You haven't identified a group, a motive, a psychological mechanism, described the method, or explained the intention in any depth.
In other words, this is a cynical lament about how other people suck that's not descriptive enough to be useful or falsifiable. I believe in acknowledging harsh realities for the sake of dealing with them, but there's just no substance here to even acknowledge.
No, they think the risks of collapse are well worth the chance of improvement, because they view what we already have as so poor. They don't actually want a collapse.
Usually because indentifying groups, motives, psychological mechanisms, methods, or intentions, usually gets labelled as anti-business, anti-red, anti-blue, antisemitic, racist, or other such "bad things" that we're getting conditioned not to do.
They're called Trumpists. They claim to have some lofty constructive values. But whenever one tries to discuss the destructive actions of their hollow cult leader with an appeal to any of those values, they fall back to whataboutism. The smarter ones change to a different topic with cookie cutter talking points about that value. The dumber ones usually just complain about an arbitrary female democrat. The only conclusion that fits is that they want to see their country and their fellow citizens get hurt, while feeling morally justified about it.
The psychological mechanism seems to be [social] media psychosis. It's been slowly festering through decades of reactionary talk radio, but really went into overdrive when the attention-surveillance industry went to town promoting the dumbest least common denominator memetic reactions to outrage bait.
signed, a libertarian who actually believes in a strong natural right to free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, fiscal responsibility, individualism, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and many more unenumerated personal liberties.
One of the core problems of contemporary news media is that you only ever get exposed to the straw man arguments of the other side. It's just so lucrative to perpetually paint the other side as obviously idiotic, so people can jerk off their ago about how smart they are. Then after years of this they have built a solid immutable mental model of their opponent that is mostly incorrect, but the thing they hold dearest. All so they can keep you tuning in to watch fucking advertisements...
Effective propaganda is generally based around slivers of truth. The real problem is the people who believe these viewpoints for valid honest reasons, yet end up getting taken in by the people promoting them for self serving reasons. They feel so happy to simply "be heard" that they end up supporting movements not actually aimed at reforming, but rather furthering corruption. This happens to both political teams - in fact I'd say this is the professional parties' primary purpose.
Please summarise these reasons. Frankly, I'm sceptical. I suspect it's a different philosophy not counterfactual outcomes. Some people dislike socialised tax and regulation.
Don't the people who dislike socialized tax and regulation have reasons though?
Part of it is that there is more than one opponent. So for example:
> automatic filing will lead to silent frictionless automatic tax increases, forever.
There are presumably real people with this concern, and it's not completely ridiculous. But then there should be ways to mitigate it. Let's compromise by requiring tax withholding to show up on bank statements. Instead of your bank statement just showing that you got a +$1100 deposit from your employer, it's required to show the full +$1800 they paid you and then separate the -$700 in transfers to the state and federal governments for the various tax withholdings.
That should satisfy the people concerned about making taxes invisible because then you're actually giving them what they want. But then there are the other opponents, and that compromise is obviously not going to satisfy the politicians taking bribes from the TurboTax company.
But it's still useful to distinguish them, because you may not need both. You only need 51 votes, not 100. If you started with 45, maybe that sort of compromise can get you 6 more.
Look if reasons are "i don't like it" then that's fine. There's no arguing with personal preference or axioms of belief like "no matter what tax is bad"
The point of argument is when people have to be reminded of the contradictions: if you file a tax claim and claim allowances you acknowledge tax exists. If your health fund demands you also exploit state or federal subsidy you're exploiting the benefits. If your company receives industry offsets or assistance...
> There's no arguing with personal preference or axioms of belief like "no matter what tax is bad"
But that's just a straw man. To hold that belief you would have to e.g. actually want to "defund the police" to avoid the need for tax revenue to pay them. Is that supposed to be a common position among Republicans?
The real contention is how much. There is a large difference between the government taking 5% of your salary and 65%, even if taxes exist in both cases. And then if you think ordinary people should be paying less than they are now rather than more, you'll reasonably want to oppose things that conceal tax collection from the constituents who are paying them, because then those constituents will be less likely to notice and object to excessive spending.
For fossil-fuel companies, it's about control and extending the world's dependency on their products as far into the future as possible. The others are on their dole to one degree or another, when you consider that many of the edges in the graph in the article represent not only relationships, but also flows of money.
Why don’t they invest in other sectors though vs doubling down? Tobacco companies, famously unscrupulous, did just this, saw the writing on the wall and now make their money off zyn and vapes vs trying to swim upstream selling traditional tobacco products. Seems to me an oil company has enough resources where they can out invest most any green vc outright and dominate the marketshare if they were so inclined.
This is playing out like the hubris film companies had towards digital sensors. Seems they don’t teach history in MBA programs I guess.
It's probably to do with vape companies still needing nicotine, and so the tobacco companies still control the primary source, so they can gain the advantages of vertical integration from buying up the downstream offshoots. Non-fossil fuel sources of energy by definition have different primary sources of energy than those controlled by fossil fuel companies, so they can't capitalize in the same way.
Btw, I looked up Juul from your other comment and saw they're 35% owned by Altria (formerly Philip Morris) who are "one of the world's largest producers and marketers of tobacco, cigarettes, and medical products in the treatment of illnesses caused by tobacco." [1]
You couldn't hope for a more tragically hilarious summation of the cynicism in this industry than that combination of businesses to be in
Respectfully, because I agree with you, I would like to suggest that you look up Mission Winnow next and let me know whether you believe “you couldn’t hope for a more tragically hilarious summation of the cynicism in this industry” held up as an accurate statement.
> Why don’t they invest in other sectors though vs doubling down?
Control and relevance. These things matter to them as much as profit.
The barrier to entry to produce renewables is lower than fossil fuels - there is no natural oligopoly.
If you own your house, you can put solar on your roof and a battery on your house, and dramatically cut back on your fossil fuel derived energy needs. Communities can do the same, as can utilities and independent businesses.
