> I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be, 

Don't fall for the political narratives, they are designed to distract you while the theft is taking place. The sponsors of the circus are rabidly cynical and pro-selfish. They are spreading the narratives, not believing in them. There is certainly a few conservatives in power who hold that the earth is only 6000 years old, who see no other option than burning down the town as a way to escape confrontation with progress and emancipation. But this is mainly what kleptocracy looks like.

The narratives work though, that is the sad reality. News anchors and the public are stuck in a loop about "children being forced to change sex, woke, climate hoax, but her e-mails, but Biden, ...", anything but what is happening at the crime scene.

Don't underestimate the power of money spend by the U.S. oil,gas,coal industry. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network#Climate_change_an...

My quick skim, I think you are right. This is getting them to halt new development, by buying them off with the equivalent of the subsidies the current administration cancelled.

These ones no construction had been started yet AFAIK.

If AI summery is to be trusted, a few other windparks got stopped that where almost done, but got completed anyway after a legal battle. Vineyard Wind 1, Coastal Virginia (CVOW), Empire Wind 1, Revolution Wind, Sunrise Wind.

Again, got it from AI, make of that what you want.

This might surprise you, but only a minority of eligible voters vote. So while it looks like 50% of people believe this is a good strategy and we should do it based on the percentage of people who voted for Trump, in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good. The problem is that few of those people vote.

So in all seriousness, if we could get a significant fraction of the young people who are negatively impacted by these policies to actually vote against the people enacting them we could see real change. But if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on then nobody will do anything about it until it's too late and we're shooting at or throwing rocks at each other.

IIRC it does not. There has been some discussions by folks around it, but so far no evidence has pointed to it being a primary motivation.

The evidence we do have is that republicans have had a party vendetta against clean energy for decades, and their current leader has had a personal vendetta specifically against wind turbines, also for decades.

This was a known risk for decades on every coastal wind project, and would have been a part of the earliest risk assessments for this project. The people building these projects are generally not as stupid as the administration trying to tear them down.

People voted in repeatedly a visibly primitive person (plus quite a few other things but lets not go there now), then they get primitive behavior.

An honest question - what the heck did you expect? Some sophisticated rational discussions instead of dumb ego tantrums?

IIRC those were solar hot water heaters. More of a curiosity than something legitimately powering the white house.

The United States has already been destroyed. It is no longer in question, or in the future tense.

Kidnapping the leader of a sovereign nation to put them on show trial and plotting to steal the country's natural resources. Blockading and strangling an island country to the point of economic collapse. Opining out loud about annexing their northern neighbours. The list goes on and on..

>The US, should it survive this administration

This level of doomerism is absurd. Of course the US will survive this administration. I blame the news for making every breathe by whichever opposition seem like the next WWIII.

I'm always gobsmacked when Trump says things like, "We need to get rid of all the wind turbines! They are killing all the birds! Look at the foot of any tower and you'll see nothing but dead birds!"

Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.

They're a relatively stable and risk-free source of money for a certain kind of politician.

The energy part is incidental.

Even Burns wasn't this deranged

https://fee.org/articles/the-candlemakers-petition/ This feels relevant

The overrated and very annoying "sun", the so-called "star" that our planet goes around has been going unquestioned for too long! Many people have been asking for a long time, perhaps even before Obama, to remove the sun from the sky and replace it with our beautiful clean coal towers!

> The guy is unhinged, hellbent on denial, just to appease his base, who are going bankrupt because of his policies.

In the middle of a war he started over war. No less. If his base wanted cheap gas, they are not going to get it.

The feds have dropped their attempts to stop those from ongoing construction for now, but only one of those projects is complete.

CVOW is supposed to flow first power this month, but won't be done for ~a year, Empire Wind is also end of '26/early '27, Sunrise later in 2027.

Vineyard was completed this month, and Revolution is delivering power and targets completion over the next few months.

63.45% voted last time. Thats not a minority.

The symbolism, and the stupidity, was there though. As time has gone on it has been more clear every year how intelligent Carter's administration was and how terrible the following administration was. Investing in/promoting solar was just one of many smart moves by Carter that were attacked purely to gain political points that only harmed us in the long run.

