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Comment by Grombobulous | Hacker News Reader

A better question is why a company is allowed to effectively lie using fraudulent false advertising in its marketing and brand image about being environmentally conscious and become the largest polluter in the country?

Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? I thought a company that name sponsored “Climate Pledge Arena” could afford to pay a little bit extra to care about the climate.

A wind/solar/battery solution is not even really much more expensive than gas power and it’s far less dependent on fluctuating fuel prices.

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> Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery?

It's more capital intensive, and interest rates are 8%, because our elected officials are completely incompetent.

8% interest rates don’t seem to be a problem for financing all the data centers and AI hardware.

Amazon can afford to power their data centers with clean energy.

It’s not called “Climate Pledge But Only If It’s Less Capital Intensive Arena”

I'm absoltutely not defending the environmental decision, but these datacenter projects seem to be funded mostly by free cash flow (not borrowed money), from the hyperscaler profit margins.

I am curious how renewables + battery compare here, if at all feasible.

I thought there was a gas turbine shortage?

They’re absolutely not that incompetent. They’re on the pockets of people who profit directly from this.

Follow the money, and all that.

I don’t think business really wants interest rates that high. Without conspiracy theories, a simpler explanation is that this is simply democracy in action. People don’t want the spending reigned in, and they don’t want their taxes raised.

I think in this thread it’s worth posting out that interest rates aren’t actually high historically. They’re pretty normal. They were just wildly low for around a decade or so.

If you look at a 30-year fixed mortgage chart, the <6% rate situation only existed between roughly 2008 and 2021. At no other time in the history of the 30-year fixed rate mortgage was it ever that low. Ever.

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