That's a future where fossil fuel companies are far less relevant. Not irrelevant, but nothing like what they were. That future may be unavoidable, but they are trying to delay its arrival as much as they can. While that may seem like an anathema to many (including me), put yourself in the shoes of a major investor in or executive at a fossil-fuel company, and you might do the same.
And yet solar and wind grow hand over fist internationally. One would think they would want to buy out some of these emerging companies in this sector and take advantage of the inevitable increasing investment and profit potential in this sector. Every other industry seems the investor class is elbowing and charging to get there first and secure marketshare e.g. ai but you just don’t see that sort of chomping at the bit with green technology for whatever reason. Seems so strange considering the entire world will need to be retooled and the money that stands to be made is so enormous. Probably more money that has been made in oil so far by several orders of magnitude thanks to parallel investments in other sectors and technologies that weren’t around when oil got its start 150 years ago.
Wind and solar grew as industries, but solar in particular is regarded as a tough business to be in because new entrants keep making better and cheaper solar panels leading to cutthroat competition.
That's a very different skill set than gaining access to scarce mineral resources and monopolising them to extract maximum profit.
Some subcontractors may have transferrable skills e.g. offshore boat crews but at a high level the two industries are fairly incompatible.
It doesn't help that the fossil companies have succeeded in using politics to salt the ground of their potential new ventures at home. A real burn the boats moment for them.
That's because there's nothing to buy. China dumped a ton of money into the sector and took full advantage of their tightly integrated manufacturing capacity to bootstrap it.
The US looked at that and said "let's tax raw material imports" and half the population is too stupid to realize that they're the ones paying those taxes.
EDIT: it should be noted this is hardly a criticism of China's strategy here- they wanted an industry they saw potential in, subsidized it and bought IP which other countries offered up, and reaped the rewards. They just literally played capitalism better.
Tobacco companies mostly just pivoted to targetting weaker nations, e.g. this summary from a study looking at price elasticity:
> The tobacco industry undermines tobacco control efforts in low-income countries and targets vulnerable populations through aggressive marketing and lobbying for less tobacco control and lower taxes.
Unfortunately for fossil fuels most of the world are importers of their products which makes them a tough sell as other options become cheaper.
Easier said than done. Legacy social media is dying, and Meta has plenty of resources to create products in and monetize other product sectors. And yet...
If what you know is how to pull oil out of the ground, and build multi billion dollar rigs to do it, that's your sector.
Meta posted increased revenues last year. Social media isn't growing like it used to, but that doesn't mean there's not plenty of blood left in the stone.
Plus you'll never find a better multiplier then software and consumer spending.
It isn’t like the tobacco companies knew any different. They just opted to buy Juul which they could do with their massive cash reserves. Their own efforts (blu?) failed. As the saying goes, those who can’t do, buy.
There are plenty of "legacy" environmental organizations that view any form of construction, including construction of renewable energy, as worthy of being opposed. They aren't all interested in the bigger picture of advancing renewable energy to slow climate change.
Maybe, but this study is about specific, named organisations with documented personnel or financial ties to fossil fuel companies. Not sure how your comment is relevant to them
Even if you don't care about climate change, spending money to stop all development of wind energy technology and its deployment into the national energy mix is very very dumb. There are a lot of people who just hate certain things and make it their life mission to inflict damage onto it no matter what. It's not a rational thought process.
I did hear an argument on Mastodon that made some kind of sense: currently the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world, not least because oil is bought with USD. Reduce the world's dependency on oil, and you reduce the world's dependency on USD. If the USA loses the benefit of the rest of the world needing USD to buy oil, that changes the US economy in bad ways. Hence the USA opposing renewable energy as much as it can.
I'm not saying it's true - I have no idea. But it's at least a rational reason for opposing renewables, which otherwise seems to be very irrational.
The uncomfortable truth is that they most likely have the same loves, passions, interests and motivations as us. They are not some alien other, they are us.
But that is uncomfortable. We like certainty more. We prefer an easily identified enemy.
The difference (in many things) is not the motivation but the beliefs about what to do about it. Political opponents are more similar than different. By understanding the other you can reach them and effectively change them.
If you are puzzled by a group of people the issue is not that group - it is the puzzlement!
However one effective political tactic is to outgroup and other an opponent. It strengthens your sense of belonging to the right group. The danger is that it is inward facing and lowers inclusiveness. Empathy generally weakens ones own political passions but brings more peace. Restricting empathy increases enthusiasm and energy and action.
Moreover, there are academic studies and popular schools of thought that say empathy is dangerous, that people should be entitled to their rage and emotions and that people shouldn't be forced to understand. That empathy itself is a tool of power.
As I understand it, at least some of these groups are nominally pro-nuclear. They are aware that nuclear plants have a very long lead time, while wind (and solar) can be installed quickly. So they can advocate for nuclear as a way of fending off other non-fossil-fuel energy sources, without actually replacing any fossil fuels with nuclear.
20-30 years ago nuclear was a quicker path towards decarbonization than solar was. So pushing solar over nuclear made sense for those hoping to delay decarbonization.
Now solar is a quicker way to decarbonize, so similar efforts are anti-solar, pro-nuclear.
What I don’t get about all these evil scrooge types that run out world, is why wouldn’t they want to make money off things like wind and actual climate salves? Seems to me the coming climate crises is going to cost a ton of money and lead to destruction of entire national economies. Meanwhile they could have been raising all boats and made even more money and had even more things to invest in.
Is oil really that profitable to ignore the havoc it wreaks and will wreak on virtually every other industry, including itself when there is less money moving around to spend on oil and oil products?
I just don’t get it how being so objectively shortsighted is actually the corrupt greedy money position instead of ensuring the world as we know it doesn’t collapse and that the money printing machine doesn’t fall apart. But what do I know I guess.
Its because they're in a death cult purity spiral.[0] They suffer from cognitive dissonance so a part of them understands this stuff but another part of them identifies so strongly with their peer group and profession that this second part wins out.
It's really unfortunate that such glaring cognitive defects appear to have doomed the human race smothering itself to death on this planet instead of reaching out to the stars.