> if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on

I don’t know if you can fix lazy. Turning out new voters basically happens once a generation. The rest tell themselves tales that their vote could never matter, and in doing that, subtly endorse the status quo.

The land will be there. (most of) people will be there. What parent probably meant is losing everything good and positive United States of America represented in past 80+ years, internally and globally.

That is gone my friend, with the wind like a sulfuric fart, for good. US is becoming a global terrorist and enemy #2 of free world and certainly whole Europe (right after its biggest and only 'friend', russia which coincidentally keeps trying to make you a thing of the past). This comes from somebody who strongly believed in your role in global hegemony despite your numerous well documented fuckups in the past. All on the whims of one visibly mentally sick man, with absolutely nobody standing up to him despite nobody really believing in any of that bullshit. No principles, just plain greed and firm fuck-the-rest approach. Right now, if Europe needs a strong big ally it will be #1 China, and then... nothing.

The fact you voted him in, and he still has massive support, and there has been 0 overthrow attempts of the biggest traitor to US in its history tells me and everybody else in the world many things, but nothing positive. Even if next election, if they will happen, will have 98% win of the democracts with that ridiculous unfair and undemocratic system of yours, it won't change a permanent shift that started and keeps happening. US has no real allies, in same vein russia or China has no real allies.

Empires rise and fall, inevitably, there was never a reason to think US would be an exception.

This is comfortable doomerism. But it isn’t accurate. Moreover, it’s dangerous since the numpties who tend to believe it then politically disengage.

Pax Americana is doomed. What the USA looks like post-hegemony is TBD.

We didn't even get the show trial!

The US is dead; it is now a Trumpian shithole.

x

It doesn't.

"Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun" - Charles Montgomery Burns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LbxDZRgA4

The US is making itself look unreliable in every aspect

Thankyou for your attention to this matter!

I had this big guy, very big guy with tears streaming down his cheeks asking me "Sir can you take down that woke star that keeps me awake"

Relevant power metal song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z769xf9ET5A

The US (with Canada and Mexico) is self-sufficient with fossil fuel energy.

And clean. Really, really clean. Just look at coal. A no-brainer. Go for it.

They are also organic, all-natural, and fat-free! And renewable on geological timescales.

This will not be a learned more robustly in the US until one or both of the only two (edit: major) gas turbine manufacturers in the world (GE Vernova, Siemens Energy) suffer a tail risk event causing their failure. Backlog for new gas turbines is ~7 years, as of this comment. Continued production capacity is a function of how fragile those two companies are.

The White House’s Bet on Fossil Fuels Is Already Losing - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-28/white-... | https://archive.today/vpvch - October 28th, 2025

Gas-Turbine Crunch Threatens Demand Bonanza in Asia - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-07/gas-tu... | https://archive.today/z4Ixw - October 7th, 2025

AI-Driven Demand for Gas Turbines Risks a New Energy Crunch - https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-gas-turb... | https://archive.today/b8bhn - October 1st, 2025

(think in systems)

To me, this deal makes it pretty clear who holds actual sway

>by buying them off with the equivalent of the subsidies the current administration cancelled

no, the billion that is being "paid" is a refund of what Total paid in for the leases. Total paid that into the US govt in anticipation of receiving returns on that investment in the form of "clean energy subsidies".

it is not clear from what is in the news story whether Total is being compensated for the would-have-been future subsidies, or whether Total simply expects to make decent profits from fossil fuels.

if one's interest is in the "clean energy" angle, then this is a "defeat". if one's interest is in reducing govt subsidies, this could be "a win", but it's not exactly clear.

What an amazing deal. We get nothing and the contractors we negotiated with get money for it!

Truly, the deals this administration crafts are nonpareil!

I really want to see the legal verbiage guaranteeing this right. Like, how many mutations can covid virus get before it legally could be sprayed on patriotic Americans?

Carter: “This energy crisis shows us how vulnerable we are to foreign autocrats. We should work toward energy independence via renewable energy and waste reduction, to lead the world away from this risky and unsustainable fossil fuel market and secure ourselves a brighter future.”

America: throws a decades-long, ongoing tantrum

It’s fairly reductive… but still kinda true.

