Mostly this is just about giving back the money RWE paid for the leases from the US government to build those turbines. Plus various fees. They could have went for suing for total profits too.

> RWE U.S. Offshore secured these leases from the U.S. government with a long-term commitment to develop offshore wind capacity in American waters and invested more than $1 billion toward the leases and the development of these projects. These leases provided legal rights to develop offshore projects and represented years of planning, investment, and partnership with federal agencies.

> After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. The settlement resolves RWE U.S. Offshore’s legal claims and provides $1.22 billion in settlement funds.

https://www.rwe.com/en/investor-relations/financial-calendar...

Out country is ran by bunch of Lionel Hutz clones

Art of the deal: Pay $1.2B in exchange for a $900M investment elsewhere.

> > not one dependent on "costly subsidies".

> While paying out 1.2 billion dollars.

for nothing. to literally replace some energy with no energy.

Narrative is defined by ideology and the media machinery able to sustain it. Facts are woven in only when serving the desired reality.

If you and I listened to the propaganda on the regular basis, our intuitive knowledge would associate clean energy with isolated from reality snowflake liberals, hippies, abortion, subsidies, as opposed to fossil fuel energy associated with manliness, strength, common sense, “good old values”, military strength, and freedom.

Just like beef (“it’s what’s for dinner”) and a delicious juicy rare steak. See?

I recommend checking out George Lakoff’s work on the power of identity and metaphors. Look up his “moral politics” lecture on YouTube.

Oh that's not nearly the amount of fossil subsidies. Some say it's $31b/yr direct. If you factor in indirect costs like climate damage, health expenses, oil wars, etc, it's much higher. Renewables are much, much cheaper regardless of a little incentive, if there are any left.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/09/fossil-f...

"common sense" is common sense because it is not "specialised sense" or "expert sense"

So if politicians base their decisions on "common sense", they confess to not being able to use experts that refine their knowledge and position about a topic.

A "common sense" strategy is therefore what is most popular and on the basis of the understanding of laymen without deeper understanding or knowledge.

There are too many interested parties involved in the energy sector. The only common sense I can think of is solar+storage at the single building level and interconnected through smart grids with neighbours.

But that leaves out the government and all those interested parties so we're never ever getting that.

Indeed. Energy is at the core of everything we do. Make it more expensive, you immediately make some people go hungry, and then you also make everything else in the economy a tad more expensive, slowing things down, and as market readjusts and contracts, this makes even more people go hungry.

There's a really strong incentive to keep energy generation cheap, because pretty much every social and political issue is downstream of it.

Subsidies (via tax or lack thereof) on aeroplane fuel is one that really does get overlooked. Yet on the other hand, use a few gallons in a car and you're demonised as a climate villain in name and taxes. Nobody factors in life of the car, the cost to dispose and replace the batteries in electric cars, or the whole aspect that cars made today are less serviceable than cars of old that its gone from being able to rebuild the car in your garage to waiting for spare parts from a dealer as it's all just replace or scrap today. So much focus on the short term, without focus on the larger picture and impact.

Just like "first principles", "common sense" differs from man to man.

It probably comes from the recognition that energy access being a common good, a tax-collecting government should work for its constituents in helping provide energy at a reasonable cost, especially if the subsidies support an improvement to the technology behind it.

Subsidies aren't universally a bad thing. This is silly thinking.

That’s a perverse incentive against ecology, case in point. Hear me out. We take citizen’s money to subsidize energy so they can get their energy for cheaper (at marginal level - while still paying the subsidy’s taxes) so they can undertake industrial/residential projects that we wouldn’t do with less energy. In a word, we incentive people to consume more (in a consumerist sense), which is bad for ecology, because we can’t afford them, and neither can the Earth.

Of course, leaving aside how petroleum is subsidized [through the department of defense].

While ecologists usually are in favor of subsidies, subsidies incentive people to consume more, which exhausts our Earth. We should develop less, i.e. we should develop in accordance with a higher facial cost of energy, which sometimes implies having a smaller home and fewer industries, which is what would happen if we didn’t sponsor solar or wind energy [or coal or fossil].

