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Comment by fknorangesite | Hacker News Reader

Planned malice. There are plenty of sections in Project 2025 demonizing renewable energy.

A certain person has had a thing against Wind Mills ever since Scotland built them spoiling the view from his golf course.

This is the most pertinent comment in the thread.

And why? That's the part that gets me. What's the reason? If we can develop renewables that brings the cost of energy down, how is that bad?

Because it's not about improving anyone's lives (other than maybe the fossil fuel execs). It's just about Fuck The Libs.

It really is just this. Like I'm sure there are some folk in the GOP, both party and voterbase, who have actual principles. That however has been sacrificed on the altar of triggering the libs.

It's all they do now. If it will make some liberal in their heads unhappy, they'll do it. They don't care how much it hurts themselves.

That's honestly why I have absolutely not one iota of sympathy for all the Republicans who's businesses are getting obliterated by the trade "policies" of the dumbass in chief. You voted for this shit. I hope it sucks for you. I hope your wife leaves you. I hope your children never talk to you again. I hope broad society rejects you, permanently, for playing such stupid fucking games with the future of your nation, your children, and your own life.

Truly, it's the Right's chickens finally come home to roost. For decades the Republican side of things has gotten to play incompetent jackass olympics with the government, and between the US's position in global politics, our overall wealth and the general stability maintained by Democrats and moderates over the shrieking howling objections of themselves, everything kept trucking more or less to spec. Like children in a home maintained by parents who know what they're doing.

Now like the adolescents they so frequently scold everyone else for acting like, they have moved out on their own, maxed out their credit cards on stupid shit, and bills are stacking up. And just like those adolescents, they have no goddamn plan and just point the blame at everyone else for letting them fuck everything up for themselves.

Fucking. Children. And I don't just mean in that a distressing amount of them seem to be pedophiles.

> It's just about Fuck The Libs.

That's how they rile up their voting base. But the actual goal is more just to get rich.

Lower energy prices and more renewables are both bad if you're in the fossil fuel business. Doubly so if the rest of the world is rapidly solarizing and you are desperate to hold onto one of your last best markets.

Many believe that renewables are a boondoggle that will never be cheaper, pushed by either radical environmentalists who hate humanity, or by some shadowy conspiracy that's doing this as part of a plot to somehow reshape the world. And that fossil fuels are great, don't run out, and don't cause harm.

And what is their belief based on?

Contrarianism, fear of change, cherry-picked info, and propaganda.

Solar and wind are unreliable and too low-impact relative to their cost and maintenance.

Every time we have this discussion, we always conclude that nuclear power generation is the only viable path forward.

The sun reliably comes out every day. The rest of this idea has been, or will be, obsoleted by how incredibly cheap batteries have become.

Nuclear NIMBYism is even harder to defeat than regular NIMBYism, so you might as well ask for geothermal.

Every time we have this discussion, we conclude that despite some good aspects nuclear is way too expensive and too slow to build.

Luckily for us, the market has also already concluded this. Global solar is now growing by 1TW of installed capacity per year.

Solar and wind + storage is a viable path forward. Solar panels are getting cheaper, and batteries are getting better capacity and charge cycle stats each year. It may not be the path forward, we may never eliminate the need for a baseline system like nuclear plants or some gas or coal plants. But we can get ourselves off of them, other countries are, it's not like the US is special here. Same physics.

Do you have proof of this?

Republicans have been anti-environmentalism since the 1970s, to cater to the anti-regulation sensibilities of big business and energy donors.

https://archive.is/h99oh

It's way beyond anti regulation now. They are actually creating regulation to hurt the environment.

See: utilities trying to shut down coal plants because they are too expensive, being stopped by the current administration.

It wasn’t demonized for ideological reasons. Whose interest is it for renewables to fail? Follow the money.

Coal and gas extraction are huge businesses with loads of money to pour into financing their own protection. They were so successful the meme it created broke free and took it's own life. It combined with reflexive anti-regulation, anti-intellectualism, and anti-tax forces so it's outlived even the need for it from some of the original creators (Shell et al have invested into their own renewables arms because they are the future).

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