Your comment is extremely reductionist and reverses causality for a large number of voters. Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency. So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power many voters (correctly) conclude that their vote will not lead to meaningful change.

> in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good.

I'm not convinced. The reason why many of these people don't vote is because they don't think Trump is that bad. They probably don't agree with everything, but that's true no matter who is in office.

Save the date! https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/maduros-next-us-court-d...

The Pax Americana was already over when Russia siezed Crimea.

It's even stupider than that, it's not even to appease his base, it's a personal grudge. Trump sued a wind energy company to prevent them from building an off-shore wind farm in view of his golf resort in Scotland. He lost that case badly and he has been railing against wind energy specifically ever since.

So far Trump hasn't done much to prevent solar farms from being built, it's only wind turbines that he's exacting his vengeance on like some sort of modern day Don Quixote.

This is kind of why I ultimately find cynicism to inherently lazy. This is coming from a very cynical (and often lazy) person.

It takes no effort to be cynical, I can tell myself "everything sucks and I shouldn't care because nothing matters anyway" and justify not doing anything I want. I can justify not voting, I can justify not helping someone if I see them struggling on the street, I can justify not even improving myself.

In the last couple years I have been trying my best to override my cynical tendencies because ultimately I think that they are bad for me. I vote in every election I am able to because even if it's infinitesimal, I at least tried to do something to avoid whom I deem bad people getting into office.

None of the institutions function, or do the thing that we used to explain to children what they do. The whole thing demonstrably does not exist. You're welcome to describe my view with whatever pejorative you prefer.

Never thought about it, but that's a great point and comparison. From quick Google search: 365 million and 988 million birds die every year from window collisions (that's US alone). Windmills/turbines: 140,000 and 679,000. Then if you do per windmill vs. per building obviously the windmills are going to "win," but it's the absolute that would seem to matter in this case.

As you said, that has nothing to do with the actual preference for fossils vs. turbines, but a great point nonetheless.

And whales, don't forget the whales https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/trump-whale-...

and the noise causes cancer

Wind turbines are also miniscule compared to issues like pollution, land use, windows, and cats. Also you can track migration and turn them off at key times if it's a huge issue (this is part of the motivation for research I'm going to do later as part of my master's dealing with tracking hawk flocks via weather radar).

Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s

Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him

It's awesome the US hasn't destabilized one of those neighbors and alienated the other one by declaring it the prospective 51st state. Soft power really is America's super power.

Is this the biggest Woosh of the year?

> The US (with Canada and Mexico) is self-sufficient with fossil fuel energy.

Oh boy can't wait for the reenactment of third reich intervening peacefully in czechoslovakia, for their own safety and wellbeing of course, and not at all for the resources they're hoarding, the filthy hoarders.

But it gets traded globally. That means if the price goes up in Asia, it also goes up in NA.

I’d wager the US is self sufficient also in terms of renewable energies.

I do find the slow Sovietization of America funny, both mentally and economically. The year is 2050, autarky on energy has been established, the markets cut off, politics in the hands of erratic and geriatric leaders. Americans proudly drive 30 year old Fords the way people used to drive Ladas, while China exports green energy, cars and infrastructure to the world.

The US is unable to implement export controls so consuming less than it creates doesnt mean theres enough since producers will export if international prices are better

Ireland during the famine was self sufficient with food production but that didn't stop people from sending food to the highest bidders abroad.

Unfortunately, we share the planet and the atmosphere with it.

Sure, if we build out refining capacity for the next ten years. Then we're golden until we run out of the finite well of combustible dead algae. So if you think we can revitalize American manufacturing and resource processing starting now, and you're okay with those investments being worthless in a few decades, and you don't give a shit about rendering the planet significantly less habitable to human life, then yeah, we're totally self-sufficient with fossil fuels.

Or we could, you know, pull energy out of the air and sun, a strategy which will be viable until our star dies.

You mean "clean coal", right? Of course it's clean, it's right in the name.

Contrary to windmills, which slows down the rotation of the earth.

