Energy Jobs Have Increased in Nearly Every County in America | Hacker News Reader

Energy Jobs Have Increased in Nearly Every County in America

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127 pointsgeox189 comments

A day ago, there were people in Montana up in arms over the supreme court in Montana siding with climate activists. "Leftist-liberal agenda being shoved down our throats" I remember reading. "We need an above-the-line energy policy, we're going the wrong direction, we need to reverse course". Yet, the energy sector is growing. Solar / Renewables, growing. Demand for it, growing. The US's ability to generate it, growing. As are many other nations around the world who are realizing their energy needs are beamed to them every day, if only they would capture it.

I'm sensationalizing a non-trivial task at the macro level but this is good news. The more we move away from burning things for energy, the better. Those same people, 10 years from now, when they can breathe without Benadryl, will probably take the credit for it. "See what having a robust homeland energy policy does?" :/

Montana has a massive amount of coal reserves, several productive oil fields, and a lot of refining capacity. If you close the oil refineries and leave coal in the ground, a lot of communities in Montana are going to become ghost towns. The lives of the children of people in those towns is going to suck -- poverty, drugs, and an early death if you can't get out.

The fact that those jobs are offset by growth in solar and energy jobs doesn't help without a centralized wealth transfer, which ain't gonna happen.

The problem with US political-economics right now is that the future of the country depends on making a series of "society wins, some regions win, some regions lose (win-win-lose)" decisions. Because the societal win is net, it could be made into a very attractive win-win-win situation. But everyone knows from the last half century of globalization that taking win-win-lose and turning it into win-win-win is a false promise that won't pan out.

There’s relatively few coal jobs left. Nationwide in 2011 it was already down to 91.5 thousand coal miners by 2021 it was 39.5 thousand, again nationwide. https://www.statista.com/statistics/215790/coal-mining-emplo...

The industry provides more jobs for mechanics etc, but any community dependent on coal workers has already been devastated.

Oil and gas are very separate as solar or wind isn’t displacing them anytime soon. In 10+ years EV’s might start to reduce the need for oil, but it’s going to be a very slow transition. If 100% of new cars are EV that’s still decades worth of existing vehicles plus boats and aircraft.

While EVs only look like a statistical blip on the oil market now, they are taking off fast enough that it will be less than 10 years before the impact is obvious. Cars are 50% of of oil (transport is 60%, so I'll just round and assume the other 10% is trucks trains, ships, airplanes... which are not going away as fast), but new cars are already starting to move to EVs, and that trend is continuing. It will be 20 years before oil isn't a significant factor in car transport

That really depends on what you mean by obvious impact.

Cars manufactured in the last year make up 4% or so of total cars on the road and thus ~2% of oil consumption. EV’s are just over 7% of new car sales right now if we assume an extremely optimistic 30% of all sales over the next 10 years that’s (4% per year * 10 years * 30% of sales * 50% of oil) = 6% reduction in oil use in 2033 vs no change. That’s significant but could easily be offset by increasing the total number of cars or other use etc.

I doubt 30% of all new cars sold by 2033 will be EV’s as it would require well over 30% to be sold in years 9 and 10 to offset years 1 and 2 etc. That said, somewhere between 15 and 30 years from now I expect the difference will be very obvious as the oldest ICE cars get aged out of the global fleet to be replaced with more efficient cars + hybrids + EV’s.

Several governments have made 100% EV by 203X a goal. Norway is farther along the path than the US. Predicting the future is always hard, but it is looking like EVs will be more like 80% of sales by 2030 many people are already seeing significant fuel savings, which is important.

Norway is already an extreme outlier in terms of both new and existing EV’s, which is included in that global number I mentioned. I expect several countries will break that 30%, but oil is a global commodity.

As to 80%, 2030 is only 6.5 years from now. You can lookup the rate companies are building factories to estimate the maximum possible adoption over the next 3-5 years and based on that 80% globally in 6.5 years is completely off the table. Also, adoption is dependent on what people actually buy which will slow thing down from the maximum theoretically possible. S curve to 50% which then slows down is common because not everyone’s needs are the same which feeds back into how much manufacturing capacity gets added etc.

Even in the parts of the US with 203X goals, many of the statutory "EV" definitions include vehicles with large gas tanks. E.g., the Toyota RAV4 Plugin Hybrid qualifies for EV tax credits in most states with such credits.

Once prices start coming down, I think we will see a dramatic increase in EV sales. They are better in just about every way and all we need is the price to come down to make them the obvious choice.

I hate to be blunt on this topic, but it's necessary to make my point. Montana needs to adapt to the 21st century. Their mining towns are barely 100 years old, and have little history. As coal jobs gradually fade away, the community can either adapt to renewables and tech, or die out. We simply cannot sustain the burning of more coal for our children's future. Yes, please think of the children on this, and maybe only this instance.

Yea, you're getting at a very unpopular reality that, if spoken would sink anyone's political career, so politicians will never say it: Many of these little towns probably just shouldn't exist. Nobody wants to admit that a community has failed. Go for a stroll through the Rust Belt or any other economically devastated area. People still live there, despite the misery! You drive through, and it's just old houses and the occasional Walmart vampirically sucking out what little wealth remains. There's no real industry anywhere. You wonder what do all these people living here do for a living?

Instead of trying to prop up obsolete mining communities with hopeless economic support, it would be better to 1. focus on retraining/re-skilling and 2. send fully-subsidized moving vans to help people physically get away from the misery.

> You wonder what do all these people living here do for a living?

Most of those people either a) commute a long distance to scrape by and lose a significant chunk of their earnings on gas because they own a 30 year old hoopty of a truck or b) live off of welfare. That’s how a lot of these small communities continue to exist. People can’t afford to move out and obviously don’t want to commit suicide (nor should they).

Having come from a small town, I don’t think these people will move even if it’s paid for. Many rural folk have these warped views of more populace towns and cities because of the warped political rhetoric and constant bombardment of negative news coverage.

It’s an extremely difficult problem that I don’t personally believe has a solution because you have to have willing participation (some will, but most won’t).

> People can’t afford to move out

Why not? There are good-paying jobs in financially functional towns and cities reasonably close by. The people who grow up in those towns can afford to live there.

Sure, they're not going to be able to upsize without a mortgage by selling the 1400 sqft 100-year-old house on a lot in a decaying ghost town. But most people don't start out with an already-paid-for home.

Because very few companies offer relocation. Living on welfare in a paid for trailer on land your ancestors lived on is much more appealing than moving without relocation for worse lifestyle in a rental in low wage work that will result in a lower effective income in a higher cost of living area.

People are often dumb, but they're not insane and over years they do respond to incentives.

>Nobody wants to admit that a community has failed. Go for a stroll through the Rust Belt or any other economically devastated area. People still live there, despite the misery!

What you call misery, others call home, and have an attachment to the land.

Go for a stroll through San Francisco and see people living in tents and defecating on the sidewalk. Maybe everyone should move to California to commute hours to work (because you can't afford to live anywhere near your job). That sounds awesome!

What you call misery, others call home, and have an attachment to the land.

Okay, so now what? Not say the quiet part out loud about how the area has economically failed? What you typed is a retort, but I don't hear a lot of solution, unless the suggestion is that a solution is not needed. I guess what I am saying is that I don't understand what point your driving toward with your comment.

The world population also had an attachment to its land but were uprooted and transported and mingled and spread all over the world and has resulted in significant economic development. Get on with the program , it is the new reality.

It sucks and only a minority of anti-social people think structuring an economy that way is desirable. If you poll Asians, well under 10% say they would migrate to another country if they had the choice. Even in sub-Saharan Africa only 1/3 of people would move: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-mi...

My large, tightly knit family emigrated in the last generation (to Canada, the US, and Australia) and it was devastating. We went from living in the same city to living on three different continents. Life is materially better, but there’s no replacement for kinship ties.

For an opposite story, my family emigrated from the Mid East to Europe then USA and it was by far the best thing that could have ever happened. My QOL would have been so much worse in Mid East, and even in Europe (developed, Northern Europe at that), vs. what it is today in the US. It's the number one thing I am most grateful for.

Materially things are better, no doubt. It helps that me and most if my cousins ended up as affluent professionals. But in some ways quality of life is much worse, being separated from our family and culture.

I think my mom never really perceived it as an upgrade. My dad did, but as he gets older it’s getting tougher. Professional networks disperse, and he doesn’t really have family in the country. His relationship with his brother (who actually immigrated to NY recently) didn’t really survive 30 years of separation. My kids will probably never meet all of their cousins.