- calculate in all building cost, side cost, post-lifetime cost, accident risk cost etc. i.e. "all cost"

- calculate expected total produced electricity which can be used

- divide one by another

- if one if majorly cheaper and chose it then that is the "common sense" strategy of choosing what works best

yes the "all cost" part is tricky to estimate.

yes you don't choose a "single technology and only use it", resilience always works best with redundancy and diversity.

still you can run the number, you can estimate error bars, and sometimes this gives already clear answers. Like a technology being quite expensive even if you lose the lowest (unrealistic cheap) bar for all costs? Then that is a bad technology and it doesn't matter that you have very wide error bars as you are already looking at the optimal choice.

----

EDIT: Me going of on a tangent, maybe ignore :/

Some technologies complement each other well (like most like solar + wind + some gravity storage, as both can have uneven output, but (at live where I live) extremely windy days are often reduced sunny and extremely sunny days often not so windy, and gravity storage can handle "dunkelflauten" sufficiently (and is has already been build and is in use(!), not some hypothetical tech like some people pretend it is)).

But also some technology works against each other, e.g. non _fully_ subsidized nuclear sells a roughly constant power output at a constant (and quite high! if not highly subsidized) cost. But if other electricity can "sometimes" produce supper cheap electricity for some hours, days or even weeks then nuclear can not compete _at all_ during this times, makes losses and need to increase the yearly average price to compensate. Which makes it even less competitive. Hence in a actual "dynamic/free" energy market nuclear makes no sense even if you ignore long term waste storage or risk for contaminating essential parts of your country risks. Still a _fully_ subsidized nuclear base power level might work if you can't generate enough electricity in average through other means. Still this IMHO makes it somewhat of a "only if there is no other solution, not competing on the free marked" choice, i.e. a bad choice you might have to do but might be able to fully avoid (e.g. by using hydro power).

Oh and please stop brown coal, especially low quality brown coal. In all categories of health damage, environmental damage, climate damage it has _horrible_ scores both during mining and usage even for modern versions with filters etc. Sure it looks cheap on paper, but it's maybe THE worst kind of power source there is. Especially if run on low quality coal and without modern filter technology. Brown coal should be a "never choose this no matter what" choice.

To me it's a reasonable point. We tend to forget that subsidies go both ways. Maybe it's a bit too sarcastic but that's about it

That's exactly what this person wanted to start.

What are you talking about, it powers a lot of people I know

And is a horrible use of land compared to solar.

Upvoted because you are right.

Young people who aren't native English speakers should realize that /s isn't English, but a convention among some very specific sites. Of which hacker news isn't included.

If this is true, this is the person some folks think is fit to lead a nation. One little thing not suiting his whim of the day? Lets hate something that helps with energy production.

Welcome the world of transactional opportunism.

I think wind farms on sea look really cool, especially if the turbines are huge. It gives some majestic feelings

I really hope someone in a future administration green lights a bunch of these right off Mar-a-Lago.

I would actually miss the windturbines they have become a part of the landscape. Besides oil refineries are hardly pretty either.

> He thinks they're ugly and noisy

The feeling is mutual

At least they’ll be out of office or age out eventually, we’ll just collectively as US taxpayers with a federal income tax burden (top ~40% of income earners, bottom ~60% have no federal income tax liability) have to pay back hundreds of billions of dollars in excess debt incurred because of this governance failure mode we experienced (or default on the debt, which is also an option).

My hot take is: be ready to move fast when the winds shift and we can get back to building instead of harm reduction.

("Progress occurs one funeral at a time." -- Max Planck)

I’m not endorsing the current administration’s policy, nor do I think it would succeed, but I find this comment really perplexing since this action is PRECISELY in line with the 2025 National Security Strategy. [1]

Also, for further insights on some of the unstated policy, I recommend reading the project 2025 document as well. [2]

Perhaps by “coherent policy” you meant “sound” or “effective”? But as it stands it certainly is coherent.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-N...

