Further evidence that the "narrative" progressive Left continues to be a costly drag on the Democratic Party's current and almost certain future political fortunes.
If you can't convince a majority of Americans of the wisdom of your radical ideas, then you can't win elections and govern. About all you can do -- and it's what the Democratic Left does best -- is assume that it is somehow of such superior intellect the unwashed masses simply cannot comprehend. And that's the very definition of an elitist, arrogant snobbery.
"Here are some findings that show why Democrats are warming back up to all-of-the-above"
The less kind but more accurate description is that Democrats are being dragged kicking and screaming to an all-of-the-above. Whether we actually move toward an all-of-the-above approach is a question of pure power politics. My hope is that the current administration has their foot to the floor to accomplish the maximum amount possible before 2026.
Decades of catastrophizing about climate has caused people to tune it out. The media thinks it can blame all natural disasters on climate, but I think people know better. Hurricanes have always happened.
Unfortunately for the left, the face of top-down environmentalist command-and-control is not AOC who is at least attractive.
It is Klaus Schwab, intoning that you will "own nothing, live in ze pod, eat ze bug burger and you will be happy" with all the charisma of the villain in Lethal Weapon 2.
And the tangible effects of environmentalism have been annoying nanny-state stuff like banning gasoline equipment / crappy gasoline cans / low flow toilets / auto shutoff cars, etc. People are generally sick and tired of the Karen State trying to take away your gas stove or lawn mower.
As with so many Democratic Party positions, the message to voters regarding energy and climate is “Don’t believe what your common sense is telling you. Listen to us because we’re the experts.” This message is combined with lies, distortions, and threats designed to silence anyone who questions the policies. Same story with border security, criminal justice, DEI, etc. They are determined to sacrifice our economy and standard of living on the altar of “green energy” policy. Thankfully, most people aren’t buying it.
"This message is combined with lies, distortions, and threats designed to silence anyone who questions the policies." -- and a long list of Dem cronies who are getting rich off massive grants with little or no oversight.
Reps should hope Ruy is never allowed to run the Dem Party. You make far too much sense. Still, there is polling, and then there is reality. Roughly 22% of our energy is now Green and every kWh of solar and wind must be backed up by fossil fuels, to avoid tragedy. In the 80s, 17% of our energy was Green, give or take, much of it hydropower. So in approximately 45 years we have increased our Green production by approximately 5%, at a cost of trillions of dollars.
Then there is the way people live in the West now, as opposed to even 30 or 40 years ago. Most boomers grew up with 1 TV in the house, 2 if they were lucky . Now add phones, computers, multiple TVs. People use to combine trips to the grocery , dry cleaner, mall. . . Now for many, most purchases are delivered, all in individual, separate tranches. AC use, as the population continues to move South, has to have increased massively. All before AI is considered.
Moreover, the majority of Americans still do not realize electricity is not energy. It is just a delivery system. The juice must come from somewhere. In the mid 90s, I barely escaped being hit by Silicon Valley neighbor with a 3 wheel EV prototype, while walking the dog. The EV was nearly silent. When he stopped to check on me, he noted I would have to be careful because soon EVs would be everywhere. 30 years later, EVs make up less than 10% of US registered vehicles.
All of the above, as long as the cost of Green energy is reasonable, is the only rational plan.
More than 1/2 of the world's population resides in Asia, much of it in places far hotter than Texas or FL. Spend a week in Singapore, and the reality of the world's needs, hits home fairly quickly. They do not enjoy mild Springs, Falls or Winters.
The era of Dems preaching the bankrupting of lower and middle earning Americans is OK , if it is in pursuit of Green fantasies is over, whether the Far Left is willing to admit it or not. Affordable and abundant Green energy will eventually exist, but not anytime soon.
The “22% renewables” figure you cite, Ronda, is misleading. Electricity generated is not equal to electricity actually consumed. That figure (renewable energy consumed, including hydro) is about 9%.
This highlights the failure of so called green energy to date. Energy production is unpredictable and inefficient (too much at times, none at other times when needed most). Transmission has to cover long distances, environmental impacts are consequential, especially when one considers disposal costs. Even when they are working, solar only produces energy about 25% of the time, wind perhaps 35%. Solar and especially wind will never play a major (e.g. > 25%) role in energy actually used. They are simply too inefficient for a society that, when it flips a switch, expects the light to come on.
The main issue being, most don’t believe the politicized basis that liberals claim is based on science. It isn’t and if you can’t prove different to the mass’, it will continue to be the loser issue that it is.
People care about what they believe in, people will only take action on what they care about.
Administrations come and go. The US and the world continues to do more with electricity all the time, and we continue to burn lots of oil and gas. Drilling has slowed tremendously here, a quick look at the price of gas is why. People will buy new electric cars, subsidy or not because they are cheaper to run and the drive trains are simpler.
The IRA was simply a boondoggle for orgs like Earth Justice and the NRDC, in my state orgs were invented simply to qualify for grants which were never used as their only ability was grant proposal writing.
Long run tariffs might be as environmental as anything else. The USA has some of the cleanest manufacturing facilities on the planet. The pump jacks are quiet in Weld County Colorado, but that's ok, good wheat harvest this year and beef is at a high.
"People will buy new electric cars, subsidy or not because they are cheaper to run and the drive trains are simpler." -- people in cold climates and people who regularly make trips over 250 miles aren't going to buy electric cars until the charging stations are up and reliable and the number of miles before charging (including running the A/C and heaters) is greatly increased.
People that drive to the grocery stores once a week love EVs.
I'll probably never buy one. At the rate I'm driving my Cummins I'll be 110 by the time it's average lifespan is up. My little run around even more. Things improve, some batteries can charge in 10 minutes now, and a significant boost in 5 min.
I'd think eventually cars will be able to go a lot further than 250 miles with AC or heat. The biggest improvement I think will be on urban ownership. Self driving might well alleviate the need to own.
