turbine.
Astroturfing has been the favorite MO of harmful industries like tobacco, oil, and defense for a long time now.
It's sad that this has become so normal, and that they can pressure opponents into silence. I'm wondering if we'll ever get rid of this.
Remove defense from that list, they are the good guys now. I see you already omitted pharmaceutical industry so you're at least almost up to date
Obligatory Simpsons clip from 32 years ago :
https://youtu.be/7D_eAtU4_DA?si=Ynafg1d_G-GRo5vM
Surprised Pikachu face. There is an entire well-funded ecosystem of "academic" research, think tanks, policy groups and so on that exist solely to propagandize the status quo.
It goes well beyond that though. I always like to tell the story of Steven Donziger to show just how corrupt this system is.
Ecuador of course has less regulation than the US and oil company went down there and made a total mess. Steven Donziger, an American lawyer, went down there and helped the people and the governemnt sue Chevron and won a $9.5 billion judgement in 2011 to clean this up.
Chevron didn't like this, withdrew their assets from Ecuador and went back to the US and sued Donziger in federal court. The judgement was deemed to be fraudulent (based pretty much on a video tape where Donziger and a minister were at the same event years earlier).
But it didn't end there. Donziger was disbarred for this. Chevron made a complaint to the Department of Justice to criminally prosecute Donziger. The DoJ declined.
But it didn't end there. The federal judge appointed a private law firm that served Chevron to criminally prosecute Donziger for not turning over a computer and other work products that were absolutely covered by attorney-client privilege. This is a little-known and little-used law for private prosecution.
Donziger was placed on house arrest with an $800,000 bail for years for contempt of court.
Donziger claims Chevron has spent in excess of $2 billion in legal fees on all this.
Don't doubt for a second that the courts don't work directly for the interests of corporations and capital owners. In fact, this is about the best way to determine how the Supreme Court will rule on key matters: what benefits the wealthy. It's not strictly true. There are exceptions but it's amazing how often it's correct.
The courts have now been packed with Christian Nationalists who will absolutely weaponize the bench in future years against climate activists and probably get them declared terrorist organizations. That's just the reality we live in now.
Not saying this isn't a real issue, but the degree of bias in this reporting (and indeed in the original article) is not the most comfortable here either.
I mean, is it really surprising that a law company with expertise in the energy sector would handle energy clients? And is it really surprising that a publication with clear bias harming the reputation of its clients would elicit a legal response?
How did the publication even get through peer review in the first place without a reviewer requesting the equivalent links for other energy sources to ensure this wasn't effectively p-hacking?
A major reason I don't treat conspiracy theorists seriously is that with all their paranoia they have a huge blind spot for the Captain-Planet-cartoon-villainy the oil industry is engaging in.
Just the stuff the Heartland Institute does is enough to write a book about and still not a peep from the usual crowd.
It is more likely they just don't care about the oil industry and focus their attention elsewhere. I would wager that most people assume that large corporations have dirty secrets.
e.g. I listen to a guy that goes exposes the conmen in the UFO community. The reason the guy focuses on UFOs is because he believes that when he was younger he saw a UFO. Over time he slowly realised over time that he had been lied to by these conmen. He isn't interested in the truth about the oil industry, he cares about the truth around UFO encounters because that is what he cares about.
If you don't treat conspiracy theorists seriously, how would you know if the conspiracy theory scene has already addressed oil industry corruption?
The War-for-Oil conspiracy theories are proven correct.
The suppression of 'free energy' is discussed widely as being a result of oil-industry repression.
And on and on.
You can learn about a scene without thinking they're competent.
It doesn't really prove war for oil, war tends to mess up production and also we have a huge amount of domestic production. But that depends on what exactly the claims are.
"Free energy" doesn't exist so that just goes back to them barking up the wrong tree. It's taking a real villain and blaming them for nonsense instead of something they actually do.
> how would you know if the conspiracy theory scene has already addressed oil industry corruption?
Because it hasn't. The "free energy" stuff is way off the mark and pales in comparison to absolute kookery of weather machines being responsible for things climate change is actually doing.
They don't have a solid grasp of reality and it shows in how they're unaware about the specific things the oil industry is doing. Much of their rhetoric is big oil propaganda being repeated anyway.
War for oil isn't a conspiracy - it's such obvious public knowledge that there are memes about it. Yes, the country that is a major oil producer and in the currency of which most if not all oil transactions are done uses its military might to preserve the status quo - that's hardly a secret.
War for oil is a conspiracy, but an unprosecuted one.
Your disdain for the conspiracy theorist scene is mirrored in that scenes disdain for justice.
In the case where there is actionable justice that can be achieved, the conspiracy theory is no longer a theory - the conspiracy is prosecuted in the courts of our proud nations' democratic institutions.
