- Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it. If your argument is an economic one then jump onto the solar, wind and battery bandwagon.
- There are virtually no real short medium or long term gains economically here. Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind and its costs are rising while solar and wind continue to fall. Building new maximum pollution plants would drop that internalized cost but who in their right mind would fund something so obviously DOA?
- Obviously the externalized costs of greenhouse gas emissions are deeply undervalued in this move. Even if they are 'fake news' in the US, the rest of the world is finally starting to take them seriously. The US's diminished soft power means it won't be able to easily bully the world into allowing it to pollute without consequence and such an obviously hostile move means it will loose even more of its soft power by taking this position. So on the international level this means we burn a lot of political capital and gain nothing but decades of distrust and anger.
- Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.
- Oh yeah and, of course, climate change is real.
This continues the US down the path of being the best buggy whip maker in the world. Worse than that, the US is becoming an obnoxious buggy whip maker who's neighbors are starting to hope fails horribly and will help make that happen as moves like this continue. This is stupid at every scale and in every dimension.
The current wars in Europe and the Middle East paradoxically push the world towards non-fossil enery like few things did before. Both oil and natural gas prices have skyrocketed on global markets, and will likely rise more, as Ukraine continues to target Russian oil infrastructure, and Houtis continue to stymie Saudi oil exports.
Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though; at worst it takes longer to ship the key components from China to Europe around Africa.
The current wars in Europe and the Middle East could paradoxically push the world towards more domestic energy production, be it fossil or non-fossil energy.
For example in reaction to 1973 Arab oil embargo Carter boosted energy efficiency and solar and promoted coal.
"
"America indeed is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and my goal as President of the United States is to see on the world energy markets Arab oil replaced with Illinois coal," Carter told miners and employees of the Old Ben Coal Mine No. 25. He also boasted that the country would, "produce more coal in 1980 than has ever before been produced in the United States of America."
"
>The current wars in Europe and the Middle East could paradoxically push the world towards more domestic energy production, be it fossil or non-fossil energy.
Fossil fuel is still going strong and will probably stay so for the next 50 years. Like I just learned Taiwan makes most of its energy from coal and LNG and is set to denuclearize, which blew my mind given their cutting edge manufacturing economy, but kinda makes sense when you factor in their geography and geopolitics.
Before, say, 2022 or 2026 for that reason, oil, coal, lithium, silicon, iron, etc were mined, processed, and shipped as usual. By now, the production and shipping of oil and oil-based fuels, and, to a lesser extent, LNG is hampered by wars. The production and shipping of what is required to build solar, wind, and even nuclear power sources continues, mostly unaffected by the wars, which makes these power sources relatively (even) more attractive.
Sadly, it does not mean that EU or USA grew less dependent on China for solar panels, industrial chemicals, or a lot of other things. OTOH, they did not grow more dependent either.
So what if all our oil comes from the middle east?
So what if all our gas comes from Russia?
So what if all chips are made in Taiwan?
So what if all mobile platforms are from the US?
Hopefully the penny will start to drop. Any minute now.
You burn a barrel of oil once. A solar panel lasts for 20+ years. After you have installed it, if China announces they will no longer sell new ones - you have two decades of lead time to start building your own domestically.
> Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though;
For now.
The majority of solar panels are made in China (85%), and they plan to invade Taiwan in just a few years, possibly as soon as 2027, at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production or defend Taiwan and cut ourselves off from the source of almost all manufactured products, and especially solar panels.
>and they plan to invade Taiwan in just a few years
Can you share your sources for that valuable intelligence? Military analysts would really be interested to learn that. Or is that form the same manufactured scaremongering genre as "Iran is 6 weeks away from building nuclear weapons" and "Iraq has WMDs" to justify endless defense spending, military interventions and warmongering.
> at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production
You can't just commandeer semi fabs like you're carjacking a Hyundai for a joyride. Semi fabs need constant parts and on-prem staff and always-on telemetry from ASML & friends to run. If that's gone, you're left with a very expensive warehouse that can't do shit.
Taiwan cannot make chips without western inputs and spare parts, so China taking over Taiwan or Korea or Japan doesn’t really give them access to making those chips.
