HN title (currently reads "US govt pays TotalEnergies nearly $1B to stop US offshore wind projects") is editorialized and it's unclear to me whether it's accurate. The article says:
> We're partnering with TotalEnergies to unleash nearly $1 billion that was tied up in a lease deposit that was directed towards the prior administration's subsidies
What's the deal with this lease deposit and how does "freeing it up" equate to the US govt "paying" TotalEnergies that amount?
Is this a situation where TotalEnergies put down a 1B deposit to lease the seashore from the government and the government is now canceling that agreement and giving them their money back? How does it relate to "subsidies"?
NY Times phrases it as a reimbursement to TotalEnergies for relinquishing wind leases that they paid for. The US made the reimbursement contingent on them investing in fossil fuel projects. "The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels."
Total waste of $1 Bil of taxpayer dollars. If the oil and gas industry want to shut down wind projects let them pay for it.
The US is a net oil exporter. If fossil fuel companies were so influential, wouldn't we expect them to be in favour of less fossil fuel production elsewhere?
Instead the what seems to be influential is the average Joe who's complaining about the price at the pump.
All the blather about Canadian "trade surplus" is actually oil.
US companies owning that infra sell that oil under market price, to their US corp divisions. The CEO, upper execs are usually American, and so their large salaries, and all corporate profits all flow to the US parent corp.
Canada of course sees some taxes per barrel of oil, and local employment, but when you remove all this, Canada has a massive trade deficit with the US
In that case, we should definitely reserve judgement on the weird payment stipulations then. The oil industry probably hates that the government is doing this, and we shouldn't cast aspersions on them.
So TotalEnergies agreed to invest 1 billion is offshore wind during thr last Administration. The current Administration doesn't want any investment in renewables so they attempted to block it. A judge said the attempted block was unlawful. So then immediately the admin said something new and that instead there were "national security concerns" with building wind plants - (Which doesn't pass the smell test to me at all) and the project would be held up while untangling those.
My assumption is the company started getting upset at being toyed around and having their 1 billion investment completely stalled for so long. So the admin said we'll kill the wind if you do our fossil fuels instead. So shift your investment away from wind (we kill it and pay you back for what you investws) if you instead do fossil fuels. And that's what's being done.
So previously the company was spending 1billion on wind and getting some subsidies. Now they spend 2 billion, and get paid 1 billion from the tax payer. For them it's at best a wash, though likely a loss since I haven't heard they get subsidies with the fossil fules. And the tax payer instead of paying for tax credits or low interest loans or other subsidies that were part of wind power portion of the Inflation Reduction Act instead pay a full 1 billion dollars to the company.
> The Trump administration will pay $1 billion to a French company to walk away from two U.S. offshore wind leases as the administration ramps up its campaign against offshore wind and other renewable energy.
This seems plausible. Though I find "pay a full 1 billion dollars to the company" to be a very confusing way to frame this if this just returning a deposit the company put down in the first place. Would be more accurate to say the company spent 1 billion, canceled that and were refunded the 1 billion, then spent that billion on a different U.S. project instead.
Though it's still a significant impact to the tax payer if the new thing they're spending 1B on is private industry and not a government-owned lease.
Sweden has been blocking offshore farms on the east side of country, where they would be fighting Russia. West side farms are fine.
USA hardly has the same problem, and the current admin are frankly a bunch of low-brow vicious thugs, who in my view wouldn't know a genuine security problem from a large hole in the ground.
The Swedish government is not blocking all offshore wind, but it is blocking a lot of it, specifically wind parks in areas of the Baltic Sea that could cause trouble for trying to detect Russian military activities.
I don't know what the situation looks like for Finland.
a) Finland needing fast & accurate RADAR tracking across their 50km gulf and restricting activity in the gulf as a result. Not just wind farms, other commercial activities are restricted in the Gulf of Finland including shipping.
b) USA restricting wind farms on it's east coast (NC and NY/NJ) where the nearest land is thousands of km away and no other commercial activities are meaningfully restricted.
(If the US can't field a RADAR for early warning off the east coast that can handle wind farms on the coast, we have other problems)
Offshore wind farms have been stopped by the Finnish and Swedish military in many parts of the Baltic sea which aren't the gulf of Finland.
If wind farms are a problem for radars in the US, then it's quite a small price to pay to block them offshore. Especially since the country is gigantic and has plenty of room inland.
Any attack on the US will be through sea or space. Both are voids and very difficult or impossible to surveil. There's a historical example in Pearl Harbor.
So why you are bringing up nearest land I have no clue? The point is that the US is exposed to the oceans.
Atlantic ocean: thousands of miles to the nearest land from the NE coast; unrestricted commercial activity
Baltic sea: Belligerent nation on the coast (Kaliningrad Oblast) ~100 miles away; heavily patrolled and monitored commercial activity
> If wind farms are a problem for radars in the US
I’m asserting they are not because they magically weren’t 2 years ago and the airspace on the NE coast of the US has some of the largest and most aggressive ADIZ in the world since 2001. If wind farms were a problem for RADAR/early warning systems we would have heard about it in the last 25 years.
> So why you are bringing up nearest land I have no clue? The point is that the US is exposed to the oceans.
Er yes... I’m sure the military groups responsible for early warning didn’t just realise that in 2025. 10 years after offshore wind farms in the area were fully operational.
Edit: I want to say that learnings from recent conflicts (especially around drones) would be a compelling argument for why we only just realised these issues, but no one has articulated that or why it’s an issue on the Atlantic coast.
If the radars that the USA uses are so great, then why don't Finland and Sweden purchase these systems instead of blocking almost all offshore wind farms? These are two countries that have very strong political agendas in favour of wind power.
Maybe there are new threats that neither you or I are aware of or understand? Secrecy is how the military operates. New and emerging threats is the exact reason which has been given by the US Department of Interior.
As for drones, at least in Finland they are investigating if land based wind power mills can be equipped with drone warning systems.
I don't buy into the hacker double think, where everything is great and glorious and rational when Europeans do it, but it's the opposite if America under Trump does it.
> If the radars that the USA uses are so great, then why don't Finland and Sweden purchase these systems instead of blocking almost all offshore wind farms?
Are you deliberately not trying to see the difference?
Early warning systems need all the help they can get when you only have 100km to your threats (ie. the baltic sea); when you have the entire Atlantic you don’t need that.
US early warning systems are great because they have 1000s of kilometers of space.
As other commenters have already pointed out to you, the Nordic countries do allow wind farms in:
And they don't allow wind farms where they are exposed to the open baltic.
What does those three seas you mentioned have in common? They have Nordic coastline on both sides. Meaning that nobody can hide in radar shadow, because they'll be seen from the other coast.
> US early warning systems are great because they have 1000s of kilometers of space.
Not if there is a disturbance in the way. You know how signals work. Everything behind the disturbance will be in shadow, stretching for as far as you please. The ocean is a giant dark void, and your enemy can be anywhere and go anywhere.
The Swedish defense minister has specified the threat to be cruise missiles in their decision to ban and block offshore wind farms. I wouldn't be surprised if the US has the same reason for their national security concerns. With a cruise missile you have to get close before launching, as compared to ICBMs which have no limits in range.
And just out of curiosity: Why don't they build these wind parks inland in the great plains? Too much energy loss from distance to consumers?
(This is why my stance is "bad faith" on the "national security" claim, if that wasn't clear; I know plenty on how RADARs work and it doesn't pass the sniff test)
Are you saying that because Sweden has to worry about Russia invading from the east, the US shouldn’t build any wind farms anywhere? That can’t be right. What do you really mean?
Much larger attack forces are currently cruising the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and have been doing so for decades. The oceans are international waters, giant voids where it's hard to know where your enemy is.
They can be a thousand miles away from your coast and launch cruise missiles with more fire power than that of Pearl Harbour. If there is a radar/signal disturbance on your coast which can help them, they will take advantage of it.
We're not the ones arguing the absurd position that the concerns two small countries with extreme closeness to Russia (and a history of prior invasions) more than a thousand miles away, with completely different geography, apply to a vastly different country in a completely different area of the world.
"Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1 billion for his campaign and told them he’d grant their policy wish list if he won. The investment, he said, would be a “deal” given the taxes and regulation they would avoid under his presidency. He also offered to help fast-track fossil fuel industry mergers and acquisitions if he won."
You should probably look up when the TARP bailiut program was passed and initiated, because it wasn't when Obama was president. The Great Financial Crisis brewed and exploded under Bush.
Obama pushed for the 2010 Dodd Frank reforms to rein in big banks after that.
Corporate bailouts, huge deficit spending, mega tax cuts for the mega rich, and bottomless pit defense spending have been Republican policy for the last 50 years.
The companies don't give a rats ass what kind of energy project it is as long as it is profitable. Wind energy, gas, cow farts, it's all the same to them. Your framing makes no sense.
Plurality, not majority. (Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates).
Which is functionally a vote for the status quo. Someone who can't bother to vote isn't going to bother e.g. protesting or otherwise affirming their rights.
> Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates
Sounds like both candidates were terrible enough that quite a few didn't bother?
Many taxpayers are non-citizens or convicted felons and cannot vote. Turnout of citizens who were eligible to vote last election was 65%. Of those, 49.8% voted for Trump. Some portion of them likely did not vote with this specific policy in mind.
They only get the money if they reinvest in oil and gas. It’s not just trying to kill wind, it’s actively trying to expand burning fossil fuels. We are being lead to our demise by idiots.
They aren't idiots, they are evil. They know what they are doing; enriching themselves and hoarding political power and resources. Claiming these folks are dumb rather than evil propagates the idea that we should give them some sort of leeway. In fact, we should have sent these clowns to prison 5 years or more ago.
I don't think they even care about enriching themselves. I don't think they care about the money. I don't even think these little projects move the needle much.
Yes. Many of these people are rich enough that they could stop working today and their descendants could maintain their lifestyle for generations. It's about power, and leveraging that power over people they don't like, for petty reasons.
Those who aren't rich enough... yes, just pure evil. Their parents didn't hug them enough or something, and now they think that "owning the libs" is a life strategy. It's pathetic. I'd feel bad for them if they weren't causing so much harm in the process.
Unfortunately it is malice and greed, not ignorance (though Trump in particular is clearly mostly just a useful idiot puppet being lead around by others). They know climate change is real and serious impacts are imminent, this is why the US has shown interest in "taking" Greenland and Canada.
Trump being the impulsive egotist he is gave the game away too early wanting to take credit for these land grabs while still alive, but there's no way there isn't some overall plan in place as the predictable results of climate change accelerate and the world has to geographically realign through mass migrations (some of it likely to result in wars) to deal with it.
A lot of what they are doing now is to profit off the opportunities of the chaos that they themselves are accelerating.
It's tempting to dismiss them like that, but that doesn't fix anything.
The reality is much more complicated. The Democratic party is far from perfect (they kinda suck, in fact), and if they aren't attracting voters, "the other side is just stupid" is a useless, arrogant way to go.
Attracting voters with things like repeatedly promising to drastically cut consumer prices on most everything ‘from day 1’, repeatedly promising no new wars/stopping being ‘the world police’, quickly ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine, etc?
Hey, I'm not saying Trump and the GOP are great. They disgust me. But they talk to people in a way they find engaging. Even when they lie, somehow. But regardless, I'm not sure how what you said has anything to do with what I wrote.
The Democratic party often sounds like a bunch of elitists, and that turns off many voters, even those who might consider themselves liberal or progressive. I'll likely vote for Democrats in every election until I die, but I don't think of myself as a Democrat, and haven't registered as one in decades (fortunately the Democratic party has open primaries in California, so I don't have to declare a party).
Oh I absolutely agree. I'm not trying to "both-sides" this. I'm just saying that calling conservatives stupid/idiots isn't productive and isn't going to solve anything.
The voters are the source of the problem and we need to focus on them instead of Trump because once he is gone they'll just elect another piece of shit.
A large portion of the population doesn't vote but if they understand the real danger of Trump supporters maybe that will motivate them
We don't know some important specifics about the deal but (IMHO) that's on purpose and is telling, meaning you only end up obscure deal details because you have something to hide.
So I don't know what stage the project was at but by withdrawing from the deal or cancelling it, the government is going to have to pay a penalty. Is that penalty $10 million? Is it $500 million? We don't really know.
So it could be that TotalEnergies is still getting paid $1 billion but now they have to spend $600 million on some fossil fuel project. But in doing so the government has essentially paid a $400 million break penalty. You see what I mean?
I don't believe for a second that the government didn't lose money on this political cancellation. The fossil fuel project is just a way to hide that and save face (IMHO).
> TotalEnergies has committed to invest approximately $1 billion—the value of its renounced offshore wind leases—in oil and natural gas and LNG production in the United States. Following their new investment, the United States will reimburse the company dollar-for-dollar, up to the amount they paid in lease purchases for offshore wind. Under this innovative agreement driven by President Donald J. Trump’s Energy Dominance Agenda, the American people will no longer pay for ideological subsidies that benefited only the unreliable and costly offshore wind industry.
> For its part, TotalEnergies will invest $928MM, on the following projects in 2026:
The development of Train 1 to 4 of Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas;
The development of upstream conventional oil in Gulf of America and of shale gas production.
Following TotalEnergies’ $928 million in investments in affordable, reliable and secure U.S. energy projects, the United States will terminate the following leases and reimburse the company
Everything is written in the voice of a terminally online Twitter troll. Every single communication from the U.S. federal government should be assumed to be a lie until proven otherwise.
Thanks, that's helpful. Pretty annoying the original article didn't link to its source given that it was just repeating the contents of a press release.
Anyone know what these "ideological subsidies" are that they're referring to? Were they part of the agreement that was just terminated? Or was that just a vaguely related talking point they inserted into the press release for political reasons?
"ideological subsidies" for this administration means any policy supporting non-thermal and non-battery (to a lesser extent, although their lobby has pretty successfully extracted them from previous renewable associations they relied on) generating units.
To get more specific, you could say everything rolled back from the IRA as part of the BBB.
If it's just BBB they're referring to then I would call that a political talking point since that doesn't seem directly related to this deal.
Unless the subsidies being repealed explains why TotalEnergies seems happy to get out of the lease now even though they presumably thought it was a good deal for them back when they originally agreed to it. If that's true though then I don't know why neither the article nor the press release say anything about it other than in this vague allusion.
They were stuck in a never-ending series of legal battles because the current administration is trying to block all wind power, so their money was not actually going anywhere useful. Coincidentally Trump hates wind power and is still bringing up his golf course having some offshore wind near it after years.
Unclear to me what would satisfy this complaint.. You wish La Monde speculated more on some glaring omission of motive here? You're original point is that they seemed to speculate too much!
They could do some actual journalism, find out the answers to some of these obvious follow-up questions, and report on them. Or, failing that, link to the press report since it seems like as is they aren't really adding much beyond that.
But my original complaint about editorializing was about the title the submitter wrote on HN, not the article title.
What if they couldn't grt an answer, should they just not publish in that case? And why would they link to the press release, they are not a propaganda office.
They could at least raise the questions in the article instead of leaving readers with the impression they didn't even try to find answers. Worst case, you write "the person we spoke to declined to comment".
> why would they link to the press release, they are not a propaganda office
Just reporting the contents of the press release as if it were your original reporting is worse IMO. At least reading a press release you know the source of the information and what their agenda is.
Not every single article needs to be Woodward and Bernstein dude. Sometimes you just need to report what happened, what someone said. If that ends being an incomplete or incongruous picture, you gotta chalk it up sometimes to the nature of such matters in the world, not a deficiency of the journalism. Your argument could be applied to literally any piece of journalism! In general, answers to possible questions are not finite, metaphysical things that we can always fully account for, and its not a news articles job (which isn't even a long form investigation style piece!) to try.
I know, of course, you are not arguing uncharitably here, so I can only assume this is the first news article you have ever read.
Yes, I'm fully aware this is an extremely common problem. I'm just saying if the article adds nothing over the press release it's reporting on (and even actively removes important context) then we should just link to the press release.
They are taking money committed to a wind project and redirecting it towards burning fossil fuels - because what other lesson can we take from a global energy shock other than to increase our exposure to the next one? The company itself (France's Total) had already committed to the wind deal, so now the Trump admin is letting them off the hook, and using Trump's irrational refusal to issue licenses for wind power as the excuse for why the deal wasn't working out as originally planned.
Total is also committed to expanding LNG - Total [0] and Oil India [1] are collaborating on a $20 Billion LNG extraction megaproject in Mozambique which was paused due to an Islamist insurgency during which Total-and-Oil India-funded paramilitary allegedly committed massacres against civilians [2] while putting down an Islamic State insurgency in Cabo Delgado.
The US, France+India, and China have been competing over this project for decades.
These are businesses - no one cares about morals, only interests. And it is in France's interest to unlock these kinds of LNG projects.
7000 hours at 60 MPH (i.e. 100 kph) is ~700,000 km. That's assuming highway speeds, obviously, but if you're doing stop and go in a diesel truck you should probably sell it to someone who isn't and be among the first to get an electric one because the difference in fuel costs is so dramatic in that case.
I think you misread my comment. I'm asking why you wouldn't want other types of vehicles that can be electrified to be electrified, such that there is less demand for the diesel that yours requires.
For example I've got a tractor that burns diesel, for effectively homeowner use. I too am not going to be replacing this piece of capital equipment any time soon (even though electrical would actually be better in a lot of regards). But since trucking is reliant on diesel and quite demand-insensistive, the Epstein war recently made diesel prices jump 60%. Whereas the fewer economically-critical vehicles there are being powered by diesel (even just the short range ones), the less that price would have spiked.
We can have and use electricity even if that's not what you put in your tank. We can have both things. This is the US government actively trying to eliminate one of them.
This deal has zero to do with someone like you. This impacts our electrical grid. Now instead of harvesting renewable wind energy we will be burning LNG to power that portion of the grid.
I suppose there are still some diesel generators out there, so they might burn that instead. Of course, that only makes you worse off.
Because in every thread about EVs someone has to chime in with their niche gas only use case, as if that somehow matters to the overall needs of the vast majority of drivers. Cool, you area niche need. Don’t buy an ev for 10 years or so.
Not sure how it relates to subsidies, but it is what you said. The government is cancelling wind shore projects leased to TotalEnergies under the Biden admin for ~$930 million.
