What the... It seems we crossed into the realm of intentionally doing damage.
I'm reminded of threatening tariffs to successfully derail global carbon levy on ship emissions.
Meanwhile China runs away with all the clean energy tech (solar, wind, batteries, etc, etc.) while we hold to fossil fuels to save less than 200,000 jobs.
> Meanwhile China runs away with all the clean energy tech (solar, wind, batteries, etc, etc.) while we hold to fossil fuels to save less than 200,000 jobs.
If you're talking about coal miners, David Frum joked / observed that there are more yoga instructors in the US than coal miners:
Trouble is... You can do it to a few minorities and get away with it. When you act like an asshole to the entire world, well suddenly assholes as big as you are in the minority... Oops.
He is going to do to America the same thing he had done to his companies - destroy it. Unfortunately, he fails upwards, so he will take over the whole world and then destroy it all.
He will die pretty soon. He's just the first stage of the rocket. He thinks he's a pharaoh letting a thousand pyramids bloom, but he's expendable. He'll be gone. People will chisel his name off the monuments he's vandalized. But the people who granted him power like what he's doing. He's somebody's monkey. The hollowing out of the US and the world order that produced western prosperity and security will continue. The people who call the tune to which he dances will call tunes for the next monkey.
Those "savings" have not withstood careful analysis. Essentially they're nonsense and with the damage they have done the final bill will be much higher than any savings.
Which one had a greater 2025 net worth increase than the president? Which one pardoned people who donated to his campaign or ballroom? Which one is subject to legal reprisal for corruption?
Business tends to vote for pro business parties. I have no idea re: the whitehouse ballroom. There’s been little legal reprisal for federal employee corruption.
there are at least two reasons trump is pushing for oil:
1) the US has lots of oil reserves, which would lose lots of value if everybody was using renewables
2) oil is the main driver for dollar demand, as oil is paid in dollar, allowing the US to have lots of debt relatively cheaply
That's also the reason why he wants to tell Europe to stop using renewables, and that's the reason why he is threatening Venezuela - because they have the biggest oil reserve and started selling it in different currencies.
Now whether that whole genius strategy to gain wealth through geopolitics is worth an extinction event is a different story.
> That's also the reason why he wants to tell Europe to stop using renewables, and that's the reason why he is threatening Venezuela - because they have the biggest oil reserve and started selling them not in USD.
What's interesting is that the strategy you suggest (tell Europe to stop using renewables, attack nations that compete with US oil sales) only motivates other nations to move away from oil. It's a terrible strategy if the intent is to sell more US oil. Renewables are far more sustainable in many regards, and bolster national energy security while remaining on fossil fuels leaves them weak wrt energy security.
it could very well be that it backfires. I guess time will tell. A lot of his actions seem to be trimmed into this direction, and it's not a new one. He left the paris climate agreement quite a while back as far as I remember. blocking offshore wind construction just fits this agenda, as supporting companies to manufacture these windmills would just make everything cheaper (more demand, rising production capacity etc.) and demonstrate actual use of it.
It's kind of hard to see the strategy you outlined as doing anything other than backfiring. Oil and other fossil fuels are consumables. Once burned, they're gone. For strategic reasons, most nations with any sense and the economic ability to do so are turning away from fossil fuels precisely due to this fact. European nations are not exceptional here, the US is actually the outlier.
Your suggested strategy is that the US wants European nations to buy more US oil, and in order to motivate them the US is demonstrating how bad oil dependence is. See Cuba (they depend on Venezuelan oil there).
How could a demonstration of the flaws of oil dependency possibly motivate the sale of US oil rather than hasten the move towards solar, wind, and other power sources?
This is why I said it's a terrible strategy. Only the non-thinking would go for it.
You could be right. I try to abstain from making any predictions, because I see the world is such a complicated mess where even stupid decisions could get a positive outcome due to unforeseeable events. (a new pandemic? a war breaks out? someone decided to retaliate? the suez canal gets occupied? a volcano erupts?)
That being said, he is obviously aware that Europe is planning on greener energy. This administration also tries to break down the EU by pulling out countries like Italy and Poland. They are clearly promoting right wing parties all over Europe which align more with his agenda and are more EU sceptic. They might try to use social media for propaganda. The goal is divide and conquer. Europe has to pay attention to this and be aware of the risk. The strategy may seem stupid, but it would be even more stupid to ignore it and not make sure it fails.