Plenty of conspiracy theorists have conspiracies about the oil industry being evil, it's just harder to spot them when so many of them turn out to be true. Fracking, OPEC, exxon, BP, government deals with "suspicious" Saudis, and oil spills are common targets. The wild stuff is pretty much the usual though. Depopulation, psychic attacks, secret global government stuff, UFOs, etc.
The disgust this article invokes is overwhelming.
I n my ideal world these people would be prosecuted.
But we live in their ideal world, not yours
This is a systematic problem, the exact same thing happened with leaded gas already (industry sponsored scientists spreading misinformation on toxicity, lawfare against scientists that uncover/publish inconvenient truths) but there were zero consequences.
Our current system makes it much too easy to hold on to profits even when direct negative externalitites cost millions of human life-years.
So let's vote them out
Also write them a very stern letter, That'll show'em.
The only way to stop those people is boots-on-the-ground political, social, and cultural activism. No, writing mean tweets and just taking part to that fancy "guess your next leader" powerball variant you do once every four years is not remotely enough.
Cute that you think there will be an election. Why do you think have all controlling and independent agencies that are part of the election process or cybersecurity been removed in the first week via executive orders?
I would love to obtain a handbook on how to convince moronic far-right leaning neighbors to change or at least soften their stance. I usually just tell them to fuck off, which apparently is not that much effective.
> love to obtain a handbook on how to convince moronic far-right leaning neighbors to change or at least soften their stance
Real answer? Pick a battle and commit to it. That means allying with folks who agree with you—or have an incentive to agree—on your one issue with whom you may strongly disagree on other policy or even moral positions. This doesn’t need to be a permanent alliance, after all, just a transactional one to achieve a goal.
Just be careful not to turn into a 1-issue voter. There's a lot of people out there that vote for the candidate that agrees with them on the one issue they consider the most important... and they ignore the substantial amount of evil that candidate does that's _not_ that one issue.
This can be… risky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National...
Dont call them moronic. Don't tell them to fuck off.
If you HONESTLY want to try to convince people that these politicians and industries are a net negative you can not just sit there and call people fucking idiots. It makes a person retreat into their view that much more. You have to just calmly explain things. Sometimes you have to explain that thing a lot.
A lot of people who voted right wing are looking for reasons to re-evaluate their decisions. Dont give them a reason to double down by calling them fucking mornons. Soft language will win this fight.
> Sometimes you have to explain that thing a lot.
This.
Sometimes I think I want people to change their minds extremely and instantaneously. When I look at the micro-changes they make, and have the endurance to see these changes over time, they can actually make extreme changes and in a short period of time. It's just rarely instantaneously extreme.
> A lot of people who voted right wing are looking for reasons to re-evaluate their decisions
i dont believe this to be the case. If they have such a reason, then surely they would've already examined it much earlier and came to a conclusion under which they won't have been a right wing voter in the first place.
So there's something else at play, such as preconceived notions, or the inability to sort out facts from fiction (being presented as fact on TV), that makes them behave the way they did.
If your only advice is to not insult people then this really isn't helpful.
> A lot of people who voted right wing are looking for reasons to re-evaluate their decisions
If only
step one, stop calling them "moronic far-right leaning neighbors" ;)
The problem is, what you're talking about is essentially cult deprogramming. And (AFAIK) that's a) very, very hard, b) something one does one person or small family group at a time, and c) a process that requires some kind of personal bond with the people you're deprogramming (so if you don't have one going in, you have to be willing and able to form one).
The far, far easier (at that end of things) way to solve our problems would be to shift our economic policies to favor the poor at the expense of the very wealthy, because a huge share of the cause of their stubborn stances is economic insecurity. But unfortunately, that...probably requires getting them on board, at least to some extent. (Not to mention actually having a free and fair election again, which...looks pretty dodgy at the moment.)
> I usually just tell them to fuck off
and then everyone clapped
That implies you don't believe the story? There is zero reason to disbelieve something as mundane as telling someone to fuck off.
Anti-wind groups are oil-funded? Surprised Pikachu.
I agree although I think the value of the piece is in literally mapping out the relationships, and in explaining the extent of the problems, such as in ties to defunding an entire university's research budget over it.
Only the ones not funded by Russia.
Well, Russia itself is oil founded (huge part of the budget)
It’s not a coincidence that the weird red carpet summit in Alaska for Putin apparently focused on joint energy projects with this shambolic administration.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-russian-officials...
Why tho? Oil money should be funding renewables so they continue making money.
Shell at one point started doing that in the UK, they installed a number of offshore wind turbines. Then they sold them and doubled down on oil.
