They wanted to aggressively support technological advances to reduce the dependence of transportation on petroleum, giving examples of making cars more efficient (they mention doubling gas mileage) and developing more flex-fuel and electric vehicles. They talked about honoraria of many millions of dollars for technological developments that could eliminate the need for gas powered cars.

They also mentioned promoting wireless communication to increase telecommuting options and reduce business travel.

All that was gone by 2012. I'm not sure what caused the change.

It should be _every_ thing that isn't a bad idea.

Solar

Wind

Geothermal

Tidal power?

Got a way of using that tasty oil cleanly? Maybe we want to reserve those complex hydrocarbons for some other use like growing crops, making solid rocket fuel, or some other national priority.

Nuclear - Yes, craft regulations that make sense and squeeze all the damned energy possible out of that 'waste'. No, I don't mean burn the fuel the easy way only - I mean send it back to military run reprocessing centers to concentrate the power and make the (effective) half life of the waste decades rather than civilizations of time (yes, concentrating it, there will also be some super mild things that decay slowly enough to be useful in other applications rather than waste).

We want to maximize energy in the long, medium and short term. Try Everything.

https://minimallysustained.substack.com/p/beyond-the-greenho...

It's manufactured grievance. Opportunists politicize losing positions for political gain because they're inherently anti-elite, anti-establishment and upset experts and the informed.

Upon this antagonization is conflict which brings on drama, eyeballs, and advertisers.

It's an attention flywheel that brings loyalty, builds a moat, and sets a differentiator...

This is Big Oil propaganda. The impact from this is massively less than the horrific damage caused by every part of the fossil fuel industry.

Note: I'm not suggesting China is not doing better here. Rather, I'm going off the title "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout" and I'm not seeing anything in those photos I haven't seen in the USA.

Driving down the 580 from SF to Tracy you pass several hundred windmills. Driving through Mojave the same. Also solar. Driving toward Vegas as well. And those are just the ones I've seen with my own eyes. There's many others.

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=altamont+pass+windmill...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=mojave+windmills&sa=X&...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=palmdale+solar+farm&sa...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=desert+stateline+solar...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=barstow+solar+plant&sa...

[0]: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/us-new-win...

Honestly, I think building regulations should mandate solar energy for homes.

Also, I'd say McCain's policy was more based on a national security argument than a climate argument. As others have pointed out, fracking changed everything. In 2008 we were a huge net importer of oil. Now we're a huge net exporter.

Mines (including oil wells) are huge wealth concentrators. A handful of very wealthy people benefit hugely from resource extraction. And the US government, as a whole regardless of party, represents the interests of large corporations both domestically and overseas.

Anyway, Bush (either one) didn't run on renewable energy. Neither did the candidates that came after. 2012 was just a reversion to mean.

His "win" might be one of the most impactful sliding doors in the human history.

It was all lies to try and win elections.

> Here’s John Boehner, the likely speaker if Republicans take the House, offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”

> Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up his plan to National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Sure Trump took everything to an absurd level of "do the opposite of biden no matter what", but it started back then.

[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/the-gops-no-compromis...

In a word: Greed. In two words: Crony Capitalism. The spend on “non-renewable“ energy is significant to the domestic economy. In 2023 (most recent year I could find), consumer spend on energy in the US was $1.6T (https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-ener...) with at least 82% of that being fossil fuels - the remainder being “renewables” and nuclear energy (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62444). This does not include billions in subsidies and infrastructure investment.

“Going green” would threaten the American Greed Machine by cutting upwards of $150B in taxes annually, interfering with the individual, corporate, and government gains from the stock and commodities markets, causing short-term inflation due to commodity value spikes, and long-term deflation due to renewable energy being relatively very low cost to generate after the infrastructure is in place. Last, but certainly there is more, the US exports a massive amount of oil and gas. Divesting from fossil fuel production would have a significant impact on GDP (find your own source).

This is why the US doesn’t invest in infrastructure that doesn’t generate significant ongoing income like it once did - it simply doesn’t make enough money. We only act once it is falling apart.

It is all about the money, man. That money is power. It keeps the Corporatocracy and those at the top of it in charge, the US as the primary reserve currency and allows the US to have a huge, formidable military.

They had a huge specially-made array of lead acid batteries, a backup wood-fired stove for cooking when their power went out, a refrigeration setup where they had to child-lock the fridge during an outage so visitors wouldn't open it and spoil their milk, and no grid connection (which wouldn't have easily allowed residential exports until the late 90s anyway). They also had no cooling other than a fan and windows, and wood heating.

It's honestly pretty impressive how far we've come. Particularly in Australia, where we're world leaders in home solar capacity but are lagging behind in utility-scale renewables, it's really breathtaking to see the country go from 44kWh to 1880kWh per capita capacity in 15 years based mostly off incentivised rooftop solar.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/11/how-the-wind-indust...

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/22/trump-leaves-wind-i...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo

[1] https://www.greenlancer.com/post/california-solar-mandate

[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/programs-and-topics/programs/calif...

For a brief window of time our consensus for decarbonization extended all the way to (the most) popular media.

But yeah, I guess your answer still applies indirectly: Fracking -> stronger interests by US oil companies -> money to the Republican party -> fossil fuel friendly regulations.

This is how floating solar is a thing.

What is free of side effects for "nature" ?

China needs power NOW though.

Compare that to something like the California High Speed Rail, or our every 4 year tug of war for elections (and mid term elections). Everything is short sighted "wins" for the next reelection, of one party vs another party, instead of making actual progress.

Its almost like when there is a good benevolent leadership in charge, for a long term, then progress comes much faster. (Singapore, China, ?)

