As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least.
It's doubly dismaying that my own country (US) is still doubling down on fossil fuels despite everything.
The concern about a new dependency on China is real, but renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in place it keeps working without continuously importing fuel. Nonetheless, China has done a good job building up their PV/battery manufacturing capacity (including via subsidies for a while if I'm not mistaken) and to the extent the rest of the world wants to avoid a dependency on them we should do that too.
I've been arguing with Europeans on twitter (including an environmental scientist) who believe this war shows we need to resume drilling in the North Sea and Groningen.
It feels like this collective insanity will never end
A couple of years ago the last of the exploration rigs in Norway left Norwegian waters. Because nothing that could be drilled (and hasn't already) can compete on price with solar etc.
Lots of people think someone should do this or that. They don't invest their own money though, they just think someone else should do, etc.
I think Europe should resume drilling in the North Sea and Groningen if they have exploitable reserves there. Europe depends on energy imports and that won't change in our lifetimes (I'm in my early forties, so at least in my lifetime.) They should take advantage of whatever resources they have.
I'm guessing you think otherwise? Why? Do you think the energy transition will be faster? What makes you think that?
Because the continued survival of civilization depends on leaving fossil fuel in the ground. If the transition isn't fast enough then we will have horrible, lethal shortages, but that's still better than the worst climate scenarios.
That may or may not be true. But it won't stay in the ground as long as there is money to be made by extracting and consuming it.
Right now all that's happening is the US is extracting that natural gas, and the middle east extracting that oil, and Europe is importing it. Which pollutes more and costs more. Just develop your domestic supplies.
It would be an inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration considering the deployment rates and cost decline curves of renewables and storage.
> But what the past year has shown is that it’s possible to go harder and faster in deploying solar panels and batteries, reducing energy use, and permanently swapping out entrenched sources of fossil fuel. Solar installations across Europe increased by a record 40-gigawatts last year, up 35% compared with 2021, just shy of the most optimistic scenario from researchers at BloombergNEF. That jump was driven primarily by consumers who saw cheap solar panels as a way to cut their own energy bills. It essentially pushed the solar rollout ahead by a few years, hitting a level that will be sustained by EU policies.
(Europe has enough wind potential to power the world, their energy constraints are deployment rate of renewables, battery storage, and transmission)
You're talking about electricity, so I assume your answer is directed to the natural gas fields at Groningen. The EU imports a lot of natural gas. Don't you think it would be better to have a domestic supply? It's better for the environment too.
Heck right now, Europe is still burning coal (and worse yet - lignite coal) for electricity. Natural gas would be a huge improvement on that.
Note that drilling for oil in the North Sea is a completely different subject, because that's not used for electricity generation, nor is electricity a substitute. EV market share in Europe is still far too low for that to be a conversation for a long time.
Your comment is wishful thinking and ignores the current reality of how Europe imports and uses energy.
But even if your best case scenario were somehow possible (and it really isn't) there's still money to be made exporting fossil fuels to the developing world. So your assertion "inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration" is just flat wrong.
No, everything can move to electricity, China is doing it, Europe can too. You are free to your opinion, but the facts and evidence are clear. If you would like an hour of time with an expert from Ember Energy to explain this, happy to pay for that hour of time for you to update your priors and mental model on the topic of Europe's energy transition trajectory.
> Note that drilling for oil in the North Sea is a completely different subject, because that's not used for electricity generation, nor is electricity a substitute. EV market share in Europe is still far too low for that to be a conversation for a long time.
Europe's EV uptake will speed based on the price of oil increasing and remaining high for the foreseeable future.
> But even if your best case scenario were somehow possible (and it really isn't) there's still money to be made exporting fossil fuels to the developing world. So your assertion "inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration" is just flat wrong.
The developing world is leapfrogging fossil fuels and going straight to solar, batteries, and EVs. What will expensive LNG do to this market? It will force them to renewables and electric mobility faster. Ethopia's uptake of EVs after they banned combustion vehicles is an example of this. Why did they ban combustion vehicles? Because they have no domestic fossil fuel supplies and the import cost was crushing them; their EVs are powered by domestic hydro electricity production.
It costs you nothing to be wrong, I've done my best to educate with facts and citations. Appreciate the discussion regardless. My offer stands to pay for you to talk to a subject matter expert.
> It feels like this collective insanity will never end
They simply do not believe that the consequences will be as bad as the models predict. And a lot of trust and good will has been expended on social issues, for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose, or to promote childhood reassignment surgery, etc. As a strategic decision, we have taken our eye off the ball, climate change is actually an existential threat, bathroom choice never was. You can argue that we can do two things at once, but there is a cost for dividing our focus and effort; even if it didn't raise the hackles of those already less predisposed to worry about the environment.
> And a lot of trust and good will has been expended on social issues, for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose, or to promote childhood reassignment surgery, etc.
I think a lot of people miss this: each time you take up the good fight, you spend some trust/goodwill. If you're going to expend the public's goodwill, make sure that there is nothing more important to you than what you are expending it on, or expend less of it to save some trust and goodwill for this.
> for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose
Ugh, I'm going to regret commenting here, but it really seems like this obsession is almost entirely on the right wing. In the US, the centrist Dems have been banging the appeasement drum for my entire political life, and it's gotten us nowhere.
Like... the right isn't going to wake up and start caring about climate change if everyone just shuts up and lets them discriminate against the hate group of the moment. The bathroom thing is also such a bait and switch, same as sports. In my state, we removed protections for housing and employment discrimination against trans people because... one trans athlete existed?
The real question we need to answer is why the right is so obsessed with other peoples' genitals, to the point that they have to make up stories and generate AI videos to get mad at.
I for one am sick of people focusing on a tiny fraction of the population and making them a scapegoat for everything. You're absolutely right that climate change is a bigger issue - so why can't we focus on it?
We can't focus on it because the anti-reality reactionaries are using trans people as a distraction. It's all one big malignant tumor on society, not a collection of unrelated issues.
> climate change is a bigger issue - so why can't we focus on it?
What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction. To claim loud and proudly that transgender issues were not important when compared to climate change. To refocus the public on climate change and take the wind out of the fringe issue.
Instead, we took to the street for BLM, when it wasn't an important issue, when compared to climate change. You can't blame the right-wing for the number of people who filled the streets for BLM... during a pandemic where we were supposed to socially distance. It cost us doubly. And not one important left-wing voice stood up and said so.
The attention to those fringe issues is brought by those conservatives and lobbyists etc who explicitly want to distract and divide attention from climate change and renewables.
It's strongly my opinion that there are far fewer people championing 'wokeness' than there are 'getting outraged by it's pervasiveness'. Mainly for the fact that all media like to seize upon controversy, thus turning minor fringe issues into multiple days in a row of front page headline items.
Blech. I've done the same thing...
Address climate change, accelerate the shift towards renewables. It's something that actually fucking matters!
> we need to resume drilling in the North Sea and Groningen
Well, there's also the simple reality that the US doesn't actually need fossil fuels from the Middle East or Russia in the same way Europe does. It affects prices here, obviously, and an increase in energy prices can do severe damage to the economy, but it's not a potentially existential crisis in the same way.
Funny part about oil is that it’s in everything. US is energy independent, but its supply chain is not. AI chips, for example, which prop up the entire economy need oil for the various materials needed to produce it.
The other funny part about oil is that it has an inelastic demand. A 20% reduction in global supply doesn’t mean a 20% increase in prices. It means increase in prices until 20% demand collapses (which could theoretically mean orders of magnitude of increase in pricing). Which means expensive fertilizers, medicines and pretty every other bare necessity.
With these two facts, pretty much every country needs the oil from the Middle East.
Yes, this is correct, Europe energy policy is catastrophically behind and needs to pursue all paths simultaneously, because the future is very murky, Europe needs a LOT of power, and it's not clear which will work best:
- Continue building out solar + battery storage
- Resume drilling in domestic accessible offshore locations safe from trade disruptions
- Recommission and build new nuclear plants
- Build LNG import terminals to eliminate dependence on Russian gas
The Russian threat in the short term is very real and this is making Russia stronger. And the economic threat to Europe in the super short term is bigger then the one to America ... and will help internal fascist movements that are very much already empowered there (and sponsored and supported by BOTH Russia and America despite being very much homegrown).
Resilience against geopolitical disruption has always been a nice characteristic of renewables (of course, centralizing the production in China is a mistake from that point of view, if for no other reason than the general danger of centralization). It is unfortunate though, if we needed an actual event to see this advantage.
"As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least."
It takes tremendous hardship and a lot of time to push people to renewables. Give them their cheap oil back and they are hooked on the needle again in no time. Historically we've been there, multiple times.
Sorry for the cynicism. I too hope it is finally happening at least, and maybe it is at last.
> renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in place it keeps working without continuously importing fuel
There are issues if the infrastructure is network accessible and is updatable. The consumer end of it (e.g. home solar) is often dependent on apps etc. and is very vulnerable. I hope (probably optimistically) that critical systems are air gapped.
Its always been obvious to me that we should have a variety or energy sources for security and its complacent to think otherwise. Over-reliance on an unstable region makes it all the worse.