The oil industry sees some of the most advanced applications of engineering on earth. One would think this is a sector used to disruption and investing in emerging technoligies with potential for profit because that is how they’ve been optimizing the oil industry this entire time. I guess somehow a line is drawn in the sand with oil vs not oil but I don’t know why. It seems hard to imagine that these massive corporations are structured such that the influence of engineers and consultants are eschewed for the feelings of a few of uninformed people. Seems unbelievable to put that amount of money behind such obstinate thinking.
It might be psychological, Exxon famously held back their report on the impact of oil on the climate in 1977. If you've fucked the whole world over that badly and know it, and then denied it for decades, it might be very difficult to acknowlwdge and repent. Doubling down might be easier.
If you haven’t heard the term you should look up accelerationists.
There’s several competing flavors of it like the ones who think “the good” communist revolution will happen after society collapses vs the ones who want democracy to fall apart because they think monarchical societies are morally superior, but they all have the same line of thinking that “the collapse” is coming any day now and they want to accelerate when they say occurs
Organised communism is almost completely defunct and afaik the 4th international likewise. At this point accelerationist left views would be as fringe as sovereign citizens and certainly not allied to the coal oil and nuclear industries.
The former RCP members who joined the tory party in the UK, people like Dominic Cummings are interesting of course. And Steve Bannon is fond of posturing as a Maoist in style if not in substance. His oilskin coat is a performance Mao jacket.
I don't understand, I try to constantly mark the threads that use software stacks I don't use or care about ("how to do X in framework Y better with respect to metric Z"). I am constantly interested in scientific discussions. Sometimes HN feels like a slow news day, and the thread with less points and less comments is what I get to see, and this underlying thread does feel suppressed...
I notice a lot of threads critical of e.g., YC vompanies, silicon valley, Israel, corporate greed, capitalism, tend to get to the front page and then disappear soon after.
I'm not sure exactly how the mechanism for the front page works, so I'm not saying it's intentional, but the effect is that the front page trends towards safe topics that don't question the status quo, not even the tech status quo, unless it's about specifically technical issues or the software labour market.
Three wind projects got scrapped in NY and I always wondered if there was some alternate hidden reason. It does seem though that it was just costs and technological shifts that made NY cancel them...
> production of wind energy is crucial for meeting science-based climate goals
What exactly is a science-based climate goal? And why would wind energy be essential for it?
I hear people talk about their solar installations all the time, and it seems like the anti-nuclear sentiment is finally wearing off too. I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about one of these windmills. It seems to be a fairly straightforward wealth transfer from tax payers and utility consumers to the windmill people. Property values go down and electricity prices go up. Windmill people move on to collect the next subsidy.
They pay for themselves in a couple of years (even without subsidies) and tend to produce peak power during periods when solar is offline (e.g. at night or cloudy days). Farmers like them because they don't take up much space and they provide revenue independent of how well their crops do, which varies wildly year to year. It's cheaper than burning fossil fuels (though not quite as cheap as solar)
Adding wind to the network does not make electricity prices go up (unless you do something stupid like shut down all your nuclear plants at the same time). That's nonsense. It's maybe not quite as cheap if you factor in the storage requirements to build up the grid "properly", but still cheaper than coal at the very least.
It's also worth mentioning that, while I'm not anti-nuclear on principle, the economic return on nuclear projects ranges somewhere between "multiple decades" and "never" - and there's a large empty gap on the timescale of a decade between spending most of that money and starting to receive dividends. And you'd better be running it 100%
At least with solar and wind the buildout takes a few weeks or months, and you can start collecting even with a partial buildout.
I'm afraid this bit - ROI time / profitability - is what will kill practical applicability of fusion power. There's already tens if not hundreds of billions in investments and decades of research, and it will take that again to turn it into a commercial endeavour, if ever.
That said, nuclear is great for baseline power production, and even with renewables generating the brunt of electricity, you still need a baseline and a quickly scaling backup (gas generators). Battery parks help too for those, but they have limited capacity of course.
Mainly because the government was backing the investment on national security grounds because of the cold war. Every variety of nuclear investment was through the roof
There was also massive demand for electricity as it was being extended to rural areas and as electric household appliances became common.
Until the AI craze there was no long term demand for that much additional electricity, and who knows if that will hold.
They're ~the cheapest power options available and provide decades and decades of zero-marginal-cost energy. Building a wind turbine today has about the same all-in "LCOE" as running existing nuclear plants. Building new nukes results in electricity that's about 4x as expensive as building turbines instead.
Not to say we shouldn't build more nuke plants, but they're extraordinarily expensive to build and have construction timelines measured in decades so it's nearly impossible to make them pencil out on a per-kwh basis when compared to wind or solar + batteries that can be deployed and commissioned in 6 months.
>They're ~the cheapest power options available and provide decades and decades of zero-marginal-cost energy.
It's not zero-marginal-cost energy because they do need maintenance. But I'm more interested in knowing where your lifespan idea comes from. I have seen multiple sources agree that wind turbines are expected to last 20ish years, after which they must at least be taken down and refurbished, if not cut into pieces and buried (as they are not recyclable).
>Building new nukes results in electricity that's about 4x as expensive as building turbines instead.
This sounds impossible, especially if you count land value, maintenance, grid stability measures that are required to deal with flaky power sources, etc.
There’s standard maintenance as with anything mechanical but most importantly for energy - they don’t burn a fuel that is subject to supply/demand, international relations, or shortages.
“Decades and decades” would satisfy your 20-yr scenario but more realistically, modern turbines from Vestas have 30-yr lifespans (which are often exceeded) and the newest gen GE turbines come with 40-yr lifespans.
There are inherent issues with LCOE but it’s the ‘least bad’ metric we have to compare energy sources. As of 2022, it looked like this:
With onshore wind about $0.04/kwh and nuclear more like $0.22/kwh. Which sounds outlandish until you realize that PPAs for wind auctions are regularly under $0.03 now and Hinkley C is going to cost something like $50 billion for the two reactors and the rate guaranteed to the owners is north of $0.18 now which will return them something terrible like 7% IRR.