But the solar panels we already have don't suddenly stop working, which is an important difference between sourcing solar panels from a potential enemy and sourcing raw fossil fuels from one. There's also nothing stopping the US or other trading partners from making solar panels, China is just the most convenient and cheapest source as it is for many other things. And to that point, the end of trade between the US and China would be incredibly damaging to both countries whether or not we buy solar panels from them now.
At least they haven't relaxed restrictions on sulfur dioxide emissions, etc.. yet. Making rain acidic again would be completely on brand for this administration.
The Gulf countries paid handsomely to get Trump in there to keep the United States as the buyer of last resort once the rest of the world goes renewable.
Problem is that installing a bunch of sick sons of bitches to do your bidding can backfire when those some morons lose a war to Iran in a matter of months.
Fossil fuel power plants are unfortunately still profitable for their owners (billionaires...). The cost of building them has mostly been written off a long time ago. None of this is about what is good for America in the long run...
I have to wonder if this is a play towards coal miners, who are part of the conservative base - and they need every vote they can get. Coal is an awful source of power, and a really big source of pollution.
I doubt they really care about coal miners’ actual votes. The US coal mining industry employs fewer than 50,000 people. I live in a major coal producing state and while it was an important industry in my grandparents’ time, these days it isn’t a particularly noteworthy share of our economy.
I would say if it’s specifically about coal at all, it’s more because of the GOP’s tendency toward weird nostalgic obsessions.
> - Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it
That's a baseless claim. For example, Germany has invested massively in solar but its electricity prices went up, not down.
> Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind
That's false. Coal power is cheaper than all of those. Solar and wind include costs for expensive battery backups since they are highly volatile.
And to make it clear: Climate change is very bad so coal plants are very bad. But that doesn't mean you can go around and claim that coal isn't cheap compared to things like solar+batteries. The fact that something is good doesn't imply that it is cheap.
This price of electricity is high because gas, which is still expensive, sets the price of electricity most of the time [1].
The levelized cost of electricity for solar (including batteries) and wind is cheaper than coal [2].
I will believe it when I see it. The only countries with both cheap and clean electricity are those that built out extensive nuclear or got lucky enough to have access to other forms of cheap base load like hydro / geothermal.
As an Australian I can say that for me personally the free energy periods have been amazing and are an example of the functional free markets making life better for the average person.
Here in Queensland the state owns the regional electricity company, Ergon. ∴ most of what they do that doesn't generate money (such as doing free electricity rather than charging for it) is taxpayer-funded.
Germany's decommissioned nuclear, and subsequent concentration of base load in Russian gas-fired plants, is certainly a lede your post is doing its best to bury.
Coal isn't cheap. Specifically coal powerplants are not and it's got nothing to do with emissions. One of the pinch points in the Australian power grid has actually been that a bunch of coal plants are aging out and no private enterprise wants to even bother financing their replacement because it's a money loser compared to renewables build out.
Fortunately this is well on it's way to being solved by the massive battery build out which has happened which means evening peak electricity usage has declined enormously[1] - i.e the primary "sun not shining" point of the day is rapidly turning into an energy use low point for the grid (which makes sense: business powers down, people go home and their batteries which have been charging cover cooking - I have an induction cook top and a 10kw inverter covers everything).
You are 100% right but I think your arguments will fall on deaf ears. Someone bribed Trump or one of his cronies to revoke pollution limits and they got it. What to do when rationality just isn't a factor in politics anymore?
> - Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.
Is not Germany an example of the opposite? I mean their decision to shut down nuclear plants while getting dependant on Russian supply of energy sources?
Value which won't bring anything to anyone. I mean, a couple of people can be more richerer, but we and them won't have a planet to spend or enjoy these theoretical riches at the end.
I'm not clear what you mean. While nuclear waste is certainly a thing that could hurt the environment if mismanaged, impacting the climate isn't really a way that it does so. The shielding also seems like an unusual thing to focus on as opposed to the waste itself.
Normally I would be concerned, but these days, we are well on our way to 3.5C. All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals.
It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren. Wait to see what happens when millions of desperate people living south of the 40th parallel start heading north in mass. No wall will stop that.
China is trying to become oil-independent by all means necessary. All their means of accessing oil go through geographic bottlenecks that could be weaponized against them in the event of military conflict. Coal, fissile materials, and sunlight are the alternatives they have access to, so they're going for all of those.