But why does US need any of that? It's a massive exporter of fossil fuels and will be much richer as a result (but yes just as every other way of getting richer, it will also increase inequality).
The argument that high oil prices are good for America is one of the most ridiculous ideas being pushed right now. Yes, on a trade deficit front, it slightly reduces the net amount of money leaving. But we are also the world’s largest consumer of oil, and it literally powers every part of our economy.
Saying that America is better off with high gas prices is like saying Americans will eat more beef if the price of beef doubles because we make lots of beef. Cattle ranchers will be better off; everyone else eats more potatoes.
Think of it this way: less trade deficit means more imports that come through without causing extra damage. It means more cheap products of all kinds for everyone.
And yes this is exactly how petrostates work. I wonder why is it surprising. Sure their population also pays higher prices for gas at the pump when the oil goes up, but they massively win in every other way.
It's simply a long, embedded stereotype of "high oil price = bad" because of traumatic experience of 1973 and 1979. It's different today. The higher the oil price, the better it is for America.
Also again, US gas prices are by far the cheapest among every halfway developed countries. Everyone else will suffer more. So relatively again, US wins even here.
It causes massive inflation of goods and food prices, as farming and supply chains are heavily dependent on fuel prices. How is runaway inflation “massively winning in every other way” for regular americans?
"Oils ain't Oils" - old motor oil company slogan from the 1980s.
What the US exports isn't "car ready" - most primary oil sources are heavily biased one way or the other (heavy, sweet, light, etc) and the useful end product is blended.
It's not straightforward for the US to get high on it's own supply and even what it delivers to others is less useful to thse others when other non-US sources aren't readily available to blend in.
Also ... using sequestered carbon has been increasing the insulation factor of our common atmosphere, left unchecked (ie. stopping the use of fossil fuels) is a major problem for the coming century.
Being a net exporter of a global commodity is only relevant in an extremely acute crisis (e.g. WWIII).
Plus one of the reasons why we export so much oil is because it's cheaper to import oil to a refinery in New Jersey from Saudi Arabia than to get it there from Texas due to some very stupid US laws.
The Jones Act requires that all goods transported by water between US ports be carried on ships that were built in the US, fly the US flag, and crewed by US citizens. That effectively makes it impossible to ship oil between US states at scale without a direct pipeline.
Though to be clear I believe we would still be a net exporter without the Jones Act, it's just one of those weird things about the US oil industry.
But US mostly wins from global warming relatively, right? I mean, it's going to suffer less than others (except EU), for geographical reasons, thus winning. I don't think global warming is a concern for US at all (some places sure, Florida will be royally fucked, but not most places).
Everyone is suffering sure, but what matters is relative degree of it. Side that suffers less, wins against others and that's the only thing that matters.
And no, in China global warming means worsening desertification, in Russia it means melting permafrost that covers 60% of the country, same in Canada. Europe and the US are uniquely positioned to suffer the least from it and many industries will win outright. For example, there will be year-round tourist season within continental EU: all summer on the Baltics and the North Sea and all winter in the Mediterranean; winemaking in Spain and southern France will suffer badly and in some places may become commercially non-viable, but will expand to great lot more territory in northern Germany, low countries, Poland, UK, thus enabling a lot richer wines due to great variety of soils.
In the short to medium term, sure . . . again, left unchecked gets bad for every human when tipping points are passed.
Eg: When surface ice gets very low the trapped heat will go more torward heating water than melting ice.
That's very double plus bad (ask a high school physics teacher about the energy used to melt, say, a kilogram of ice .. then ask them by how many degrees C does that same energy raise the temp. of water).
Don't forget all the states in the middle that are experiencing the worst drought in a millenium, with snowpack and river flows at record lows, all while each state is adding more people (and thus more water demand), and interstate river compacts expire, and years-long negotiations on a renewal have been fruitless.
It’s just pulling forward future gains while shrinking the time horizon, if the world speeds the transition to renewables and electrification from this. Short term gain for faster irrelevance.
Oil to $200/barrel please, as long as possible, same with LNG.
Certainly, but you can solve for that with windfall taxes or nationalizing the oil industry in your jurisdiction, if there is the will. Based on all available evidence, the will does not exist.
Broadly speaking, the overall system dependent on energy must adapt or die. The capital exists to decarbonize rapidly. How hard the arm must be twisted is the natural experiment to observe. In the meantime, all critical fossil assets are legitimate targets in the operating environment.
These are all choices. If you are unhappy with the outcomes of choices you have the authority to make, make better choices.
It will take longer than the duration of the war to realistically transition to renewables in any quantity that truly matters.
So the oil companies are happy because this temporarily brought forward future demand and thus profit, as well as expend a bunch of money/resources from competitors of oil which predicates a high price per barrel to make financial sense. If/when oil prices drop back down, these renewable investments might not compete.
To truly transition over will mean doing it with the world kicking and screaming imho. It cannot be made smooth.
Unfortunately much of China’s perverse tactics (they’ve done this in a wide array of industries) is to steal patented tech and trade secrets from companies outside China, subsidize the manufacturing and development etc, then sell their product at an artificially low price which kills the original company and good faith competitors as they cannot compete with the artificially lower prices.
Then once the dust settles they’re the only company which can handle large order sizes required for supply chains to build downstream products, and the world becomes further reliant on them.
Security concerns and national defense aside, a prime example pre-ban was Huawei layer 1 infrastructure products which far exceeded feature density, and cost effectiveness than competitors due to the subsidies. They’ve done similar tactics with solar panels.
This doesn’t imply China or their state sponsored companies never create novel tech, but there’s a hugely perverse system whose purpose is to illegally undercut competition overseas with no real recourse from the victim countries outside of total company bans. And even then, people find a way around the bans and the damage is already done to the original companies.
The reason china was able to do this is because of the free trade movement that started with Reagan to undercut US unions. US companies outsourced all the manufacturing as much as possible and china capitalized on the market opportunity.
Am I supposed to be mad that jobs shipped to china who steals a tech weren't shipped to Vietnam who hasn't stolen tech?
China is hardly the only country that has used internal policies and loose intellectual copyrights to get ahead (Famously, the US did the same thing in the late 1800s, stealing factory designs from england). And part of the reason US companies still do business with them is because they are cheaper.
Ideas are cheap and execution is what matters. Any attempt to "own" an idea is an exercise in futility and a sign that you probably suck at execution. Sorry, but we should be encouraging competition and reducing barriers, not sitting here crying that the Chinese are running laps around us because of intellectual property "theft"
Germany ripped off British engineering texts because they had no copyright laws there.
America got started taking what was started elsewhere, the same can be said for any country except for Scotland.
I think those lovely Chinese people would laugh at your sinophobic 'thinking'. Maybe stay off the corporate media and do your own research.
Huawei are an amazing company, all of their kit is highly innovative, but too good for you and your slave masters. Hence the lies. In fact, if you want a computer that isn't 'NSA Inside', go with Huawei. You won't look back, although they won't sell you a PC with Nvidia in it or a phone with Google in it because of your government.
Solar panels? Germany did the work on that, China bought the IP and did the production engineering. All is legit.
Besides, that screen you are looking at, was that made in America? Nah, it is going to be China, outside chance, Korea.
The profit marginsof these industries are ridiculously high, to the point that if you’re willing, you can manufacture many useful, high‑quality products.
only when China could build them, there are real "free" market
It feels so slow. I would like to have an electric car or e-bike. I live in a building that is part of a housing company that has many owners (most of them people living here). It is slow to decide and implement renovation, and the pipeline is basically full for a few years.
We might get car charging infrastructure only a few years down the line. Maybe a bike shed for e-bike charging a year after that?
What happened to those optimistic ideas where every lamp post had a charger? I would pay for that. I also see these small transformer huts on the streets. What if at least those had neighborhood high speed chargers, it shouldn't cost much since basically there's a good power source right there?
There's just so much friction. I hope some enterpreneur here makes these things real!
Yeah, I live in Spain and probably once again we'll have restrictions on AC in the summer just like at the start of the Ukraine war. Hopefully, we can avoid actual blackouts.
The bizarre thing is that our government still wants to close down the remaining nuclear power plants. One of the issues with our proportional electoral system is that smaller, more extreme parties can become kingmakers and in our current situation the centre-left governing party relies on the support of the far-left party to stay in power, and those guys are rabidly anti-nuclear power.
But this should be a clear signal that we need renewable power and nuclear power and we need to speed up the adoption of electric vehicles. Ending the tariffs with China that stop us benefiting from their affordable PV panels and electric cars would be a good step towards this.
Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear. In the case of Spain, it is cheaper to build more energy lines with Morocco and battery storage than to use nuclear. Spain already has some of the cheapest energy in Europe thanks to renewables.
In the case of Germany, nuclear makes sense, but it is not clear where you would buy fuel for it, It might still be a supply chain risk since Russia and Kazakhstan are the main players there.
It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments. Without them, closing power plants (of any kind) is, IMO, nonsensical.
Ironically, Spain has plenty of Uranium, but there is an environmental law that doesn't allow its mining.
> It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments.
The outage in spain had multiple complex causes.
While the grid had a rather routine instability/oscillation on-going during time of the incident, the actual point-of-no-return was completely non-technical: Prices crossed into the negatives, which caused generation to drop by hundreds of megawatts and load to increase likewise within a minute (!) because the price acted as a non-technical synchronized drop-off signal for the grid.