I drive around 400 miles every six weeks to visit family, I hate stopping for gas much less hunting for charging station and then sitting there. I often thought if I was just buying EV to drive around town, I'd just Uber. Factoring in the cost of the car, maintenance, insurance - I'd probably come out ahead.
Climate crisis, as it now should be called, is a donor class self actualization hobby, an upper class luxury belief, and a leftist NGO career path. It is also a tool of the now declining Democrat-loving WEF globalists that have sought to deindustrialize the old West and replace capitalism with their dream of a global collectivist corporatocracy. It was always against the people. If Trump had lost they would be still trying to ram it down our throats.
How ironic that Ruy runs another piece about how the working class doesn't care about climate change, with us recovering from yet another in a series of climate change-fueled disasters. They may not care about climate change, but climate change cares about them. Insurance companies care about climate change as they raise rates to insure homes facing increased rates of natural disasters:
Anyway, to (re) state the obvious, energy policy under Biden WAS "all of the above". US fossil fuel output reached all time highs after recovering from COVID pandemic price collapse (remember when the price of oil went negative?) While this was going on, Biden adopted incentives for people to adopt solar and wind power and American made EVs, not to mention onshoring semiconductor manufacturing.. Dems and climate activists went all carrot (subsidies) and no stick (carbon taxes/cap and trade) after years of getting no where.
Solar/wind+ battery storage is capable of providing up to 80% of current electricity consumption at current costs and even more as costs drop as technology improves:
The solar panels I just installed are twice as efficient as the once I installed on a previous home.
Like it or not, green energy+batteries and EVs are the technologies of the future. The US can and should subsidize these to counteract the subsidies that the Chinese are giving their companies.. What I fear will happen is that when the US awakens from its current stupor, China will have firmly established itself in control of all the critical technologies and we will be looking at the end of the American Century and the start of the Chinese one, in addition to all the climate-change related weather disasters. MAGAts who are running the country and world into the ground so they can impose their reactionary agenda are neither "liberal" nor "patriots"
Weather disasters have become more expensive because people are building high priced real estate in the path of hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, not because those events are more numerous or more intense. Years ago before insurance, people didn't build structures they were not willing to lose on the beach.
Biden's handlers were driven to continue the production of oil and gas due to necessity, but not because they wanted to. Have you forgotten the EV mandates, the banning of gas furnaces, stoves, and anything else that worked in the name of "climate change"? And there is no way that solar, wind, and battery storage can even remotely come close to replacing 80% of our electric use, and any attempt to do so will cost far more. Also, the blackout in Spain recently is a wakeup call for trying to run the grid on inverter-based power without enough spinning generation to provide inertia and act as a moderator for keeping the grid stable. Whatever the propaganda might be, real engineering assessments of what happened was that the grid was down to about 25% spinning power (hydro, nuclear, and conventional gas-fired generation) when a large solar plant tripped and unbalanced the load. Without enough inertia, everything else tripped off to protect itself. Yes, there are very expensive ways of providing synthetic inertia for battery or inverter-based power but why should we spend trillions on this when we can build nuclear plants? Doesn't make sense.
"Green" energy and batteries (which are NOT "green", but require a great deal of mining for the metals and fossil-fuel based energy to construct, and may never generate enough to cover the cost to build them) are niche technologies that have a place but will never provide for all of our energy needs. The Chinese are using EVs to clean up the air pollution in their cities, they are exporting the pollution to rural areas where they are building new coal-fired generating plants at a rate of about one a week. And you can be sure there are no scrubbers on the stacks. Also, don't forget that solar/wind provide only about 8% of our electric needs on a 24/7 365-day basis, so most of the electricity that charges the average EV does so from conventional power plants. If you want an EV, buy one. But don't make everybody else buy one they don't want.
Solar and wind are cost effective even though they are intermittent because 1> low capital costs and short construction times 2> no fuel costs and 3> battery (and other) storage buffers the output. Nukes are the most expensive new source. Grid shutdown in Spain was, as you describe, due to lack of spinning generation, but the episode was just part of the learning curve.
Biden administration did not "mandate" EVs nor did it "ban" gas stoves, but it did provide incentives for people to adopt them. Carbon tax is the optimal policy but since Repubs won't even admit climate change exists, Dems resorted to third -best policies to achieve their goal.
Climate-change driven weather events are more common, not just more expensive:
Nuclear energy is only expensive because the elites who want the world to live in energy poverty hate it, they realize it can be a nearly limitless source of abundant power and if people have lots of cheap energy the elites can't control the population. So these elites have made the permit process so ridiculously drawn out and onerous that it is nearly impossible to navigate for a company that wants to build a nuclear power plant, or even to test new designs that are better than existing ones. From a strictly engineering perspective, permitting is not that difficult and shouldn't take decades.
I don't see a fundamental failure to appreciate the physics of electric generation to be "part of the learning curve".
No, Biden's handlers were careful not to actually "ban" gas appliances or "mandate" EVs but that was the intended effect of their regulations, which the manufacturers of the appliances and cars fully understood. Creating unreasonable emissions standards for ICE cars and impossible efficiency standards for gas appliances were effective bans on these products. The products that people were expected to purchase instead were more expensive and less effective for the intended purpose than the products that they replaced. Heat pumps don't work in very cold climates. Electric stoves are miserable to cook on compared to gas - ask a restaurant chef about that.
