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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   26652 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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Why are Americans becoming more anti-renewable?

The share of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who say the country should prioritize oil, coal and natural gas over wind and solar power has doubled to 71% over the last six years. Majorities of Republicans see wind and solar power as less reliable than other energy sources, and decreasing shares of Republicans say wind and solar energy is better for the environment.

With rising energy costs and increased demand, Americans are still more likely to say that renewable energy should be prioritized over fossil fuels. But that share continues to drop: 57% say this today, down from 79% in 2020. About eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic leaners (83%) say the country should give priority to developing wind and solar production, but this share has also ticked downward in the last few years.

Wind and solar attract the most support, with about two-thirds (65%) calling for policies to expand production from these sources. And coal mining attracts the least support, with more saying the government should discourage (36%) this activity than encourage it (27%). Americans have more mixed views of other sources, with none attracting majority support, but also none facing large opposition.

Republicans have long been less supportive of wind and solar production than Democrats. In 2022, a slim majority (54%) of Republicans supported government policies to encourage production of these renewable sources. In four years, that has dropped 10 percentage points to 44%. This is consistent with past Center surveys, which found that the shares of Republicans who say they support more wind power and solar power both dropped by more than 20 points from 2020 to 2025. An overwhelming majority of Democrats (85%) continue to say the federal government should encourage the production of wind and solar power.

The opposite pattern emerges with fossil fuel sources: Republicans have been more supportive than Democrats of federal programs to encourage these sources, and the share in favor of such programs has grown. 62% of Republicans now say the federal government should encourage oil and gas drilling, up 11 percentage points since January 2022. 45% of Republicans say the federal government should encourage coal mining, up 13 points in four years. Much smaller shares of Republicans say the federal government should discourage oil and gas drilling (8%) or coal mining (14%). Just as in the Biden years, Democrats are far more likely to say the federal government should discourage rather than encourage oil and gas drilling and coal mining.

As with other attitudes around renewable energy, Republicans are less likely than they were five years ago to say solar and wind power are better for the environment. Republicans are 14 percentage points less likely now to say that solar power is better for the environment than most other energy sources. Similarly, there has been a 12-point drop in the share of Republicans who say that wind power is better for the environment than most other energy sources. About three-in-ten Republicans (29%) now say wind power is worse for the environment, up 12 points from five years ago. More Republicans say wind (44%) and solar (43%) cost consumers more than other energy sources than say these cost less than other sources (19% and 24%, respectively).

Americans view both solar and wind power as less reliable than other energy sources (though more Americans say wind is less reliable than say the same about solar). Republicans are especially negative about these sources’ reliability. This year, Republicans are far more likely to say solar and wind power are less reliable rather than more reliable compared with other energy sources, while Democrats are more mixed. Democrats are split on the reliability of wind power, and they’re more likely to think solar power is more reliable than less reliable.

Landman really is that popular, huh? Battery tech has only gotten better and cheaper, and the LCOE of renewables even with storage added is competitive with or better than fossil fuels, yet public opinion is backsliding. Gas is still great because the US has so much of it, but the DoE is even trying to force coal plants to keep running at cost to consumers, even when states and operators want them retired. Coal miners can't be that large of a constituency, surely, so what's driving this obsession in particular?

Why are Americans becoming more anti-renewable?

Beacuse they are correctly updated on the reliability issues of renewables, and not at all updated on the fact battery technology is now quite good and cheap. ERCOT is standing up massive amounts of batteries right now.

God bless Texas, in some places capitalism still has a reality bias.

I'm typing this from inside my solar-panel-bedecked house in Texas, so don't take it too critically, but Texas is among the best spots for solar, not the typical spots. I get 300 days a year of good sunlight, and most of my residential energy demand is coming from A/C requirements that spike only a few hours after the solar supply does, so people here can get away with few batteries ... or if you rely on the grid for evening power like I do, no on-site batteries.

If your city doesn't get as much insolation (most of China, for some reason?) the economics look a little different. If much of your home energy demand is coming from a heat pump that needs to be pumping in the opposite direction (what, half the US?), the economics look a lot different. If both are true (half of Europe?) then it's long past time (except for you, France, we're cool) to just go nuclear.

For sure. Renewables aren't something you can just put anywhere. They have pros/cons like all power generation options. The pro/con balance has just shifted massively in the last 10 years and people don't recognize or acknowledge that.

It's just another tool in the belt of an industrial civilization. And to dismiss them because of culture warring is retarded and counterproductive to the betterment of humanity.

Why are Americans becoming more anti-renewable?

Because they monitor the situation, and see that world is getting more spicy and big boog is coming. And in boog times, dispersed renewable power sources are completely indefensible.

If you disagree, show your work, show your plan to protect solar plant or offshore wind farm from attack by drone swarms that are now common in Eastern Europe.

19th century technology is the answer for 21st century problems.

Germany considers ramping up coal power to avert energy crisis

Italy to push back coal plant phase out to 2038

Asian nations push for dirty fuels to ease energy crisis amid West Asia war

The future is not shiny happy solarpunk, the future is combination of cyberpunk, steampunk and gulagpunk. This is not the future you have to like, but this is the future you were promised.

show your plan to protect solar plant or offshore wind farm from attack by drone swarms that are now common in Eastern Europe.

No infrastructure can withstand a coordinated attacker with access to a large number of cutting edge effectors...

If you disagree, show your work, show your plan to protect solar plant or offshore wind farm from attack by drone swarms that are now common in Eastern Europe.

What's the plan to defend refineries and fuel plants? Solar farms are at least widely dispersed. A drone can only knock out a few panels, or a single turbine, at a time.

Russia's invasion didn't save coal and this won't either.

I think the major reason is not anything more complicated than "libs like renewable energy and often get annoying about it, so I like the opposite of renewable energy".

It's not that much of an exaggeration to say that you could get some right-wingers to jump off a bridge if you told them that the libs were against jumping off bridges, and vice versa that you could get some left-wingers to jump off a bridge if you told them that Trump was against jumping off bridges.