[2] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042-project-202...

It might be more expensive to build/run, but is cheaper on the environment.

All forms of power generation are heavily subsidized. Anyone complaining about a particular form being subsidzed is a dishonest liar.

I am personally for building nuclear and compulimenting it with some wind and hydro, but that is not related to what things are subsidized but because nuclear and hydro has worked really well here in Sweden providing reliable power and while wind has a spottier record I think diversification is good.

Yes, but as a nation, we are stupid to go along with it.

> Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest.

Sure, but in cases like the new Navy battleships... it's just plain dumb, no two ways about it. Aside from the new ship class name, I see no way that it could be attributed to self-interest.

Wait, it is all about the name and that it's big, isn't it. That is self-interest I suppose, but it's just vanity, which is the stupid form of self-interest.

> Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest.

Interesting. Sounds like a counter-point to Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

I use Hanlon's quite a bit to explain nonsense I see day to day, but this is a better one in some ways. It shift the conclusion of "but if only they were shown the right way" to "they know what they are doing and are looking out for number 1".

If an empire is subject to the whim of individuals acting in their own self interest, which causes damage and destruction to the empire, I think this is the definition of dying? It has no recourse against the looters so it gets looted to death.

Any worldview that calls destroying your own civilization self-interest deserves to fall

Much of the stupidity stems from the impulse to coddle Trump’s ego. Both from Trump himself and anyone who interacts with him.

It becomes self-interest only because this man with a terrifically fragile holds so much power, so there is a strong incentive to appease him.

But the root problem is a powerful man beholden to a very fragile ego.

So we're dying to selfishness?

Ultimately the strings are being pulled by someone who stands to gain, but it's not like Trump, Hegseth, Rubio, &co are playing 5D chess here. There are a lot of stupid blundering narcissists running things right now. The actual string-pullers know that, and as long as the stupid blundering narcissism doesn't get in the way of the string-pulling then it doesn't matter to the string-pullers, because stupid blundering narcissists are ultimately the right people for the job (easily manipulated themselves, and effective manipulators of the public). But that doesn't make them or their decisions or their statements less stupid.

Not to mention this all rides on the stupidity and emotional fragility of literally tens or hundreds of millions of voters; anything less and the project would never be possible. That's one reason debilitating the education system at all levels has become a top priority of the current administration (the other being suppression of the free thinking and often liberal or left-wing politics that historically exist at universities).

and your point?

It's almost as if acting solely in one's own self-interest is stupid.

"what about empires that actually survived or adapted" — which ones exactly?

Empires are pathological developments of nations. They don't tend to survive all that long.

> what about empires that actually survived or adapted?

Really the Roman Empire did very well on this one, depending on when you date its final end to. But the pattern is there, especially if you look at the more rapid and more recent collapse of the Chinese empire, with the result of the Imperial line extinct and the successor state stuck on a relatively small island.

All administration exists on a spectrum from bureaucracy to personal intervention. You can break out Max Weber here, but it is generally agreed that a state needs a bureaucracy to be effective on a large scale. This machine "works" when it is functioning uniformly and according to process in order to achieve goals, and it breaks down when it is disrupted by a system of personal grift, favor, corruption and favouritism.

So the collapse of China runs roughly: poor leader (dowager Empress Cixi) -> ineffective state -> pushed over by foreign powers (European states vs Boxer rebellion) -> even worse leader (Puyi, last Emperor of China, took the throne at age 2) -> pushed over by foreign powers again (Japan) -> internal collapse of remaining China (Maoist rebellion).

Edit: forgot the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion, which belongs on the front of that list at about 1850, which is yet another civil war that killed somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population of China!

It would be a fun alternative history to swap the Japanese and Chinese leadership of the 1850-1950 era, such that Japan remains a feudal agricultural state and China got the Meiji restoration. How many carriers do they arrive at Pearl Harbor with?