In grids where the price action is not forwarded directly to the generators and consumers there would be no incentive to suddenly drop off decentralized generation. So for example in Germany a black-out would not happen like this.
Unfortunately, to have an informed opinion, you pretty much have to read all these pages, because the situation is just so complex. Otherwise, you just fall for agenda pushing from all sides.
That being said, I was apparently also under the impression of outdated or just plain wrong information.
While the report I listed mentions the sudden loss of decentralized generation as starting point of the blackout, and also specifically mentions small-scale rooftop PV, it says that the cause for that sudden synchronized drop-off is actually unknown.
But doesn't nuclear power present a complication when designing a power grid for renewable energy? It is basically very expensive caseload energy that needs permanent demand, when the entire proposition of a renewable-focused grid is that you manage a non-certain production with dynamic demand (via batteries and price-sensitive usage).
Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today.
It is NOT cheap, it is cheap for sellers, because they account on the basis of a MWh being equally useful all the time. It isn't. There are TWh-scale shortfalls in winter because, and a medieval peasant understood this, a shortage of ambient energy is what winter is, and it's worth paying energy penny you have to avoid its worst effects.
Business is not better. I've worked in the chemicals industry, and conferences in Europe have been like a wake for the last decade. I've overseen large orders go to China because, I could not give a shit how much it cost, the European green alternative - for delivery within Europe - could not guarantee timeframes, due to reliance on renewables. The Chinese shipped product could. That is your "cheap".
You can buy uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, Mali, Canada, US, Australia, or the sea if you really want to, all of those have large reserves, and store multiple years' worth more or less by accident, modern industrial processes actually struggle to make sense at the low volumes nuclear requires. Bringing that up as a problem is just not honest.
Can you please source and explain your claims? They don't match my understanding.
For example:
> Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today.
Do you mean cost per country (not levelized?)? Even then, UK energy is not the most expensive.
They can't (because LCoE is a per-project or per-technology measure, not a grid-wide measure, for a start).
UK energy is expensive because we have gas-linked wholesale pricing. That's nothing to do with the true cost of renewables. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're being disingenuous.
(Gas-linked pricing was implemented for sensible reasons, but I don't see how it continues to be tenable today).
Yeah, but that reminds me of Nick Clegg in the UK in 2010 saying:
> By the most optimistic scenarios... there's no way they are going to have new nuclear come on stream until 2021, 2022. So it's just not even an answer
Well, now we are in 2026, and we still have the same problem.
The UK has had complete political unity on building new nuclear power since 2006. That tells you the timelines.
For Hinkley Point C with the latest estimate being the first reactor online (not commercially operational) in 2030 that gives a "planning to operation" time of 24 years.
For Sizewell C EDF are refusing to take on any semblence of a fixed price contract and they are instead going with a guaranteed profit pay as you go model. Where ratepayers handout enormous sums today to hopefully get something in return in the 2040s.
The far-left are not the cause of the nuclear close down, nor are they unilaterally holding the government hostage in this area.
The centre-left party made the agreement with the power companies in 2019 when they were not yet in coalition, for economic reasons.
The far-left, now in the coalition, does consider nuclear a red line. It is unknown what the cost of crossing it would be. But I believe it's irrelevant, because if the centre-left party would be governing alone, they wouldn't walk back the agreement now. No matter price of oil, the investment in nuclear has a too large price-tag, and would take way to long to reap any benefits. If any - given the current progression on renewables.
Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh than wind + battery in Denmark, which also has excellent links to reliable hydropower from Norway and Sweden? Especially when your greatest external security threat is Russia which has openly threatened targeting nuclear reactors of a country they are trying to invade?
Not to speak of the inconvenient fact that Uranium is not a resource found in sufficient quantity in Europe and current European nuclear reactors get their fuel from Russia and Niger, not exactly reliable havens of stability.
Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors to retain the required workforce and research base. For everyone else it is a money sink and a complication when designing their grid for renewable energy.
> Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh than wind + battery in Denmark
Strategic mix.
I'm not saying its a good or bad idea, but nuclear can be used as a tool with batteries to make wind much more reliable. urianium sourcing can be an issue, but sadly so are batteries. (granted nuclear fuel is changed more often)
I am unfortunately not the one empowered to make these decisions, nor do I know the reasoning of those who are, I just noted it seems back on the table based on discussions, maybe because
>Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors
since also on the table seems to be making a deal with France for Nuclear Weapons access, as I understand what I read.
Wind + Battery doesn't exist. Wind and solar renewables are dependent on natural gas plants at this moment. This is why nuclear is still a consideration, it's more "green" then most "green" energy.
This might make sense on a larger timeframe but stating that your grid isn't stable enough to support AC demand while also pushing for electric car adoption seems counter intuitive. It would likely take years to improve the grid to support accelerating electric vehicle demands.
Years and tens if not hundreds of billions; the Netherlands is experiencing this, after a decade of cheap solar, a rise in EV, and new builds being built fully electric on the consumer side, and many datacenters and green energy generators built on the business side, our grid is at capacity to the point where new businesses can't get connected and new housing projects are put on hold (I think); the grid can't manage any more. The grid manager Tennet spent 15 billion last year, and will need to keep doing that for at least another decade - and that's a relatively small country.
Yeah, sucks they're trying to shut down our nuclear power, I agree. However, we're lucky the country is so sunny, if we could cover the inland deserted areas with solar panels, batteries and what not as an alternative, I'm OK with that as a compromise I suppose.
Spain's situation is bad: very high gas prices (now at the same level as Finland, despite much lower purchasing power), poor public transport (train) services, opposition to nuclear energy, electric cars that are only affordable for the wealthy (and even then, the infrastructure makes them difficult to use), high VAT on electricity, etc. All this in a country where many people have to ration their heating or air conditioning because they often can't afford it under normal circumstances. Population seem to not care much about being miserable as the same parties that do nothing about it keep getting elected so good luck I guess.
> The bizarre thing is that our government still wants to close down the remaining nuclear power plants.
That is very weird, even Germany stated recently that closing down their Nuclear Plants was a big mistake.
For a very long time, I have always said France is smarter than what people give them credit for. Spain should take a peek over the mountains at France to see what a sane energy policy looks like.
Even France shut down the Superphénix. It was just built too! A waste of ten billion dollars because the government gave in to these extremist environmental groups. One of them even fired an RPG at it while it was being built.
Strange how there are so many progressive radical groups and somehow the anti-nuclear activists are the only ones that manage to change the energy agenda in favour of the very powerful lobby of the fossil fuels. The animal activists never changed the subsidies to animal agriculture, the activists for international causes like Palestine haven't managed much either.
... it was shut down in 1998, relevant section from German Wikipedia as the English version is lacking details:
In June 1997, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced the closure of the power plant as one of his first official acts. He justified this step by pointing to the enormous costs the plant incurred. In the preceding ten years, it had produced no electricity for most of the time due to malfunctions. It even consumed considerable amounts of electricity to keep the sodium in the cooling system above its melting temperature. Each pipe carrying sodium and every tank was equipped with heaters and thermal insulation for this purpose.
... so it used a lot of energy while being shut down because of malfunctions for most of those 10 years. Seems like shutting it down was the best course of action.
It had problems but it was new technology. That’s always the case. Now only China, Russia and India have Fast Breeder Reactors.
Plus there was the pressure from Les Verts and Sortir du nucléaire, the Molotov cocktail attacks by the Fédération Anarchiste, the RPG attack by the Cellules Communistes Combattantes etc.
No, we did not. Katharina Reiche and that guy from Bavaria are certainly not "Germany" or the majority of Germans. No atom reactor is going to be built, it's just typical rhetoric from both of them.
Not even the major energy suppliers are interested in building new nuclear reactors.
I was not against prolonging the phase out for a bit, but we don't even have a permanent storage solution after all this time.
A lot of people thought France was just being arrogant for not going all in on becoming dependent on the US and maintaining their own ways of doing things. These past few years, it's been paying off for them. Hopefully other countries will wisen up and not allow their defense and entire economy to be dependent on the US or any other big country. It always comes back to bite them in the ass. The post WW2 decades were unusually stable and assuming it'll be that way forever is not wise.
You can't do everything, and the smaller your country the less you can do. France isn't doing other things because of the opportunity cost.
Of course the EU is bigger than the US and there is value in duplicated/distributed effort. The EU as a whole should be thinking "partner with everyone, but have our fingers in every single pot someplace just in case".
> For a very long time, I have always said France is smarter than what people give them credit for. Spain should take a peek over the mountains at France to see what a sane energy policy looks like.
Incidentally, if I remember correctly, one of the causes (or things that made it worse) of the almost day-long blackout we (Spain) had last year was because France disconnected one of the links to Spain without notifying us properly.
Purely from an engineering standpoint that is an attractive option. But North African countries have often been politically unstable. It's risky to place your energy security in the hands of a region that could erupt in another coup or civil war at any time.
I thought the proposal for a solar link between Morocco and the UK was a great idea. Unfortunately the UK government has decided not to back it with a contract for different guarantee.