UK should confiscate his golf courses and build on shore wind on them as reparations for this Iran war he sarted

Agree. And look, being cynical and just minding your own matters is fine. It means the system is working well enough for that person that doing anything isn’t actually worth it. But those people are also electorally—and more broadly, politically—irrelevant. So if you’re trying to do something, betting on them tends to be a losing pitch.

I relate to the feeling. I am extremely cynical. I fully believe the world is fucked and we are in for a very turbulent 50-100 years. I still work to improve myself and the world because WTF else are you going to do? At least doing something feels better than doing nothing.

Is this comment on purpose? The whooshes are getting hard to track!

Both of those are big wind tubine manufactres as well.

> do the thing that we used to explain to children what they do. The whole thing demonstrably does not exist

Something misfunctioning doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. A massive economy, industry and war machine are still here. Pretending that doesn’t exist because it doesn’t work the way we like is an expression of exasperation, not a description of reality.

Isn't there Ansaldo Energia too?

If the US taunts someone into a nuclear war, the rest of us get to live but should be investing more in cancer research.

another option is not to shit on all countires who do have resources driving the prices up for everyone.

Alberta tar sands have hundreds of years worth of reserves. They're also expensive and incredibly dirty to extract and emit significantly more CO2 during processing than a light oil well will. (The tar is usually melted by heating with natural gas).

I'm quite confident cheap renewable alternatives will make the tar sands inviable far before they run out.

People laugh at this, but anthracite genuinely is cleaner than other coal in every regard save CO2 emissions. People just think it's a joke because they've come to believe that CO2 is the only coal emission worth caring about, which definitely isn't true.

Doesn't that depend whether you point them east or west?

Point them north and you'll increase Earth's axial tilt.

Won't someone think of the ~children~ birds?!

>A massive economy, industry and war machine are still here

Those things are exactly what destroyed the nation. The military industrial complex and the billionaires who removed the teeth from institutions that used to prevent the accumulation of power (see also: antitrust litigation against Standard Oil). Those entities are now in complete control and democracy is nothing but a sham, a clown show between two faces of the same coin.

The US as a country didn't fail with Trump. It failed when Microsoft got away scot-free. This was the biggest sign that the country was no longer a serious entity, because a serious entity would try to preserve its own power, while the United States of Burgers is something to be sold to the highest bidder.

Yes, but their production volume is limited (imho) compared to the two companies I mentioned. Good callout regardless. I'll have a post put together to share here enumerating and comparing.

(i track global fossil generation production capacity as a component of tracking the overall rate of global energy transition to clean energy and electrification, but some of my resources are simply an excel spreadsheet)

Some good news though, with the war in Iran the spiking oil price means that Albertan executives can ramp up operations and stay quite profitable! Push the price to 200/barrel and we'll just strip mine the entire province after airlifting out Calgary and Edmonton.

"Clean coal" is like saying "a fast snail". Sure it can be faster than other snails, but even if it's twice as fast as the second fastest snail, it's still a snail and I'll still laugh when an ant runs circles around it.

No, the criticism isn't because people get caught up about CO2 -- it's because "cleaner than other coal" is a very low bar to meet to be calling something "clean" full stop.

Also "clean coal" is not a type of coal being burnt (although that does matter too) but pollution control systems added to coal plants.

I think you just solved both leap seconds and daylight savings time.

Anthracite burns clean enough to use in a pizza oven. If your neighbor told you he was going to install a new furnace and offered you the choice of it burning wood pellets or anthracite, from a smell standpoint you should absolutely choose the anthracite.

Anthracite, in these regards, is very different from bituminous coal.

And both are very different from not burning anything.

>Anthracite burns clean enough to use in a pizza oven.

Yeah, so does wood, which is horribly polluting.

Undoubtedly. Doesn't change the fact that one kind of coal burns smokeless with a clean blue flame while the other will cover everything for miles in a film of soot and tar.

The smell of wood might be nice for flavor, but that's beyond the point of anthracite being clean. That particulate pollution from wood burning is severe compared to the smoke you'll get off anthracite, which is virtually nonexistent.

Regardless of how good it might be at being the cleanest dirty thing, it's not what the US trope of "clean coal" refers to anyway. Anthracite is not used in the US to generate power because it is too expensive.