I think it's a bit better now. I don't think invasions change that much.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/fossil-fuels/chart-the-...

Meanwhile, China has made the obvious realization that independence from oil and gas is economically, geopolitically, and environmentally beneficial.

So i would have to disagree. We are significantly far ahead from the initial “idea”.

The materials for renewable energy are still in a usable form.

China being so big and populous makes it hard to make simple comparisons.

edit: looked it up, US is still ahead of China as of 2024:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/renewable-electricity-per...

Bear in mind that pre 2000 is likely hydro, in the early years of solar and wind that confused matters if lumped in together but I think it's now obvious when the new tech kicks in.

And the Mojave solar concentrator is being shut down, from what I've heard.

The article here starts with: Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.

Is the US anywhere in this ballpark?

You can go out and buy solar panels to cover your roof for a few thousand dollars/pounds/euros. You could definitely not do that in 1999.

Anecdotally, a ton of solar has gone up in the last four years here in Germany, both rooftop and, increasingly, in what were likely canola fields for biodiesel along highways - at first driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the need to reduce natural gas consumption, but now by how absolutely cheap those panels are. Too bad they're not being made here...

My favorite installation so far: a large field in SW Germany, with the panels high enough for cattle to wander and grass to grow under them. The cattle were almost all under those panels, munching away - it was a hot day.

The longevity of this plus the “no anthropogenic climate change” nonsense is astounding. Armchair climate sceptics are happy to seriously stick to talking points that are so out of date that even the oil industry doesn’t use them anymore.

It's useful for the plastics and petrochemical industry, but it's not going to make the country energy independent, even including battery costs wind still trounces.

The only way this could change net heat if it significantly altered the reflectivity of the surface, and in practice the affected area is too small to matter. As an exaggerated example, I found an article [1] that calculated the area that would need to be covered by solar panels to generate power equal the total global electricity consumption to be 115,625 square miles, approximately equal to the state of New Mexico.

[1] https://www.axionpower.com/knowledge/power-world-with-solar/

The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.

Their 2060 plan has enough non intermittent base load that they can run the whole country off it for a decade.

That half of your grid capacity is there 'just in case' is something no one in the west can wrap their head around. China building out massive solar and wind farms isn't because wind and solar are the future. It's because they can tick off their 30 year plan 25 years ahead of schedule and focus on the hard parts next.

Got a long way to go as electricity is only a portion of our energy consumption - heating and transport are still largely fossil fuel based ATM

Found the Oil & Gas lobbyist / apologist.

China might not have oil, but at least they are trying to figure something else out. Credit to them. Say what you want about The Party (I certainly have) but gotta give credit where and when its due. They have an interest in pushing alternative fuels, and by god they are doing it.

We've learned that lesson. Not to toot our own horn too much but we to a large extent kickstarted the thing in Germany with very little reward for it. 50% of Europe's energy produced is now reneables[1]. China's progress is incredibly impressive, but they are also the largest consumer of middle eastern oil in the world. Not really to their own fault, countries are going to be dependent on oil for a long time to come. (it's used in many more things than energy production)

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

No? He doesn't do that at all? Gee maybe he never really cared then.

That said "you're just repeating what you're told" is a comforting argument but doesn't go all that far.

They could preserve all that scenery by just building out nuclear. That's without mentioning the horrible ecological impact of blanketing an entire ecosystem in panels.

No, it was agreed during Kyoto that developed nations would reduce emissions, and developing nations (aka PRC, India) would not. Developing nations could keeping scaling fossil to industrialize until Paris where all countries had to submit climate plan (again not explicitly to reduce), and PRC's was to peak emissions by 2030s, which they're on trend to do early. PRC did what was legally permitted / agreed upon, and if developed nations want to cope / be butthurt and label following the agreement as dirty and not cooperate in the future global projects because they're not financial beneficiaries then that's on them. Also "some" solar and wind is ~ROW combined, which surely is very unimpressive.

> sell the solution

Selling solution to problems is solving problem, selling solutions to problems cheaply is solving said problem faster. As if developed economies did not decarbonize by selling clean tech solutions... which btw PRC bought. PRC simply doing globe a favor by selling real climate solutions at cost and scale that makes global difference, instead of scaling retarded paper solutions like carbon credits from countries that primarily scales spreadsheets.

When did German achieve that?

Seems to me like wind solar batteries and nuclear are the answer, what’s actually being built now in a big way, not pie in the sky like fusion.

You may never see them. Not because we aren't adding renewables, but because South Australia was at about 80% renewable last year (average, not peak) so if you were going to get those sort of pictures anywhere in Australia, you would be getting them from SA now.

You probably don't see them because while the countries are about the same size in land area, but China has 50 times the population so it needs about 50 times more power.

But I get it, and tradeoffs are necessary.

Another reason China may prefer this to more concentrated nuclear power is that is is much more distributed and resilient to targeted attacks.

China is rocketing ahead in every domain possible, from resource and financial independence, to infrastructure in terms of high-speed rail, bridges, roads, advanced fission reactors and bleeding-edge fusion research. Heavy industry like mining and processing, chemicals, ship-building.

Let's not even get into semiconductors. I fully expect them to achieve parity with TSMC before 2030 and surpass them shortly after.

Meanwhile, Western countries will say 'clean coal' or have a million different stakeholders squabble about where and how to build nuke power plants.

What makes this more valid than something like "it's incredible how many YIMBY talking points there are" in a thread about housing, aside from you agreeing with the YIMBYs? Is "talking points" just a roundabout way to summarily dismiss the opposition's arguments and imply they're dumb/misguided?