That would then make sense why Russia's dirty tricks squad likes to back extreme-Left and extreme-Right parties, and is likely behind calls for proportional representation: it would give the geopolitical aggressors an effective veto over national politics and prevent the emergence of a European superpower on land they consider "theirs".
> Yeah, I live in Spain and probably once again we'll have restrictions on AC in the summer just like at the start of the Ukraine war. Hopefully, we can avoid actual blackouts.
I live on Spain . What the hell restrictions are you talking about ?
This did happen in summer of 2022, but only in public buildings, private households were not affected, so the OP's point seems a bit overly dramatic. Given that AC usage is highest when solar production is also highest, this seems highly unlikely given the solar build-out of the last 4 years.
what do you think of theory that denuclearisation movement in west europe was funded by CCCP? it makes sense to think CCCP/Putin would finance subversive movements to remove nuclear and coal and make the region dependent on russian energy exports
They fund other stuff that weakens and divides Europe too like the separatist movements in Scotland, Catalonia etc.
That's not to say that all the people in these movements are Russian agents or that these groups don't have some good points and legitimate grievances, but nonetheless they are an easy, cost-effective way for Russia to attack us.
Of all the silly things I’ve seen Europe do over the last 20 years, getting rid of nuclear plants has to be one of the strangest. Sure, we all want solar but it’s not there yet. Hidden forces here would not be a surprise.
That sort of event doesn't fade away quickly and definitely influenced energy policy that persists to this day. Thankfully the tide is turning due to safer designs.
Nuclear power has an LCOE that is 5x the cost of solar and wind. Nobody would build it on cost alone.
The only reason countries build and run nuclear power plants is because it shares supply chain and a skills base with the nuclear military.
Which means they have nukes (France, Russia, US) or they they want to take out an option to one day build a nuke in a hurry just in case for a threat that is usually very obvious (Sweden, Japan, South Korea).
This was clearly recognized when Iran started building nuclear power plants but when Poland suddenly got interested in 2023 ostensibly "because environment" after decades of burning mountains of coal nobody batted an eye.
I wonder where the gulf states are going to end up.
They have tried hard to build economies that aren't just fossil fuel exports. Tourism, trade, finance, luxury living for rich foreigners… but everything they have tried is contingent on peace in the region. I doubt foreigners are looking forward to layovers in Dubai now there are Iranian drones heading their way.
Maybe future travelers will not see two trunkless legs in a desert, but empty condo towers and abandoned super cars still loaded with labubus.
They're done. They export oil/LNG, import food, invest the proceeds in the US companies/treasuries and brand themselves as logistics hubs + safe havens for the global rich. It's all out of the window now.
They also spent decades sending money to the US to buy influence and protection, which instantly vaporized the second a missile was launched their way.
The big story I think is how handily they took out billions of dollars of US radars and that these air defense systems are not up to the task (we actually already knew this from Ukraine, but media worked overtime to ignore this fact). In a way, all this supposedly "superior" US and Israeli tech (at least on the defense side, offense is a different story) has been exposed. I do think focused engineering efforts could close this gap, that was needed already 4 years ago.
The war in itself? For sure, but if a million dollar rocket saves a billion dollar radar system against a 50.000 drone, it still seems working as intended.
That doesn't say 10+ radars have been destroyed. It says radar sites have been attacked 10 times across 7 locations in 6 countries, with some damaged and some destroyed.
Plus a couple videos of fixed radomes getting hit by drones
Defending against ballistic missiles is well known to not be perfect, even against Iran's lest sophisticated missiles it's very difficult. But the high end missile systems are worth trying. The main problem is the lack of cheap drone interceptors which has been a blaring siren since Ukraine war started that the US neglected by not treating it as an emergency.
C-RAM radar at at least one US embassy was hit with an elcheapo drone as well, rendering it useless. Thats a legit problem and was only possible because they took out most of the important ballistics radars first.
"It’s worth pointing out that Hezbollah has managed to get rockets right down to the south of Israel today – and that is unprecedented. Never before has Hezbollah managed to get rockets so far south into Israel."
Isn't this a different thing? I tend to assume when someone is talking about ballistic missile defense, they are thinking of ICBMs. A House of Dynamite is an example of that. But that seems substantially different from the regional missile defense that seems much more effective. Mach 5 is pretty fast, but Mach 25 is considerably faster.
That puts you in an energy deficit, but you still need and are using energy. Until your body is decomposed it uses energy (after you die your body is energy for the bacteria decomposing it).
Fasting can use previous/saved energy, but it still needs energy.
It's probably also good to have things on hand as an insurance policy anyway. If shit hits the fan regulations don't apply anymore. No one is going to complain about solar on your roof if the grid isn't reliable.
I heard somewhere that there is some sort of evangelical Christian sect in Korea that believes the current US president was sent by God. Not as a positive force, but as a force to end the global status quo (which I suppose they consider unjust). I find this fascinating because the US president's actions so far have: exposed decade-old myths about the rule-based international order, caused the EU to seek more self-reliance, caused former enemies in Asia to consider alliances and now accelerate the end to fossil fuel dependence. One could argue that the results of his actions are indistinguishable from that of a double agent's.
From what I've read, the immediate effect will likely be worse for CO2 emissions, because the alternative to (liquefied) gas is often coal power. Also, the various inputs that are needed for global manufacturing are also affected, so maybe even renewable tech gets more expensive.
I'm not saying that the dependence on the middle east was good, but I think it's good to keep in mind that this was a pretty stable equilibrium even with the various questionable countries involved until the US initiated a global supply shock without a good reason.
WFH and the almost 100% shutdown off airline travel at the beginning of the pandemic resulted in nearly 0 change in CO2 emission and levels in the atmosphere.
Of course we shouldn't expect a couple of years of shutdown to significantly reverse 200 years of man-made atmospheric CO2 accumulation, but surely it would help stopping the problem to get worse if the widespread WFH effort were sustained after the pandemic.
It helped on reducing traffic, spending more time with family, favouring local shops... Why we went back still is a mystery for me. Even if it was "working from a coworking space" or anything that was not the downtown open-space.
I remember reading articles about local politicians insisting companies and governments do return to office for no other reason than to have the workers spend money downtown for lunch. Not even implying it, directly stating it.
Because downtown city centers were missing out on office worker revenue and started giving incentives to companies who brought people back into the office. I 100% believe the reason we went back into the office at all was because of this despite all the talk of 'in-person collaboration.'
I don't have data but I was always under the impression that consumer use of fossil fuels (ie gas) was a drop in the bucket compared to enterprise use of fossil fuels (shipping trucks/boats/planes, private jets, etc).
The whole "reduce your carbon footprint PSA" was just a ruse.
But think of the commercial real estate market?!?! What about the chopped salad slop bowl market?! Dry cleaning?! This would shatter the fabric of our precious society. We need butts in seats. We need to foster open communication and cross functional pollination.
Our company made a 'bet' that energy management, sustainability, clean energy and whatnot would become a big thing. This was around the time of COP26 (2021) where there seemed to be a societal drive for reducing carbon emissions and a general acceptance that climate change was a thing. We employed young and enthusiastic sustainability consultants, we run a successful project to reduce energy consumption in polymer manufacturing, we build product that worked. That part of our business has shut down completely.
Unfortunately governments were reluctant to really get behind regulations that were needed, and the business case for investment in any drive to sustainability did not exist. People lost interest as inflation went up, and other things seemed more important. The market was flagging and Trump's "drill baby drill" was the final nail in the coffin.
The world was _nearly_ there to rapidly accelerate reducing the dependency on fossil fuels on the back of climate change. Instead we went back to fossil fuel cars and built energy-intensive AI data centres. We collectively dropped the ball and one day will look back on it as a missed opportunity.
Easier said than done, during this week many German regions are on general strike, thus everyone just switched back to their cars, complaining about unions, their power in infrastructure and so on.
Naturally most of those cars are combustion based, because it is still very expensive to buy a new EV, and even used ones are more expensive than new combustion cars, and there is the whole question of how damaged the battery will be anyway.
Interest rates change for all sorts of reasons. People who take out variable rate home mortgages are always gambling. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose.
Wonder if Chinese solar involution finally going to end, time to jack up prices, and crank factories to full utilization. PRC can make enough solar to replace global oil / lng and good parts of coal in ~10 years, assuming storage also scales proportionally soon.
Slightly different reasons, of course, but I imagine that right about now the regime in Cuba is wishing they had put more effort into solar. Being heavily reliant on oil when you do not produce it yourself is a vulnerable position to be in.
Fossil-fuel subsidies from governments totalled $7trn in 2022.
Thats about 7% of global GDP.
The world spends 4% of GDP on education.
Source Monocle Magazine no.190 page 88.
There is a lot to unpack here and also an obvious solution.
While it could be good to shift to renewable for other reasons, it's naive to assume that nations won't be dependent on others for critical minerals and metals needed to make solar/wind/batteries/etc.
The dependencies needed for the replacement of equipment having a lifetime of many decades are infinitely less dangerous than the dependencies for consumables like fuel.
For critical minerals and metals it is easy to stockpile them to have a buffer sufficient for many years of infrastructure replacement.
Such dependencies may remain a problem during a war, when the infrastructure could be destroyed, but in normal times such dependencies would not be sufficient to enable the kind of blackmailing that can be done with consumables, like food and fuel.
