* Most crops have shifted to corn which 1/3-1/2 of what the US produces is for energy
* China is all in on solar and renewables because the amount of energy & how they import is a weakness the US threatens. It also makes a great export & influence for them over other countries.
* Many Republican donors, voters and politicians have invested a lot in corn, oil, coal and ethanol infrastructure which solar/wind threaten if they grow to fast. Some of their towns may depend on that as the main reason anyone lives there.
* Corn is really easy to grow for most farmers in the midwest, easy to store for long periods & farmers have invested a lot in machinery (which creates lobbyists from John Deere & others)
* Corn farms are an incredible waste of land by almost all measures compared to other crops or solar & wind, especially when you do a mixed land of solar/wind with small animals, bees & battery storage.
* The US has a lot of land available
* Most people care little about what's good for everyone or what's good for the planet, even if they claim to. This one is just my opinion based on how people actually behave.
1 - Secretary Rollins Blocks Taxpayer Dollars for Solar Panels on Prime Farmland
2- Secretary Rollins Prioritizes American Energy on National Forest Land
Both have quotes about putting "America first" to confuse people to make them think this is better for all. We think the USDA is about getting healthy food to people, but really they're about maximizing the money for farmers and people who own the land. Terrible.
I'm in Wisconsin and if I drive on a county road, I see signs near the road that say "Save our S̶o̶l̶a̶r̶ Farms". Maybe some are fine with them, but seems like lots of internal pressure to say no or unfortunate reasons.
They may feel like grassroots campaigns to save farms, but much of it is backing from large corporate interests. Doesn't mean that there aren't legit concerns, but the sponsorship makes me weary.
Is it affordable because they are dumping though? Or is it because of the slave labor? Or is it cheap because they freely pollute the air water and land? Or maybe all of the above? I would personally love to see a full ban on imports from countries unless they are at parity with US environmental/labor/trade laws.
An interesting take. What happens for all the things where US laws and policy are worse (“below standard”) for many developed countries, which are plenty?
My point isn’t that the US is great at everything (it’s clearly not), it’s that putting restrictions on US businesses while trading with places that don’t have the restrictions is moronic. It puts US businesses at a disadvantage and then still has the negative effect the regulations were trying to prevent in many cases (e.g. air pollution, water pollution, abuse of workers if you care about Chinese people too and don’t want to support their abuse, etc).
I don't get it… isn't up to the landowner whether they farm corn, soybeans, or solar radiation? The government may provide different incentives for each, but AFAIK, they aren't forcing a choice.
Depending on the state, not enough to matter. Farmers are not a major voting block in most of the US anymore. Farmers are a bit over 1% of the US population. I'm trying to find better sources than listicle type things, but the best I can find is that in the states with the highest percentage of farmers, it's still only 5-6% of their state population.
That can be enough to swing things, but it's not enough to be the deciding block that many think they are. A century ago things were much different.
And even that is probably an optimistic number for what most people would consider a "farmer." It always irks me when people are blaming farmers for the polices of farm counties when the vast majority of voters in those communities have nothing at all to do with farming.
Iowa was listed as 63% urban in the 2020 census. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. An area needs 2000 housing units and/or 5000 people to be counted as urban. If you’ve been through the state, you’ll see lots of tiny little 2000-3000 person towns that have an urban street grid around a couple-block downtown core. These things don’t get counted as urban.
The farmland is too valuable for you to see much of any sprawl except in Des Moines and Iowa City. Even Council Bluffs (the Iowa side of the Omaha metro) has very little for the metro size.
This is very wrong: farmers still have incredibly outsized influence in American politics, mostly to our detriment. We have a number of horrible policies (ethanol subsidies, HFCS in everything, tons of inexplicable restrictions on food stamps, water policy in the west emptying all the aquifers) that are entirely because of lobbying by farmers, and the Farm Bill distributes between 70 and 100 billion per year, much of it well-spent but also with a great deal of graft and patronage because of farming lobbying.
Someone can be more specific and accurate with this, but in the US, population percentages don't vote. Or in other words, some votes are worth more than others. So relying entirely on % of population isn't a great measure.
That's a fair point. By the numbers, about 60% of voters turned out in the last election. Historically, though, we've had lower turnouts. Let's say that nationally only 50% turned out but all farmers voted. That would make their 1+% block closer to 2-3% of the votes for an election which is more significant.
Another wrinkle is funding for Secure Rural Schools under the 1908 25% fund act hasn't been renewed. Counties that have a national forest presence have a federal government offset to compensate for lost logging.
Serious question. Why do farmers need the USDA's help on this? Is it a financial issue, banks don't believe there is a positive ROI on farmland solar so the wont lend? Is it health related, the USDA needs to approve solar panel usage in close proximity to crops? Is it infrastructure related, someone has to approve and build transmission lines to the farm?
Came here looking for information on the same. I would be upset if restrictions were put on installation of renewables, but this looks like its ending giveaways to farmers.
My partner works directly with farmers and USDA folks. Farmers have long, established relationships with USDA people and field offices. It's not always perfect and the relationships aren't always great but it's people they know and farmers being out in the middle of nowhere and very busy people those relationships are rare and valuable. That's how I understand it anyway.
> Subsidized solar farms have made it more difficult for farmers to access farmland by making it more expensive and less available. Within the last 30 years, Tennessee alone has lost over 1.2 million acres of farmland and is expected to lose 2 million acres by 2027.
A quick Google says that solar generates ~20 W/sq ft., so the amount of farmland lost here, by implication, to solar generation, is enough to power the entire United State with solar power alone, twice over.
Obviously, not all 1.2 million acres of land here is lost to solar generation as the government is implying. They don't cite their source, but AFAICT, this is all land that is no longer farmland for any reason at all.
The land argument is terrible. 40% of US corn acreage is already used for a form of solar energy, ethanol. Its over 20x less efficient than PV, so it's a huge waste of land.
Wind power on farmland only results in a tiny drop in acreage. And a hot area of study is mixing solar PV with various ag uses. In some cases yield is improved.
Finally, farmland that is used for solar is almost always not the best yielding land. Maybe the farmer is facing a water shortage or is just not that competitive. Solar could be a lifeline in situations like that.
Solar doesn't eat up land anyway; it improves it. You can put things under the panels, you can use solar panels as fencing, you can put it over water to reduce its evaporation, etc. Farmland doesn't need burning hot direct sunlight.
While this is true, it's also true that they were pretty awful early thermal solar panels and Reagan removed them not to own the libs but because the roof was leaking. I doubt that this was politically motivated by Reagan, or that Reagan was generally cognizant of anything in 1986.
While that’s technically correct, they could have put them back
This is what Google says when asked about why the panels were removed:
“President Ronald Reagan had the White House solar panels removed in 1986 as part of his administration's broader opposition to government involvement in renewable energy and a belief that the free market, not the government, should drive energy policy. While the administration cited cost as a reason for not reinstalling them during roof repairs, the decision reflected Reagan's philosophy and his administration's cuts to renewable energy funding”
Not sure about the sources though. So I guess it’s debatable
Still interesting to realize that the US govt can zigzag so much, and that it’s not necessarily progressing in a specific direction
If I ran this board I would instantly and permanently ban people for quoting a discount robot. Why would you expect someone to engage in a conversation by proxy with Google AI Mode search results?
They are motivated by people with money today, who plan on continuing to make money tomorrow, without competing with new technologies. Money is the motivation for everyone in the chain that is alive today, not worrying about those that live in a far tomorrow.
Agreed. There are a lot of people who would rather be a big fish in a small polluted pond than a small or middle-sized fish in a more competitive one. A lot of the objection 'globalism', 'green new scam', 'woke mind virus' is just atavistic dislike of outsiders manifesting as a desire for autarchy.
truth.
I have been off grid for a long time, my motivation to do so was founded in a grade school science project with the wreckage of a camera light meter, conclusion sunlight=electricity, blink, blink, blink!
and one day after getting my first decent silcone pv panel leaned up against my no power hook up farm house, a guy pulls in on his harley, and after a bit starts raving about banning solar
about 15 years ago, and now I have a realy visible
array, and there is solar everywhere you care to look
they tryin to turn back the tide, and have zero chance with that.
the first pannel still runs and cost me more than $2.50 /watt, current prices hover around $0.20/watt......retail
also that first panel provided minimum lights and water for a house, then was installed on.the hood of a truck that got destroyed by bieng rear ended, and is now moumted on.another building providing lighting and power for small tools, chargers, etc.
ie: the stuff is tough
You underestimate how making something illegal can stop the thing in that country. Look at a place like Germany, blocking fracking and nuclear power and now reliant on Russian gas.
Germany has historical low usage of gas for generation and is adding 14-17GW of solar per year. Germany will need ~57 GWh of batteries by 2030 to sunset coal generation, scaling to 271 GWh by 2050. Current storage is just ~19 GWh (mostly in homes).
> Germany needs north of 10TWh of batteries to sunset _gas_ generation.
Citation? Because the EU intends to phase out Russian gas entirely by 2027. I'm not too concerned about Germany consuming non Russian LNG at this time as they continue to deploy renewables and batteries (GP said "and now reliant on Russian gas." in their comment above). Germany is now getting almost two-thirds of its power from renewables; if that isn't a success story, I don't know what is.