We can speculate about how quick/slow all this will progress. But it's worth pointing out that e.g. IEA, EIA and similar institutes have been repeatedly wrong and overly pessimistic with their predictions for things like adoption and cost of renewables. People are still basing policy and important decisions on their reports. So this matters. The "What if they are wrong, again?" question might have some uncomfortable answers if you are betting on them not being wrong.

A lot of developing markets are skipping oil/gas/coal completely and are going straight to renewables. They are not first building a grid using coal/gas plants but working around what little they have in terms of unreliable grid by going straight for solar/batteries and microgrids. That's a pattern you see all over parts of Africa with historically very little/flaky power infrastructure and countries like Pakistan. These are growth economies showing much quicker economical growth than the world average. That's going to spread.

Lots of countries are going to be decimating their oil/gas imports over the next 20 years. That includes transport and power generation. They'll be installing wind/solar/batteries and buying lots of EVs. Fossil fuel usage won't go all the way to zero. But it won't stay at current levels or anywhere close to that. Some countries will be faster some will be slower. Being slower isn't necessarily good for economies.

Good advice here is to take an economic point of view and be aware of things like growth trends, cost curves, learning effects, technological changes, etc. You don't have to be an early adopter or believer. But there's a lot of data out there that supports an optimistic view. And a lot of pessimistic wishful thinkers that are not really looking at data or just cherry picking reports that support their believes. The fossil fuel industry sponsors a lot of reports research. And they are about as trust worthy as the Tobacco industry is when it comes to the pros/cons of smoking. That's why the IEA and EIA keeps getting it wrong. It helps to understand who pays for their reports (hint: fossil fuel companies and countries that depend on those).

A healthy personal perspective is maybe considering what happens if your pension fund bets on fossil fuel and that cliff I mentioned turns out to be very real in about 10-20 years. Because if you bet wrong, that affects the value of that. Before you knee jerk to an answer, take a close look at what institutional investors have actually been doing for a while. Hint: coal plants were written off as good investments ages ago and gas plants aren't looking much better at this point. I think you'll see them move on oil funds next.

I remember that day vividly.

It was the middle of the Great Recession, it was the worst our economy was doing in a long time. Millions were out of work. People were looking to the government to see what the plan was to get the country back on track.

A reporter asks McConnell what the senate’s number one priority was.

The answer? Not fixing the economy, not helping out every day Americans. Not finding the root cause of the crash and making sure it doesn’t happen that way again.

No, the answer was “make sure Obama is a one term president.” That’s all we would expect from the senate for the next 6 years.

The day McConnell said that, I said out loud: “I will never vote Republican again for the rest of my life.” (Prior to that point I mostly voted D but not 100% of the time.)

And I plan to keep that promise until I die.

They hated him for what he was.

This also happens in China. With better ratio for renewables but still. Globally there was more energy from coal than before. Much more was from renewables but in context of climate change absolute numbers of CO2 are what matters.

EU is also reverting it's green targets because of this new situation. So near future does not look good.

And our lovely tailings: Syncrude Tailings Dam

But because they take so long to form, stumbles along the path of energy advancement mean a planetary civilization could run out of fossil fuels before reaching the level of advancement necessary to move beyond them. At that point, the civilization is essentially doomed since they lack the technological ability to move beyond fossil fuels and they lack the energy resources necessary to develop that technology.

The globe burnt about 8.8 billion tons of coal in 2024. Which is a huge amount. This is the peak, most estimates are that we will reduce from there.

Australia alone estimates that it has 147 billion tons of economically recoverable coal. That is Australia alone could supply the entire globe at peak usage for over 16 years. And Australia only has about 14% of the globes coal reserves, we can keep burning coal at this pace for at least the next hundred years. And it a hundred years the scope of what we consider to be economically recoverable will have expanded greatly, further increasing our supply.

We will cook ourselves before we run out of fuel.

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M586/K...

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2026-01-11/trump-b...

That's insane. I cannot fathom how anyone with a home isn't doing it ASAP.

Even here in Maine, a smaller system will pay for itself rapidly and offset the high energy costs.

Still impressive for a country of that size, but "world leading" is technically no longer correct.

[1] https://www.renewableuk.com/energypulse/blog/uk-wind-and-glo... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1489147/uk-offshore-wind...

ps.: Per capita it's also not #1 — Denmark and the Netherlands both have higher offshore wind capacity per person.

I'd also love to see solar panels on top of every Bunnings, Westfield, and other warehouses/complexes, as well as above every outdoor carpark, which would have the added bonus of preventing hand roasting in summer.

How can Germany achieve it? It is 10x less people?

So what if you read his emotions correctly? It’s not like your response will change his mind?

In a world of 1 > 0, someone needs to be looked down upon. Why not look down on me? Why can’t others look down on China? And why would looking down based on “truth”, which you seem to so much value, change anything?

Utter horseshit.

Putting up what amounts to a bunch of shade on steel pillars just doesn't harm the environment. There are more than a few contexts where it improves the environment.

There's no identified or predicted harm from large scale photovoltaic installations.

It happens all the time...

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23527...

You're right, it's not infinite, but we are in no crisis now or in the foreseeable future.

Every time someone uses the term “renewable” they are providing coverage to this notion.

It is deeply bizarre you can think otherwise.

A graph comparing China to the US would have been better.

The difference is just scale, China has 3x our population but very many of them had little or even no electricity available so they’re playing catch up. Americans are functionally all served by the power grid already. So of course they’re building more of it as an absolute number.

But I’d also bet they built more coal plants last year than the entire world built in a decade.

Recycling now recovers >95% of raw minerals (and will continue to improve).