The Trump admin is paying them back with the understanding that TotalEnergies will reinvest the money into oil and gas operations in the US
If the government would like to pay me to also not build wind turbines, hit me up. I mean, I wasn't going to build any in the first place, but I think this makes me qualified to continue not building any.
> [Major Major’s father's] specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county….
These things are common. For instance, we pay dockworkers to not work so that they would let us do containerization. When they say they're striking, half of those striking dockworkers wouldn't be working anyway. They're paid not to so that we could use containers. When US ports finally automate, it will be the same. The boss of that union wears a Rolex because he's good at extracting these concessions from us. So here's a variant for them:
> His specialty was containers, and he made a good thing out of not loading any. Ever since containerization came in, he was paid handsomely for every crate he did not touch. The more containers he did not load, the more money he was given, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on securing more seniority on the docks to increase the amount of cargo he did not handle. He worked without rest at not working the piers. On long evenings he lingered by the hiring hall and did not sling a single hook, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that no breakbulk cargo had somehow returned.
As much as I agree the longshoremen situation is "unappealing" from a policy perspective, it's not really a valid equivalence to compare a trade union trying to protect itself from being automated out of existence with a multinational corporation asking an historically corrupt government to let them use the $1bn that they were given for something other than its intended purpose.
Everyone always has a story to tell for why they deserve the Rolex and the other guy doesn’t. And nothing is equivalent except perhaps fundamental particles in each class. That’s the nature of reality.
I’m not this guy or that guy. I’m just a victim of both of them. And both of them are happy to conspire against me. So until they’re willing to give the rest of us Rolexes for sitting at home I don’t see much of a difference.
> The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I'm not saying that the longshoremen deserve Rolexes. I'm saying that if you had to choose between a handful of longshoremen with Rolexes and a Captain Planet villain with a Rolex and private jet and a bunch of new fossil fuel projects, I think the latter is clearly a worse outcome overall. False equivalence is a propaganda tool to confuse priorities and deflect.
Shit like this has been happening since the first colonists came to the US. On of the first thing the Massachusetts Bay Company did in the 1630s was subsidizing the Winthrop Salthouse for decades ... which never successfully produced salt. Another thing commonly done was the English government or charters would gift land and then turn right around and buy it back at market price.
Just look at it as America going back to the colonial ages and then everything that's happening makes sense. The bad news is that people were willing to put up with that for over 100 year so there's no guarantee anyone will do anything for a long time.
I'm investing in property in places that will allow me to get permanent residency without jumping through too many hoops.
You theoretically lose yield compared to the S&P average - but if you're hedging your bets against the US possibly going to shit - the S&P is unlikely to perform as well as its historic average IFF that scenario unfolds.
Seems like a better hedge than gold, but my crystal ball isn't working.
Mostly, we're looking at global warming maps and trying to figure out whether we're in a spot that'll be habitable in 30 years, assuming worst-case climate projections (which are more optimistic than current trajectories). There aren't that many good places to move.
Shorter term, we need to rotate investments out of USD.
There are two obvious problems with exiting to a more stable country: (1) we'd be putting ourselves on the business end of a large gun being held by a madman (2) when things really hit the fan, will it actually be more stable for American expats?
I cannot believe you went to the UK. what? You’re smart and went.. I don’t think anyone on that island has made 1 good decision in 50 years.
Thatcher: bad
Invasion of Iraq: bad
Brexit: bad
Human Challenge Trials: good
Free Speech: bad
Too many immigrants: bad
Revolving cascade of PMs who can’t get anything done: bad
Listing out a few - I guess I appreciate the Covid stuff. Hmm. still on the whole, I would be in the green longterm shorting everything about the UK.
The most interesting cultural export is Bonnie Blue (sign of decline).
Pay may be numerically less in the eu, but rather than me trying to convince you, try on youtube: 'why I left the USA for europe'.
There are very many.!
I've seen a lot of those and commonly the people are academics or in near median paying professions. Do high paid techies make the usa->Europe switch? Generally most of the grievances people have with the US disappear with a high enough salary. Like getting guarantees many weeks of vacation and having great healthcare.
there is an absurdly large rush of americans applying for canadian citizenship because canada recently allowed anyone with ancestry, multi-generations back, to qualify
I don't plan on moving, but I already have dual citizenship and it helps me sleep better at night knowing that if things got so bad to restrict US passports I have an alternative.
no, it used to be single generation but now people as far back as 4-5 are getting citizenship — I'm helping others go through the process myself but it's taking months longer than it used to due to the influx
How does that work so many generations back? Doesn't Bill C-3 add the additional requirement to demonstrate your parent(s) must have lived in Canada for ~3 years in order to make that path available?
That new law is only required for people applying after the law went into effect (so, babies at this point).
I have a feeling there may be more changes coming due to the rush of applicants, but they are incredibly unlikely to revoke anyone who successfully applies before that happens.
> - Assume everything will be fine and America will remain a global economic superpower.
My guess is 2/3 of the country at lease believe in that.
> - Plan an exit to a more serious, stable country.
Only the Top 0.1% are eligible. Probably only half of them are prepared. The other half are blind.
> - Some option in the middle of the two to hedge your bets?
That's the same cohort of the half of 0.1%. These people are not betting against the US as much as they are hedging their bets. They'll remain in the US till it's clear that the downward spiral is inevitable.
I'm finally getting around to acquiring that EU citizenship I'm eligible for. Not that I'm necessarily planning to leave, but it can't hurt to have the option.
Even if the insanity stopped right this second, it's likely that the EU will be actively working to step out of the US's economic and military shadow in the next couple decades. For anyone not in tech, most of the EU is already better than most of the US. The same is also true for many people in tech (most outside NYC/SF/Seattle).
Also, Canada. They're likely to withstand global warming better than most of the world, and would be comparatively easy to adapt to. If I didn't own a house, I'd already be working to move there, though I have recent ancestry that makes it a relatively more appealing option.
> Even if the insanity stopped right this second, it's likely that the EU will be actively working to step out of the US's economic and military shadow in the next couple decades.
It's not likely at all if you've looked at the polls for France, Germany, the UK and Spain, and how those have been trending over the last decade.
Lol thats trivial if you actually know history and politics a tiny bit - Switzerland. 800 years of most free citizens in the world (lost that armed part but still valid for whole Europe with maybe Finland having similar numbers).
Salaries in tech sector still give you higher overall quality of life than most of US can ever offer. Then you have - extremely beautiful nature at your doorstep, more top notch destinations like Italy and France just at the border, very low criminality compared to US, very good free healthcare, very good free education including top notch public universities, very well functioning social programs. One doesn't have to be ashamed their taxes go to killing innocent civilians half around the world (although at this point US population including folks here seems fine with that). And so on and on and on.
Also, you don't spend your whole active life getting it and (almost) burning out for that, 40h/week and then you can live your life and chase dreams and passions.
Quite a few swiss residents would be happy to have this (or at least some more cost control).
There's mandatory health insurance with preexisting condition coverage, but it's not free (tho it's partially tax supported, depending on location and income).
Swiss people are quite rude and unaccepting of foreigners, even foreigners who grow up there. I don't think they have room for Americans wishing to leave.
Americans have a twisted outlook because despite muh racism USA has allowed more foreigners in than any other country, a quite sizeable chunk of them via overstay or illegal immigration, so we think we could do the same thing and just as an average person up and move somewhere else because we see that it can be done and most of the time it is at least possible to get away with it unless you have bad luck or do something stupid.
Argentina and Brazil are about the only other countries where you can almost get away with this and legalize your existence (Argentina in particular has constitution that says essentially if you survive 2 years, you are basically citizen) , although most of Africa wouldn't bother to enforce it (South Africa in particular has almost as much illegal immigration per capita as USA although with a wide band of possible error in estimates, and they can't meaningfully enforce it).
Otherwise you need investments (usually 50k+), permanent pension, top-tier education, a professional job offer, cultural/family ties, or connections with the political apparatus. Switzerland in particular is on extreme hard mode for a non-EU citizen to get citizenship.
Other than the unauthorized category (see e.g. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi... for estimates), it's pretty hard to get established legally in the USA too, and the criteria are similar to what you cite for Switzerland. By the numbers (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R42866#_Toc181884259), the majority of legal immigrants are family of people who are already citizens. The other big group is employment-related. Immigration for other reasons (specific diversity groups & asylees/refugees) is comparatively small.
American citizens generally do not think that they can just walk into another country and settle there, because you can't do that in the USA. A big part of what got Trump elected was that people just about everywhere, except the left wing of the political spectrum, were concerned about the scale of unauthorized immigration during the Biden administration. That does include a huge amount of asylum seekers under various programs, but even just CBP parolees at the southwest border totaled over 1.1 million July 2023 - July 2024 and that is a shitton of people (https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-...).
Also the USA has a literally 250 year tradition of people moving here (and an equally long tradition of fretting over how the "wrong" people are moving here). The entire history of the country is: people moved here and never stopped moving here, and along the way most of the native population were killed or exterminated by disease. You make it sound like some ill-founded 20th century liberalism run amok.
If anything, modern Europeans are too accustomed to people not migrating around. But it's worth remembering just how much migration (within and from without) had to happen before the modern European socio-ethnic layout emerged.
Wouldn’t banking just relocate? I assume the Swiss were working mostly in Pounds Sterling 100 years ago. Presumably they’ll be mostly in Euros and Chinese Yuan in 50. US is chunky but highly replaceable. It’s not like our banking sector is particularly sophisticated.
They seem to be buying a nice house/condo in a good area and having kids.
Investment wise they are doing well.
They often own multiple homes.
They are not “smart” if they think a civil war will go down.. that’s poorly read people imo, sentiment pushed by the group that lost elections. And sooo context unaware. Could these people name any politics outside the US? Nope. Clueless, which is why they lost the election.
Some very smart friends are making investments in SA irt building factories.
Yep, the only thing that's sure is that children of said smart people will suffer their whole life so these smart people could give a bit more money to the fossil barons.
[please excuse this exploratory fiction, as I am recovering from running a chainsaw all morning and am feeling old and tired]
I'm almost 50 and mostly retired except for work I like doing (producing musical events or performing).
About the time my kiddo graduated high school, I moved to a rural area far from cities, and about 18 months ago I bought some land that had primitive shacks on it.
I spend a lot of time reading history. I assume that the US fails eventually;
not because I have any illusions about surviving that house fire, have a lack of awareness of the mass death that would cause, or fantasies about how I'd be able to function in some post-US world.
That assumption comes out of watching the capitalists strip the wiring from the walls of US soft power along side watching the fact that it's 85 degrees in March at 6500 feet here... "climate isn't weather" is true, but I'm not an idiot and we didn't have a real winter this year.
The failure of the US is terrifying, not because I and my community would mourn the loss of some glorious and benevolent order, but in the way that the death of my estranged parents was terrifying:
we are no longer doing things because we're forced by the fantasy of belonging to some larger political order, but now have to choose what to do.
Having read a lot about what the US has done in the world, I believe that a) it's unethical/racist/genocidal / exploitative in almost all its actions and b) I think the only actual hope for climate change is the end of the US as a world order. I don't know if the end of that order is sufficient to fix the ecosystem, which I feel is on the verge of some calamitous changes, but it certainly seems necessary.
Not having control over that failing system, and not having a lot of fantasies about belonging to the polis associated with that system, it's perhaps easier for me to look at its failure modes more clinically than I might have when I was 25 and saw it as an impenetrable solid face; I've moved downstream from Fisher's statement, and now it's much easier to see a possibility for the end of capitalism (or at least the uni-polar US world order) than the end of the world itself.
Not that it's the actions of a bunch of angry and over-educated leftists who would bring it about, but as has always been understood by Marxists (among whom I do not count myself), the failure leading to its dissolution are the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself.
Which makes me feel amazingly hopeful, actually. I don't have any real political power (beyond my affinity group), so it's nice to know (like Duncan instead of MacBeth) that these things could maybe take care of themselves without me doing anything I don't find ethical.
Because I believe that there is a future for humans, I spend a lot of time organizing with folks even when I think the short-term goals aren't super useful: for instance, doing ICE Watch support with local folks, shooting a lot of guns with folks who understood the wisdom of John Brown, or just being available to help out folks who have politics oriented around direct action.
I have been spending most of my time clearing the scrub oak from various parts of the land where I live to make the wildland fire interface a little less terrifying. I build a pretty sturdy solar power system here. I've spent the last couple of months getting my head into programming the esp32 and its peripherals. I got a ham license and have been working on building radio systems. Hopefully I will figure out how to get an underground cistern next month, and then act on the septic permit I got last year.
Other than that, I assume that things aren't going to change much in my life time... I just sit here in my shack playing banjo and hoping for the best.
Prognostication should be illegal and all, but I suspect that Trump will probably kick off in 6 months from a stroke, the Dems will elect Newsom, and then they won't do a damn thing to change anything, and we will be fighting the facists under worse conditions when they finally find a pretty face to solidify them.
So I look forward to dying of Super Ebola-fluenza at age 65 in the middle of a mid-June snow-hurricane near Bluff, UT while supporting a bunch of anarchist 30 year-olds in a drone-powered trench line while they fight the "Western Slope Fascist Front". But I bet I'll still be driving my Tacoma to that battle...
This is the core flaw of the democratic system. Once a person gets elected, democracy effectively ends. Many of their policies may be harmful to the country, and their promises may not be fulfilled, but there is no punishment mechanism. As long as they step down from office, the media may criticize or mock them, yet no one really cares about the damage they caused.
Leaving aside the fact that offshore wind power is already a mature technology, at the current stage of human development we should be promoting this kind of clean energy as much as possible. I remember a scientist once said that resources like oil are non-renewable, and simply burning them is actually a waste. We should try to use them for other purposes whenever possible, since there are so many renewable energy sources available.
Of course, the lifespan of a country is shorter than that of oil, and the lifespan of a politician is even shorter than that of a country. That, too, is one of the tragedies of human society.
1. how did the HS2 project go in UK? anybody get punished? is it so clean that no corruption happens in this project even it spends so many money with very little progress?
2. Should someone be held responsible for Germany’s energy problems?
3. Sanae Takaichi is the prime minister of Japan with the highest vote share in recent years. Because of her poor foreign policy, Japan’s relations with South Korea, Russia, and China have all worsened, and her approval rating is now continuously declining.Should she be held responsible for these things? Or is it enough that she can simply be voted out next time?
4. Mongolia has the second-highest proportion of prostitutes in the world(#1 is Philippines, which has a simpilar system compare to USA) . Among the countries near Mongolia, it is considered by the media to be the most free and democratic. Why is Mongolia’s system unable to solve this problem? Or is this problem something that does not need to be solved? Does nobody need to be responsible for it?
Ones that can remove corrupt officials, not merely toothlessly impeach them to no actual end.
Ones that can call a new election on a dime (relative to the lumbering US system) and don't fetishize a Little King absolute ruler.
Looking about, Australia (as one example) took a hard look at both the US and UK systems and ran with a hybrid of their own design - "Washminster".
Australia has shortcomings, as do all systems, but they do have the ability to churn Prime Ministers at a quick pace until they get a good one .. with no great impact on the functioning of the country, they have proportional voting - and get a wider spread than a simplistic monolithic two party standoff as a result, better seperation of Legal, Civil, Policy, and Military than currently evidenced in the US.
All the same, there are 190+ countries in the world .. and the USofA is just one - and certainly not the poster child for a well run democracy.
> This is the core flaw of the democratic system. Once a person gets elected, democracy effectively ends.
That's an intentional feature of representative democracy, not a bug. Letting voters micromanage every individual decision would be direct democracy.
> there is no punishment mechanism
In the next election voters can and will exact a punishment if they don't like the direction things are going. Politicians live in constant fear of this.
It is true that term limits reduce the effect of this threat somewhat, but in a system with shared governance not everyone gets term limited at the same time so there's still a strong collective effect. The issue in this case is just that too much power has been concentrated in the hands of one term limited person; the executive branch was not designed to wield this much unilateral power over domestic policy.
I'm investing in local energy - solar on my roof and electric cars in my garage. Maybe it doesn't make financial sense for everyone to do this, but the more people who do it, the less demand will exist for fossil fuels. This is a free market opportunity. Over 7 years, the solar should pay for itself, and then it's pure profit.
That's great that you're doing that, every deployment of renewables is a net positive. But local deployments in the burbs won't be enough to power out factories, office buildings, data centers, etc. also some people (A LOT of people actually) live in apartments or condos, so it's not just a financial barrier, they physically don't have the space.
We still need these large scale deployments to make meaningful progress in decarbonizing.
Do I have it right that the two projects that this deal kills off haven't seen any construction work yet? These aren't among the projects that the stop work orders were issued against in December, right?
My quick skim, I think you are right. This is getting them to halt new development, by buying them off with the equivalent of the subsidies the current administration cancelled.
>by buying them off with the equivalent of the subsidies the current administration cancelled
no, the billion that is being "paid" is a refund of what Total paid in for the leases. Total paid that into the US govt in anticipation of receiving returns on that investment in the form of "clean energy subsidies".
it is not clear from what is in the news story whether Total is being compensated for the would-have-been future subsidies, or whether Total simply expects to make decent profits from fossil fuels.
if one's interest is in the "clean energy" angle, then this is a "defeat". if one's interest is in reducing govt subsidies, this could be "a win", but it's not exactly clear.
These ones no construction had been started yet AFAIK.
If AI summery is to be trusted, a few other windparks got stopped that where almost done, but got completed anyway after a legal battle. Vineyard Wind 1, Coastal Virginia (CVOW), Empire Wind 1, Revolution Wind, Sunrise Wind.
Again, got it from AI, make of that what you want.
The symbolism, and the stupidity, was there though. As time has gone on it has been more clear every year how intelligent Carter's administration was and how terrible the following administration was. Investing in/promoting solar was just one of many smart moves by Carter that were attacked purely to gain political points that only harmed us in the long run.
Carter: “This energy crisis shows us how vulnerable we are to foreign autocrats. We should work toward energy independence via renewable energy and waste reduction, to lead the world away from this risky and unsustainable fossil fuel market and secure ourselves a brighter future.”
To be fair, he was essentially wrong about the efficiency angle because of the Jevons paradox and the "make your dryer not actually dry your clothes" kind of thing was pretty stupid.
