> not one dependent on "costly subsidies".
While paying out 1.2 billion dollars.
While paying out 1.2 billion dollars.
> RWE U.S. Offshore secured these leases from the U.S. government with a long-term commitment to develop offshore wind capacity in American waters and invested more than $1 billion toward the leases and the development of these projects. These leases provided legal rights to develop offshore projects and represented years of planning, investment, and partnership with federal agencies.
> After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. The settlement resolves RWE U.S. Offshore’s legal claims and provides $1.22 billion in settlement funds.
https://www.rwe.com/en/investor-relations/financial-calendar...
> While paying out 1.2 billion dollars.
for nothing. to literally replace some energy with no energy.
If you and I listened to the propaganda on the regular basis, our intuitive knowledge would associate clean energy with isolated from reality snowflake liberals, hippies, abortion, subsidies, as opposed to fossil fuel energy associated with manliness, strength, common sense, “good old values”, military strength, and freedom.
Just like beef (“it’s what’s for dinner”) and a delicious juicy rare steak. See?
I recommend checking out George Lakoff’s work on the power of identity and metaphors. Look up his “moral politics” lecture on YouTube.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/09/fossil-f...
The entire sector is a catastrophic, institutionally corrupt scam.
https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
Consider the taxes on gasoline.
Based on what our media and our education system teaches us, one would have assumed that common sense and sound logic would prevail in a democracy, but rather what we see is insane nonsense, paranoia, and misinformation (including about vaccines) prevail in the U.S., to the point of burning piles of money (including the 1.2B in this case) just to satisfy a childish and bully like need to spite and trigger the progressive side (like talking about causing more pollution with the goal of “owning the libs” or triggering “delicious liberal tears”). And we’re talking about massive negative externalities with increased pollution. This kind of childish bully behavior is as though you had a neighbor who cared about not littering in public and the streets being clean, and you just threw garbage on the streets to upset her. A ridiculous level of immaturity, truly.
Meanwhile, we have totalitarian dictatorships (like the Emirates which has heavily moved toward zero carbon electricity sources like solar and nuclear) behaving far more logically, rationally, and soundly with a view towards the long-term rather than the short-term.
this is my point, too
renewables, especially solar, just have gotten very competitive to a point they will gain ground even if not subsidized
and I believe we will see (and in some niches have already seen) this happening for electric cars, too. They are plain simple just better technology which for now is still in the earlier stages.
How much relevance wind will have we have to see, it's less advantages then solar and less easy to deploy. It's pretty good in some very windy northern (i.e. also less solar efficient) places and often iff it's extremely windy it's not extremely sunny and if extremely sunny it's often not extremely windy. This makes them complement each other quite nicely. So I still see a future for it even outside of the more northern regions.
Grid-scale battery storage just keeps getting installed at an increasing rate.[1] 9.7 gigawatt-hours installed in Q1 2026.[2] It's not very visible. It's just shipping containers laid out on cement pads. It doesn't take up that much space. It can be placed anywhere there's good access to transmission lines. It's profitable if you can buy cheap solar power in the daytime and sell it at night. It's safe now that it uses lithium-iron phosphate batteries.
88 days to the midterm elections. Trump will still be in office for a while longer, but with less power to make trouble.
[1] https://energy.maryland.gov/SiteAssets/Pages/Info/renewable/...
[2] https://gcn.com/america-s-grid-batteries-strongest-first/204...
So I still appreciate knowing the bad news.
The difference you’re spotting is the leaders of those nations have some remaining incentive to care about the wealth and wellbeing of the country they’re leading beyond the expiration date of a 4 or 8 year term.
For better and for worse, they have that, the US doesn’t.
Neither China nor the UAE can be said to have a purely benevolent dictatorship but it's not purely tyrannical either. So not surprisingly they're better than democracies in some aspects and worse in others.
The current US administration calls such things comunism.
This would be perfect.
this way of thinking, is not very useful and can be pretty harmful, just because something is imperfect doesn't mean it's fully broken. Just because people have always manipulated democracy doesn't mean it "basically just shadow government".
And sure, the US is a very bad case, _especially_ in recent years. But also let's not forgot that for most of it's history just one of the countless scandals of Trump would have been enough to highly risk impeachment for a president and be equal to political suicide. I.e. there has been quite a bit of limits on corruption and influences from behind the scene. It's just that the US went and broke itself. And yes a two party system was never truly democratic, it's still better then a one party system nor the same as a full shadow government.
Which brings us to another point, there never was "the" shadow government, just many different people which had way to much influence behind the scene in not so democratic ways. A shadow government implies some form of organization/structure which actually governs and then puppets in front, but that was never really the case in the US AFIK. Even today it isn't as a lot of the escalating corruption is just pretty much out in the open by the governing people, instead of in any shadow, by people not in a official position.
Edit: to the downvotes, our system doesn't care about popular vote, and neither do the most democratic/left left leaning states, who don't care to use proportional voting.
You can have idiotic authoritarian governments that ruin the economy. China and Vietnam were exceptions among communist countries, who switched to a form of market economy, when they saw that central planning was poverty-inducing and nigh impossible to do.
The problems we're seeing in democracies might lie with the level of disinformation for electioneering purposes that is permitted under free speech today.
Also, you can swear on whatever you want here. It's the person's choice. You could swear on a copy of hitchiker's guide to the galaxy if you wanted.
That communist country also likes the current war in Iran. They get all that oil cheap for their reserves stockpile.