Import volume of natural gas from Russia in Germany from June 2021 to November 2024 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332783/german-gas-impor... ("As of November 2024, Germany has imported no Russian natural gas since September 2022. To compare, in August 2022, the import volume of the named commodity stood at around 953 million cubic meters. Over the period observed, the highest figure was recorded at 5.2 billion cubic meters in December 2021.")
(edit: Supermancho wrote in a deleted comment about energy demand destruction due to German de-industrialization, but I'm unsure if that energy demand should be forecasted in the future without good data about potential re-industrialization in the future creating said energy demand)
> Citation? Because the EU intends to phase out Russian gas entirely by 2027.
Yes, by replacing it with natgas from Azerbaijan, Qatar, and other wonderful countries.
I'm kinda jaded about this whole topic because it exposes the utter hypocrisy of Germany's Greens.
But long story short, Germany can get Dunkelflaute. Long periods of time in winter when renewable generation falls to about 10% of the _normal_ generation for that time period. A once-in-100-years event is a full month of sustained Dunkelflaute. And this is not a hand-wavy theory. For example, in 2019 there was a 10-day sustained Dunkelflaute: https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht... - look at the period from 17 to 26 Jan. And as you see, they also coincide with heightened energy consumption, which will become even _worse_ as Germany switches to heat pumps for heating.
The current plan for these is to build more natgas powerplants (German government had to _subsidize_ them directly). With noises about magic "hydrogen".
> Spending 10x as much on nuclear power subsidies and hopefully getting some plants finished in the 2040s?
Here's the thing. If Germany had spent on nuclear the same amount of money it has spent (so far) on renewables, then it could have had 100% carbon-free electricity and heating. With lower energy prices than now.
So yes. Nuclear all the way.
Instead, we now face the reality where Germany will have to rely on imported natural gas as far as the eye can see. And certainly past 2040. While having one of the highest electricity rates in Europe, so high that they're now depressing the industry. And the plan to fix it is to keep repeating the word "hydrogen" until something happens.
Meanwhile:
> The coalition agreement between the CDU/CSU alliance and the SPD mentions the construction of up to 20 GW of gas-fired power plant capacity by 2030. In June, Reiche announced a first step with a tender volume of between five and ten gigawatts.
Where are you getting that number? Germany produced 488 twh of electricity from all sources over the entire course of 2024. That's a bit over 1 twh per day.
Please provide a source for this. It seems like you are making stuff up because you can’t accept renewables and storage delivering.
I also love how the goalposts keep moving.
A few years ago ”even an hour” of storage was the impossible marker. Then it quickly became ”a day!!!” and now we are at a month without any solar or wind power.
The study was from 2005. I can find it, if you want.
> A few years ago ”even an hour” of storage was the impossible marker. Then it quickly became ”a day!!!” and now we are at a month without any solar or wind power.
No. The problem has been known for decades, but governments simply ignored it. That's why there's so much noise about hydrogen in Geramny. It's used to whitewash the natural gas.
China is working on it: whether hydropower, solar, onshore wind, or offshore wind, it ranks first in the world — and the cost of generation has already fallen below coal. If the world’s fastest-growing industrial nation can rely on renewable electricity, I can’t see any reason why other countries wouldn’t.
This is the part I don’t understand. Trump goes on and on about the threat of China but doesn’t appear to be positioning the US to actually compete with them. An energy revolution is coming and China looks poised to take most of the spoils while the US buries its head in the sand and clings to the past.
It's a talking point. His base can't think beyond "China bad" and "Trump is us". If he says $action is good for the US, and bad for China then the only question they'll have is how many of those pesky elites will be sad because of this.
If you stop thinking so critically and logically, it'll all start to make a lot more sense.
Trump wants to be king of America and make Washington DC and the White House in particular look like his vision of how America should have been. He is not that interested in the outside world or how people live, which is why he puts a non-negligible share of his mental energy into things like remodeling the Rose Garden to look more like a hotel patio, eg
I mean I don't think him or most other politicians care. They will be long dead before anyone wealthy feels the consequences. In the meantime they are making money, have power to wield, and the propaganda they spew gives them a decent chunk of public support.
If you made a graph of the amount of land area being used for wind and solar, you’d have a hard time finding a way to actually visualize how little land that is…
That graph would be misleading - wind may only have a tiny footprint, they cover a lot more area. In some parts of iowa there are wind turbines in all directionsas far as the eye can see. That is how my iowa utility can claim I'm 103% wind - they generated more wind power than all customers used. (But there are other utilities in iowa so state wide and official numbers are not as good - though iowa is number 2 in the us for windpower)
When people talk about land usage for wind, they normally include the entire clear area of land around each turbine.
Nobody is claiming a huge wind farm technically has a tiny footprint because only the base of each tower touches the ground. The US if fucking huge, seeing “as far as the eye can see” is only about 28 sq miles, even if we assume we’re looking for wind turbines only (so can see 100m tall turbines with their bases over the horizon), you’re looking at 1500 sq miles. The U.S. is 3.5 million square miles. That’s three orders of magnitude greater than the area with wind turbines are far as the eye can see in every direction covers.
Or put another way, if you stood in the middle of a wind farm filled with the worlds largest onshore wind turbine stretching in every direction as far as the eye can see, that would be a land area about equivalent to 0.042% of the U.S. I don’t think there are wind farms even remotely close to that size.
Another way of looking at that number, is wind turbines evenly distributed across the US, so that a turbine as always just visible over the horizon from anywhere, would only consume 0.042% of the U.S. So yeah, it would be very hard to visualise show just how little land the U.S. wind turbines currently cover.
Yeah. And I’m not sure how America does it but all the wind turbines I’ve seen in Ontario are just sitting in farmers’ fields. No fences. Spread out. The footprint is really quite small. I could see it being larger if one stuffed them so close together that the incorporated land really couldn’t be utilized well, but even then, it’s such a tiny amount of land. Especially compared to basically every other land use.
Idiocracy. It’s all just a move to protect vested interests in fossil fuels.
Tesla has the right idea with solar roofs but we need better options than shingles or giant panels mounted. Wind gen is amazingly good if you have a consistent supply.
When I was sailing, the sun and wind would recharge my batteries during the day. At night, wind would keep the batteries charging so I could run lights, laptops, VHF, and NMea2000 equipment.
The future isn’t this. Banning renewable energy is like banning breathing.
EDIT
Coming back after a walk, I can't stop thinking about this. When I worked at an energy tech company, me and a couple data scientists actually worked out that if, theoretically you had solar panels capable of capturing sun energy with 99% efficiency - you could power all of humanity on 1 day's worth of sunlight. (granted you had the storage capacity, we did fun things like "You saved 254,143 trees by reducing your water use" kind of stuff).
The wind farms off the coasts in the EU countries are producing massive amounts of energy at fractions of the cost. Yes, the engineering is hard. Yes, the big tall windmills are ugly (paint them, put LED lights on them, who cares). You don't need the giant big ones, a field of smaller ones works too at the same altitude (key part... wind is faster at altitude). Make a wind mill kite and send it up. There's so much energy around us. We just need to find a way to trap those electrons.
At least President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho cared about things enough to make things better for his people, hired the smartest person he knew and genuinely tried to fix things.
To be fair there is a considerable amount of power used in creating products that isn't directly accounted for by someones home energy needs. And that number gets a good bit bigger if we want those production processes to be clean themselves. The energy we pay for directly through electricity and fuel is only a part of our energy consumption pie.
It's not really good for those vested interests. If the rest of the world moves away from fossil fuels, they'll be stuck, in a market with shrinking growth. Instead they could invest in a different, growth market. If they get mixed signals from the US govt, they risk making poor strategic decisions
It may be short term good for them but long term fairly idiotic (for them and the US).
Long term isn't even that far away. Much of the developing world will be happy to adopt renewables and battery storage, just as they've been happy to adopt mobile networks over fixed lines. It's a leapfrog moment and the US is not supplying the materials nor participating in the improvements gained from it.
The current moment is a bit like seeing the internet take off and investing in print. Sure it’ll be around still in some form, but it’s the wrong time to double down.
And the US's economic opponents are taking advantage of the moment. China is spending massively on solar production and deployment, and selling their panels to other countries. The US will be the loser here:
1. More expensive power from non-renewables. Especially as the global consumption of fossil fuels decline (so domestic costs will likely rise). This will become a drag on the US economy.
2. Not participating in the production and sale of solar panels to other nations.
Trump decries the US trade deficit while simultaneously discouraging one massive upcoming market that the US could become a net exporter in.
He's doing the exact opposite of making America great again. If there was ever a time for other countries to leap frog us and get ahead, it's now. Just don't touch our AI bubble.
The article's claim is misleading - biofuels don't consume the majority of US cropland. Corn for ethanol uses ~38% of US corn production, but only about 7% of total US cropland is devoted to all biofuel crops combined according to USDA data.
This is so shortsighted. The US needs a huge increase in its electricity generation capabilities, and nowadays, rewnewables, especially solar, are the cheapest option.
