Mapping connections of anti-offshore wind groups and their lawyers
climatedevlab.brown.edu
climatedevlab.brown.edu
In other words, this is a cynical lament about how other people suck that's not descriptive enough to be useful or falsifiable. I believe in acknowledging harsh realities for the sake of dealing with them, but there's just no substance here to even acknowledge.
Nobody benefits from this sort of thinking.
The psychological mechanism seems to be [social] media psychosis. It's been slowly festering through decades of reactionary talk radio, but really went into overdrive when the attention-surveillance industry went to town promoting the dumbest least common denominator memetic reactions to outrage bait.
signed, a libertarian who actually believes in a strong natural right to free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, fiscal responsibility, individualism, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and many more unenumerated personal liberties.
for example:
1) more expensive energy of any kind is extremely harmful to society
EDIT: more expensive energy reduces prosperity for everyone. Renewable energy can and should be competitive and cost effective.
2) automatic filing of taxes is more harmful long-term than individuals filing taxes manually
EDIT: automatic filing will lead to silent frictionless automatic tax increases, forever.
3) government funding of internet/broadband/etc is harmful
EDIT: picking winners is more harmful that makeing good public policies.
it's just hard to reason though the details, though it is worth the effort.
My point is that there could be valid viewpoints that are not self-serving/greed-based.
Part of it is that there is more than one opponent. So for example:
> automatic filing will lead to silent frictionless automatic tax increases, forever.
There are presumably real people with this concern, and it's not completely ridiculous. But then there should be ways to mitigate it. Let's compromise by requiring tax withholding to show up on bank statements. Instead of your bank statement just showing that you got a +$1100 deposit from your employer, it's required to show the full +$1800 they paid you and then separate the -$700 in transfers to the state and federal governments for the various tax withholdings.
That should satisfy the people concerned about making taxes invisible because then you're actually giving them what they want. But then there are the other opponents, and that compromise is obviously not going to satisfy the politicians taking bribes from the TurboTax company.
But it's still useful to distinguish them, because you may not need both. You only need 51 votes, not 100. If you started with 45, maybe that sort of compromise can get you 6 more.
The point of argument is when people have to be reminded of the contradictions: if you file a tax claim and claim allowances you acknowledge tax exists. If your health fund demands you also exploit state or federal subsidy you're exploiting the benefits. If your company receives industry offsets or assistance...
But that's just a straw man. To hold that belief you would have to e.g. actually want to "defund the police" to avoid the need for tax revenue to pay them. Is that supposed to be a common position among Republicans?
The real contention is how much. There is a large difference between the government taking 5% of your salary and 65%, even if taxes exist in both cases. And then if you think ordinary people should be paying less than they are now rather than more, you'll reasonably want to oppose things that conceal tax collection from the constituents who are paying them, because then those constituents will be less likely to notice and object to excessive spending.
For fossil-fuel companies, it's about control and extending the world's dependency on their products as far into the future as possible. The others are on their dole to one degree or another, when you consider that many of the edges in the graph in the article represent not only relationships, but also flows of money.
This is playing out like the hubris film companies had towards digital sensors. Seems they don’t teach history in MBA programs I guess.
Btw, I looked up Juul from your other comment and saw they're 35% owned by Altria (formerly Philip Morris) who are "one of the world's largest producers and marketers of tobacco, cigarettes, and medical products in the treatment of illnesses caused by tobacco." [1]
You couldn't hope for a more tragically hilarious summation of the cynicism in this industry than that combination of businesses to be in
Control and relevance. These things matter to them as much as profit.
The barrier to entry to produce renewables is lower than fossil fuels - there is no natural oligopoly.
If you own your house, you can put solar on your roof and a battery on your house, and dramatically cut back on your fossil fuel derived energy needs. Communities can do the same, as can utilities and independent businesses.
That's a future where fossil fuel companies are far less relevant. Not irrelevant, but nothing like what they were. That future may be unavoidable, but they are trying to delay its arrival as much as they can. While that may seem like an anathema to many (including me), put yourself in the shoes of a major investor in or executive at a fossil-fuel company, and you might do the same.
Those initiatives failed due to short-termism, infighting, failure to commit sufficient resources, et cetera.