I totally get the folks in rural Ohio that don’t want to emigrate to the coasts for jobs. They’re going to be facing significant disruptions in their family networks. And it’s not like they’ll enjoy a quantum leap in living standards and social status elsewhere. They’ll just be at the bottom of the totem pole somewhere unfamiliar.

| and have an attachment to the land.

This is understandable, but does not always make sense. After all, these towns were created by European immigrants who left their homeland of hundreds of years, their language, customs, foods, climate etc for a better opportunity. These towns had sizable black populations who left southern towns for the same reasons.

Before Europeans, north america was settled by many different tribes who had migrated from eurasia . Not to mention different groups of humans also migrated from Africa all over the world, because they saw good reason to do so.

At some point you have to cut your losses, or seek a better life. Not saying it is easy, but this option should be pointed out to anyone in untenable situations.

> What you call misery, others call home, and have an attachment to the land.

Mostly, people aren't moving to better communities because they can't.

In a good year, a typical relocation requires stacks of available cash and jobs waiting at the other end for every working member of the household. And those jobs need to add up to the living expenses at the destination.

If you're a household that needs to move to survive, the odds are quite low you have the resources at hand to make that happen.

Don’t underestimate people’s attachment to their homes. Only 1/3 of people in sub-Saharan Africa say they would emigrate to another country if they had the choice: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-mi.... In South Asia it’s under 10%. Is it a surprise people in rural Ohio want to stay put?

Indeed the desire to stay near home is probably strongest for those with the fewest resources. For skilled, educated people, emigration is often an adventure. Exciting opportunities await you in the new place. But if you’re a low skill worker in Ohio, what does moving to San Francisco get you? What do you get for leaving your friends and family behind? Better chances to get a service job waiting on some Facebook engineers?

I'm a big fan of programs which help pay for both those relocations and the educations to help the transition.

I'm not a fan of holding the economy and the environment hostage because they have a traditional "attachment" to something that makes the world a worse place.

No argument from me. I just wanted to clarify that while moving is an impossibility, all other reasons for staying are moot.

The small rust belt and Appalachian towns we're talking about are not much different than the streets in San Francisco in terms of their social ills.

Usually it happens anyways, just delayed. Old people usually don't want to move, but the younger people are more flexible and move away as soon as they can if they don't see any future.

Then these towns get older and older until eventually they won't be viable anymore (or find something else to still attract young people).

So the trends are happening, they are just delayed by a couple of decades. As the average life expectation grows the cycles get longer however.

Nearly all of these towns are slowly dying. Young people leave and few come back. Nationwide its a lot of people but many of these towns are literally a few dozen people or less who will never leave because they live in a home for almost nothing or they have a family home they have inherited.

It's the same thing that has happened in lots of rural areas of Texas.

> You wonder what do all these people living here do for a living?

I don't, because I know over half the federal budget is spent on welfare: social security, medicare, medicaid.

The irony is that their little communities are going to die out no matter what. There is only so much coal in that soil.

>As coal jobs gradually fade away, the community can either adapt to renewables and tech, or die out.

This is very easy to say if you don't live there. There is no reason to think that a town that exists because it has a coal deposit is going to be a logical place for any business to put a clean energy plant of some sort.

If you are going to be for phasing out coal very quickly then you have to be willing to bite the bullet and accept that certain regions of the country are just going to be completely effed over.

I wonder about this because it seems like we were totally ok with moving manufacturing jobs overseas for example, or when a shipyard closes up shop in a town we accept it, but when it comes specifically to coal jobs it’s like all of a sudden it’s all about won’t someone think of the poor families?!

I would generally agree that if as national policy we are going to do something like shut down an industry we should try and help people including maybe just buying them out (reskilling/learn2code is extremely difficult), but it’s kind of like what Elon said once which was good which was when we lower the price customers don’t want to pay us the higher price and when we raise the price they want the lower price they initially agreed to (it wasn’t that exact thing but you get my point) and when it comes to subsidizing industries like we do for oil and gas for example I think the same mentality applies.

People were not ok with manufacturing moving overseas, the owners of those factories were. Closing a coal mine affects the owner of the mine directly. This has nothing to do with the workers- the owners would be just as happy to turn MT coal miners into opioid welfare recipients as they were NC textile mill workers as long as the owners continued to make money.

Consumers were also ok with manufacturing moving overseas, as they were all buying these cheaper products, making it impossible for local manufacturing to survive.

We are not okay with manufacturing moving overseas. I don't know where you got that idea, it is clearly false. Ross Perot was in 1996 one of the most successful third party candidates ever, and he ran on the "great sucking sound" of NAFTA moving manufacturing jobs to Mexico.

The one difference is manufacturing hasn't been lost in the US - by most measures we make more stuff in the US than ever. There are less jobs though because of automation, but those jobs have been replaced by engineering. Coal mining by contrast is a death industry and won't come back. What people in the coal industry need is someone to setup a factory in their town. A factory making some weird widget in a small town tends to make a rural town.

> If you are going to be for phasing out coal very quickly then you have to be willing to bite the bullet and accept that certain regions of the country are just going to be completely effed over.

What do you think happened to Appalachia? It sucked for a while, and it's still not a bustling tech hub and never will be, but people are adapting and in a few generations it will be a good (if less populated) area.

If only we gathered some money together from all of the places, especially the places that are booming and were the opposite of effed over, and then used that money on the regions of the country that would be effed over, to un eff over people, possibly by moving them to non-effed over locations! I don't know what that would be called, but boy that would be something!

It seems like large scale renewables are done by a large outside crew that comes in and gets things going as fast as possible.

That might be the only way wind can be done because of the size.

But for solar, it seems like there could be a local crew that installs a row of panels every day. Or week.

Currently the landowner gets rent, the area gets taxes but the locals don’t see much from renewables. Truck in racks and panels a month ahead of when they’re needed. Try agrivoltaics.

And any time you decide to eff over anyone, you can and should expect resistance.

> accept that certain regions of the country are just going to be completely effed over.

Pieces of countryside do not suffer. People are potentially more mobile than that.

Sure. It's fine to tell people to move. I have moved a lot of times in my life so I'm not personally offended.

But most people do not move and do not want to move and I think people on here underestimate the political difficulty of telling people they will have to sell their house for close to nothing and move to life an adequate life.

People in those towns have family connections going back centuries in some cases. They wouldn't even take a buyout, because they know everyone and it would be like losing family. If you haven't exper it, it doesn't seem like a valuable thing to worry about losing, but it is the world they know, and we shouldn't be surprised if many of them fight to keep it, potentially in a literal fashion. I don't know what the answer is, but buyouts and financed moves will be seen as authoritarian, while ending subsidies and just letting places fail might be seen as a faceless market force, even if itbis worse for those involved

America has weathered these events before mostly by shrugging.

See: the deindustrialization of New England in the 1920s, the Dust Bowl and its migrations, the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt

> People in those towns have family connections going back centuries in some cases.

You are correct, in some cases they go back 2-4 centuries. From when their ancestors settled in the colonies there. Settlers. Colony. 2-4 centuries, short term by European standards. It is hypocritical to expect it to be eternal now. There was no guarantee that it would last past when they milked out all the non-renewable resources. As noted, the US tends to be fairly institutionally indifferent to e.g. a Dust Bowl.

I hope that they better than that this time, I really do. But not at the expense of keeping coal mines and coal-mining-towns with no other viable way open. It never was a good job anyway (see "black lung").

Yes, that's the problem with US political-economics right now. You've (failed to?) identify the "political" part of "political-economics".

I don't see a null decision as political, but I think you get the point. It's OK for the tows to die, as the alternative is worse for literally everyone.

I’ll be blunt. Montana has self-determinism, which is one of the key principals of our form of government. They don’t need to do anything they don’t want to do. Life is about compromise. If you want something from them, you need to be willing to give something up.

>Montana needs to adapt to the 21st century

https://www.iea.org/news/the-world-needs-more-diverse-solar-...

"China’s share in all the key manufacturing stages of solar panels exceeds 80% today, according to the report, and for key elements including polysilicon and wafers, this is set to rise to more than 95% in the coming years, based on current manufacturing capacity under construction."

Given the current state of US-Chinese politics, coal is seeming like a very 21st century solution for the US.