> we all agree on the problem. What are all the solutions and how do we know they're the correct ones?

That is not at all how the last few years have worked, because an astonishing amount of lying about everything from basic facts to obvious outcomes is polluting the discourse.

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

Funny you should say that

The concerning part is that peak lead exposure was with Gen X. We're still being led by boomers and silent generation. So any contribution from lead stands to get worse before it gets better.

I hate this theory. It is extremely condescending, offers nothing, has no proof, but sounds plausible enough that many people believe it.

It is much more likely that our economic system rewards hostile behavior and that money has outsized influence in politics and a criminal justice system which lets rich people get away with crimes. That money correlates more with hostile behavior then lead, Instead of blaming lead, blame capitalism.

Just think about all the people who put lead in the gasoline in the first place, did they go to prison for their crimes, or did they make a bunch of money and retire in luxury.

That's what I was thinking.

>Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest.

¿Por Qué No Los Dos? Really seems to speed up the process more so than I've seen since the Nixon malfeasance.

definitely

But then it's also true the real arc of these things is only properly visible in retrospect. For example I'm sure historians looking back would include the Iraq war as one of the data points on stupidity even though in the moment, people would feel it is totally disconnected from current circumstances. So we are still talking decades.

The collapse did take about 1,000 years.

The end is usually considered to have been the Suez crisis; after exiting India, the UK failed to invade a Middle Eastern country in order to control a narrow waterway. If you want parallels to the present.

Brexit is a particularly 21st century phenomenon, a failed attempt to retreat to autarky.

I started with the Lex Fridman podcast [0] and then I went from there exploring further with reading mostly online material interweaved with discussions with ChatGPT. It is actually a fascinating way to read about history. Admittedly, it is hardly a way to gain a proper comprehensive understanding.

I didn't think this comment would get so many replies!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv1TUJSEM2k

Not OP but the book ”The storm before the storm” covers what sets in motion the fall of the republic. I think the foreword or opening chapter notes the similarities with the state of the US (Trumps first presidency at the time of writing).

The author is the podcast host of ”History of Rome”, which is also great, and he does the audiobook narration perfectly.

A better parallel is the fall of the republic with the rise of strong men using populism and power to dismantle its form of democracy in favor of authoritarianism.

The Romans pretty much had their way (peak) for 300 years. Yes decline was not instantaneous, but no one can complain about having 300 years of relative success/dominance, which they did once they defeated the Carthaginians all the way to about 200 A.D.

The Romans pretty much had their way. Their decline happened pretty much in the same way all civilizations end the elite’s participation in defending the empire or their civilization became less and less in short decadence sound familiar? Arguably the Civil War was probably the last war where the largest percentage of the elite actually participated in fighting the war and that percentage has gone down in every war since.

The United States from its founding until about 1990 had its way but now the shine appears to be coming off slowly. The way it currently looks 2100 is probably going to have a new number 1.

Your comment is shockingly low in the rankings. Anyone who upvoted the parent is being absolutely ravished by confirmation bias. Yes the US has big problems, but that doesn't mean anyone should unthinkingly approve of any thought that's critical of it.

HS history is more than enough dispel any notion that this is anything like the Roman Empire.

Very dissapointed in the HN community in this moment.

Not OP. The Storm before the Storm, Mike Duncan.

Blaming the people who aren't quite as good at politics for the actions of the people who actually won the last election and are fucking this country seems... Insane?

The issue will be "out of sight, out of mind" (or rather knowingly ignored) until the issue appears at scales as small as the home village, which in terms of the US government means the front and back yard of the white house or similar.

These people are living in parallel societies, where they are completely detached from the reality for many people living in the country. And that is not merely a problem in the US.

These damn arsonists are really going for it this year, huh?

The coordination between them is amazing - being able to pull this off in multiple European countries, the US and Canada at the same time.

Nobody will care until the white house burns down (again)

Nearly all of those are forests that are supposed to burn every year or two. Check with a forester knowledgeable in your specific area because there is no universal truth here. However the generalization that all forests in North America need to burn regularly for good health is true even though there are exceptions.