That's a very different skill set than gaining access to scarce mineral resources and monopolising them to extract maximum profit.
Some subcontractors may have transferrable skills e.g. offshore boat crews but at a high level the two industries are fairly incompatible.
It doesn't help that the fossil companies have succeeded in using politics to salt the ground of their potential new ventures at home. A real burn the boats moment for them.
The US looked at that and said "let's tax raw material imports" and half the population is too stupid to realize that they're the ones paying those taxes.
EDIT: it should be noted this is hardly a criticism of China's strategy here- they wanted an industry they saw potential in, subsidized it and bought IP which other countries offered up, and reaped the rewards. They just literally played capitalism better.
> The tobacco industry undermines tobacco control efforts in low-income countries and targets vulnerable populations through aggressive marketing and lobbying for less tobacco control and lower taxes.
Unfortunately for fossil fuels most of the world are importers of their products which makes them a tough sell as other options become cheaper.
If what you know is how to pull oil out of the ground, and build multi billion dollar rigs to do it, that's your sector.
Plus you'll never find a better multiplier then software and consumer spending.
I'm not saying it's true - I have no idea. But it's at least a rational reason for opposing renewables, which otherwise seems to be very irrational.
Is oil really that profitable to ignore the havoc it wreaks and will wreak on virtually every other industry, including itself when there is less money moving around to spend on oil and oil products?
I just don’t get it how being so objectively shortsighted is actually the corrupt greedy money position instead of ensuring the world as we know it doesn’t collapse and that the money printing machine doesn’t fall apart. But what do I know I guess.
It's really unfortunate that such glaring cognitive defects appear to have doomed the human race smothering itself to death on this planet instead of reaching out to the stars.
But that is uncomfortable. We like certainty more. We prefer an easily identified enemy.
The difference (in many things) is not the motivation but the beliefs about what to do about it. Political opponents are more similar than different. By understanding the other you can reach them and effectively change them.
If you are puzzled by a group of people the issue is not that group - it is the puzzlement!
However one effective political tactic is to outgroup and other an opponent. It strengthens your sense of belonging to the right group. The danger is that it is inward facing and lowers inclusiveness. Empathy generally weakens ones own political passions but brings more peace. Restricting empathy increases enthusiasm and energy and action.
Moreover, there are academic studies and popular schools of thought that say empathy is dangerous, that people should be entitled to their rage and emotions and that people shouldn't be forced to understand. That empathy itself is a tool of power.
Now solar is a quicker way to decarbonize, so similar efforts are anti-solar, pro-nuclear.
There’s several competing flavors of it like the ones who think “the good” communist revolution will happen after society collapses vs the ones who want democracy to fall apart because they think monarchical societies are morally superior, but they all have the same line of thinking that “the collapse” is coming any day now and they want to accelerate when they say occurs
The former RCP members who joined the tory party in the UK, people like Dominic Cummings are interesting of course. And Steve Bannon is fond of posturing as a Maoist in style if not in substance. His oilskin coat is a performance Mao jacket.
University student?
I'm not sure exactly how the mechanism for the front page works, so I'm not saying it's intentional, but the effect is that the front page trends towards safe topics that don't question the status quo, not even the tech status quo, unless it's about specifically technical issues or the software labour market.
https://governorswindenergycoalition.org/3-offshore-wind-pro...
What exactly is a science-based climate goal? And why would wind energy be essential for it?
I hear people talk about their solar installations all the time, and it seems like the anti-nuclear sentiment is finally wearing off too. I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about one of these windmills. It seems to be a fairly straightforward wealth transfer from tax payers and utility consumers to the windmill people. Property values go down and electricity prices go up. Windmill people move on to collect the next subsidy.
Adding wind to the network does not make electricity prices go up (unless you do something stupid like shut down all your nuclear plants at the same time). That's nonsense. It's maybe not quite as cheap if you factor in the storage requirements to build up the grid "properly", but still cheaper than coal at the very least.
Do you have a source on this?
At least with solar and wind the buildout takes a few weeks or months, and you can start collecting even with a partial buildout.