The learning curves for battery and solar tech will more than make up the for the shortfall.

Meaning at some point in the near future (2050 IIRC), humanity will have mined all the lithium it'll ever need.

Also, in the same time frame, it'll be economical to mine our garbage dumps. Further reducing the need to extract raw materials.

In a very myopic way.

Sorry I don't believe your paraphrasing of this person's real thoughts and ideas. I'm sure these people exist, but it doesn't mean anything. I could equally go find someone crazy saying the world is going to end this year.

You also have situations, like today, where a German developer has handed back a seabed lease for 3GW of offshore power because they didn’t get a contract for power from government (CFD) and their lease fees are approx £400m/yr if they want to continue developing the windfarm. This is after spending £1B already on lease fees with nothing to show for it.

(direct link to image: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iy93Jvbye2e...)

Solar panels are meant to be water proof, after all they are meant to survive rain storms and melting snow and coastal weather.

"The US Geological Survey estimates that onshore northeast Greenland (including ice-covered areas) contains around 31 billion barrels of oil-equivalent in hydrocarbons – similar to the US’s entire volume of proven crude oil reserves."

Source: https://theconversation.com/greenland-is-rich-in-natural-res...

The reality is that they don't have a good source of fossil fuels, and energy independence is a core necessity.

They are not on trend to peak emissions pre 2030. Here is what happens Reliable china emission data takes a long time to verify and collect. So during the times where good data is not available china makes a ton of claims that will not line up with the next emissions study that comes out.

Ok then why does every country scale up their manufactering to make clean tech solutions. Im sure US, EU, India and Africa could use a few more steel mills and some coal plants to power it, we can handwave the emissions if they end up producing clean tech.

> and PRC's was to peak emissions by 2030s

This appears to be wrong. Peak is supposed to be before 2030. They will not hit it.

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/targets/

If you assume that .5% of population are "einsteins" then China has 7.5m einsteins who are now able to access universities and advance sciences whether it's AI or solar power or self driving cars.

There's no doubt about the fact that the future belongs to China.

There's just no way to deny this. The economical and political power will shift to China.

However, we could also build out more green energy technology to become a large energy exporter. (You could argue we are kind of that now, with the amount of coal we export.)

Especially given we have strong but complicated geopolitical ties to both China and the USA, it feels like guaranteeing our own energy sovereignty, plus gaining the ability to export power directly, would be a strong political as well as environmental move.

Oil, cigarettes and alcohol were all clearly being pushed and promoted. Pretty sure it was episode four where a women rather matter-of-factly stated that one alcoholic beverage when pregnant was perfectly fine - inso much that it was good because it helped her body generate breast milk. Such a weird statement to shoe-horn into this soap opera.

Coupled with BBT chain smoking the coffin nails, the rampant shit-canning of renewables and incessant self promotion of how large and wonderful the fossil fuel industry is the money behind the show was as subtle as a sledgehammer.

Plus the sexual objectification of women in this show is ludicrous.

It's 2026. It seems everything old is new again.

Oh, and the

Europe is also at least a decade ahead.

And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely.

No, too much Fox "News".

It is. I've read dozens of comments like this on HN, and repeatedly see the "it's incredible that...", "talking points"/"propaganda", and "wow look at how much bad stuff there is in this thread"/"I'm so disappointed in HN" memes, and every single time it's because the author is trying to dismiss the opposition's arguments without responding to them individually and actually addressing their points.

This kind of thing clearly fits into the "sneering" category of things that aren't allowed on HN and so is valid for flagging. I do it and I highly encourage anyone else to do it who wants to preserve the culture of HN.

Okay, you're right... their military capabilities are still laughable. Thanks for the reassurance, that'll help me sleep at night a bit better.

Unlimited spending from the fossil fuel industry basically standardized Republican candidates on climate denial talking points. Plus whatever bizarre fetishes random Republican billionaires had, like Adelson keeping Gingrich's primary campaign on life support for months. That fucked up Romney's pivot to the general election for no perceivable gain to any of them. According to Wikipedia Adelson spent over $90 million on losing candidates in 2012!

All of that was through Super PACs.

To your point about the fossil fuel cliff, I think it was either a Bloomberg or Forbes article that discussed how China's deep involvement in the EV/battery/solar/wind Expansion in dozens of countries around the world gives it a chance to put a serious dent in oil consumption as well as locking American interests out of developing markets.

The cfd auctions are competitive on price, but things like clean industry bonus and supply chain plans expect some local content. You can’t compete on price and also use expensive UK suppliers.

That doesn't contradict your statement, of course. But in the long term the fossil fuel niches will start looking more like today's rocket-fuel niches.

Current US estimates for solar land usage are 500,000 acres.

The land use arguments are bunk. Anyone who complains is repeating oil and gas propaganda.

For me, yes it is. It wouldn't if policy discussions were purely technical and well informed. In the arena of public discourse they aren't. The majority of the population (including HN) is tribal, ideologically biased, emotionally driven and badly informed. Public discourse, particularly in America, is contaminated by propaganda of established economic powers (i.e.: Big Oil, Big Pharma, Tech companies). They can easily advance their talking points because they have much more economic resources for propaganda and lobbying.

I agree that, eventually, most people will discover that oil & coal are doomed and destroying the world. Reality has a way to force itself into ideologies.

But that will take a long time. I need truth and certainty now.

color bait.

1. Fission: TMSR-LF1 (a thorium breeder, molten salt research reactor)

Based on US work in 1960s and independent Chinese Sinap work in 1970s. They recently published that they had detected Protactiunium in the salt - a new milestone.

2. Fusion: EAST tokomak

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/nuclear-energy/chin...