I believe you may be basing your figure on current Data Center power consumption. But - it's estimately to grow significantly:

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/doe-data-centers-...

also - 1 year is a lot, if we actually act diligently to stave the warming crisis and to prepare for some of the effects through changes to construction & infrastructure.

Still, I would agree that Data Centers are just one particular aspect of the struggle against global warming.

For anyone who wants to learn more about this claim, I thought this video was cool: https://youtu.be/M9Hoy9Kn1u0?is=1O5AJPEziihH1MSJ

If you think about this in terms of systems... it's unsustainable. You'll eventually get to a point where the damage you've done requires a flow of wealth/energy that cannot be generated for everyone.

I'm assuming that we can drive our environment to that kind of state, maybe there's an upper limit on how bad the environment can get. I'm not a climate scientist and don't have the curiosity to look into if there's a limit to climate change.

1. The past is not a predictor of the future. Driving towards a cliff has very positive results right up until a sharply negative one.

2. Energy does not require damaging the environment through drilling. We can get it straight from our star, for example.

3. Dealing with the consequences of something is always more expensive than preventing it in the first place.

I think there is progress on allowing agents to pay?

The oil industry is full of really smart people, but this all appears to be so stupid. Why don't the fossil fuel companies just expand their investment portfolios to include off-shore wind?

This is all in their wheelhouse: mega-scale construction, off-shore ops, dealing with the government in favorable ways, and such a simpler and lower-risk business!

It must be that they are just afraid of the entire idea of a competing sector? Or, they are addicted to the power they have controlling a more centralized energy distribution system? Or, what could it be? Again, I know these are not dumb people.

But... you're commenting on an article in which we are stopping the "we are building" part?

> We are building lots. Of everything.

Did you read the headline?

Do you know what article you're commenting on?

I suspect wind investment is going to take a decade to recover. Nobody wants to deal with a legal fight if they can avoid it. Offshore wind takes a lot of planning and engineering to deploy. These projects were halted midway, forcing the companies to eat a ton of costs while the construction was sitting idle.

People were for years joking about us approaching Idiocracy but I think this reality is already dumber than that in some regards. Trump & co really turbocharged the idiotification

Global warming is also killing wildlife. And by many magnitudes more than drilling some holes for offshore wind parks.

It is really great for the wildlife after the drilling is done though, as the windmills tend to make the area safer against fishermen.

Nothing is great for wildlife, including leaving it alone and undisturbed, because nature doesn't care if animals are happy, or even if they exist.

No energy source producing the required amounts to run civilization will be non-disruptive to wildlife and the environment. But perfect is the enemy of good.

Renewable energy sources heavily reduce this factor, make countries more independent from imports (other countries) and slow down the catastrophic effects of increased atmospheric energy due to greenhouse effect of carbon-based energy sources.

Conservatives should be the top number one supporters of renewable energy because of more independence from other governments and better conservation of the environment.

But alas, the only thing they like to preserve is their personal greed.

There's a reason so many racing games put them on their maps. They look dope.

Chevron’s Gorgon project LNG plants on Barrow Island also absolutely do not look cool.

How about pumpjacks? Do you think they look cool? Texas is also covered in those, though much less than it used to be.

> Texas which are covered with turbines

Is "Texas" the plural of "Texa"?

> Texas which are covered with turbines, and they absolutely do not look cool.

Compared to coal plants, which are _extremely_ cool-looking. /s

So they look hot?

Germany is already way ahead of the US in switching away from fossil electricity (also ahead of China).

Sure, keeping the entire nuclear fleet from ~2000 would have maybe helped, but would have required very costly (economically and politically!) investments over the last few decades, and those basically went into renewables instead which turned out fine.

See: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

This is about a German company that was going to make a renewable project in the US.