With some luck, the net effect will be fewer greenhouse gases than keeping themselves oil-dependent, though that isn't necessarily the, or even a, goal. If it happens, it'll be as a side effect.
In a saner world, they wouldn't need to be wary of a catastrophic oil shortage due to another power deciding to cut off their access to oil. A saner world is achieved when all countries agree to an international system of rules and conflict resolution and abide by agreements, so things are predictable in the long term.
The less predictable things become, the faster everyone ramps up potential solutions to bad potential scenarios.
Some are trying to bring that sanity back. Others are trying to increase the chaos as much as they possibly can, and preferably more.
> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.
China also invested significantly in technology like flue gas desulfurization 10-20 years ago, as well as other approaches which try to mitigate some of the impact of coal burning. So while bringing online coal power plants is obviously and can never be carbon neutral, a more appropriate comparison would be to measure the new plants' additional GHG and SLCP emissions, and compare that to the approach in the US.
China mined more coal in 2025 then ever, but burned less in coal plans. Coal is slowly shifting from electricity production to synthetic oil and chemical production.
Would you mind sharing your source? AFAIK the coal plants are only backups, so it'd be very surprising if they're utilized as much as the solar capacity.
Which is easy to do when you live an authoritarian state with plenty of vast desert wastelands to erect solar/wind farms. Was there a village there last week? Not anymore, it was in the way. And best of all they can build it all with Uyghur forced labor. Accolades for China all around!
This is not really very impressive in context, for two reasons. First, China generated 10,400 TWh in 2025 and France generated only 547 TWh. The 95% and 50% are being applied to different numbers, and the scales here just aren’t comparable. Second, nearly all of France’s power generation was built decades ago, and China’s was built very recently - and is still expanding rapidly in both nuclear and renewables. Comparing France to China is like comparing a 1970s solar powered bungalow to a gigafactory under construction.
> It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren.
It's a cryin' shame these people don't care how much of a sucky life they are handing everyone's grandchildren, and not nearly enough people actually cared when we could have still done something about it...
According to Al Gores movie (shown to US students) we were already supposed to be beyond 2C by now. When the ClimateGate "hide the decline" emails were released that also raised a few eyebrows. So saying the world is now going to 3.5C rings on deaf ears. That's not science that's just the fact of what actually happened so far.
Your narrative is repeated less and less because it isnt compelling.
My narrative is substantially different because the trend was correct and 1.4 vs 2.0 does not prove a negative.
The massive FUD and misinformation campaigns by industrialist operations, along with opportunist/capitalist denials and misdirection, has successfully confused enough of the US public to withold opinion on the matter. This has allowed politics to treat it as a marginal issue where there are 2 sides, rather than a morally catastrophic eventuality.
1.4 vs 2.0 is a massive miss because that diff isn't starting from 20 years ago, but rather a pre-industrial baseline. So the actual diffs are something more like +0.2 (actual) vs +0.8 (predicted) over that 20 ish year interval, and the prediction of the warming trajectory is off several times. (that is if the movie actually said that, which I didn't check).
The USA is already holding the record for greenhouse gas pollution per capita and they elected the lunatic that raved about climate change being a hoax. I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier.
The fact these regulations didn't make it through the normal law making progress (senate/house) doomed it before it even took shape. With presidents like Trump undoing everything his predecessor(s) did just to feel powerful, legislation like this is doomed from that start.
And when there are cheaper, faster built, renewable sources of energy that the whole world is building out. I don’t think the lost time can be fixed post Trump (if he even gives up power that is).
Because it stops society falling apart and regressing. Humanity is not some angelic, monolith stoic super species, which is just programmed wrong. Its half-sane monkeys which fall apart in a regression as soon as the surplus bribery stops and then try to sew the bakeries oven apart, so everyone has something to eat.
One can not create policies that destroy the thing they want to protect from a crisis to come, by inducing a different crisis by ignoring the material you work with. Trump is your doing, you brought this guy forth, by deindustrializing the west, by making western buisnesses unable to compete. Stop working with idealized paper-cut outs of people- and actually engage, with the species you got. And no, your good intentions and noble goals, do not entitle you to wing it.
