The current wars in Europe and the Middle East paradoxically push the world towards non-fossil enery like few things did before. Both oil and natural gas prices have skyrocketed on global markets, and will likely rise more, as Ukraine continues to target Russian oil infrastructure, and Houtis continue to stymie Saudi oil exports.

Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though; at worst it takes longer to ship the key components from China to Europe around Africa.

At least they haven't relaxed restrictions on sulfur dioxide emissions, etc.. yet. Making rain acidic again would be completely on brand for this administration.

The Gulf countries paid handsomely to get Trump in there to keep the United States as the buyer of last resort once the rest of the world goes renewable.

Problem is that installing a bunch of sick sons of bitches to do your bidding can backfire when those some morons lose a war to Iran in a matter of months.

Fossil fuel power plants are unfortunately still profitable for their owners (billionaires...). The cost of building them has mostly been written off a long time ago. None of this is about what is good for America in the long run...

I have to wonder if this is a play towards coal miners, who are part of the conservative base - and they need every vote they can get. Coal is an awful source of power, and a really big source of pollution.

But is it stupid if you want to sell some fossil fuels in the short to medium term?

> - Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it

That's a baseless claim. For example, Germany has invested massively in solar but its electricity prices went up, not down.

> Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind

That's false. Coal power is cheaper than all of those. Solar and wind include costs for expensive battery backups since they are highly volatile.

And to make it clear: Climate change is very bad so coal plants are very bad. But that doesn't mean you can go around and claim that coal isn't cheap compared to things like solar+batteries. The fact that something is good doesn't imply that it is cheap.

You are 100% right but I think your arguments will fall on deaf ears. Someone bribed Trump or one of his cronies to revoke pollution limits and they got it. What to do when rationality just isn't a factor in politics anymore?

> - Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.

Is not Germany an example of the opposite? I mean their decision to shut down nuclear plants while getting dependant on Russian supply of energy sources?

Translated to American: "fuck you, I got mine"

A thought is that from 'their' perspective the potential loss of power and status on the tip top of things is to them existential. Consider a certain Senator being wheeled into the Senate to vote. Why even subject ones self to that. Because to step down is annihilation. There was another Senator in 2023 being wheeled around the same way.

So all of this is performative asserting power in order to punish anyone seen as a threat to the current system.

Because it'll create value.

Value which won't bring anything to anyone. I mean, a couple of people can be more richerer, but we and them won't have a planet to spend or enjoy these theoretical riches at the end.

So, no biggie.

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

Après nous, le déluge!

Normally I would be concerned, but these days, we are well on our way to 3.5C. All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals.

It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren. Wait to see what happens when millions of desperate people living south of the 40th parallel start heading north in mass. No wall will stop that.

The USA is already holding the record for greenhouse gas pollution per capita and they elected the lunatic that raved about climate change being a hoax. I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier.

The fact these regulations didn't make it through the normal law making progress (senate/house) doomed it before it even took shape. With presidents like Trump undoing everything his predecessor(s) did just to feel powerful, legislation like this is doomed from that start.

US energy usage is flat in real terms since 2000 despite skyrocketing population growth. In per capita terms, it's plummeting.

China builds hundreds of coal plants a year while they are exempt from scrutiny.

And when there are cheaper, faster built, renewable sources of energy that the whole world is building out. I don’t think the lost time can be fixed post Trump (if he even gives up power that is).

Because it stops society falling apart and regressing. Humanity is not some angelic, monolith stoic super species, which is just programmed wrong. Its half-sane monkeys which fall apart in a regression as soon as the surplus bribery stops and then try to sew the bakeries oven apart, so everyone has something to eat.

One can not create policies that destroy the thing they want to protect from a crisis to come, by inducing a different crisis by ignoring the material you work with. Trump is your doing, you brought this guy forth, by deindustrializing the west, by making western buisnesses unable to compete. Stop working with idealized paper-cut outs of people- and actually engage, with the species you got. And no, your good intentions and noble goals, do not entitle you to wing it.

Sorry but you can't have EVs everywhere, WA and CA banning natural gas for heat and cooking, WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power. The math does not add up.

Solar and wind output is not constant or reliable. NIMBYs sabotaged nuclear years ago. It takes how many years to bring a new plant online?

A lot of feel-good rules and regs were passed, pushing a massive shift to electric power, with no consideration as to where the additional power would come from.

You can't wave your arms like a Peanuts cartoon and have all that extra power appear, which is the logic that was used in passing many of these impractical regulations.

Rooftop solar in the US is incredibly expensive from most installers even as panel prices have come down and energy prices are typically low enough that the payoff time and up-front cost are seen as not worth it for many people. The US also has a lot of homes where (cheap) natural gas is used for cooking, heating, and hot water, which you'd have to continue paying for even after you installed solar panels or pay a lot of money to convert to electrical equivalents.