A lot of the methods of subsidizing things were also quite incompetent, e.g. Solyndra. If you want to subsidize something like this you do it on the consumer side, e.g. 75% tax credit for every US-made solar panel you install, which drives demand for US-made solar panels without opening you up to scandals like that or the usual corruption where the money goes to the administration's buddies.
"In the year 2000, the solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy. A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people: harnessing the power of the Sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil." - Jimmy Carter (1979) [1]
Jimmy Carter has supported not only solar energy, but also domestic fossil fuel production and encouraged both of them. The policy of Carter administration never was to go 100% renewable.
"Our Nation's energy problem is very serious—and it's getting worse. We're wasting too much energy, we're buying far too much oil from foreign countries, and we are not producing enough oil, gas, or coal in the United States."
One of the lasting consequences of Carter's administration is the strong increase in worldwide CO2 output. Why? Yes they did encourage, at that time, developing countries (now becoming industrial countries) to pursue renewable energy resources but the main goal was to stop them developing nuclear technology.
Notable absent from the "Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978" is the word "coal". Developing countries were barred from developing nuclear technology, but were free solve their growing energy needs using coal.
I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be, but I'm still shocked to see things like this. And I'm fully aware of Trump's Scotland experience and how that contributed or directly led to this, but, still, shocked. And then I'm also shocked because I know that at least half, if not a good bit more, of US citizens are in agreement with this strategy. Not sure how I can still be shocked but here I am.
And I say that not as some rabid renewables person. Just the insane binary thinking, regardless of the dollars and cronyism at work. There's zero room for nuance, which I guess is my biggest complaint about the world at large.
Aside: people who think climate change will be the death of us all, and sooner than later, I get it, and I fully appreciate you pushing for a cleaner and more livable world. At this point I'm just going to sit in the corner and hope you, and China, figure it out and then it spreads quickly to the rest of the world, which I think at this point is pretty much a foregone conclusion barring a nuclear war (will refrain from commenting about how the likelihood of that has ticked up the past couple of weeks in an area teeming with (sarcastically shocked this time!) fossil fuels).
I'm always gobsmacked when Trump says things like, "We need to get rid of all the wind turbines! They are killing all the birds! Look at the foot of any tower and you'll see nothing but dead birds!"
Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.
> Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.
This can be seen by the changes to the interpretation of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) his administration made in 2017 during his first term.
Briefly, they said it only prohibited intentional killing of birds. So say I wanted to pave over some wetlands that are a crucial nesting grounds for some birds that are covered by the MBTA to build a parking lot.
Before, the near universal interpretation of the MBTA by nearly everyone in any of the countries that are a party to the treaty (US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Russia) was that I can't put my parking lot there.
Under the Trump interpretation as long as I'm not building my parking lot there to intentionally kill the birds I can do it.
This was overturned in court in 2020. Just before leaving office in 2021 they tried to again make that the interpretation.
Wind turbines are also miniscule compared to issues like pollution, land use, windows, and cats. Also you can track migration and turn them off at key times if it's a huge issue (this is part of the motivation for research I'm going to do later as part of my master's dealing with tracking hawk flocks via weather radar).
Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s
Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him
Never thought about it, but that's a great point and comparison. From quick Google search: 365 million and 988 million birds die every year from window collisions (that's US alone). Windmills/turbines: 140,000 and 679,000. Then if you do per windmill vs. per building obviously the windmills are going to "win," but it's the absolute that would seem to matter in this case.
As you said, that has nothing to do with the actual preference for fossils vs. turbines, but a great point nonetheless.
Domestic cats kill on the order of 100x as many birds as windmills do.
Fossil fuels also kill millions of animals every year (not just birds), and harm the health of humans. Even ignoring the long-term effects of CO2, fine particulates cause respiratory problems, higher blood pressure, and can cause cancer. The tricky bit is you can draw a straight line from the burning of coal to any particular (heh heh) death, it is just a statistical shift in health outcomes.
Anyway, all of that absolutely dwarf the birds getting killed by wind farms.
Yeah, I'm your parent and I think I wrote that reply without reading it over because I was attempting to point out, with numbers, how absurd it is that anyone would say "windmills are bad because of how many birds they kill" as if that's a logical argument vs. the countless other things that kill birds en masse.
Yeah, see the reply I left with your sibling. I am in full agreement with you and wrote my comment way too quickly because I was trying to rebut the argument that windmills are in any way responsible for some crazy number of bird deaths.
Since you wrote "honest question" I feel like I should answer... I expected what's happening and I expect even worse in the future. And goes to show you (I!) can still be shocked even when you're expecting some pretty rough stuff.
I would have expected them not to vote a primitive person. And the most shocking part is people pretending he's got some sort of master plan or that the rest of us are just not seeing his genius. Absolute cinema, I swear.
This might surprise you, but only a minority of eligible voters vote. So while it looks like 50% of people believe this is a good strategy and we should do it based on the percentage of people who voted for Trump, in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good. The problem is that few of those people vote.
So in all seriousness, if we could get a significant fraction of the young people who are negatively impacted by these policies to actually vote against the people enacting them we could see real change. But if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on then nobody will do anything about it until it's too late and we're shooting at or throwing rocks at each other.
> if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on
I don’t know if you can fix lazy. Turning out new voters basically happens once a generation. The rest tell themselves tales that their vote could never matter, and in doing that, subtly endorse the status quo.
This is kind of why I ultimately find cynicism to be inherently lazy. This is coming from a very cynical (and often lazy) person.
It takes no effort to be cynical, I can tell myself "everything sucks and I shouldn't care because nothing matters anyway" and justify not doing anything I want. I can justify not voting, I can justify not helping someone if I see them struggling on the street, I can justify not even improving myself.
In the last couple years I have been trying my best to override my cynical tendencies because ultimately I think that they are bad for me. I vote in every election I am able to because even if it's infinitesimal, I at least tried to do something to avoid whom I deem bad people getting into office.
Agree. And look, being cynical and just minding your own matters is fine. It means the system is working well enough for that person that doing anything isn’t actually worth it. But those people are also electorally—and more broadly, politically—irrelevant. So if you’re trying to do something, betting on them tends to be a losing pitch.
I relate to the feeling. I am extremely cynical. I fully believe the world is fucked and we are in for a very turbulent 50-100 years. I still work to improve myself and the world because WTF else are you going to do? At least doing something feels better than doing nothing.
I've just grown to really respect older people who manage to stay excited and optimistic. It's so much easier to become a cynic, and I think it required effort on their end to try and be a positive person.
Your comment is extremely reductionist and reverses causality for a large number of voters. Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency. So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power many voters (correctly) conclude that their vote will not lead to meaningful change.
> Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency
Someone only tuning into general elections and making this complaint is either not intellectually there or plain lazy. Very few places in this country have zero competitive elections on the ballot. And none exist where calling electeds and showing up to advocate don’t move the needle. Doing those things takes effort, however, and I concede that for a lot of people that effort isn’t worth it since they’re comfortable enough—personally—with the status quo.
The flip side is that leaves a lot more room for everyone else. It’s genuinely surprising how accessible power in America is once you start wielding it. That sucks when nobody is watching but a few paid interests. It gets interesting when you find yourself, repeatedly, as the only person in the room with the levers.
That elections are "competitive" is utterly irrelevant in a political system where local, state, and federal legislation is almost exclusively drafted by lobbyists. Lobbyists who in addition to supplying pre-written legislation also supply staffers with pre-formatted position statements to distribute to anyone who bothers contacting their office about said.
In practice that "competition" you seem so taken by produces nice sound bites and some column inches on whatever culture war rag is being waved in the face of the citizenry, and literally nothing of substance that addresses any of the myriad slow burning economic and systemic crises that have been building for the last 40 years.
Using agriculture as a microcosm for the larger economy there has been nothing proposed much less ratified to address the complete chokehold Monsanto, John Deer, Cargill, and Tyson Foods have on every aspect of the agricultural industry . And they've had literal decades to make a move.
Princeton University released a study 16 years ago that concluded the US was a de facto oligarchy and if anything legislative capture has only deepened in the US since then. Hell at the local level I've watched the county planning board float a ballot initiative to greenlight a major construction project which was soundly rejected by local voters. Net result: 5 years later they broke ground on the project anyway. So you can tell me there's movable needles out there until you're blue in the face, let's see some reciepts.
> So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power
Quick question: how many _months_ total in the last quarter century have the Dems had the Presidency, Senate, and House at the same time.
The answer is 47. Forty seven total months. Out of 300. We got the ACA (Obamacare) and the Inflation Reduction Act during those brief time periods, too.
The ACA was poorly camouflaged pork for the insurance industry and healthcare statistics have continued to decline since it was passed. Who did the IRA pay off?
> in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good.
I'm not convinced. The reason why many of these people don't vote is because they don't think Trump is that bad. They probably don't agree with everything, but that's true no matter who is in office.
> I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be,
Don't fall for the political narratives, they are designed to distract you while the theft is taking place. The sponsors of the circus are rabidly cynical and pro-selfish. They are spreading the narratives, not believing in them. There is certainly a few conservatives in power who hold that the earth is only 6000 years old, who see no other option than burning down the town as a way to escape confrontation with progress and emancipation. But this is mainly what kleptocracy looks like.
The narratives work though, that is the sad reality. News anchors and the public are stuck in a loop about "children being forced to change sex, woke, climate hoax, but her e-mails, but Biden, ...", anything but what is happening at the crime scene.
- Widespread arrests and murder / deportations of US citizens.
- Federal agents routinely kidnap pregnant child abuse victims so they can be transported to Texas where they're denied health care + forced to carry their assailant's child to term.
- Blowing up fishermen + using the footage in weird 80's movie montage propaganda films.
- Installing censors at most news organizations in the US.
And literally hundreds of comparably bad stories. They arrive at a rate of 2-3 per day, and have been for over a year.
Perhaps they try to please the US government. A previous total CEO "maintained complicated relations with the United States". He died in a plane crash accident. Was it an accident or a murder, perhaps the current Total CEO prefers to be safe than dead.
They've funded massacres in 2021 [0] in order to unlock the $20 Billion Cabo Delgado LNG deal [1] in Mozambique. Greenwashing is the least of their worries.
I've found French business culture to be extremely refreshing compared to their DACH peers - French business norms tend to be much more pragmatic, and will try to maintain strategic autonomy by hook or by crook.
I really want to see the legal verbiage guaranteeing this right. Like, how many mutations can covid virus get before it legally could be sprayed on patriotic Americans?
This will not be a learned more robustly in the US until one or both of the only two (edit: major) gas turbine manufacturers in the world (GE Vernova, Siemens Energy) suffer a tail risk event causing their failure. Backlog for new gas turbines is ~7 years, as of this comment. Continued production capacity is a function of how fragile those two companies are.
Yes, but their production volume is limited (imho) compared to the two companies I mentioned. Good callout regardless. I'll have a post put together to share here enumerating and comparing.
(i track global fossil generation production capacity as a component of tracking the overall rate of global energy transition to clean energy and electrification, but some of my resources are simply an excel spreadsheet)
People laugh at this, but anthracite genuinely is cleaner than other coal in every regard save CO2 emissions. People just think it's a joke because they've come to believe that CO2 is the only coal emission worth caring about, which definitely isn't true.
The oxymoronic term "clean coal" refers to carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) technology [0], touted by the fossil fuel industry as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and continue employing coal workers.
Thus far, it is incredibly expensive, at a time when solar and wind generation is cost-competitive with fossil-fuel plants which don't employ CCS. It is simply a dead end. You can generate more renewable energy, and store it, for far less than it takes to equip and operate CCS in conjunction with a fossil-fuel-fired plant. Only direct government subsidy makes it viable for a vanishingly small amount of GHG emissions.
"Clean coal" is like saying "a fast snail". Sure it can be faster than other snails, but even if it's twice as fast as the second fastest snail, it's still a snail and I'll still laugh when an ant runs circles around it.
No, the criticism isn't because people get caught up about CO2 -- it's because "cleaner than other coal" is a very low bar to meet to be calling something "clean" full stop.
Also "clean coal" is not a type of coal being burnt (although that does matter too) but pollution control systems added to coal plants.
Anthracite burns clean enough to use in a pizza oven. If your neighbor told you he was going to install a new furnace and offered you the choice of it burning wood pellets or anthracite, from a smell standpoint you should absolutely choose the anthracite.
Anthracite, in these regards, is very different from bituminous coal.
Undoubtedly. Doesn't change the fact that one kind of coal burns smokeless with a clean blue flame while the other will cover everything for miles in a film of soot and tar.
The smell of wood might be nice for flavor, but that's beyond the point of anthracite being clean. That particulate pollution from wood burning is severe compared to the smoke you'll get off anthracite, which is virtually nonexistent.
Regardless of how good it might be at being the cleanest dirty thing, it's not what the US trope of "clean coal" refers to anyway. Anthracite is not used in the US to generate power because it is too expensive.
I do find the slow Sovietization of America funny, both mentally and economically. The year is 2050, autarky on energy has been established, the markets cut off, politics in the hands of erratic and geriatric leaders. Americans proudly drive 30 year old Fords the way people used to drive Ladas, while China exports green energy, cars and infrastructure to the world.
> The US (with Canada and Mexico) is self-sufficient with fossil fuel energy.
Oh boy can't wait for the reenactment of third reich intervening peacefully in czechoslovakia, for their own safety and wellbeing of course, and not at all for the resources they're hoarding, the filthy hoarders.
It's awesome the US hasn't destabilized one of those neighbors and alienated the other one by declaring it the prospective 51st state. Soft power really is America's super power.
Imports into the US will experience inflation regardless. Semiconductor imports from East Asia are one example, since they depend on helium and energy from the Gulf.
tbh I’m kind of surprised the admin hasn’t enacted export tariffs on oil and gas already to take the pressure off car owners.
Wouldn’t do anything to the prices of imported products since the entire intl supply chain would be subject to even higher prices, but would reduce pressure at the pump
Sure, if we build out refining capacity for the next ten years. Then we're golden until we run out of the finite well of combustible dead algae. So if you think we can revitalize American manufacturing and resource processing starting now, and you're okay with those investments being worthless in a few decades, and you don't give a shit about rendering the planet significantly less habitable to human life, then yeah, we're totally self-sufficient with fossil fuels.
Or we could, you know, pull energy out of the air and sun, a strategy which will be viable until our star dies.
Alberta tar sands have hundreds of years worth of reserves. They're also expensive and incredibly dirty to extract and emit significantly more CO2 during processing than a light oil well will. (The tar is usually melted by heating with natural gas).
I'm quite confident cheap renewable alternatives will make the tar sands inviable far before they run out.
Some good news though, with the war in Iran the spiking oil price means that Albertan executives can ramp up operations and stay quite profitable! Push the price to 200/barrel and we'll just strip mine the entire province after airlifting out Calgary and Edmonton.
This assumes that there isn't profound demand destruction caused by the stratospheric energy prices.
Fossil fuels were already an inferior energy source when oil was $60/barrel. Electrification has been moving fast and accelerating, even at the pre-energy crisis prices.
Now? Current events are likely to take fossil fuels out back and give 'em the Old Yeller treatment with surprising speed.
I absolutely agree, _in market driven economies_, fossil fuels are slowly pricing themselves out of relevancy. The issue is that for some reason the US specifically subsidizes their usage keeping them artificially lowly priced.
So, how many billions of newly printed debt is Trump willing to throw at the problem to keep those subsidies up so that he can be sheltered from the scary windmills?
I don't agree with redirecting towards fossil fuels instead of wind power, but its not really paying TotalEnergies "for not building wind capacity", its more like changing what was ordered on behalf of the population: first the wind power capacity was ordered, then it was stalled and blocked, and now this president and TotalEnergies have agreed to change the order to another type of meal (investing in fossil fuel facilities within the US).
The US is unable to implement export controls so consuming less than it creates doesnt mean theres enough since producers will export if international prices are better
Ignoring the part where just running everything off fossil fuel is suicidal for the planet, the US actually isn't self-sufficient with just fossil fuels.
Renewables are cheaper to build out, and we're facing a massive energy shortage. We need to be building renewable production as quickly as possible just to keep up with demand.
Insisting that we use obsolete, expensive and dirty technologies while the rest of the planet modernizes is just dumb.
> "TotalEnergies CEO Pouyanné said offshore wind was 'not the most affordable way to produce electricity' in the US, which he identified as being natural gas-fired power plants. [...] So it was a win-win dialog," he said."
Pouyanné is only 62 years old. If, as I hope, there are criminal trials in the future for those responsible for recklessly endangering life on this planet, then I hope that he is still alive and that statements like this form part of the prosecution. Unfortunately Trump will almost certainly be long dead by then.
Trump wrecks the global energy economy and his next move is to increase our dependence on it? They don't make enough dimensions for the type of chess this brainiac is playing.
Kidnapping the leader of a sovereign nation to put them on show trial and plotting to steal the country's natural resources. Blockading and strangling an island country to the point of economic collapse. Opining out loud about annexing their northern neighbours. The list goes on and on..
This level of doomerism is absurd. Of course the US will survive this administration. I blame the news for making every breathe by whichever opposition seem like the next WWIII.
The land will be there. (most of) people will be there. What parent probably meant is losing everything good and positive United States of America represented in past 80+ years, internally and globally.
That is gone my friend, with the wind like a sulfuric fart, for good. US is becoming a global terrorist and enemy #2 of free world and certainly whole Europe (right after its biggest and only 'friend', russia which coincidentally keeps trying to make you a thing of the past). This comes from somebody who strongly believed in your role in global hegemony despite your numerous well documented fuckups in the past. All on the whims of one visibly mentally sick man, with absolutely nobody standing up to him despite nobody really believing in any of that bullshit. No principles, just plain greed and firm fuck-the-rest approach. Right now, if Europe needs a strong big ally it will be #1 China, and then... nothing.
The fact you voted him in, and he still has massive support, and there has been 0 overthrow attempts of the biggest traitor to US in its history tells me and everybody else in the world many things, but nothing positive. Even if next election, if they will happen, will have 98% win of the democracts with that ridiculous unfair and undemocratic system of yours, it won't change a permanent shift that started and keeps happening. US has no real allies, in same vein russia or China has no real allies.