Sorry but you can't have EVs everywhere, WA and CA banning natural gas for heat and cooking, WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power. The math does not add up.
Solar and wind output is not constant or reliable. NIMBYs sabotaged nuclear years ago. It takes how many years to bring a new plant online?
A lot of feel-good rules and regs were passed, pushing a massive shift to electric power, with no consideration as to where the additional power would come from.
You can't wave your arms like a Peanuts cartoon and have all that extra power appear, which is the logic that was used in passing many of these impractical regulations.
There’s no way for you to know that. You don’t do the math. People like me, who work in the clean energy industry, do the math. The math works fine. You should try working as hard as the math does, instead of complaining.
> WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power.
Have a closer look at the hydro dams that have been removed for salmon habitat.
From what I've seen capacity was tens of MegaWatts [1] and some were just for irrigation. Meanwhile, large dams [2] are doing gigawatts.
Large dams also have negative environmental effects and maybe one day they'll get removed too, but accepting the tradeoff for large amounts of power makes more sense than destroying samon fishing to get irrigation water or a piddly amount of power.
Especially at a time when electrical power use was trending down due to efficiency gains and offshoring manufacturing, and samon fisheries were in danger of failing, it made sense to remove dams that weren't terribly productive. And start considering actually doing the work to make the larger dams fish friendly, eventually.
Until the sun goes down at night or the wind stops blowing. You ignored the word "output".
> Energy storage is required along with solar farms
How many batteries are we going to need for that? They literally just figured out how to get the child slaves in the Congo out of the supply chain with a shift to LFP.
There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example. It consists of heating something very big that holds a lot of heat and releases it slowly, then using that stored heat to generate electricity while it cools down. This isn't suitable for home use, but at the city scale, or larger, it's quite efficient:
> There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example.
Yeah, there's also pumped water storage, and other forms of gravity/kinetic storage, various means of chemical energy storage, and all kinda other neat battery-like ideas folks have been trying/using.
The UK has Dinorwig power station, a pumped hydro station capable of storing over 9 GWh of energy. This alone rivals the entire combined 10.5 GWh of battery storage across the whole country. It certainly seems much more feasible when you have the terrain to allow it.
Enough to store the energy between gaps, plus a buffer?
Batteries aren't exactly made from gold. Grid scale batteries especially, where weight and size doesn't matter as much, are totally viable on a mass scale.
You're not being pragmatic, you're being myopic. Our current energy systems are the result of deliberate complex work. It seems shortsighted to think it's somehow the only system that can ever be built just because other systems have new challenges to overcome.
What an opinion to have when thus far evidence has concluded the opposite. Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors doesn’t make the anti-renewable parrots correct. There are situations where —at minimum- hybrid solutions are far more viable options but for many locations just those two solutions work very well.
> Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors
Speaking of infrastructure, how about pushing a mass rollout of EVs before giving a single consideration as to where the charging infra would come from?
Charging infra would only exist if there's demand for it, if you have a better solution for this catch-22 I'm all ears.
Though it looks like rolling out EVs before the charging network existed worked, there are thousands upon thousands of chargers now that there are enough vehicles to use them.
That seems like a pretty bad example considering the rising popularity of EVs has coincided with an enormous grown in available charging infrastructure to service the EV customer base. It's almost like human society can handle complex, interdependent systems as they change, either through deliberate organization or natural market incentives.
It's not like the current mix of electrical generation and fossil fuel distribution is some naturally occurring phenomenon or alien technology. It's an enormously complex and interdependent system we built. I'm pretty confident we can build new and different things.
I know HN has lots of American readers, so maybe they can explain.
Why aren't the vast majority of America's suburban single family dwellings using rooftop solar? Huge numbers of Americans live in these homes - they're not so much a thing, especially to this degree, in other countries and they seem basically ideal for rooftop solar.
Rooftop solar in the US is incredibly expensive from most installers even as panel prices have come down and energy prices are typically low enough that the payoff time and up-front cost are seen as not worth it for many people. The US also has a lot of homes where (cheap) natural gas is used for cooking, heating, and hot water, which you'd have to continue paying for even after you installed solar panels or pay a lot of money to convert to electrical equivalents.