We would all be better off if the US and China just collaborated.

Except, that's not even true. Some existing wind turbines are not recyclable.

Except that's not entirely true either! The tower portion of the turbine is usually steel, and easily recyclable! The nacelle, too. It's the base and the blades that can't be recycled.

Except that's not entirely true either! Existing turbine blades are made (mostly) of fibreglass, which is made of the fibre and the resin. The fibres aren't reliably as strong when recycled (which makes them not-very-useful when recycled), but the resin is just fine. And of course, if the blade is e.g. carbon fibre, then you can either re-use it or just burn it.

So, you statement should be that some (components of) existing wind turbines cannot be profitably recycled with current technology.

The wind turbine's concrete base doesn't need to be smashed up or ignored, incidentally - it can be re-used. Concrete is much sturdier than the e.g. gearbox.

Two points regarding blade recycling techniques taken straight from the top of the article:

- Cement co-processing and chemical dissolution are primary viable methods, yielding $27.57/ton and $199.71/ton returns respectively.

- Chemical recycling achieves top circularity (PCI=0.7) and notable carbon reduction (−0.475 t CO₂/ton).

Chemical recycling is not yet ready for industrial use; cement co-processing is.

People have home solar, but it's hardly widespread. It's still a "fancy" thing to have.

Have you not heard of climate change influenced by fossil fuel burning, or are you a climate change skeptic?

The general consensus is that climate change is a crisis, now and in the foreseeable future.

The user was arguing that the materials to exploit them are renewable too.

Meanwhile what doesn't get captured in accounting is US increasing fossil exports (crude, lng etc), and PRC exporting renewables. Assuming 25 year lifecycle, PRC exports solar last year displaces ~5 years worth of US fossil exports in barrels of crude equivalent (400 GW of solar = 14000TWh electricity, or 8B barrels of oil, i.e. 22m barrels per day). TLDR PRC is reducing absolute fossil use, MASSIVELY increasing global renewable use. US is simply increasing net fossil use, much of it hidden from domestic balance sheets because it's exported globally.

Not of plastic - recycling rates are decreasing. This is largely due to the excess ethane begin produced as a by-product of US fracking.

The ethane is converted to ethylene, then to polyethylene as a cost below that of collecting, cleaning, and processing used plastic.

Given current events, one doesn't have to be crazy to believe this

The largest LNG gas fields currently producing are not being "fracked", eg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pars/North_Dome_Gas-Cond...

(TBF Irish standards have gotten much better for airtightness)

7 days ago, 93 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536866

Direct thermal pollution like this is not yet globally significant, but if demand increased to the point that land constraints actually applied then it would become important.

1% off according to dashboard analysis for 2025 5 year plan target. There's study from Q4 that PRC emissions has been stalled/trending, i.e. peaked for past 18months. Functionally they've peaked emissions before 2030 NDC commitment.

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-emissions-decline

I guess it is a bit like François Truffaut's statement that there are no "anti-war films". I imagine if some population segment has chosen to identify with a particular lifestyle (oilman, soldier, gangster, etc.) then it doesn't really matter quite how that lifestyle is portrayed so long as the viewer can make a connection with it.

oh Paramount

the ones that just decimated CBS News, put talentless propagandist Bari Weiss in charge, and censored a critical report on human rights abuses ordered by POTUS

all running on Oracle (tm)

China WAS a developing nation in Paris 2015, GDP per capita $11000, high income $13000 USD.

China JUST around developed nation in 2025, GDP per capita $14000, high income $14000.

They're on trend to peak emissions last year, see study below for PRC emissions trending down for last 18 months. What happens is we have these things called satellites that can detect emissions live, so you get the PREVIOUS study that confirms they have likely already peaked emissions.

Every country SHOULD scale manufacturing, no other country can scale as much as PRC into making stuff commodity tier. If PRC peak domestic emissions and global clean tech exports displaces 5x more emissions than US oil and produce net global reduction in emissions then that's aggregate emission reduction. If other countries can/wants to do that they ought to. It's not about handwaving emissions, it's about realizing 50% of world are developing, they're going to consume and generate massive amounts of shit, aka poverty alleviation, which is moral good, which will require magnitude increase in power and the most sustainable pathway to that is use as much clean tech as possible, clean tech that net displaces more emissions, which is only possible by making clean tech cheap, which PRC is uniquely able to do.

Trump is well outside the norms of POTUS's through history.

"Grr greed" is an easy answer that's popular these days but by itself it can't explain a change as it's a constant factor in us as a species.

Republicans on the other hand are hoping somehow that a gutted NRC will pave the way for looser regulations that will help ramp up conventional nuclear fission and nuclear fusion timelines (all efforts invested into by the current president's family and his fellow cronies of course), while abjectly gutting down any progress in renewable energy in the present moment.

But also, due to infrastructure. Everyone who could afford it has had a battery and inverter in our homes since forever. Hooking up some solar panels to it is relatively straightforward.

I think there are also some state sponsored subsidies involved although I couldn’t tell you how much.

One of those people is the current President of the United States.

Leasing the seabed before you win a CfD auction is a commercial risk but they probably didn't win because their bid price was too high

Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy. Nuclear will output power come rain or shine, and like I said, it's not like China isn't investing in advanced fission. They're throwing money at everything to see what sticks. They're working on SMRs, molten salt, thorium, and more.

I can think of two possible reasons: (1) it's America, and it's very hard to build anything, and nuclear is smaller and fits on site, and (2) we have an administration openly hostile to solar and wind energy for political "vibes" reasons.

Vibes are dumb. I think looking back this is going to be seen as an age of people deciding based more on vibes, which ultimately comes down to tribal dog whistles, than reason.