Regardless of climate change issues, the anti-renewable policy doesn't seem to make any sense from an economic, growth, or national security standpoint. It even is contrary to the anti-regulation and pro-capitalism _stated_ stance of the administration.
> At the state fairgrounds in Lebanon, Tennessee, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Monday that the agency will no longer allow “businesses to use your taxpayer dollars to fund solar projects on prime American farmland, and we will no longer allow solar panels manufactured by foreign adversaries to be used in our USDA-funded projects.”
> Brooke Rollins said Monday that the agency will no longer allow “businesses to use your taxpayer dollars to fund solar projects on prime American farmland, and we will no longer allow solar panels manufactured by foreign adversaries to be used in our USDA-funded projects.”.
Could be reasonable, we need more renewable independence.
> ...while boosting support for biofuels...
And there it is, going backwards. So tired of this.
My biggest concern is this could bring hybrid solutions to a halt. Solar panels make for perfect shading in some use cases, for multi-use land. There has been many approaches to selectively place solar panels to increase farming efficiency while providing energy, a win-win-win scenario.
What you're describing makes complete sense to me, but what I don't understand is why the USDA should be endorsing specific practices like this or that. To be clear, I also think the Farm Bill is a ridiculous and unnecessary giveaway.
Refer to David Brooks' opinion piece in today's NYT, about Republican Nihilism. He claims there is a spirit of "burn it all down". Seems to be seconded by several comments in this thread.
I'm rapidly getting to the point of joining that group.
I'm getting real tired of fighting tax breaks for people with 131 Scrooge McDuck piles of money already, at the cost of services a large portion of the country uses or may need.
To be clear, I don't have kids, but want my tax dollars to fund free lunches, but we can't have that. Instead we get garbage like public school busses being used to drive kids to private schools, while the public school students walk. (See Ohio)
Oh I think the wealthiest will be the first with heads on pikes when it all comes tumbling down.
The wealthiest people aren’t descendants of Julius Caesar, the Medicis, the Hapsburgs, Rollo (who is an ancestor to every European monarch), the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, etc.
Some of these are moderately wealthy now (eg the Rothchilds) but they don’t dominate the world’s wealth.
Part of this is that can be hard to maintain a lineage over time. Also, foolish fail sons will squander family wealth.
But some wealthy people just go the French Revolution way.
I don’t believe the Gateses, Musks, Bezoses, etc will survive the upheaval, violence and revolution they are making inevitable.
From the outside, the current model looks more like the Russian style burning down, not French revolution.
At the end it's an olygarchy with too much stockpiled military slowly creeping on it's neighbour and stationning troops "on vacation" across the border.
The wealthiest live in gated communities with private security, and are the ones who can scramble to their private jets when SHTF. The ones whose heads mostly end up on the spikes are the richest proles (i.e. "top middle class") - those who have enough money that it is obvious they're each, yet not enough to buy actual security or to be truly isolated from the rest of society if they so wish.
Yeah but who are their private security, cooks, cleaners, gardeners, handymen, pilots, etc? They're ordinary people and loyalty becomes harder and harder to motivate when the world is burning down.
Also, where are they running to? In an increasingly interconnected world, the whole developed world looks like it'll go down together.
I advocate for things like universal healthcare and providing food and shelter for every person not only because it's moral but also because we can afford it and it preserves the current system. If the ultra-wealthy really took a long-term view, they'd be fighting for those things because they simply won't survive the revolution.
But I believe we're beyond the point where electoral politics can halt a violent upheaval of the current economic order. And many, many people will die in that process.
Planned malice. They simply hate "lib shit" and want liberals to suffer. The left likes solar and wind so actively placing barriers in the way of solar and wind is a way of saying "fuck you, libs" and kicking sand in their faces.
My aunt is a conservative lobbyist. She is also a drunk. This means that she gets drunk and texts my family her real feelings all the time. She is absolutely 100% motivated by hate. That's it. She has told her sister to kill herself because she's on government benefits. She has told my mom that she should be thrown in prison for going to an anti-Trump protest. She has told her own daughter that she'd be better off dead than bisexual. Her daughter has attempted suicide twice.
She is not motivated by some actual policy outcome. She is not motivated by trying to help people just through some different mechanism than the left would use. She is not motivated by libertarian ideals. She is motivated by hate.
This is true, but the funny part is, it's only going to impact red states. PNW/California already get most of their power from low carbon sources. Illinois has the largest fleet of commercial nuclear generators, and subsidizes it. NYISO gets a bunch of clean hydro power from Canada and some fossil gas. Is industry going to build where power costs are higher out of stupidity? Unlikely. "Stop hitting yourself."
As another comment mentioned, this is immaterial at the rate at which solar PV and batteries are being manufactured, it just makes electricity more costly (an additional tax) until we get to the future.
Outright banning solar and wind in red states and then watching as power generation companies flee to blue states as these energy sources outcompete fossil fuels in the marketplace doesn't matter. They still got to say "fuck you, libs." That's all that matters. Pointing out how this hurts their own voters won't change anything because the thing they want is not actually human flourishing. The thing they want is "fuck you, libs" and they got that already.
Hurting the voters in this way is a win for Republicans though.
They can use it as a wedge issue.
Look, Republicans in Republican states, they're leaving you without jobs and giving your jobs to immigrants. See, slightly red but mostly purple States? This is what will happen to you. And the energy companies take the blame, not legislators.
I don't even believe that this matters. I don't think the motivation is based on "hey we can use this as a strategy to get re-elected." I truly believe that the motivation is "fuck you, libs" and nothing deeper. Even if it makes them less likely to retain power they'll still do it. Because they got to spit on the left.
You’re not wrong, we’re just waiting for voters to age out (~2M 55+ every year, ~5k per day). Angry, irrational, uneducated people will not be swayed, nor change their mind or their vote. We just keep powering forward through the molasses. It is what it is. Change what you can, ignore what you cannot.
With health technology they'll live until 100 costing an disproportionate amount of money through government heathcare while continuing to vote Republican
The data is kind of misleading. Texas actually produces almost twice as much solar + wind power as California. The %mix is lower because Californians don’t have to run AC and heat year-round, so power demand per capita is way lower as a function of geography rather than policy.
I accounted for that in the comment you replied to. Texas has a voracious appetite for power due to data centers, manufacturing, and air conditioning, and impairing new renewables will hurt Texas more than California. Energy policy is in direct opposition to Texas' need for inexpensive, low carbon power due to their higher per capita consumption. Texas should be doing everything in its power to support the deployment of renewables, but out of ideology at the federal and state levels, they are not.
California is ahead of the curve by having built renewables and batteries before this policy change, while other states will be stuck with suboptimal energy policy for at least the next half decade, increasing their cost of power. California is also the world's fourth largest economy with the energy system they have built.
Unfortunately we cannot. She is actively stealing my grandparents' remaining money and taking legal steps to gain legal and economic control over my other aunt's life once my grandparents die.
My family would absolutely love to go no-contact with her. But if she ends up with guardianship of my other aunt once my grandparents pass then she'll be sentenced to suffer and die.
Also it sounds like that contact should be helping you for any eventual guardianship hearings. You are keeping a log with the exact date, time, and content of things like "She has told her sister to kill herself", right?
But unfortunately being a republican lobbyist means a couple things. She is extremely persuasive and she is friends with some relevant government officials.
Sounds like she’s a mean drunk? Or maybe she has her own trauma that you’re not aware of. Sort of a dehumanizing picture you paint.
It sounds like your broader point is that conservatives are all stupid and motivated by hatred. I kind of feel like you have plenty of your own hatred though but seem sort of blind to it.
I assure you that I am not missing some hidden trauma that complicates my aunt. What I described above is just a taste of the harm she's done to people.
Trauma is not an excuse or justification for the level of hatred described and especially not for years.
Unless someone is completely incapable of rational action (which has happened to me), there’s some level of personal responsibility involved.
I wouldn’t argue that conservatives are stupid and motivated by hatred. However, many people voted for a campaign of blatant hate and an explicitly stated desire for revenge. This definitely colors your view of anyone that doesn’t think this is a bad thing.
You seem to happily ignore who started this garbage, who's responsible for the orange shit stain on the entire country, who yelled "Fuck your feelings" when anyone disagreed, who refused to wear a mask to possibly prevent infections, but is quite happy to see their idiocy forced upon anyone else.
It’s pretty simple, actually, you have a problem with institutionalized corruption in your country. This was lobbied for and now executed. Drill, baby, drill.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Also, please don't use this site primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which politics they prefer.
Lower energy prices and more renewables are both bad if you're in the fossil fuel business. Doubly so if the rest of the world is rapidly solarizing and you are desperate to hold onto one of your last best markets.
Coal and gas extraction are huge businesses with loads of money to pour into financing their own protection. They were so successful the meme it created broke free and took it's own life. It combined with reflexive anti-regulation, anti-intellectualism, and anti-tax forces so it's outlived even the need for it from some of the original creators (Shell et al have invested into their own renewables arms because they are the future).
It really is just this. Like I'm sure there are some folk in the GOP, both party and voterbase, who have actual principles. That however has been sacrificed on the altar of triggering the libs.
It's all they do now. If it will make some liberal in their heads unhappy, they'll do it. They don't care how much it hurts themselves.
