I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna. With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry in my opinion.
More or less.
Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).
Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.
In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.
The initial premise of the country is that anybody who could scrape together £50 could start their own farm. Ben Franklin wrote about this in his pamphlets and was super stoked.
Unfortunately the North experienced waves of immigration from groups fleeing famine. These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine.
This presented two problems for the North, which you may observe in newspapers of the day:
1. The immigrants clogged the cities & threatened public order.
2. Western expansion into undeveloped land would necessarily be won by the political bloc most capable of farming.
The South had a booming workforce capable of farming and few issues in its cities.
The two problems were solved by war. #1 was solved by sending an army comprised of roughly half immigrants or sons of immigrants to die. Union soldiers burned and razed agricultural capacity, solving #2.
Note in the newspapers and political cartoons of the day that war with the South was only one of a number of options. I believe war with Spain was the most popular choice.
- "These people categorically did not want to start a farm; otherwise they would not have been facing famine." The vast majority of immigrants to the US at this time WERE farmers who were not allowed to own land in Europe. The reason they came to the North instead of the South is because they were largely not allowed to settle anywhere East of the Appalachians in the South. The South was staunchly anti-immigrant and barely had any cities at the time.
- At the outbreak of war, the Union army was almost entirely made up of American born volunteers. Later, immigrant brigades were enlisted, but most were highly regarded and commended and still made up less than half of the army.
- Your explanation cutely ignores the fact that Southern troops fired first in the Civil War
Please tell me more on your theories regarding these immigrants.
The only ones I'm aware of were Irish immigrants. Most of them were urban dwellers, not farmers. The Irish who were farmers were generally working on farms owned by the English.
I'm not saying we shouldn't read historical documents. I'm saying to not apply the same skepticism you would apply to modern media to old media is a mistake.
Taking Europe versus China, California versus Texas, it seems like social pressure is less effective than markets. Let markets build the power source they want to build and lo and behold you get lots of solar and wind and batteries.
Solar is historically a great example where public / private collaboration actually has a place. Even if today it’s time to let market forces work.
0. https://www.energy.gov/state-american-energy-promises-made-p...
Oil is over, regardless of this admin's propaganda on the topic. If we want to speed up the US EV transition, we push refineries into retirement faster, pushing up refined gasoline prices. No one will build new refineries due to stranded asset risk, so those that remain are on borrowed time.
Oil analysts say there is a supply glut — why that hasn't translated to lower prices this year - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-analysts-say-there-is-a-s... - February 22nd, 2026 ("Coming into 2026, the consensus view among oil analysts was that the crude market was entering a period of deep oversupply, likely to keep depressing prices throughout the year. In 2025, oil prices fell by roughly 20% as the glut widened.")
US drillers cut oil rigs to lowest in four years, Baker Hughes says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-drillers-cut-oil-... | https://archive.today/84kwl - November 26th, 2025
China’s shrinking oil footprint: How electric vehicle adoption is shaping China’s oil consumption - https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/chinas-shrinking-oil-footprin... - November 4th, 2025
North American Oil Refineries and Pipelines - https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=5e7f84d84b...
(no current oil commodity exposure)
Then why has both global [0] and US [1] consumption been rising year-over-year for the last few years and projected to continue to rise [2]?
All those articles you're posting about short term changes in the dynamics of the oil market (except China, which is remains a net energy importer only because of oil, so they have a strong strategic reason to reduce oil depdence, though they still use quite a bit[3]).
Btw I'm not citing these things because I'm a big supporter of hydrocarbons or against green energy (which will continue to grow with or without boosters, since there is a real demand for that energy), but more so a realist pointing out that we are absolutely not making any progress in reducing our global need for hydrocarbons.
0. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-consumption-by-countr...
1. https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10324
2. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China#/media/File:Chin...
Not very long ago not only was consumption increasing every year, it was increasing at an increasing rate every year. And that increasing rate was itself increasing not so much time before that. We've reversed the 3rd derivate, and we've reversed the 2nd derivative. If the 2nd derivative is negative for sufficient time, the 1st derivative will itself go negative. Looks like it'll happen this year, but the year's not over yet.
