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I work in renewables in the US. The current picture is actually a lot more positive than people believe. But good news are usually boring at not good for click bait, so they aren’t covered by the media. There’s a lot of work on solar energy currently and the forecast is VERY good. We do have some issues like grid connectivity and shifting policies but the market economics are working extremely well. The fact is solar is too cheap and, unlike wind, very easy to deploy, so it doesn’t matter what your political views are, you will eventually support it. Texas for example, the conservative oil and gas hub of the US, is already outpacing California in total capacity additions because 1) they have tons of land and 2) no BS, quick local permits. So if you are a solar builder, you go to Texas not California. And yes, Texas is still pro fossil fuels, but the laws of supply and demand will continue favoring solar so that’s where the money will flow to.

> fact is solar is too cheap and, unlike wind, very easy to deploy, so it doesn’t matter what your political views are, you will eventually support it

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.

California has only four really good wind sites, and they already have wind farms on them. The real US wind belt is from the Texas panhandle northward to Canada. Look at a wind map of the US.[1]

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...

all the US needs is Australia like pricing and combine it with individual energy independence branding + clean long term financing like mortgage and there is no better place in the world to harness the urban sprawl and single family homes for rooftop solar. This assumes utilities and their business models can be quietly upended which is probably the biggest bottleneck

I do perfectly believe that there's a lot of progress in renewables and am happy about it. I also think of how much farther we would have come if it wasn't in spite of 40-50 years of obstruction by governments to satisfy coporate entities stuck in the old world.

So I still appreciate knowing the bad news.

> 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.

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.

It's been a common saying for a long time that a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government and a tyrannical dictatorship the worst. Democracy exists primarily to avoid the latter, not that it's better than the former.

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 sweet spot is representative democracy with a tendency of socialism, to mildly distribute welath and assure social coherence. A voting system which results in a division of force, representing the voters will.

The current US administration calls such things comunism.

> The sweet spot is representative democracy with a tendency of socialism, to mildly distribute wealth and assure social coherence.

This would be perfect.

The thing we have called "democracy" for the past three hundred or so years is basically just shadow government by whoever has the deepest pockets to influence public opinion with propaganda and pay politicians to do what they want. The politicians get blamed and cycled out while everything continues as before.

no

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.

If that were true Hillary Clinton would have been president.

Money is deep on both "sides". It didn't help Harris to have the most either. But you can't deny that some political steerage toward donor agendas occurs.

She won the popular vote by a mile, he won the electoral vote. Some would say she should have been.

Nobody with cursory knowledge of the US voting system would though.

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.

Its because democracies werent and arent really democracies. But that aside. Corruption is rampant, the oil sector has politians in their pocket for a long long time and since the cold war, a counter narrative doesnt really put any weight in the scale. The billionaires arent afraid anymore.

It's almost like we've been sold a lie about good guys and bad guys, us vs them, and so on.

It has always been about where you lived and not how the guys really were.

I do think authoritarianism on its own is bad. I want the freedom to criticize my government, and I want the freedom to run for elections or to advocate for changes I want to see. I think democracy and logical long-term thinking shouldn't be mutually exclusive. I feel democracy and sensible behavior are two not connected things.

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.

Oh please. You wouldn’t survive in the regime 15seconds.

As an atheist I wouldn't survive in Texas for 15 seconds lol. I think I'll stick to my little Euro socialist country where politicians don't swear on a bible.

That's a funny thing to say about a place you've obviously not been for 15 seconds.

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 is sitting on a year’s worth of oil reserves, and rolls out a ton of coal for when they run out of oil. Makes you wonder why… almost looks like they know they’re going to be under complete sanctions sometime soon!

That communist country also likes the current war in Iran. They get all that oil cheap for their reserves stockpile.

The enemy is both weak and powerful.