That said, I know a lot of people who have recently installed solar panels on their roof and it's increasingly worth it from a financial perspective. The other thing worth noting though is that while cool, rooftop solar really isn't the best approach to installing solar capacity compared to grid scale solar farms on land which also tends to be abundant in the US.
The data that I've seen shows that the barriers to solar adoption for the average American home are high installation cost, low grid power cost, unfavorable net metering agreements for grid interconnect, and even some pushback from neighborhood committees (homeowners association aka HOA).
There are exceptions such as Hawaii where grid power is expensive and sunshine abundant, but the US is big, geographically diverse, and because of that adoption varies greatly on regional dynamics.
Tech workers located in South Africa and nearby regions suffer, because the power grid there is unreliable at best. Therefore, those workers may be required by employers to prove that they have arranged for reliable backup power and network connections in order to stay connected (nearly to the antipodes) and ensure that their performance is competitive with workers located in stable regimes with robust power grids and network backbones.
It may seem unfair or unnecessary for US employers to require US employees to have a UPS, solar array, a redundant network connection, etc. But if employers required these things up-front, surely some tech workers could step up to the challenge and perhaps even be distinguished from those who don't get it.
1. A lot of single family dwellings are occupied by renters. In this scenario, the renter has no ability to install rooftop solar, and the owner has no incentive to install rooftop solar because the renter is paying the energy bills. (The same goes for things like installing high-efficiency heat pumps etc.)
2. HOA regulations can block things like rooftop solar depending on where you live.
3. The up-front investment involved in rooftop solar can be prohibitive for many people. Things like tax incentives can help but we've been getting rid of those under the current administration, and tax incentives only go so far if your tax return is 6+ months away.
From the wording, it's not clear if the ruling (from 2024) had any impact on power plant running today, or newly built one (it seems like it was mandating carbon capture eventually.)
The "good" news is that coal plants are already suboptimal, economically. This is delaying the closure of existing plans, which is just absurd, but completely on brand for the political party that people voted in office, with complete knowledge of what would happen.
I suppose they also voted for "cheaper groceries" and "no more endless wars", but that will come any time soon.
you're comparing years, not standards. i hope you're just foolish and not intentionally disingenuous.
"The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039, which would have reduced carbon pollution by an estimated 1.38 billion metric tons through 2047"
Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.
My point is that after a large change, reversion to the mean should not be treated breathlessly, but viewed in a measured manner.
> Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.
This is an exaggeration that stretches credulity, since there have been strict limits for decades around secondary outputs that are required by power plant energy production effectively limiting production and emissions (which is the entire point).
The 2024 plan would have reduced annual CO₂ emissions by about 533 million metric tons by 2040. That's roughly equivalent to taking half of all U.S. passenger cars and light-duty trucks off the road.
With the rollback, that reduction will no longer occur. So, this is significant.
Imagine you’re driving headlong toward a cliff. Someone turns the steering wheel a little, not nearly enough, but it’s a small part of an attempt to steer away from the cliff.
This comment thread shows that, if anything, the Americans want this. If they released exhaust fume inhalers, the majority of the US population would willingly buy one and take hit after hit to disprove the myth of weird, alien things like "caring about the environment" while quietly wheezing about "but China..." to themselves.
NFTs never made sense. You're buying a short URL on a blockchain in the hopes that it'll somehow retain value. The URL could go bad, it could be pointed at something else, etc. But what NFTs did was induce demand for crypto, particularly Ethereum. That was the point.
For a long time I thought we went to war for oil. No, that's backwards. Our oil dependence exists to induce demand for weapons. I will once again refer to the article No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].
So when you see things like pollution limits being lifted on power plants because of data centers, know that the ultimate driving force is the sale of weapons.
Let me give a concrete example. If I drill a well in West Texas that produces, say, 1000 barrels per day ("bpd"). It doesn't produce that forever. As the pressure goes down, the daily production goes down. In the industry this is called the decline rate. For the Permian Basin, the decline rate of any oil well is typically 15-20% per year. So in year 2, that well will produce 800-850bpd. In year 3, it'll be ~650-700. In year 4 it'll be 500-550.