I don’t think Montana’s stance on coal jobs is ruining your future children’s world in any directly measurable way - but please, keep speculating on other state’s internal politics.

So this is the exact opposite view of the Montana supreme court. The GP post. The children won the lawsuit.. Coal is absolutely and directly ruining their future. This is no longer an argument.

Appealing to the decision of Montana’s Supreme Court does little to refute whether coal production in their state produces an imminent danger to your children. If you are a Montanan then excuse me.

I don't understand this refute at all. Coal cannot stay confined to Montana's borders in any real sense. The coal is mined to export, and it is then burned in coal plants, which are very bad.

asynchronous's comment was about whether coal jobs in Montana yield any measurable risks to your children, wherever you are. Referring to Montana's judicial decisions as if they are edicts that span beyond its borders is a weak counterargument.

This is the opposite of a weak counterargument! Referring to Montana's judicial decisions as if they are edicts that span beyond its borders is called stare decisis or legal precedent. Montana's supreme court decision can absolutely guide decisions beyond Montana's border.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent#Principle

This implies that every state constitution has provisions similar to the ones in Montana’s state constitution that were used to uphold the decision and have already given it the distinction of precedence. The ruling on its own is not legally binding on other states, they can refer to it at their own discretion.

This isn’t a question of the decision’s influence in the future or its likelihood. It’s about the decision’s effect today. Either way, as far as I could find, the text of the ruling does nothing to convey concern for the measurable effects that Montana’s coal industry could have on you or your children elsewhere. That’s what we’re talking about.

By law, your self interests were not referred to at all. The "good news" is that your country is governed by self interests, and I’m inclined to believe that The Powers That Be ® are catering to yours this time around.

And people wonder how Jim Crow became a household name…

Ah yes, CO2 famously stops at state borders, it's very nice like that.

This isn't about the facetious point that you're trying to make. It's about whether one state's specific judicial decision at all concerns what takes place beyond its borders.

>Coal is absolutely and directly ruining their future. This is no longer an argument.

The courts are not infallible or all-knowing.

Wouldn't Montana have disproportionate influence on US politics, due to the way the US Senate works? As well as presidential elections.

Yes, but it isn't that extreme. They only have 2 senators out of 100.

Two senators, each of which represent about 550,000 people, compared to (on the other end of the scale) California's two senators, who each represent about 20,000,000 people. That's a 36x imbalance, which is pretty disproportionate.

Every person from a state with lower population than the median is overrepresented in the Senate, every state with higher than median is underrepresented.

It is a good thing that the Senate represents the States then, and not the people. There wouldn't be much point in having two houses of legislature if they both represented the same entities.

Future archeologists will wonder at the evidence they see in tree rings and ice cores: "These morons burned coal when they had renewable energy sources?"

I love how no one actually addressed my comment which was we have a literal S-tier energy source pretty much anywhere we want it, at the expense of a small amount of radioactive waste, and yet we stick our heads in the sand and let the solar panel door-to-door salesmen convince us not to use it.

You’re joking if you don’t include nuclear energy into the green new deal.

Agree with a lot of your points (most especially "a bullshit promise that won't pan out"), but recent legislation does attempt to mitigate the losses the communities you mention will face as coal is rapidly phased out. Folks in the industries we're transitioning from should not be left out in the economic cold.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2022/08/24/inf... (Inflation Reduction Act Benefits: Billions In Just Transition Funding For Coal Communities)

https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/green-jobs/WCMS_824102/lan...

This is hand-waving a real concern away. It's why people on the right are so mad right now.

Did we hand-wave the homelessness issue away in CA? Seems like there's an awful lot of hand-waving we did in the past 15 years growing the tech sector that left a shit-ton of people behind. I know a bunch of people are going to hand-wave this comment away too. The downvotes generated on hacker news will not translate at the voting booth.

It's a real concern, but it is the best that is going to be provided. 2 million voters over the age of 55 die every year, 4 million voters turn 18. Conservatives can vote all they want, the electorate turnover and outcome is a combination of inertia (inflation reduction act has stoked an enormous amount of renewables manufacturing capacity coming online) and demographic destiny. Fossil fuels will die due to economics, it is just a matter of time horizon.

I want to stress that I strongly support a just transition (policy should express compassion and empathy at scale), and if people can't be found other jobs, retiring them out early to bridge the gap to other social safety nets (medicare, social security, etc), but there is no path to success for conservative ideology on the issue of leaving fossil fuels behind (either through votes or economics).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37052550 (citations)

> 2 million voters over the age of 55 die every year, 4 million voters turn 18.

I think this is a bit of a simplification that makes the effect sound much more drastic than it really is. While 2 million voters over the age of 55 may die every year, they are replaced by a similar number of voters who just became over 55 and who's politics, on average, are only marginally different. Of course this applies to every age group as well. Not that I'm assuming that you're meaning to suggest that the effect is drastic, but I often see the very same line of reasoning in the political media and I'm quite certain it is what they're suggesting---because clicks.

Although as every year that ticks on, the people ageing into conservative middle-age are less and less likely to have a strong emotional or economic link to coal mining.

The change is not drastic, but it is inevitable. 2 million deaths per year, 4 million per two year election cycle, 8 million every presidential election cycle. TLDR There are tipping points, keep an eye on these metrics to understand them and predict when they arrive. Think in systems.

For example, Rep. Lauren Boebert won by only 546 votes last year in her district. You don't need much electorate change for that to not happen again.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/16/politics/demographic-changes-...

Additional citations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37152682 ("The renewable energy revolution is happening faster than you think.")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37152803 ("The US climate law is fueling a factory frenzy. Here’s the latest tally.")

> but there is no path to success for conservative ideology on this issue (either through votes or economics).

This is perhaps why there has been a big motivation for conservative politicians to use (or look the other way from) anti-democratic means to maintain power.

Even more than the claimed small-government ideology, there is such an incredibly strong allegiance with the fossil fuel extraction industries [1] that artificially propping those industries is worth the subversion of democracy. There are models of this elsewhere in the world, after all.

1. Liberals once had that too, but lost the fossil fuel geography after the 60s. Manchin is the last of his kind.

“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy." ― David Frum

Liberals ("neolibs") fucked up bad by taking the working class for granted and letting globalization erode them [1] [2] [3], very similar to what is happening with conservative fossil fuel electorate today. Maybe things have gotten bad enough for that cohort to be catered to again [4], maybe things need to get worse first.

[1] https://kof.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/kof-bulletin/kof-bull...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2017/07/05/535626109/the-end-of-loyalty-...

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCyZHB7NdPE

I get what Frum is saying, but he is getting quite a bit of mileage by overly conflating "conservative" and "Republican". I think the people he is referring to are the Conservative Nationalists, who have struck a tacit deal with the fossil fuel extraction industries (someone let me know if there is a pro-renewables Conservative Nationalist of any significance out there).

From a small-c conservative point of view, renewables make imminent sense because of the low cost and the fact that they literally conserve resources. This fits very much with the conservative tendency to save and not spend frivolously.

Observing this contradiction really demonstrates to me how much big-C Conservatism in the US is really more about institutionally prolonging and cementing the long term viability of fossil fuels. Everything else seems in service to that goal.

> Liberals ("neolibs") fucked up bad by taking the working class for granted and letting globalization erode them

I can't help but take note of the dichotomy that exists in current US politics. The implication seems to be that Liberals took on a policy stance that was electorally unfavorable and could jeopardize their ability to win elections. And yet:

“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Democratic Party. You should. Liberals will always be with us. If liberals become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon liberalism. The will reject democracy." ― nobody

There are tons of working class liberals. I'm tired of people implying working class people are all conservatives. These people are always framing arguments equating the working class to everyone with staunch conservative political views.

> There are tons of working class liberals

You are correct, but with the rise of nationalism as an appealing ideology, there are fewer white working class liberals (AKA blue collar) than there were in the past. These people were decisive in the 2016 election, and were a big reason that swing states had close elections in 2020.

Many of them have abandoned universalist progressive economic ideas because of the loss of economic security they experienced with globalization.

Also, unlike the capitalist and professional classes, the nationalists are often OK with strong safety nets, as long as these benefits are limited to their tribe. They are really neither conservative or liberal. There are other political dimensions involved.

> there are fewer white working class liberals (AKA blue collar) than there were in the past.

This could be because of increased migration into the US and a billion other reasons that have nothing to do with nationalism.