That's honestly why I have absolutely not one iota of sympathy for all the Republicans who's businesses are getting obliterated by the trade "policies" of the dumbass in chief. You voted for this shit. I hope it sucks for you. I hope your wife leaves you. I hope your children never talk to you again. I hope broad society rejects you, permanently, for playing such stupid fucking games with the future of your nation, your children, and your own life.
Truly, it's the Right's chickens finally come home to roost. For decades the Republican side of things has gotten to play incompetent jackass olympics with the government, and between the US's position in global politics, our overall wealth and the general stability maintained by Democrats and moderates over the shrieking howling objections of themselves, everything kept trucking more or less to spec. Like children in a home maintained by parents who know what they're doing.
Now like the adolescents they so frequently scold everyone else for acting like, they have moved out on their own, maxed out their credit cards on stupid shit, and bills are stacking up. And just like those adolescents, they have no goddamn plan and just point the blame at everyone else for letting them fuck everything up for themselves.
Fucking. Children. And I don't just mean in that a distressing amount of them seem to be pedophiles.
Many believe that renewables are a boondoggle that will never be cheaper, pushed by either radical environmentalists who hate humanity, or by some shadowy conspiracy that's doing this as part of a plot to somehow reshape the world. And that fossil fuels are great, don't run out, and don't cause harm.
Solar and wind + storage is a viable path forward. Solar panels are getting cheaper, and batteries are getting better capacity and charge cycle stats each year. It may not be the path forward, we may never eliminate the need for a baseline system like nuclear plants or some gas or coal plants. But we can get ourselves off of them, other countries are, it's not like the US is special here. Same physics.
That’s how I feel about the title. How could that sentence ever make sense? People can support whatever they want. Which renewable resources? Pulpwood? Is it illegal to recycle?
Turns out the department that deals with farming, is going to focus on farming… and not on pushing electricity production.
Well yeah, the Department of Energy should probably be the ones spearheading our solar, wind, etc.
One problem with that is that the department of agriculture already has the relationships with farmers and producers. Now farmers who want to make a few extra bucks with some wind turbines or solar (which works well in tandem with growing stuff) have to talk to a stranger.
I’ve dealt with a lot of government agencies and never had a relationship with any of them. I doubt farmers have tight relationships with their local DOA rep.
Cool me too but I don't farm. I'm also probably missing out on resources that my taxes support. Are you?
Did those agencies you dealt with provide you with grants that you depended on to stay in business? Did those grants rely on actual proof that required onsite presence to confirm? Because it's one thing to measure a farm's yield and it's another to see how that yield came to be. There's a reason why the NRCS has field offices at the county level. It's so farmers can go there and so those working in the offices can go to the farms.
Next up: Ban all electric cars. Then ban all electricity. Standard Oil became the biggest company selling kerosene for lamps. We need to restore status quo!
Lets hope the children/grandchildren of these people, as they are struggling to avoiding heat stroke and watching their homes float/fly away, realize how stupid there ancestors where.
That is were we are headed, if you live below the Mason/Dixon line, a good chance your descendants will be one of those migrants many people seem to hate these days.
I have solar panels on my land. Do you realize how much heat those things absorb from the sun? My fields are way hotter(several celsius) because of the panels that what they were before without them.
Solar panels are manufactured using energy that comes mostly from coal.
I certainly do not believe that solar panels are the universal solution for climate change, like a lot of zealots with no contact with reality believe.
It sounds like you’re implying that solar panels are a net negative in regards to reducing heat and/or carbon but you never actually made a firm declaration.
As much of a fan of human spaceflight as I am, the Apollo program which made up the most notable part of the reaction to Sputnik was immensely wasteful and unnecessary.
You don’t even need to have a theoretical, they are doing that today with the race for a moon base with China. The Artemis program was our plan to get to one, most likely going to be located in a crater on the pole if they could find one with ice in it.
They are currently cutting funding and trying to cut what’s left after that too
Crops are already not doing well with the drought. This will increase carbon in the atmosphere and create worse droughts. If we want power, we're going to need to get it from sources that don't rely on steam to turn a turbine. That rules out coal, Natural Gas, biomass and Nuclear.
The bill prioritizes use of agricultural land for food over renewables (using just 0.05% of acres vs. biofuels' 30-40% of corn/soy), curbs land cost inflation, and favors U.S. energy.
It also bans Chinese solar panels, ends wind/solar tax credits post-2027, and extends biofuel credits to 2029.
This is common-sense stuff to me. America chooses America and food-supply security. The article is horribly biased.
If "choosing America" means significantly higher Co2 emissions, then that's not a good strategy for maintaining food supply security. Extreme and more unpredictable weather makes farming difficult, especially without irrigation. Any country that still sees fossil fuels as primary form of power generation is basically risking its (and everyone else's) food supply in the future.
As I understand, CO2 emissions by the US have been decreasing since the year 2000. The US has decreased its emissions by 1.2% in the past year, while China has increased it by 1.9%.
This bill is not increasing CO2 emissions, just creating a more sensible change, and also protecting the American economy.
https://archive.md/Qsxhj
Many things can be true at once:
* Most crops have shifted to corn which 1/3-1/2 of what the US produces is for energy
* China is all in on solar and renewables because the amount of energy & how they import is a weakness the US threatens. It also makes a great export & influence for them over other countries.
* Many Republican donors, voters and politicians have invested a lot in corn, oil, coal and ethanol infrastructure which solar/wind threaten if they grow to fast. Some of their towns may depend on that as the main reason anyone lives there.
* Corn is really easy to grow for most farmers in the midwest, easy to store for long periods & farmers have invested a lot in machinery (which creates lobbyists from John Deere & others)
* Corn farms are an incredible waste of land by almost all measures compared to other crops or solar & wind, especially when you do a mixed land of solar/wind with small animals, bees & battery storage.
* The US has a lot of land available
* Most people care little about what's good for everyone or what's good for the planet, even if they claim to. This one is just my opinion based on how people actually behave.
5% of all land in America is dedicated just to growing inedible field corn.
Go to usda.gov and two recent press releases are
1 - Secretary Rollins Blocks Taxpayer Dollars for Solar Panels on Prime Farmland
2- Secretary Rollins Prioritizes American Energy on National Forest Land
Both have quotes about putting "America first" to confuse people to make them think this is better for all. We think the USDA is about getting healthy food to people, but really they're about maximizing the money for farmers and people who own the land. Terrible.
[1] - https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/08/... [2] - https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/08/...
Farmers also want solar panels is the thing. It brings their costs down.
I'm in Wisconsin and if I drive on a county road, I see signs near the road that say "Save our S̶o̶l̶a̶r̶ Farms". Maybe some are fine with them, but seems like lots of internal pressure to say no or unfortunate reasons.
They may feel like grassroots campaigns to save farms, but much of it is backing from large corporate interests. Doesn't mean that there aren't legit concerns, but the sponsorship makes me weary.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1154867064/solar-power-misinf...
Presumably they are still free to purchase solar panels?
The US already banned the import of affordable solar technology from china
And how they feel about US tariffs on foreign agricultural products?
Is it affordable because they are dumping though? Or is it because of the slave labor? Or is it cheap because they freely pollute the air water and land? Or maybe all of the above? I would personally love to see a full ban on imports from countries unless they are at parity with US environmental/labor/trade laws.
An interesting take. What happens for all the things where US laws and policy are worse (“below standard”) for many developed countries, which are plenty?
My point isn’t that the US is great at everything (it’s clearly not), it’s that putting restrictions on US businesses while trading with places that don’t have the restrictions is moronic. It puts US businesses at a disadvantage and then still has the negative effect the regulations were trying to prevent in many cases (e.g. air pollution, water pollution, abuse of workers if you care about Chinese people too and don’t want to support their abuse, etc).
I don't get it… isn't up to the landowner whether they farm corn, soybeans, or solar radiation? The government may provide different incentives for each, but AFAIK, they aren't forcing a choice.
> Farmers also want solar panels is the thing. It brings their costs down.
I am a little curious to know what percentage voted for this.
Depending on the state, not enough to matter. Farmers are not a major voting block in most of the US anymore. Farmers are a bit over 1% of the US population. I'm trying to find better sources than listicle type things, but the best I can find is that in the states with the highest percentage of farmers, it's still only 5-6% of their state population.
That can be enough to swing things, but it's not enough to be the deciding block that many think they are. A century ago things were much different.
And even that is probably an optimistic number for what most people would consider a "farmer." It always irks me when people are blaming farmers for the polices of farm counties when the vast majority of voters in those communities have nothing at all to do with farming.
Except the Iowa farmer has a disproportionate amount of voting power compared to say someone in NY or CA.
They don't, they have some early power but even in iowa there are a lot of non farmers.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/11/change-the-se...
I’m not sure what exactly you mean by that link.
Iowa was listed as 63% urban in the 2020 census. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. An area needs 2000 housing units and/or 5000 people to be counted as urban. If you’ve been through the state, you’ll see lots of tiny little 2000-3000 person towns that have an urban street grid around a couple-block downtown core. These things don’t get counted as urban.
The farmland is too valuable for you to see much of any sprawl except in Des Moines and Iowa City. Even Council Bluffs (the Iowa side of the Omaha metro) has very little for the metro size.
