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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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It’s viable if those panels and turbines are produced in Chinese coal powered factories and the US forever prices itself out of any competitive industrial production. It’s pretty damning that the production of renewable electricity generating devices never seems to use renewable energy itself.

Also after many times multiplying your electricity costs, you will still have to deal with blackouts regularly. Which means home generators for the rich and just “dealing with it” for the poor in practice.

California has outlawed home generators, which means New York will be next, and then the country. So it's darkness for everyone.

Yes, the blue states will be crushed by their contradictions any day now, just as the dialectic predicts.

No, the victims of blue state policies will be crushed, and the perpetrators will profit.

Nybbler is wrong: California has outlawed portable generators, but exempted the $40,000+ full-mansion backup generators like the Obamas have at their estates.

What's the profit in banning generators again?

Lots. Employing regulators and enforcers from your party, using the law to prevent competition from better products, exploiting the pain your policies caused to generate demand for relief and subsidies... Which your party will control and profit from.

That all of this is negative sum wrecking and looting doesn't stop it being extremely profitable for the perpetrators.

Competition? What competition? We're talking about two separate markets here. People with portable generators are never going to buy $40k units.

Same goes for subsidies. To be clear, you are claiming California will subsidize $40k gas generators?

And the perpetrators of this elimination of competition and collapse of sales are... Generator companies? The ones that profit from selling people generators? The ones that will sell almost no generators in California?

https://mil.wa.gov/extreme-weather-grant-program

Cause outages, ban solutions, hire another thousand sociology grads to oversee a grant program for Public Warming Centers serving Multiplicitly Vulnerable Populations.
https://mil.wa.gov/extreme-weather-grant-program

Multiply by a hundred thousand and you have our modern economy run by these people https://www.dvidshub.net/image/7388150/diversity-matters-day-brings-together-military-department-employees-learn-and-reflect
The kind who get excited at the thought of joining "a trend promoted by organizations such as Common Ground to piggyback vulnerability indexes and site data onto HUD-mandated enumeration studies", because it means more grants to study the need to make more power point presentations calling for more grants.

So you've got nothing to back up your claims about competition or subsidies to drive profits? You're equivocating between the alleged grift being to destroy competition (benefiting producers) and to fund political cronyism (benefitting the cronies). Please speak plainly about who is benefitting and how, in particular how cratering demand for generators would increase profits.

As for the grants program you posted, community heating and cooling centers have been a thing for at least 30 years. Even in years without blackouts (and even in California blackouts are rare) there's people who e.g. don't have air conditioners and can't afford to install them. This isn't a result of mismanagement, the poor will always be with you.

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This surprised me, are you sure it's true? I seem to be able to buy quote-unquote CARB-compliant generators online, or at least generators that have a sticker claiming it, and the price premium for extra emissions controls appears to be small. There are also provisions to run a non-compliant generator in declared emergencies.

It phases in over the next four years to boil the frog slowly. The lawn equipment ban started this year, and the full "zero emission" rule for generators in '28.

Looks like it takes effect in 2028. I think it was supposed to be this year.

Which means home generators for the rich

It means Tesla power walls, you mean, and in the United States that means quite middle class people- I have salesmen coming to my door offering power walls and solar for less than the cost of a typical car payment.

I think he was obliquely referencing Obama's 2,500 gallon propane tank and whole house generator at his oceanfront estate in Martha's Vineyard.

No I don’t know what you are talking about.

But I lived in poor countries with expensive and intermittent electricity. So I was just referring to what happens in such places.

And good luck with middle class installing Tesla walls when the Chinese stop subsidising your consumption in exchange for all your industrial capacity.

It's probably fine in the US specifically for the coming three decades or so given the abundance of cheap NG, which of course is the actual plan, just like cheap Russian NG was in Germany.

New NG hookups are banned in many blue states now, and in my area they're pushing the utilities to abandon existing pipelines. My whole county never got gas access because of these policies.

Natural gas in homes, yes, blue states are banning that for whatever reason. Natural gas power plants are no harder to build than anything else.