>Also, unlike the capitalist and professional classes, the nationalists are often OK with strong safety nets, as long as these benefits are limited to their tribe. They are really neither conservative or liberal. There are other political dimensions involved.

Agreed

> This could be because of increased migration into the US and a billion other reasons that have nothing to do with nationalism.

As voting numbers go, migration only comes into play if you interpret "fewer white working class liberals" proportionally, but I meant it in an absolute sense: that blue collar white Americans have shifted Conservative independently.

There is pretty good evidence of the nexus of race and occupational class in recent voting patterns [1][2]. This coupled with the fact that this population overwhelmingly supported economically liberal candidates in the past indicates a major shift, balanced partly in the other direction by the shift of the white professional class toward liberal voting tendencies.

If the argument is that migration into the US (which is mostly non-white [3]) is encouraging the white working class less liberal, then that is pretty well describing nationalism.

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-28/how-occup...

2. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examinati...

3. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s...

Conservatism has always been opposed to democracy from the moment “conservative” and “liberal” as political labels were created.

At most, they might abandon pretending to support it as cover while working to chip away at the edges when that pretense stops working for them, but that’s not a loss for democracy.

> Conservatism has always been opposed to democracy

Conservatism distilled to its essence can probably be summarized as Chesterton's fence: to not make rash moves changing the status quo without fully understanding both the reason the status quo is the way it is, and the nth-degree aftereffects of the change.

So I grant you, in the beginning of democracy, almost by definition conservatism was against it, when the status quo was a feudal monarchy or whatever; but there's been a few hundred intervening years, and I don't think it's fair to make the argument that "conservatism" is still, and will always be, opposed to "democracy".

> I don't think it's fair to make the argument that "conservatism" is still, and will always be, opposed to "democracy".

I think they are talking about Conservatism in the US specifically, not in general. In the US, Conservatism has been quite active in limiting the voting power of several demographics [1][2], a distinctly anti democratic pattern of behavior. It's a unique situation reflecting our own troubled racial history and the large ideological gulf between the older and younger generations.

I wouldn't call that anti-democratic conduct small-c conservative at all, but it's very big-C Conservative in the US.

1. https://apnews.com/article/alabama-redistricting-voting-righ...

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/20/cleta-mitch...

I wish I had the time to delve a bit deeper into those case of voting restrictions, because they're both more interesting than the surface level reported by the media (which is approximately that "GOP only wants landowning white males to vote"); but I have a busy week, so I'll have to settle for a few short counter-points, even though I appreciate your reasoned discourse and would like to continue in more depth. I really do!

First, on the Allen v. Milligan case, it's illustrative to imagine instead what would be the appropriate number of majority-black districts? The state is 68.9% white and 26.8% black[0] and has seven congressional districts. 26.8% of seven is 1.876, so one (which is what it is currently) is too few and two is actually too many. If all districts reflected the state's demographics as a whole equally, none would be majority-black. Besides, I think it imprudent to assume that people vote on racial lines; as the majority opinion notes, "The Court’s opinion does not diminish or disregard the concern that [section 2 of the Voting Rights Act] may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States", and that "racial gerrymandering, even for remedial purposes, may balkanize us into competing racial factions; it threatens to carry us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters". Both the majority and the dissents are worth reading, as usual.

On the second point of campus voting, I think there is reasonable room to argue on what the voting age should be. Prior to the 26th Amendment in 1971, the voting age was 21; which meant that for most of the country's history, young first-time voters already had many years of work experience under their belts and were further on their way to "adulthood". Nowadays, someone at the first-time voting age of 18 is less likely than ever to have worked[1].

Besides, if limiting suffrage is anti-democratic, then is expanding suffrage necessarily pro-democratic? There have been attempts at lowering the voting age to 16[2]; would it be considered anti-democratic to oppose such an action? And even states that are perennially unfriendly to big-C Conservatism based on voting record[3], like New York and New Jersey, were among states that made voting more difficult[4] recently.

All this to say: we should continue to have rational debates on the best way to ensure the ongoing health of the nation (that is, politics), and we would all be served better if one side was not depicted as acting against ("anti democratic pattern of behavior") that health, at least not without critical examination.

[0]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/AL

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300012

[2]: https://meng.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/meng-rein...

[3]: https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/ranking-t...

[4]: https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ELECTION/VOTING-RESTRIC...

> The state is 68.9% white and 26.8% black[0] and has seven congressional districts. 26.8% of seven is 1.876, so one (which is what it is currently) is too few and two is actually too many

Since we are talking about an imperfect system with any solution, disenfranchising black voters by 88% of a seat is significantly worse than disenfranchising white voters by 12% of a seat. This is especially so considering that the Voting Rights Act was enacted to counteract the history of black voter suppression in states like Alabama. Even in majority white districts, suppression of black voting happens through enacting laws that make it harder to vote [1].

> Besides, I think it imprudent to assume that people vote on racial lines

At the individual level, it's true race is no strict predictor of voting preferences, but at the coarse/aggregate resolution of a congressional seat, that's a very reasonable assumption, especially in manifestly racially balkanized places like Alabama.

> Nowadays, someone at the first-time voting age of 18 is less likely than ever to have worked.

Plenty of people have a few years of work experience by 18. There are also many people 30+ who haven't worked a day in their lives (think trust fund kids) that vote. Same for lifelong stay at home parents . I don't think we should disenfranchise any of them either. But that's all still irrelevant. 18 year olds have the right to vote according to the law, and changing the law to make it harder for them to vote is at the very least wrong.

> Besides, if limiting suffrage is anti-democratic, then is expanding suffrage necessarily pro-democratic?

That's not really what we are discussing, and is an appeal to the theoretical. The subject is preventing the disenfranchisement of people who have the full constitutional right to vote today.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/politics/voting-rights...

> Conservatism distilled to its essence can probably be summarized as Chesterton's fence: to not make rash moves changing the status quo without fully understanding both the reason the status quo is the way it is, and the nth-degree aftereffects of the change.

That's not the political ideology called conservatism, though its how “conservatism” is used in other contexts (and it would be a fair use in a political context when discussing praxis [how you acheive the goals of your ideology] rather than ideology [the ends at which your praxis is directed], though “incrementalism” is more common there to avoid collision with the ideological label.)

Conservative ideology is often advocating for change, and often (when the status quo is farther from the goals of conservative ideology) more rapid and radical breaks from the established status quo than opposing ideologies, whereas the incrementalist praxis you describe can be found in ideologies that are very far from conservatism.

> Conservative ideology is often advocating for change

> the incrementalist praxis you describe can be found in ideologies that are very far from conservatism

If your argument is that conservative politics in practice aren't very conservative (in the incrementalist fashion, as you describe), then I'm not sure if any political ideology is really self-consistent in that way. As an example, some majority-progressive (perhaps "radicalist", as an opposite of "incrementalist"?) municipalities around the country behave in a frustratingly incrementalist manner when it comes to land use changes, such that high rents and increasing homelessness result due to the supply of housing not being able to keep up with demand.

This country being dominated by two parties -- which is a mathematical inevitability given a first-past-the-post voting system -- we necessarily end up with one big-tent "conservative" party and one big-tent "progressive" party, for many senses of those words. And because those tents are so big, there are people with many conflicting ideas under them. So it stands to reason that the conservative party does some non-conservative things, or things in a non-conservative manner, and vice versa for the progressive party.

> f your argument is that conservative politics in practice aren't very conservative (in the incrementalist fashion, as you describe), then I'm not sure if any political ideology is really self-consistent in that way.

No, it has nothing to do with self-consistency. “Conservative” as an ideological label refers to something other than than incrementalism, though in contexts other than ideology, it can refer to that. It is simply words having different meanings in different contexts.

Conservative ideology and incrementalist praxis have nothing to do with each other, though they can be mistaken for each other when the status quo is near the goals of ideological conservatism. (In the US, that apparent overlap with incrementalist praxis is currently more common with neoliberal ideology today than conservative ideology—it can be hard to tell an incrementalist who doesn't seek neoliberal ends from a neoliberal of any praxis, because the status quo is mostly neoliberal.)

Demographic destiny is the Lucy pulling the football away from liberals’ Charlie Brown. In the first few elections after Joe Biden took office in the 1970s, Democrats won the Congressional popular vote by 6-17 percentage points. Their margin was only 3 percentage points in 2020, and they lost by 3 percentage points last year. Liberalism is weaker than it has been in half a century.

It's the folks on the right who prevent any action more than hand-waving.