Ironically the Orthodox Church has always had a very strong relationship with nature and ecological preservation. Just do an Amazon search for books on Orthodoxy and ecology. If the standard right-winger thinks renewable and clean energy is something that makes you a liberal then they clearly aren’t aware of the threads within their own tradition.

Just do an Amazon search for books on Orthodoxy and ecology.

And then do search on actually existing Orthodox countries environmental practices.

To be fair, the church was suppressed in the majority of their populations for a large part of the 20th century. Not that I really think they would have been great friends of the environment even if the church had not been suppressed. There wasn't really much of a choice, unfortunately. They had to either industrialize hard or be invaded at worst or reduced to economic backwaters at best.

...this seems confused, to me?

Firstly, almost no American right-wingers are Orthodox, because almost no Americans are Orthodox full stop. It is entirely to be expected that Eastern Orthodoxy plays practically zero role in the formation of beliefs on the American right. Most American right-wingers do not feel that Orthodoxy is part of their heritage and therefore pay no attention to it. Orthodoxy is simply not a relevant part of the American political or cultural landscape.

Secondly, Orthodox Christians are not a particularly right-wing demographic. Per Pew there, in 2023-24, 50% of Orthodox identified as Republican or leaning Republican, versus 6% in the middle, and 44% for Democrats. By comparison, Evangelicals are 70-6-24, Mainline Protestants are 52-8-41, Catholics are 49-8-44, and Mormons are 73-4-23. Mainline Protestants are more right-wing than Orthodox!

Thirdly, if I search Amazon for 'Religion X and ecology', I will find a huge number regardless. Just doing it now, Catholicism gets me 108 results, Protestantism gets 63, Evangelicalism 27, and Orthodoxy 22. Orthodoxy, at least on the metric you gave, does not seem particularly impressive.

Fourthly, I'd argue that citing authoritative works from a person's religious tradition is often ineffective in changing a person's mind, especially if the citation seems to be made aggressively or in bad faith. The obvious case study would be Laudato si', hailed with great enthusiasm by liberal Christians of all varieties, ignored by most others, and yet used by the former to try to pull conservative Catholics in their direction. Did this work? Not really. I think when one tries to cite a religious tradition, it's more important to be closely embedded in that group's actual practice.

On a final note, I do not for a second disagree with the idea that Christian doctrine, regardless of denomination, tells us to take care of the Earth and its resources. It very clearly does.

However, I think that Orthodoxy is not especially unique or more active in proposing care for the world than other traditions, I think most American right-wingers do not perceive Orthodoxy to be part of their tradition at all, and I'm not sure Orthodoxy should be seen as particularly right-wing at all.

I wasn’t referring to American Orthodoxy specifically, maybe that’s why it’s somewhat confused. Policy-wise, I obviously can’t speak to the footprint the tradition has in steering the politics of places like Greece or Russia. But if people want to associate environmentalism with left-wing ideologies, they’re fairly ignorant because it has a big impact in the thinking of Christians.

My understanding is that in Greece the church is not particularly mobilised, politically. There is a vague, general sort of sense that it leans right, but pretty much every major party in Greek politics at least puts on a show of being pious, prays publicly, respects priests, and so on.

In Russia, it's obviously a complicated mess, partly due to the communist legacy, partly due to Patriarch Kirill's ties to Putin, and more. Certainly today the Russian Orthodox Church is in alliance with Putin and the larger 'right', but there are significant contingent factors there.

In general it is absolutely correct to say that Christianity, as a whole, has a strong environmentalist message.

Going back to the Pew Religious Landscape Study, one of the questions it asks is whether people agree with the statement "God gave humans a duty to protect and care for the Earth, including the plants and animals". 97% of Evangelical Protestants either completely, mostly, or somewhat agree with that, compared to 90% of Mainline Protestants, 90% of Catholics, 89% of Muslims, 84% of Orthodox, 75% of Hindus, 56% of Jews, 56% of Buddhists, 24% of agnostics, and 3% of atheists.

Obviously the lower numbers are modified heavily by the number who don't believe in God at all - the Jewish number is only so low, I'd guess, because 28% of Jews don't believe in God. Likewise the Orthodox number looks worse than the other Christians, but I'd guess that's because 9% of Orthodox either don't believe in God or did not answer a question about believing in God.

(This is probably because Orthodoxy is an 'ethnic faith' in many cases? There are people who say "I'm Orthodox" but all that means is "I'm Greek" or "I'm Russian". Like the professor or grandfather in this story - "You can't convert from being Greek!")

(I am also comfortable saying that the lower numbers are just because of atheism because Pew also asks people if they support government regulation to protect the environment - Jews support that at 72%, Buddhists at 68%, agnostics at 83%, and atheists at 87%. This is not a perfect measure, because it's possible to believe that humans must protect the environment but that government regulation is not the right way to do it - presumably this is what's going on with evangelicals, who only 44% support environmental regulation laws - but it is nonetheless indicative.)

Anyway, I would be comfortable asserting that among Christians who believe in God, it is overwhelmingly consensus, at 90+% agreement, that God gave humans a duty to protect and care for the Earth. We must kindly steward this marvellous creation.

I was just at dinner at the home of a guy who refuses to recycle aluminum cans. He asked me if I was a "good recycler" so you know he sees the entire thing as moral signalling. He foregoes the refund and just puts them in the trash on principle. I tried to explain that aluminum is the type of recycling that makes the most sense, but he's up to his eyeballs in the culture and he won't do it.

Locally, last I checked:

  • glass "recycling" isn't. It's garbage that you can place in the blue bin. Beer bottle reuse is worthwhile.
  • plastic recycling is mostly split between shipping it to Asia (and hoping it doesn't get dumped in the Pacific) and worse than new manufacture
  • paper is kind of a waste, but I guess it's okay since a fraction of the infrastructure is paid for by the fully-useless ones anyways
  • aluminum is absolutely, definitely worthwhile.