I know plenty of people personally who can rant about energy prices being high while somehow finding room in the same breath to demonize wind and solar energy and even namedrop whichever foul devil bogeyman it is this week that is said to be the cause of this disjointed trauma that they find so overwhelming.
In the next breath, they pick something else from the deck to be upset about: These days, that's usually brown people, emails, laptops, the American cities that people in frog costumes burn to the ground every night, brown people, guns, laptops, and Hillary.
Sometimes, they then take a break to hear themselves talk about baseball, praise the president for getting so much done that he doesn't even have time to sleep, or to complain about the plot from the episode of The Dukes of Hazard -- from 1983 -- that they watched for the 14th time last night on Pluto.
After the break, it's time for them to complain about how they can't afford visit a doctor or buy eyeglasses, but they sure as hell don't want them any of those librawls to take any of their hard-earned money so everyone can go to the doctor.
Then things shift back to being weirder again: Schools turning boys into girls, kids using litter boxes in the classroom, men wearing dresses, God's Perfect Plan, guns, brown people, groceries, brown people, and blue hair dye.
This tiresome process repeats until I manage to escape, or I tell them very pointedly to shut the fuck up (hints don't work).
None of the people I know who act this way seem to be particularly bright, but I know them anyway.
"while somehow finding room in the same breath to demonize wind and solar energy "
Did you ever consider that all the money spent on expensive renewables is money not spent on cheaper forms of power? Did you ever consider that they are correct and that spending on renewables drives up power costs? Because that's what the data says is happening. Now, I am aware that the amount of FUD on this topic is very different to get through. But if you learn about the differences between capacity and utilization costs and the other accounting games that are played with energy costs, you will learn how to see through the FUD. But I'm sure it is more psychologically comforting to just look down on them which is what you are actually doing.
I consider that I'm intertwined in the evolution of a very different friend's very local efforts, with their own hybrid battery-backed grid-tied offline-capable solar power system.
That rig is pretty sweet.
It pays for itself, and in present form and with their present use (wherein: they're not trying to live particularly-efficiently) it is almost entirely capable of keeping them with power even if the grid goes down for an indefinite period.
But, sure: We can talk about games, instead, if what you want to chat about is just games.
"entirely capable of keeping them with power even if the grid goes down for an indefinite period."
You do know that batteries have a capacity right? And powerplants have something called a capacity factor. That means for a given amount of capacity, you generate on average a certain amount of power. For nuclear that factor is .9. For renewables its .1. So 1 watt of nuclear provides the same power as 9 watts of renewables. That's why when you say that renewables have 1/3 the capacity cost, it really means its 3x more expensive than nuclear. That means higher bills for people, which is what we mean when we say utilization cost. That's the real cost that people pay and actually counts. And all this is before we talk about siting issues with renewables. Fun fact, most PV is sites (located) somewhere with an albino factor of less than .25. But since you connected a battery terminal to a PV panel, you must know what that means. Seriously, you are just spreading misinformation that transfers cost from the rich to the poor, such a hero you are.
Most grown men are influenced by this. The patriachy is strongggg.
Just like you can manipulate women en-masse by appealing to patriarchal attitudes around femininity and beauty, maybe by talking about weight or hair, you can influence men by appealing to patriachal attitudes around masculinity.
I mean, you can convince the average American man to drop an extra 20K on a truck he doesn't need and a multiply his gas cost by 2x just by convincing him it's manly. You can discourage men from drinking cosmopolitans and instead have them drink the equivalent of cat piss by telling him it's unmanly.
“Last week, Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social that is majority-owned by the president, said it was getting into the energy business, announcing a merger with a fusion firm TAE Technologies.”
Reminiscent of how most water which used to melt into the Great Salt Lake is now being used to farm Alfalfa, which only makes up 1% of their GDP and far fewer jobs than other industries. Of course if this continues for another generation, toxic arsenic dust will pollute and force the failure of Salt Lake City and surrounding regions. Luckily this will cause the agricultural industry to fail (after killing many people) and nature will heal itself.
91 million lives were saved over the last two decades. The vast majority of that wasn't "international development" fluff; it was basic survival. We’re talking about stopping tuberculosis, malaria, and starvation.
Framing this as getting rid of unwanted "cultural programs" is a convenient way to ignore the fact that we pulled the plug on the life support system for 30 million children.
More like "if we can't be partners we'll find your enemies and fund them instead." or, "we'll partner with your next of kin who may be more sympathetic [or suggestive] to our concerns."
china runs with everything. They are still expanding coal units for firming and they'll build a ton of new gas units too. But to ban deployment of wind turbines without any explanation is ... expected from current administration...