I think we have to realize that for folks on the right it is a matter of Identity and not Policy. At this point their opinion or concerns should be just ignored because - 1) Addressing them will not get their votes (as it is a matter of Identity for them. A positive Policy for them will not impact their decision who to vote for) 2) Addressing their concerns just delays the inevitable (the inevitable could be either a significant move to renewables or climate disaster)

This is a curious take considering there isn't a person on earth who can force another person to learn, use, and sharpen the technical skills required to work in tech sectors. Are you saying that the success of one group through innovation shouldn't occur because another group refuses or is incapable of learning the skills required for the aforementioned?

Solar and Wind power is available practically everywhere. So that is directly contrary to your "this region is winner take all", which is really what the old "strike it rich with black gold" of fossil fuels was. Solar/Wind is about as win-win-win as it gets right now.

Also, there really isn't anything like a "coal reserve" anymore. Coal is not a useful material anymore outside of the coal fired plants that are still in operation. Coal is so far behind other forms of power generation cost (including even nuclear) that practically all coal fired plants are being actively planned for retirement/replacement. You cannot have an "economic plan for coal" that involves anything except planning for the jobs to go away.

At a minimum all coal plants will be replaced with natural gas turbine. Still fossil fuel but much cleaner in particulate and so much more efficient that the carbon release is reduced. With Solar/Wind falling under gas turbine in LCOE, gas turbine will become like coal in 10 years.

Solar/wind isn't responsible for the devaluation of rural communities. That happened with globalization. And economic development has historically followed the availability of cheap plentiful power, which solar/wind already represent an technological advancement in. Solar/wind are the cheapest form of power generation, and unlike coal/gas which are basically played out in terms of cost improvement, likely have another 10-20 years of cost improvement from economies of scale and technological improvement. Put it this way: if fusion became net-positive and sustained reaction tomorrow, it wouldn't matter. At the rate solar/wind are dropping, no fusion reactor would beat it economically for another 50 years.

These jobs are going sooner or later. It’s cheaper to build new solar than to operate existing coal plants in many places in the US.

If you are serious about the welfare of folks currently working in the coal industry, IMO you need to look at retraining programs (say, Green New Deal style) to replace fossil jobs with building wind, solar, battery, etc. components.

Pragmatically I’m fine with buying off the coal communities with subsidies to transition to green tech. We should not just leave them hanging.

The people advocating for a green energy economy understand this and are generally in favor of supporting those that worked in the fossil industry. However the lobbyist dollars opposing a green transition come from the big companies that stand to lose huge revenue streams, and they don’t seem to be that interested in the long-term welfare of those in the industry.

I suspect many horseshoers and saddle makers lost their income when the automobile came to be.

Not to mention all those freshly unemployed horses.

They found jobs in the glue industry.

Actually, in the early 20th century, those horses likely went to war.

There are also other industries in Montana. Cattle outnumber people 2:1. Wheat is also a big export.

I also recall the bigger towns/cities being fairly popular places for remote work (even filling local airports over capacity), although I'm not sure if that persisted through calls to return to offices.

The thing is, if these people are going to act completely unreasonable, and completely unwilling to learn new trades, they aren't going to get a lot of sympathy from the rest of us when they go around screaming nonsense and filling their kids heads with outright lies. As others have pointed out, most of the coal jobs are already gone, these communities are already fucked, and protesting clean energy will do nothing to un-fuck them.

I fully support jobs programs, training programs, welfare programs, and a whole host of other "liberal" things that would help these communities transition away from being dependent on fossil fuels, but they just get super pissy and throw all of that back in our faces.

> Montana has a massive amount of coal reserves, several productive oil fields, and a lot of refining capacity.

And also "Montana has so much renewable energy potential, it’s incredible" (1)

> If you close the oil refineries and leave coal in the ground, a lot of communities in Montana are going to become ghost towns.

Unless they find something else to do for money. See point above.

1) https://flatheadbeacon.com/2023/06/17/expert-cites-montanas-...

The problem is that either Montana springs up ghost towns, or the likes of Florida become uninhabitable as an entire state as hurricanes becomes worse. Furthermore, this pity for the poor coal miners is as good as having pity for hitmen, because their job is now actually killing people (one example, top Google result: https://www.voanews.com/a/death-toll-rises-as-heat-wave-grip...).

Yeah, this is basically it. We need to provide those people living coal and oil towns a pension and some type of national purpose as their jobs wind down so they aren't impoverished. The coal people can do environmental reclamation on the mines and the oil people can dig geothermal wells or something. No one has to be uprooted during their lifetime and their children will be able to make informed choices without the pressure of poverty around them.

IMHO coal should be banned as an energy source and efforts made to convert existing plants to nuclear.

Coal is going away no matter what. Be it from natural gas or wind. It is just not economic anymore.

From HTML to CSS to JS to React to God knows what … we have to learn new technologies all the time. Folks should be retrained on new technologies and transferred to new jobs for a nice transition to happen. Why we make it so complicated?

Frankly, screw them. They have had decades of warning and done nothing about it but whine.

Yup, that's about right, I'd say.

It's disgusting, too. Every time "the experiment" is run, we find that "the returns" from preventing excessive concentration of wealth VASTLY exceed any claimed benefits of allowing individuals and individual families to limitlessly accrue. VASTLY exceed, not merely economically, but all the way "down to" things like human well-being (and lack thereof: suffering). I.e., down to the roots of strong societies, communities, and ultimately COUNTRIES.

Consequently, those with an insatiable "need to hoard" know that they need to convince those with power (which, in the US, is The People [to some degree]) to believe in the opposite of the evidence. Unfortunately, of course, this is all too easy. While some degree of "representational democracy" and "mass media" and "universal public education"* increases the challenge, the class warfare continues. Some among the "upper class", in particular, engage in it very actively and intentionally, quite secure in the knowledge that terms like "data", and "evidence", and, even moreso, "statistics" / "economics", are meaningless / of little direct concern to most people. All you really need is "marketing".

So, really, all you do is - keep telling people that (OUR - i.e., The People's) "government doesn't work", keep telling them it's "corrupt", etc. (fostering conditions for degrees of self-fulfilling prophecy). Remove civics classes from schools. Tell them that the government just exists to perpetuate itself and to grow unchecked ... try to get people to forget, as much as possible, how self-governing is supposed to look ... what it grew out of, how we basically self-organized, quite effectively, through decades and then centuries worth of work (and quite radical ideas ... including at least two or three periods of significant upending of feudalistic components of the economy, often involving efforts of "enlightened" "class traitors"**). Ask them if, given all of this - that "we all know" that "government doesn't work", "people in government are corrupt self-dealers", "government can't be trusted" ... they'd like to keep some more of "THEIR" money each month, which, obviously, THEY are more QUALIFIED to spend. And, of course, as politics becomes more debased and less serious - driven by actual facts and what works vs. appeals to feelings and rhetoric [marketing] - slap a pretty face on it (Reagan).

Then, just rinse and repeat.

Pretty soon, so many people have a solid internal wall preventing any serious consideration of appropriate taxation to pay for services far more valuable than an extra night out at a restaurant every once in a while, this modified regime is quite entrenched and resistant to movement back towards more progressive ideas. All the while, you can keep marketing more and more extreme ideas ... like, oh I don't know, "maybe we need to reevaluate that whole 'Civil Rights Act' deal...".

The ideals and optimism etc. that propelled people to make changes good for themselves (in a broad sense, not narrow in time and space like greed) and society exist on the fringes - utterly extinguished in the center. Not given any serious consideration any longer.

You, yourself, provide an example: "But everyone knows from the last half century of globalization that taking win-win-lose and turning it into win-win-win is a false promise that won't pan out." And, you provide it in the right context, I'd say: "The problem with US political-economics right now". It's an important point - it doesn't have to be like this. The "disruptors" of systems who have marketed against ideas like "The New Deal" have worked for decades to get us to the point we're at now. I'd say, as usual, it will take enough people getting upset enough to create the conditions in which we can have a lurch back in the other direction.