This is very wrong: farmers still have incredibly outsized influence in American politics, mostly to our detriment. We have a number of horrible policies (ethanol subsidies, HFCS in everything, tons of inexplicable restrictions on food stamps, water policy in the west emptying all the aquifers) that are entirely because of lobbying by farmers, and the Farm Bill distributes between 70 and 100 billion per year, much of it well-spent but also with a great deal of graft and patronage because of farming lobbying.
here in California, the word "farmers" can mean very different things
Someone can be more specific and accurate with this, but in the US, population percentages don't vote. Or in other words, some votes are worth more than others. So relying entirely on % of population isn't a great measure.
That's a fair point. By the numbers, about 60% of voters turned out in the last election. Historically, though, we've had lower turnouts. Let's say that nationally only 50% turned out but all farmers voted. That would make their 1+% block closer to 2-3% of the votes for an election which is more significant.
That still elides over the electoral college. A vote in Pennsylvania is worth a lot more than a vote in California or Georgia.
Most polls hover around 75% [1]
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/07/g-s1-52362/tariffs-farmers-tr...
Another wrinkle is funding for Secure Rural Schools under the 1908 25% fund act hasn't been renewed. Counties that have a national forest presence have a federal government offset to compensate for lost logging.
https://krcrtv.com/news/local/trinity-county-urges-congress-...
Serious question. Why do farmers need the USDA's help on this? Is it a financial issue, banks don't believe there is a positive ROI on farmland solar so the wont lend? Is it health related, the USDA needs to approve solar panel usage in close proximity to crops? Is it infrastructure related, someone has to approve and build transmission lines to the farm?
Came here looking for information on the same. I would be upset if restrictions were put on installation of renewables, but this looks like its ending giveaways to farmers.
My partner works directly with farmers and USDA folks. Farmers have long, established relationships with USDA people and field offices. It's not always perfect and the relationships aren't always great but it's people they know and farmers being out in the middle of nowhere and very busy people those relationships are rare and valuable. That's how I understand it anyway.
> Subsidized solar farms have made it more difficult for farmers to access farmland by making it more expensive and less available. Within the last 30 years, Tennessee alone has lost over 1.2 million acres of farmland and is expected to lose 2 million acres by 2027.
A quick Google says that solar generates ~20 W/sq ft., so the amount of farmland lost here, by implication, to solar generation, is enough to power the entire United State with solar power alone, twice over.
Obviously, not all 1.2 million acres of land here is lost to solar generation as the government is implying. They don't cite their source, but AFAICT, this is all land that is no longer farmland for any reason at all.
A solar farm produces 30 to 100 times more energy per acre than corn.
So they're worried about (easily removable) solar eating up farm land, but not (impossible to remove) suburbs. OK.
The land argument is terrible. 40% of US corn acreage is already used for a form of solar energy, ethanol. Its over 20x less efficient than PV, so it's a huge waste of land.
Wind power on farmland only results in a tiny drop in acreage. And a hot area of study is mixing solar PV with various ag uses. In some cases yield is improved.
Finally, farmland that is used for solar is almost always not the best yielding land. Maybe the farmer is facing a water shortage or is just not that competitive. Solar could be a lifeline in situations like that.
Solar doesn't eat up land anyway; it improves it. You can put things under the panels, you can use solar panels as fencing, you can put it over water to reduce its evaporation, etc. Farmland doesn't need burning hot direct sunlight.
They are not actually worried about that.
They just think that solar and wind is woke shit that liberals like and since they hate liberals they need to hate solar and wind.
It was pretty shocking to me, learning that the White House had solar panels in the 70s!, and Reagan removed them when he came into office
While this is true, it's also true that they were pretty awful early thermal solar panels and Reagan removed them not to own the libs but because the roof was leaking. I doubt that this was politically motivated by Reagan, or that Reagan was generally cognizant of anything in 1986.
The symbolic impact of removing but not replacing them was nationally, even internationally, significant.
The "economics" of a particular roof repair are simply irrelevant in this context.
While that’s technically correct, they could have put them back
This is what Google says when asked about why the panels were removed:
“President Ronald Reagan had the White House solar panels removed in 1986 as part of his administration's broader opposition to government involvement in renewable energy and a belief that the free market, not the government, should drive energy policy. While the administration cited cost as a reason for not reinstalling them during roof repairs, the decision reflected Reagan's philosophy and his administration's cuts to renewable energy funding”
Not sure about the sources though. So I guess it’s debatable
Still interesting to realize that the US govt can zigzag so much, and that it’s not necessarily progressing in a specific direction
If I ran this board I would instantly and permanently ban people for quoting a discount robot. Why would you expect someone to engage in a conversation by proxy with Google AI Mode search results?
It's not that either. It's money.
We'd see different behavior if they were motivated by money.
They are motivated by people with money today, who plan on continuing to make money tomorrow, without competing with new technologies. Money is the motivation for everyone in the chain that is alive today, not worrying about those that live in a far tomorrow.
Agreed. There are a lot of people who would rather be a big fish in a small polluted pond than a small or middle-sized fish in a more competitive one. A lot of the objection 'globalism', 'green new scam', 'woke mind virus' is just atavistic dislike of outsiders manifesting as a desire for autarchy.
truth. I have been off grid for a long time, my motivation to do so was founded in a grade school science project with the wreckage of a camera light meter, conclusion sunlight=electricity, blink, blink, blink! and one day after getting my first decent silcone pv panel leaned up against my no power hook up farm house, a guy pulls in on his harley, and after a bit starts raving about banning solar about 15 years ago, and now I have a realy visible array, and there is solar everywhere you care to look they tryin to turn back the tide, and have zero chance with that. the first pannel still runs and cost me more than $2.50 /watt, current prices hover around $0.20/watt......retail
also that first panel provided minimum lights and water for a house, then was installed on.the hood of a truck that got destroyed by bieng rear ended, and is now moumted on.another building providing lighting and power for small tools, chargers, etc. ie: the stuff is tough
Doesn't matter. At this point renewables are going to win, it's just an economic fact. This will only serve to delay this by a small amount.
You underestimate how making something illegal can stop the thing in that country. Look at a place like Germany, blocking fracking and nuclear power and now reliant on Russian gas.
Germany has historical low usage of gas for generation and is adding 14-17GW of solar per year. Germany will need ~57 GWh of batteries by 2030 to sunset coal generation, scaling to 271 GWh by 2050. Current storage is just ~19 GWh (mostly in homes).
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE/12mo/monthly
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/germany/
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/eu-battery-storage-...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/03/germany-hits-62-7-ren...
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/negativ...
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Power-generation-from-renewable...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-27/how-germa... | https://archive.today/4Vk52
Germany needs north of 10TWh of batteries to sunset _gas_ generation.
If you're looking for a renewables success story, Germany ain't it.
> Germany needs north of 10TWh of batteries to sunset _gas_ generation.
Citation? Because the EU intends to phase out Russian gas entirely by 2027. I'm not too concerned about Germany consuming non Russian LNG at this time as they continue to deploy renewables and batteries (GP said "and now reliant on Russian gas." in their comment above). Germany is now getting almost two-thirds of its power from renewables; if that isn't a success story, I don't know what is.
EU plans ban on new Russian gas contracts using trade law - https://www.ft.com/content/8b005c13-2088-47cd-aa47-9163e36ef... | https://archive.today/INqOI ("Russian gas makes up less than 19 per cent of the EU’s overall imports of the fossil fuel, down from around two-fifths when Moscow started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.")
Import volume of natural gas from Russia in Germany from June 2021 to November 2024 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332783/german-gas-impor... ("As of November 2024, Germany has imported no Russian natural gas since September 2022. To compare, in August 2022, the import volume of the named commodity stood at around 953 million cubic meters. Over the period observed, the highest figure was recorded at 5.2 billion cubic meters in December 2021.")
Renewables Supplied Two-Thirds of Germany’s Power Last Year [2024] - https://e360.yale.edu/digest/germany-renewable-power-2024 - January 8th, 2025
(edit: Supermancho wrote in a deleted comment about energy demand destruction due to German de-industrialization, but I'm unsure if that energy demand should be forecasted in the future without good data about potential re-industrialization in the future creating said energy demand)
> Citation? Because the EU intends to phase out Russian gas entirely by 2027.
Yes, by replacing it with natgas from Azerbaijan, Qatar, and other wonderful countries.
I'm kinda jaded about this whole topic because it exposes the utter hypocrisy of Germany's Greens.
But long story short, Germany can get Dunkelflaute. Long periods of time in winter when renewable generation falls to about 10% of the _normal_ generation for that time period. A once-in-100-years event is a full month of sustained Dunkelflaute. And this is not a hand-wavy theory. For example, in 2019 there was a 10-day sustained Dunkelflaute: https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht... - look at the period from 17 to 26 Jan. And as you see, they also coincide with heightened energy consumption, which will become even _worse_ as Germany switches to heat pumps for heating.
The current plan for these is to build more natgas powerplants (German government had to _subsidize_ them directly). With noises about magic "hydrogen".
What do you suggest? Spending 10x as much on nuclear power subsidies and hopefully getting some plants finished in the 2040s?