Germany itself has a huge offshore wind industry, which is probably how they have companies that planned to do the same in the US.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46292341 and now outside Europe too

Nuclear scepticism… did you know that nuclear power plants need cooling? Germany is learning that lesson the hard way right now, just check the news, it really speaks for reducing their dependency on nuclear as having been a very very good idea.

No wait, they’re not learning it the hard way because they’ve already got rid of them. Phew…

There is no french or german electricity price. Its a common market. Price difference is only different taxation

This is the second time this week I have seen this website misrepresenting data using this same trick.

Primary energy is not total energy generated its total energy in the fuel used.

On average coal / gas plants are only ~35% efficient so the graph does not correctly represent the useful energy generated as percentage.

The graph is basically putting actual energy generation of solar and wind next to actual energy generated by coal and gas multiplied by 3.

If they want to be even close to representative of reality they should multiply the solar power generated by 4. The same has to be done for the wind energy but I am not sure what the efficiency of that is.

From their page:

> Each source is measured by its physical energy content: fossil fuels and biomass by the heat released when they are burned; nuclear and geothermal by the heat they produce; and wind, solar, and hydropower by the electricity they generate.

This graph is far more representative of reality: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=stack...

China is still behind in percentage but by only 1-3%

Wanna know a great way to lose a race? Check your rear view mirror and see how far ahead you are and then let off the gas. Or worse, start braking.

You can look at current levels, or look at trends. China has stopped increasing coal. They're building a small number of new coal plants, but this is outstripped by the coal plants being underutilized or decommissioned

China is really only building new renewables, almost 100x as much net renewable capacity per year compared to nuclear.

This is misleading, because China has no gas, and they use coal power as dispatchable source with lower capacity factor (similar to gas elsewhere).

Coal+gas electricity is basically the same fraction in China than in the US.

But countries like Germany or Spain are significantly ahead in this regard, with much higher fraction of electrical energy coming from solar/wind.

See: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

China is also ~4x the population of the US and accounts for 30% of the worlds manufacturing and energy production.

The scale is so crazy that these numbers rarely make sense on their own.

The direction of travel is clear though. China is making massive investments in renewable energy (and dominating sectors like solar in the process) while the US seems hell bent on going the other way.

Slightly less than half now as of the most recent figures.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-generates-less...

> That [coal] share was well down from 65.5% in 2016, previous NEA figures showed.

> Renewable energy's share grew to 41.2% — topping 40% for the first time — and of that wind and solar accounted for 24.6%, Xing added. Wind and solar's share was up from 9.7% in 2020.

GP was talking about energy independence. They use domestic coal not imported coal, so the goal of energy independence is still achieved.

On the other hand only 3% of China's electricity comes from natural gas whereas 43% of US electricity does.

When combined coal and gas provide about 62% of China's electricity and 58% of US electricity. (Sources differ slightly on percentages. When you add in all fossil fuel electricity sources, China and the US get about the same percentage of electricity from them).

It is this way because China has plenty of coal and very little natural gas, whereas the US thanks to fracking has a lot of natural gas and it is much cheaper than coal so since then gas has rapidly replace coal.

That's the static picture. Now look at the first derivative. China is not just massively ahead at building renewables, they are massively ahead at building support infrastructure.

Look at UHV transmission lines for example: China has 60 000 km, quite a bit ahead of the 0 km in the US.

Things are changing. Look at starting points and direction, not just things as they currently are.

That said, renewable sources are so cheap and consequently economically appealing that not even the incredibly dumb Trump admin can stop them.

> Slightly more than half of electricity is generated by burning coal,

So this means, slightly less than half is other sources (hydro, solar, etc)

Yes. Where is this money coming from anyway? If it was from the clean energy legislation, then surely this will be overturned

China thinks, the US administration doesn’t.

Someone who is "rich" in a consumable asset and therefore chooses to just consume that instead of investing in a renewable or compounding asset is colloquially known as "a dumbass."

> US is rich in fossil energy so it doesn't have the same incentives as China does obviously.

China isn't rich in fossil energy? That's news to me.