>“Decades and decades” would satisfy your 20-yr scenario
Actually it's more like "decade and decade" lol
I have been surprised at the figures I found for nuclear power versus wind. The reason our nuclear reactors cost so much, so far as I've heard, is that each one is designed anew and there are tremendous regulatory compliance costs. I think designs could be standardized and regulatory stuff streamlined, so as to drastically reduce costs for nuclear. Say what you will about Chinese safety or quality, but they seem to be cranking out a ton of new nuclear reactors as most of the West is foolishly retiring theirs with no good replacement.
Yes; there are a few companies (iirc / top of my head) developing or deploying small-scale, standardized / modular nuclear power plants; NuScale [0] has developed a few models that have gotten Nuclear Regulatory Commission approvals in 2022 and this year [1] they approved a 77 MW generator, which is enough to power a data center. This one weighs about 700 tons, about 23 meters tall, is built in a factory and can be transported / installed anywhere.
Unfortunately Nuscale (and the other SMR companies) aren't going to work.. they keep missing all their deadlines and earlier announced plans/contracts have all fallen through when they start to try and build the things. Nuscale is instructive in that they announced a plant in 2015 that would provide energy in 2023 cost $3 billion in 'overnight' dollars. In 2018, they increased the cost estimate to $4.8 billion. In 2020, they increased it to $6.1 billion. In 2023, they increased the estimate to $9.3 billion -- before a single shovel had hit the ground. Needless to say, the utilities who would be on the hook for these costs walked away. Why in the world would anyone spend well over $10 billion on an "SMR"?
Sure, but "just build nuke plants cheaper" isn't really a viable plan when you need electrons tomorrow. There's a well-known issue in the West that we've lost the ability to build large projects on budget or schedule and there a million reasons for it, but none of it really matters to people buying power.
As of today, if you had $20 billion and had to choose between maybe generating your first watt from nuclear somewhere around 2040 if things go well or just building 15,000 3MW wind turbines that could start generating power next year and will have over a decade of revenue coming in before you see the first dollar from the nuke - investors make the obvious choice.
I’m sure I dropped a 0 somewhere and the math works out to be 1,500 turbines - but China installed over 5,000 turbines last month.. so even the larger number isn’t too outlandish
It’s one based on science instead of whatever someone finds convenient. So sub 2 C.
Why would wind not be essential for it? Wind is free just like solar. Some places have amazing wind. Wind costs have declined dramatically so it’s a viable piece of the mix.
There are some who think windmills unsightly, which I don’t understand at all. The old style associated with Dutch stereotypes is cute and picturesque, and the modern type futuristic. If I see windmills within eyeshot, my first thought is, “oh cool, the people here really have it figured out.” Of all the things that I might see on the horizon, windmills are among those that would bother me the least.
For what it's worth: one of the reasons Google has a datacenter in Iowa (of all places) is that there's a windfarm out there making up something like 60% of the local power generation. That makes the power super cheap (and with all the land they have, that windfarm can continue to scale).
If Google's putting their money into it, I suspect there's more to the wind story than "wealth transfer from tax payers and consumers to the windmill people."
Same in the Netherlands; companies like Google, Microsoft etc invest in offshore power alongside the government and energy companies. Unfortunately this also means they "claim" a percentage of its capacity for newly built datacenters, meaning that it's not so much replacing non-renewable energy sources as adding to total production.
Electricity prices go up? Are you blaming the windmills? It should you blame the new AI data centers
And windmills are profitable by themselves. And reduces foreign imports with increasing taxes on this goods. If we removed all subsidies coal would be the real affected.
I am not sure about property value but burning gas next to homes creating health problems to power Elon musk data centers surely doesn't help. The dark fumes from coal, gas or oil are going to affect it.
It's more precise, avoiding that strange construction, "science-based". If I understand correctly, linguists call these productive analogies (?), where we start producing more of them by analogy to some root, so:
Wind power also has the benefit that it keeps the carbon in the ground and isn't contributing to the massive climate crisis that humanity and the earth's ecosystems are facing. And there's no direct waste from energy production.
> What exactly is a science-based climate goal? And why would wind energy be essential for it?
Land-based wind power is OK-ish. It's susceptible to renewable droughts, but it's fine as long as it's just a part of the mix.
But the offshore wind power is pretty much the _only_ reliable renewable, outside of classic hydro and exotics like tidal power or geothermal. Offshore wind generators are pretty much guaranteed to always produce at least _some_ power due to diurnal wind patterns.
Is it just money that motivates these people? Is that all? At this point, they must just want to watch civilization collapse for short-term gains.
There are literally millions of people in this country who would like to watch civilization collapse, and aren't even smart enough to get paid for it.
You haven't identified a group, a motive, a psychological mechanism, described the method, or explained the intention in any depth.
In other words, this is a cynical lament about how other people suck that's not descriptive enough to be useful or falsifiable. I believe in acknowledging harsh realities for the sake of dealing with them, but there's just no substance here to even acknowledge.
Nobody benefits from this sort of thinking.
There are accelerationists, who think that society is so flawed that it has to collapse so that something better can be built, as an example.
No, they think the risks of collapse are well worth the chance of improvement, because they view what we already have as so poor. They don't actually want a collapse.
Usually because indentifying groups, motives, psychological mechanisms, methods, or intentions, usually gets labelled as anti-business, anti-red, anti-blue, antisemitic, racist, or other such "bad things" that we're getting conditioned not to do.
They're called Trumpists. They claim to have some lofty constructive values. But whenever one tries to discuss the destructive actions of their hollow cult leader with an appeal to any of those values, they fall back to whataboutism. The smarter ones change to a different topic with cookie cutter talking points about that value. The dumber ones usually just complain about an arbitrary female democrat. The only conclusion that fits is that they want to see their country and their fellow citizens get hurt, while feeling morally justified about it.