The first derivative is consumption. The 0th derivative is amount of carbon in the air. For that to go down would require a carbon negative economy which I don't have much hope for.
So no, we need our refineries for a good part of this century. Likely we will keep just the integrated ones (chemical + fuels).
The main obstacle is aeroplanes, so that's Jet-A aka Kerosene as fuel, but even then if the numbers get nasty the airlines will kill a lot of services rather than try to pass on unaffordable prices and eat the fuel cost when there aren't enough buyers.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-...
(think in systems)
Or we could just let electric cars slowly/naturally replace gas cars without artificially increasing inflation.
“You are being misled about renewable energy technology”
Eg. Texas is doing really well in renewable rollouts (see the amount of battery capacity they are putting in - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...
It’s certainly not because of Texan politics either. It’s just cold hard reality. Renewables won’t be stopped at this point. Even the executive orders to halt wind farms don’t make a dent in what’s happening. We may end up a few years later than other nations but at least it’s unstoppable.
No, the right isn't meant to be pro free-market. It's meant to protect the interests, longevity, and demand-capture of its donor industries, primarily fossil fuels extraction, processing, and distribution, but increasingly large technology companies in monopoly positions in their markets.
All the "free-market" to "culture-war" rhetoric are just political/religious strategies to achieve that end.
A lot of folks are spreading the message 'it's not right vs left but up vs down when in reality its both.
Besides the whole petro money and lobbyism thing that drove the US politics since Edwin Drake?
It's hard for people to visualize the massive shift here. It's the difference between needing to eat every single day, to merely needing to buy a 5-year supply and never having to worry about eating again until 5 years from now.
Except that it's 30+ years for solar panels, 20+ years for batteries.
The amount of independence and security that renewables-based energy infrastructure provides is hard to imagine for most people. The US's two big inflationary events in the past 50 years have been due to global fossil fuel supply shocks. And the second one that happened in the 2020s was when the US was a net exporter of energy! We still had exposure to inflation shocks because we had a global market for our energy sources.
Renewables change all that. Even if we bought all of our solar panels and batteries from China today, we'd have far better energy security, and have decades to build up the industry to replace them if we wanted to switch to autarky. (And autarky is a terrible idea, but that's a different discussion...)
In practice: https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2026/0116/1553440-mayo-wind...
>> "Each one of the new wind turbines will be capable of supplying more power to the national electricity grid than was generated by the entire Bellacorick wind farm."
Additionally this talk makes the usual mistake of conflating "electricity" with "energy". While the US does have fairly high percentage of energy in the form of electricity it's still only around 33% of the US energy needs.
And still we see that "green energy" only supplements not replaces our other energy needs. We've seen tremendous EV adoption and yet US oil consumption is on an upward trend and nearing pre-pandemic highs [0].
It's wild that there are multiple, very serious global conflicts heating up over control of oil and people still believe we're just a few more years away from a purely green energy world with no evidence to suggest that's a remotely reasonable belief.
I'm super optimistic about green energy and in favor of expanding it.
But also acutely aware it's barely putting a dent on energy use despite year-on-year record levels of capacity install (>90% of new capacity is green), which far exceeds expert expectations every single year. Non-renewables keep growing, forecasts and ambitions were cut by the Trump admin, and it is expected that the latest economic revolution's (AI) main bottleneck is going to be energy by the end of the year.
We have essentially blown past the paris accord thresholds (we've seen months of +1.5c temperature, which was the limit we envisioned in 2015) and despite renewables far exceeding expectations, they completely fell short of what is necessary pre-2023. Post-2023 you have Trump derailing renewables wherever he can and AI increasing demand even further.
It really looks pretty hopeless and frankly it's sad that there is no real conversation about this, which seems to be an existential question for the generation living in 2100 and beyond.
You're also now getting to the point that adding new capacity is increasing the amount of renewable energy that is being curtailed (i.e. thrown away), meaning while renewables get cheaper over time, the rate of things getting cheaper will slow down as renewables must be increasingly paired with storage investments (which are also getting cheaper but introduce additional cost).