What I think is really weird in the world today is the power companies don't seem interested in selling more power. A parallel branch of Wind and Solar companies are doing all the installations and running the power but not to the extent of bringing new capacity online, its all purely for replacing the old coal and gas systems. Quite a lot of companies are having to buy their own installations and run them so they can have their new data centre.
China has to import 70% of its oil so it needs to focus on renewables. If the US doesn't produce enough oil for its own needs, it too would be building solar and wind at scale I presume. But the US is a net oil exporter.
For oil companies, smooth transition to renewables == lost profits.
They'd rather see world go through an energy crisis which will make their profits skyrocket, before we eventually de-fossilize.
oil is a huge mistake at this point, as any country that is investing in a solar/wind/renewables GRID, is watching there costs go into freefall, not just freefall, but costs that are disconected from energy markets built on consumable fuels and therefor stable and predictable. many countrys are figuring out that energy stability = societal/cultural stability and are slowly backing away from the chaos and ongoing disaster of oil/carbon
It's because renewables aren't what customers naturally want, that's why grids have to be forced to take their output using preference schemes and subsidies.
The financial modeling also relies heavily on the assumption of government preference (hard if there is a huge lobby who hates your guts) and wind speeds holding constant (wind speeds are falling and this is blowing holes in wind farm finances).
electricity customers want one thing - cheap, reliable power. Where it comes from does not matter unless there is a price on carbon emissions.
The electricity grid is not "forced" to accept anything. Places like Texas show that economic incentives work for renewable energy. In fact, economic incentives are stronger than disinformation.
Fossil fuel companies and investors control massive oil assets that won't ever be exploited in a world that doesn't use oil at the rate we do. The value of these stranded assets make up a huge fraction of their valuation. To some extent that world is already inevitable, thanks to the huge renewable buildouts happening in China. But the revaluation hasn't come yet, and what the fossil companies are doing now is trying to push it out just a few more years (even a decade) so they can unload. The cost of this is terrible, and it's still doomed to failure, but there's a lot of money on the line.
Also most of the value capture in solar and batteries like literally 70%+ is happening in China, while this could've been a win-win situation it has disturbed a lot of existing equations of the system.
As an example I feel even Gas electricity LCOE equivalent is calculated as Capex + Opex where Capex amortisation over lifetime depends on capacity factor of Gas turbine plant. With more renewable penetration even in a competitive market like ERCOT the LCOE equivalent costs for Gas increases although technically this should drive overall electricity lower and should work for everyone.
This completely creates a significant issue for Natural Gas future too which I think was unthinkable for US Gas producers as it was the safest bet decades into the future.
Not too talk about what even a 3-4% Oil demand destruction in Oil for transportation due to EVs can do to the oil markets.
All this seemed theoretical before but now the tides are finally changing led by China and most of the world has a vested interest in reducing Oil and Gas dependency as most of the world are net importers too.
So all these plays are essentially trying to maximise the cash producing life of the current assets whether it can be achieved by FUD or whatever other means necessary.
You can argue both sides right? It makes business sense for oil money to do that.
However, there's also a trend that giant corporations are kind of like giant oil tankers (no pun intended). It takes a humongous amount of energy to change a company's fundamental core business. Oil companies are in the business of oil. Even if they expand to becoming an energy company, it takes a long time for them to change their "oil DNA". Based on that, I can imagine that certain oil companies - though not all oil companies - elect to maintain the status quo.
I don't think this is unique to big oil. It's unique to big {pharma, tech, oil, *}. What I find harder to find out is what the "weights" are for both sides and how they are influenced.
> Oil money should be funding renewables
not while there's still oil to be extracted. Rigs (esp. offshore ones) take a lot of initial investment, and takes several decades to fully pay out. It's not hard to imagine that those investments hadn't fully matured and so they'd want the demand for oil to continue.
Even when going full renewable and nuclear, demand for existing infrastructure is unlikely to make these rigs unprofitable over the long term. Moving all the economy will take time.
The demand for oil as hydrogen base, plastic and other derivatives will keep those platforms profitable for a long time. Maybe not as massively profitable as now but more than a reasonable ROI. Oh wait, more profits above everything no matter what because the plebs are the only ones affected by it so they don't care.
My very limited understanding is that many of those assets require a certain timeline and rate of oil consumption for the investment to make sense financially. If global oil consumption goes down by say 50%, lots of assets just become worthless (even if someday we use them.)
And renewables are quick money. We need all sort of generation, it's not like renewables are going to replace all oil in near future. Every generation is being swollen up.
The whole point for them is ownership and while you can in effect own oil fields and these companies do, you don't own the wind -- the oil companies weren't smart enough/ early enough to persuade major governments to say oh, actually the wind belongs to BP and Exon.