The psychological mechanism seems to be [social] media psychosis. It's been slowly festering through decades of reactionary talk radio, but really went into overdrive when the attention-surveillance industry went to town promoting the dumbest least common denominator memetic reactions to outrage bait.
signed, a libertarian who actually believes in a strong natural right to free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, fiscal responsibility, individualism, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and many more unenumerated personal liberties.
I've listened to plenty of smart people who have what seems contrary viewpoints that seem to be reasonable after explanation.
for example:
1) more expensive energy of any kind is extremely harmful to society
EDIT: more expensive energy reduces prosperity for everyone. Renewable energy can and should be competitive and cost effective.
2) automatic filing of taxes is more harmful long-term than individuals filing taxes manually
EDIT: automatic filing will lead to silent frictionless automatic tax increases, forever.
3) government funding of internet/broadband/etc is harmful
EDIT: picking winners is more harmful that makeing good public policies.
it's just hard to reason though the details, though it is worth the effort.
My point is that there could be valid viewpoints that are not self-serving/greed-based.
One of the core problems of contemporary news media is that you only ever get exposed to the straw man arguments of the other side. It's just so lucrative to perpetually paint the other side as obviously idiotic, so people can jerk off their ago about how smart they are. Then after years of this they have built a solid immutable mental model of their opponent that is mostly incorrect, but the thing they hold dearest. All so they can keep you tuning in to watch fucking advertisements...
Effective propaganda is generally based around slivers of truth. The real problem is the people who believe these viewpoints for valid honest reasons, yet end up getting taken in by the people promoting them for self serving reasons. They feel so happy to simply "be heard" that they end up supporting movements not actually aimed at reforming, but rather furthering corruption. This happens to both political teams - in fact I'd say this is the professional parties' primary purpose.
Please summarise these reasons. Frankly, I'm sceptical. I suspect it's a different philosophy not counterfactual outcomes. Some people dislike socialised tax and regulation.
Don't the people who dislike socialized tax and regulation have reasons though?
Part of it is that there is more than one opponent. So for example:
> automatic filing will lead to silent frictionless automatic tax increases, forever.
There are presumably real people with this concern, and it's not completely ridiculous. But then there should be ways to mitigate it. Let's compromise by requiring tax withholding to show up on bank statements. Instead of your bank statement just showing that you got a +$1100 deposit from your employer, it's required to show the full +$1800 they paid you and then separate the -$700 in transfers to the state and federal governments for the various tax withholdings.
That should satisfy the people concerned about making taxes invisible because then you're actually giving them what they want. But then there are the other opponents, and that compromise is obviously not going to satisfy the politicians taking bribes from the TurboTax company.
But it's still useful to distinguish them, because you may not need both. You only need 51 votes, not 100. If you started with 45, maybe that sort of compromise can get you 6 more.
Look if reasons are "i don't like it" then that's fine. There's no arguing with personal preference or axioms of belief like "no matter what tax is bad"
The point of argument is when people have to be reminded of the contradictions: if you file a tax claim and claim allowances you acknowledge tax exists. If your health fund demands you also exploit state or federal subsidy you're exploiting the benefits. If your company receives industry offsets or assistance...
> There's no arguing with personal preference or axioms of belief like "no matter what tax is bad"
But that's just a straw man. To hold that belief you would have to e.g. actually want to "defund the police" to avoid the need for tax revenue to pay them. Is that supposed to be a common position among Republicans?
The real contention is how much. There is a large difference between the government taking 5% of your salary and 65%, even if taxes exist in both cases. And then if you think ordinary people should be paying less than they are now rather than more, you'll reasonably want to oppose things that conceal tax collection from the constituents who are paying them, because then those constituents will be less likely to notice and object to excessive spending.
> Is it just money that motivates these people?
For fossil-fuel companies, it's about control and extending the world's dependency on their products as far into the future as possible. The others are on their dole to one degree or another, when you consider that many of the edges in the graph in the article represent not only relationships, but also flows of money.
Why don’t they invest in other sectors though vs doubling down? Tobacco companies, famously unscrupulous, did just this, saw the writing on the wall and now make their money off zyn and vapes vs trying to swim upstream selling traditional tobacco products. Seems to me an oil company has enough resources where they can out invest most any green vc outright and dominate the marketshare if they were so inclined.
This is playing out like the hubris film companies had towards digital sensors. Seems they don’t teach history in MBA programs I guess.
It's probably to do with vape companies still needing nicotine, and so the tobacco companies still control the primary source, so they can gain the advantages of vertical integration from buying up the downstream offshoots. Non-fossil fuel sources of energy by definition have different primary sources of energy than those controlled by fossil fuel companies, so they can't capitalize in the same way.
Btw, I looked up Juul from your other comment and saw they're 35% owned by Altria (formerly Philip Morris) who are "one of the world's largest producers and marketers of tobacco, cigarettes, and medical products in the treatment of illnesses caused by tobacco." [1]
You couldn't hope for a more tragically hilarious summation of the cynicism in this industry than that combination of businesses to be in
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altria
Respectfully, because I agree with you, I would like to suggest that you look up Mission Winnow next and let me know whether you believe “you couldn’t hope for a more tragically hilarious summation of the cynicism in this industry” held up as an accurate statement.
> Why don’t they invest in other sectors though vs doubling down?
Control and relevance. These things matter to them as much as profit.
The barrier to entry to produce renewables is lower than fossil fuels - there is no natural oligopoly.
If you own your house, you can put solar on your roof and a battery on your house, and dramatically cut back on your fossil fuel derived energy needs. Communities can do the same, as can utilities and independent businesses.
That's a future where fossil fuel companies are far less relevant. Not irrelevant, but nothing like what they were. That future may be unavoidable, but they are trying to delay its arrival as much as they can. While that may seem like an anathema to many (including me), put yourself in the shoes of a major investor in or executive at a fossil-fuel company, and you might do the same.
Many oil companies did try. For example BP's "Beyond Petroleum" initiative was more than greenwashing (although it was also greenwashing).
Those initiatives failed due to short-termism, infighting, failure to commit sufficient resources, et cetera.