Empires rise and fall, inevitably, there was never a reason to think US would be an exception.
None of the institutions function, or do the thing that we used to explain to children what they do. The whole thing demonstrably does not exist. You're welcome to describe my view with whatever pejorative you prefer.
> do the thing that we used to explain to children what they do. The whole thing demonstrably does not exist
Something misfunctioning doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. A massive economy, industry and war machine are still here. Pretending that doesn’t exist because it doesn’t work the way we like is an expression of exasperation, not a description of reality.
>A massive economy, industry and war machine are still here
Those things are exactly what destroyed the nation. The military industrial complex and the billionaires who removed the teeth from institutions that used to prevent the accumulation of power (see also: antitrust litigation against Standard Oil). Those entities are now in complete control and democracy is nothing but a sham, a clown show between two faces of the same coin.
The US as a country didn't fail with Trump. It failed when Microsoft got away scot-free. This was the biggest sign that the country was no longer a serious entity, because a serious entity would try to preserve its own power, while the United States of Burgers is something to be sold to the highest bidder.
> Those things are exactly what destroyed the nation
You're confusing the destruction of the dream of a nation with the desrtruction of the nation per se. The Roman Republic's fall was the destructionn of a dream. Those who thought they were witnessing the destruction of a nation, on the other hand, were dead wrong.
The guy is unhinged, hellbent on denial, just to appease his base, who are going bankrupt because of his policies. Would he pay Sun as well to stop shining over the US?
It's even stupider than that, it's not even to appease his base, it's a personal grudge. Trump sued a wind energy company to prevent them from building an off-shore wind farm in view of his golf resort in Scotland. He lost that case badly and he has been railing against wind energy specifically ever since.
So far Trump hasn't done much to prevent solar farms from being built, it's only wind turbines that he's exacting his vengeance on like some sort of modern day Don Quixote.
The overrated and very annoying "sun", the so-called "star" that our planet goes around has been going unquestioned for too long! Many people have been asking for a long time, perhaps even before Obama, to remove the sun from the sky and replace it with our beautiful clean coal towers!
This was a known risk for decades on every coastal wind project, and would have been a part of the earliest risk assessments for this project. The people building these projects are generally not as stupid as the administration trying to tear them down.
IIRC it does not. There has been some discussions by folks around it, but so far no evidence has pointed to it being a primary motivation.
The evidence we do have is that republicans have had a party vendetta against clean energy for decades, and their current leader has had a personal vendetta specifically against wind turbines, also for decades.
I think everyone here would appreciate it if you didn't delve into identity politics, especially not when starting a thread.
Just the facts, please. Or your beliefs, if you want -- but just because you state that you "believe" something, doesn't make it a fact, like you claimed.
Unless you were stating it was a fact that you believed that claim? The wording you used was a bit convoluted there.
Seems you did, even though nobody responded in kind. My reply simply stated the facts. For more detail, read the post you just responded to [0] (in particular, the 2nd and 3rd paragraph), and the other replies to the original thread [1].
In the future, it'd be better if you don't represent your beliefs and opinions as fact [1], and didn't try to preemptively portray anyone who doesn't share your beliefs as counterfactual and politically-motivated [1].
Building out fossile fuel production shifts oil revenue from various dictatorships around the world to the US in this case. That's a good thing. I wish we in Europe produced more gas ourselves instead of being highly dependent on other countries.
This does not mean higher gas demand, which is what matters for CO2 reduction.
I would argue it’s a waste of resources. Fossil fuels will be phased out over the next 50 years. If China is an indicator it can be done quite a bit faster than you’d think.
It’s already questionable to build fossil fuel capacity at today’s prices. In 10 years it won’t make any financial sense. In 20 you’d be laughed out of the room.
Why waste money on a dying technology? It’d be like mining bitcoin
(Based on AI research) fossile fuel production takes a few years to recoup investment. Only refineries seem quite long term (15-20 years). I'm sure the companies have projections about future demand to decide which projects are worth pursuing. If they miscalculate, the oil companies loose money (oh no! /s).
Anyway, you won't loose money on this.
There is of course also an argument about national security, not being at the whim of some Iranian dictator. So some form of government investment would be justified, but not necessary IMO.
I do lose money on this. I (and you, and the rest of the world) have to both clean up emissions and pay for climate change. The more we emit the worse the effects.
The production shifts oil revenue from Islamic dictatorships to Christian dictatorship of USA. Maybe a hyperbole for now, but for how long? Independent media and education under attack, gerrymandering your voting rights away etc. Considering most of the population lives is solid red or blue state and thus their vote for president doesn't count, how much of a democracy is USA when the minority of independents live in swing states are the only who's vote counts?
Also USA us doing nothing relevant to reduce gas demand like CO2 cap and trade or CO2 based tariffs.
At this rate buy Chinese will be a more moral choice than buy American by next decade.
Voters in the US have the ability to actually change the course of their country.
Voters can say they want Obama or Trump in charge and the government has to obey that choice.
In Europe you only have the same parties/"uniparty" in power all the time. Many people never had a representative they voted for.
I understand the nuance about the US voting system. But when I look at the outcomes, the US seems way more democratic than Europe.
Re gas demand:
Renewables are cheaper than fossile fuels. They will obviously win out in a free market. No subsidies needed.
Theses wind farms have not even started construction yet. Once Don Quixote is out of office, some future administration undoubtedly will start wind farm construction.
I'm actually less concerned about the continued non-existence of a bunch of windmills, vs the billion-dollar payout to ensure that they continue to not exist.
I've spent my entire life not building any windmills and nobody's paid me a billion dollars for it yet.
This seems like a good thing considering the “TotalEnergies CEO Pouyanné said offshore wind was "not the most affordable way to produce electricity" in the US, which he identified as being natural gas-fired power plants.”
Not sure why we’re building offshore wind plants when land based gas plants provide cheaper energy. We need to be reducing the cost of living for working people and not raising it. Our goal should be to reduce people’s cost of living and we should align our actions towards those goals.
Wind and solar are consistently the cheapest forms of new energy generation. Pouyanné knows that. He is being a politician here, saying what he knows will play well with the current administration. When in Rome...
Does the offshore wind energy costs include externalities of fabricating, assembling, shipping, installing, maintaining and decommissioning the turbines? Does it also include bird losses and whale harms?
Does the gas turbine include externalities of fabricating, assembling, shipping installing, maintaining, and decommissioning oil drilling rigs? And of shipping, storing, and burning the gas? And the climate change caused by gas leaks? And the harms to humans, the fishing industry, and bird losses and whale harms by oil spills (I know you really care about those)?
I really want to know how in the hell whales are getting stuck in wind turbine blades. I want to see a video of this happening.
There's also the externality of paying for the natural gas, which is passed on to the consumer in the form of higher energy bills.
It probably also makes sense to include the $800M we are burning per day right now on patriot missiles (assuming the stockpile hasn't been depleted yet).
The argument is that vibrations of the wind power plants at sea disturb the whales.
Paying for the gas itself would not be an externality. Externalities are for example the worldwide damages caused by extreme weather which is caused by climate change, health problems caused by air pollution or the usage of clean water for cooling
Normally, I'd agree, but in this age of massive corruption, you need to be careful figuring out who the stakeholders are. The purpose of these new fossil plants is not to produce electricity. Their purpose is to line the pockets of the ultra-wealthy people building them, and of the politicians accepting bribes to get them built.
Fueling the power plant is an externality for the people building the power plant. You could argue that it increases their costs, but these things are monopolies, with prices set by bought-off politicians. The plant + fuel costs much more than renewables (so ratepayers get screwed), but I'll wager the plant without fuel is still a bit less than solar or wind construction.
I think you forgot to account for the massive emissions. Which we have to pay for eventually. Don’t know if you noticed but the majority of the US had the hottest March on record just now. Like a few days ago. There is an enormous cost to emissions. Probably for each $1 spent on gas power there’s $50 to ameliorate the emissions. Building more gas capacity is perhaps the stupidest economic policy imaginable
In 2026 utilities will install 86 GW of new generation, of which only 6 GW will be natural gas. The other 80 GW will all be solar, wind and battery storage. Utilities are doing this because of economics. Environment is secondary. Even oil and gas rich Texas has been aggressively adding solar, wind and battery.
Wind is one of the cheapest sources of electricity available. Even if you are a completely brain-dead climate change denier it makes sense from a financial perspective.
The longer quote seems to be "In the situation of the U.S., where you have huge amount of resources, huge amount of land to produce electricity, offshore wind is not the most affordable way to produce electricity" which sounds like it's just as much about the extra cost of off-shore makes less sense when you're not land-constrained like in Europe or Asia.
HN title (currently reads "US govt pays TotalEnergies nearly $1B to stop US offshore wind projects") is editorialized and it's unclear to me whether it's accurate. The article says:
> We're partnering with TotalEnergies to unleash nearly $1 billion that was tied up in a lease deposit that was directed towards the prior administration's subsidies
What's the deal with this lease deposit and how does "freeing it up" equate to the US govt "paying" TotalEnergies that amount?
Is this a situation where TotalEnergies put down a 1B deposit to lease the seashore from the government and the government is now canceling that agreement and giving them their money back? How does it relate to "subsidies"?
NY Times phrases it as a reimbursement to TotalEnergies for relinquishing wind leases that they paid for. The US made the reimbursement contingent on them investing in fossil fuel projects. "The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels."
Total waste of $1 Bil of taxpayer dollars. If the oil and gas industry want to shut down wind projects let them pay for it.
Why would they do that when they already paid for a corrupt new regime to do it for them?
Slight tangent:
The US is a net oil exporter. If fossil fuel companies were so influential, wouldn't we expect them to be in favour of less fossil fuel production elsewhere?
Instead the what seems to be influential is the average Joe who's complaining about the price at the pump.
US fossil fuel companies also make money from projects outside US. They explore, build the infrastructure, and operate oil fields for other countries.
Indeed.
All the blather about Canadian "trade surplus" is actually oil.
US companies owning that infra sell that oil under market price, to their US corp divisions. The CEO, upper execs are usually American, and so their large salaries, and all corporate profits all flow to the US parent corp.
Canada of course sees some taxes per barrel of oil, and local employment, but when you remove all this, Canada has a massive trade deficit with the US
Of course for this US calls Canada trade unfair.
It's all smoke and mirrors.
Maybe. But it's not obvious that they would benefit from cheap petrol.
In that case, we should definitely reserve judgement on the weird payment stipulations then. The oil industry probably hates that the government is doing this, and we shouldn't cast aspersions on them.
Not maybe, they do. And noone wants their product so expensive that people starts looking for alternatives.
At a guess, they're probably happy to encourage continued reliance on petroleum, whilst the rest of the world is switching over to renewable energy.
> in favour of less fossil fuel production elsewhere?
Another slight tangent: the street of Hormuz being closed has them covered nicely there currently.
Yes, that _would_ be evidence in favour of oil interests having influence in the government.
But that's also an unusual situation; and the US administration is also lifting sanctions on Russian oil at the same time.
So TotalEnergies agreed to invest 1 billion is offshore wind during thr last Administration. The current Administration doesn't want any investment in renewables so they attempted to block it. A judge said the attempted block was unlawful. So then immediately the admin said something new and that instead there were "national security concerns" with building wind plants - (Which doesn't pass the smell test to me at all) and the project would be held up while untangling those.
My assumption is the company started getting upset at being toyed around and having their 1 billion investment completely stalled for so long. So the admin said we'll kill the wind if you do our fossil fuels instead. So shift your investment away from wind (we kill it and pay you back for what you investws) if you instead do fossil fuels. And that's what's being done.
So previously the company was spending 1billion on wind and getting some subsidies. Now they spend 2 billion, and get paid 1 billion from the tax payer. For them it's at best a wash, though likely a loss since I haven't heard they get subsidies with the fossil fules. And the tax payer instead of paying for tax credits or low interest loans or other subsidies that were part of wind power portion of the Inflation Reduction Act instead pay a full 1 billion dollars to the company.
> The Trump administration will pay $1 billion to a French company to walk away from two U.S. offshore wind leases as the administration ramps up its campaign against offshore wind and other renewable energy.
1. https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climat...
This seems plausible. Though I find "pay a full 1 billion dollars to the company" to be a very confusing way to frame this if this just returning a deposit the company put down in the first place. Would be more accurate to say the company spent 1 billion, canceled that and were refunded the 1 billion, then spent that billion on a different U.S. project instead.
Though it's still a significant impact to the tax payer if the new thing they're spending 1B on is private industry and not a government-owned lease.
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Sweden has been blocking offshore farms on the east side of country, where they would be fighting Russia. West side farms are fine.
USA hardly has the same problem, and the current admin are frankly a bunch of low-brow vicious thugs, who in my view wouldn't know a genuine security problem from a large hole in the ground.
Could you give some sources for this? I can't seem to find anything with a cursory search, but I'd be interested in reading.
https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2024/11/avslag-pa...
The Swedish government is not blocking all offshore wind, but it is blocking a lot of it, specifically wind parks in areas of the Baltic Sea that could cause trouble for trying to detect Russian military activities.
I don't know what the situation looks like for Finland.
> Firms struggle to cope with Finnish military's wind turbine ban
> More than 200 wind energy projects have been canned in south-east Finland due to concerns that they could disrupt military radar.
https://yle.fi/a/3-10374540
Since then the military has just become stricter.
There's a big difference between
a) Finland needing fast & accurate RADAR tracking across their 50km gulf and restricting activity in the gulf as a result. Not just wind farms, other commercial activities are restricted in the Gulf of Finland including shipping.
b) USA restricting wind farms on it's east coast (NC and NY/NJ) where the nearest land is thousands of km away and no other commercial activities are meaningfully restricted.
(If the US can't field a RADAR for early warning off the east coast that can handle wind farms on the coast, we have other problems)
Offshore wind farms have been stopped by the Finnish and Swedish military in many parts of the Baltic sea which aren't the gulf of Finland.
If wind farms are a problem for radars in the US, then it's quite a small price to pay to block them offshore. Especially since the country is gigantic and has plenty of room inland.
Any attack on the US will be through sea or space. Both are voids and very difficult or impossible to surveil. There's a historical example in Pearl Harbor.
So why you are bringing up nearest land I have no clue? The point is that the US is exposed to the oceans.
> Baltic sea
Still don’t see a problem making this comparing?
Atlantic ocean: thousands of miles to the nearest land from the NE coast; unrestricted commercial activity
Baltic sea: Belligerent nation on the coast (Kaliningrad Oblast) ~100 miles away; heavily patrolled and monitored commercial activity
> If wind farms are a problem for radars in the US
I’m asserting they are not because they magically weren’t 2 years ago and the airspace on the NE coast of the US has some of the largest and most aggressive ADIZ in the world since 2001. If wind farms were a problem for RADAR/early warning systems we would have heard about it in the last 25 years.
> So why you are bringing up nearest land I have no clue? The point is that the US is exposed to the oceans.
Er yes... I’m sure the military groups responsible for early warning didn’t just realise that in 2025. 10 years after offshore wind farms in the area were fully operational.
Edit: I want to say that learnings from recent conflicts (especially around drones) would be a compelling argument for why we only just realised these issues, but no one has articulated that or why it’s an issue on the Atlantic coast.
If the radars that the USA uses are so great, then why don't Finland and Sweden purchase these systems instead of blocking almost all offshore wind farms? These are two countries that have very strong political agendas in favour of wind power.
Maybe there are new threats that neither you or I are aware of or understand? Secrecy is how the military operates. New and emerging threats is the exact reason which has been given by the US Department of Interior.
As for drones, at least in Finland they are investigating if land based wind power mills can be equipped with drone warning systems.
I don't buy into the hacker double think, where everything is great and glorious and rational when Europeans do it, but it's the opposite if America under Trump does it.
> If the radars that the USA uses are so great, then why don't Finland and Sweden purchase these systems instead of blocking almost all offshore wind farms?
Are you deliberately not trying to see the difference?
Early warning systems need all the help they can get when you only have 100km to your threats (ie. the baltic sea); when you have the entire Atlantic you don’t need that.
US early warning systems are great because they have 1000s of kilometers of space.
As other commenters have already pointed out to you, the Nordic countries do allow wind farms in:
And they don't allow wind farms where they are exposed to the open baltic.
What does those three seas you mentioned have in common? They have Nordic coastline on both sides. Meaning that nobody can hide in radar shadow, because they'll be seen from the other coast.
> US early warning systems are great because they have 1000s of kilometers of space.
Not if there is a disturbance in the way. You know how signals work. Everything behind the disturbance will be in shadow, stretching for as far as you please. The ocean is a giant dark void, and your enemy can be anywhere and go anywhere.
The Swedish defense minister has specified the threat to be cruise missiles in their decision to ban and block offshore wind farms. I wouldn't be surprised if the US has the same reason for their national security concerns. With a cruise missile you have to get close before launching, as compared to ICBMs which have no limits in range.
And just out of curiosity: Why don't they build these wind parks inland in the great plains? Too much energy loss from distance to consumers?
> What does those three seas you mentioned have in common? They have Nordic coastline on both sides.
You should check out the Norwegian Sea?
> And just out of curiosity: Why don't they build these wind parks inland in the great plains? Too much energy loss from distance to consumers?
Don't worry, this administration has been canceling those projects too: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/trump-c...
(This is why my stance is "bad faith" on the "national security" claim, if that wasn't clear; I know plenty on how RADARs work and it doesn't pass the sniff test)
Read some real news
Read official decisions from the defence forces of Finland and/or Sweden. Huge offshore wind projects have been stopped recently.
Or be a reality denying hacker if you prefer.
I can’t make heads or tails of your point.
Are you saying that because Sweden has to worry about Russia invading from the east, the US shouldn’t build any wind farms anywhere? That can’t be right. What do you really mean?
They don't want another surprise attack from the sea like pearl harbor.
You're saying offshore wind farms would prevent the US from detecting an intercontinental attack crossing the ocean?
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%27lyeh
From where else would an enemy be able to attack? There's two options: ocean or space.
And you think a Pearl Harbor sized attack force could cross oceans undetected and hide behind wind farms?
Please tell me you’re just yanking our chains and don’t really believe that?
Much larger attack forces are currently cruising the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and have been doing so for decades. The oceans are international waters, giant voids where it's hard to know where your enemy is.