I'm not sure the stockpiling you mention will work the way you propose. We already stockpile oil, yet we still see price shocks. Stockpiling metals can still lead to price shocks due to reluctance to release them and the need to eventually replenish them.
We also stockpile foods and medications, and that doesn't provide price stability.
Food is a constant need, and you can't exist for long without it.
Sure we need to increase battery sotrage, but in ~5 years time, it'll be maintainance, assuming the correct adoption rate. So yes we will still _need_ batteries, but we don't need a constant supply of new batteries to keep the lights on.
They are, but unlike fossil fuels, those dependencies go down over time (modulo the utility growth that makes demand for everything go up, of course).
If you buy fossil fuel from a country that may not be an ally forever, your demand remains constant (or goes up over time) because you are changing that fuel into a state that cannot be used again.
If you buy, say, lithium, you put that in a battery and in the future, you can get more lithium from the ground but you can also grind up batteries and re-extract it when they fail. Battery ingredients are, generally, not consumable over even medium and long-term scale if you build out the recycling infrastructure to recapture those ingredients.
Yes, the shocks aren't as immediate if you have the infrastructure set up and you are out of the initial adoption phase. Even things like lithium and silver are limited resources, so getting more out of the ground will eventually face scarcity as energy demand has always increased over the long term.
We should generate our own power on our own land with our own technology - one day it will seem like insanity that we ever outsourced our most precious resource to the other side of the world, and relied on international shipping/markets to deliver it. Solar is a miracle technology. Wind is very good. Hydro and nuclear can supply large base load. Our own oil can supply peakers. What are we doing in the middle east?
We consume 101 million barrels of oil per day. The amount of oil humans consume per day has doubled since 1980. Is this the way we finally wake up to the urgency of addressing the climate crisis caused by burning fossil fuels?
Now you see, the only country to have used a nuclear weapon in anger also elected itself as world arbitrator of who gets energy and who doesn't, because reasons.
Every country should be speed running nuclear tech as fast as possible if only to scare the freedom fighters away...
Europe and the US need to bring manufacturing of EVs, batteries, solar, and relevant components back locally. Use automation to make it more feasible. We need rooftop solar + regional SMRs for a cheap, stable energy supply.
To do so, we need to adapt regulation & deregulate. This needs to happen now. If we continue on like this, we'll decelerate back to the stone age.
> China has, however, been relatively insulated from the crisis due to its ample emergency oil reserves and high rate of electrification, with EVs representing more than half of its domestic new car sales and its grid more than 50% powered by renewable energy sources.
In the U.S., by comparison, EVs are less than 10% of the market, while renewable power is around a quarter of the nation's electricity generation.
My favorite quote from "Studio 60 on the Sunset Street" (an antique show from the late 2000s) is from the CEO of a fictional media conglomerates, coming back from a trip to Macau with disbelief:
"Tell you kids to learn Mandarin."
The USA is either handing the future on a plate to the Chinese Empire ; or acting like a "chaos monkey" in an anti fragile system, giving just enough scares to the rest of the world to get their act together.
Maybe climate change could not do that because of the long timescale and unpalpability of the issues.
Maybe the first few oil shocks were not enough because you could hope for better days.
Maybe market pressure was not enough because incumbents fossil fuel industries could always buy the right élections to set up the right incentives ; and also, people don't want to change.
Maybe the perfect storm will nudge it ?
That, or we'll just have to speak Mandarin. They do that in Firefly, after all..
I'm unpacking my electric motorbike[1] and its moped sister[2] from winter storage and preparing them both for a summer in a city in a nation which energy supply is mostly renewables.
Of course, it took a lot of gasoline to get them here, but I sure as heck won't be using much gasoline to put them to solid use clocking up the kilometers, 100 at a time.
Got a few deals on solar panels for the backyard that'll get me completely off the grid for the most part, and from then on it'll be maintenance mode and solar powered travel as priority number one ..
If past crisis are any indication this "push" won't last.
We've had crisis with fossil fuels since OPEC's first big price increase in 1973 and the pattern is always the same: first the whole world realizes they need to find alternative sources of energy. Then, after a while, politicians go "drill, baby, drill".
Oil is an addiction and most people don't drop addictions by their own.
Thank god for Elon musk, the only guy actually doing anything with solar, batteries, and affordable electric cars.
Everyone else is just talking advantage of the situation for their own profit.
Honestly, those who attacked Iran should cover the global increase in energy costs for everyone else. Why do I have to pay more for the orange guy? Instead he benefits with his superrich buddies.
if my country has 0 dependence on fossils, how many fucks would I have given for whatever is happening or will be happening in the future in shithole places like the middle east?
Like 1 year ago, wallstreet bros were being interviewed saying they decided all the green pledges and all that was woke from the pre-trump 2 era, and I haven't heard anything at all about climate change really from any world leader in the last few years. I guess once again, people have their coming to jesus moment when it's far too late.
Although the results are very similar, the motivation of energy independence is quite different that of climate change.
America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent. Whereas in Europe we do as there isn't much natural gas or oil and even the coal that remains is difficult to extract and thus less economical.
Even at that, America is rapidly turning away from oil as wind and solar are so much cheaper. The leaders are putting on the brakes, and the change is uneven - but there is a lot of wind and solar going up in the US even now and it has been happening for 15+years.
> America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent.
In the short to medium term. The natural gas, oil etc. are in fact finite resources created over a tremendously long period of time in pre-history and so once they run out you're done.
You could run nuclear power plants much longer, perhaps even indefinitely, and of course wind and sunlight are renewable, Sol doesn't give a shit what we do, it's going to shine on the planet and cause winds here until long after we're dead. But the dinosaur juice runs out, it's a quick burst and then if you didn't transition too fucking bad game over.
Yeah, exactly. We have a relatively short window of a few centuries, perhaps less, to master nuclear power (perhaps even nuclear fusion), photovoltaic panels, efficient wind turbines (including more complex offshore construction) and deploy them all at scale.
And to do it all before we cook ourselves in greenhouse gases.
I'm rather optimistic about it but it does seem that most people don't fully grasp the importance of such a transition.
Anyone has any respect left for US Americans after they elected this? This is so ridiculous at so many levels:
Not US hollywood culture or whatever Americans culturally exported in the past all around the world, but this will forever represent US Americans in my mind. That this is how they overall want to be seen and represented as all around the world, seemingly:
“Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran,” President Trump posted on X. “Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility.”
“NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar,” the U.S. president also wrote, proceeding then to threaten to “massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.”
What even is this style of communication and thinking behind it from a leader of the richest country in the world? Is he a child? Who can even be impressed by this... unbelievable. Feels like we're like living in a very dumb, very deadly, reality show.
Kamala was always obviously a better option than Trump. Let's not pretend people didn't know who and what Trump was, or that his behavior after 2024 came as a shock to anyone.
I think most people expected Trump Two to be a similar shit show to Trump One. I was no fan, but he was generally popular on the issue of the economy during his first term, and I think a lot of people had the economy as their primary consideration in 2024. Flooding the zone works, they tuned out all the rhetoric as partisan noise.
A majority thought differently. They knew who Trump was and who Kamala was, and they voted for Trump. That's how it goes in a democracy...
Anyways, they're getting what they voted for
I'm not so sure that's true. Trump is making very different decisions in this term than his first term. I think a lot of his voters thought, "Everything was fine in his first term while all the liberals were crying all the time, I'd like more of that". This time around, things are not fine and we're seeing the regret show up in the polling numbers.
It's doubly dismaying that my own country (US) is still doubling down on fossil fuels despite everything.
The concern about a new dependency on China is real, but renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in place it keeps working without continuously importing fuel. Nonetheless, China has done a good job building up their PV/battery manufacturing capacity (including via subsidies for a while if I'm not mistaken) and to the extent the rest of the world wants to avoid a dependency on them we should do that too.
It feels like this collective insanity will never end
A couple of years ago the last of the exploration rigs in Norway left Norwegian waters. Because nothing that could be drilled (and hasn't already) can compete on price with solar etc.
Lots of people think someone should do this or that. They don't invest their own money though, they just think someone else should do, etc.
I'm guessing you think otherwise? Why? Do you think the energy transition will be faster? What makes you think that?
Right now all that's happening is the US is extracting that natural gas, and the middle east extracting that oil, and Europe is importing it. Which pollutes more and costs more. Just develop your domestic supplies.
I don't follow your logic.
Ember Energy: European electricity prices and costs - https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an... (updated daily)
Ember Energy: Wind and solar generated more power than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time in 2025 - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-gener... - January 22nd, 2026
Bloomberg: How Europe Ditched Russian Fossil Fuels With Spectacular Speed - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/ukraine-n... | https://archive.today/yxGp2 - February 21st, 2023
> But what the past year has shown is that it’s possible to go harder and faster in deploying solar panels and batteries, reducing energy use, and permanently swapping out entrenched sources of fossil fuel. Solar installations across Europe increased by a record 40-gigawatts last year, up 35% compared with 2021, just shy of the most optimistic scenario from researchers at BloombergNEF. That jump was driven primarily by consumers who saw cheap solar panels as a way to cut their own energy bills. It essentially pushed the solar rollout ahead by a few years, hitting a level that will be sustained by EU policies.
