- Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it. If your argument is an economic one then jump onto the solar, wind and battery bandwagon.
- There are virtually no real short medium or long term gains economically here. Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind and its costs are rising while solar and wind continue to fall. Building new maximum pollution plants would drop that internalized cost but who in their right mind would fund something so obviously DOA?
- Obviously the externalized costs of greenhouse gas emissions are deeply undervalued in this move. Even if they are 'fake news' in the US, the rest of the world is finally starting to take them seriously. The US's diminished soft power means it won't be able to easily bully the world into allowing it to pollute without consequence and such an obviously hostile move means it will loose even more of its soft power by taking this position. So on the international level this means we burn a lot of political capital and gain nothing but decades of distrust and anger.
- Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.
- Oh yeah and, of course, climate change is real.
This continues the US down the path of being the best buggy whip maker in the world. Worse than that, the US is becoming an obnoxious buggy whip maker who's neighbors are starting to hope fails horribly and will help make that happen as moves like this continue. This is stupid at every scale and in every dimension.
Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though; at worst it takes longer to ship the key components from China to Europe around Africa.
For example in reaction to 1973 Arab oil embargo Carter boosted energy efficiency and solar and promoted coal.
" "America indeed is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and my goal as President of the United States is to see on the world energy markets Arab oil replaced with Illinois coal," Carter told miners and employees of the Old Ben Coal Mine No. 25. He also boasted that the country would, "produce more coal in 1980 than has ever before been produced in the United States of America." "
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/29/1158426645/jimmy-carters-envi...
New coal gasification projects in India
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-clears-4-billi...
Problem is that installing a bunch of sick sons of bitches to do your bidding can backfire when those some morons lose a war to Iran in a matter of months.
Value which won't bring anything to anyone. I mean, a couple of people can be more richerer, but we and them won't have a planet to spend or enjoy these theoretical riches at the end.
So, no biggie.
you're definitely not clear on the meaning.
It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren. Wait to see what happens when millions of desperate people living south of the 40th parallel start heading north in mass. No wall will stop that.
China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.
With some luck, the net effect will be fewer greenhouse gases than keeping themselves oil-dependent, though that isn't necessarily the, or even a, goal. If it happens, it'll be as a side effect.
The less predictable things become, the faster everyone ramps up potential solutions to bad potential scenarios.
Some are trying to bring that sanity back. Others are trying to increase the chaos as much as they possibly can, and preferably more.
https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/09/China-Energy-Tr...
(Page 14)
https://www.mining.com/web/chinas-coal-output-hits-record-in...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-top-coal-regi...
That's not really relevant to the topic at hand. No one has said that China is a utopia and paragon of human rights.
Despite all of that, Electricitymaps predicts that they can generate 48% of their total energy from carbon-free sources at noon-hours.
Now, this is impressive, despite building 50 new coal plants in 2025 alone.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/france#how-much-of...
China produced 41% of electricity from low-carbon sources last year.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-...
Interestingly Turkey passed 50% mark apparently. That's also an out of left field revelation for me.
It's a cryin' shame these people don't care how much of a sucky life they are handing everyone's grandchildren, and not nearly enough people actually cared when we could have still done something about it...
The fact these regulations didn't make it through the normal law making progress (senate/house) doomed it before it even took shape. With presidents like Trump undoing everything his predecessor(s) did just to feel powerful, legislation like this is doomed from that start.
And now that the Data Centre Industrial Complex has come along it’s somewhat sidelined the Climate Change Industrial Complex*.
Funny how that happens.
Solar and wind output is not constant or reliable. NIMBYs sabotaged nuclear years ago. It takes how many years to bring a new plant online?
A lot of feel-good rules and regs were passed, pushing a massive shift to electric power, with no consideration as to where the additional power would come from.
You can't wave your arms like a Peanuts cartoon and have all that extra power appear, which is the logic that was used in passing many of these impractical regulations.
There’s no way for you to know that. You don’t do the math. People like me, who work in the clean energy industry, do the math. The math works fine. You should try working as hard as the math does, instead of complaining.
Have a closer look at the hydro dams that have been removed for salmon habitat.
From what I've seen capacity was tens of MegaWatts [1] and some were just for irrigation. Meanwhile, large dams [2] are doing gigawatts.
Large dams also have negative environmental effects and maybe one day they'll get removed too, but accepting the tradeoff for large amounts of power makes more sense than destroying samon fishing to get irrigation water or a piddly amount of power.
Especially at a time when electrical power use was trending down due to efficiency gains and offshoring manufacturing, and samon fisheries were in danger of failing, it made sense to remove dams that weren't terribly productive. And start considering actually doing the work to make the larger dams fish friendly, eventually.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161221064310/http://www.water....
Energy storage is required along with solar farms.
> Energy storage is required along with solar farms
How many batteries are we going to need for that? They literally just figured out how to get the child slaves in the Congo out of the supply chain with a shift to LFP.
Yeah, there's also pumped water storage, and other forms of gravity/kinetic storage, various means of chemical energy storage, and all kinda other neat battery-like ideas folks have been trying/using.
Batteries aren't exactly made from gold. Grid scale batteries especially, where weight and size doesn't matter as much, are totally viable on a mass scale.