The story of the 50+ years has involved a trade between "left" and "right". The left-of-center ideas have dominated on the social side of things, while the right-of-center ideas have dominated on the economic side. Seems like conditions are ripe for something of a reversal - the 10+ year ascent of "the culture war(s)" (as a more intentional and even engineered effort on the right [in part driven by being "out of actual ideas" {that are practical}] on the economic policy side for probably 2 decades or more) are evidence and fertile ground for reversal ... combined with heightened economic insecurity ONCE AGAIN. But, we'll have to wait to find out just how pissed off people really are ... and, if they can find their way back to the best lever US citizens get for pushing the system the way it needs to be pushed - the "voting booth 'lever'".***

* Thomas Jefferson was quite the "disruptor", pushing for universal education as early as he did (he was a complex person - my knowledge is fairly limited, but my general impression is that he would have fit in rather well with the subpopulation of "baby boomers" who experimented with radical "hippie" ideas in the 60s. Plenty in this generation, after this brief "Rumspringa", turned around, moved to suburbia, became part of the system they experimented with fighting, voted for a "pretty face" and "pretty words" wrapped around ideas they generally found repulsive only a decade or two earlier [Reagan], etc. That should not be taken to diminish Jefferson in any way - not my intention. And, he did much that was positive, but also, plenty that wasn't. My sense is that he's somewhat more difficult to judge / analyze than someone like Washington, who was very principled, "virtuous" [in a sort of "honesty internally" &/ of core character], consistent, etc. Who, interestingly, had a life more akin to the self-made immigrants who came through Ellis Island, say, raising his station up through life from a really low rung among the gentry class, all the way through leader of a nation he helped found.)

** People who go into history books as "Great", and certainly tend to be recognized for "virtue", "humanity", and "equity" and such - who REALLY embraced the idea "All men are created equal..." (where "men" is understood variously, of course, but, in an arc / from principles that only concludes in a meaning of "All people"). I.e., Washington et al., Lincoln et al., FDR et al. ... while others like "the Mercers"**** lurk in the shadows and work to dismantle the deservedly popular and virtuous work that brought such benefit to individuals AND the nation as a whole (aside from the grievances of the wealth and power hoarders).

*** What an anachronism, now, eh? ... Anyway, the change in voting patterns among other factors suggest political pressure is really starting to ramp up. ... Lastly, this comment is absolutely absurd in length - apologies and apologies for likely mistakes, can't really look it over right now, time has grown tight.

**** Also around in the time of Washington - the ancestry isn't simple, various Mercers weren't uniform in Loyalist sympathies, and, AFAIK, the current extreme right-wing Robert Mercer's direct ancestors didn't arrive in the colonial era, but, this family is comparatively visible right now and can be viewed within that sort of model (association of a give family with a particular member and their views, e.g., George Washington)

Everyone is happy when the government throws free money at them. That's why even the most climate denying and self proclaimed "fiscally conservative" politicians will vote for subsidizing new solar jobs in their free state.

What people get up and arms about are policies that destroy jobs or make things more expensive. This why all climate-change related legislation is about throwing free money at the problem rather than pricing in the externality in bad environmental practices. Even in the farthest left of politicians only make vague suggestions of a carbon tax because they know that they'd immediately get kicked out of office if they allowed gasoline prices to rise to what they are in Europe, let taxing all sources of greenhouse gases.

I see people up in arms about massive solar farm installations in Ohio. I'm not sure what the issues are as no one has ever quantified them other than to say "I moved here because of the fields" or "They are gobbling up good farm land for solar panels." You see signs everywhere: "Say NO to Solar!" As an Appalachian I recognize this as a miss. These people could have easily legislated (and still can!) a cut of the energy $$ to themselves. Instead they are trying to burn it all down and will be unsuccessful at it. Where is JD Vance or Mike DeWine on that one? Probably too busy ducking energy policy corruption charges.

That's not really about an opposition to green energy though. It's your standard NIMBY excuses about ruining the view and whatnot.

They say "Look at the fields of solar panels, they're so ugly!"

I imagine these people have never seen a coal mine.

"destroy jobs"

> Jobs up 95%

"more expensive"

> free money.

You're acting as if I made a contraction, but I didn't. Montana is getting sued because they aren't destroying jobs, and neither is any other state. The government is granting free money to people who buy solar panels, EVs, etc which is why jobs are being created.

What are you trying to say?

Breathe without Benadryl? Isn’t Benadryl used for allergies? Allergies come mainly from plants and pollen. Hopefully those won’t be going away as we adopt solar more.

> Asthma and allergic diseases cases have risen in recent decades. Plant pollen is considered as the main aeroallergen causing allergic reactions. According to available data, urban residents experience more respiratory allergies than rural residents mainly due to the interaction between chemical air pollutants and pollen grains.

From: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5941124/

There's a lot of research linking the two - particulate matter in the air from burning coal is another allergen related to this.

I’m diagnosed as having pollution induced Asthma and allergies to wood smoke. While I need steroids or an N95 mask when the air quality is very poor, Benadryl indeed does help with the symptoms.

What value does your comment add by nick picking his comment? The premise of his argument is correct. Fossil fuels kill far more people than renewables and nuclear.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/fossil-fuels/which-powe...

Because even if we went 100% fossil free today, we’d still need Benadryl to breathe.

It reduces inflammation in the respiratory track. Relax.

Since we're being nitpicky. It's tract not track.

Point still stands though.

“the more we move away from burning things for energy, the better” is not self evident. We’ve been burning things for energy since the invention of fire 1 or 2 million years ago. It is a major major factor for how we have built this global civilization that we all benefit from. That said, we moved away from burning fire, not because we ran out of wood, but because we found something more efficient. Currently, hydrocarbons are the single best method of generating and delivering cheap, reliable energy. Only nuclear comes close, but for some stupid reason it is demonized. Solar and wind serve a purpose, but they’re nowhere near ready to replace hydrocarbons. We should only transition away from hydrocarbons at the point that by doing so, humans flourish more, and not less. This means either we develop a newer, better technology (nuclear nuclear nuclear), or we begin to run out of fossil fuels, which won’t be for a very long time.

> Solar and wind serve a purpose, but they’re nowhere near ready to replace hydrocarbons. We should only transition away from hydrocarbons at the point that by doing so, humans flourish more, and not less. This means either we develop a newer, better technology (nuclear nuclear nuclear), or we begin to run out of fossil fuels, which won’t be for a very long time.

You are ignoring the main reason we have to move away from burning things for energy: it is making our future selves flourish less.

People aren't suggesting to move towards renewables because they look better or because it just feels so nice to use solar energy. The negative externalities from our energy usage today are literally negatively affecting, partially even destroying, our future. If you only look at the present you're ignoring all the problems our current consumption of fossil fuels is introducing.

Imagine your grandma is cold. Sure, you can warm her up by setting her house on fire, but it will only help for a short time.

Technologies like solar and wind are actually very ugly! No one is suggesting moving to them flippantly, and certainly not because of an aesthetic.

To the extent that we can make the planet more survivable, fossil fuels is our number one energy source for making that happen, and nothing comes close. I’m a fan of solar and wind, as much as I am of hydroelectric, but they simply can’t handle the demand at their current output. Not to mention, they require energy from the burning of fossil fuels to build their own infrastructure, and then even more to provide the on-demand backups whenever the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow enough.

The energy we derive from fossil fuels is precisely why we have thriving civilization and flourishing humans today. Nowhere where fossil fuels are absent do we see such flourishing. That doesn’t mean we should put our heads down and burn burn burn until the planet runs dry. It means we should acknowledge the good and the bad, and work towards a more sustainable future.

In my opinion, until we come up with a better way to harness solar energy (which is what hydrocarbons actually are), we can’t lock ourselves into solar panels and batteries. There has to be something more efficient and cheaper than hydrocarbons.

It’s nuclear. Nuclear is the answer. The faster we can get people, countries and continents to adopt nuclear, the faster we can move toward a future where our energy concerns effectively disappear.

I like green energy as much as the next guy but I think it's hard to know if it's growing organically or growing because the government is spending trillions of dollars on it.

One aspect is that storage is getting cheaper than peaker plants [1][2], in the "more profit with storage" sense.

[1] https://www.ge.com/power/transform/article.transform.article...

[2] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights....

It was growing even under Trump's admin, who was NOT spending trillions on it. China made renewables cheaper than coal.

> A day ago, there were people

> ... I remember reading

Any references?

Courts rather than legislatures making climate policy is indeed "an agenda being shoved down our throats". Legislators who face elections are more likely to consider tradeoffs.

It is widely accepted that one of the court's jobs is to determine whether the legislature's laws are in line with state and federal constitutions. This mechanism exists to make sure that the majority cannot infringe upon the rights of a minority simply because they control the legislature.