They can be a thousand miles away from your coast and launch cruise missiles with more fire power than that of Pearl Harbour. If there is a radar/signal disturbance on your coast which can help them, they will take advantage of it.
We're not the ones arguing the absurd position that the concerns two small countries with extreme closeness to Russia (and a history of prior invasions) more than a thousand miles away, with completely different geography, apply to a vastly different country in a completely different area of the world.
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GOP capitalism at its worst: take public money and give it to private interests, without any thoughts of what makes sense.
"Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1 billion for his campaign and told them he’d grant their policy wish list if he won. The investment, he said, would be a “deal” given the taxes and regulation they would avoid under his presidency. He also offered to help fast-track fossil fuel industry mergers and acquisitions if he won."
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/foss...
Cough Cough Big Bank bailout..... this is corpocracy with two branding every few year interval.
You should probably look up when the TARP bailiut program was passed and initiated, because it wasn't when Obama was president. The Great Financial Crisis brewed and exploded under Bush.
Obama pushed for the 2010 Dodd Frank reforms to rein in big banks after that.
Corporate bailouts, huge deficit spending, mega tax cuts for the mega rich, and bottomless pit defense spending have been Republican policy for the last 50 years.
... while all the time blaming Democrats for everything they do themselves, at a much larger scale.
Hypocrisy works, if you have an electorate that can't think critically and are addicted to "news" sources that confirm their biases.
Left (foot), right (foot).
The companies don't give a rats ass what kind of energy project it is as long as it is profitable. Wind energy, gas, cow farts, it's all the same to them. Your framing makes no sense.
The majority of tax payers voted for this to happen
And the majority of tax payers voted for the previous admin too, which started this offshore wind project in the first place.
Ok? And?
The majority voted to move in one direction then the majority wanted to reverse it.
Plurality, not majority. (Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates).
"Both sides"
Both candidates weren't equally bad. That is always the situation and you must choose the least worse or best candidate.
With Trump getting a little bit less than half the vote and a 65% turnout, "did not vote" was the plurality.
Which is functionally a vote for the status quo. Someone who can't bother to vote isn't going to bother e.g. protesting or otherwise affirming their rights.
Or defeatism. Discouragement campaigns go a long way: “both sides are bad so don’t vote!”
Not voting is a choice and the same as voting for the winner
So, in this case, "plurality" means "third place".
> Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates
Sounds like both candidates were terrible enough that quite a few didn't bother?
1.They weren't equally bad.
2. Not voting still results in one being elected. This isn't the same as being offered two foods you don't like and declining to eat either.
3. The judgment on the quality of the candidates is likely mostly based on misinformation and manipulation by others.
I didn't see this particular policy on the ballot. I hope you use this logic uniformly when deciding if it is valid to care about a particular policy.
Many taxpayers are non-citizens or convicted felons and cannot vote. Turnout of citizens who were eligible to vote last election was 65%. Of those, 49.8% voted for Trump. Some portion of them likely did not vote with this specific policy in mind.
>Some portion of them likely did not vote with this specific policy in mind.
Their fault. The Republican party has been quite open about being a against environmentalism and related policies.
Voted for what? More pollution, more expensive gas, more expensive electricity??
> Voted for what? More pollution, more expensive gas, more expensive electricity??
Yes, but the hope is that the downside happens to the people you don't like, and you somehow only get the upside.
Well, yes. The GOP's disdain for renewables is well-known and not recent.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/trumps-latest-anti-w...
They only get the money if they reinvest in oil and gas. It’s not just trying to kill wind, it’s actively trying to expand burning fossil fuels. We are being lead to our demise by idiots.
> We are being lead to our demise by idiots.
They aren't idiots, they are evil. They know what they are doing; enriching themselves and hoarding political power and resources. Claiming these folks are dumb rather than evil propagates the idea that we should give them some sort of leeway. In fact, we should have sent these clowns to prison 5 years or more ago.
I don't think they even care about enriching themselves. I don't think they care about the money. I don't even think these little projects move the needle much.
It's literally just evil for evil's sake.
Yes. Many of these people are rich enough that they could stop working today and their descendants could maintain their lifestyle for generations. It's about power, and leveraging that power over people they don't like, for petty reasons.
Those who aren't rich enough... yes, just pure evil. Their parents didn't hug them enough or something, and now they think that "owning the libs" is a life strategy. It's pathetic. I'd feel bad for them if they weren't causing so much harm in the process.
> We are being lead to our demise by idiots.
Unfortunately it is malice and greed, not ignorance (though Trump in particular is clearly mostly just a useful idiot puppet being lead around by others). They know climate change is real and serious impacts are imminent, this is why the US has shown interest in "taking" Greenland and Canada.
Trump being the impulsive egotist he is gave the game away too early wanting to take credit for these land grabs while still alive, but there's no way there isn't some overall plan in place as the predictable results of climate change accelerate and the world has to geographically realign through mass migrations (some of it likely to result in wars) to deal with it.
A lot of what they are doing now is to profit off the opportunities of the chaos that they themselves are accelerating.
The only idiots are the people who voted for Trump
It's tempting to dismiss them like that, but that doesn't fix anything.
The reality is much more complicated. The Democratic party is far from perfect (they kinda suck, in fact), and if they aren't attracting voters, "the other side is just stupid" is a useless, arrogant way to go.
Attracting voters with things like repeatedly promising to drastically cut consumer prices on most everything ‘from day 1’, repeatedly promising no new wars/stopping being ‘the world police’, quickly ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine, etc?
Hey, I'm not saying Trump and the GOP are great. They disgust me. But they talk to people in a way they find engaging. Even when they lie, somehow. But regardless, I'm not sure how what you said has anything to do with what I wrote.
The Democratic party often sounds like a bunch of elitists, and that turns off many voters, even those who might consider themselves liberal or progressive. I'll likely vote for Democrats in every election until I die, but I don't think of myself as a Democrat, and haven't registered as one in decades (fortunately the Democratic party has open primaries in California, so I don't have to declare a party).
>The Democratic party often sounds like a bunch of elitists
Can you give an example of a Democrat politician making elitist statements?
How do you know this feeling isn't the result of propaganda by the Republican party and their news media supporters to paint the Democrats as elite?
Neither party will ever be perfect. One is better than the other.
Oh I absolutely agree. I'm not trying to "both-sides" this. I'm just saying that calling conservatives stupid/idiots isn't productive and isn't going to solve anything.
The voters are the source of the problem and we need to focus on them instead of Trump because once he is gone they'll just elect another piece of shit.
A large portion of the population doesn't vote but if they understand the real danger of Trump supporters maybe that will motivate them
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We don't know some important specifics about the deal but (IMHO) that's on purpose and is telling, meaning you only end up obscure deal details because you have something to hide.
So I don't know what stage the project was at but by withdrawing from the deal or cancelling it, the government is going to have to pay a penalty. Is that penalty $10 million? Is it $500 million? We don't really know.
So it could be that TotalEnergies is still getting paid $1 billion but now they have to spend $600 million on some fossil fuel project. But in doing so the government has essentially paid a $400 million break penalty. You see what I mean?
I don't believe for a second that the government didn't lose money on this political cancellation. The fossil fuel project is just a way to hide that and save face (IMHO).
You could go to the source and see[1].
> TotalEnergies has committed to invest approximately $1 billion—the value of its renounced offshore wind leases—in oil and natural gas and LNG production in the United States. Following their new investment, the United States will reimburse the company dollar-for-dollar, up to the amount they paid in lease purchases for offshore wind. Under this innovative agreement driven by President Donald J. Trump’s Energy Dominance Agenda, the American people will no longer pay for ideological subsidies that benefited only the unreliable and costly offshore wind industry.
> For its part, TotalEnergies will invest $928MM, on the following projects in 2026:
The development of Train 1 to 4 of Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas; The development of upstream conventional oil in Gulf of America and of shale gas production. Following TotalEnergies’ $928 million in investments in affordable, reliable and secure U.S. energy projects, the United States will terminate the following leases and reimburse the company
[1] https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-and-totalenergies...
I know it's par for the course, but I'm constantly surprised to see how editorialised official communications from the US government are.
Everything is written in the voice of a terminally online Twitter troll. Every single communication from the U.S. federal government should be assumed to be a lie until proven otherwise.
I wonder how long it takes (it took?) before Americans think this is how it all should be, and that this is how it is in every country.
So, to add insult to injury, this is going to a $1B railway expansion that won't carry passengers?
Thanks, that's helpful. Pretty annoying the original article didn't link to its source given that it was just repeating the contents of a press release.
Anyone know what these "ideological subsidies" are that they're referring to? Were they part of the agreement that was just terminated? Or was that just a vaguely related talking point they inserted into the press release for political reasons?
"ideological subsidies" for this administration means any policy supporting non-thermal and non-battery (to a lesser extent, although their lobby has pretty successfully extracted them from previous renewable associations they relied on) generating units.
To get more specific, you could say everything rolled back from the IRA as part of the BBB.
If it's just BBB they're referring to then I would call that a political talking point since that doesn't seem directly related to this deal.
Unless the subsidies being repealed explains why TotalEnergies seems happy to get out of the lease now even though they presumably thought it was a good deal for them back when they originally agreed to it. If that's true though then I don't know why neither the article nor the press release say anything about it other than in this vague allusion.
They were stuck in a never-ending series of legal battles because the current administration is trying to block all wind power, so their money was not actually going anywhere useful. Coincidentally Trump hates wind power and is still bringing up his golf course having some offshore wind near it after years.
Unclear to me what would satisfy this complaint.. You wish La Monde speculated more on some glaring omission of motive here? You're original point is that they seemed to speculate too much!
They could do some actual journalism, find out the answers to some of these obvious follow-up questions, and report on them. Or, failing that, link to the press report since it seems like as is they aren't really adding much beyond that.
But my original complaint about editorializing was about the title the submitter wrote on HN, not the article title.
What if they couldn't grt an answer, should they just not publish in that case? And why would they link to the press release, they are not a propaganda office.
They could at least raise the questions in the article instead of leaving readers with the impression they didn't even try to find answers. Worst case, you write "the person we spoke to declined to comment".
> why would they link to the press release, they are not a propaganda office
Just reporting the contents of the press release as if it were your original reporting is worse IMO. At least reading a press release you know the source of the information and what their agenda is.
Not every single article needs to be Woodward and Bernstein dude. Sometimes you just need to report what happened, what someone said. If that ends being an incomplete or incongruous picture, you gotta chalk it up sometimes to the nature of such matters in the world, not a deficiency of the journalism. Your argument could be applied to literally any piece of journalism! In general, answers to possible questions are not finite, metaphysical things that we can always fully account for, and its not a news articles job (which isn't even a long form investigation style piece!) to try.
I know, of course, you are not arguing uncharitably here, so I can only assume this is the first news article you have ever read.
Yes, I'm fully aware this is an extremely common problem. I'm just saying if the article adds nothing over the press release it's reporting on (and even actively removes important context) then we should just link to the press release.
They are taking money committed to a wind project and redirecting it towards burning fossil fuels - because what other lesson can we take from a global energy shock other than to increase our exposure to the next one? The company itself (France's Total) had already committed to the wind deal, so now the Trump admin is letting them off the hook, and using Trump's irrational refusal to issue licenses for wind power as the excuse for why the deal wasn't working out as originally planned.
Total is also committed to expanding LNG - Total [0] and Oil India [1] are collaborating on a $20 Billion LNG extraction megaproject in Mozambique which was paused due to an Islamist insurgency during which Total-and-Oil India-funded paramilitary allegedly committed massacres against civilians [2] while putting down an Islamic State insurgency in Cabo Delgado.
The US, France+India, and China have been competing over this project for decades.
These are businesses - no one cares about morals, only interests. And it is in France's interest to unlock these kinds of LNG projects.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/mozambique-says-tota...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-india-sees-resta...
[2] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gw119ynlxo
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> And even if there were, are you (tax payers) prepared to buy it for me, because I’m not due for an upgrade for about another 400,000 kilometres.
400,000 km is around two years for a commercial driver, isn't it?
In the EU it would be about 7 000 hours of driving so more like three years, or more.
What kind of vehicle is it though? There are battery electric vehicles available now in almost all commercial vehicle segments in Europe.
7000 hours at 60 MPH (i.e. 100 kph) is ~700,000 km. That's assuming highway speeds, obviously, but if you're doing stop and go in a diesel truck you should probably sell it to someone who isn't and be among the first to get an electric one because the difference in fuel costs is so dramatic in that case.
You should be lobbying for cheap electricity so that people put heat pumps in their homes instead of burning diesel for heat.
It seems like you should want the types of vehicles that can avoid using fossil fuels to do so, to keep your own prices down?
What is with this attitude of reflexively interpreting the development of alternatives as if they are mandatory ?
Whether I wanting them or not is irrelevant to the fact that they presently don’t exist, and that I’m not due for a new vehicle for years.
I did try to make that clear in the comment you replied to.
The battery technology doesn’t exist.
I think you misread my comment. I'm asking why you wouldn't want other types of vehicles that can be electrified to be electrified, such that there is less demand for the diesel that yours requires.
For example I've got a tractor that burns diesel, for effectively homeowner use. I too am not going to be replacing this piece of capital equipment any time soon (even though electrical would actually be better in a lot of regards). But since trucking is reliant on diesel and quite demand-insensistive, the Epstein war recently made diesel prices jump 60%. Whereas the fewer economically-critical vehicles there are being powered by diesel (even just the short range ones), the less that price would have spiked.
We can have and use electricity even if that's not what you put in your tank. We can have both things. This is the US government actively trying to eliminate one of them.
This deal has zero to do with someone like you. This impacts our electrical grid. Now instead of harvesting renewable wind energy we will be burning LNG to power that portion of the grid.
I suppose there are still some diesel generators out there, so they might burn that instead. Of course, that only makes you worse off.
You know if demand goes down for fossil fuels because the grid is powered by renewables then the cost would decrease right?
Also “kilometers”? “petrol tank”? Thanks for holding three fingers up and letting me know you’re cosplaying as an American
I live in Australia.
Then why are you asking
> And even if there were, are you (tax payers) prepared to buy it for me, because I’m not due for an upgrade for about another 400,000 kilometres.
When commenting on a story about an American infrastructure project that does not affect you, your taxes, or how your taxes are implemented?
Because in every thread about EVs someone has to chime in with their niche gas only use case, as if that somehow matters to the overall needs of the vast majority of drivers. Cool, you area niche need. Don’t buy an ev for 10 years or so.
> There are no fully electric, or even hybrid, options for the type of vehicle I drive.
So fucking what? Keep driving your air-pollution vehicle. No one (not even Obama or Biden) is trying to take it away from you.
Not sure how it relates to subsidies, but it is what you said. The government is cancelling wind shore projects leased to TotalEnergies under the Biden admin for ~$930 million.
The Trump admin is paying them back with the understanding that TotalEnergies will reinvest the money into oil and gas operations in the US
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We paid them that to make wind farms.
They're now being allowed to keep the money, and not build wind farms.
Title seems accurate? It's the clear intention of the administration's actions here.
If the government would like to pay me to also not build wind turbines, hit me up. I mean, I wasn't going to build any in the first place, but I think this makes me qualified to continue not building any.
> [Major Major’s father's] specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county….
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
These things are common. For instance, we pay dockworkers to not work so that they would let us do containerization. When they say they're striking, half of those striking dockworkers wouldn't be working anyway. They're paid not to so that we could use containers. When US ports finally automate, it will be the same. The boss of that union wears a Rolex because he's good at extracting these concessions from us. So here's a variant for them:
> His specialty was containers, and he made a good thing out of not loading any. Ever since containerization came in, he was paid handsomely for every crate he did not touch. The more containers he did not load, the more money he was given, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on securing more seniority on the docks to increase the amount of cargo he did not handle. He worked without rest at not working the piers. On long evenings he lingered by the hiring hall and did not sling a single hook, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that no breakbulk cargo had somehow returned.
Enjoy.
As much as I agree the longshoremen situation is "unappealing" from a policy perspective, it's not really a valid equivalence to compare a trade union trying to protect itself from being automated out of existence with a multinational corporation asking an historically corrupt government to let them use the $1bn that they were given for something other than its intended purpose.
Everyone always has a story to tell for why they deserve the Rolex and the other guy doesn’t. And nothing is equivalent except perhaps fundamental particles in each class. That’s the nature of reality.
I’m not this guy or that guy. I’m just a victim of both of them. And both of them are happy to conspire against me. So until they’re willing to give the rest of us Rolexes for sitting at home I don’t see much of a difference.
> The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I'm not saying that the longshoremen deserve Rolexes. I'm saying that if you had to choose between a handful of longshoremen with Rolexes and a Captain Planet villain with a Rolex and private jet and a bunch of new fossil fuel projects, I think the latter is clearly a worse outcome overall. False equivalence is a propaganda tool to confuse priorities and deflect.
So Major Major‘s father is being paid to let land be available for rich biodiversity. Sounds not unreasonable to me.
Henry George would like a word.
Shit like this has been happening since the first colonists came to the US. On of the first thing the Massachusetts Bay Company did in the 1630s was subsidizing the Winthrop Salthouse for decades ... which never successfully produced salt. Another thing commonly done was the English government or charters would gift land and then turn right around and buy it back at market price.
Just look at it as America going back to the colonial ages and then everything that's happening makes sense. The bad news is that people were willing to put up with that for over 100 year so there's no guarantee anyone will do anything for a long time.
I think it’s in part returning money this company paid the government
Serious question, but not entirely related to the topic - how are “smart” people in the US preparing for the next 20-30 years?
- Assume everything will be fine and America will remain a global economic superpower.
- Plan an exit to a more serious, stable country.
- Some option in the middle of the two to hedge your bets?
I'm investing in property in places that will allow me to get permanent residency without jumping through too many hoops.
You theoretically lose yield compared to the S&P average - but if you're hedging your bets against the US possibly going to shit - the S&P is unlikely to perform as well as its historic average IFF that scenario unfolds.
Seems like a better hedge than gold, but my crystal ball isn't working.
Mostly, we're looking at global warming maps and trying to figure out whether we're in a spot that'll be habitable in 30 years, assuming worst-case climate projections (which are more optimistic than current trajectories). There aren't that many good places to move.
Shorter term, we need to rotate investments out of USD.