(Europe has enough wind potential to power the world, their energy constraints are deployment rate of renewables, battery storage, and transmission)
Heck right now, Europe is still burning coal (and worse yet - lignite coal) for electricity. Natural gas would be a huge improvement on that.
Note that drilling for oil in the North Sea is a completely different subject, because that's not used for electricity generation, nor is electricity a substitute. EV market share in Europe is still far too low for that to be a conversation for a long time.
Your comment is wishful thinking and ignores the current reality of how Europe imports and uses energy.
But even if your best case scenario were somehow possible (and it really isn't) there's still money to be made exporting fossil fuels to the developing world. So your assertion "inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration" is just flat wrong.
> Note that drilling for oil in the North Sea is a completely different subject, because that's not used for electricity generation, nor is electricity a substitute. EV market share in Europe is still far too low for that to be a conversation for a long time.
Europe's EV uptake will speed based on the price of oil increasing and remaining high for the foreseeable future.
> But even if your best case scenario were somehow possible (and it really isn't) there's still money to be made exporting fossil fuels to the developing world. So your assertion "inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration" is just flat wrong.
The developing world is leapfrogging fossil fuels and going straight to solar, batteries, and EVs. What will expensive LNG do to this market? It will force them to renewables and electric mobility faster. Ethopia's uptake of EVs after they banned combustion vehicles is an example of this. Why did they ban combustion vehicles? Because they have no domestic fossil fuel supplies and the import cost was crushing them; their EVs are powered by domestic hydro electricity production.
Surging Gas Prices Reignite EV Interest - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-14/iran-war-... | https://archive.today/BkAfR - March 14th, 2026
Global EV sales hit 1.1 million – Europe surges while the US slides - https://electrek.co/2026/03/12/global-ev-sales-hit-1-1-milli... | https://archive.today/nhIbF - March 12th, 2026
EVs Avoided the Use of 2.3M Barrels of Oil per Day in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420092 - March 2026
Electric Vehicle Sales Boom as Ethiopia Bans Fossil-Fuel Car Imports - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068567 - February 2026
How we made it: will China be the first electrostate? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44101275 - May 2025
Massive global growth of renewables to 2030 is set to match entire power capacity of major economies today, moving world closer to tripling goal - https://www.iea.org/news/massive-global-growth-of-renewables... - October 9th, 2024
The World Hit ‘Peak’ Gas-Powered Vehicle Sales — in 2017 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-30/world-hit... - January 30th, 2024
You're living in a fantasy world that doesn't exist.
They simply do not believe that the consequences will be as bad as the models predict. And a lot of trust and good will has been expended on social issues, for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose, or to promote childhood reassignment surgery, etc. As a strategic decision, we have taken our eye off the ball, climate change is actually an existential threat, bathroom choice never was. You can argue that we can do two things at once, but there is a cost for dividing our focus and effort; even if it didn't raise the hackles of those already less predisposed to worry about the environment.
I think a lot of people miss this: each time you take up the good fight, you spend some trust/goodwill. If you're going to expend the public's goodwill, make sure that there is nothing more important to you than what you are expending it on, or expend less of it to save some trust and goodwill for this.
Ugh, I'm going to regret commenting here, but it really seems like this obsession is almost entirely on the right wing. In the US, the centrist Dems have been banging the appeasement drum for my entire political life, and it's gotten us nowhere.
Like... the right isn't going to wake up and start caring about climate change if everyone just shuts up and lets them discriminate against the hate group of the moment. The bathroom thing is also such a bait and switch, same as sports. In my state, we removed protections for housing and employment discrimination against trans people because... one trans athlete existed?
The real question we need to answer is why the right is so obsessed with other peoples' genitals, to the point that they have to make up stories and generate AI videos to get mad at.
I for one am sick of people focusing on a tiny fraction of the population and making them a scapegoat for everything. You're absolutely right that climate change is a bigger issue - so why can't we focus on it?
We can't focus on it because the anti-reality reactionaries are using trans people as a distraction. It's all one big malignant tumor on society, not a collection of unrelated issues.
What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction. To claim loud and proudly that transgender issues were not important when compared to climate change. To refocus the public on climate change and take the wind out of the fringe issue.
Instead, we took to the street for BLM, when it wasn't an important issue, when compared to climate change. You can't blame the right-wing for the number of people who filled the streets for BLM... during a pandemic where we were supposed to socially distance. It cost us doubly. And not one important left-wing voice stood up and said so.
It's strongly my opinion that there are far fewer people championing 'wokeness' than there are 'getting outraged by it's pervasiveness'. Mainly for the fact that all media like to seize upon controversy, thus turning minor fringe issues into multiple days in a row of front page headline items.
Blech. I've done the same thing...
Address climate change, accelerate the shift towards renewables. It's something that actually fucking matters!
Well, there's also the simple reality that the US doesn't actually need fossil fuels from the Middle East or Russia in the same way Europe does. It affects prices here, obviously, and an increase in energy prices can do severe damage to the economy, but it's not a potentially existential crisis in the same way.
The other funny part about oil is that it has an inelastic demand. A 20% reduction in global supply doesn’t mean a 20% increase in prices. It means increase in prices until 20% demand collapses (which could theoretically mean orders of magnitude of increase in pricing). Which means expensive fertilizers, medicines and pretty every other bare necessity.
With these two facts, pretty much every country needs the oil from the Middle East.
You’re referring to Twitter, right? ;)
- Continue building out solar + battery storage
- Resume drilling in domestic accessible offshore locations safe from trade disruptions
- Recommission and build new nuclear plants
- Build LNG import terminals to eliminate dependence on Russian gas
So, like, both I guess.
It takes tremendous hardship and a lot of time to push people to renewables. Give them their cheap oil back and they are hooked on the needle again in no time. Historically we've been there, multiple times.
Sorry for the cynicism. I too hope it is finally happening at least, and maybe it is at last.
That said I’m all for it, too bad the supply chain disruption that this mess will cause will make it twice as hard as it could’ve been.
There are issues if the infrastructure is network accessible and is updatable. The consumer end of it (e.g. home solar) is often dependent on apps etc. and is very vulnerable. I hope (probably optimistically) that critical systems are air gapped.
Its always been obvious to me that we should have a variety or energy sources for security and its complacent to think otherwise. Over-reliance on an unstable region makes it all the worse.
The dependency is latent, is only become a problem when you (USA) does something to dick with China's dependency on you.
If you don't do that, no problems. The rest of us live just fine depending on things from China.
Saying that America is better off with high gas prices is like saying Americans will eat more beef if the price of beef doubles because we make lots of beef. Cattle ranchers will be better off; everyone else eats more potatoes.
And yes this is exactly how petrostates work. I wonder why is it surprising. Sure their population also pays higher prices for gas at the pump when the oil goes up, but they massively win in every other way.
It's simply a long, embedded stereotype of "high oil price = bad" because of traumatic experience of 1973 and 1979. It's different today. The higher the oil price, the better it is for America.
Also again, US gas prices are by far the cheapest among every halfway developed countries. Everyone else will suffer more. So relatively again, US wins even here.
Most of the retail pump price difference is self-inflicted, though. If those other countries wanted to suffer less in that regard, they know how.
What the US exports isn't "car ready" - most primary oil sources are heavily biased one way or the other (heavy, sweet, light, etc) and the useful end product is blended.
It's not straightforward for the US to get high on it's own supply and even what it delivers to others is less useful to thse others when other non-US sources aren't readily available to blend in.
Also ... using sequestered carbon has been increasing the insulation factor of our common atmosphere, left unchecked (ie. stopping the use of fossil fuels) is a major problem for the coming century.
Plus one of the reasons why we export so much oil is because it's cheaper to import oil to a refinery in New Jersey from Saudi Arabia than to get it there from Texas due to some very stupid US laws.
Though to be clear I believe we would still be a net exporter without the Jones Act, it's just one of those weird things about the US oil industry.
Its not just Florida. There are multiple problems. Many can be mitigated, but I very much doubt they will be as its easy to put off.
And no, in China global warming means worsening desertification, in Russia it means melting permafrost that covers 60% of the country, same in Canada. Europe and the US are uniquely positioned to suffer the least from it and many industries will win outright. For example, there will be year-round tourist season within continental EU: all summer on the Baltics and the North Sea and all winter in the Mediterranean; winemaking in Spain and southern France will suffer badly and in some places may become commercially non-viable, but will expand to great lot more territory in northern Germany, low countries, Poland, UK, thus enabling a lot richer wines due to great variety of soils.
Eg: When surface ice gets very low the trapped heat will go more torward heating water than melting ice.
That's very double plus bad (ask a high school physics teacher about the energy used to melt, say, a kilogram of ice .. then ask them by how many degrees C does that same energy raise the temp. of water).
Oil to $200/barrel please, as long as possible, same with LNG.
Edit: Iran attack wipes out 17% of Qatar’s LNG capacity for up to five years, QatarEnergy CEO says - https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/2026/03/19/iran-attack-... - March 19th, 2026
Looks like the global clean energy transition will be getting back up to speed.