A heuristic of recycling being useless is accurate for 75% of those material categories. He's wrong about the last one, but I find it hard to blame someone for not knowing about how energy-intensive refining aluminum from bauxite is and how much easier it is to recover from cans and other scrap.

I think a lot depends on whether he puts the aluminum in the trash because he has a heuristic that recycling is useless or whether he puts it in the trash because it's a symbolic way to attack the libs.

There's one particular plastic -- clear polyethylene -- for which recycling makes sense, and recycled material costs MORE than virgin (presumably because of government incentives to recycle).

The thing is, from the context I suspect that it's less like the guy had checked how useless various types of recycling are and just pattern-matched aluminium with the rest of them, and more like he has a rock that says "recycling is fake lib shit".

Yeah, I'm guessing he didn't do a full cost-benefit analysis before deciding on a simple strategy he could use in everyday life, but there's still a reason why he has that heuristic.

I’m sure he’s excellent with managing money too.

Or, say, get urban IPA-drinking millennial libs to buy Bud Light, or the alt right to listen to Kanye West.

Not many people remember years ago when there was debate about how automotive EV’s will ever become mainstream and you’ll never get people to switch over to using them. Next thing you know Elon (or rather the marketing department) came around and made it look “cool” to own a Tesla. Now you see them almost everywhere in the big cities. My mechanic however recently told me there’s something of an undercurrent of desire among people looking to go retro and away from all the bells and whistles. A lot of people want older cars little more advanced than a decent radio and power locks and windows; and I’m with them on that. I shook my head in disbelief years ago at the thought of “firmware,” or having to install a software patch on my car. Just give me something affordable, reliable and industrial; and that can be maintained. That’s all I need.

Just give me something affordable, reliable and industrial; and that can be maintained. That’s all I need.

I think you are looking for a "fleet vehicle". Its what companies buy in bulk to serve their business needs. They usually have a minimum of creature comforts (suck it up employees, you are on the clock). They are usually built to be properly maintained, but also survive long periods of "severe" use. Think taxi cabs, cop cars, rental cars, plumber/electrician vans, etc.

I have no idea how you actually buy one of these vehicles, but I strongly assume it is possible.

Downside for you is that these vehicles are probably still built up to spec for safety regulations. And certain computer based driving features are increasingly being considered safely enhancements. Like rear view cameras, auto brakes, etc.

I know very little about cars. What is it about highly computerized cars that makes automobile manufacturers want to manufacture them? I doubt there was ever much demand for computerized cars before the manufacturers began to make them, but I could be wrong of course. Do customers actually get some extra value out of their cars being computerized? Is it more that the manufacturers like being able to easily get data from their cars and change the cars' behavior without having to modify hardware?

I doubt there was ever much demand for computerized cars before the manufacturers began to make them, but I could be wrong of course.

I think you are wrong. Regardless of vibes, many customers have been and probably continue to be willing to pay more, sometimes a lot more, for smarter cars, for extra features, for added convenience and performance. People definitely do get extra value from the infotainment, from all the power options, from the different driving modes and driver profiles, from automatic functions and driver assist systems. Not everyone, but the customers who don't get value from any of those things are extremely niche, and probably so cheap they're not going to buy a new car anyways.

The main advantages to carmakers is that it's a lot easier to make and especially to scale across multiple products and that it's easier to make changes after production, etc, even if you don't add any new functions or telemetry vs, say, 90s cars.

For a car to drive smoothly requires a lot of things to happen just right at the right times, in the right way, like a complex ballet performance. You can get there with exquisitely engineered mechanical parts, electrical parts, electronics, discrete computers or centralized computers (and yeah in a physical way, computers are electronics which are electrical parts, but the degree of complexity and flexibility is different). Having mechanical parts do all of this complex ballet is possible, but difficult; tolerances have to be extremely precise, the materials quasi perfect... It's slightly easier to fudge some of the things with simple electrical parts. For instance, instead of smooth high quality gears and cranks just put an electric motor and limit switches to control a window (it's also easy to make a cheap, bad window crank tho). It's even easier to have electronics like purpose made chips do some of it instead; a servomotor doesn't need to have as much complexity built into it to avoid decapitating a child whose head was out of the window when it started closing. And a computer makes it all even easier, you can start producing the car first and worry about how much strength the motor for the windows are able to push after, and if a regulatory agency changes it (or if different jurisdictions have different limits) you can still use the same part and just change the programming.

The big change from the 90s and early 00s to now is that we're going from multiple discrete computers, which can be limited and hard to access, to less, but more powerful, central computers. That's easier for the dealership to access (according to the industry though, giving independant mechanics access will get women raped in parking garages*).

For consumers, there's some advantages. You can have "modes" that change the throttle response of the car, you can have simulated shifting on CVT transmissions, you can have more complex features for controls like locking window controls for the back row from the front row, more complex security and safety features, a mechnical or electrical car is trivial to hotwire. You can also have features like accident detection that can, on top of calling emergency services on your behalf in some of the more advanced cases, in simpler cases it could automatically unlock the door so it's easier to evacuate. The cases where the consumers are (rightly) complaining is when manufacturers, following Tesla's lead, are replacing physical controls that are easy to use without looking with modal touchscreens (which require more attention from the driver to use). Part of this from the manufacturer is because it's cheaper, part of it is because there's the impression that futuristic means clean means no buttons.

And then of course, they like getting their telemetry data.

*Sadly I can't find the actual ad anymore.

Computerized car engines give you more efficiency, more power, less pollution, and more reliability than mechanical ignition and injection systems did.

Computerized driver controls I'm much less sanguine about. Nothing I might want to fiddle with while watching the road should be controlled by a modal UI, much less by a touch screen, rather than by a knob or button whose function is determined by a shape and position I can actually discern by touch.

get data from their cars and change the cars' behavior without having to modify hardware?

Well, this is perhaps the source of the design problems, not just the design decision, isn't it? Some of the common examples of risk compensation are claims that car drivers take more risks when they know they have anti-lock brakes or seat belts partially protecting them from the consequences, but software producers, including car software producers, also have incentive to take more risks when they know they have automatic patch application partially protecting them from the consequences. Do you really need to fix all the bugs before launch now, or can you just fix the worst of them and then try to get to more of the rest before buyers get too pissed?