Being blind with bias is also expected. I don't like what is going on either, but please consider that if it was only about "damaging" as others have implied, it would not just be off shore wind turbines. I can assure you there are other reasons.
I hope you realize that China's coal and oil use for electricity is at an all-time high and increasing. They have installed more coal capacity since 2020 than the US has total. US coal usage peaked circa 2000 and has decreased for the last 2 decades.
That article is about emissions, not admixture. If you look at the source of that article, which they link to: https://carbonmonitor.org/variation
First off we can now look at the full year instead of 6 months of data, its no longer US +4.2% and China -2.7%, its US +2.0% and China -2.3%
China's 2025 YoY emissions decline is almost all due to a decline in industry, not power (1.8% of their 2.3% decline, in other words, most of it). It's understandable to have a lower year if you have an economic slowdown. Russia also had a decline, not for green reasons.
A 3% GDP growth this year is a slowdown from 2024. Did you read this paper? I encourage you to at least read the abstract. It discusses whether "China's 2025 economic growth story turns on whether investment merely declined in the second half of the year or collapsed."
China had an emissions decline in 2025 that is substantially attributable to a decline in industry, per their first source. The decline in industry is plausible so long as GDP growth in 2025 is lower than GDP growth in 2024, and is additionally supported by the newly introduced source that the commentor did not read. Yes, it is possible to have an economic slowdown and a positive GDP print.
In general it's weird to say '"economic slowdown" is an exaggeration' and then link to something that talks about the economic slowdown.
I don't know what "decline in industry" means here tbh. Emissions from industry went down, but GDP still went up. Does that mean there's "less industry" or "more industry"? How do you measure "industry"? Maybe their industry just became more efficient.
Total emissions also went down. Yeah GDP went up less than last year but that hardly matters when we're talking about an emissions reduction. Not "less emissions growth than last year", an absolute decrease.
New coal data is out just a few days ago [1], it's plateaued globally and expected to start to decline.
China's consumption this year was about the same as last, and looking to drop a bit, so likely old coal plants were being retired at about the same rate as newer ones were built, and that will start to go the other way (more retired than built).
>It seems we crossed into the realm of intentionally doing damage.
"The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande ... The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered." [https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...]
# Country CO2/capita CO2 total (2022) Population
- ------------- ---------- ---------------- ----------------
1 China 8.89 12,667,428,430 1,425,179,569
2 United States 14.21 4,853,780,240 341,534,046
3 India 1.89 2,693,034,100 1,425,423,212
America is still the largest historical polluter by a mile and China has already hit peak emissions. They are doing much better than America on this front. At this rate they’ll hit net zero before we will
If somebody does pollution for a while how in the world would that make them ineligible from being the leader in the future technologies that stop the pollution?
I am not following your logic or point here. The US has been the leading polluter, would that somehow stop us from saving the world from pollute if we came up with the technology for the rest of the world to stop polluting? Of course not. It's a very strange whataboutism that you are purveying that gets repeated frequently in online forums, but doesn't stand up to a little bit of back-and-forth.
Pollutant-wise, are you insinuating that solar and wind and battery manufacturing is more polluting overall than the extraction and burning of fossil fuels they replace?
Parent deleted his comment with insults and got flagged dead. Perhaps insulting those with legitimate questions and people who have long-term accounts (indicating a lack of low-effort brigading ala reddit) isn't the best method, particularly when you don't respond to any of those questions. A bit of a "look in the mirror" moment.
Nothing to do with my comment or your reply specifically. I suspected bot voting manipulation and this entire discussion is filled with absolutely stupid Reddit-style comments. People posting substantive comments were being downvoted.
Some of the dumbest, low quality comments I read here come from 10+ year old accounts so account age has no correlation to discussion quality.
I can't argue in good faith when everyone is acting like children.
> China is by far the world's biggest polluter, by a factor of 2-3x that of the US so let's not paint them as some beacon of environmental stewardship.
China's leading the planet in development and deployment of renewable energy tech.
What proportion of China's emissions are a consequence of The West's externalizing the manufacturing of what it consumes?
At least with China in the driver's seat it looks like the planet's manufacturing needs will actually get cleaned up. Meanwhile the US will keep pearl clutching as it fades into irrelevance and Zimbabwean hyperinflation.
Meanwhile China runs away with all the clean energy tech (solar, wind, batteries, etc, etc.) while we hold to fossil fuels to save less than 200,000 jobs.