They are the world's largest coal producer and still create over half of their electricity from coal. The difference to the US is that China seems to realize that this strategy isn't a long term solution.

It's not a majority at all. it's a manipulating minority.

...and this inability to get people to work together is architected, designed, and reinforced constantly. Fact: no where in any general education within the United States are people taught how to discuss issues with disagreement. This is strategic: the lack of this education creates easily emotionally swayed non-intellects that fall for cons over and over. The US is a conman paradise.

Less than half of people who voted voted for Trump, and turnout was 64%.

Being allowed to chose between two evils every few years isn't democracy.

Roughly 1/3 voted for the winner, 1/3 for the loser, and the rest didn’t vote.

A majority did not choose this.

...unless the gangsters change the rules. Which they have and will.

Trump 1 was so bad, people showed up in droves to vote for anything else. That's how we ended up with a dimensia president.

Biden was so bad, people showed up in droves to vote for anything else. That's how we ended up in a war with Iran.

Trump 2 is so bad, people will show up in droves to vote for anything else. The downward spiral continues.

If you watch the news coverage for any kind of elections in the US, you would assume they are not determined by votes, but instead they are fundraising competitions: The one that raises the most money gets elected.

I can't recall any situation where the news report that someone is bound to win because people view their platform as superior, and not because they raised the most money.

I believe that such cases do exist (Mamdani would be one), but it seems that the traditional media intentionally insist on only reporting the money raised (i.e. promote the establishment-sponsored candidate) to make people give up on their vote.

A lot of people question them. But the supreme Court has decided that giving money is equivalent to free speech, and can't be touched. I don't know how we will ever get out of that problem.

What is your contingency plan for if the groundwork that has been laid to falsify election results works? Wait harder?

The ethical US has rolled over already.

Even if the Republican party loses this time, what makes you think they won't find someone even worse than Trump next time? That seems to be the pattern over the last decades.

I don't see myself ever being able to trust the US again. Maybe if they manage 2-3 decades without conservative idiocy, but the Epstein class would never allow that.

Germany has its own problems of institutional capture by fossil fuels and reluctance to change. Even culture war and a local Nazi problem.

Some of this has the same roots in social media and dodgy money (esp. wirecard), but not all of it.

This is/was a project in the USA. Europe is baffled by this US administration but has no say if the US does something so short-sighted.

It's not like the Trump administration is stopping off shore wind projects here... yet.

Using the HN homework from earlier about multi-objective optimization... perhaps a Pareto optimal trade space of evil and dumb, to the maximum extent the two can coexist

Sorry but greed is evil, this is driven by greed.

you are being too charitable, they are both.

Dismissing Trump and his cohorts as merely "dumb" is how we got allllll the way to 2026 from 2016.

That kinda stinks, I wonder if getting the settlement was contingent on the re-investment.

Yeah, they say that, but I wonder how much of it is just to make the Trump admin happy.

Like, I don't doubt that they will go and build gas projects, and might even use some of this money to kickstart it, but presumably RWE was already pretty far along the pipeline of preparing this offshore buildout, and there's likely a lot equipment orders, staff, ships, etc that they'd rather not cancel, and would rather redirect into another project if they can.

Maybe that's copium from me though, just sad to see a big wind project go to waste.

When I have drive past the course, I always have the urge to pee. One day I'll get out and take a piss on the green.

Pool some money together to build a coal power plant next to Mar-a-Lago.

Yes as everyone loves to retort, the planet will survive! We might not, the current ecosystem wont, no one and nothing we love or care about or cherish is likely to.

But a very lovely species of bug may at some point look down and marvel at the beautiful new world they've conquered. And I guess we've collectively decided we're happy to give them that.

So like a subsidy?

Trump literally just paid money (taxpayer money) for nothing

Indeed: https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-announces-energy-...

>30% of people usually just don't vote, even in the presidential elections that happen every 4 years.

It's of primary importance to motivate these folks to vote at all. Getting them to favor for a candidate who isn't batshit crazy is a secondary function.

