ZeroGravitas

From his earlier article on the same topic:

> The postliberal religious right in the United States, for its part, elevates honor, piety and self-sacrifice. These may not be highly valued goods for liberals, who may even attack them as the root causes of oppression. But they are undeniable human goods, and if we fail to acknowledge their appeal to those who see the world differently, we miss the main drivers of the allure, stability and spread of illiberalism today.

> I’m not defending these regimes. My goal is to understand them.

Well you've failed.

If you invite Steve Bannon to your thought experiment dinner party to learn about "honor, piety and self-sacrifice" you are at best a useful idiot contrarian.

"everything Trump touches dies" (the title of a Republican Strategist's book) seems more appropriate.

Apart from literal deaths, this has torched American military and diplomatic credibility across the globe. It was basically guaranteed to, with the only potential slim upside for America being a demonstration that their military might when applied ruthlessly might dramatically punish their victims as a warning to others. And it has so far failed at that.

I use Libby on a Boox android based ereader.

Texas has many federal and state incentives for building renewables.

There's a recentish YouTube talk when he introduces the concept and contrasts against those.

My (oversimplified) summary: it's like vim versus an IDE. Good for tinkerers and obsessives who like small, sharp and customisable tools.

And economists agree that schemes similar to ETS is the most economically efficient way to achieve carbon targets.

So, if you want to say: "I don't think governments should have agreed to the Paris agreement" then you should just say that, rather than attack various highly efficient ways of achieving those goals.

CfDs only cover about 15% of renewables, though it's increasing.

When the Ukraine invasion spiked prices one suggestion was to offer the non CfD renewables a chance to enrol for CfDs, which would reduce their short term profits but guarantee long term predictable profit. I don't think it was actually done though.

They bombed the negotiators who were in a third country who were hosting negotiations.

That's totally different from war continuing while negotiations take place. That's more like something the bad guys would do in a Game of Thrones plotline.

Trump is now threatening CNN with legal repercussions for publishing the Iraninian government's take on this, so I think it safe to say we all lost this war.

People really love this "might makes right" stuff till it's their civilians being killed in large numbers, then suddenly it's a problem.

I have no idea what you are talking about.

I'm open to the idea that oil and gas are protected and subsidized in many different ways.

Accurate information on how much more they costs than renewables I don't see the link.

Accurate prices are good. Actions that stop the market acting on the accurate prices are bad.

The UK is world leading in battery rollout because someone did the sums and decided it did make sense at scale.

It's not the highest possible price, it's roughly the same price but with less transparency and some fudge factors added due to uncertainty.

In a world where renewables are cheaper the transparency speeds the transition

Why are people making (intentionally?) vague statements about prices going up?

Are you referring to the war Trump started, or are you all climate denying loons who love Trump and think net-zero is a Chinese hoax?

Or just nihilists that just think the world is going to shit in multiple ways and refuse to even contemplate small silver linings on dark clouds?

It's impossible to tell from these quips.

Texas has some different choices in their electricity markets but they use the same pay-as-clear marginal pricing system that the above poster thinks is a secret UK plan to subsidise renewables. In reality it is the standard way to set the market price of commodities.

But since 2/3rd of the fossil energy is wasted, it's more like 40% of the useful energy.

Some people don't know about the primary energy fallacy, others know about it and try to exploit it, so you should be suspicious of the opinions of anyone trying to use it suggest lack of progress and futility.

As with many of these renewable cause negative price stories, the data shows something they never talk about:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/72h/hourly

That shows that they still had roughly 5% gas and 5% coal running at the lowest price point.

An unironic 4D chess claim! You don't see them much anymore.

The peaks are the dirtiest and most costly parts of the generation.

That's why solar in air conditioned areas was such a boon. And now batteries are combining with solar to take down the next dirty/expensive peak (and you can already see them start to address the morning peak).

They were in the middle of a big upgrade switchover that caused some drama:

https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter/discussio...

One less conspiratorial but more pernicious angle, is that attacking things that are good but complex is a great strategy for troll politicians who don't care about the success of their country but just like the attention.

See Brexit, and free trade in general.

It's a good way to get "the establishment" to gang up on you and defend something complicated while you present simple but wrong alternatives and promise the world.

I also think he's up for sale (as are all the other similar politicians) to a multitude of buyers, foreign and domestic.

2/3rds of that other 79% is wasted as unwanted heat, so we only need to replace 1/3rd of 79% (~26 percent points) so slightly more than double the current clean energy supply.

An extensive explanation of this "primary energy fallacy":

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/reframing-energy-fo...

In the last decade or so hydro generation has grown about as much as solar and wind (they all basically grow about the same amount as global nuclear generation, hydro doubling and wind and solar growing exponentially from basically zero).

So it's not going to take off like solar but it's a big chunk of relatively clean electricity production and it's often basically a byproduct of managing water supplies. It also pairs really well with renewables as even without pumps it has a degree of flex and storage.

Bit of a cop out headline, should have said "will power the world".

Even boring staid organisations are predicting solar will be more than half the planet's electricity supply by 2050 which is I think enough to say it powers the world.

If you build batteries on the scale that the article suggests (and is probably going to happen in the real future) you can use batteries charged from fossil fuels.

It's a few percent dirtier (round trip losses) but in return you can use gas plants that are 50% more efficient to charge them rather than run peaker plants.

And of course that's ignoring wind which is nearly as cheap as solar and anti-correlated with it.

Note that the article title has "the world" in it, immediately limits his specific claims to 80% of the world nearer the equatorr as most of the people in the world have more need for cooling than heating.

He even has a map that covers this and multiple paragraphs of discussion about high latitudes and wind in winter.

Musk was proposing about 1.2TW of solar capacity, the US installed about 250GW since then and is currently installing about 50GW a year and is projected to have 770GW by 2036 in a decades time.

So the US is probably over-delivering compared with many things Elon has proposed delivering himself.

This author has worked on behalf of the patent parasite companies before so if you are left feeling "I need to pay these people" that may not be accurate.

Clean generation is probably going to be 44% for 2025, up from 41% in 2024.

That's nuclear, hydro, wind and solar.

A glance at any chart showing that broken down reveals the solar and wind part to be growing at a surprising rate and the main hope for the future. There's no real limit to its growth leading to graphs like this:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/WEO24...

> Seaver Wang, Climate and Energy Director at the Breakthrough Institute and co-author of “Greenwashing with Chinese Characteristics,” published in the Breakthrough Journal.

Recent article:

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/03/29/progressive-funders-nee...

> Breakthrough did not just publish another contrarian essay. It filed an amicus brief against a climate lawsuit challenging Trump administration actions, then defended that intervention in a piece that framed climate litigation as anti-democratic lawfare. That should be a jump the shark moment for any progressive funder still writing checks out of habit, nostalgia, or inattention.