The ruling in this case is weirdly hard to find, probably because it's not a supreme court case yet, but the reports say that all the judge did was strike down one provision of a law that the legislature passed, according to a pretty reasonable interpretation of this provision in the state constitution [0].

[0] https://leg.mt.gov/bills/mca/title_0000/article_0090/part_00...

Yes, but I think you're missing the point. The Montana constitution was adopted in 1972 in a constitutional convention. The people that were elected to that convention were not the legislature (because the previous constitution forbade someone from holding 2 elected offices at one time). The people elected were largely not even politicians, just regular people.

Therefore it shouldn't matter at all - the parent post comes from a position of "the people must be ruled over" and the Montana constitution has a "will of the people" vibe.

I'm not sure what in your comment actually contradicts what I just said. OP argued that the court was out of line, I responded that the court was doing its job in interpreting the Constitution that the people of Montana put in place. What the grandparent poster may or may not have implied about people being ruled over seems immaterial to the question of whether the court was making policy or interpreting the Constitution.

The way these systems are set up is that if the will of the people is united enough then they can modify the Constitution. As it is, the people of Montana clearly indicated their intention to protect the environment, and state laws prohibiting experts in the executive branch from even considering a specific class of environmental impact are pretty obviously out of line with the intent of the Constitution.

The courts in this case are interpreting the constitution of the state of Montana, which was written and ratified by the legislature. Quoted below:

Constitution of Montana -- Article IX -- ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES

Section 1. Protection and improvement.

(1) The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.

(2) The legislature shall provide for the administration and enforcement of this duty.

(3) The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources.

Courts act based on ... something. You can agree with the reasoning or not but it's not simply an arbitrary policy based on nothing. In the Montana situation it is based on the rights of younger people who will take the brunt of choices made today. Courts make decisions all the time about balancing different people's rights.

This is the judicial branch upholding a law put in place by the legislative branch. That is exactly how our government is supposed to work.

We were promised cheaper energy. Nothing is cheaper about renewables, and the costs grow ~3% per year. To say nothing of the raw materials demand, requirement of fossil fuels to develop and use 'renewables' and the cost to replace such equipment. For example, battery replacement for EV are outside of affordability for the mass market. And of course, there is the inescapable long term problem of 250MM electric vehicles requiring charge when we're already telling people that they can't charge their EV due to grid constraints. The inconvenient truth is this; there isn't enough raw material on earth to electrify all transportation, upgrade the entire national grid (every line, every transformer, every substation) to meet the demand that an total EV conversion demands, not for 30 years and definitely not by 2030. Saying otherwise is simple wishful thinking. My apologies in advance for offending the perpetual victims in the church of climatology.

Creating jobs is easy: Spend a lot of money and/or make it more effortful to produce things. In either case, workers will be doing more of one thing and less of another.

In this case, more workers are spending more time in "Energy," but this comes at the cost of all the other things those workers might be doing instead. This may or may not be a net-win, but unless we account for the reduced production in other areas, we will delude ourselves about the benefits of these energy jobs.

We will be motivated to keep "creating jobs" simply by shifting workers from one task to another, and then another, regardless of whether those new tasks are actually more valuable to society than the ones they had been doing. We will put in place rules that make production more effortful, because this creates jobs in that field, despite the fact that we will have less overall stuff.

I don't think that's how labor markets function in the U.S. at the moment, and I think it's an odd critique to make of green energy projects in particular.

Not all labor creates the same amount of wealth, and there isn't a fixed demand for skilled labor. Lots of energy construction projects increases the demand for skilled labor, which pulls people out of unskilled labor or service jobs. Greater labor demand in general means everyone wins - companies have projects that they're getting built, workers have negotiating power and wage growth, and wealth is being created in the form of energy infrastructure.

I did not intend to critique energy jobs or projects in particular - I meant to highlight that shuffling people from one task to another is not (necessarily) productive overall, but it's easy to delude ourselves. We see the increased productivity concentrated in one area/industry, but don't see the decreased productivity diffused throughout the rest of the economy.

This may still be a net win, but you have to consider both sides.

As far as moving people from less-skilled to more-skilled jobs - the real question is which one is more valuable for society. There might be plenty of low-skill jobs that are valuable, and high-skill ones that aren't. Also, we have to be careful about what we consider "skill." Would you say waiting tables is low-skill? A waiter may beg to differ... What are these "low-skill" jobs that people are giving up in order to move into which "high-skill" jobs in energy? Or is it just about whether someone has to wear a blouse or button-up shirt and slacks and go to an office?

The important thing is that people should move from lower-value jobs to higher-value ones. But people do not get a direct signal of value, only of pay. So we can pay people more to do a job, and they will do it. But that does not mean it is more valuable overall.

Precisely. Enter Bastiat.

I wonder what he would have to say on our current world. Here are some stats I find interesting from America in particular.

Federal Government Current Receipts

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGRECPT

Personal current transfer receipts: Government social benefits to persons: Medicare

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W824RC1

Personal current transfer receipts: Government social benefits to persons: Social security

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W823RC1

It appears at the moment that more spending on everything is bipartisan, and universally loved. Until it breaks:

Federal government current expenditures: Interest payments/Federal government current tax receipts

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=sOG

Some food for thought:

https://www.americas-capital.com/blog/we-will-see-the-return...

Yep - everyone wants money to be spent. But few consider how that money spent contributes to overall productivity. One cannot live in money or eat money. If we want things, they have to be produced by workers. Does spending money increase overall production? Maybe, but I rarely hear anybody address that question.

Does hiring people into government roles end up producing consumer goods, factories, or productivity-enhancing research? This is an unasked question.

Coupling energy production success to job creation is a mistake, and the DOE is taking political wins at the cost of long-term energy abundance. Labor inherently puts a floor on the price of energy, no matter how cheap or clean the technology is!

"Cheap, clean energy" IS the consumer benefit, not the bureaucracy and make-work.

We should aim for a world where near-infinite energy production is produced by one guy in DC with a button that says "PRODUCE MORE".

Exactly -- producing the same amount of energy with more people is a bad thing.

We're producing more energy, not the same amount: https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/#/?f=A&start=19...

You're misinterpreting the comment, almost certainly. The claim is more specifically: "Per given amount of energy generation, renewables are requiring employing more people, likely causing higher energy costs than other methods might"

I'm just observing here. Obviously, there's tradeoffs to consider. I don't personally have a stance that this is a problem or that there's currently a better way to make our energy production green.

> Per given amount of energy generation, renewables are requiring employing more people,

I don't really see that claimed backed by sources.

But short-term, yes probably, it'll take a lot of work install renewable energy sources everywhere. But once installed, maintenance will probably require fewer human hours. And certainly fewer human hours spent extracting raw materials (oil, gas, coal).

You’re splitting hairs.

The real metric would be man hours per GWh generated or similar. That metric is moving in the wrong direction as we move to distributed, intermittent generation.

Make work is not progress, it’s a tax.

I do think that would be an interesting metric, but it sounds pretty difficult to calculate and I haven't found any related research. I disagree that distributed generation is the wrong direction, I think it's extremely valuable and worth extra labor if it's more resistant to supply chain issues and less carbon intensive than whatever it's replacing.

Not really because you’re completely ignoring the externalities with that metric.

But if you did include the entire supply chain, how many many man hours went into securing oil supply with the invasion of Iraq? Not just the armed forces, but the man hours of production for the materiel.

That is not strictly correct, especially in comparison with fossil fuel energy where production is highly concentrated. Automating things in a refinery is a lot easier than building robot steeplejacks to maintain 10,000 windmills.

Secondly, renewables capex, which is rapidly growing, creates lots of jobs, and will do so until production levels satisfy demand.

A reminder as always that the ideal number of jobs (i.e. labor cost) needed to produce adequate energy to meet consumption demand is 0.

Yeah, yeah, this is startup cost in many cases. But jobs are not (or shouldn't be) the goal of an energy policy.

I know several people building startups around green energy labor. The impression I get is that the labor demand isn't a policy thing, that solar installers in particular are desperate for more labor and turning down projects that they can't staff.

So I think this is a good thing! It takes labor to build infrastructure, it's not make-work. And a strong demand for skilled labor creates a lot of positive externalities.

Yeah but if one of the biggest political obstacles is "what about the jobs" then it makes sense to talk about the renewables jobs.

Why should energy, unlike any other service or industry, require no labor to provide

I may have misunderstood, but I think GP's point is that the ideal number of jobs for any productive endeavor is zero, i.e. "fully automated luxury gay space communism". If technology advances to the point where it's the equivalent of waving a magic wand to get energy, food, and resources, that's the ideal state.