Weather events: this is an impossibly politicized subject at this point, anyone can see in the chaos of weather anything they want to see. However, almost all of the data on the frequency of major weather events is either anecdotal or based on a very short history, since we have only had the technology to track hurricanes out at sea accurately for a few decades. Before that, we had to depend on observations of storms that made landfall and didn't know much if anything about storms that stayed out to sea. These landfall events are irregular and relatively rare compared to the absolute number of storms so it is difficult to make many comparisons, but I have looked at reports of the actual data which show that the frequency of hurricanes is not much different now than it was in the 1950's. And I have also studied reports on temperature proxies for the last 10,000 years (end of the last ice age) which show that there have been many fluctuations of warm and cool periods. Our current climate based on these proxies, and not on the biased and easily-manipulated surface temperature records, is not as warm now as in previous warm periods, such as the Medieval Warm Period (peak around 1100AD), or the Minoan Warm Period (peak around 1600BC). There was also the Roman Warm Period which coincided with the maximum extent and power of the Empire. If humans are causing the climate to heat up, how did these warm periods and others in pre-industrial times occur without our help? And how did the intervening cold periods occur? That's a fundamental question that the climate change hysterics never answer. They also prefer to ignore the well-documented Medieval Warm Period, as in Michael Mann's infamous "hockey-stick" graph published early in the climate wars. But if you want to follow the real science, you can't ignore these data.
Nukes are expensive because of high capital requirements and long building times. It has nothing to do with your conspiracy theories about "elites" wanting to "control the population". The heat trapping qualities of CO2 were noted by Svante Arrhenius (Nobel Prize Chemistry 1903) or were the "elites" active even back then? Also see Bell Labs TV program from 1958 https://youtu.be/-jmdcjRmlxI or were the "elites" at it back then, too?
Writing long-winded but unsubstantiated comments are unconvincing. PS I saw today that ALL of increase in Texas electricity generation since 2015 is from wind and solar.
I appreciate the dialog and that you have not resorted to insults like some do. I am not attempting to convince you, just to present facts for your consideration and for others reading this to think about. I can substantiate all of my arguments but it would take up far more space than is available here. If you search just a little bit, you will find enormous amounts of hard data supporting my statements. I recommend "Energy Security and Freedom", another Substack with abundant information about climate and energy. There are other sources also.
Nuclear plants are expensive but they have very long useful lives and are on line 90%+ of the time. Some of the expense is unnecessary permit delays imposed by government. New reactor designs will be less expensive and more easily deployed. I have worked on permitting for a nuclear plant.
My comment about the elites is not a conspiracy theory, it is based on real information like statements that the Davos WEF crowd have made about taking away material possessions from the majority, forcing everyone to live in "walkable" cities where everything is 15 minutes away, and similar proposals. Another proposal I read recently that sounded like they were serious, was about restricting everyone to driving no more than a few miles a day, only one or two trips out of town a year, and a few airplane trips every couple of years. Although this is political commentary, for what it is worth various observers have speculated that the real agenda behind California's electric car mandates without any accompanying expansion of the electrical infrastructure in cities is to make cars unaffordable or unusable for the majority. Knowing the agenda-driven politicians here and other things they are doing, I think this is likely to be their end game. California has passed an actual law (though it does not appear to be enforced yet) to restrict domestic water usage to 55 gallons per person per day, which will not conserve any noticeable amount of water but will impose enormous burdens and compliance costs on everybody. However the elites do not seem to be willing to curb their extravagant lifestyles. I think this adds up to elites wanting to impose burdens on the general population as a means of control.
Our understanding of the chemistry of the atmosphere has advanced considerably since 1903 and 1958, and the nuances of the CO2 cycle even now are not completely understood.
And yes Texas is installing a lot of solar and wind, to the detriment of their grid and energy reliability. They aren't always smart.
I have credentials in this area, I am an earth scientist by profession with a 40 year career in the energy industry so I have worked in this and related fields. I have also worked with numerical simulation models similar in concept to climate models which provides me with an understanding of how easy they are to manipulate to produce the desired results. I have also studied geologic history which includes a large amount of data on past climates.
And it is conspiracy theory to think some green elite is planning on "taking away material possessions from the majority", and restricting travel. I'd love to see the source of that one.
The real malicious elite is the one that decoupled productivity growth and wage growth in the US from the early 70s to the mid 90s and stashes all their ill gotten gains in offshore banking sites to avoid paying taxes.
I'm not sure I follow the premise of this article. The Biden Admin policy was essentially "All of the Above," they weren't doing anything to restrict fossil fuel production. The new Trump policy, on the other hand, is trying to kneecap renewables and emphasizing only fossil fuel production. Even on nuclear, which they claim to be interested in, they are going to make new nuclear plants harder to initiate if they decimate the Nuclear Regulatory Commision, as some suggest they are.
The Trump Admin is also trying to stifle any and all discussion of climate change, as if not talking about will make it go away.
Biden restricted new leases and slowed drilling permits. He banned drilling on federal lands. The first day of his Presidency, Joe basically announced the US was leaving fossil fuels behind. Oil soared. It is the reason Putin invaded Ukraine instead of just taking pieces piecemeal. He could afford to do so.
Taking away subsidies is hardly “knee capping “ renewables. They simply have to compete on merit. The culture of the NRC shifted over decades from being supportive of nuclear power to actively opposing it. It’s not going away, but it is going to return to its actual mission.
Nope, the Trump crowd. Historically, the left has been less enthusiastic about nuclear but recently they have become more so. The Trump Party talks about nuclear but also is trashing incentives for nuclear.
For the past 30 years or so, the NRC has been captured by anti-nuclear ideologues and its self-assigned mission was slowing down nuclear permitting to effectively stop any progress towards nuclear electric generation. Like all the other government agencies, probably the NRC accumulated a lot of extra staff that wasn't doing anything except throwing sand in the gears of progress. As I understand the situation, Trump has removed the agency head and streamlined the operations so that they can actually do the job they are supposed to do, which is expediting the review of permits for power plants so they can be built in a reasonable time frame.
Ok, I'm seeing conflicting information on this topic. They did fire one of the member of the NRC and I assume that some were citing that as evidence of the agency being "gutted." However, appears the agency is still functioning, so I'm no longer convinced my original statement is correct.