Broadly speaking, the overall system dependent on energy must adapt or die. The capital exists to decarbonize rapidly. How hard the arm must be twisted is the natural experiment to observe. In the meantime, all critical fossil assets are legitimate targets in the operating environment.
These are all choices. If you are unhappy with the outcomes of choices you have the authority to make, make better choices.
So the oil companies are happy because this temporarily brought forward future demand and thus profit, as well as expend a bunch of money/resources from competitors of oil which predicates a high price per barrel to make financial sense. If/when oil prices drop back down, these renewable investments might not compete.
To truly transition over will mean doing it with the world kicking and screaming imho. It cannot be made smooth.
A few get rich. Project2025 (that is, their hardwing agenda is the cover up for theft).
We need to monitor these guys and then take back what they took from all of us globally.
Please read hn rules.
Then once the dust settles they’re the only company which can handle large order sizes required for supply chains to build downstream products, and the world becomes further reliant on them.
Security concerns and national defense aside, a prime example pre-ban was Huawei layer 1 infrastructure products which far exceeded feature density, and cost effectiveness than competitors due to the subsidies. They’ve done similar tactics with solar panels.
This doesn’t imply China or their state sponsored companies never create novel tech, but there’s a hugely perverse system whose purpose is to illegally undercut competition overseas with no real recourse from the victim countries outside of total company bans. And even then, people find a way around the bans and the damage is already done to the original companies.
Solar panels: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2021/12/09/chinas-state-sp...
Huawai: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/chinas-huawei-threat-us-na...
The reason china was able to do this is because of the free trade movement that started with Reagan to undercut US unions. US companies outsourced all the manufacturing as much as possible and china capitalized on the market opportunity.
Am I supposed to be mad that jobs shipped to china who steals a tech weren't shipped to Vietnam who hasn't stolen tech?
China is hardly the only country that has used internal policies and loose intellectual copyrights to get ahead (Famously, the US did the same thing in the late 1800s, stealing factory designs from england). And part of the reason US companies still do business with them is because they are cheaper.
Welcome to the real world. Whoever isn't cheating is losing.
Germany ripped off British engineering texts because they had no copyright laws there.
America got started taking what was started elsewhere, the same can be said for any country except for Scotland.
I think those lovely Chinese people would laugh at your sinophobic 'thinking'. Maybe stay off the corporate media and do your own research.
Huawei are an amazing company, all of their kit is highly innovative, but too good for you and your slave masters. Hence the lies. In fact, if you want a computer that isn't 'NSA Inside', go with Huawei. You won't look back, although they won't sell you a PC with Nvidia in it or a phone with Google in it because of your government.
Solar panels? Germany did the work on that, China bought the IP and did the production engineering. All is legit.
Besides, that screen you are looking at, was that made in America? Nah, it is going to be China, outside chance, Korea.
no all that shit just not worth that much;
The profit marginsof these industries are ridiculously high, to the point that if you’re willing, you can manufacture many useful, high‑quality products.
only when China could build them, there are real "free" market
We might get car charging infrastructure only a few years down the line. Maybe a bike shed for e-bike charging a year after that?
What happened to those optimistic ideas where every lamp post had a charger? I would pay for that. I also see these small transformer huts on the streets. What if at least those had neighborhood high speed chargers, it shouldn't cost much since basically there's a good power source right there?
There's just so much friction. I hope some enterpreneur here makes these things real!
The bizarre thing is that our government still wants to close down the remaining nuclear power plants. One of the issues with our proportional electoral system is that smaller, more extreme parties can become kingmakers and in our current situation the centre-left governing party relies on the support of the far-left party to stay in power, and those guys are rabidly anti-nuclear power.
But this should be a clear signal that we need renewable power and nuclear power and we need to speed up the adoption of electric vehicles. Ending the tariffs with China that stop us benefiting from their affordable PV panels and electric cars would be a good step towards this.
In the case of Germany, nuclear makes sense, but it is not clear where you would buy fuel for it, It might still be a supply chain risk since Russia and Kazakhstan are the main players there.
Ironically, Spain has plenty of Uranium, but there is an environmental law that doesn't allow its mining.
https://alpoma.medium.com/uranium-in-spain-8ef975763257
This country is crazy.
The outage in spain had multiple complex causes.
While the grid had a rather routine instability/oscillation on-going during time of the incident, the actual point-of-no-return was completely non-technical: Prices crossed into the negatives, which caused generation to drop by hundreds of megawatts and load to increase likewise within a minute (!) because the price acted as a non-technical synchronized drop-off signal for the grid.
In grids where the price action is not forwarded directly to the generators and consumers there would be no incentive to suddenly drop off decentralized generation. So for example in Germany a black-out would not happen like this.
You can download the full ENTSO-E report here: https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-ib... (See page 10 for a broad incident timeline)
Unfortunately, to have an informed opinion, you pretty much have to read all these pages, because the situation is just so complex. Otherwise, you just fall for agenda pushing from all sides.
While the report I listed mentions the sudden loss of decentralized generation as starting point of the blackout, and also specifically mentions small-scale rooftop PV, it says that the cause for that sudden synchronized drop-off is actually unknown.
All reasonable grids already force renewables to handle reactive power if they want to connect, like they do for all electricity generation.
It is a trivial expense, but still an expense so no one does it unless forced.
It is NOT cheap, it is cheap for sellers, because they account on the basis of a MWh being equally useful all the time. It isn't. There are TWh-scale shortfalls in winter because, and a medieval peasant understood this, a shortage of ambient energy is what winter is, and it's worth paying energy penny you have to avoid its worst effects.
Business is not better. I've worked in the chemicals industry, and conferences in Europe have been like a wake for the last decade. I've overseen large orders go to China because, I could not give a shit how much it cost, the European green alternative - for delivery within Europe - could not guarantee timeframes, due to reliance on renewables. The Chinese shipped product could. That is your "cheap".
You can buy uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, Mali, Canada, US, Australia, or the sea if you really want to, all of those have large reserves, and store multiple years' worth more or less by accident, modern industrial processes actually struggle to make sense at the low volumes nuclear requires. Bringing that up as a problem is just not honest.
For example:
> Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today.
Do you mean cost per country (not levelized?)? Even then, UK energy is not the most expensive.
UK energy is expensive because we have gas-linked wholesale pricing. That's nothing to do with the true cost of renewables. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're being disingenuous.
(Gas-linked pricing was implemented for sensible reasons, but I don't see how it continues to be tenable today).
The problem is new built nuclear power which costs €180-240 per MWh excluding insurance, backup, final waste disposal etc.
It also won't be online until the 2040s meaning it is entirely irrelevant as as solution to anything on a time scope not on the level of decades.
> By the most optimistic scenarios... there's no way they are going to have new nuclear come on stream until 2021, 2022. So it's just not even an answer
Well, now we are in 2026, and we still have the same problem.
For Hinkley Point C with the latest estimate being the first reactor online (not commercially operational) in 2030 that gives a "planning to operation" time of 24 years.
For Sizewell C EDF are refusing to take on any semblence of a fixed price contract and they are instead going with a guaranteed profit pay as you go model. Where ratepayers handout enormous sums today to hopefully get something in return in the 2040s.
The centre-left party made the agreement with the power companies in 2019 when they were not yet in coalition, for economic reasons.
The far-left, now in the coalition, does consider nuclear a red line. It is unknown what the cost of crossing it would be. But I believe it's irrelevant, because if the centre-left party would be governing alone, they wouldn't walk back the agreement now. No matter price of oil, the investment in nuclear has a too large price-tag, and would take way to long to reap any benefits. If any - given the current progression on renewables.
Not to speak of the inconvenient fact that Uranium is not a resource found in sufficient quantity in Europe and current European nuclear reactors get their fuel from Russia and Niger, not exactly reliable havens of stability.
Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors to retain the required workforce and research base. For everyone else it is a money sink and a complication when designing their grid for renewable energy.
Strategic mix.
I'm not saying its a good or bad idea, but nuclear can be used as a tool with batteries to make wind much more reliable. urianium sourcing can be an issue, but sadly so are batteries. (granted nuclear fuel is changed more often)
I am unfortunately not the one empowered to make these decisions, nor do I know the reasoning of those who are, I just noted it seems back on the table based on discussions, maybe because
>Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors
since also on the table seems to be making a deal with France for Nuclear Weapons access, as I understand what I read.
Let them enjoy their "cheap" wind and battery solution.
Because the related lobby pays well and a huge power station project (which runs well into the tens of billions) has much larger space for bribes
At least the MAGA Hard right is staring to come around. Who could have guessed that they like extremely cheap distributed energy generation!?!?
> Why MAGA suddenly loves solar power
> The Trump-led attack on solar eases as the right reckons with its crucial role in powering AI and keeping utility bills in check.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/03/02/katie-mil...
That is very weird, even Germany stated recently that closing down their Nuclear Plants was a big mistake.
For a very long time, I have always said France is smarter than what people give them credit for. Spain should take a peek over the mountains at France to see what a sane energy policy looks like.
In June 1997, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced the closure of the power plant as one of his first official acts. He justified this step by pointing to the enormous costs the plant incurred. In the preceding ten years, it had produced no electricity for most of the time due to malfunctions. It even consumed considerable amounts of electricity to keep the sodium in the cooling system above its melting temperature. Each pipe carrying sodium and every tank was equipped with heaters and thermal insulation for this purpose.