If my theory here is right, then computerized car engines could actually get worse as cabin computer connectivity gets more popular. If your buyer can't do an ECU firmware update without going into the shop, they're going to be pissed if they ever need an update, and you'd better make sure that engine computer is solid from day one, whether or not there's a bug in the radio UI. But if you have an internet connection that lets you slip an ECU firmware update in without the buyer even noticing? Getting software solid is expensive, and you could probably save a lot of time and money by just getting it mostly solid and then waiting for the diagnostic data and the bug reports...

When you put it that way, I guess there's some investment ideas I could probably get from it.

It's really just people applying the "There must be a balancing downside" just world heuristic. Same reason people think strong people must not also be fast or smart because it violates some kind of int/str/dex rpg assumptions. It just wouldn't be fair if solar had stats in every category vs coal, there must be a trade off, especially because it's politically contentious. And there are the obvious ones like not being reliable when the sun don't shine or the wind don't blow, which are real but have had engineers and scientists working on them for decades now with some good work arounds. But fundamentally people are suspicious of something that seems too good to be true.

SP’s can be good for serving very local requirements that don’t depend on supplying energy on a massive scale. If you want to provide electricity to a particular household, then fine. A general problem with the energy intake however is as you said, with wind and solar it’s highly intermittent and varies all over the place. Who knows though, maybe with climate change fucking up the whole stratosphere maybe the opportunity’s there for SP’s to harvest 10x the amount of energy. That sounds like Beavis and Butthead physics to me (“let’s just keep polluting so we can trap more energy in the planet…”), but it’s the only way I could imagine solar to work at any large scale. (No, that isn’t how that works.)

Solar already works at pretty large scale, it's already deployed and working. You connected it to a large grid with a variety of sources and storage. We don't have to speculate on whether solar panels work at grid scale.

Certainly solar can provide power at scale. But unless your demand is variable-on-demand, or you have truly massive amounts of storage, it's not adding capacity, it's just reducing fuel costs. Because not only does solar only work part of the time, those parts of the time are well-correlated.

And there are the obvious ones like not being reliable when the sun don't shine or the wind don't blow, which are real but have had engineers and scientists working on them for decades now with some good work arounds.

They still get handwaved and/or completely ignored in most treatments of the subject outside the trade press. Don't play a drinking game with a rule of "take a drink every time they compare fossil and solar nameplate capacity as if they're equivalent" if you value your liver.

  1. Cultural war over climate change, which in some ways is also a religious argument for many conservatives who think saying humans can change the world is ridiculous.

  2. the increasing nostalgiafication of politics and media leading to older jobs like that being seen as better just by default

  3. General "Working class" fetishism, similar to factory labor.

  4. Half of conservative culture now is just being reactionary for "liberal tears"

Good news is that in an open market, it really doesn't matter. The best decisions economically will win out over time, and as wind and solar becomes increasingly more viable, it's going to win out more. Texas of all states is the new leader of renewable energy and battery capacity, past even the most left leaning ones because their market is far more free and the electricity companies are making their choices without spending years on bullshit environmental studies or zoning disputes or whatever. And it's not just Texas, four of the top five clean energy states are conservative leaning

Good news is that in an open market, it really doesn't matter. The best decisions economically will win out over time, and as wind and solar becomes increasingly more viable, it's going to win out more.

This seems correct and, along with your bullet points above it, indicates that any sort of renewable-focused activism in the past was a complete failure, and in the future would be a complete waste of time. I wish I could hope that those people who were complete failures in the past would learn from this so as not to waste their (and our) time and resources in the future, but I'm not that naive.

which in some ways is also a religious argument for many conservatives who think saying humans can change the world is ridiculous.

I can't speak for all conservatives, but I don't think this is an accurate summary. If you want to put a religious spin on things, I would say that global warming hysteria is perceived as the pagan shaman who is demanding sacrifices to appease the weather god.

The best decisions economically will win out over time, and as wind and solar becomes increasingly more viable, it's going to win out more

In principle, that's fine with me. My sense is that there has been a regulatory thumb on the scale, but if wind and solar are genuinely more economical, I have much less of an objection to them.

Landman* really is that popular, huh? Battery tech has only gotten better and cheaper, and the LCOE of renewables even with storage added is competitive with or better than fossil fuels, yet public opinion is backsliding.

I don't believe this. This particular document is clear nonsense. It is assuming only 4 hours storage. Which means you're going to need a LOT of fossil fuel standby capacity -- almost the same as your solar capacity. All you're saving is fuel. If you want to save any capital costs at all, you either need enough battery to cover the longest dark period, or you need to spin up your generators before your battery gets low (which lets you save somewhat on capital costs, but gives higher fuel costs)

It is assuming only 4 hours storage.

I've never seen an earnest accounting of solar with storage accounting for (1) seasonal variation and (2) a full transition to heat-pump heating. Combined, they mean that peak energy usage north of the sunbelt is going to be in winter, where solar flux is at best a fraction of summer peaks. This requires either (1) overbuilding solar to handle peak heating demand in mid-winter, (2) storage that handles months, not hours, (3) long-haul interconnects to sunnier climes, or (4) mass-migration toward temperate climates with low winter heating loads.

But I'm open to someone sharing data suggesting this is actually becoming feasible.

I've never seen an earnest accounting of solar with storage accounting for (1) seasonal variation and (2) a full transition to heat-pump heating.

And electric cars. (and ranges and water heaters, though those are likely insignficant) "Get an electric car, bro, you can just charge it at night when demand is low, bro." "Now with solar power electric supply is low at night too bro, you can't charge your car bro".

The last few percentage points of reliability are the costliest for power storage (see page 31). So peaking gas or some other dispatchable will still probably be necessary.

The dream: I live somewhere hot and sunny. I get a solar panel attached to my house or carport or neighborhood. The money I was already spending on energy goes into paying for the solar panel.