There are two obvious problems with exiting to a more stable country: (1) we'd be putting ourselves on the business end of a large gun being held by a madman (2) when things really hit the fan, will it actually be more stable for American expats?
I will always wonder why the elites prefer building bunkers when they have been politically overrepresented the whole time.
I don't know if I qualify for "smart" but my plan has been to keep one foot in the US and one foot in Europe.
I saw the writing on the wall long ago. I predicted all of this happening many years ago. I left the US back in 2015.
Currently in the UK, and I hope to eventually get dual citizenship. My partner is European, so that is possible too.
I cannot believe you went to the UK. what? You’re smart and went.. I don’t think anyone on that island has made 1 good decision in 50 years.
Thatcher: bad Invasion of Iraq: bad Brexit: bad Human Challenge Trials: good Free Speech: bad Too many immigrants: bad Revolving cascade of PMs who can’t get anything done: bad
Listing out a few - I guess I appreciate the Covid stuff. Hmm. still on the whole, I would be in the green longterm shorting everything about the UK.
The most interesting cultural export is Bonnie Blue (sign of decline).
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I'd leave the US if the tech jobs didn't pay so much better here.
I mostly like the US but the years since Obama have been rough
Pay may be numerically less in the eu, but rather than me trying to convince you, try on youtube: 'why I left the USA for europe'. There are very many.!
I've seen a lot of those and commonly the people are academics or in near median paying professions. Do high paid techies make the usa->Europe switch? Generally most of the grievances people have with the US disappear with a high enough salary. Like getting guarantees many weeks of vacation and having great healthcare.
And oddly enough plenty the other way.
That's good to know! Those would be good to look at if one wanted to know why some people move to the US.
Now let's look at how each of them is trending over time.
D) Die. I'll reach my expected lifespan by then. If possible, move to a serious, stable country before then.
I live in iowa - all my electric comes from wind, and I drive an ev or bike. I'm not worried
First they came…
My partner is keeping her foreign citizenship. Just in case.
there is an absurdly large rush of americans applying for canadian citizenship because canada recently allowed anyone with ancestry, multi-generations back, to qualify
I frequently see billboards in the SF Bay Area encouraging professionals to move to Canada.
My main concern is that it might not be far enough away.
I don't plan on moving, but I already have dual citizenship and it helps me sleep better at night knowing that if things got so bad to restrict US passports I have an alternative.
Wasn't that revised to a single generation?
no, it used to be single generation but now people as far back as 4-5 are getting citizenship — I'm helping others go through the process myself but it's taking months longer than it used to due to the influx
How does that work so many generations back? Doesn't Bill C-3 add the additional requirement to demonstrate your parent(s) must have lived in Canada for ~3 years in order to make that path available?
That new law is only required for people applying after the law went into effect (so, babies at this point).
I have a feeling there may be more changes coming due to the rush of applicants, but they are incredibly unlikely to revoke anyone who successfully applies before that happens.
> - Assume everything will be fine and America will remain a global economic superpower.
My guess is 2/3 of the country at lease believe in that.
> - Plan an exit to a more serious, stable country.
Only the Top 0.1% are eligible. Probably only half of them are prepared. The other half are blind.
> - Some option in the middle of the two to hedge your bets?
That's the same cohort of the half of 0.1%. These people are not betting against the US as much as they are hedging their bets. They'll remain in the US till it's clear that the downward spiral is inevitable.
I'm somewhere in the middle and bought an ocean going sailboat.
I'm finally getting around to acquiring that EU citizenship I'm eligible for. Not that I'm necessarily planning to leave, but it can't hurt to have the option.
Please list the more serious and stable country if America collapses.
I’ll wait.
On a serious note;
I’m looking at my billion dollar neighbors and they all just are citizens everywhere now. No allegiance to anything but their own pleasure.
Even if the insanity stopped right this second, it's likely that the EU will be actively working to step out of the US's economic and military shadow in the next couple decades. For anyone not in tech, most of the EU is already better than most of the US. The same is also true for many people in tech (most outside NYC/SF/Seattle).
Also, Canada. They're likely to withstand global warming better than most of the world, and would be comparatively easy to adapt to. If I didn't own a house, I'd already be working to move there, though I have recent ancestry that makes it a relatively more appealing option.
> Even if the insanity stopped right this second, it's likely that the EU will be actively working to step out of the US's economic and military shadow in the next couple decades.
It's not likely at all if you've looked at the polls for France, Germany, the UK and Spain, and how those have been trending over the last decade.
You're going to have to be less vague.
I think they are talking about the rise of right wing populism with a wiff of Authoritarianism.
But that is just a guess on what OP means.
Lol thats trivial if you actually know history and politics a tiny bit - Switzerland. 800 years of most free citizens in the world (lost that armed part but still valid for whole Europe with maybe Finland having similar numbers).
Salaries in tech sector still give you higher overall quality of life than most of US can ever offer. Then you have - extremely beautiful nature at your doorstep, more top notch destinations like Italy and France just at the border, very low criminality compared to US, very good free healthcare, very good free education including top notch public universities, very well functioning social programs. One doesn't have to be ashamed their taxes go to killing innocent civilians half around the world (although at this point US population including folks here seems fine with that). And so on and on and on.
Also, you don't spend your whole active life getting it and (almost) burning out for that, 40h/week and then you can live your life and chase dreams and passions.
> very good free healthcare
Quite a few swiss residents would be happy to have this (or at least some more cost control).
There's mandatory health insurance with preexisting condition coverage, but it's not free (tho it's partially tax supported, depending on location and income).
Swiss people are quite rude and unaccepting of foreigners, even foreigners who grow up there. I don't think they have room for Americans wishing to leave.
Americans have a twisted outlook because despite muh racism USA has allowed more foreigners in than any other country, a quite sizeable chunk of them via overstay or illegal immigration, so we think we could do the same thing and just as an average person up and move somewhere else because we see that it can be done and most of the time it is at least possible to get away with it unless you have bad luck or do something stupid.
Argentina and Brazil are about the only other countries where you can almost get away with this and legalize your existence (Argentina in particular has constitution that says essentially if you survive 2 years, you are basically citizen) , although most of Africa wouldn't bother to enforce it (South Africa in particular has almost as much illegal immigration per capita as USA although with a wide band of possible error in estimates, and they can't meaningfully enforce it).
Otherwise you need investments (usually 50k+), permanent pension, top-tier education, a professional job offer, cultural/family ties, or connections with the political apparatus. Switzerland in particular is on extreme hard mode for a non-EU citizen to get citizenship.
Other than the unauthorized category (see e.g. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi... for estimates), it's pretty hard to get established legally in the USA too, and the criteria are similar to what you cite for Switzerland. By the numbers (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R42866#_Toc181884259), the majority of legal immigrants are family of people who are already citizens. The other big group is employment-related. Immigration for other reasons (specific diversity groups & asylees/refugees) is comparatively small.
American citizens generally do not think that they can just walk into another country and settle there, because you can't do that in the USA. A big part of what got Trump elected was that people just about everywhere, except the left wing of the political spectrum, were concerned about the scale of unauthorized immigration during the Biden administration. That does include a huge amount of asylum seekers under various programs, but even just CBP parolees at the southwest border totaled over 1.1 million July 2023 - July 2024 and that is a shitton of people (https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-...).
Also the USA has a literally 250 year tradition of people moving here (and an equally long tradition of fretting over how the "wrong" people are moving here). The entire history of the country is: people moved here and never stopped moving here, and along the way most of the native population were killed or exterminated by disease. You make it sound like some ill-founded 20th century liberalism run amok.
If anything, modern Europeans are too accustomed to people not migrating around. But it's worth remembering just how much migration (within and from without) had to happen before the modern European socio-ethnic layout emerged.
Switzerland would likely be one of the first to collapse financial institutions due to a US fallout.
It’s amazing how poorly you understand their financial situation. They are possible the most privately leveraged entity on the planet by ratio
Their banking systems against their gdp is at 600%.
You couldn’t pick a worse place
Wouldn’t banking just relocate? I assume the Swiss were working mostly in Pounds Sterling 100 years ago. Presumably they’ll be mostly in Euros and Chinese Yuan in 50. US is chunky but highly replaceable. It’s not like our banking sector is particularly sophisticated.
> Please list the more serious and stable country if America collapses.
New Zealand is really nice. So is Australia with free electricity.
Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland are all great. Iceland I want to live in.
Good friends live the simple life in Costa Rica and love it.
Canada has a much better quality of life, but it’s probably a bit close if the US melts.
There are a lot of options
> Please list the more serious and stable country if America collapses.
Chinahhhh.
Switzerland?
Please list the more serious and stable country if America collapses.
Uh, anywhere that hasn't collapsed?
Where wouldn't collapse if America collapsed?
Ah, too big to fail! Problem solved!
They seem to be buying a nice house/condo in a good area and having kids.
Investment wise they are doing well.
They often own multiple homes.
They are not “smart” if they think a civil war will go down.. that’s poorly read people imo, sentiment pushed by the group that lost elections. And sooo context unaware. Could these people name any politics outside the US? Nope. Clueless, which is why they lost the election.
Some very smart friends are making investments in SA irt building factories.
People believe X can’t happen there until it happens. Tale as old as time.
Smart people know that you can't predict or plan for anything on anywhere close to that time horizon. The only plan is be adaptable.
Yep, the only thing that's sure is that children of said smart people will suffer their whole life so these smart people could give a bit more money to the fossil barons.
> The only plan is be adaptable
And that's exactly what the question was.
You seem to consider yourself in the "smart people" ranks, so what's your big plan for adaptability?
Own huge swathes of land (there is plenty) and grow your own food.
My "plan" is don't make big long term plans
You can build contingencies and hedge bets. You can plan. You just can't predict what will happen so it's playing the odds.
[please excuse this exploratory fiction, as I am recovering from running a chainsaw all morning and am feeling old and tired]
I'm almost 50 and mostly retired except for work I like doing (producing musical events or performing).
About the time my kiddo graduated high school, I moved to a rural area far from cities, and about 18 months ago I bought some land that had primitive shacks on it.
I spend a lot of time reading history. I assume that the US fails eventually;
not because I have any illusions about surviving that house fire, have a lack of awareness of the mass death that would cause, or fantasies about how I'd be able to function in some post-US world.
That assumption comes out of watching the capitalists strip the wiring from the walls of US soft power along side watching the fact that it's 85 degrees in March at 6500 feet here... "climate isn't weather" is true, but I'm not an idiot and we didn't have a real winter this year.
The failure of the US is terrifying, not because I and my community would mourn the loss of some glorious and benevolent order, but in the way that the death of my estranged parents was terrifying:
we are no longer doing things because we're forced by the fantasy of belonging to some larger political order, but now have to choose what to do.
Having read a lot about what the US has done in the world, I believe that a) it's unethical/racist/genocidal / exploitative in almost all its actions and b) I think the only actual hope for climate change is the end of the US as a world order. I don't know if the end of that order is sufficient to fix the ecosystem, which I feel is on the verge of some calamitous changes, but it certainly seems necessary.
Not having control over that failing system, and not having a lot of fantasies about belonging to the polis associated with that system, it's perhaps easier for me to look at its failure modes more clinically than I might have when I was 25 and saw it as an impenetrable solid face; I've moved downstream from Fisher's statement, and now it's much easier to see a possibility for the end of capitalism (or at least the uni-polar US world order) than the end of the world itself.
Not that it's the actions of a bunch of angry and over-educated leftists who would bring it about, but as has always been understood by Marxists (among whom I do not count myself), the failure leading to its dissolution are the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself.
Which makes me feel amazingly hopeful, actually. I don't have any real political power (beyond my affinity group), so it's nice to know (like Duncan instead of MacBeth) that these things could maybe take care of themselves without me doing anything I don't find ethical.
Because I believe that there is a future for humans, I spend a lot of time organizing with folks even when I think the short-term goals aren't super useful: for instance, doing ICE Watch support with local folks, shooting a lot of guns with folks who understood the wisdom of John Brown, or just being available to help out folks who have politics oriented around direct action.
I have been spending most of my time clearing the scrub oak from various parts of the land where I live to make the wildland fire interface a little less terrifying. I build a pretty sturdy solar power system here. I've spent the last couple of months getting my head into programming the esp32 and its peripherals. I got a ham license and have been working on building radio systems. Hopefully I will figure out how to get an underground cistern next month, and then act on the septic permit I got last year.
Other than that, I assume that things aren't going to change much in my life time... I just sit here in my shack playing banjo and hoping for the best.
Prognostication should be illegal and all, but I suspect that Trump will probably kick off in 6 months from a stroke, the Dems will elect Newsom, and then they won't do a damn thing to change anything, and we will be fighting the facists under worse conditions when they finally find a pretty face to solidify them.
So I look forward to dying of Super Ebola-fluenza at age 65 in the middle of a mid-June snow-hurricane near Bluff, UT while supporting a bunch of anarchist 30 year-olds in a drone-powered trench line while they fight the "Western Slope Fascist Front". But I bet I'll still be driving my Tacoma to that battle...
This is the core flaw of the democratic system. Once a person gets elected, democracy effectively ends. Many of their policies may be harmful to the country, and their promises may not be fulfilled, but there is no punishment mechanism. As long as they step down from office, the media may criticize or mock them, yet no one really cares about the damage they caused.
Leaving aside the fact that offshore wind power is already a mature technology, at the current stage of human development we should be promoting this kind of clean energy as much as possible. I remember a scientist once said that resources like oil are non-renewable, and simply burning them is actually a waste. We should try to use them for other purposes whenever possible, since there are so many renewable energy sources available.
Of course, the lifespan of a country is shorter than that of oil, and the lifespan of a politician is even shorter than that of a country. That, too, is one of the tragedies of human society.
* This is the core flaw of the (USofA) democratic system.
* Once a person gets elected, (USofA) democracy effectively ends.
* Many of their policies may be harmful to the country, and their promises may not be fulfilled, but there is no punishment mechanism (in the USofA).
All democratic systems are not the USofA .. the USofA hasn't progressed much since inception.
1. how did the HS2 project go in UK? anybody get punished? is it so clean that no corruption happens in this project even it spends so many money with very little progress?
2. Should someone be held responsible for Germany’s energy problems?
3. Sanae Takaichi is the prime minister of Japan with the highest vote share in recent years. Because of her poor foreign policy, Japan’s relations with South Korea, Russia, and China have all worsened, and her approval rating is now continuously declining.Should she be held responsible for these things? Or is it enough that she can simply be voted out next time?
4. Mongolia has the second-highest proportion of prostitutes in the world(#1 is Philippines, which has a simpilar system compare to USA) . Among the countries near Mongolia, it is considered by the media to be the most free and democratic. Why is Mongolia’s system unable to solve this problem? Or is this problem something that does not need to be solved? Does nobody need to be responsible for it?
It's unclear what any of this has to do with the implication in your GP comment that "democracy" and the "USofA system" were one and the same.
Flaws of the US system are not necessarily flaws in generic democracy, and may or may not be issues in other democracies.
i think they share similar systems and it's a flaw in generic democray. to be clear, i mean no Accountability.
Which countries do substantially better?
Ones that can remove corrupt officials, not merely toothlessly impeach them to no actual end.
Ones that can call a new election on a dime (relative to the lumbering US system) and don't fetishize a Little King absolute ruler.
Looking about, Australia (as one example) took a hard look at both the US and UK systems and ran with a hybrid of their own design - "Washminster".
Australia has shortcomings, as do all systems, but they do have the ability to churn Prime Ministers at a quick pace until they get a good one .. with no great impact on the functioning of the country, they have proportional voting - and get a wider spread than a simplistic monolithic two party standoff as a result, better seperation of Legal, Civil, Policy, and Military than currently evidenced in the US.
All the same, there are 190+ countries in the world .. and the USofA is just one - and certainly not the poster child for a well run democracy.
> This is the core flaw of the democratic system. Once a person gets elected, democracy effectively ends.
That's an intentional feature of representative democracy, not a bug. Letting voters micromanage every individual decision would be direct democracy.
> there is no punishment mechanism
In the next election voters can and will exact a punishment if they don't like the direction things are going. Politicians live in constant fear of this.
It is true that term limits reduce the effect of this threat somewhat, but in a system with shared governance not everyone gets term limited at the same time so there's still a strong collective effect. The issue in this case is just that too much power has been concentrated in the hands of one term limited person; the executive branch was not designed to wield this much unilateral power over domestic policy.
I'm investing in local energy - solar on my roof and electric cars in my garage. Maybe it doesn't make financial sense for everyone to do this, but the more people who do it, the less demand will exist for fossil fuels. This is a free market opportunity. Over 7 years, the solar should pay for itself, and then it's pure profit.
That's great that you're doing that, every deployment of renewables is a net positive. But local deployments in the burbs won't be enough to power out factories, office buildings, data centers, etc. also some people (A LOT of people actually) live in apartments or condos, so it's not just a financial barrier, they physically don't have the space.
We still need these large scale deployments to make meaningful progress in decarbonizing.
7 years, I guess the math including car is required. I cannot make it work over 20+ years.
Do I have it right that the two projects that this deal kills off haven't seen any construction work yet? These aren't among the projects that the stop work orders were issued against in December, right?
My quick skim, I think you are right. This is getting them to halt new development, by buying them off with the equivalent of the subsidies the current administration cancelled.
>by buying them off with the equivalent of the subsidies the current administration cancelled
no, the billion that is being "paid" is a refund of what Total paid in for the leases. Total paid that into the US govt in anticipation of receiving returns on that investment in the form of "clean energy subsidies".
it is not clear from what is in the news story whether Total is being compensated for the would-have-been future subsidies, or whether Total simply expects to make decent profits from fossil fuels.
if one's interest is in the "clean energy" angle, then this is a "defeat". if one's interest is in reducing govt subsidies, this could be "a win", but it's not exactly clear.
What an amazing deal. We get nothing and the contractors we negotiated with get money for it!
Truly, the deals this administration crafts are nonpareil!
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These ones no construction had been started yet AFAIK.
If AI summery is to be trusted, a few other windparks got stopped that where almost done, but got completed anyway after a legal battle. Vineyard Wind 1, Coastal Virginia (CVOW), Empire Wind 1, Revolution Wind, Sunrise Wind.