A person who doesn't vote can't be meaningfully swayed one way or another to begin with.

Nah the people voting for the orange fuhrer are beyond reason. It's the third that doesn't vote that needs to decide which road they want us all to take.

Thought process is: "me and my buddies get richer, fuck all of you"

Most of those people are old and don't care about the future. Not their problem.

Once you are a trillionaire or getting there, personal safety can be bought even without receiving future payments.

> We should be doing this

It'd be very reasonable to assume "this" means wind here.

That number directly correlates with life quality in almost every country on earth. More energy per capita means higher life quality, without a doubt in every high quality place.

Electrification roughly halves total energy use in an economy.

Fossil fuels are very inefficient compared with alternatives like EVs and heat pumps and renewables.

You're not wrong, but it simply isn't politically viable, which has been illustrated quite obviously by now. The "use less" strategy is a complete (and predictable) failure.

There are only two routes to preventing the climate disaster we've already set in motion:

Risky geoengineering projects like stratospheric aerosol injection.

Direct atmospheric capture of CO2.

The latter is the safer option because it's just restoring the atmosphere to a known good state. Direct atmospheric capture of billions of tons of CO2 per year will take enormous amounts of energy. We're going to need a lot more nuclear power plants if there's any hope of pulling this off.

Alternative is World War Three when large parts of the planet become uninhabitable.

In medieval times we used tiny amounts of energy on lighting and everyone sat around in the dark, however the energy used per lumen and indeed the carbon impact per lumen was far higher than it is today

Do you think we should return to medieval heat and light?

I just learnt about Virtual Power Plants using big batteries i.e 40Kwh+ - so yeah that could work.

Its not stupidity though. The admin has a personal vendetta against renewables.

I think I don't want to believe this. I believe it in my brain but not in my heart. This kind of power just cannot be in such irresponsible hands. It makes me wanna scream.

The MAGA crowd is gone and lost. There is little difference to other religious nutjobs, no matter is muslim or christian.

Afaiac MAGA is just a the white/dumb/uneducated version of jihad.

... along with fraud and sexual predation

yes, worth adding: Various changes/improvements in the way wind mills are build, have marking & lights on them are expected to reduce the number by quite a bit. Through a lot of already build existing wind mill and limited pressure to apply such changes means we will have to see how much of this actually will help iff even relevantly used at all.

Another problem is that the actual impact on bats for _offshore_ wind seems unclear. Yes it happens, bats do migrate across sea areas in some places. But we have very little knowledge about bat migration routes and amounts in such cases AFIK.

But selective subsidising still doesn't really help that. Subsidise household rooftop solar, home batteries, EVs and a whole host of other ways that directly benefit the more average person.

I’m not sure what I need to cite but logically when you’ve paid 1B for a lease up front, you’ll want to recoup that through the money you get paid for the electricity you generate. The project accounting probably includes a return on that similar to CAPEX (could be as high as 10%), so its impact grows every year as well.

My feeling is that these projects would require offtake costs so high to be viable that they would not be appealing to the states that awarded the leases. The blockade from trump is a very appealing exit ramp for projects that are dead in the water.

You can see in Germany / UK projects awarded with high lease costs failing (Mona already went pop in uk, I imagine any r4 lease not awarded cfd in AR8 will be returned, Total not moving forward with German portfolio…)

I’ve worked on debt financed offshore wind projects for the last decade, the whole project viability hinges on devex/capex balanced against offtake and resource.

I disagree.

The US is the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world. We’re also a net energy exporter.

We import some crude because our refineries are set up for it. That’s a long way from being “entirely reliant” on foreign fuel.

For onshore wind, probably wind.

For offshore wind, not nearly as clear. The US still lacks a lot of the specialized vessels, ports and manufacturing capacity.

Solar has bigger upstream dependence on Asian wafer/cell production.

See

1. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/securing-us-supply-chain...

2. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/84710.pdf

3. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107769

4. https://www.energy.gov/cmei/wind/articles/report-outlines-su...