So Hill Farmer Bob can just put a turbine up on the big hill and get "free" electricity. If there was magically Oil everywhere, and Bob was legally allowed to just drill for it, that's what he would obviously do, but in most places there is no oil and oil companies ensured they control the rights so Bob couldn't drill.
This is what capitalism is about, you own stuff therefore you get free money forever. But you don't own the sun or wind.
Which is weird, because there's precedent for companies owning water rights. The step to owning wind rigths doesn't feel that far.
I'm wondering if the current governmental backlash to wind is just a prelude to getting "wind rights" of vast geographical areas sold to some properly bribing oil corporation.
Then the company can totally control the transition from oil to wind in such a fashion as to extract maximum revenue without having to care about any external competition.
You can actually do both. This way you have full control - invest where you control the market and sabotage where you don't.
Because short-term profits outweigh everything probably.
How and why would “Scientists” be doing any kind of “exposing” in the first place (“scientists” are now some kind of detectives?) and why all the biased language; “anti-wind”, “oil-funded”?
Also why does this feel like cult-like conditioning of, “we the righteous ones against the evil anti-us false opposition”? It is “they hate you, but I love you, and they want to use the state to take your babies away from you so you better come live in my compound” vibes.
That’s propaganda and abuse, especially when “scientists” is used like some kind of omnipotent deity. “The great and wonderful scientists have revealed the truth to us!”
If they are supporting “anti-wind”, who wouldn’t expect oil companies to support opposition? Are people not allowed to oppose your thing? It’s being treated like some kind of heresy against the corrupt church, and only if you support the subsidized, corrupt wind turbine industry that has politicians on the payroll to push selling wind turbines at public expense, are you righteous believers.
The problem is that all industries and all of our governments are massively corrupted and rotten, and everyone wants to get the other-peoples-money the corrupt politicians have to hand out like the despotic kings or lords they effectively have become.
“Oh yes, lord, you are the most gracious lord of all lords for bestowing upon me the lands and peasants that work them”
In the case of America, where do you think much of that $32 Trillion dollars in national debt deficit spending went in the last 25 years?? If you spend any time in the circles of the 0.1% it will become apparent where that money went, even if you can’t understand that it also went into your 1% pockets.
If you’re having a hard time or will never get access to the top 0.1%, reference the graph of the wealth of the richest people.
In the case of Europe and Germany especially now, they’ve been trying to get at the national “savings” of the German people for decades now, and it seems that BlackRock Merz has finally cracked the vault and he’s going to let the thieves plunder Germany and Europe, as he commits $9 billion annually to the Ukraine for absolutely no rational reason and funding the whole EU project to plunder the German savings, while he tells German pensioners that they can’t get what they worked for all their lives because foreigners that have invaded their country need to be prioritized.
I know regular, grounded people who are in “anti wind” groups they themselves founded, who are clearly not “oil funded” and simply oppose “wind” in their local community because they have heard from others about the impacts. They just don’t like deforesting tracts of woodland and natural habitat, putting in massive concrete foundations, digging up orchards, killing thousands of birds, the noise pollution of the turbines son at all, and the massive corruption due to kickbacks, subsidies, and political aspirations; to build wind turbines where there is basically no wind at all and the turbines won’t pay for themselves even with massive price distorting subsidies. They’re not opposed to “wind” in general, just not the corrupted kind that makes no ecological or business sense, to enrich individuals at the public expense.
I personally think the best solution to these things is that supporters not only get signed up to pay for what they support, but they also get bonded to the projects doing what they promised they would do. You support “wind”; ok, great, you get taxed another 10% to pay for the cost and compensation to anyone affected, and if the turbines don’t produce what you said they would, then you pay for full removal, ecologically sound disposal, and ecological restoration.
But it’s always so allowing to be con artists to trick others out of their money instead.
Next you’ll tell me anti-oil groups are wind-funded.
Anti-oil groups are oil funded so that the oil can show they are "responsible" to their boards.
edit: apart from that, no one is willing to pay for a realistic substitute for the fuel oil (marine) or diesel, so the question is actually moot.
I don’t think big oil feels particularly threatened by renewables. They are definitely scared of nuclear and car batteries.
Anthropomorphizing big industries is always fraught, but looking at their actions, I'd concede it means something that the American Gas Association is doing things like hiring influencers to promote gas cooking over induction ranges.
https://www.treehugger.com/the-marketing-of-gas-stoves-never...
Unrelated but gas stoves are really better imo.
Heats faster, doesn’t crack etc.
With induction, heating faster is just a matter of getting a high enough wattage stovetop. So maybe don't compare a low-end induction stove to a gas one? Low-end gas stoves have different problems (reliability, ease of cleaning, etc).
With gas you also have to worry about proper ventilation, and most homes don't actually have that. Not to mention that gas leaks are a risk as well.