For example, sunny Cyprus curtailed 13%, 29% and 49% (!!) of its solar generation in 2023 to 2025 respectively. Yes last year half of the solar power that was produced, was thrown away, because of a lack of demand-supply balancing. Cyprus is uniquely poorly positioned (high solar potential, small country with a single small timezone, no interconnectors to offload surplus to other countries, no storage facilities etc) but it's still a sign of things to come. Further generation will increasingly need to be paired with significant storage, or it's partially wasted.
That's what happens when the "Leader of the Free World" is 79 with dementia with memories of the 1970s oil crisis.
We're not likely to get useful oil out of Venezuela, and any we do get isn't gonna be cost-competitive against solar.
Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.
A clusterfuck of priorities.
Hopecore. Onward. The horrors persist, but so do we.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
https://web.archive.org/web/20260225073026/https://www.eia.g...
Future offshore wind farms now need to add in the expected costs and project risks of this sort of illegal government action when they make the decision at the early stage.
Trump is likely to have delayed off shore wind in the US by at least 4 years, and may be many more. This will cost ratepayers a lot, and set the US behind most other countries in the world.
Agreed on solar and batteries being mostly unstoppable, though. The Trump administration has not yet figured how to misuse the courts to block those. Their better influence is through PUCs and utility execs, that are likely to bend to the will of Trump.
> Trump is likely to have delayed off shore wind in the US by at least 4 years, and may be many more. This will cost ratepayers a lot, and set the US behind most other countries in the world.
Democracy has unfortunate failure scenarios, make a note for history books and system design lessons. The electorate should learn to vote better next time. Existing coal plants will get run into the ground (they only supplied 16% of power in the US in 2024, and that number will decline forever), and there are only two gas turbine manufacturers in the world; their backlog is 5-7 years. As the US exports more LNG, that will force domestic prices up, pushing up electricity prices of generation from fossil gas. Renewables and battery storage will be the only option.
As of this comment, the world is very close to 1TW/year of solar PV deployment, and this will not slow down:
https://ember-energy.org/focus-areas/clean-electricity/
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/global-solar-install...
Major problems with the US system have been known for a long time. It's been regarded as basically obsolete for over a century now, by the kind of people who study this stuff.
"We basically run a coalition government, without the efficiency of a parliamentary system" - Paul Ryan.
To be more specific, our majority-based government locks us into a two-party system where one party just has to be slightly less bad than the other to win a majority. But our two parties are really just a rough assembly of smaller coalitions that are usually at odds with each other.
The presidential democracies that function usually have some sort of "hybrid" model where the legislature has some sort of oversight on the executive office. But they are still much more prone to deadlock or power struggles.
Germany had 7 major political parties in the run up to 1933. In fact if you look at the history of dictatorships that took over democracies, having 2 to 3 stable institutionalized parties is actually protective. The other thing that appears to be protective is a history of peaceful transitions of power, which the US has the longest or second longest.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
[2] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o1byqi/...
What is the money doing that the voter can't overcome?
*best is funny to define
The US is mostly hurting itself here, our portion of emissions is mostly historical now, and if we have more expensive and less reliably energy because we are dumping money into decrepit coal generators rather than cheaper renewables, that will only limit the US's economic growth even more, and make the US a smaller chunk of emissions overall.
I have a very rosy view of the future of energy for the world, especially for Africa which can be completely revolutionized with solar and batteries. But for the US, it's dark days. We need to stop hitting ourselves, but as long as hitting ourselves and hurting our economy is owning the libs, part of our body politic is going to keep on doing it.
Is the US hurting it's future economic potential and infrastructure stock out of ideology? Absolutely. Do I care if the US continues to fight against these energy technology torrent rapids out of ideology? I do not. That is the US' choice to impair their future infrastructure and capabilities as a nation state. I can only observe and comment on a suboptimal system I do not control.
I still feel an obligation to fix the mess here, as much as possible, and will continue to do so, but full minimization of US-exposure has never sounded so good.