... so it used a lot of energy while being shut down because of malfunctions for most of those 10 years. Seems like shutting it down was the best course of action.
Plus there was the pressure from Les Verts and Sortir du nucléaire, the Molotov cocktail attacks by the Fédération Anarchiste, the RPG attack by the Cellules Communistes Combattantes etc.
It was a highly political decision.
Not even the major energy suppliers are interested in building new nuclear reactors.
I was not against prolonging the phase out for a bit, but we don't even have a permanent storage solution after all this time.
They aren't even compatible with climate change: https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
Of course the EU is bigger than the US and there is value in duplicated/distributed effort. The EU as a whole should be thinking "partner with everyone, but have our fingers in every single pot someplace just in case".
Well that's because we have a new government, CDU was always in favor of nuclear power.
Incidentally, if I remember correctly, one of the causes (or things that made it worse) of the almost day-long blackout we (Spain) had last year was because France disconnected one of the links to Spain without notifying us properly.
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
I live on Spain . What the hell restrictions are you talking about ?
I guess private homes weren’t included because of the difficulty of enforcement.
They fund other stuff that weakens and divides Europe too like the separatist movements in Scotland, Catalonia etc.
That's not to say that all the people in these movements are Russian agents or that these groups don't have some good points and legitimate grievances, but nonetheless they are an easy, cost-effective way for Russia to attack us.
That sort of event doesn't fade away quickly and definitely influenced energy policy that persists to this day. Thankfully the tide is turning due to safer designs.
Nuclear power has an LCOE that is 5x the cost of solar and wind. Nobody would build it on cost alone.
The only reason countries build and run nuclear power plants is because it shares supply chain and a skills base with the nuclear military.
Which means they have nukes (France, Russia, US) or they they want to take out an option to one day build a nuke in a hurry just in case for a threat that is usually very obvious (Sweden, Japan, South Korea).
This was clearly recognized when Iran started building nuclear power plants but when Poland suddenly got interested in 2023 ostensibly "because environment" after decades of burning mountains of coal nobody batted an eye.
Winters here have more sunshine than UK summers.
They have tried hard to build economies that aren't just fossil fuel exports. Tourism, trade, finance, luxury living for rich foreigners… but everything they have tried is contingent on peace in the region. I doubt foreigners are looking forward to layovers in Dubai now there are Iranian drones heading their way.
Maybe future travelers will not see two trunkless legs in a desert, but empty condo towers and abandoned super cars still loaded with labubus.
Maybe they actually will gaze upon it and despair (just not for the reason the original poem said :-))
As long as you don't look at the receipts yes, technically it works very well, in every other aspect it's a massive waste of resource and money.
https://abcnews.com/International/us-allied-radar-sites-midd...
This biggest loss was the mobile THAAD radar in Jordan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/TPY-2_transportable_radar There's also evidence they hit a building in Saudi Arabia containing a AN/TPY-2 but it's not clear if it was damaged
Plus a couple videos of fixed radomes getting hit by drones
Defending against ballistic missiles is well known to not be perfect, even against Iran's lest sophisticated missiles it's very difficult. But the high end missile systems are worth trying. The main problem is the lack of cheap drone interceptors which has been a blaring siren since Ukraine war started that the US neglected by not treating it as an emergency.
"It’s worth pointing out that Hezbollah has managed to get rockets right down to the south of Israel today – and that is unprecedented. Never before has Hezbollah managed to get rockets so far south into Israel."
https://aje.news/b8762y?update=4414645
I think we might be the fanatics starting a religious war.
I might reach my dream life (no work just binge hacking kernels) sooner than I expected. Now I just need to pretend I don’t need money as well.
Fasting can use previous/saved energy, but it still needs energy.
(Maybe that OLTP project was onto something, after all)
I'm not saying that the dependence on the middle east was good, but I think it's good to keep in mind that this was a pretty stable equilibrium even with the various questionable countries involved until the US initiated a global supply shock without a good reason.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
The whole "reduce your carbon footprint PSA" was just a ruse.
It is especially true in the context of this war when the US is attacking oil infrastructure which is causing catastrophic environmental damage: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/world/middleeast/iran-oil...
Similarly related to the paper straw meme that has been circulating the last while.
When I buy a large SUV / Truck, and never drive it, is that not counted negative towards my carbon foodprint?
They did it during covid so I wouldn't rule it out.
Unfortunately governments were reluctant to really get behind regulations that were needed, and the business case for investment in any drive to sustainability did not exist. People lost interest as inflation went up, and other things seemed more important. The market was flagging and Trump's "drill baby drill" was the final nail in the coffin.
The world was _nearly_ there to rapidly accelerate reducing the dependency on fossil fuels on the back of climate change. Instead we went back to fossil fuel cars and built energy-intensive AI data centres. We collectively dropped the ball and one day will look back on it as a missed opportunity.
Naturally most of those cars are combustion based, because it is still very expensive to buy a new EV, and even used ones are more expensive than new combustion cars, and there is the whole question of how damaged the battery will be anyway.
Feels like stressful living.
There is a lot to unpack here and also an obvious solution.
For critical minerals and metals it is easy to stockpile them to have a buffer sufficient for many years of infrastructure replacement.
Such dependencies may remain a problem during a war, when the infrastructure could be destroyed, but in normal times such dependencies would not be sufficient to enable the kind of blackmailing that can be done with consumables, like food and fuel.
We also stockpile foods and medications, and that doesn't provide price stability.
Food is a constant need, and you can't exist for long without it.
Sure we need to increase battery sotrage, but in ~5 years time, it'll be maintainance, assuming the correct adoption rate. So yes we will still _need_ batteries, but we don't need a constant supply of new batteries to keep the lights on.
If you buy fossil fuel from a country that may not be an ally forever, your demand remains constant (or goes up over time) because you are changing that fuel into a state that cannot be used again.
If you buy, say, lithium, you put that in a battery and in the future, you can get more lithium from the ground but you can also grind up batteries and re-extract it when they fail. Battery ingredients are, generally, not consumable over even medium and long-term scale if you build out the recycling infrastructure to recapture those ingredients.
Every country should be speed running nuclear tech as fast as possible if only to scare the freedom fighters away...
To do so, we need to adapt regulation & deregulate. This needs to happen now. If we continue on like this, we'll decelerate back to the stone age.
My favorite quote from "Studio 60 on the Sunset Street" (an antique show from the late 2000s) is from the CEO of a fictional media conglomerates, coming back from a trip to Macau with disbelief:
"Tell you kids to learn Mandarin."
The USA is either handing the future on a plate to the Chinese Empire ; or acting like a "chaos monkey" in an anti fragile system, giving just enough scares to the rest of the world to get their act together.
Maybe climate change could not do that because of the long timescale and unpalpability of the issues.
Maybe the first few oil shocks were not enough because you could hope for better days.
Maybe market pressure was not enough because incumbents fossil fuel industries could always buy the right élections to set up the right incentives ; and also, people don't want to change.
Maybe the perfect storm will nudge it ?
That, or we'll just have to speak Mandarin. They do that in Firefly, after all..
Of course, it took a lot of gasoline to get them here, but I sure as heck won't be using much gasoline to put them to solid use clocking up the kilometers, 100 at a time.
Got a few deals on solar panels for the backyard that'll get me completely off the grid for the most part, and from then on it'll be maintenance mode and solar powered travel as priority number one ..
[1] - https://www.blackteamotorbikes.com/
[2] - https://unumotors.com/
We've had crisis with fossil fuels since OPEC's first big price increase in 1973 and the pattern is always the same: first the whole world realizes they need to find alternative sources of energy. Then, after a while, politicians go "drill, baby, drill".
Oil is an addiction and most people don't drop addictions by their own.
That would be the stupidest takeaway
oh, surprise! blowing up oil infrastructure increases oil prices.
shocking news.
meanwhile.. didn't china start selling cars with sodium sulfur batteries?
America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent. Whereas in Europe we do as there isn't much natural gas or oil and even the coal that remains is difficult to extract and thus less economical.
In the short to medium term. The natural gas, oil etc. are in fact finite resources created over a tremendously long period of time in pre-history and so once they run out you're done.
You could run nuclear power plants much longer, perhaps even indefinitely, and of course wind and sunlight are renewable, Sol doesn't give a shit what we do, it's going to shine on the planet and cause winds here until long after we're dead. But the dinosaur juice runs out, it's a quick burst and then if you didn't transition too fucking bad game over.
And to do it all before we cook ourselves in greenhouse gases.
I'm rather optimistic about it but it does seem that most people don't fully grasp the importance of such a transition.
Not US hollywood culture or whatever Americans culturally exported in the past all around the world, but this will forever represent US Americans in my mind. That this is how they overall want to be seen and represented as all around the world, seemingly:
“Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran,” President Trump posted on X. “Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility.”
“NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar,” the U.S. president also wrote, proceeding then to threaten to “massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.”
What even is this style of communication and thinking behind it from a leader of the richest country in the world? Is he a child? Who can even be impressed by this... unbelievable. Feels like we're like living in a very dumb, very deadly, reality show.
It took you hindsight? I could've told you that in 2024 with regular sight.