> Spending 10x as much on nuclear power subsidies and hopefully getting some plants finished in the 2040s?
Here's the thing. If Germany had spent on nuclear the same amount of money it has spent (so far) on renewables, then it could have had 100% carbon-free electricity and heating. With lower energy prices than now.
So yes. Nuclear all the way.
Instead, we now face the reality where Germany will have to rely on imported natural gas as far as the eye can see. And certainly past 2040. While having one of the highest electricity rates in Europe, so high that they're now depressing the industry. And the plan to fix it is to keep repeating the word "hydrogen" until something happens.
Meanwhile:
> The coalition agreement between the CDU/CSU alliance and the SPD mentions the construction of up to 20 GW of gas-fired power plant capacity by 2030. In June, Reiche announced a first step with a tender volume of between five and ten gigawatts.
Where are you getting that number? Germany produced 488 twh of electricity from all sources over the entire course of 2024. That's a bit over 1 twh per day.
Yep. And Germany needs around 20-30 days of storage. Closer to 20, if some demand response is factored-in.
Please provide a source for this. It seems like you are making stuff up because you can’t accept renewables and storage delivering.
I also love how the goalposts keep moving.
A few years ago ”even an hour” of storage was the impossible marker. Then it quickly became ”a day!!!” and now we are at a month without any solar or wind power.
Here's a really nice overview: https://www.diw.de/documents/vortragsdokumente/220/diw_01.c.... (or the good old Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute#Droughts )
The study was from 2005. I can find it, if you want.
> A few years ago ”even an hour” of storage was the impossible marker. Then it quickly became ”a day!!!” and now we are at a month without any solar or wind power.
No. The problem has been known for decades, but governments simply ignored it. That's why there's so much noise about hydrogen in Geramny. It's used to whitewash the natural gas.
Who's making anything illegal here
Short-sighted actions. Sad to see that the US is taking all these backward approaches while China is charging heads down toward renewal future....
China is working on it: whether hydropower, solar, onshore wind, or offshore wind, it ranks first in the world — and the cost of generation has already fallen below coal. If the world’s fastest-growing industrial nation can rely on renewable electricity, I can’t see any reason why other countries wouldn’t.
This is the part I don’t understand. Trump goes on and on about the threat of China but doesn’t appear to be positioning the US to actually compete with them. An energy revolution is coming and China looks poised to take most of the spoils while the US buries its head in the sand and clings to the past.
It's a talking point. His base can't think beyond "China bad" and "Trump is us". If he says $action is good for the US, and bad for China then the only question they'll have is how many of those pesky elites will be sad because of this.
If you stop thinking so critically and logically, it'll all start to make a lot more sense.
Trump wants to be king of America and make Washington DC and the White House in particular look like his vision of how America should have been. He is not that interested in the outside world or how people live, which is why he puts a non-negligible share of his mental energy into things like remodeling the Rose Garden to look more like a hotel patio, eg
https://x.com/MargoMartin47/status/1958969428948980139
I mean I don't think him or most other politicians care. They will be long dead before anyone wealthy feels the consequences. In the meantime they are making money, have power to wield, and the propaganda they spew gives them a decent chunk of public support.
Trump doesn't understand that it's a new fight. He's trying to win the old fight again.
In the exact same way that "back in my day" stories don't matter to the lives of the grandchildren being told.
If you made a graph of the amount of land area being used for wind and solar, you’d have a hard time finding a way to actually visualize how little land that is…
That graph would be misleading - wind may only have a tiny footprint, they cover a lot more area. In some parts of iowa there are wind turbines in all directionsas far as the eye can see. That is how my iowa utility can claim I'm 103% wind - they generated more wind power than all customers used. (But there are other utilities in iowa so state wide and official numbers are not as good - though iowa is number 2 in the us for windpower)
When people talk about land usage for wind, they normally include the entire clear area of land around each turbine.
Nobody is claiming a huge wind farm technically has a tiny footprint because only the base of each tower touches the ground. The US if fucking huge, seeing “as far as the eye can see” is only about 28 sq miles, even if we assume we’re looking for wind turbines only (so can see 100m tall turbines with their bases over the horizon), you’re looking at 1500 sq miles. The U.S. is 3.5 million square miles. That’s three orders of magnitude greater than the area with wind turbines are far as the eye can see in every direction covers.
Or put another way, if you stood in the middle of a wind farm filled with the worlds largest onshore wind turbine stretching in every direction as far as the eye can see, that would be a land area about equivalent to 0.042% of the U.S. I don’t think there are wind farms even remotely close to that size.
Another way of looking at that number, is wind turbines evenly distributed across the US, so that a turbine as always just visible over the horizon from anywhere, would only consume 0.042% of the U.S. So yeah, it would be very hard to visualise show just how little land the U.S. wind turbines currently cover.
Yeah. And I’m not sure how America does it but all the wind turbines I’ve seen in Ontario are just sitting in farmers’ fields. No fences. Spread out. The footprint is really quite small. I could see it being larger if one stuffed them so close together that the incorporated land really couldn’t be utilized well, but even then, it’s such a tiny amount of land. Especially compared to basically every other land use.
That is the problem - farmers like that rent he turbine pays - but the town people can't get that and so will oppose them.
Idiocracy. It’s all just a move to protect vested interests in fossil fuels.
Tesla has the right idea with solar roofs but we need better options than shingles or giant panels mounted. Wind gen is amazingly good if you have a consistent supply.
When I was sailing, the sun and wind would recharge my batteries during the day. At night, wind would keep the batteries charging so I could run lights, laptops, VHF, and NMea2000 equipment.
The future isn’t this. Banning renewable energy is like banning breathing.
EDIT
Coming back after a walk, I can't stop thinking about this. When I worked at an energy tech company, me and a couple data scientists actually worked out that if, theoretically you had solar panels capable of capturing sun energy with 99% efficiency - you could power all of humanity on 1 day's worth of sunlight. (granted you had the storage capacity, we did fun things like "You saved 254,143 trees by reducing your water use" kind of stuff).
The wind farms off the coasts in the EU countries are producing massive amounts of energy at fractions of the cost. Yes, the engineering is hard. Yes, the big tall windmills are ugly (paint them, put LED lights on them, who cares). You don't need the giant big ones, a field of smaller ones works too at the same altitude (key part... wind is faster at altitude). Make a wind mill kite and send it up. There's so much energy around us. We just need to find a way to trap those electrons.
> Idiocracy.
At least President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho cared about things enough to make things better for his people, hired the smartest person he knew and genuinely tried to fix things.
To be fair there is a considerable amount of power used in creating products that isn't directly accounted for by someones home energy needs. And that number gets a good bit bigger if we want those production processes to be clean themselves. The energy we pay for directly through electricity and fuel is only a part of our energy consumption pie.
Clean processes generally use less power than dirty, inefficient fossil based processes.
Full electrification would halve energy needs even if it doubled electrical usage.
One country stands out starkly if you look at the pace of electrification over the last decade or so, and it's China.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/0...
It's not really good for those vested interests. If the rest of the world moves away from fossil fuels, they'll be stuck, in a market with shrinking growth. Instead they could invest in a different, growth market. If they get mixed signals from the US govt, they risk making poor strategic decisions
It may be short term good for them but long term fairly idiotic (for them and the US).
Long term isn't even that far away. Much of the developing world will be happy to adopt renewables and battery storage, just as they've been happy to adopt mobile networks over fixed lines. It's a leapfrog moment and the US is not supplying the materials nor participating in the improvements gained from it.
The current moment is a bit like seeing the internet take off and investing in print. Sure it’ll be around still in some form, but it’s the wrong time to double down.
And the US's economic opponents are taking advantage of the moment. China is spending massively on solar production and deployment, and selling their panels to other countries. The US will be the loser here:
1. More expensive power from non-renewables. Especially as the global consumption of fossil fuels decline (so domestic costs will likely rise). This will become a drag on the US economy.
2. Not participating in the production and sale of solar panels to other nations.
Trump decries the US trade deficit while simultaneously discouraging one massive upcoming market that the US could become a net exporter in.
He's doing the exact opposite of making America great again. If there was ever a time for other countries to leap frog us and get ahead, it's now. Just don't touch our AI bubble.
> while boosting support for biofuels, which consume the majority of the country’s cropland.
Wow. I knew it was a lot but did not know it was the majority.
The article's claim is misleading - biofuels don't consume the majority of US cropland. Corn for ethanol uses ~38% of US corn production, but only about 7% of total US cropland is devoted to all biofuel crops combined according to USDA data.
you can run numbers in many ways. a part of most crops goito renewable but there is other parts on the same crop used for food
If I were an adversarial state to the US I would certainly applaud all those initiatives and Big Beautiful Bills from the current US administration.
In time, it seems to me that those will drive the US economy right into a solid brick wall.
This administration might not be full of adversarial agents, but they sure are behaving like they are.
It only takes a few well placed hostile (or fools) to take down an organization, especially when there are no ramifications.
This is so shortsighted. The US needs a huge increase in its electricity generation capabilities, and nowadays, rewnewables, especially solar, are the cheapest option.