The Biden handlers were doing all they can to destroy oil and gas industry, it was just difficult for them since the vast majority of production in the US is from private land and is regulated by the states, so what they could do was limited. But they did block some new pipelines and basically ended leasing of federal lands for drilling, which was a violation of the law which required the government to hold lease sales. As for the NRC, as I commented elsewhere, the NRC has become the anti-nuclear agency and was refusing to process or issue permits for nuclear plants. Trump cleaned them out and ordered them to expedite the permitting. As for "climate change", talk about it all you want, but CO2 is not a danger to anyone, it is plant food and we need more of it. Climate is changing naturally all the time and human society has always done better in warmer times than in colder. There is no space here to go into real climate science, but I suggest that for a different perspective with far more truth than you can find in the legacy media, you visit the substack "Energy Security and Freedom".
This is one of the five "Democrat Civil Wars" that I wrote of last June. It has only gotten worse. As AI continues to explode, there will be a wildebeest stampede toward nuclear power.
From Lazard's latest Levelized Cost of Energy: "On an unsubsidized $/MWh basis, renewable energy remains the most cost-competitive form of generation. As such, renewable energy will continue to play a key role in the buildout of new power generation in the U.S. This is particularly true in the current high power demand environment, where renewables stand out as both the lowest-cost and quickest-to-deploy generation resource"
I do not think that it is credible that the unsubsidized cost of intermittent wind/solar energy can possibly be cost competitive with conventional generation, especially since almost all of the nominal power rating of such installations must be backed up by dispatchable gas-fired or other conventional generation to take over when they quit producing. I read recently that solar plants are actually online about 25% of the time, and wind at most 35%. It can't possibly be cost effective to build an industrial facility that only runs 25% of the time. However, with so much debased and deceptive information out there, I can believe that someone can create a study that shows anything they want it to with what looks like real data.
I did read the articles and I see a lot of "if this happens" kind of analysis, which may not happen, to support the conclusions that solar is cheaper. For cost data, the analysis relies on California data which I do not trust, the state tends to fudge the numbers when it comes to bolstering its advocacy for solar/wind energy so it looks for ways to minimize costs for those technologies and maximize costs for standard generation technologies. Various other factors are not discussed, or only in passing. One, the analysis only touches on the long transmission lines needed to convey energy from remote utility-scale solar installations to the consumers where the energy is needed. Two, it doesn't discuss at all the severe environmental degradation that occurs when large, low-energy-density solar farms are built out over and destroy natural ecosystems. Environmentalists would sue any other project out of existence that wanted to destroy that much habitat, but they are quiet for the solar plants. That is rank hypocrisy, and it disgusts me. It doesn't matter how the habitat is destroyed, it's still gone, whether the enviros like the project or not shouldn't matter. Three, the construction of solar panels requires a great deal of mined materials and energy, which for Chinese-made panels comes from coal-fired electrical generation plants, and the disposal of panels at end of life is handled very poorly - which could change, but recycling doesn't seem to be making any significant improvements as yet. Four, the energy density and amount of actual energy produced in relation to the nominal capacity for solar is very low, which means it is an inherently inefficient method of generation and any investment with a low efficiency factor is never really economic if analyzed without political bias. Five, the analysis skates over the costs, size, and problems of utility-scale battery storage that would be needed for the installations contemplated by the author. The technology for batteries like this that are safe and affordable is not yet here, and may never be - we are dealing with the laws of physics, not engineering. Six, supporters of solar say it can be installed faster than conventional generation plants, but that is largely a permitting issue and governments have complete control over this one. They can expedite permitting when the want to, and when they don't they can allow environmental lawfare to clog up the permit process forever it that suits their political purposes. This is a bogus argument. Seven, and this is pure physics, it is absolutely necessary that the electric grid runs always within a very narrow frequency range, any deviation outside of this will cause catastrophic failure to connected equipment everywhere. Conventional generation turbines run on water, steam, or gas and are spinning which provide the necessary "beat" frequency, further, they are huge chunks of metal with high inertia and when the system is disrupted they keep spinning for a while, providing a precious few seconds for system operators to rescue the system and prevent catastrophic failure. That failure was what happened recently in Spain, the system had too much inverter-based solar power and not enough spinning power, when a solar plant tripped the inertia was not enough to prevent blackouts. Yes, there are devices that will generate fake inertia from batteries, but why spent trillions on installing more such equipment when we can build compact, space-efficient nuclear power plants instead?
The one area where I agree that solar has a role to play is rooftop solar, where the generation occurs at the point of consumption, no extra land is needed, and existing transmissions lines are used. In this way it can contribute to the energy mix, with a side benefit that roofs shaded with solar panels do not heat up the buildings as much and therefore produce some air conditioning savings as well. However, there are equity issues that may not be adequately addressed, such as the fact that only businesses and middle class and above homeowners receive any benefit from rooftop solar - it is necessary to own the building. Due to generous rate plans in some (many?) areas the owners do not pay the full cost of supporting the grid, while renters pay for all their electric use and partially subsidize upscale homeowners and their solar systems. California has tried to remedy this with a complicated scheme of rebates but it doesn't completely solve the problem.
DOE favors batteries, geothermal and nuclear. The federal tax credits remain for these technologies. Many batteries will be paired with solar generation.
Further evidence that the "narrative" progressive Left continues to be a costly drag on the Democratic Party's current and almost certain future political fortunes.
If you can't convince a majority of Americans of the wisdom of your radical ideas, then you can't win elections and govern. About all you can do -- and it's what the Democratic Left does best -- is assume that it is somehow of such superior intellect the unwashed masses simply cannot comprehend. And that's the very definition of an elitist, arrogant snobbery.
"Here are some findings that show why Democrats are warming back up to all-of-the-above"
The less kind but more accurate description is that Democrats are being dragged kicking and screaming to an all-of-the-above. Whether we actually move toward an all-of-the-above approach is a question of pure power politics. My hope is that the current administration has their foot to the floor to accomplish the maximum amount possible before 2026.
