coryrc

They weren't able to prevent solar, wind, and EV subsidies.

> Domestic heating has little to do with industrial base.

It does because 1. they're both fighting for now-expensive imported natural gas 2. rates go up for everybody to pay for the malinvestment in solar

> Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.

I meant "for Germany". Those are a problem for others.

Good. Outdoor cats are a bigger problem than a few native coyotes.

Just a couple years before the first invasion of Ukraine. Wouldn't it have been nice in 2022 when the Nordstream pipelines stopped?

> We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).

That doesn't solve your problems in the slightest. You get less than half the return on investment for PV that most other countries in the world get, and does nothing for when your peak energy load is. Every dollar spent on PV requires another dollar on natural gas for the winter and locks you into fossil fuel dependency. Spend the money on something which gives you winter power!

> the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.

That's exactly what I mean. Where can you actually build it? And is that enough? And why spend a dime on solar until you've maximized wind?

> If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?

See, exactly, that's the kind of national conversation you (and here in the USA) should be having. But we don't do that kind of thing any more. The politicians make money lying about the costs of things -- Gerhard Schröder being, I guess, a Russian stooge at best, a great example of downplaying the full costs.

"safe" is a spectrum. While coal is allowed to kill millions of people a year, the safety level of nuclear in the US was raised to "no matter whatever happens no one ever anywhere must have harm come to them" and that's not realistic. Solar kills orders of magnitude more people than nuclear! But we haven't regulated rooftop solar out of existence, plus that wasn't even an option 50 years ago. That's 40 years we didn't have to be poisoning the Earth with coal.

> It's deeply unrealistic that a huge mass of representatives are going to get anything passed on their own.

Every member should be able to bring some number of proposals to full vote and all members should be forced to make a vote. Make every GOPer put a No vote on the "release DJT rape transcripts" bill, instead of burying them in committee. Make every pretend liberal vote No on "Medicare 4 All".

If they let me buy the heat for cheap, yes in my backyard. Well, not literally in my back yard, but only because there's a great space several blocks over where there's already lots of freeway noise, so any process noise will be overwhelmed. My city needs tax revenue too, so this would be great.

Or use ~/.cvsignore for all the other things which use that same file.

> we paid dearly for that

And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.

> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind

15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?

> I'm asking why anyone else listened to them on this topic alone

First, it wasn't this topic alone; whaling too. You also don't need 100% of people to listen. You just need to shift from 45% to 55%. If people were already skeptical about nuclear because they conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power, then they only need to shift ~10% on the issue. And money gets their message out much stronger.

> That had the double benefit of keeping their hands clean while discrediting future environmentalists.

Washington State had I-732, which would make taxes less regressive and efficiently tax carbon. Both issues liberals pretend to care about. Most state environmentalist groups fought against this! It got defeated because of that opposition, then those groups put up a different carbon tax initiative which would funnel the money to them to spend as they want. Also shot down with a shift of who voted for and against. Environmentalists are sometimes the villains.

Because they were useful idiots funded by fossil fuel companies.

(also US whaling is nearly banned by the US and most countries, and we're not going to go to war with Japan over it)

In January 2025, solar generated 1.5TWh of electricity in Germany (in June it generated 10TWh): https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat...

In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels.

You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.

PV panels can't be switched off remotely because China doesn't like you. Once within your country's borders, they are yours.

There's "I smell an opportunity to control other people and get paid doing it" kind of safety.

And what's worse, like an infectious person, we're sending out that corruption into other countries. We're actively funding and sending people to stoke homophobia in Africa, our idiots are indoctrinating others online to work against their own interests.

The Scopes trial? What was "corporate" about evolution?

The Salem witch trials.

McCarthyism

And "Universities" are the mouthpieces of corporations? The people keep electing politicians who are anti-worker-protection laws. They're purposely choosing corporation-owner-friendly legislators. This is not the fault of universities.

Of course it's a complicated issue, but it's not my University friends doing public outreach for kids that's to blame for not doing enough. It's the authoritarian public school system, it's that we allow people to be shitty parents and pass on generational trauma/poverty, it's that the foundational mythos is you can do everything yourself (even though 99.999% of people don't live somewhere nor have the skills to be self-sufficient) because the government and rich owners like keeping people divided.

The question is whether you use solar PV or build more coal plants to supply them. The latter makes people sicker, but more dependent on the government, so you can guess which one gets the tax breaks and which one gets tariffs and international politics to make it more expensive to acquire.

They have tons of people using small vehicles, bicycles and public transport. Unfortunately they aren't following China in mass rollout of solar photovoltaic; 90% of their energy consumption is fossil fuels:

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/india

USA is at 80%, which isn't much better, but at least trending down:

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states

China is also at 80%, but trending down far steeper:

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china

> But when you think about it, governments, state agencies, and even universities themselves are not actively trying to improve this

They are, all the time, doing outreach. It's just as Isaac Asimov said:

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

The origin story the government brainwashes everyone through public schools is partly to blame. There are people challenging it, but mostly they end up pushing for a different form of anti-intellectualism :(.

Why do you think this is better than the old practice of filling straight holes a few layers deep?

I don't know. Europe had the opportunity to make themselves energy independent multiple times; instead they doubled down on Russian oil, and in response to the latest invasion, they instead doubled down on Qatar natural gas...

Germany spent enough on solar to have nuclear power for winter heating and instead they get nearly nothing from it when energy (note I said Energy not Electricity) demand is the highest: winter heating.

Now, if they had put that solar in North Africa and ran cables, sure, but they didn't. Or if they did Drake's landing solar storage, that would also work. But they spent a fortune only to still be completely dependent on fossil fuels and are destroying the economic base because of the cost.

The slip rings are not in the middle of the motor, they're on the butt. I know car makers don't always try to make things serviceable, but it'll be hard to make it hard to replace. Probably the only issue will be needing to remove other parts first to get to it, if anything.

It matters because of opening up cheaper ways to install them. For example, in some Scandinavian country they're cheaper than fence panels, so they just use them for fences, and the power they generate is a nice bonus.

Dumb waste of money, paying an order of magnitude more.

The numbers for 2014-2024: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/table.php?t=epa_03_01...

I doubted what you wrote, but everything you said is correct (for the last 10 years, at least). Over the time period, natural gas increased 740 TWh/year (to 1870) and coal decreased 940 TWh/year (to 650). Electricity production is up ~7%, but that's quite low compared to the growth of everything else.

> This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc

Biden's administration put on solar tariffs, but of course I'll grant the current administration is fucking up everything else possible.

Russian(?) scientists during the siege of... Leningrad? starved to death while surrounded by seed potatoes.

The people you mention are failing society, not the other way around.

That's every place :(

I assume you're not in the Seattle area?

Edit: Pittsburgh

They're not ramping up capacity though.