That said, I know a lot of people who have recently installed solar panels on their roof and it's increasingly worth it from a financial perspective. The other thing worth noting though is that while cool, rooftop solar really isn't the best approach to installing solar capacity compared to grid scale solar farms on land which also tends to be abundant in the US.

Most houses are old and many in shit condition, you'd want at least replace shingles before installing solar.

Everything becomes harder and expensive - no more standard gutter cleaning fee (200-300 bucks per average roof). For damp subclimates no more moss treatment possible.

For many houses you'd need structural engineer assessment to make sure roof can add such a load.

Many vents and outlets need to be relocated to cover large and nice area with the panels.

Dealing with contractors on standard things is such a pain already in US - expensive, many unskilled, trying to get more money out of your pocket. When they see someting expensive or non-standard their attitude changes even more.

The data that I've seen shows that the barriers to solar adoption for the average American home are high installation cost, low grid power cost, unfavorable net metering agreements for grid interconnect, and even some pushback from neighborhood committees (homeowners association aka HOA).

There are exceptions such as Hawaii where grid power is expensive and sunshine abundant, but the US is big, geographically diverse, and because of that adoption varies greatly on regional dynamics.

It’s expensive? We were quoted 60k last year. Maybe a scammy company but that’s a lot up front.

Some speculative answers based on what I know:

1. A lot of single family dwellings are occupied by renters. In this scenario, the renter has no ability to install rooftop solar, and the owner has no incentive to install rooftop solar because the renter is paying the energy bills. (The same goes for things like installing high-efficiency heat pumps etc.)

2. HOA regulations can block things like rooftop solar depending on where you live.

3. The up-front investment involved in rooftop solar can be prohibitive for many people. Things like tax incentives can help but we've been getting rid of those under the current administration, and tax incentives only go so far if your tax return is 6+ months away.

you're comparing years, not standards. i hope you're just foolish and not intentionally disingenuous.

"The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039, which would have reduced carbon pollution by an estimated 1.38 billion metric tons through 2047"

Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.

China invested heavily into oil, gas, and coal for energy. Their coal use is still expanding, just like their big investments in solar, wind, and nuclear. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-coal-power-ri...

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

> By 2025, coal accounted for approximately 54.6% of China's electricity generation

China became the manufacturing capital of the world because it doesn't have these regulations. It's time we caught up.

Power Plants answer to the shareholders, hence…

Im really not seeing the comparison.

nfts were about trying to make inherently not scare things scarce, and to try to get people involved in a ponzi scheme

the oil being drilled and mined is exceptionally useful, and people buy it even when you dont need to go to war or get weapons. War would still be happening in the middle east without oil, its a key trade route between Europe and Asia.

the oil dependence exists because it lets people get work and labour done without hiring labourers.

if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that, and whenever people start building giant solar farms in borth africa, we will see armed militas conquering each other for control over the profits

Also worth noting that they are being revoked.

Why is that notable?

I mean we elected an outrageous criminal into office. I think we are in a post-shame society.

Like the greens in Germany who decided it's best to shut down nuclear power plants?

He should be awarded the FIFA Environment Protection prize.

Not a law. A regulation. If it were a law, it would have required Congress to change. Not that that would likely have stopped this administration.

That's because the technology is already there, if plants were willing to run at a bit of a higher OpEx and add some CapEx. Amine scrubbing coupled with decades-old technology like Rotary Packed Beds Reactors can already capture 90% of CO2 at minimum. The UAE's Ruwais facility already does this onsite and uses the captured CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery (aka fracking for the last bits of oil in wells). This has the benefit of sequestering CO2 while also not using water for fracking as an option.

The first ever version of the "Greenhouse gas" wikipedia page lists CO₂ as the first such gas (besides water vapor, obviously disregarded).

That page is from 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greenhouse_gas&ol...

It is not weird at all.

A completely useful (and consistent with the modern usage of the word) definition of "pollution" can be worded as:

"anthropogenic alteration of the open environment with negative consequences on ecosystems or society".

Have you heard about noise pollution? Match it with the definition above.

CO2 emitted by combustion from human activities is orders of magnitude more than what any natural biological process emits.

Now you can see why CO2 emitted by fossil fuels combustion is, by any logic, pollution.

This is ridiculous. There is no redefinition, it was always part of definition. Seriously. The only end run around consensus are lies like "CO2 as polution is a novel thing".

Do you have children?

We're already paying for and will continue to pay more for the downstream effects of climate change some way or the other, you just refuse to or are unable to look at the bigger picture.

How does one move power plant pollution offshore to China?

> a booming industrial economy

Nothing more important than that!!

This is absurd. The cheapest energy available is solar, which is becoming more true every day. If truly the goal was just to have cheap energy, solar buildout would be a huge component of the strategy.

So now as a planet we have to curb greenhouse gasses in the US _and_ China or India or whatever.