Even in other scenarios e.g. ""semi-automated exploitative capitalism", as CEO, if I can replace expensive human workers with cheaper automated systems, I have reduced costs and the board and shareholders will like it.

I think that grandparent's point is that the ideal "limiting case" of this trend is zero human workers. Ideals are not necessarily attainable, but they point the direction of travel. Optimising for "more jobs, more payroll" is not what does or should happen.

_edit_ other commenters have pointed out that "clean power makes jobs!" is a political not economic or business reply to "what about the coal jobs?". And if it's true (as seems likely), then it's a stronger statement: "despite efficiency, this is a jobs growth area".

If the clean energy sector could be cheaply 100% automated, it would be done for business reasons, leaving the politicians to deal with the fallout of unemployed voters. But then, exactly the same is true of coal energy. Or anything else, really. Aren't there a lot fewer jobs assembling cars now than there used to be? Why is the "rust belt" called that?

Because people are really, really expensive to employ. The fewer people it takes to generate 1 kW of energy, the cheaper that energy can be sold on the market, and to a first-order approximation, economic growth and increase in standard of living are mostly because energy got cheaper (and these things stop happening when energy stops getting cheaper). Note that for most other goods, it's uncontroversial that the reason people can afford it now, thus bettering their standard of living, is that it takes fewer people to make them than it used to (because of automation).

As a CEO of any service or industry, why should I aspire to a higher expenditure on wages?

So... you're saying "People don't like spending money."

Oh, you don't say? Gee, what a worthwhile comment.

Back to reality--

Energy is such a critical industry. And given the size of the USA, for example, the maintenance of energy infrastructure is never ending.

So, this argument the idea of "zero" is quite meaningless in the context of reality.

> But jobs are not (or shouldn't be) the goal of an energy policy.

No one is saying that.

There is a transition to wind and solar, this is an indication of that.

"Solar jobs increased in the largest number of counties of any electric power generation technology, growing in 74% of U.S. counties."

Can’t wait to have ten billion windmills breaking down every year that we need millions of windmill techs for, rather than just a handful of nuclear reactors that require extensive maintenance every 30 years.

If the solar panels and windmills and their technicians are cheaper to build and operate (safely) than the nuclear reactors, externalities included, then it seems like the market is making the right decision.

Yeah, maybe it's expensive to pay people to drive around and climb windmills, but it's nothing compared to waiting out the half-life of nuclear contamination of a major city.

Except it’s not expensive.

Unsolvable maintenance problems, like the leaky Vermont Yankee plant, can't be solved by adding more workers. Which is by your lights better?

Design issue. The DOE has enough manpower and resources to put their heads together and design a perfect reactor - one that could be built and function as expected.

They won’t get around to it while they waste time and resources with stop-gap solutions like wind and solar which don’t generate energy consistently or reliably.

Famously, fossil fuels require zero maintenance, being a magic energy source

Reality is wind today is far cheaper to both build, maintain and decommission than nuclear

The problem with wind is variable supply - especially in regional areas.

I am part of a two new energy companies in OKC Larkspur Minerals and Operating -https://www.larkspurminerals.com/. We take over old fields and increase production (marginal wells) we also work with renewable energy either through helping companies acquire land and or operating. Given our size the deals sizes are about the same though from a cash flowing prospective Oil and Gas is still king.

A fun stat is Oklahoma renewable electric production is at 47% in 2022 up from 10% in 2011. Now 90% of that is wind power, but we are expanding into utility scale solar. And the country folk are self installing solar panels with cost $.50-$.75 per watt.

> Data is reported for five energy sectors: Electric Power Generation; Transmission, Distribution, and Storage; Fuels; Energy Efficiency; and Motor Vehicles and Component Parts

No real mention of what these jobs actually are? I'm guessing the software development needs in this sector are comparatively pretty minimal...

There are a ton of software development jobs in those sectors! Especially if you include all the "software" jobs that are less like the sort of programming at a typical software shop and more like "Math/CS/Eng PhDs writing MATLAB code".

I think we will see that transition throughout the economy, actually: software will continue to be very important, but the marginal value add of someone writing software will depend on their having deep domain expertise.

I'm interested in moving into this sector. Do you have any resources/companies/etc to share?

Sure.

National Labs (NREL, Argonne, Sandia...etc)

EPRI is a big one that sits between industry and academia and hires plenty of both to act as an R&D hub for industry.

The large RTO/ISOs (CAISO, ERCOT, SPP, MISO, PJM, ISO-NE, NYISO) run large regions of the grid and work to maintain the reliable operation of the grid, optimize the use of hundreds of generators every 5 minutes in automatic competitive auctions, and plan certain upgrades like transmission.

Consulting firms (too many to count) like EPE typically run simulations for anyone who needs it done

Software Vendors (GE, Siemens, Hitachi, Energy Exemplar...etc)

Utilities that are members of the RTO/ISOs (or independent as in the South east)

Renewables developers (Nextera, EDF, ENEL...etc) that try to get renewables built and then participate in the RTO/ISO markets.

This is just a section of the power industry as well. Good paying jobs, but a fair amount of red tape too depending on where you go. From a software perspective there's a lot of IT Enterprise work, a lot of programming that engineers do typically involves calling the APIs of commercial software and trying to analyze the resulting data. R&D work typically involves building prototypes. Enterprise software is typically Java, SQL, C#, JavaScript, or C++ depending on what it is. The engineer stuff is mostly in Python. R&D work is typically Python or Matlab.

Can you be more specific as to your background and skills?

Thanks this is a good place for me to start digging into. I have BS/MS in CS/HCI, but I've been working as a product designer for nearly a decade now. I'm planning on moving back towards the engineering side of things though and energy is one industry I'm interested in.

Plenty of places will take a comp sci degree. Just start anywhere and get some experience and then figure out where you want to go.

There's a load of software needed, but it's really not sexy, or it requires relatively esoteric languages like MATLAB. I know of at least one ubiquitous system, PSCAD for simulations, that still relies on Fortran

And? What are you trying to say? Banking software IS sexy?

Each of those sectors has a variety of support roles: accounting, HR, software, janitorial, etc, in addition to primary operations.

> These findings illustrate how Bidenomics is working, and President Biden’s Investing in America agenda is ensuring all communities have access to affordable, reliable, clean electricity, helping deliver on the President's ambitious clean energy and climate goals

Gosh, I wish press releases like this weren't blatantly playing politics.

When we keep politics out of press releases like this, it helps bring people onboard who otherwise may get stuck because the person in an elected office isn't the person they voted for.

People don't often come onboard for the people they voted against. The people who issued that press release are well aware that they're not going to convince anybody who opposes the incumbent.

It's about the opposite: reassuring his constituency that they are getting something. They need something that sits in their mind when they ask the question "What has this guy done for me lately?"

It would be great if they could do it in a less blunt fashion; this is rather on-the-nose. But even a better press release isn't going to suddenly convince the President's opponents that they were wrong about him all along. The best he can hope for is to nudge them towards having higher priorities on election day than voting.

It would also be great if I didn't have to talk about politics in this abstract fashion. But in the end a politician cannot accomplish the goals that they believe to be important if they don't win. I'd love it if the voters simply looked at their own priorities and chose the candidate who fit them, but rhetoric has been understood to be more important than policy since before Aristotle.

i wonder why they include 'motor vehicles and component parts' jobs as 'energy jobs' but not, for example, carpentry jobs or cooking jobs

a dude selling car parts isn't producing or reselling energy, and i'm pretty sure a cook with a gas burner applies more energy in their work

if we cast the net wide enough to include auto parts stores then 100% of jobs are energy jobs

maybe they're trying to choose only the categories of jobs where employment is going up instead of down

Probably because it aligns with this administration's push to create clean energy jobs, in large part, by (quite successfully) pushing for EV and EV battery manufacturing in the US.

does that mean a guy who sells replacement shock absorbers for diesel trucks has an 'energy job' tho

feels similar to the logic behind what goes into the CPI and what doesn’t

"Bidenomics is working, and the clean energy transformation is creating good jobs in every pocket of America"

This is propaganda, not news.

It’s literally a press release from the Biden administration, not a news outlet. I’m not sure what you are mad about.

It's a press release from the government based on a recent analysis, I don't think it was trying to be news...

It is definitely propaganda.

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