This video from a few days ago analyzes the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tNp2vsxEzk
Regardless of climate change issues, the anti-renewable policy doesn't seem to make any sense from an economic, growth, or national security standpoint. It even is contrary to the anti-regulation and pro-capitalism _stated_ stance of the administration.
I can't read it. Is it going to cut subsidies or put new restrictions on what farmers can do with their own land?
> At the state fairgrounds in Lebanon, Tennessee, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Monday that the agency will no longer allow “businesses to use your taxpayer dollars to fund solar projects on prime American farmland, and we will no longer allow solar panels manufactured by foreign adversaries to be used in our USDA-funded projects.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20250822182457/https://insidecli...
It’s going to cut a specific kind of subsidy in favor of other subsidies (biofuel, biomass, nat-gas hydrogen).
> Brooke Rollins said Monday that the agency will no longer allow “businesses to use your taxpayer dollars to fund solar projects on prime American farmland, and we will no longer allow solar panels manufactured by foreign adversaries to be used in our USDA-funded projects.”.
Could be reasonable, we need more renewable independence.
> ...while boosting support for biofuels...
And there it is, going backwards. So tired of this.
My biggest concern is this could bring hybrid solutions to a halt. Solar panels make for perfect shading in some use cases, for multi-use land. There has been many approaches to selectively place solar panels to increase farming efficiency while providing energy, a win-win-win scenario.
What you're describing makes complete sense to me, but what I don't understand is why the USDA should be endorsing specific practices like this or that. To be clear, I also think the Farm Bill is a ridiculous and unnecessary giveaway.
[flagged]
Refer to David Brooks' opinion piece in today's NYT, about Republican Nihilism. He claims there is a spirit of "burn it all down". Seems to be seconded by several comments in this thread.
I'm rapidly getting to the point of joining that group.
I'm getting real tired of fighting tax breaks for people with 131 Scrooge McDuck piles of money already, at the cost of services a large portion of the country uses or may need.
To be clear, I don't have kids, but want my tax dollars to fund free lunches, but we can't have that. Instead we get garbage like public school busses being used to drive kids to private schools, while the public school students walk. (See Ohio)
The sad part is that once it all burns down, the 131 rich fucks will be the most likely to survive it all. The rest of us not so much.
That's not entirely accurate...
(bonus points if you know what movie that quote comes from)
I fly, I pilot... (burp)
Oh I think the wealthiest will be the first with heads on pikes when it all comes tumbling down.
The wealthiest people aren’t descendants of Julius Caesar, the Medicis, the Hapsburgs, Rollo (who is an ancestor to every European monarch), the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, etc.
Some of these are moderately wealthy now (eg the Rothchilds) but they don’t dominate the world’s wealth.
Part of this is that can be hard to maintain a lineage over time. Also, foolish fail sons will squander family wealth.
But some wealthy people just go the French Revolution way.
I don’t believe the Gateses, Musks, Bezoses, etc will survive the upheaval, violence and revolution they are making inevitable.
From the outside, the current model looks more like the Russian style burning down, not French revolution.
At the end it's an olygarchy with too much stockpiled military slowly creeping on it's neighbour and stationning troops "on vacation" across the border.
Accurate, as I'd expect from Team Rocket.
The wealthiest live in gated communities with private security, and are the ones who can scramble to their private jets when SHTF. The ones whose heads mostly end up on the spikes are the richest proles (i.e. "top middle class") - those who have enough money that it is obvious they're each, yet not enough to buy actual security or to be truly isolated from the rest of society if they so wish.
Yeah but who are their private security, cooks, cleaners, gardeners, handymen, pilots, etc? They're ordinary people and loyalty becomes harder and harder to motivate when the world is burning down.
Also, where are they running to? In an increasingly interconnected world, the whole developed world looks like it'll go down together.
I advocate for things like universal healthcare and providing food and shelter for every person not only because it's moral but also because we can afford it and it preserves the current system. If the ultra-wealthy really took a long-term view, they'd be fighting for those things because they simply won't survive the revolution.
But I believe we're beyond the point where electoral politics can halt a violent upheaval of the current economic order. And many, many people will die in that process.
[dead]
Planned malice. They simply hate "lib shit" and want liberals to suffer. The left likes solar and wind so actively placing barriers in the way of solar and wind is a way of saying "fuck you, libs" and kicking sand in their faces.
My aunt is a conservative lobbyist. She is also a drunk. This means that she gets drunk and texts my family her real feelings all the time. She is absolutely 100% motivated by hate. That's it. She has told her sister to kill herself because she's on government benefits. She has told my mom that she should be thrown in prison for going to an anti-Trump protest. She has told her own daughter that she'd be better off dead than bisexual. Her daughter has attempted suicide twice.
She is not motivated by some actual policy outcome. She is not motivated by trying to help people just through some different mechanism than the left would use. She is not motivated by libertarian ideals. She is motivated by hate.
This is true, but the funny part is, it's only going to impact red states. PNW/California already get most of their power from low carbon sources. Illinois has the largest fleet of commercial nuclear generators, and subsidizes it. NYISO gets a bunch of clean hydro power from Canada and some fossil gas. Is industry going to build where power costs are higher out of stupidity? Unlikely. "Stop hitting yourself."
As another comment mentioned, this is immaterial at the rate at which solar PV and batteries are being manufactured, it just makes electricity more costly (an additional tax) until we get to the future.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly (center on US)
It doesn't matter.
Outright banning solar and wind in red states and then watching as power generation companies flee to blue states as these energy sources outcompete fossil fuels in the marketplace doesn't matter. They still got to say "fuck you, libs." That's all that matters. Pointing out how this hurts their own voters won't change anything because the thing they want is not actually human flourishing. The thing they want is "fuck you, libs" and they got that already.
Hurting the voters in this way is a win for Republicans though.
They can use it as a wedge issue.
Look, Republicans in Republican states, they're leaving you without jobs and giving your jobs to immigrants. See, slightly red but mostly purple States? This is what will happen to you. And the energy companies take the blame, not legislators.
Politics today is ruled by cynicism.
I don't even believe that this matters. I don't think the motivation is based on "hey we can use this as a strategy to get re-elected." I truly believe that the motivation is "fuck you, libs" and nothing deeper. Even if it makes them less likely to retain power they'll still do it. Because they got to spit on the left.
That's not cynicism. That's brute honesty.
You’re not wrong, we’re just waiting for voters to age out (~2M 55+ every year, ~5k per day). Angry, irrational, uneducated people will not be swayed, nor change their mind or their vote. We just keep powering forward through the molasses. It is what it is. Change what you can, ignore what you cannot.
With health technology they'll live until 100 costing an disproportionate amount of money through government heathcare while continuing to vote Republican
I think you'll find this social science paper relevant and lightening. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
The data is kind of misleading. Texas actually produces almost twice as much solar + wind power as California. The %mix is lower because Californians don’t have to run AC and heat year-round, so power demand per capita is way lower as a function of geography rather than policy.
I accounted for that in the comment you replied to. Texas has a voracious appetite for power due to data centers, manufacturing, and air conditioning, and impairing new renewables will hurt Texas more than California. Energy policy is in direct opposition to Texas' need for inexpensive, low carbon power due to their higher per capita consumption. Texas should be doing everything in its power to support the deployment of renewables, but out of ideology at the federal and state levels, they are not.
California is ahead of the curve by having built renewables and batteries before this policy change, while other states will be stuck with suboptimal energy policy for at least the next half decade, increasing their cost of power. California is also the world's fourth largest economy with the energy system they have built.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO/12mo/monthl...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/us-electricity-2025...
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/04/23/california-is-now-the-4th-...
Texas has significantly more heavy industry than California which probably makes up more of the power delta than AC usage.
My aunt is a conservative lobbyist. She is also a drunk.
That started out grimly funny but got more and more depressing as I read on. Dealing with that can't be easy.
Just block. Life's too short to deal with people like this.
Unfortunately we cannot. She is actively stealing my grandparents' remaining money and taking legal steps to gain legal and economic control over my other aunt's life once my grandparents die.
My family would absolutely love to go no-contact with her. But if she ends up with guardianship of my other aunt once my grandparents pass then she'll be sentenced to suffer and die.
Also it sounds like that contact should be helping you for any eventual guardianship hearings. You are keeping a log with the exact date, time, and content of things like "She has told her sister to kill herself", right?
Yes.
But unfortunately being a republican lobbyist means a couple things. She is extremely persuasive and she is friends with some relevant government officials.
Yeah, I guess I threw that out in the hope that there will be justice, even though the trend is clearly in favor of corruption.
I don't envy your situation, or your mom's, at all.
Wow, that is unbelievably degenerate. I'll never understand how someone can pidgeon-hole themselves into an identity like that.
If only you can dig up some dirt and get her imprisoned. That seems to be the only way out of this mess.
1) Assert what you want - gotta know e.g. "I want kind people in my life"
2) Enforce your boundaries
Sounds like it would be easy to get her on a drunk-driving charge.
You continue to talk to your aunt which validates her opinions.
You can see my other comment which explains why we cannot safely go no contact with her.
Sounds like she’s a mean drunk? Or maybe she has her own trauma that you’re not aware of. Sort of a dehumanizing picture you paint.