And yet solar and wind grow hand over fist internationally. One would think they would want to buy out some of these emerging companies in this sector and take advantage of the inevitable increasing investment and profit potential in this sector. Every other industry seems the investor class is elbowing and charging to get there first and secure marketshare e.g. ai but you just don’t see that sort of chomping at the bit with green technology for whatever reason. Seems so strange considering the entire world will need to be retooled and the money that stands to be made is so enormous. Probably more money that has been made in oil so far by several orders of magnitude thanks to parallel investments in other sectors and technologies that weren’t around when oil got its start 150 years ago.
Wind and solar grew as industries, but solar in particular is regarded as a tough business to be in because new entrants keep making better and cheaper solar panels leading to cutthroat competition.
That's a very different skill set than gaining access to scarce mineral resources and monopolising them to extract maximum profit.
Some subcontractors may have transferrable skills e.g. offshore boat crews but at a high level the two industries are fairly incompatible.
It doesn't help that the fossil companies have succeeded in using politics to salt the ground of their potential new ventures at home. A real burn the boats moment for them.
That's because there's nothing to buy. China dumped a ton of money into the sector and took full advantage of their tightly integrated manufacturing capacity to bootstrap it.
The US looked at that and said "let's tax raw material imports" and half the population is too stupid to realize that they're the ones paying those taxes.
EDIT: it should be noted this is hardly a criticism of China's strategy here- they wanted an industry they saw potential in, subsidized it and bought IP which other countries offered up, and reaped the rewards. They just literally played capitalism better.
Solar has been growing predominately because the Chinese government is willing to lose billions in subsidies to panel manufacturers.
Tobacco companies mostly just pivoted to targetting weaker nations, e.g. this summary from a study looking at price elasticity:
> The tobacco industry undermines tobacco control efforts in low-income countries and targets vulnerable populations through aggressive marketing and lobbying for less tobacco control and lower taxes.
Unfortunately for fossil fuels most of the world are importers of their products which makes them a tough sell as other options become cheaper.
Easier said than done. Legacy social media is dying, and Meta has plenty of resources to create products in and monetize other product sectors. And yet...
If what you know is how to pull oil out of the ground, and build multi billion dollar rigs to do it, that's your sector.
Meta posted increased revenues last year. Social media isn't growing like it used to, but that doesn't mean there's not plenty of blood left in the stone.
Plus you'll never find a better multiplier then software and consumer spending.
It isn’t like the tobacco companies knew any different. They just opted to buy Juul which they could do with their massive cash reserves. Their own efforts (blu?) failed. As the saying goes, those who can’t do, buy.
There are plenty of "legacy" environmental organizations that view any form of construction, including construction of renewable energy, as worthy of being opposed. They aren't all interested in the bigger picture of advancing renewable energy to slow climate change.
Maybe, but this study is about specific, named organisations with documented personnel or financial ties to fossil fuel companies. Not sure how your comment is relevant to them
If the waters are a bit muddier now, that’s the relevance. Flooding the zone with confusion and whataboutism is the tactic of choice these days.
Even if you don't care about climate change, spending money to stop all development of wind energy technology and its deployment into the national energy mix is very very dumb. There are a lot of people who just hate certain things and make it their life mission to inflict damage onto it no matter what. It's not a rational thought process.
I did hear an argument on Mastodon that made some kind of sense: currently the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world, not least because oil is bought with USD. Reduce the world's dependency on oil, and you reduce the world's dependency on USD. If the USA loses the benefit of the rest of the world needing USD to buy oil, that changes the US economy in bad ways. Hence the USA opposing renewable energy as much as it can.
I'm not saying it's true - I have no idea. But it's at least a rational reason for opposing renewables, which otherwise seems to be very irrational.
The uncomfortable truth is that they most likely have the same loves, passions, interests and motivations as us. They are not some alien other, they are us.
But that is uncomfortable. We like certainty more. We prefer an easily identified enemy.
The difference (in many things) is not the motivation but the beliefs about what to do about it. Political opponents are more similar than different. By understanding the other you can reach them and effectively change them.
If you are puzzled by a group of people the issue is not that group - it is the puzzlement!
However one effective political tactic is to outgroup and other an opponent. It strengthens your sense of belonging to the right group. The danger is that it is inward facing and lowers inclusiveness. Empathy generally weakens ones own political passions but brings more peace. Restricting empathy increases enthusiasm and energy and action.
Moreover, there are academic studies and popular schools of thought that say empathy is dangerous, that people should be entitled to their rage and emotions and that people shouldn't be forced to understand. That empathy itself is a tool of power.
The same reason why they almost the same people behind anti-nuclear initiatives. Maintain the status quo.
As I understand it, at least some of these groups are nominally pro-nuclear. They are aware that nuclear plants have a very long lead time, while wind (and solar) can be installed quickly. So they can advocate for nuclear as a way of fending off other non-fossil-fuel energy sources, without actually replacing any fossil fuels with nuclear.
SMR changes that game.
Even under ideal conditions, nuclear is much more expensive than solar and wind. And when was the last time there were ideal conditions?
20-30 years ago nuclear was a quicker path towards decarbonization than solar was. So pushing solar over nuclear made sense for those hoping to delay decarbonization.
Now solar is a quicker way to decarbonize, so similar efforts are anti-solar, pro-nuclear.
What I don’t get about all these evil scrooge types that run out world, is why wouldn’t they want to make money off things like wind and actual climate salves? Seems to me the coming climate crises is going to cost a ton of money and lead to destruction of entire national economies. Meanwhile they could have been raising all boats and made even more money and had even more things to invest in.
Is oil really that profitable to ignore the havoc it wreaks and will wreak on virtually every other industry, including itself when there is less money moving around to spend on oil and oil products?
I just don’t get it how being so objectively shortsighted is actually the corrupt greedy money position instead of ensuring the world as we know it doesn’t collapse and that the money printing machine doesn’t fall apart. But what do I know I guess.
Its because they're in a death cult purity spiral.[0] They suffer from cognitive dissonance so a part of them understands this stuff but another part of them identifies so strongly with their peer group and profession that this second part wins out.