The reality: subsidies go to the enormous concentrated solar farm in the middle of the desert. Birds and lizards keep getting burnt to death from the heat, and it looks terrible over much larger areas of land than an equivalent fossil fuel plant and oil pumps. They pay less in taxes than the oil extractors, and maintain fewer roads (I care about this in a large, net oil producing state). Are the giant desert solar farms supplying energy to one of the desert data centers that's competing with traditional chile farmers? Is it running air conditioners somewhere? Where? I could look this up, but neither have most of the people taking the poll.

Result: Meh. It's a good idea to develop the technology, I guess. Not especially "green" in implementation, though.

There have been a lot of green energy initiatives in my area. Every time, the initiative claims that it will create jobs and lower utility prices, and do so with minimal disruption to the local environment and community.

This is, inevitably, bullshit. The jobs never materialize. Our power bill goes up even faster than it had been rising before. Entire sections of forest get torn out and replaced with a few half-assed plantings of non-native softwoods. Even us dumb, cousin-fucking rednecks catch on to the game eventually.

Beyond that, I've noticed that "green energy" is for the peasants. For the things that actually matter to the neo-aristocracy right now, like data centers, we're burning fossil fuels like never before with local gas turbines.

At this point, I'm thoroughly fatigued by it. Whenever somebody hectors me about installing grid scale renewable energy, my default response is "you go first".

This is, inevitably, bullshit. The jobs never materialize.

Good, the more jobs necessary for power generation the less efficient it is for society (the workers can now go do something else people want and utility rate increases!) and the more costly it will be for people who need power.

Unfortunately due to NIMBYism, companies have to convince the local shortsighted idiots who don't understand the point of a job is to get something done and not to just give random citizen Joe some money so they'll often over promise on that.

Our power bill goes up even faster than it had been rising before.

Yeah, there's been a huge surge in demand for electricity now what with the data centers and whatever else. New power generation is like a +10 while power demand is a -20 right now and we need to get even more power so it can be like a +25/-20 situation instead. Unfortunately state regulations and local zoning laws are hostile to new construction of basically any kind, so electricity NIMBYism is fucking us over just like housing NIMBYism is screwing over homebuyers and renters.

Entire sections of forest get torn out and replaced with a few half-assed plantings of non-native softwoods.

All energy production is disruptive, so is it much worse than other methods is the important question.

Ideally the point of a job is to get something done.

The problem is, the message that our society sends people through both words and actions is that hard, productive work is for idiots and if you want to ever escape the rat race you should hustle and cut corners and only focus on your own bottom line no matter what.

The average person might actually be most likely to succeed in life by doing good, honest, productive work. But even if that's true, the data that supports it being true would be buried in dry statistics somewhere. Meanwhile, we see an endless parade of people like Pelosi with her remarkable investment acumen, Trump the narcissistic bully who was born rich and genuinely does not seem to know any way of life other than corruption, and all the Kardashians of the world who are famous for being good at being famous.

Which is not to say that politics and entertainment can't be productive work. Politicians can do a lot of good to organize society. Entertainers bring joy to people. But the most visible exemplars of both politicians and entertainers are people who charismamaxxed their way to the top and/or are corrupt.

Meanwhile, we see an endless parade of people like Pelosi with her remarkable investment acumen, Trump the narcissistic bully who was born rich and genuinely does not seem to know any way of life other than corruption, and all the Kardashians of the world who are famous for being good at being famous.

To be a successful politician for this long does take some genuine skill somewhere. Tons and tons of people try and fail. There's tons of competition and political threats to you and getting away with such brazen corruption like Trump or Pelosi requires continued popularity and support. Often the skill is the same sort of thing that the Kardashians provide, taking short term victories and turning it into their long term empires. They easily could have been like the many many people who only see minor fame for a few years (or even just a month), but they took it and turned it into a greater opportunity. They might seem trashy to us, but that doesn't change that they're providing entertainment or hope or whatever to tens/hundreds of millions of people worldwide and those people are willing to pay money/watch commercials/etc other forms of profiting off that. The Kardashians are getting stuff done too, even if I don't personally enjoy them.

Or another way to look at it. I think religion is mostly hogwash, but I can still understand what the point of churches and pastors and religious movies and music is. Other people do believe in it, and thus those things are still getting stuff done

Politicians and entertainers are people who charismamaxxed

Yes. Of course politicians and entertainers are people who generally appeal to some meaningfully sized subset of the population. Trump has basically formed a roughly 30-35% cult of personality around him, where like the only thing I can think of where he didn't manage to control his followers brains around in circles is with vaccines. This helps make him very successful against any would be conservative challengers or criticism.

The only renewable energy that's indefinitely sustainable on a large enough scale is nuclear.

People forget that manufacturing SP's pollutes the hell out of the environment. It’s also economically more expensive. The amount of energy that goes into both making and maintaining solar panels is so enormous, that the net gain we get back from those panels before they expire is paltry. There's also specialized maintenance costs even when you subtract the fact that they lose about 1% of the ability to capture per year. Extrapolate that out on a long-term national scale. There's also the hidden costs in power storage. They only generate during the day and batteries or any other storage system also entails economic other costs in waste: mining, manufacturing, transportation, disposal, recycling; etc., and they also lose a lot of what they hold (no battery system is 100% efficient; especially when you count the energy cost to make them, and their variable efficiency at temperature), so they waste energy, too (and hence, they're also consuming energy).

Nuclear though outperforms every other source of electrical power. It pollutes 'way' less, kills less people, and generates far more energy in proportion to input. Most nuclear plants today are old and it's the old plants are the most dangerous, which the public doesn't take into account. New plants implement safety and security and efficiency advances that vastly reduce the dangers and risks of nuclear power, and also greatly reduce the amount and potency of nuclear waste as well.