If you think wind turbines are a significant cause of bird deaths it shows that you have no clue what you're talking about. Please don't bother commenting on this topic again.

Of course there is "way".

All the above above in itself sounds like propaganda. You forget other political (authoritarian system making massive mistakes), demographic (1.0, probably less in reality, birth per woman), psychological (disillusioned young population), and geographic (food and other imports) aspects, among other things.

Conservatives, protesting on the street to save the whales. Talk about a sight to see.

that oil & coal are doomed and destroying the world

to be green-agenda talking points?

https://x.com/duncancampbell/status/1647109450438955008

I'm not saying the idea is institutionalized by the democrats, but I think musk/tesla hatred is kinda driving it

Obstructionism as a core tenet of the (former) Republican platform is reprehensible, and retrospectively probably led to quite a bit of discontent with the government’s inability to address problems that Americans face. That same discontent fomented the current reactionary swing, so in the end maybe they really got what they wanted. Shameful.

One could also say that they change heavily natural landscapes, but this is a matter of taste.

Also, they're soon going to run out of women, so they need to perfect artificial wombs.

The few remaining party elites will want to live practically forever, so biology will be on the programs once fusion and robots have been cracked.

And it doesnot even seem like china will make ussr-level mistakes.

Our only hope for beating China, at this point, would be to recreate an "opium wars" situation where the whole population becomes dumb and stop caring. (A bit like what tiktok and X are doing to use at the moment, but with much more social control.)

China has been building 5% extra nuclear capacity every year for the last 30 years. On target for making up 24% of their energy mix in 2060.

Also sorry but I would require a citation for "new wind turbines are recyclable". That the tech exists doesn't mean that all installed turbines have it.

It's durable energy storage and can be easily moved around like liquid fuels.

It also would remove CO2 emissions from things like airplanes, which won't be able to be battery powered in the near future, and could renewably replace chemical feedstocks in lots of industrial processes.

But this requires immense industrial capability, probably some serious innovation in absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere because that's basically an unsolved problem right now, and a massive oversupply of solar power which cannot happen under market systems because nobody builds infrastructure to sell power at below market rates.

It might be a 50 year plan.

Sorry for being vague; I was only referring to economically valuable minerals used in electric batteries.

Aqua Metals has previously said they'll be able to reuse battery quality graphite (from batteries) as well (vs releasing it as CO2). But my recent scan of their progress wasn't very encouraging.

Learning more about Redwood Recycling stack is on my to do list.

I had solar installed last year, at the end of the summer, it cost roughly £14,000 for a system that can produce 6.51kWp and with 12kWh of battery storage (about 10kWh usable).

The 465W all-black panels (14 of them) I had installed are a little under £100 each to buy off-the-shelf, that accounts for 10% (£1400) of the cost of my system.

The batteries and inverter together another roughly £3.5k, so, about £9k of that cost was not for "solar and battery tech", a good chunk of it, somewhere around 40% of the total was labour, and the rest in scaffolding. Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.

Even if the hardware was free, £8-10k installation costs seems prohibitively expensive for the average UK household, unless you were totally wiping out your monthly bills and could pay it off over the lifetime of the system.

I suspect part of the issue in Australia is the same; I believe (perhaps incorrectly) you have a lot more sun down there so I'd expect the scale of (number of) installations to be higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country#Global_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062...

Seems like a weird location to me, but what do I know.

IIRC that list of companies that polluted the most on the planet, 1 and 2 were Chinese state owned entities. China Coal and China Petroleum from memory.

OFC they are dwarfed IIRC by the US Military.

But coal is the worst fossil fuel from a practical stance. It's really only good for energy generation. You can't really power tanks or warships with it.

Denmark does not (since 2009) control Greenland's minerals, nor take revenues from resource extraction[0,1]; and Greenland's democratic government has in fact totally banned oil exploration[2].

[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-neglect-greenland-min... ("In 2009, Denmark handed Greenland's inhabitants control of their natural resources...")

[1] https://english.stm.dk/the-prime-ministers-office/the-unity-... ("Revenues from mineral resource activities in Greenland are to accrue to the Self-Government. Such revenues will have influence on the size of the Danish Government subsidy, cf. section below on the economic arrangement.")

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27871672 ("Greenland bans all oil exploration (cbc.ca)" (2021))

> "Global warming means that retreating ice could uncover potential oil and mineral resources which, if successfully tapped, could dramatically change the fortunes of the semi-autonomous territory of 57,000 people."

> ""The future does not lie in oil. The future belongs to renewable energy, and in that respect we have much more to gain," the Greenland government said in a statement. The government said it "wants to take co-responsibility for combating the global climate crisis."

Sometimes technologies really do have showstoppers. There are fundamental reasons to think fusion is not going to be competitive. I know of no fundamental reason self driving cars would be impossible. The analogy doesn't work.

That's two baskets right there.

That's where long distance interconnects come into play.

...which is why China has 40 000 km of UHV transmission lines forming a vast network to move the energy from where it is abundant to where it is needed. They have 8 new UHV projects that started in 2024 or 2025 that will add another 10 000 km.

OpenAI bets on SMRs (now an ectoplasm, check NuScale...) and solar arrays: https://cdn.openai.com/global-affairs/openai-doe-rfi-5-7-202... , and drives breakthroughs on renewable energy: https://openai.com/index/strengthening- americas-ai-leadership-with-the-us-national-laboratories/

Microsoft: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/micros...