It's really unfortunate that such glaring cognitive defects appear to have doomed the human race smothering itself to death on this planet instead of reaching out to the stars.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_spiral
The oil industry sees some of the most advanced applications of engineering on earth. One would think this is a sector used to disruption and investing in emerging technoligies with potential for profit because that is how they’ve been optimizing the oil industry this entire time. I guess somehow a line is drawn in the sand with oil vs not oil but I don’t know why. It seems hard to imagine that these massive corporations are structured such that the influence of engineers and consultants are eschewed for the feelings of a few of uninformed people. Seems unbelievable to put that amount of money behind such obstinate thinking.
It might be psychological, Exxon famously held back their report on the impact of oil on the climate in 1977. If you've fucked the whole world over that badly and know it, and then denied it for decades, it might be very difficult to acknowlwdge and repent. Doubling down might be easier.
If you haven’t heard the term you should look up accelerationists.
There’s several competing flavors of it like the ones who think “the good” communist revolution will happen after society collapses vs the ones who want democracy to fall apart because they think monarchical societies are morally superior, but they all have the same line of thinking that “the collapse” is coming any day now and they want to accelerate when they say occurs
Organised communism is almost completely defunct and afaik the 4th international likewise. At this point accelerationist left views would be as fringe as sovereign citizens and certainly not allied to the coal oil and nuclear industries.
The former RCP members who joined the tory party in the UK, people like Dominic Cummings are interesting of course. And Steve Bannon is fond of posturing as a Maoist in style if not in substance. His oilskin coat is a performance Mao jacket.
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So if offshore windmills aren't built then civilization will collapse...
University student?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45036231 479 points 245 comments
I don't understand, I try to constantly mark the threads that use software stacks I don't use or care about ("how to do X in framework Y better with respect to metric Z"). I am constantly interested in scientific discussions. Sometimes HN feels like a slow news day, and the thread with less points and less comments is what I get to see, and this underlying thread does feel suppressed...
I notice a lot of threads critical of e.g., YC vompanies, silicon valley, Israel, corporate greed, capitalism, tend to get to the front page and then disappear soon after.
I'm not sure exactly how the mechanism for the front page works, so I'm not saying it's intentional, but the effect is that the front page trends towards safe topics that don't question the status quo, not even the tech status quo, unless it's about specifically technical issues or the software labour market.
Three wind projects got scrapped in NY and I always wondered if there was some alternate hidden reason. It does seem though that it was just costs and technological shifts that made NY cancel them...
https://governorswindenergycoalition.org/3-offshore-wind-pro...
> production of wind energy is crucial for meeting science-based climate goals
What exactly is a science-based climate goal? And why would wind energy be essential for it?
I hear people talk about their solar installations all the time, and it seems like the anti-nuclear sentiment is finally wearing off too. I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about one of these windmills. It seems to be a fairly straightforward wealth transfer from tax payers and utility consumers to the windmill people. Property values go down and electricity prices go up. Windmill people move on to collect the next subsidy.
They pay for themselves in a couple of years (even without subsidies) and tend to produce peak power during periods when solar is offline (e.g. at night or cloudy days). Farmers like them because they don't take up much space and they provide revenue independent of how well their crops do, which varies wildly year to year. It's cheaper than burning fossil fuels (though not quite as cheap as solar)
Adding wind to the network does not make electricity prices go up (unless you do something stupid like shut down all your nuclear plants at the same time). That's nonsense. It's maybe not quite as cheap if you factor in the storage requirements to build up the grid "properly", but still cheaper than coal at the very least.
> They pay for themselves in a couple of years (even without subsidies)
Do you have a source on this?
https://www.turbinehub.com/post/how-long-does-a-wind-farm-ta...
It's also worth mentioning that, while I'm not anti-nuclear on principle, the economic return on nuclear projects ranges somewhere between "multiple decades" and "never" - and there's a large empty gap on the timescale of a decade between spending most of that money and starting to receive dividends. And you'd better be running it 100%
At least with solar and wind the buildout takes a few weeks or months, and you can start collecting even with a partial buildout.
I'm afraid this bit - ROI time / profitability - is what will kill practical applicability of fusion power. There's already tens if not hundreds of billions in investments and decades of research, and it will take that again to turn it into a commercial endeavour, if ever.
That said, nuclear is great for baseline power production, and even with renewables generating the brunt of electricity, you still need a baseline and a quickly scaling backup (gas generators). Battery parks help too for those, but they have limited capacity of course.
This is a frequent argument against nuclear, that it’s too expensive(and takes forever to build).
But this wasn’t always the case, and so I wonder if it’s really such a strong argument.
In Sweden most of our plants were built fast and have been an enormous success.
The speed was partially enabled by an economy of scale that will not be possible to reach again like it was in the 50s / 60s / 70s.
Why wouldn’t that be possible?
Mainly because the government was backing the investment on national security grounds because of the cold war. Every variety of nuclear investment was through the roof
There was also massive demand for electricity as it was being extended to rural areas and as electric household appliances became common.
Until the AI craze there was no long term demand for that much additional electricity, and who knows if that will hold.
They're ~the cheapest power options available and provide decades and decades of zero-marginal-cost energy. Building a wind turbine today has about the same all-in "LCOE" as running existing nuclear plants. Building new nukes results in electricity that's about 4x as expensive as building turbines instead.
Not to say we shouldn't build more nuke plants, but they're extraordinarily expensive to build and have construction timelines measured in decades so it's nearly impossible to make them pencil out on a per-kwh basis when compared to wind or solar + batteries that can be deployed and commissioned in 6 months.
>They're ~the cheapest power options available and provide decades and decades of zero-marginal-cost energy.
It's not zero-marginal-cost energy because they do need maintenance. But I'm more interested in knowing where your lifespan idea comes from. I have seen multiple sources agree that wind turbines are expected to last 20ish years, after which they must at least be taken down and refurbished, if not cut into pieces and buried (as they are not recyclable).
>Building new nukes results in electricity that's about 4x as expensive as building turbines instead.