So if you rely on oil you constantly need to be building new wells to maintain your same production level. For the US, which produces 13-15Mbpd of oil, that means you need to add 2Mbpd of new wells every year just to maintain that level of production.
Oil wells, like any form of resource extraction, are excellent wealth concentrators. They make people rich. If I put up 1GW of solar panels then, apart from some cleaning and general maintenance, they're going to produce 1GW of electricity every year (with some variance for sunshine). Nobody gets rich from that. And nobody needs to go to war for that. Which means nobody gets rich from selling weapons to secure that oil.
nfts were about trying to make inherently not scare things scarce, and to try to get people involved in a ponzi scheme
the oil being drilled and mined is exceptionally useful, and people buy it even when you dont need to go to war or get weapons. War would still be happening in the middle east without oil, its a key trade route between Europe and Asia.
the oil dependence exists because it lets people get work and labour done without hiring labourers.
if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that, and whenever people start building giant solar farms in borth africa, we will see armed militas conquering each other for control over the profits
> if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that
You're going to spend maybe a billion dollars to build your solar farm, maybe you get somebody to lend you the billion dollars at 4% annual interest for 10 years,
Your panels make maybe 1.5 TWh of electricity each year, you can sell that for maybe $50 per MWh, so that's $75M per year. But the interest on your loan was $40M, so after year one your owe $965M, after the ten year loan finishes you still owe almost $600M and your panels are now ten years old.
It's just a normal business venture, if you've got people who can execute and a favourable environment it should work, like if you opened a fast food chain, or a dry clean business or a distillery. This is completely different from resource owners, who instead are just granted ownership of a finite natural resource.
It wasn't the Greens that decided this for Germany. It was our conservatives, the CDU/CSU. The latter had high-ranking officials literally threaten to step down, unless Germany exits nuclear energy production.
The real irony is that, despite all this, Trump may accidentally become the greenest US president by driving up the price of oil for the whole world. For years to come.
I mean, anyone can say they're for the environment, but are you willing to start a war, lose a midterm, and murder a school full of kids to reduce your carbon footprint? /s
That's because the technology is already there, if plants were willing to run at a bit of a higher OpEx and add some CapEx. Amine scrubbing coupled with decades-old technology like Rotary Packed Beds Reactors can already capture 90% of CO2 at minimum. The UAE's Ruwais facility already does this onsite and uses the captured CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery (aka fracking for the last bits of oil in wells). This has the benefit of sequestering CO2 while also not using water for fracking as an option.
I don't see the point of trying to redefine "pollution" to include CO2. We have been discussing climate change for decades, but it was only recently that people tried to shoehorn CO2 into category of "pollution." It just takes a category where society has some consensus and then shoehorns some new disputed idea into existing category. It's an end-run around the process of building consensus around the new thing.
Did we call it “pollution” back then or something else? That is, did we lump CO2 conceptually into the same category as soot from coal plants and things like that?
Society uses labels to group things together so that we can treat similar things similarly for various purposes. For example, when we talk about “education” we usually mean teaching kids in schools or colleges. Of course, there’s lots of other things you can call “education.” But if the Department of Education comes in and says it’s going to regulate technical presentations at software conferences because that’s also “education,” then you’d say: “that’s not what people mean by the word education in this context.” That is, we have a consensus about what “education” encompasses and what it doesn’t for purposes of government regulation, and seminars at conferences falls outside that understanding.
Yes, labels matter; so let's take a step back and ask why you're fighting this argument? Why does it matter which of the harmful emissions from a smokestack count as "pollution"?
> Why does it matter which of the harmful emissions from a smokestack count as "pollution"?
Because society uses labels to delineate the boundaries between different legal regimes and sources of authority, and adhering to those boundaries is important. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) can't point to the traffic on a fiber cable within a data center and say it falls within their jurisdiction because that's also "communications."
It's especially important in this context, because the half-century-old laws and regulations designed to control soot emissions from factory smokestacks is ill-suited to managing CO2 emissions. The fundamental premise of the Clean Air Act is that pollution can be controlled at the source with control technologies (RACT, BACT, etc.).