We have today a much safer plant design. It's way harder to damage with natural disasters or terrorist attacks, and producing much less waste material with a much lower radioactivity or lifespan. The newest designs actually consume nuclear waste and burn it into electricity. And further investment will only lead to more improvements in these respects. The most contemporary version is the molten salt reactor, which has been around a long time, but it's also been upgraded into the most advanced nuclear reactor in tested use. It has numerous safety advantages (e.g. it's meltdown proof; it consumes no water; etc.); and by actually consuming nuclear waste as a fuel it reduces the environmental impact of even old reactors, and produces less environmental impact itself.

The amount of energy that goes into both making and maintaining solar panels is so enormous, that the net gain we get back from those panels before they expire is paltry.

Can you show your work here? Just googling "solar panels lifetime EROI" gives me tons of papers that come to the exact opposite conclusion, even including storage to make it more comparable. Given that EROI figures are easily manipulated that's not strong evidence either way, but a great many countries have rolled out solar at scale so I tend towards believing it to be roughly true. If it were not, what would those countries' motive be to do this? I've heard arguments to the effect of "China is subsidizing the panels to hide their ineffectiveness as a scheme to wreck their opponents' economies", but they're building out solar capacity massively as well, so if energy-wise solar is a long-term zero sum scam, they've fallen for it too.

The amount of energy that goes into both making and maintaining solar panels is so enormous, that the net gain we get back from those panels before they expire is paltry.

Nuclear does have the best EROI, but that doesn't really matter in a comparison if both sources manage to stay above the required threshold of 3 or 7 or whatever. The additional energy costs will be subsumed into LCOE anyways. Which also incorporates all those maintenance and construction costs. Batteries obviously add cost and reduce EROI but it's also getting better every year.

China's doing some interesting work with pebble bed/molten salt reactors, but it's still going to be years before large scale deployment and renewables just keep getting better in the meantime.

Datacenters use gas turbines because it's the fastest way to bring online a shit ton of reliable power. The goal is first to AGI, costs (and disruption to neighbors) be damned. That being said, some companies have already signed contracts with renewable farms for next year.

This survey is structured so that not supporting subsidizing renewable energy counts as pro-coal (See question 2 about the role of government). I don't think it is surprising that when energy prices go up many voters care more about increasing whatever form of capacity is cheapest than subsidizing greener options.

Even with the subsidy phase out, >50% of new power generation will be solar this year. Seems like good evidence that green energy isn't more expensive.

You also have to account for restrictions and regulations on coal and other sources. If coal and oil plants were allowed to burn as dirty as their 18th century equivalents, there would be no beating them on cost per kwh. Whether or not that would be a good thing is a separate question, but the comparison isn't a completely fair one because even without subsidies it's not a completely level playing field.

Do you have numbers on that? The entropic (fuel) efficiency of modern plants is much better than their 18th century equivalents. Are the emissions control costs really dominant here?

Was hard to find any hard numbers (most sources just talked about how much coal plants emitted, but not how much the tech to limit emissions costs per kwh). I did find this though: https://about.bnef.com/insights/industry-and-buildings/us-coal-plants-face-new-rule-capture-co2-or-shutter/

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids renewable and coal alike to produce lung-killing particulates, heavy metals, and excess CO2".

The EPA has rolled back a bunch of these measures but it won't change the trendline. The last coal plant started was in 2013 and it still hasn't come online.

Or it just outsources the pollution to China. Not saying to pollution from making solar panels is equivalent to the pollution from burning coal, but clean energy isn't quite as clean as many of its proponents like to portray it.

In my experience green energy and rail always ends up being a waste of money that serves to enrich the Democratic stronghold employees above anything else.

If you want my support let's start with something like a revenue neutral carbon tax (pay a citizens dividend annually with everything collected and reduce means tested support by the amount of the dividend) and let people choose how they want to respond and don't subsidize anything.

After that's working we can add sensible subsidies like insulation heat pumps and such.

reduce means tested support by the amount of the dividend

This makes the carbon tax revenue positive.

Coal miners can't be that large of a constituency, surely, so what's driving this obsession in particular?

Coal miners are a symbolically massive constituency. There aren't that many coal miners, but there are quite a lot of people who view coal miners as representative of a particular vision of America (sort of like how there aren't that many cowboys or farmers). Specifically, a mid-century vision oriented around stereotypically "manly" industries like manufacturing and resource extraction. Conversely, opponents of clean energy will raise practical objections, but there's a heavy undercurrent of aesthetic distaste for green energy. Like caring about the environment more broadly, it's hippy and lib-coded. It's not a coincidence that the non-fossil fuel most attractive to anti-environmentalists is nuclear power, with its massive engineering requirements and historic status as bete noire to environmentalists. There is, of course, also the broad self-interest question. Red states are heavily intertwined with the oil and gas industry, so there's interest in portraying renewable energy sources as inefficient or outright pointless while downplaying the costs associated with fossil fuels.

Of course, there's a tension between peoples' personal views and the legal environment in which these systems exist. Thus, e.g. Texas installing more solar than California despite Texans thinking that solar power is gay.

nuclear power, with its massive engineering requirements and historic status as bete noire to environmentalists

...and its ability to provide power when we tell it to, rather than when the weather feels like it.

The intermittancy of certain kinds of green energy isn't quite a fake problem, but it is close. Solar especially has consistently made fools of skeptics, and the technical obstacles that were supposed to render it impractical have proven extremely surmountable.

And on the other side of things, Nuclear has a whole raft of its own problems. It is theoretically a "proven" technology, but it is extremely expensive and slow to deploy, with a break-even time measured in decades. The waste problem, while not technically difficult, is politically radioactive (hah) and imposes security problems that Solar and Wind do not have. It is not a coincidence the genuinely successful nuclear-dominated power systems that we (e.g. France, Eastern Bloc) see came from top-down political systems that had the power to tell objectors to suck it and which were only marginally sensitive to economic concerns. There is also the stated preferences vs outcomes issue I alluded to in my first post - Nuclear is deployed more as a rhetorical deflection from other green energy sources than as a serious alternative, and given conservatives' affinity for the fossil fuel industry I think it is very likely that if decarbonization advocates were pushing Nuclear they'd be against it.

Remember "learn to code"?

Years of being talked down to by someone who was smugly wrong has done a lot of damage.