Alphabet (Google) buys 'Intersect' which "delivers ((...)) infrastructure for data centers and other energy-intensive industries by co-locating industrial demand with dedicated gas and renewable power generation". 4.75 billion USD. https://abc.xyz/investor/news/news-details/2025/Alphabet-Ann...

That may hamper us more than anything else. If AI proves to be as beneficial as its proponents hyped, the economic gains will just mostly get soaked up by landowners. Even UBI won't save us, because it will just get absorbed by landowners. Ditto for renewable energy.

They're looking for credulous investors in the nuclear startups they founded?

Do you also lead a zero-plastic, zero-waste lifestyle?

> are intermittent, require fossil fuels for when the wind doesn't blow

Batteries.

> are not profitable.

Let the businesses worry about that.

Might be more accurate to say that the PRC has successfully done an opium wars situation to the USA with e.g. fentanyl precursors.

Shows how poorly those politicians understood the constituency they were fomenting. He was boo'd for it by people that had come to see him specifically, and about 15 years later, republican voters built a scaffold outside the Capital they were breaking into while chanting about hanging the Republican vice president.

I feel like American politicians often play with fire without understanding its nature as something that burns.

Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar.

Nuclear is transcedental. If we had practically unlimited fusion power, we could build underground, grow plants in aquaponics and aeroponics and ride it out in underground cities and farms.

Don't count on it.

Some people may be willing to uproot their lives and move continent in the hope that 4 years later you won't re-elect another one like Trump, but it won't be as many as before. Heck, there was a brief window where I had the opportunity to migrate to the USA, but just the US electing Trump the first time ruled it out for me.

Not that I'd call myself "the best", but I was good enough if I'd wanted to. But I do also know some really good Cambridge graduates who were expressly asked by their American employer to relocate to the US, declined.

Your current government seems determined to make sure this won't happen.

Compared to the US democracy?

Scientists at Chevron came to this conclusion in the 70s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergius_process

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...

Australia > all of Europe (yes all of Europe, not just EU) combined on that one.

Also focusing on only carbon footprint is misleading. EVs pollute far less overall, even on the 2015 electric grid.

https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-...

Noone has done more for global clean energy, and its not even close. Sure they polluted a lot up until now, but honesty who cares about the past, times change fast.

The elites are pinning us to fossil fuels and driving up the cost of necessities.

Regardless, the US isn’t taking over Greenland for its oil. That is just ridiculous and there would be far easier targets to go after if that was the case.

This is pie-in-the-sky, by-and-by fantasy. Fusion's sole accomplishment is likely to be making fission look cheap in comparison.

Just because something became a science fiction trope doesn't mean it's actually going to be a part of the future.

Maybe tell the Chinese they have it wrong and are risking extinction.

The asteroid is just science unlikely fiction.

I personally know at least two highly qualified STEM workers that went back to Europe after Brexit/Trump2 and from what I can tell this was at least 70% pure "spite" (instead of being affected by actual anti-foreign regulation or somesuch).

In that:

* Nuclear power plant failures can be very, very nasty. As in, "producing uninhabitable land for eons" nasty. Yes, dam failures are spectacularly nasty, too (but don't create unlivable land as much). Yes, fossil fuel power plants also are quite bad in a "more silent way" via pollution (plus the occasional centuries-burning coal mine fires etc.). All power sources have problems. But this is a pretty big negative.

* What this means is that big centralized nuclear is also a big target for rogue actors... similar to dams, but not similar to more distributed energy sources like solar or wind. Blowing up a single solar farm or windmill doesn't have a huge impact, relatively speaking, compared to blowing up a nuclear plant. Nuclear plants thus have to spend extra expense protecting themselves against this sort of thing. (And, in the United States at least, classify much of the process of doing so.)

* Nuclear power plants can also be used to produce nuclear weapons. Now this is where the really fun politics begins. Many countries would be really unhappy if their adversary countries start making nuclear weapons from their nuclear power plants. A lot of military stuff has been spent over the last decades trying to prevent such.

This last point is where China's solar panel play actually makes more sense compared to nuclear. Think of the politics involved if China builds a big nuclear point in (insert adversary of some other country here). Could be very, very tricky in many cases. Whereas, there is very little if any politics involved with shipping a solar panel somewhere.

The distributed, small scale nature of solar panels also means that customers in countries with poor centralized power grids (common in developing countries) are able to use them to bypass the current system. This happened previously in many of these countries with mobile phones, where customers were able to bypass poor centralized phone networks. In this aspect, I think the "decentralized" aspect is far more important than the "renewable" aspect... but still.

(There are positives to nuclear, of course; I'm mainly countering the "transcendental" word here. All power sources have plusses and minuses.)

(Note: I have heard of work on smaller scale nuclear systems, but I am not certain if even a small nuclear power device completely resolves political or security concerns.)

The Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, French, British, and even Singaporean[1] (of all places, one might expect a tiny equatorial city-state to be the last place to think about nuclear, but it is all the same, because nuclear is ridiculously power-dense) governments seem to agree with me.

[1]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/singapore-seriou...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632072...

and from last year, US specific, endangered species:

A comparative assessment with data from the 2010 Red List reveals an increase in the proportion of threatened species recorded as being impacted by certain threats. Notably, the incidence of hunting and trapping as a documented threat has increased from 34% to 41% of threatened species. Similarly, the proportion of species assessments with fire/fire suppression, climate change, pollution, invasive alien species and energy production have each increased by 3-5 percentage points.

https://datazone.birdlife.org/articles/state-of-the-worlds-b...

Wind turbines are a significantly lower threat than windows, look it up!