Again, got it from AI, make of that what you want.
The feds have dropped their attempts to stop those from ongoing construction for now, but only one of those projects is complete.
CVOW is supposed to flow first power this month, but won't be done for ~a year, Empire Wind is also end of '26/early '27, Sunrise later in 2027.
Vineyard was completed this month, and Revolution is delivering power and targets completion over the next few months.
I'm reminded of Reagan taking down the White House solar panels.
Here is a summery and where the panels ended up.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...
IIRC those were solar hot water heaters. More of a curiosity than something legitimately powering the white house.
The symbolism, and the stupidity, was there though. As time has gone on it has been more clear every year how intelligent Carter's administration was and how terrible the following administration was. Investing in/promoting solar was just one of many smart moves by Carter that were attacked purely to gain political points that only harmed us in the long run.
Carter: “This energy crisis shows us how vulnerable we are to foreign autocrats. We should work toward energy independence via renewable energy and waste reduction, to lead the world away from this risky and unsustainable fossil fuel market and secure ourselves a brighter future.”
America: throws a decades-long, ongoing tantrum
It’s fairly reductive… but still kinda true.
To be fair, he was essentially wrong about the efficiency angle because of the Jevons paradox and the "make your dryer not actually dry your clothes" kind of thing was pretty stupid.
A lot of the methods of subsidizing things were also quite incompetent, e.g. Solyndra. If you want to subsidize something like this you do it on the consumer side, e.g. 75% tax credit for every US-made solar panel you install, which drives demand for US-made solar panels without opening you up to scandals like that or the usual corruption where the money goes to the administration's buddies.
"In the year 2000, the solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy. A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people: harnessing the power of the Sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil." - Jimmy Carter (1979) [1]
[1] https://energyhistory.yale.edu/president-jimmy-carters-remar...
Jimmy Carter has supported not only solar energy, but also domestic fossil fuel production and encouraged both of them. The policy of Carter administration never was to go 100% renewable.
"Our Nation's energy problem is very serious—and it's getting worse. We're wasting too much energy, we're buying far too much oil from foreign countries, and we are not producing enough oil, gas, or coal in the United States."
Energy Address to the Nation. April 05, 1979 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/energy-address-the...
One of the lasting consequences of Carter's administration is the strong increase in worldwide CO2 output. Why? Yes they did encourage, at that time, developing countries (now becoming industrial countries) to pursue renewable energy resources but the main goal was to stop them developing nuclear technology.
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978 Title V – United States Assistance to Developing Countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Proliferation_Act_...
Notable absent from the "Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978" is the word "coal". Developing countries were barred from developing nuclear technology, but were free solve their growing energy needs using coal.
Carter was too good for America, in the sense that he was actually a good person (sidenote is he still alive?).
December 29, 2024,
If wind is "weather-dependent", how should one describe oil? "Peace-dependent"?
Israel(US) toddler tantrum dependent.
Although I found this funny, I'd prefer to see this kind of message on reddit than on HN.
It was not meant as a joke unfortunately.
But thank you for expressing your disapproval so kindly
I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be, but I'm still shocked to see things like this. And I'm fully aware of Trump's Scotland experience and how that contributed or directly led to this, but, still, shocked. And then I'm also shocked because I know that at least half, if not a good bit more, of US citizens are in agreement with this strategy. Not sure how I can still be shocked but here I am.
And I say that not as some rabid renewables person. Just the insane binary thinking, regardless of the dollars and cronyism at work. There's zero room for nuance, which I guess is my biggest complaint about the world at large.
Aside: people who think climate change will be the death of us all, and sooner than later, I get it, and I fully appreciate you pushing for a cleaner and more livable world. At this point I'm just going to sit in the corner and hope you, and China, figure it out and then it spreads quickly to the rest of the world, which I think at this point is pretty much a foregone conclusion barring a nuclear war (will refrain from commenting about how the likelihood of that has ticked up the past couple of weeks in an area teeming with (sarcastically shocked this time!) fossil fuels).
Don't underestimate the power of money spend by the U.S. oil,gas,coal industry. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network#Climate_change_an...
I'm always gobsmacked when Trump says things like, "We need to get rid of all the wind turbines! They are killing all the birds! Look at the foot of any tower and you'll see nothing but dead birds!"
Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.
True Bird Lovers only care about bird fatalities from windmills. Oil spills, buildings, and cats don't register.
> Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.
This can be seen by the changes to the interpretation of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) his administration made in 2017 during his first term.
Briefly, they said it only prohibited intentional killing of birds. So say I wanted to pave over some wetlands that are a crucial nesting grounds for some birds that are covered by the MBTA to build a parking lot.
Before, the near universal interpretation of the MBTA by nearly everyone in any of the countries that are a party to the treaty (US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Russia) was that I can't put my parking lot there.
Under the Trump interpretation as long as I'm not building my parking lot there to intentionally kill the birds I can do it.
This was overturned in court in 2020. Just before leaving office in 2021 they tried to again make that the interpretation.
Wind turbines are also miniscule compared to issues like pollution, land use, windows, and cats. Also you can track migration and turn them off at key times if it's a huge issue (this is part of the motivation for research I'm going to do later as part of my master's dealing with tracking hawk flocks via weather radar).
Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s
Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him
Never thought about it, but that's a great point and comparison. From quick Google search: 365 million and 988 million birds die every year from window collisions (that's US alone). Windmills/turbines: 140,000 and 679,000. Then if you do per windmill vs. per building obviously the windmills are going to "win," but it's the absolute that would seem to matter in this case.
As you said, that has nothing to do with the actual preference for fossils vs. turbines, but a great point nonetheless.
Domestic cats kill on the order of 100x as many birds as windmills do.
Fossil fuels also kill millions of animals every year (not just birds), and harm the health of humans. Even ignoring the long-term effects of CO2, fine particulates cause respiratory problems, higher blood pressure, and can cause cancer. The tricky bit is you can draw a straight line from the burning of coal to any particular (heh heh) death, it is just a statistical shift in health outcomes.
Anyway, all of that absolutely dwarf the birds getting killed by wind farms.
Yeah, I'm your parent and I think I wrote that reply without reading it over because I was attempting to point out, with numbers, how absurd it is that anyone would say "windmills are bad because of how many birds they kill" as if that's a logical argument vs. the countless other things that kill birds en masse.
Per-windmill bird fatalities are much, much lower for new windmills. They made some cosmetic changes that scare the birds off.
Also, it turns out that bird flight patterns are very stable from year to year, so they study flight patterns, and place the windmills out of the way.
Yeah, see the reply I left with your sibling. I am in full agreement with you and wrote my comment way too quickly because I was trying to rebut the argument that windmills are in any way responsible for some crazy number of bird deaths.
And whales, don't forget the whales https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/trump-whale-...
and the noise causes cancer
People voted in repeatedly a visibly primitive person (plus quite a few other things but lets not go there now), then they get primitive behavior.
An honest question - what the heck did you expect? Some sophisticated rational discussions instead of dumb ego tantrums?
Since you wrote "honest question" I feel like I should answer... I expected what's happening and I expect even worse in the future. And goes to show you (I!) can still be shocked even when you're expecting some pretty rough stuff.
I would have expected them not to vote a primitive person. And the most shocking part is people pretending he's got some sort of master plan or that the rest of us are just not seeing his genius. Absolute cinema, I swear.
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> No one wanted, since you guys started it, that fucking rock ape as the USA’s first woman president.
You can't do that here. We've banned this account.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This might surprise you, but only a minority of eligible voters vote. So while it looks like 50% of people believe this is a good strategy and we should do it based on the percentage of people who voted for Trump, in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good. The problem is that few of those people vote.
So in all seriousness, if we could get a significant fraction of the young people who are negatively impacted by these policies to actually vote against the people enacting them we could see real change. But if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on then nobody will do anything about it until it's too late and we're shooting at or throwing rocks at each other.
> if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on
I don’t know if you can fix lazy. Turning out new voters basically happens once a generation. The rest tell themselves tales that their vote could never matter, and in doing that, subtly endorse the status quo.
This is kind of why I ultimately find cynicism to be inherently lazy. This is coming from a very cynical (and often lazy) person.
It takes no effort to be cynical, I can tell myself "everything sucks and I shouldn't care because nothing matters anyway" and justify not doing anything I want. I can justify not voting, I can justify not helping someone if I see them struggling on the street, I can justify not even improving myself.
In the last couple years I have been trying my best to override my cynical tendencies because ultimately I think that they are bad for me. I vote in every election I am able to because even if it's infinitesimal, I at least tried to do something to avoid whom I deem bad people getting into office.
Agree. And look, being cynical and just minding your own matters is fine. It means the system is working well enough for that person that doing anything isn’t actually worth it. But those people are also electorally—and more broadly, politically—irrelevant. So if you’re trying to do something, betting on them tends to be a losing pitch.
I relate to the feeling. I am extremely cynical. I fully believe the world is fucked and we are in for a very turbulent 50-100 years. I still work to improve myself and the world because WTF else are you going to do? At least doing something feels better than doing nothing.
I've just grown to really respect older people who manage to stay excited and optimistic. It's so much easier to become a cynic, and I think it required effort on their end to try and be a positive person.
Your comment is extremely reductionist and reverses causality for a large number of voters. Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency. So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power many voters (correctly) conclude that their vote will not lead to meaningful change.
> Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency
Someone only tuning into general elections and making this complaint is either not intellectually there or plain lazy. Very few places in this country have zero competitive elections on the ballot. And none exist where calling electeds and showing up to advocate don’t move the needle. Doing those things takes effort, however, and I concede that for a lot of people that effort isn’t worth it since they’re comfortable enough—personally—with the status quo.
The flip side is that leaves a lot more room for everyone else. It’s genuinely surprising how accessible power in America is once you start wielding it. That sucks when nobody is watching but a few paid interests. It gets interesting when you find yourself, repeatedly, as the only person in the room with the levers.
That elections are "competitive" is utterly irrelevant in a political system where local, state, and federal legislation is almost exclusively drafted by lobbyists. Lobbyists who in addition to supplying pre-written legislation also supply staffers with pre-formatted position statements to distribute to anyone who bothers contacting their office about said.
In practice that "competition" you seem so taken by produces nice sound bites and some column inches on whatever culture war rag is being waved in the face of the citizenry, and literally nothing of substance that addresses any of the myriad slow burning economic and systemic crises that have been building for the last 40 years.
Using agriculture as a microcosm for the larger economy there has been nothing proposed much less ratified to address the complete chokehold Monsanto, John Deer, Cargill, and Tyson Foods have on every aspect of the agricultural industry . And they've had literal decades to make a move.
Princeton University released a study 16 years ago that concluded the US was a de facto oligarchy and if anything legislative capture has only deepened in the US since then. Hell at the local level I've watched the county planning board float a ballot initiative to greenlight a major construction project which was soundly rejected by local voters. Net result: 5 years later they broke ground on the project anyway. So you can tell me there's movable needles out there until you're blue in the face, let's see some reciepts.
> So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power
Quick question: how many _months_ total in the last quarter century have the Dems had the Presidency, Senate, and House at the same time.
The answer is 47. Forty seven total months. Out of 300. We got the ACA (Obamacare) and the Inflation Reduction Act during those brief time periods, too.
The ACA was poorly camouflaged pork for the insurance industry and healthcare statistics have continued to decline since it was passed. Who did the IRA pay off?
63.45% voted last time. Thats not a minority.
> in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good.
I'm not convinced. The reason why many of these people don't vote is because they don't think Trump is that bad. They probably don't agree with everything, but that's true no matter who is in office.
The narratives work though, that is the sad reality. News anchors and the public are stuck in a loop about "children being forced to change sex, woke, climate hoax, but her e-mails, but Biden, ...", anything but what is happening at the crime scene.
Don’t leave us hanging, what exactly is happening at the crime scene?
Read the news.
- Trump received $4B in bribes last year.
- Widespread arrests and murder / deportations of US citizens.
- Federal agents routinely kidnap pregnant child abuse victims so they can be transported to Texas where they're denied health care + forced to carry their assailant's child to term.
- Blowing up fishermen + using the footage in weird 80's movie montage propaganda films.
- Installing censors at most news organizations in the US.
And literally hundreds of comparably bad stories. They arrive at a rate of 2-3 per day, and have been for over a year.
Total doesn’t greenwash anymore.
Perhaps they try to please the US government. A previous total CEO "maintained complicated relations with the United States". He died in a plane crash accident. Was it an accident or a murder, perhaps the current Total CEO prefers to be safe than dead.
https://www.france24.com/fr/20160714-margerie-deces-enquete-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unijet_Flight_074P
Total doesn't care.
They've funded massacres in 2021 [0] in order to unlock the $20 Billion Cabo Delgado LNG deal [1] in Mozambique. Greenwashing is the least of their worries.
I've found French business culture to be extremely refreshing compared to their DACH peers - French business norms tend to be much more pragmatic, and will try to maintain strategic autonomy by hook or by crook.
[0] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gw119ynlxo
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/mozambique-says-tota...
We truly live in the bad place
I feel like Total could have pushed for more, much more.
It's very important that Windmills and 5G antennas do not spray Covid19 on proud patriotic americans
I really want to see the legal verbiage guaranteeing this right. Like, how many mutations can covid virus get before it legally could be sprayed on patriotic Americans?
Depends on the mutation, but it could be as little as 1. A single mutation could turn the virus inert, therefore making it legal.
We keep going down the wrong direction. We need more energy self-sufficiency. More investment in solar and wind.
Fortunately, fossil fuels are a stable and geopolitically risk-free source of energy.
They're a relatively stable and risk-free source of money for a certain kind of politician.
The energy part is incidental.
Is this the biggest Woosh of the year?
Is this comment on purpose? The whooshes are getting hard to track!
This will not be a learned more robustly in the US until one or both of the only two (edit: major) gas turbine manufacturers in the world (GE Vernova, Siemens Energy) suffer a tail risk event causing their failure. Backlog for new gas turbines is ~7 years, as of this comment. Continued production capacity is a function of how fragile those two companies are.
The White House’s Bet on Fossil Fuels Is Already Losing - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-28/white-... | https://archive.today/vpvch - October 28th, 2025
Gas-Turbine Crunch Threatens Demand Bonanza in Asia - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-07/gas-tu... | https://archive.today/z4Ixw - October 7th, 2025
AI-Driven Demand for Gas Turbines Risks a New Energy Crunch - https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-gas-turb... | https://archive.today/b8bhn - October 1st, 2025
(think in systems)
Both of those are big wind tubine manufactres as well.
Luckily, the wind futures market is pretty bullish for the foreseeable future
Isn't there Ansaldo Energia too?
Yes, but their production volume is limited (imho) compared to the two companies I mentioned. Good callout regardless. I'll have a post put together to share here enumerating and comparing.
(i track global fossil generation production capacity as a component of tracking the overall rate of global energy transition to clean energy and electrification, but some of my resources are simply an excel spreadsheet)
Hah, that's super interesting. How are we looking? What under served areas are you seeing? Do you post anywhere your numbers?
They are also organic, all-natural, and fat-free! And renewable on geological timescales.
Contrary to windmills, which slows down the rotation of the earth.
Doesn't that depend whether you point them east or west?
Point them north and you'll increase Earth's axial tilt.
I think you just solved both leap seconds and daylight savings time.
I personally would like more hours in the day.
No problem: Just build a subterranean boat and launch a few nukes close to the core to restart rotation.
Won't someone think of the ~children~ birds?!
The US has their own oil fields.
If they can burn down the EU in that ongoing crisis, they don't care.
That's likely the strategy the administration is running.
And clean. Really, really clean. Just look at coal. A no-brainer. Go for it.
You mean "clean coal", right? Of course it's clean, it's right in the name.
People laugh at this, but anthracite genuinely is cleaner than other coal in every regard save CO2 emissions. People just think it's a joke because they've come to believe that CO2 is the only coal emission worth caring about, which definitely isn't true.
The oxymoronic term "clean coal" refers to carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) technology [0], touted by the fossil fuel industry as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and continue employing coal workers.
Thus far, it is incredibly expensive, at a time when solar and wind generation is cost-competitive with fossil-fuel plants which don't employ CCS. It is simply a dead end. You can generate more renewable energy, and store it, for far less than it takes to equip and operate CCS in conjunction with a fossil-fuel-fired plant. Only direct government subsidy makes it viable for a vanishingly small amount of GHG emissions.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage
"Clean coal" is like saying "a fast snail". Sure it can be faster than other snails, but even if it's twice as fast as the second fastest snail, it's still a snail and I'll still laugh when an ant runs circles around it.
No, the criticism isn't because people get caught up about CO2 -- it's because "cleaner than other coal" is a very low bar to meet to be calling something "clean" full stop.
Also "clean coal" is not a type of coal being burnt (although that does matter too) but pollution control systems added to coal plants.
Anthracite burns clean enough to use in a pizza oven. If your neighbor told you he was going to install a new furnace and offered you the choice of it burning wood pellets or anthracite, from a smell standpoint you should absolutely choose the anthracite.
Anthracite, in these regards, is very different from bituminous coal.
Considering the mercury and arsenic in all coal, wood is preferred in ovens.
And both are very different from not burning anything.
Undoubtedly. Doesn't change the fact that one kind of coal burns smokeless with a clean blue flame while the other will cover everything for miles in a film of soot and tar.
>Anthracite burns clean enough to use in a pizza oven.
Yeah, so does wood, which is horribly polluting.
The smell of wood might be nice for flavor, but that's beyond the point of anthracite being clean. That particulate pollution from wood burning is severe compared to the smoke you'll get off anthracite, which is virtually nonexistent.
Regardless of how good it might be at being the cleanest dirty thing, it's not what the US trope of "clean coal" refers to anyway. Anthracite is not used in the US to generate power because it is too expensive.
The doesn't cause acid rain version is called "clean" and that seems pretty fair to me when the other version causes acid rain.
It is still dirtier than all of the alternatives we have.
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The US (with Canada and Mexico) is self-sufficient with fossil fuel energy.
I do find the slow Sovietization of America funny, both mentally and economically. The year is 2050, autarky on energy has been established, the markets cut off, politics in the hands of erratic and geriatric leaders. Americans proudly drive 30 year old Fords the way people used to drive Ladas, while China exports green energy, cars and infrastructure to the world.