Decades of catastrophizing about climate has caused people to tune it out. The media thinks it can blame all natural disasters on climate, but I think people know better. Hurricanes have always happened.
Unfortunately for the left, the face of top-down environmentalist command-and-control is not AOC who is at least attractive.
It is Klaus Schwab, intoning that you will "own nothing, live in ze pod, eat ze bug burger and you will be happy" with all the charisma of the villain in Lethal Weapon 2.
And the tangible effects of environmentalism have been annoying nanny-state stuff like banning gasoline equipment / crappy gasoline cans / low flow toilets / auto shutoff cars, etc. People are generally sick and tired of the Karen State trying to take away your gas stove or lawn mower.
As with so many Democratic Party positions, the message to voters regarding energy and climate is “Don’t believe what your common sense is telling you. Listen to us because we’re the experts.” This message is combined with lies, distortions, and threats designed to silence anyone who questions the policies. Same story with border security, criminal justice, DEI, etc. They are determined to sacrifice our economy and standard of living on the altar of “green energy” policy. Thankfully, most people aren’t buying it.
"This message is combined with lies, distortions, and threats designed to silence anyone who questions the policies." -- and a long list of Dem cronies who are getting rich off massive grants with little or no oversight.
Reps should hope Ruy is never allowed to run the Dem Party. You make far too much sense. Still, there is polling, and then there is reality. Roughly 22% of our energy is now Green and every kWh of solar and wind must be backed up by fossil fuels, to avoid tragedy. In the 80s, 17% of our energy was Green, give or take, much of it hydropower. So in approximately 45 years we have increased our Green production by approximately 5%, at a cost of trillions of dollars.
Then there is the way people live in the West now, as opposed to even 30 or 40 years ago. Most boomers grew up with 1 TV in the house, 2 if they were lucky . Now add phones, computers, multiple TVs. People use to combine trips to the grocery , dry cleaner, mall. . . Now for many, most purchases are delivered, all in individual, separate tranches. AC use, as the population continues to move South, has to have increased massively. All before AI is considered.
Moreover, the majority of Americans still do not realize electricity is not energy. It is just a delivery system. The juice must come from somewhere. In the mid 90s, I barely escaped being hit by Silicon Valley neighbor with a 3 wheel EV prototype, while walking the dog. The EV was nearly silent. When he stopped to check on me, he noted I would have to be careful because soon EVs would be everywhere. 30 years later, EVs make up less than 10% of US registered vehicles.
All of the above, as long as the cost of Green energy is reasonable, is the only rational plan.
More than 1/2 of the world's population resides in Asia, much of it in places far hotter than Texas or FL. Spend a week in Singapore, and the reality of the world's needs, hits home fairly quickly. They do not enjoy mild Springs, Falls or Winters.
The era of Dems preaching the bankrupting of lower and middle earning Americans is OK , if it is in pursuit of Green fantasies is over, whether the Far Left is willing to admit it or not. Affordable and abundant Green energy will eventually exist, but not anytime soon.
The “22% renewables” figure you cite, Ronda, is misleading. Electricity generated is not equal to electricity actually consumed. That figure (renewable energy consumed, including hydro) is about 9%.
This highlights the failure of so called green energy to date. Energy production is unpredictable and inefficient (too much at times, none at other times when needed most). Transmission has to cover long distances, environmental impacts are consequential, especially when one considers disposal costs. Even when they are working, solar only produces energy about 25% of the time, wind perhaps 35%. Solar and especially wind will never play a major (e.g. > 25%) role in energy actually used. They are simply too inefficient for a society that, when it flips a switch, expects the light to come on.
The Groups have entered the discussion. They are already blaming the TX floods on Climate Change/Trump.
The main issue being, most don’t believe the politicized basis that liberals claim is based on science. It isn’t and if you can’t prove different to the mass’, it will continue to be the loser issue that it is.
People care about what they believe in, people will only take action on what they care about.
Administrations come and go. The US and the world continues to do more with electricity all the time, and we continue to burn lots of oil and gas. Drilling has slowed tremendously here, a quick look at the price of gas is why. People will buy new electric cars, subsidy or not because they are cheaper to run and the drive trains are simpler.
The IRA was simply a boondoggle for orgs like Earth Justice and the NRDC, in my state orgs were invented simply to qualify for grants which were never used as their only ability was grant proposal writing.
Long run tariffs might be as environmental as anything else. The USA has some of the cleanest manufacturing facilities on the planet. The pump jacks are quiet in Weld County Colorado, but that's ok, good wheat harvest this year and beef is at a high.
"People will buy new electric cars, subsidy or not because they are cheaper to run and the drive trains are simpler." -- people in cold climates and people who regularly make trips over 250 miles aren't going to buy electric cars until the charging stations are up and reliable and the number of miles before charging (including running the A/C and heaters) is greatly increased.
People that drive to the grocery stores once a week love EVs.
I'll probably never buy one. At the rate I'm driving my Cummins I'll be 110 by the time it's average lifespan is up. My little run around even more. Things improve, some batteries can charge in 10 minutes now, and a significant boost in 5 min.
I'd think eventually cars will be able to go a lot further than 250 miles with AC or heat. The biggest improvement I think will be on urban ownership. Self driving might well alleviate the need to own.
I drive around 400 miles every six weeks to visit family, I hate stopping for gas much less hunting for charging station and then sitting there. I often thought if I was just buying EV to drive around town, I'd just Uber. Factoring in the cost of the car, maintenance, insurance - I'd probably come out ahead.
Climate crisis, as it now should be called, is a donor class self actualization hobby, an upper class luxury belief, and a leftist NGO career path. It is also a tool of the now declining Democrat-loving WEF globalists that have sought to deindustrialize the old West and replace capitalism with their dream of a global collectivist corporatocracy. It was always against the people. If Trump had lost they would be still trying to ram it down our throats.