In the last year, 2.11% or 308 MWh of our electricity came from solar: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/GB/12mo/monthly

By way of comparison, that same source shows Germany generating 2.16% (527 MWh) of its electricity from solar so its pretty similar: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/12mo/monthly

My system is larger than typical for a UK home, I also paid a premium to have it installed by a company with an excellent reputation for their work, I'd had a new roof the week before and wanted a high quality installation.

I also went with a company that let me decide how I wanted it installed; other companies wanted to put the batteries in my loft or under the stairs which was an absolute no from me, I don't want them inside my home, and I had them install the batteries and inverter in a brick out house on the opposite end of the property to where the consumer unit is, again, at a premium.

I had per-panel optimisers and monitoring hardware installed, and because I wasn't aware of it until later, I added the bird-mesh on after signing the contract and did get ripped off on that part (NOTE: if you get solar in the UK, and have ever so much as seen a pigeon, get bird mesh).

It's also worth noting that checking today, all of the hardware has dropped in price, my panels are now 20% cheaper, batteries are 15% cheaper, inverter is 10% cheaper, and I imagine installations and labour might be cheaper in the winter than the peak of summer like I had mine installed.

All of that said, the total cost of installation doesn't really matter so much as the ROI, which for me works out at most ~6 years, if none of the hardware fails in the meantime.

EDIT: There's a mistake in my previous comment which I based all of the subsequent numbers on; the cost of 2 batteries + inverter was closer to £5k not £3.5k.

Contributing to climate change sounds reasonable.

DESTROYING THE WORLD!!! dun dun duunnnnn.

Hyperbole. Get a grip Greta.

France's EDF has said its preliminary cost estimate for the project to build six EPR2 reactors at Penly, Gravelines and Bugey totals EUR72.8 billion (USD85.3 billion).

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/edf-estimates-ep...

Each reactor outputs 1650 megawatts of electricity running at full power. Assuming they run at 92% capacity factor, that's $9.38 per real annualized watt.

A. Where would we be without China, well with a significantly reduced problem. But they are doing their part and doing it well.

B. That list gets used as a bludgeon against free enterprise and a great deal of the entities on the list dont represent free enterprise.

Chernobyl is pretty much habitable now in most places. People live there, work at the power plant.

I used to live in Cambridge. Only one person I knew there was pro-Brexit, call him C. In the run-up to the referendum, I'd already told C I was looking to move out of the UK due to the entirely native political choices of the UK. The domestic political nonsense was necessarily only going to get less constrained by a policy decision (Brexit) specifically about getting less constrained.

One of my last memories of C was that a group of us were in a local pub discussing it, one said they were worried Brexit would make Cambridge smaller. C shouted "Good!".

Given my plans, obviously when C shouted "Good!" at the idea of Cambridge shrinking, I was shocked, took it somewhat personally. Then the referendum came, and I was both angry with him and far too busy, so I stopped talking to C entirely.

Other people report that C was very confused by this, did not understand at all.

I suggest you, personally, assist with finding that solution.

Without it, even if we trust you personally, how can we trust you as a nation?

Unless there's a serious reckoning afterwards, the rest of the world is gonna operate on the assumption that it can and probably will happen again soon.

I keep wondering where the line in the sand is for the wider GOP base. We keep crossing what I think "this is the line … right?" and nope, that wasn't it, either.

And on the foreign front, well, the trust has been broken and I don't think it can be repaired easily. The remaining NATO allies are very stable, they understand mutual respect and collaboration is the foundation of their survival, whereas attacking each other breaks trust completely. Even if a new fantastic president is chosen that understands his huge responsibility both for Americans and the world, other countries learned their lesson hard and understand there is no guarantee in a few years the USA become their enemy again.

What size inverter? Is it a hybrid inverter? 10kWh of Storage is 8-9kWh usable because batteries are only warrantied to 80-90% depth-of-discharge, is that enough?

Since there's only ~5.6kWp of panels in that quote it's probably over-provisioned, and it will likely come with a smaller inverter, say 3.6kW, which is what a lot of these cheaper companies will do, and export will be limited under G98 to 3.68kW.

That also means that in peak sun, your 5.6kW of panels are going to clip at the inverter capacity and you won't be able to access more than that limit in power.

£200 per extra panel isn't bad, the company I went with charged £300, but mine came with per-panel optimisers (at my request, mainly for the monitoring functionality rather than optimisation). If I wanted to add an additional elevation though, that would be per-panel cost plus ~£2000 for the additional elevation of scaffolding.

If you're going for one of these installations and haven't already, ask these questions, and if you can get a decent price that's great, I wish you luck. I'm not on reddit so I can't comment on the quality of that sub.

For comparison, wind is about $5/W. Assuming a 35% capacity factor and a 30 year expected lifetime for the latest turbines that comes to $10.0 billion per year of capital expenditure with no storage or fossil backup systems or extra capacity given weather variability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France

Despite Australia's high solar and battery penetration Australia's electricity generation is fairly high emissions.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/5y/monthly

France and Sweden have considerably lower emission electricity generation than Australia does.

Like I said in the original post:

>Even the people who understand the scale don't understand the purpose.

>The Chinese grid isn't renewable or non-renewable. It's built to keep the lights on for anything short of a thousand year catastrophe.

Only capitalists are so penny wise and pound foolish to bet their civilization on the lowest bidder while hoping the inevitable doesn't happen in the next quarter.

https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WV

Looks like west virginia is still a state where hybrid-electric vehicles have lower emissions than all-electric ones. Who knew.

Intermittents are only gaining market share because their unreliable and intermittent power which is less valuable is being purchased by governments at prices that far exceed what it is worth. In other words, massive hidden subsidies. Without those, there would be next to no intermittents on the grid anywhere.

See “Market matching costs” here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source