> The US (with Canada and Mexico) is self-sufficient with fossil fuel energy.
Oh boy can't wait for the reenactment of third reich intervening peacefully in czechoslovakia, for their own safety and wellbeing of course, and not at all for the resources they're hoarding, the filthy hoarders.
Unfortunately, we share the planet and the atmosphere with it.
If the US taunts someone into a nuclear war, the rest of us get to live but should be investing more in cancer research.
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It's awesome the US hasn't destabilized one of those neighbors and alienated the other one by declaring it the prospective 51st state. Soft power really is America's super power.
I’d wager the US is self sufficient also in terms of renewable energies.
But it gets traded globally. That means if the price goes up in Asia, it also goes up in NA.
It doesn't have to be traded globally. The US could ban oil and gas exports, and that would decouple local prices from the global market.
Why the US can't use its own oil: it's the wrong type. https://blog.drillingmaps.com/2025/06/this-is-why-us-cant-us...
Imports into the US will experience inflation regardless. Semiconductor imports from East Asia are one example, since they depend on helium and energy from the Gulf.
tbh I’m kind of surprised the admin hasn’t enacted export tariffs on oil and gas already to take the pressure off car owners.
Wouldn’t do anything to the prices of imported products since the entire intl supply chain would be subject to even higher prices, but would reduce pressure at the pump
Sure, if we build out refining capacity for the next ten years. Then we're golden until we run out of the finite well of combustible dead algae. So if you think we can revitalize American manufacturing and resource processing starting now, and you're okay with those investments being worthless in a few decades, and you don't give a shit about rendering the planet significantly less habitable to human life, then yeah, we're totally self-sufficient with fossil fuels.
Or we could, you know, pull energy out of the air and sun, a strategy which will be viable until our star dies.
Alberta tar sands have hundreds of years worth of reserves. They're also expensive and incredibly dirty to extract and emit significantly more CO2 during processing than a light oil well will. (The tar is usually melted by heating with natural gas).
I'm quite confident cheap renewable alternatives will make the tar sands inviable far before they run out.
Some good news though, with the war in Iran the spiking oil price means that Albertan executives can ramp up operations and stay quite profitable! Push the price to 200/barrel and we'll just strip mine the entire province after airlifting out Calgary and Edmonton.
This assumes that there isn't profound demand destruction caused by the stratospheric energy prices.
Fossil fuels were already an inferior energy source when oil was $60/barrel. Electrification has been moving fast and accelerating, even at the pre-energy crisis prices.
Now? Current events are likely to take fossil fuels out back and give 'em the Old Yeller treatment with surprising speed.
I absolutely agree, _in market driven economies_, fossil fuels are slowly pricing themselves out of relevancy. The issue is that for some reason the US specifically subsidizes their usage keeping them artificially lowly priced.
So, how many billions of newly printed debt is Trump willing to throw at the problem to keep those subsidies up so that he can be sheltered from the scary windmills?
another option is not to shit on all countires who do have resources driving the prices up for everyone.
This is an article about paying private industry to not build wind capacity.
I don't agree with redirecting towards fossil fuels instead of wind power, but its not really paying TotalEnergies "for not building wind capacity", its more like changing what was ordered on behalf of the population: first the wind power capacity was ordered, then it was stalled and blocked, and now this president and TotalEnergies have agreed to change the order to another type of meal (investing in fossil fuel facilities within the US).
The US is unable to implement export controls so consuming less than it creates doesnt mean theres enough since producers will export if international prices are better
Ireland during the famine was self sufficient with food production but that didn't stop people from sending food to the highest bidders abroad.
It didn't look like that at the gas pump today.
Ignoring the part where just running everything off fossil fuel is suicidal for the planet, the US actually isn't self-sufficient with just fossil fuels.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/fossil-fuels-fall-be...
Renewables are cheaper to build out, and we're facing a massive energy shortage. We need to be building renewable production as quickly as possible just to keep up with demand.
Insisting that we use obsolete, expensive and dirty technologies while the rest of the planet modernizes is just dumb.
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If this is accurate the US is making itself look unreliable for major energy investment
The US is making itself look unreliable in every aspect
Simply insane.
This event is giving “banana math” from the show Arrested Development (S01E02 Top Banana).
The president - in his personal capacity - hates windmills. That is probably the entire reason this happened, in addition to hurting blue states.
> TotalEnergies CEO Pouyanné said offshore wind was "not the most affordable way to produce electricity"
Wind bad? Solar good?
https://oilprice.com/Company-News/TotalEnergies-and-Holcim-L...
Idiocracy
... was optimistic.
> "TotalEnergies CEO Pouyanné said offshore wind was 'not the most affordable way to produce electricity' in the US, which he identified as being natural gas-fired power plants. [...] So it was a win-win dialog," he said."
Pouyanné is only 62 years old. If, as I hope, there are criminal trials in the future for those responsible for recklessly endangering life on this planet, then I hope that he is still alive and that statements like this form part of the prosecution. Unfortunately Trump will almost certainly be long dead by then.
If we all lived on a space station these are the kind of people that would buy Oxygen futures and veto fixing the leaks in the hull.
You leftists think you hate free market capitalism, but no one hates it like Republicans.
No country can survive this level of waste and stupidity. Not even the US.
How about Equinor? They are suing the US govt for stopping the wind projects.
At least it doesn't seem like a direct payoff. So in that sense the title is clickbait.
> redirect those funds towards fossil fuel production [...] > US interior secretary [says] the deal was worth "nearly $1 billion
The rest of the comments here... yep.
Trump wrecks the global energy economy and his next move is to increase our dependence on it? They don't make enough dimensions for the type of chess this brainiac is playing.
Sorry, I do not know how else to say this:
Well hopefully when Trump is gone NY remembers this and tells Pouyanné to screw when they put out bids to restart the project.
Feels like the kind of grift DOGE should not allow
Can we unwind? How and by whom was this project started such that now it has to be cancelled?
x
Kidnapping the leader of a sovereign nation to put them on show trial and plotting to steal the country's natural resources. Blockading and strangling an island country to the point of economic collapse. Opining out loud about annexing their northern neighbours. The list goes on and on..
We didn't even get the show trial!
Save the date! https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/maduros-next-us-court-d...
>The US, should it survive this administration
This level of doomerism is absurd. Of course the US will survive this administration. I blame the news for making every breathe by whichever opposition seem like the next WWIII.
Pax Americana is doomed. What the USA looks like post-hegemony is TBD.
The Pax Americana was already over when Russia siezed Crimea.
The land will be there. (most of) people will be there. What parent probably meant is losing everything good and positive United States of America represented in past 80+ years, internally and globally.
That is gone my friend, with the wind like a sulfuric fart, for good. US is becoming a global terrorist and enemy #2 of free world and certainly whole Europe (right after its biggest and only 'friend', russia which coincidentally keeps trying to make you a thing of the past). This comes from somebody who strongly believed in your role in global hegemony despite your numerous well documented fuckups in the past. All on the whims of one visibly mentally sick man, with absolutely nobody standing up to him despite nobody really believing in any of that bullshit. No principles, just plain greed and firm fuck-the-rest approach. Right now, if Europe needs a strong big ally it will be #1 China, and then... nothing.
The fact you voted him in, and he still has massive support, and there has been 0 overthrow attempts of the biggest traitor to US in its history tells me and everybody else in the world many things, but nothing positive. Even if next election, if they will happen, will have 98% win of the democracts with that ridiculous unfair and undemocratic system of yours, it won't change a permanent shift that started and keeps happening. US has no real allies, in same vein russia or China has no real allies.
Empires rise and fall, inevitably, there was never a reason to think US would be an exception.
The US is dead; it is now a Trumpian shithole.
x
The United States has already been destroyed. It is no longer in question, or in the future tense.
This is comfortable doomerism. But it isn’t accurate. Moreover, it’s dangerous since the numpties who tend to believe it then politically disengage.
None of the institutions function, or do the thing that we used to explain to children what they do. The whole thing demonstrably does not exist. You're welcome to describe my view with whatever pejorative you prefer.
> do the thing that we used to explain to children what they do. The whole thing demonstrably does not exist
Something misfunctioning doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. A massive economy, industry and war machine are still here. Pretending that doesn’t exist because it doesn’t work the way we like is an expression of exasperation, not a description of reality.
>A massive economy, industry and war machine are still here
Those things are exactly what destroyed the nation. The military industrial complex and the billionaires who removed the teeth from institutions that used to prevent the accumulation of power (see also: antitrust litigation against Standard Oil). Those entities are now in complete control and democracy is nothing but a sham, a clown show between two faces of the same coin.
The US as a country didn't fail with Trump. It failed when Microsoft got away scot-free. This was the biggest sign that the country was no longer a serious entity, because a serious entity would try to preserve its own power, while the United States of Burgers is something to be sold to the highest bidder.
> Those things are exactly what destroyed the nation
You're confusing the destruction of the dream of a nation with the desrtruction of the nation per se. The Roman Republic's fall was the destructionn of a dream. Those who thought they were witnessing the destruction of a nation, on the other hand, were dead wrong.
The guy is unhinged, hellbent on denial, just to appease his base, who are going bankrupt because of his policies. Would he pay Sun as well to stop shining over the US?
> The guy is unhinged, hellbent on denial, just to appease his base, who are going bankrupt because of his policies.
In the middle of a war he started over war. No less. If his base wanted cheap gas, they are not going to get it.
To me, this deal makes it pretty clear who holds actual sway
Well at least oil prices are up, which is a good thing I was told by the commandering chief. Goes hand in hand with America (oil) first policy.
https://fee.org/articles/the-candlemakers-petition/ This feels relevant
It's even stupider than that, it's not even to appease his base, it's a personal grudge. Trump sued a wind energy company to prevent them from building an off-shore wind farm in view of his golf resort in Scotland. He lost that case badly and he has been railing against wind energy specifically ever since.
So far Trump hasn't done much to prevent solar farms from being built, it's only wind turbines that he's exacting his vengeance on like some sort of modern day Don Quixote.
UK should confiscate his golf courses and build on shore wind on them as reparations for this Iran war he sarted
He is a bit Don Quixote. I like it!
The overrated and very annoying "sun", the so-called "star" that our planet goes around has been going unquestioned for too long! Many people have been asking for a long time, perhaps even before Obama, to remove the sun from the sky and replace it with our beautiful clean coal towers!
"Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun" - Charles Montgomery Burns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LbxDZRgA4
Thank you. I needed that.
Thankyou for your attention to this matter!
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
Relevant power metal song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z769xf9ET5A
I had this big guy, very big guy with tears streaming down his cheeks asking me "Sir can you take down that woke star that keeps me awake"
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Even Burns wasn't this deranged
Good. Get rid of potential more special, non-recycable waste before it's created.
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This was a known risk for decades on every coastal wind project, and would have been a part of the earliest risk assessments for this project. The people building these projects are generally not as stupid as the administration trying to tear them down.
IIRC it does not. There has been some discussions by folks around it, but so far no evidence has pointed to it being a primary motivation.
The evidence we do have is that republicans have had a party vendetta against clean energy for decades, and their current leader has had a personal vendetta specifically against wind turbines, also for decades.
well that didn't take long.
I think everyone here would appreciate it if you didn't delve into identity politics, especially not when starting a thread.
Just the facts, please. Or your beliefs, if you want -- but just because you state that you "believe" something, doesn't make it a fact, like you claimed.
Unless you were stating it was a fact that you believed that claim? The wording you used was a bit convoluted there.
Uh, I didn't start it.
Seems you did, even though nobody responded in kind. My reply simply stated the facts. For more detail, read the post you just responded to [0] (in particular, the 2nd and 3rd paragraph), and the other replies to the original thread [1].
In the future, it'd be better if you don't represent your beliefs and opinions as fact [1], and didn't try to preemptively portray anyone who doesn't share your beliefs as counterfactual and politically-motivated [1].
0 – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507794
1 – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493747
It doesn't.
This really seems like a nothing burger.
The $1B were a refund. Net exchange ~$0.
Building out fossile fuel production shifts oil revenue from various dictatorships around the world to the US in this case. That's a good thing. I wish we in Europe produced more gas ourselves instead of being highly dependent on other countries.
This does not mean higher gas demand, which is what matters for CO2 reduction.
I would argue it’s a waste of resources. Fossil fuels will be phased out over the next 50 years. If China is an indicator it can be done quite a bit faster than you’d think.
It’s already questionable to build fossil fuel capacity at today’s prices. In 10 years it won’t make any financial sense. In 20 you’d be laughed out of the room.
Why waste money on a dying technology? It’d be like mining bitcoin
(Based on AI research) fossile fuel production takes a few years to recoup investment. Only refineries seem quite long term (15-20 years). I'm sure the companies have projections about future demand to decide which projects are worth pursuing. If they miscalculate, the oil companies loose money (oh no! /s). Anyway, you won't loose money on this.
There is of course also an argument about national security, not being at the whim of some Iranian dictator. So some form of government investment would be justified, but not necessary IMO.
I do lose money on this. I (and you, and the rest of the world) have to both clean up emissions and pay for climate change. The more we emit the worse the effects.
Right, but that negative externality is on emissions. For emissions it doesn't really matter who is producing the oil.
The production shifts oil revenue from Islamic dictatorships to Christian dictatorship of USA. Maybe a hyperbole for now, but for how long? Independent media and education under attack, gerrymandering your voting rights away etc. Considering most of the population lives is solid red or blue state and thus their vote for president doesn't count, how much of a democracy is USA when the minority of independents live in swing states are the only who's vote counts?
Also USA us doing nothing relevant to reduce gas demand like CO2 cap and trade or CO2 based tariffs.
At this rate buy Chinese will be a more moral choice than buy American by next decade.
Voters in the US have the ability to actually change the course of their country. Voters can say they want Obama or Trump in charge and the government has to obey that choice.
In Europe you only have the same parties/"uniparty" in power all the time. Many people never had a representative they voted for.
I understand the nuance about the US voting system. But when I look at the outcomes, the US seems way more democratic than Europe.
Re gas demand: Renewables are cheaper than fossile fuels. They will obviously win out in a free market. No subsidies needed.
It’s not as big of a deal as it sounds.
Theses wind farms have not even started construction yet. Once Don Quixote is out of office, some future administration undoubtedly will start wind farm construction.
I'm actually less concerned about the continued non-existence of a bunch of windmills, vs the billion-dollar payout to ensure that they continue to not exist.
I've spent my entire life not building any windmills and nobody's paid me a billion dollars for it yet.
It’s a refund for buying the lease, not a payout.
This seems like a good thing considering the “TotalEnergies CEO Pouyanné said offshore wind was "not the most affordable way to produce electricity" in the US, which he identified as being natural gas-fired power plants.”
Not sure why we’re building offshore wind plants when land based gas plants provide cheaper energy. We need to be reducing the cost of living for working people and not raising it. Our goal should be to reduce people’s cost of living and we should align our actions towards those goals.
Most people are cost sensitive!
Wind and solar are consistently the cheapest forms of new energy generation. Pouyanné knows that. He is being a politician here, saying what he knows will play well with the current administration. When in Rome...
the dollar cost he's talking about does not include the large dollar cost the externalities burning gas creates
Does the offshore wind energy costs include externalities of fabricating, assembling, shipping, installing, maintaining and decommissioning the turbines? Does it also include bird losses and whale harms?
Does the gas turbine include externalities of fabricating, assembling, shipping installing, maintaining, and decommissioning oil drilling rigs? And of shipping, storing, and burning the gas? And the climate change caused by gas leaks? And the harms to humans, the fishing industry, and bird losses and whale harms by oil spills (I know you really care about those)?
I really want to know how in the hell whales are getting stuck in wind turbine blades. I want to see a video of this happening.
There's also the externality of paying for the natural gas, which is passed on to the consumer in the form of higher energy bills.
It probably also makes sense to include the $800M we are burning per day right now on patriot missiles (assuming the stockpile hasn't been depleted yet).
The argument is that vibrations of the wind power plants at sea disturb the whales.
Paying for the gas itself would not be an externality. Externalities are for example the worldwide damages caused by extreme weather which is caused by climate change, health problems caused by air pollution or the usage of clean water for cooling
Normally, I'd agree, but in this age of massive corruption, you need to be careful figuring out who the stakeholders are. The purpose of these new fossil plants is not to produce electricity. Their purpose is to line the pockets of the ultra-wealthy people building them, and of the politicians accepting bribes to get them built.
Fueling the power plant is an externality for the people building the power plant. You could argue that it increases their costs, but these things are monopolies, with prices set by bought-off politicians. The plant + fuel costs much more than renewables (so ratepayers get screwed), but I'll wager the plant without fuel is still a bit less than solar or wind construction.
> The argument is that vibrations of the wind power plants at sea disturb the whales.
It's an argument that's always reeked of whale shit to me. If they really cared about marine sound pollution they'd go after super yachts first.
The biggest harm to whales is indeed human-based, but more along the lines of being collateral damage from the fishing industry.
The project life cycle cost: yes. The birds and whales: no. But neither do the fossil power plants.
Yes.
I think you forgot to account for the massive emissions. Which we have to pay for eventually. Don’t know if you noticed but the majority of the US had the hottest March on record just now. Like a few days ago. There is an enormous cost to emissions. Probably for each $1 spent on gas power there’s $50 to ameliorate the emissions. Building more gas capacity is perhaps the stupidest economic policy imaginable
Uhm, I dunno if you just time travelled here from the 60s but there's this thing called global warming.
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In 2026 utilities will install 86 GW of new generation, of which only 6 GW will be natural gas. The other 80 GW will all be solar, wind and battery storage. Utilities are doing this because of economics. Environment is secondary. Even oil and gas rich Texas has been aggressively adding solar, wind and battery.
Coal is not cheap. At least support oil/gas if you're going to push this cost sensitivity schtick
Wind is one of the cheapest sources of electricity available. Even if you are a completely brain-dead climate change denier it makes sense from a financial perspective.
In this specific case the CEO stated that gas is the cheaper choice given their ~$1B they can spend.
The longer quote seems to be "In the situation of the U.S., where you have huge amount of resources, huge amount of land to produce electricity, offshore wind is not the most affordable way to produce electricity" which sounds like it's just as much about the extra cost of off-shore makes less sense when you're not land-constrained like in Europe or Asia.