That said, nuclear is great for baseline power production, and even with renewables generating the brunt of electricity, you still need a baseline and a quickly scaling backup (gas generators). Battery parks help too for those, but they have limited capacity of course.
But this wasn’t always the case, and so I wonder if it’s really such a strong argument.
In Sweden most of our plants were built fast and have been an enormous success.
There was also massive demand for electricity as it was being extended to rural areas and as electric household appliances became common.
Until the AI craze there was no long term demand for that much additional electricity, and who knows if that will hold.
Not to say we shouldn't build more nuke plants, but they're extraordinarily expensive to build and have construction timelines measured in decades so it's nearly impossible to make them pencil out on a per-kwh basis when compared to wind or solar + batteries that can be deployed and commissioned in 6 months.
It's not zero-marginal-cost energy because they do need maintenance. But I'm more interested in knowing where your lifespan idea comes from. I have seen multiple sources agree that wind turbines are expected to last 20ish years, after which they must at least be taken down and refurbished, if not cut into pieces and buried (as they are not recyclable).
>Building new nukes results in electricity that's about 4x as expensive as building turbines instead.
This sounds impossible, especially if you count land value, maintenance, grid stability measures that are required to deal with flaky power sources, etc.
“Decades and decades” would satisfy your 20-yr scenario but more realistically, modern turbines from Vestas have 30-yr lifespans (which are often exceeded) and the newest gen GE turbines come with 40-yr lifespans.
There are inherent issues with LCOE but it’s the ‘least bad’ metric we have to compare energy sources. As of 2022, it looked like this:
https://www.powerengineeringint.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
With onshore wind about $0.04/kwh and nuclear more like $0.22/kwh. Which sounds outlandish until you realize that PPAs for wind auctions are regularly under $0.03 now and Hinkley C is going to cost something like $50 billion for the two reactors and the rate guaranteed to the owners is north of $0.18 now which will return them something terrible like 7% IRR.
Actually it's more like "decade and decade" lol
I have been surprised at the figures I found for nuclear power versus wind. The reason our nuclear reactors cost so much, so far as I've heard, is that each one is designed anew and there are tremendous regulatory compliance costs. I think designs could be standardized and regulatory stuff streamlined, so as to drastically reduce costs for nuclear. Say what you will about Chinese safety or quality, but they seem to be cranking out a ton of new nuclear reactors as most of the West is foolishly retiring theirs with no good replacement.
[0] https://www.nuscalepower.com/
[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-nuscale-powe...
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nuscale-uamps-project-small...
As of today, if you had $20 billion and had to choose between maybe generating your first watt from nuclear somewhere around 2040 if things go well or just building 15,000 3MW wind turbines that could start generating power next year and will have over a decade of revenue coming in before you see the first dollar from the nuke - investors make the obvious choice.
If Google's putting their money into it, I suspect there's more to the wind story than "wealth transfer from tax payers and consumers to the windmill people."
Why would wind not be essential for it? Wind is free just like solar. Some places have amazing wind. Wind costs have declined dramatically so it’s a viable piece of the mix.
Wind power also has the benefit that it keeps the carbon in the ground and isn't contributing to the massive climate crisis that humanity and the earth's ecosystems are facing. And there's no direct waste from energy production.
Land-based wind power is OK-ish. It's susceptible to renewable droughts, but it's fine as long as it's just a part of the mix.
But the offshore wind power is pretty much the _only_ reliable renewable, outside of classic hydro and exotics like tidal power or geothermal. Offshore wind generators are pretty much guaranteed to always produce at least _some_ power due to diurnal wind patterns.
And windmills are profitable by themselves. And reduces foreign imports with increasing taxes on this goods. If we removed all subsidies coal would be the real affected.
I am not sure about property value but burning gas next to homes creating health problems to power Elon musk data centers surely doesn't help. The dark fumes from coal, gas or oil are going to affect it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nrMSJOxI6Iqw6HRKtnvWjOkj3tp...
It's more precise, avoiding that strange construction, "science-based". If I understand correctly, linguists call these productive analogies (?), where we start producing more of them by analogy to some root, so:
Faith-based -> Community-based -> Evidence-based -> Plant-based -> Science-based
Or some other hypothetical inheritance chain.