It sounds like your broader point is that conservatives are all stupid and motivated by hatred. I kind of feel like you have plenty of your own hatred though but seem sort of blind to it.
I have dealt with her for my entire life.
My mother has dealt with her for her entire life.
I assure you that I am not missing some hidden trauma that complicates my aunt. What I described above is just a taste of the harm she's done to people.
Trauma is not an excuse or justification for the level of hatred described and especially not for years.
Unless someone is completely incapable of rational action (which has happened to me), there’s some level of personal responsibility involved.
I wouldn’t argue that conservatives are stupid and motivated by hatred. However, many people voted for a campaign of blatant hate and an explicitly stated desire for revenge. This definitely colors your view of anyone that doesn’t think this is a bad thing.
The left's hate is in response.
You seem to happily ignore who started this garbage, who's responsible for the orange shit stain on the entire country, who yelled "Fuck your feelings" when anyone disagreed, who refused to wear a mask to possibly prevent infections, but is quite happy to see their idiocy forced upon anyone else.
It’s pretty simple, actually, you have a problem with institutionalized corruption in your country. This was lobbied for and now executed. Drill, baby, drill.
Planned malice. There are plenty of sections in Project 2025 demonizing renewable energy.
A certain person has had a thing against Wind Mills ever since Scotland built them spoiling the view from his golf course.
This is the most pertinent comment in the thread.
[flagged]
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Also, please don't use this site primarily for political battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which politics they prefer.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
And why? That's the part that gets me. What's the reason? If we can develop renewables that brings the cost of energy down, how is that bad?
Lower energy prices and more renewables are both bad if you're in the fossil fuel business. Doubly so if the rest of the world is rapidly solarizing and you are desperate to hold onto one of your last best markets.
Coal and gas extraction are huge businesses with loads of money to pour into financing their own protection. They were so successful the meme it created broke free and took it's own life. It combined with reflexive anti-regulation, anti-intellectualism, and anti-tax forces so it's outlived even the need for it from some of the original creators (Shell et al have invested into their own renewables arms because they are the future).
It wasn’t demonized for ideological reasons. Whose interest is it for renewables to fail? Follow the money.
Because it's not about improving anyone's lives (other than maybe the fossil fuel execs). It's just about Fuck The Libs.
> It's just about Fuck The Libs.
That's how they rile up their voting base. But the actual goal is more just to get rich.
It really is just this. Like I'm sure there are some folk in the GOP, both party and voterbase, who have actual principles. That however has been sacrificed on the altar of triggering the libs.
It's all they do now. If it will make some liberal in their heads unhappy, they'll do it. They don't care how much it hurts themselves.
That's honestly why I have absolutely not one iota of sympathy for all the Republicans who's businesses are getting obliterated by the trade "policies" of the dumbass in chief. You voted for this shit. I hope it sucks for you. I hope your wife leaves you. I hope your children never talk to you again. I hope broad society rejects you, permanently, for playing such stupid fucking games with the future of your nation, your children, and your own life.
Truly, it's the Right's chickens finally come home to roost. For decades the Republican side of things has gotten to play incompetent jackass olympics with the government, and between the US's position in global politics, our overall wealth and the general stability maintained by Democrats and moderates over the shrieking howling objections of themselves, everything kept trucking more or less to spec. Like children in a home maintained by parents who know what they're doing.
Now like the adolescents they so frequently scold everyone else for acting like, they have moved out on their own, maxed out their credit cards on stupid shit, and bills are stacking up. And just like those adolescents, they have no goddamn plan and just point the blame at everyone else for letting them fuck everything up for themselves.
Fucking. Children. And I don't just mean in that a distressing amount of them seem to be pedophiles.
Republicans have been anti-environmentalism since the 1970s, to cater to the anti-regulation sensibilities of big business and energy donors.
https://archive.is/h99oh
It's way beyond anti regulation now. They are actually creating regulation to hurt the environment.
See: utilities trying to shut down coal plants because they are too expensive, being stopped by the current administration.
Many believe that renewables are a boondoggle that will never be cheaper, pushed by either radical environmentalists who hate humanity, or by some shadowy conspiracy that's doing this as part of a plot to somehow reshape the world. And that fossil fuels are great, don't run out, and don't cause harm.
And what is their belief based on?
Contrarianism, fear of change, cherry-picked info, and propaganda.
[flagged]
It’s proving very difficult to stop them.
Solar and wind are unreliable and too low-impact relative to their cost and maintenance.
Every time we have this discussion, we always conclude that nuclear power generation is the only viable path forward.
Solar and wind + storage is a viable path forward. Solar panels are getting cheaper, and batteries are getting better capacity and charge cycle stats each year. It may not be the path forward, we may never eliminate the need for a baseline system like nuclear plants or some gas or coal plants. But we can get ourselves off of them, other countries are, it's not like the US is special here. Same physics.
The sun reliably comes out every day. The rest of this idea has been, or will be, obsoleted by how incredibly cheap batteries have become.
Nuclear NIMBYism is even harder to defeat than regular NIMBYism, so you might as well ask for geothermal.
Every time we have this discussion, we conclude that despite some good aspects nuclear is way too expensive and too slow to build.
Luckily for us, the market has also already concluded this. Global solar is now growing by 1TW of installed capacity per year.
Do you have proof of this?
That’s how I feel about the title. How could that sentence ever make sense? People can support whatever they want. Which renewable resources? Pulpwood? Is it illegal to recycle?
Turns out the department that deals with farming, is going to focus on farming… and not on pushing electricity production.
Well yeah, the Department of Energy should probably be the ones spearheading our solar, wind, etc.
One problem with that is that the department of agriculture already has the relationships with farmers and producers. Now farmers who want to make a few extra bucks with some wind turbines or solar (which works well in tandem with growing stuff) have to talk to a stranger.
I’ve dealt with a lot of government agencies and never had a relationship with any of them. I doubt farmers have tight relationships with their local DOA rep.
Cool me too but I don't farm. I'm also probably missing out on resources that my taxes support. Are you?
Did those agencies you dealt with provide you with grants that you depended on to stay in business? Did those grants rely on actual proof that required onsite presence to confirm? Because it's one thing to measure a farm's yield and it's another to see how that yield came to be. There's a reason why the NRCS has field offices at the county level. It's so farmers can go there and so those working in the offices can go to the farms.
I don't think ban is the right word for this? The federal government will no longer be funding renewables on farmland which is stupid but not a ban.
> bans support
Do we really need to play this game? It's obviously sensationalistic and "ends funding" is more accurate.
Next up: Ban all electric cars. Then ban all electricity. Standard Oil became the biggest company selling kerosene for lamps. We need to restore status quo!
Whale oil does not seem out of the question.
The Trump administration has already sold many brand-new electric vehicles at a loss with the same sort of logic.
What is being banned
Lets hope the children/grandchildren of these people, as they are struggling to avoiding heat stroke and watching their homes float/fly away, realize how stupid there ancestors where.
That is were we are headed, if you live below the Mason/Dixon line, a good chance your descendants will be one of those migrants many people seem to hate these days.
I have solar panels on my land. Do you realize how much heat those things absorb from the sun? My fields are way hotter(several celsius) because of the panels that what they were before without them.
Solar panels are manufactured using energy that comes mostly from coal.
I certainly do not believe that solar panels are the universal solution for climate change, like a lot of zealots with no contact with reality believe.
What claim are you trying to make here?
It sounds like you’re implying that solar panels are a net negative in regards to reducing heat and/or carbon but you never actually made a firm declaration.
If Sputnik had happened today,MAGA would would have dismissed it as commie wastefulness.
As much of a fan of human spaceflight as I am, the Apollo program which made up the most notable part of the reaction to Sputnik was immensely wasteful and unnecessary.
You don’t even need to have a theoretical, they are doing that today with the race for a moon base with China. The Artemis program was our plan to get to one, most likely going to be located in a crater on the pole if they could find one with ice in it.
They are currently cutting funding and trying to cut what’s left after that too
[flagged]
In the US we’re fond of pigs
Crops are already not doing well with the drought. This will increase carbon in the atmosphere and create worse droughts. If we want power, we're going to need to get it from sources that don't rely on steam to turn a turbine. That rules out coal, Natural Gas, biomass and Nuclear.
They have overproduction of corn this year. What are on about in here.
The bill prioritizes use of agricultural land for food over renewables (using just 0.05% of acres vs. biofuels' 30-40% of corn/soy), curbs land cost inflation, and favors U.S. energy.
It also bans Chinese solar panels, ends wind/solar tax credits post-2027, and extends biofuel credits to 2029.
This is common-sense stuff to me. America chooses America and food-supply security. The article is horribly biased.
If "choosing America" means significantly higher Co2 emissions, then that's not a good strategy for maintaining food supply security. Extreme and more unpredictable weather makes farming difficult, especially without irrigation. Any country that still sees fossil fuels as primary form of power generation is basically risking its (and everyone else's) food supply in the future.
As I understand, CO2 emissions by the US have been decreasing since the year 2000. The US has decreased its emissions by 1.2% in the past year, while China has increased it by 1.9%.
This bill is not increasing CO2 emissions, just creating a more sensible change, and also protecting the American economy.