LONG LIVE THE GREEN NEW DEAL!
How ironic that Ruy runs another piece about how the working class doesn't care about climate change, with us recovering from yet another in a series of climate change-fueled disasters. They may not care about climate change, but climate change cares about them. Insurance companies care about climate change as they raise rates to insure homes facing increased rates of natural disasters:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-is-climate-change-impacting-home-insurance-markets/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Anyway, to (re) state the obvious, energy policy under Biden WAS "all of the above". US fossil fuel output reached all time highs after recovering from COVID pandemic price collapse (remember when the price of oil went negative?) While this was going on, Biden adopted incentives for people to adopt solar and wind power and American made EVs, not to mention onshoring semiconductor manufacturing.. Dems and climate activists went all carrot (subsidies) and no stick (carbon taxes/cap and trade) after years of getting no where.
Solar/wind+ battery storage is capable of providing up to 80% of current electricity consumption at current costs and even more as costs drop as technology improves:
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-scale-solar-pv
The solar panels I just installed are twice as efficient as the once I installed on a previous home.
Like it or not, green energy+batteries and EVs are the technologies of the future. The US can and should subsidize these to counteract the subsidies that the Chinese are giving their companies.. What I fear will happen is that when the US awakens from its current stupor, China will have firmly established itself in control of all the critical technologies and we will be looking at the end of the American Century and the start of the Chinese one, in addition to all the climate-change related weather disasters. MAGAts who are running the country and world into the ground so they can impose their reactionary agenda are neither "liberal" nor "patriots"
Weather disasters have become more expensive because people are building high priced real estate in the path of hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, not because those events are more numerous or more intense. Years ago before insurance, people didn't build structures they were not willing to lose on the beach.
Biden's handlers were driven to continue the production of oil and gas due to necessity, but not because they wanted to. Have you forgotten the EV mandates, the banning of gas furnaces, stoves, and anything else that worked in the name of "climate change"? And there is no way that solar, wind, and battery storage can even remotely come close to replacing 80% of our electric use, and any attempt to do so will cost far more. Also, the blackout in Spain recently is a wakeup call for trying to run the grid on inverter-based power without enough spinning generation to provide inertia and act as a moderator for keeping the grid stable. Whatever the propaganda might be, real engineering assessments of what happened was that the grid was down to about 25% spinning power (hydro, nuclear, and conventional gas-fired generation) when a large solar plant tripped and unbalanced the load. Without enough inertia, everything else tripped off to protect itself. Yes, there are very expensive ways of providing synthetic inertia for battery or inverter-based power but why should we spend trillions on this when we can build nuclear plants? Doesn't make sense.
"Green" energy and batteries (which are NOT "green", but require a great deal of mining for the metals and fossil-fuel based energy to construct, and may never generate enough to cover the cost to build them) are niche technologies that have a place but will never provide for all of our energy needs. The Chinese are using EVs to clean up the air pollution in their cities, they are exporting the pollution to rural areas where they are building new coal-fired generating plants at a rate of about one a week. And you can be sure there are no scrubbers on the stacks. Also, don't forget that solar/wind provide only about 8% of our electric needs on a 24/7 365-day basis, so most of the electricity that charges the average EV does so from conventional power plants. If you want an EV, buy one. But don't make everybody else buy one they don't want.
Suggest you read https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-scale-solar-pv and Lazard's latest Levelized Cost of Energy https://www.lazard.com/media/eijnqja3/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2025.pdf
Solar and wind are cost effective even though they are intermittent because 1> low capital costs and short construction times 2> no fuel costs and 3> battery (and other) storage buffers the output. Nukes are the most expensive new source. Grid shutdown in Spain was, as you describe, due to lack of spinning generation, but the episode was just part of the learning curve.
Biden administration did not "mandate" EVs nor did it "ban" gas stoves, but it did provide incentives for people to adopt them. Carbon tax is the optimal policy but since Repubs won't even admit climate change exists, Dems resorted to third -best policies to achieve their goal.
Climate-change driven weather events are more common, not just more expensive:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58073295
or this:
https://www.foxweather.com/extreme-weather/5-rare-1000-year-rain-events-within-a-month-climate-change-may-force-noaa-to-update-criteria
Nuclear energy is only expensive because the elites who want the world to live in energy poverty hate it, they realize it can be a nearly limitless source of abundant power and if people have lots of cheap energy the elites can't control the population. So these elites have made the permit process so ridiculously drawn out and onerous that it is nearly impossible to navigate for a company that wants to build a nuclear power plant, or even to test new designs that are better than existing ones. From a strictly engineering perspective, permitting is not that difficult and shouldn't take decades.
I don't see a fundamental failure to appreciate the physics of electric generation to be "part of the learning curve".
No, Biden's handlers were careful not to actually "ban" gas appliances or "mandate" EVs but that was the intended effect of their regulations, which the manufacturers of the appliances and cars fully understood. Creating unreasonable emissions standards for ICE cars and impossible efficiency standards for gas appliances were effective bans on these products. The products that people were expected to purchase instead were more expensive and less effective for the intended purpose than the products that they replaced. Heat pumps don't work in very cold climates. Electric stoves are miserable to cook on compared to gas - ask a restaurant chef about that.