This focus on control technologies puts well-defined guardrails on the EPA. The EPA can't go around making big decisions about how factories work or what people produce. They can simply tell you to put the best reasonably available scrubbers on your factory. That approach completely breaks down when it comes to CO2, because there is no such thing as a "CO2 scrubber." Treating CO2 as a pollutant puts the EPA into a role of supervising the energy sector that the agency simply was never designed to do.
It uses the term “greenhouse gas” to refer to CO2 and uses the term “air pollution” to refer to what people traditionally think of as air pollution. For example, in one place of says: “Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g., by air pollution).” So that’s treating “CO2 enrichment” (emissions) as distinct from “air pollution.”
I think you miss rayiner's point. He's not disputing whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas. He's saying that doesn't make it a "pollutant" as the term was understood at the time, say, the EPA was created. There was no congressional legislation that said that it was something the EPA was empowered to regulate. Then the EPA decided to regulate it anyway (and, yes, won the court case about whether it could). But it was still shoehorned in, as it was not considered a pollutant in the way that NO2 or particulates or chlorine were.
This is ridiculous. There is no redefinition, it was always part of definition. Seriously. The only end run around consensus are lies like "CO2 as polution is a novel thing".
In the 1990 IPCC report it talks about “greenhouse gasses” and also about “air pollution” but treats those as two distinct things: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_a.... For example, on page 97, it says “CO2 enrichment” may “enhance plant growth,” but that “enhanced levels of air pollution could also reduce this positive effect.” There’s it’s clearly talking about CO2 and air pollution as two different things that have opposite effects on plant growth.
CO2 can be pollution while still allowing plants to grow, plants use CO2 in their growth cycle, if you didn't know, they don't use other greenhouse gases to grow.
Page 9 lists CO2 as the first item in a list of greenhouse gases. I don't want to spend all day read this 37 year old report.
In what world are greenhouse gases not air pollutants?
You don't have to read the whole report, just search for how it uses the words "greenhouse gases" and "air pollution." The IPCC treats those as being two distinct things.
For example, on p. 55.
> "Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g. by air pollution)"
That clearly refers to "air pollution" as an example of "other environmental factors"--something different from "CO2 enrichment" (rising CO2 levels). The report uses the same terminology on pp. 88 and 97. Throughout the report, it treats "greenhouse gasses" as it's own category that can interact with "air pollution"--but is different from air pollution.
It's a pollutant in quantities such as emitted by human activities, always orders of magnitude more than what any terrestrial life form emits through respiration.
This GHG is emitted (alongside methane, by the way), by humans, in such quantities that it severely impacts the thermal balance of the planet, and threatens an extinction-event comparable to what only large asteroids are usually capable of.
Yes (I agree with you, I am just trying to rephrase to make your point even more punchy).
It has been a pollutant as soon as it has started to be emitted at large scale through combustion, in particular of fossil fuels.
People who deny it are usually very brain-washed by far-right/alt-right propaganda, which tries to hammers into their brains that "it's just the same stuff that you exhale when you breathe".
They don't understand (or rather, they haven't been told!) that the scales are incommensurate.
I have also vaguely noticed that it started being called pollution sometime this century. "Huh, that's new", I thought. Not particularly surprising, though. Of course that timespan is almost 30 years, so my concept of recent change might be getting stretched.
But yeah, more familiar pollutants are dirty or caustic or radioactive, and chew holes in things or give you lung diseases or poison the wildlife, things like that, so it was a little jarring. Though I suppose we had CFCs, they didn't do anything directly harmful either.
If it was always this way, explain why the IPCC's seminal report on climate change uses the phrases "CO2 enrichment" (rising CO2 levels) and "air pollution" as if they're two different categories?
> 2.2.4 Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g. by air pollution).
Help me parse this according to your understanding that "CO2 was an air pollutant 30 years ago." If CO2 is a subcategory of "air pollution," then it makes no sense to list "air pollution" as an example of "other environmental factors." It wouldn't be grammatical. The report uses this basic sentence structure, referring to "CO2 enrichment" as one thing in distinction to "other environmental factors" including "air pollution" several times. Explain to me how that's consistent with your position?
I think this is good idea. I am not against combating climate change, but it can't come at the expanse of our economy. If you disagree stop using whatever device you are reading this on.