This sounds impossible, especially if you count land value, maintenance, grid stability measures that are required to deal with flaky power sources, etc.
There’s standard maintenance as with anything mechanical but most importantly for energy - they don’t burn a fuel that is subject to supply/demand, international relations, or shortages.
“Decades and decades” would satisfy your 20-yr scenario but more realistically, modern turbines from Vestas have 30-yr lifespans (which are often exceeded) and the newest gen GE turbines come with 40-yr lifespans.
There are inherent issues with LCOE but it’s the ‘least bad’ metric we have to compare energy sources. As of 2022, it looked like this:
https://www.powerengineeringint.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
With onshore wind about $0.04/kwh and nuclear more like $0.22/kwh. Which sounds outlandish until you realize that PPAs for wind auctions are regularly under $0.03 now and Hinkley C is going to cost something like $50 billion for the two reactors and the rate guaranteed to the owners is north of $0.18 now which will return them something terrible like 7% IRR.
>“Decades and decades” would satisfy your 20-yr scenario
Actually it's more like "decade and decade" lol
I have been surprised at the figures I found for nuclear power versus wind. The reason our nuclear reactors cost so much, so far as I've heard, is that each one is designed anew and there are tremendous regulatory compliance costs. I think designs could be standardized and regulatory stuff streamlined, so as to drastically reduce costs for nuclear. Say what you will about Chinese safety or quality, but they seem to be cranking out a ton of new nuclear reactors as most of the West is foolishly retiring theirs with no good replacement.
Yes; there are a few companies (iirc / top of my head) developing or deploying small-scale, standardized / modular nuclear power plants; NuScale [0] has developed a few models that have gotten Nuclear Regulatory Commission approvals in 2022 and this year [1] they approved a 77 MW generator, which is enough to power a data center. This one weighs about 700 tons, about 23 meters tall, is built in a factory and can be transported / installed anywhere.
[0] https://www.nuscalepower.com/
[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-nuscale-powe...
Unfortunately Nuscale (and the other SMR companies) aren't going to work.. they keep missing all their deadlines and earlier announced plans/contracts have all fallen through when they start to try and build the things. Nuscale is instructive in that they announced a plant in 2015 that would provide energy in 2023 cost $3 billion in 'overnight' dollars. In 2018, they increased the cost estimate to $4.8 billion. In 2020, they increased it to $6.1 billion. In 2023, they increased the estimate to $9.3 billion -- before a single shovel had hit the ground. Needless to say, the utilities who would be on the hook for these costs walked away. Why in the world would anyone spend well over $10 billion on an "SMR"?
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nuscale-uamps-project-small...
Sure, but "just build nuke plants cheaper" isn't really a viable plan when you need electrons tomorrow. There's a well-known issue in the West that we've lost the ability to build large projects on budget or schedule and there a million reasons for it, but none of it really matters to people buying power.
As of today, if you had $20 billion and had to choose between maybe generating your first watt from nuclear somewhere around 2040 if things go well or just building 15,000 3MW wind turbines that could start generating power next year and will have over a decade of revenue coming in before you see the first dollar from the nuke - investors make the obvious choice.
One does not "merely" manufacture and install 15000 3 MW wind turbines lol...
I’m sure I dropped a 0 somewhere and the math works out to be 1,500 turbines - but China installed over 5,000 turbines last month.. so even the larger number isn’t too outlandish
It’s one based on science instead of whatever someone finds convenient. So sub 2 C.
Why would wind not be essential for it? Wind is free just like solar. Some places have amazing wind. Wind costs have declined dramatically so it’s a viable piece of the mix.
Property values? Do you live on an oil rig or something?
There are some who think windmills unsightly, which I don’t understand at all. The old style associated with Dutch stereotypes is cute and picturesque, and the modern type futuristic. If I see windmills within eyeshot, my first thought is, “oh cool, the people here really have it figured out.” Of all the things that I might see on the horizon, windmills are among those that would bother me the least.
Ok but this is about offshore wind
They’re just not a big fan of windmill people ok?!? ;)
For what it's worth: one of the reasons Google has a datacenter in Iowa (of all places) is that there's a windfarm out there making up something like 60% of the local power generation. That makes the power super cheap (and with all the land they have, that windfarm can continue to scale).
If Google's putting their money into it, I suspect there's more to the wind story than "wealth transfer from tax payers and consumers to the windmill people."
Same in the Netherlands; companies like Google, Microsoft etc invest in offshore power alongside the government and energy companies. Unfortunately this also means they "claim" a percentage of its capacity for newly built datacenters, meaning that it's not so much replacing non-renewable energy sources as adding to total production.
Electricity prices go up? Are you blaming the windmills? It should you blame the new AI data centers
And windmills are profitable by themselves. And reduces foreign imports with increasing taxes on this goods. If we removed all subsidies coal would be the real affected.
I am not sure about property value but burning gas next to homes creating health problems to power Elon musk data centers surely doesn't help. The dark fumes from coal, gas or oil are going to affect it.
As usual, the facts are in the linked report not in the journalist's summary.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nrMSJOxI6Iqw6HRKtnvWjOkj3tp...
It's more precise, avoiding that strange construction, "science-based". If I understand correctly, linguists call these productive analogies (?), where we start producing more of them by analogy to some root, so:
Faith-based -> Community-based -> Evidence-based -> Plant-based -> Science-based
Or some other hypothetical inheritance chain.
Wind power is among the cheapest sources of electricity, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...
Wind power also has the benefit that it keeps the carbon in the ground and isn't contributing to the massive climate crisis that humanity and the earth's ecosystems are facing. And there's no direct waste from energy production.
> What exactly is a science-based climate goal? And why would wind energy be essential for it?
Land-based wind power is OK-ish. It's susceptible to renewable droughts, but it's fine as long as it's just a part of the mix.
But the offshore wind power is pretty much the _only_ reliable renewable, outside of classic hydro and exotics like tidal power or geothermal. Offshore wind generators are pretty much guaranteed to always produce at least _some_ power due to diurnal wind patterns.