Pretty much everyone is smugly wrong all the time, so it's not a strong explanation for anything in particular. Right-wing anti-environmentalism predates any sort of SE-related retraining push. Environmentalism is lib-coded in the US because libs are generally the ones worried about the commons and proposing trading off economic growth for QoL improvements, while red states are more likely to have a direct interest in the fossil fuel industry.

--

Separately from that, the problem with "learn to code" was not that it was it was wrong, but that, like every other kind of bootstrap rhetoric, it wasn't actionable. It's one step up from "git good" in terms of life advice. If they were capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, they wouldn't be rotting in a central PA town. However, the underlying concept was correct: "The mine/paper mill/meat packing facility/whatever isn't coming back and you/your community is going to have to reinvent itself or (more realistically) die. Anyone telling you otherwise is scamming you."

Of course, telling a bunch of middle-aged rural conservatives "change or die" didn't go over great, no matter what positive gloss was put on it. But no one was quite willing to bite the bullet and tell them their options were to get pensioned off while their kids moved away and their way of life slowly died or to get none of that and have their way of life still slowly die off. Not that it would have made much difference. Nobody gracefully accepts extinction, so it was pretty much a given that they'd fall for any conman willing to promise to turn back the clock.

Environmentalism is lib-coded in the US because libs are generally the ones worried about the commons and proposing trading off economic growth for QoL improvements

Liberals have also never satisfactorily rooted out the watermelons in the movement, nor the plainly misanthropic. Maybe now that Ehrlich is finally dead they can move on from their human culling fantasies.

God that phrase chaps my ass.

I have coal miners in my family. There is no way that they would be able to learn to code with enough proficiency to find a job. Even if they could, they live in East god-damned Kentucky. After the return to office mania of the last 18 months, where the hell would they get a job doing it?

There is no way that they would be able to learn to code with enough proficiency to find a job.

Yeah one big problem we're facing especially now with AI potentially is "what do we do with the morons who can't or won't do something else that is needed/wanted when their job is no longer necessary". During the Great recession, the answer was put the old idiots on disability like it's early retirement as a band aid solution, but this has awful aesthetics and doesn't work when technology might soon be making larger and larger portions of the population into useless morons who can't compete with automation.

Like it makes sense to put them on disability to some degree. Like if you think of some mentally handicapped man who can only understand things at the level of "pick up bucket, go to river, fill bucket, come back" and has been doing that for 30 years, and then piping gets invented and he's no longer needed, he suddenly goes from able bodied to disabled. He could work, now he can't.

That it's a 59 year old former factory worker or coal miner or other laborer who can't meaningfully adjust to a new job after they got automated out doesn't change the underlying logic here. But still, bad aesthetic.

Years of being talked down to by someone who was smugly wrong has done a lot of damage.

For me, this touches on a big issue. I strongly suspect that the people who are pushing wind and solar are the same people who are wrong about George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, Duke Lacrosse, Global Warming, gender ideology, HBD, third-world immigration, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Black Lives Matter, gay marriage, and probably a bunch of other stuff I can't think of at the moment.

What all these things have in common is that they are a magnet for people who are far more interested in following what's fashionable, i.e. virtue-signalling, than anything else.

This is interesting to me, because one of those is just a plain brute fact that is true, that can't be argued with, and yet you choose to deny it and package it up with all the other culture war shibboleths that are part of the culture.

I wonder to what extent everything someone believes is received from the air their breath with no reference to how the world actually is? Is it the same for every population, or do some groups actually have more of a connection to cause and effect?

It's global warming by the way. There is room for debate on some other yes/no propositions you have up there interspersed with the axiomatic statements, but that one is just a thing that is real, but some people don't want to be real so they close their eyes to it/believe the grifters and woowoo peddlers instead.

It's global warming by the way. There is room for debate on some other yes/no propositions you have up there interspersed with the axiomatic statements, but that one is just a thing that is real

Well when you assert that "global warming" is "real" and a "plain brute fact" what exactly do you mean by "global warming"?

That average temperatures across the globe taken over the course of year X, are higher than x-1, and x+1 will be higher than x.

Eg, the globe is warming.

Less snarkily, that the models popularised over the last 50 years or so have been mostly correct, and all show a warming trend. That is the thing that is a plain brute fact that can't be denied: that climatologists in the 70's said "Hey, it looks like it's getting hotter" and then it did.

That average temperatures across the globe taken over the course of year X, are higher than x-1, and x+1 will be higher than x.

Well, this one's just not true; e.g. 2021 was cooler than 2020. Even x to x+10 failed for 1998 vs 2008. I'm not sure if we'll ever see a decadal drop again without some major change, but the trend is still only something like 0.025C/year, and year-to-year variation of ~0.1C still regularly swamps that.

Less snarkily, that the models popularised over the last 50 years or so have been mostly correct, and all show a warming trend.

Remove "popularised" and this one's true. But the way we (well, the news media and the most salacious academics) popularize a model is to take whatever the most extreme possibility is at one p<0.01 end of the predictions, turn that into a "it will never snow in Britain again!!" headline, and so convert tomorrow's credibility into today's paycheck. Current measured warming since 1990 is pretty much right on the "Business-as-Usual"+"Best Estimate" line from the 1990 IPCC report, which puts it way above the "weather just changes, it'll probably revert to the mean again" null hypothesis, but "we're up nearly 1C and it's still accelerating" feels anticlimactic to people who vaguely think they remember that coastal cities were supposed to be flooding or something by now.

The models are not mostly correct. The IPCC report includes out a whole bunch of estimates... which have on some occasions ALL been high, but just the fact that there are a lot of them suggests chicanery. Unless the same model consistently hits, which is not the case.

I don't respect the nibbling at the edges, god of the gaps vibe from these sorts of arguments against climate change.

When people say global warming, what the mean is: Is the Globe Warming? And the answer is: Yes!