Speaking of infrastructure, how about pushing a mass rollout of EVs before giving a single consideration as to where the charging infra would come from?
It's not like the current mix of electrical generation and fossil fuel distribution is some naturally occurring phenomenon or alien technology. It's an enormously complex and interdependent system we built. I'm pretty confident we can build new and different things.
Though it looks like rolling out EVs before the charging network existed worked, there are thousands upon thousands of chargers now that there are enough vehicles to use them.
One can not create policies that destroy the thing they want to protect from a crisis to come, by inducing a different crisis by ignoring the material you work with. Trump is your doing, you brought this guy forth, by deindustrializing the west, by making western buisnesses unable to compete. Stop working with idealized paper-cut outs of people- and actually engage, with the species you got. And no, your good intentions and noble goals, do not entitle you to wing it.
The "good" news is that coal plants are already suboptimal, economically. This is delaying the closure of existing plans, which is just absurd, but completely on brand for the political party that people voted in office, with complete knowledge of what would happen.
I suppose they also voted for "cheaper groceries" and "no more endless wars", but that will come any time soon.
"The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039, which would have reduced carbon pollution by an estimated 1.38 billion metric tons through 2047"
Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.
> Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.
This is an exaggeration that stretches credulity, since there have been strict limits for decades around secondary outputs that are required by power plant energy production effectively limiting production and emissions (which is the entire point).
America is actively ceding the future to China, and our ruling class have no ideas left other than looting the place as it’s burning to the ground.
Violently demonstrating the geopolitical liability of relying on Greenhouse Gasses is more compelling than more climate conferences apparently.
https://canada.citizensclimatelobby.org/media-release-ccl-ca...
NFTs never made sense. You're buying a short URL on a blockchain in the hopes that it'll somehow retain value. The URL could go bad, it could be pointed at something else, etc. But what NFTs did was induce demand for crypto, particularly Ethereum. That was the point.
For a long time I thought we went to war for oil. No, that's backwards. Our oil dependence exists to induce demand for weapons. I will once again refer to the article No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].
So when you see things like pollution limits being lifted on power plants because of data centers, know that the ultimate driving force is the sale of weapons.
Let me give a concrete example. If I drill a well in West Texas that produces, say, 1000 barrels per day ("bpd"). It doesn't produce that forever. As the pressure goes down, the daily production goes down. In the industry this is called the decline rate. For the Permian Basin, the decline rate of any oil well is typically 15-20% per year. So in year 2, that well will produce 800-850bpd. In year 3, it'll be ~650-700. In year 4 it'll be 500-550.
So if you rely on oil you constantly need to be building new wells to maintain your same production level. For the US, which produces 13-15Mbpd of oil, that means you need to add 2Mbpd of new wells every year just to maintain that level of production.
Oil wells, like any form of resource extraction, are excellent wealth concentrators. They make people rich. If I put up 1GW of solar panels then, apart from some cleaning and general maintenance, they're going to produce 1GW of electricity every year (with some variance for sunshine). Nobody gets rich from that. And nobody needs to go to war for that. Which means nobody gets rich from selling weapons to secure that oil.
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
nfts were about trying to make inherently not scare things scarce, and to try to get people involved in a ponzi scheme
the oil being drilled and mined is exceptionally useful, and people buy it even when you dont need to go to war or get weapons. War would still be happening in the middle east without oil, its a key trade route between Europe and Asia.
the oil dependence exists because it lets people get work and labour done without hiring labourers.
if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that, and whenever people start building giant solar farms in borth africa, we will see armed militas conquering each other for control over the profits
or can a dictator president do this at all without congress?
btw how many gallons of crude oil do you think the Epstein Memorial Ballroom can hold?
because we're going to need a new strategic oil reserve, he destroyed the current system by bottoming it out
I mean, anyone can say they're for the environment, but are you willing to start a war, lose a midterm, and murder a school full of kids to reduce your carbon footprint? /s
- wow 2039. So this already had no teeth. We can just pass this law again in 2029.
That page is from 2002.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greenhouse_gas&ol...
It uses the term “greenhouse gas” to refer to CO2 and uses the term “air pollution” to refer to what people traditionally think of as air pollution. For example, in one place of says: “Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g., by air pollution).” So that’s treating “CO2 enrichment” (emissions) as distinct from “air pollution.”
Society uses labels to group things together so that we can treat similar things similarly for various purposes. For example, when we talk about “education” we usually mean teaching kids in schools or colleges. Of course, there’s lots of other things you can call “education.” But if the Department of Education comes in and says it’s going to regulate technical presentations at software conferences because that’s also “education,” then you’d say: “that’s not what people mean by the word education in this context.” That is, we have a consensus about what “education” encompasses and what it doesn’t for purposes of government regulation, and seminars at conferences falls outside that understanding.
Source?
The thing that is also known as "air pollution"?
I want to tell you to stop being a moron, but its against this site's TOS.
Is the IPCC also “morons?”
CO2 can be pollution while still allowing plants to grow, plants use CO2 in their growth cycle, if you didn't know, they don't use other greenhouse gases to grow.
Page 9 lists CO2 as the first item in a list of greenhouse gases. I don't want to spend all day read this 37 year old report.
In what world are greenhouse gases not air pollutants?