Weather events: this is an impossibly politicized subject at this point, anyone can see in the chaos of weather anything they want to see. However, almost all of the data on the frequency of major weather events is either anecdotal or based on a very short history, since we have only had the technology to track hurricanes out at sea accurately for a few decades. Before that, we had to depend on observations of storms that made landfall and didn't know much if anything about storms that stayed out to sea. These landfall events are irregular and relatively rare compared to the absolute number of storms so it is difficult to make many comparisons, but I have looked at reports of the actual data which show that the frequency of hurricanes is not much different now than it was in the 1950's. And I have also studied reports on temperature proxies for the last 10,000 years (end of the last ice age) which show that there have been many fluctuations of warm and cool periods. Our current climate based on these proxies, and not on the biased and easily-manipulated surface temperature records, is not as warm now as in previous warm periods, such as the Medieval Warm Period (peak around 1100AD), or the Minoan Warm Period (peak around 1600BC). There was also the Roman Warm Period which coincided with the maximum extent and power of the Empire. If humans are causing the climate to heat up, how did these warm periods and others in pre-industrial times occur without our help? And how did the intervening cold periods occur? That's a fundamental question that the climate change hysterics never answer. They also prefer to ignore the well-documented Medieval Warm Period, as in Michael Mann's infamous "hockey-stick" graph published early in the climate wars. But if you want to follow the real science, you can't ignore these data.
Nukes are expensive because of high capital requirements and long building times. It has nothing to do with your conspiracy theories about "elites" wanting to "control the population". The heat trapping qualities of CO2 were noted by Svante Arrhenius (Nobel Prize Chemistry 1903) or were the "elites" active even back then? Also see Bell Labs TV program from 1958 https://youtu.be/-jmdcjRmlxI or were the "elites" at it back then, too?
Writing long-winded but unsubstantiated comments are unconvincing. PS I saw today that ALL of increase in Texas electricity generation since 2015 is from wind and solar.
I appreciate the dialog and that you have not resorted to insults like some do. I am not attempting to convince you, just to present facts for your consideration and for others reading this to think about. I can substantiate all of my arguments but it would take up far more space than is available here. If you search just a little bit, you will find enormous amounts of hard data supporting my statements. I recommend "Energy Security and Freedom", another Substack with abundant information about climate and energy. There are other sources also.
Nuclear plants are expensive but they have very long useful lives and are on line 90%+ of the time. Some of the expense is unnecessary permit delays imposed by government. New reactor designs will be less expensive and more easily deployed. I have worked on permitting for a nuclear plant.
My comment about the elites is not a conspiracy theory, it is based on real information like statements that the Davos WEF crowd have made about taking away material possessions from the majority, forcing everyone to live in "walkable" cities where everything is 15 minutes away, and similar proposals. Another proposal I read recently that sounded like they were serious, was about restricting everyone to driving no more than a few miles a day, only one or two trips out of town a year, and a few airplane trips every couple of years. Although this is political commentary, for what it is worth various observers have speculated that the real agenda behind California's electric car mandates without any accompanying expansion of the electrical infrastructure in cities is to make cars unaffordable or unusable for the majority. Knowing the agenda-driven politicians here and other things they are doing, I think this is likely to be their end game. California has passed an actual law (though it does not appear to be enforced yet) to restrict domestic water usage to 55 gallons per person per day, which will not conserve any noticeable amount of water but will impose enormous burdens and compliance costs on everybody. However the elites do not seem to be willing to curb their extravagant lifestyles. I think this adds up to elites wanting to impose burdens on the general population as a means of control.
Our understanding of the chemistry of the atmosphere has advanced considerably since 1903 and 1958, and the nuances of the CO2 cycle even now are not completely understood.
And yes Texas is installing a lot of solar and wind, to the detriment of their grid and energy reliability. They aren't always smart.
I have credentials in this area, I am an earth scientist by profession with a 40 year career in the energy industry so I have worked in this and related fields. I have also worked with numerical simulation models similar in concept to climate models which provides me with an understanding of how easy they are to manipulate to produce the desired results. I have also studied geologic history which includes a large amount of data on past climates.
Compare the level of model detail at https://energysecurityfreedom.substack.com/p/pjm-battery-storage-would-cost-a
and https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-scale-solar-pv
and decide which is more credible.
And it is conspiracy theory to think some green elite is planning on "taking away material possessions from the majority", and restricting travel. I'd love to see the source of that one.
The real malicious elite is the one that decoupled productivity growth and wage growth in the US from the early 70s to the mid 90s and stashes all their ill gotten gains in offshore banking sites to avoid paying taxes.
I'm not sure I follow the premise of this article. The Biden Admin policy was essentially "All of the Above," they weren't doing anything to restrict fossil fuel production. The new Trump policy, on the other hand, is trying to kneecap renewables and emphasizing only fossil fuel production. Even on nuclear, which they claim to be interested in, they are going to make new nuclear plants harder to initiate if they decimate the Nuclear Regulatory Commision, as some suggest they are.
The Trump Admin is also trying to stifle any and all discussion of climate change, as if not talking about will make it go away.
Biden restricted new leases and slowed drilling permits. He banned drilling on federal lands. The first day of his Presidency, Joe basically announced the US was leaving fossil fuels behind. Oil soared. It is the reason Putin invaded Ukraine instead of just taking pieces piecemeal. He could afford to do so.
Taking away subsidies is hardly “knee capping “ renewables. They simply have to compete on merit. The culture of the NRC shifted over decades from being supportive of nuclear power to actively opposing it. It’s not going away, but it is going to return to its actual mission.
"...if they decimate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as some suggest they are..." The "some" are Dems I assume?
Nope, the Trump crowd. Historically, the left has been less enthusiastic about nuclear but recently they have become more so. The Trump Party talks about nuclear but also is trashing incentives for nuclear.
Who specifically has advocated decimating the Nuclear Regulatory Commission?
For the past 30 years or so, the NRC has been captured by anti-nuclear ideologues and its self-assigned mission was slowing down nuclear permitting to effectively stop any progress towards nuclear electric generation. Like all the other government agencies, probably the NRC accumulated a lot of extra staff that wasn't doing anything except throwing sand in the gears of progress. As I understand the situation, Trump has removed the agency head and streamlined the operations so that they can actually do the job they are supposed to do, which is expediting the review of permits for power plants so they can be built in a reasonable time frame.