Re. old models: First google result. You can get better graphs and data, but i'm not trying to dig it out of a paper: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-finds-exxonmobil-internal-research-accurately-predicted-climate-change/

The Exxon internal predictions in the the 70's have been about 75% accurate. Good enough for horseshoes and climatology.

That average temperatures across the globe taken over the course of year X, are higher than x-1, and x+1 will be higher than x.

Eg, the globe is warming.

This is what I would call "motte global warming." And yes, there is little room to doubt that motte global warming is "real" and a "plain brute fact."

But when I said that a certain group of people was wrong about global warming, that's not what I meant. Because they push what could be called "bailey global warming." The idea that (1) if unchecked, mankind's CO2 emissions will cause significant warming; AND (2) that warming will be magnified by water vapor feedback; AND (3) that this magnified warming will have a devastating impact on the climate, i.e. it will cause major harm.

To be sure, when these people are on the defensive, they do what all motte & bailey types do: They pivot to the motte. "It's indisputable that global surface temperatures have risen measurably over the last 100 years" or "basic mathematical calculations show that an increase in CO2 levels will lead to measurable increases in global surface temperatures" All true, but later they pivot to the bailey: "We must substantially reduce CO2 emissions or else there will be a disaster!!"

Less snarkily, that the models popularised over the last 50 years or so have been mostly correct, and all show a warming trend.

I can't really comment on this since I don't know what specific models you are referring to. That being said, I would challenge you to find a prominent climate model which (1) made bona fide predictions which were interesting, correct, and were actual (i.e. not retroactive) predictions; and (2) also predicts dangerous warming for the Earth.

There is no bailey, it’s all motte. There’s an extremely strong scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to global warming and there’s no credible alternative explanation for the rise in temperature. The only thing that tracks the rapid temperature rise is human causes.

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How can you be “wrong” about gay marriage? You can be for or against gay marriage, but it’s not a fact that you can be empirically right or wrong about, unlike global warming.

You’re committing the exact same sin of picking your worldview based on what’s fashionable to the red tribe. Why can’t you accept global warming and HBD at the same time? Be against third world immigration and for trans rights?

How can you be “wrong” about gay marriage? You can be for or against gay marriage, but it’s not a fact that you can be empirically right or wrong about, unlike global warming.

Briefly, gay marriage is a policy. Proposed policies have predicted positive and negative consequences, and supporters of proposed policies are staking a position that the positive consequences will outweigh the negative consequences. People are wrong on a policy if, when the policy is enacted, their prediction is falsified because the positive effects end up being outweighed by the negative effects. You can be empirically right or wrong about the consequences of a policy, including gay marriage.

Whether the positive effects are outweighed by the negative effects is a value judgment, not something you're right or wrong about.

But specific predictions about positive or negative consequences can be wrong. Not in terms of "outweighing", but in terms of materializing or not.

How can you be “wrong” about gay marriage?

That's a good question, because yeah, it's largely a question of values. To me, it's somewhat clear -- but not indisputably clear -- that the costs of gay marriage significantly outweigh the benefits. That being said, if the people supporting wind and solar were supporting gay marriage but none of the other nonsense, I would be less skeptical.

Because that alienates my potential allies and prevents me from forming strong in-group bonds, which is what all humans aspire to accomplish?

This mindset is what put us in this mess in the first place. Do you not think perhaps many on the other side are the same?

Personally, I believe rightwing populist movement started off with valid grievances. But this mentality of refusing to contradict your allies empowers extremists, grifters and manipulative sociopaths that distort your movement, make you deny reality more and more, until one day you’re fighting in the service of a monster that bears no resemblance to your original beliefs.

To me this is what’s happening to the right in America and the West in general. There is no rightwing ideology anymore. The “leaders” of the movement are abandoning all of its core principles and the only thing you’re left with is vibes, bonding with your allies in saying more and more grotesque untruths, and needing to beat the “other side” at all costs.

This mindset is what put us in this mess in the first place. Do you not think perhaps many on the other side are the same?

Of course I think that. I even said so! See:

which is what all humans aspire to accomplish?

Although I admit it isn't rare to see dehumanization of political opponents, so I guess I wasn't explicit enough.

Coal miners: "This job is hell on earth"

Politicians: More coal mines, gotcha

Of course, there's a tension between peoples' personal views and the legal environment in which these systems exist. Thus, e.g. Texas installing more solar than California despite Texans thinking that solar power is gay.

I'd expect that to be more related to Texas being at a lower latitude and also having more sunny days.

I’m surprised there was near bipartisan support for renewables in the first place. Solar panels and wind power always felt like a green/lefty thing while the right loved their oil and gas. Caring about the environment is definitely left-coded, although ironically, rooftop solar, batteries and an electric vehicle make you a lot more self sufficient energy wise than depending on big government’s power grid.

Maybe it’s to do with the waning influence of libertarians and tech industry CEOs on the right? They had their moment to get the populists in power, then were discarded the moment they were no longer useful, and then the right could go back to disseminating pro-fossil fuel views to their audience and line the pockets of the oil and gas industry.

Caring about the environment is definitely left-coded, although ironically, rooftop solar, batteries and an electric vehicle make you a lot more self sufficient energy wise than depending on big government’s power grid.

The 8-Bit Guy is a youtuber I follow, he makes videos on retrocomputing. He got semi-cancelled a few years ago because he's a Texan gun guy who used to have an airsoft channel and once open-carried a rifle at a shopping mall (which is legal in Texas). But he's also a big EV guy, and he did a whole series of videos about adding a solar system to his house as an emergency backup, after the Texas grid blackout a few years ago caused his heating to die, a pipe to burst, and his house flooded.

He said he didn't like the "sell your electricity back to the grid" solar deployment mechanism, because that requires you to be on the grid and doesn't have the opportunity to run independently -- if the grid goes down, so does your solar, to avoid backfeeding in an outage. But apparently you can set up off-grid electricity as a backup if you install a specialized switch in your breaker that forces the grid connection off when your solar is on.

I guess it's like you said; libertarians and tech people are pro-renewables, but also pro-nuclear, and there's not much of a place in the Republican coalition for anything but fossil fuels.

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