Ok, I'm seeing conflicting information on this topic. They did fire one of the member of the NRC and I assume that some were citing that as evidence of the agency being "gutted." However, appears the agency is still functioning, so I'm no longer convinced my original statement is correct.
The Biden handlers were doing all they can to destroy oil and gas industry, it was just difficult for them since the vast majority of production in the US is from private land and is regulated by the states, so what they could do was limited. But they did block some new pipelines and basically ended leasing of federal lands for drilling, which was a violation of the law which required the government to hold lease sales. As for the NRC, as I commented elsewhere, the NRC has become the anti-nuclear agency and was refusing to process or issue permits for nuclear plants. Trump cleaned them out and ordered them to expedite the permitting. As for "climate change", talk about it all you want, but CO2 is not a danger to anyone, it is plant food and we need more of it. Climate is changing naturally all the time and human society has always done better in warmer times than in colder. There is no space here to go into real climate science, but I suggest that for a different perspective with far more truth than you can find in the legacy media, you visit the substack "Energy Security and Freedom".
This is one of the five "Democrat Civil Wars" that I wrote of last June. It has only gotten worse. As AI continues to explode, there will be a wildebeest stampede toward nuclear power.
From Lazard's latest Levelized Cost of Energy: "On an unsubsidized $/MWh basis, renewable energy remains the most cost-competitive form of generation. As such, renewable energy will continue to play a key role in the buildout of new power generation in the U.S. This is particularly true in the current high power demand environment, where renewables stand out as both the lowest-cost and quickest-to-deploy generation resource"
I do not think that it is credible that the unsubsidized cost of intermittent wind/solar energy can possibly be cost competitive with conventional generation, especially since almost all of the nominal power rating of such installations must be backed up by dispatchable gas-fired or other conventional generation to take over when they quit producing. I read recently that solar plants are actually online about 25% of the time, and wind at most 35%. It can't possibly be cost effective to build an industrial facility that only runs 25% of the time. However, with so much debased and deceptive information out there, I can believe that someone can create a study that shows anything they want it to with what looks like real data.
Suggest you read https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-scale-solar-pv and Lazard's latest Levelized Cost of Energy https://www.lazard.com/media/eijnqja3/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2025.pdfSolar and wind are cost effective even though they ar intermittent because 1> low capital costs and short construction times 2> no fuel costs and 3> battery (and other) storage buffers the output.
I did read the articles and I see a lot of "if this happens" kind of analysis, which may not happen, to support the conclusions that solar is cheaper. For cost data, the analysis relies on California data which I do not trust, the state tends to fudge the numbers when it comes to bolstering its advocacy for solar/wind energy so it looks for ways to minimize costs for those technologies and maximize costs for standard generation technologies. Various other factors are not discussed, or only in passing. One, the analysis only touches on the long transmission lines needed to convey energy from remote utility-scale solar installations to the consumers where the energy is needed. Two, it doesn't discuss at all the severe environmental degradation that occurs when large, low-energy-density solar farms are built out over and destroy natural ecosystems. Environmentalists would sue any other project out of existence that wanted to destroy that much habitat, but they are quiet for the solar plants. That is rank hypocrisy, and it disgusts me. It doesn't matter how the habitat is destroyed, it's still gone, whether the enviros like the project or not shouldn't matter. Three, the construction of solar panels requires a great deal of mined materials and energy, which for Chinese-made panels comes from coal-fired electrical generation plants, and the disposal of panels at end of life is handled very poorly - which could change, but recycling doesn't seem to be making any significant improvements as yet. Four, the energy density and amount of actual energy produced in relation to the nominal capacity for solar is very low, which means it is an inherently inefficient method of generation and any investment with a low efficiency factor is never really economic if analyzed without political bias. Five, the analysis skates over the costs, size, and problems of utility-scale battery storage that would be needed for the installations contemplated by the author. The technology for batteries like this that are safe and affordable is not yet here, and may never be - we are dealing with the laws of physics, not engineering. Six, supporters of solar say it can be installed faster than conventional generation plants, but that is largely a permitting issue and governments have complete control over this one. They can expedite permitting when the want to, and when they don't they can allow environmental lawfare to clog up the permit process forever it that suits their political purposes. This is a bogus argument. Seven, and this is pure physics, it is absolutely necessary that the electric grid runs always within a very narrow frequency range, any deviation outside of this will cause catastrophic failure to connected equipment everywhere. Conventional generation turbines run on water, steam, or gas and are spinning which provide the necessary "beat" frequency, further, they are huge chunks of metal with high inertia and when the system is disrupted they keep spinning for a while, providing a precious few seconds for system operators to rescue the system and prevent catastrophic failure. That failure was what happened recently in Spain, the system had too much inverter-based solar power and not enough spinning power, when a solar plant tripped the inertia was not enough to prevent blackouts. Yes, there are devices that will generate fake inertia from batteries, but why spent trillions on installing more such equipment when we can build compact, space-efficient nuclear power plants instead?
The one area where I agree that solar has a role to play is rooftop solar, where the generation occurs at the point of consumption, no extra land is needed, and existing transmissions lines are used. In this way it can contribute to the energy mix, with a side benefit that roofs shaded with solar panels do not heat up the buildings as much and therefore produce some air conditioning savings as well. However, there are equity issues that may not be adequately addressed, such as the fact that only businesses and middle class and above homeowners receive any benefit from rooftop solar - it is necessary to own the building. Due to generous rate plans in some (many?) areas the owners do not pay the full cost of supporting the grid, while renters pay for all their electric use and partially subsidize upscale homeowners and their solar systems. California has tried to remedy this with a complicated scheme of rebates but it doesn't completely solve the problem.
DOE favors batteries, geothermal and nuclear. The federal tax credits remain for these technologies. Many batteries will be paired with solar generation.