Good to see some action away from "climate" regulations ruining the energy sector and making everything downstream more expensive. You can't have a booming industrial economy without cheap energy. And no, having strict regulations that just end up moving production offshore doesn't solve anything. It just moves to pollution to China or India or whatever.
We're already paying for and will continue to pay more for the downstream effects of climate change some way or the other, you just refuse to or are unable to look at the bigger picture.
Taxing carbon will affect everything, including private jets, and China is doing more for solar power than any other place in the world and they're also investing heavily in renewables and nuclear.
In any case, the solution to other countries not doing their parts is figuring out ways to incentivise and coordinate better outcomes, not giving up completely, giving up only makes sense if someone is in denial regarding the consequences.
This is absurd. The cheapest energy available is solar, which is becoming more true every day. If truly the goal was just to have cheap energy, solar buildout would be a huge component of the strategy.
There are a multitude of arguments against this:
- Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it. If your argument is an economic one then jump onto the solar, wind and battery bandwagon.
- There are virtually no real short medium or long term gains economically here. Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind and its costs are rising while solar and wind continue to fall. Building new maximum pollution plants would drop that internalized cost but who in their right mind would fund something so obviously DOA?
- Obviously the externalized costs of greenhouse gas emissions are deeply undervalued in this move. Even if they are 'fake news' in the US, the rest of the world is finally starting to take them seriously. The US's diminished soft power means it won't be able to easily bully the world into allowing it to pollute without consequence and such an obviously hostile move means it will loose even more of its soft power by taking this position. So on the international level this means we burn a lot of political capital and gain nothing but decades of distrust and anger.
- Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.
- Oh yeah and, of course, climate change is real.
This continues the US down the path of being the best buggy whip maker in the world. Worse than that, the US is becoming an obnoxious buggy whip maker who's neighbors are starting to hope fails horribly and will help make that happen as moves like this continue. This is stupid at every scale and in every dimension.
The current wars in Europe and the Middle East paradoxically push the world towards non-fossil enery like few things did before. Both oil and natural gas prices have skyrocketed on global markets, and will likely rise more, as Ukraine continues to target Russian oil infrastructure, and Houtis continue to stymie Saudi oil exports.
Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though; at worst it takes longer to ship the key components from China to Europe around Africa.
The current wars in Europe and the Middle East could paradoxically push the world towards more domestic energy production, be it fossil or non-fossil energy.
For example in reaction to 1973 Arab oil embargo Carter boosted energy efficiency and solar and promoted coal.
" "America indeed is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and my goal as President of the United States is to see on the world energy markets Arab oil replaced with Illinois coal," Carter told miners and employees of the Old Ben Coal Mine No. 25. He also boasted that the country would, "produce more coal in 1980 than has ever before been produced in the United States of America." "
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/29/1158426645/jimmy-carters-envi...
New coal gasification projects in India
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-clears-4-billi...
>The current wars in Europe and the Middle East could paradoxically push the world towards more domestic energy production, be it fossil or non-fossil energy.
Fossil fuel is still going strong and will probably stay so for the next 50 years. Like I just learned Taiwan makes most of its energy from coal and LNG and is set to denuclearize, which blew my mind given their cutting edge manufacturing economy, but kinda makes sense when you factor in their geography and geopolitics.
>Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though; at worst it takes longer to ship the key components from China to Europe around Africa.
Except you know, all the actual mining and manufacturing of those things, which isn't in the west but mostly in China.
Before, say, 2022 or 2026 for that reason, oil, coal, lithium, silicon, iron, etc were mined, processed, and shipped as usual. By now, the production and shipping of oil and oil-based fuels, and, to a lesser extent, LNG is hampered by wars. The production and shipping of what is required to build solar, wind, and even nuclear power sources continues, mostly unaffected by the wars, which makes these power sources relatively (even) more attractive.
Sadly, it does not mean that EU or USA grew less dependent on China for solar panels, industrial chemicals, or a lot of other things. OTOH, they did not grow more dependent either.
so what if theyre made in china?
But we are not buying oil or gas. We are buying hardware that will generate electricity for decades.
I do hope the US turns around. As I see it, we (western countries) have aligned values and it's better for us all (US included) to stick together.
You burn a barrel of oil once. A solar panel lasts for 20+ years. After you have installed it, if China announces they will no longer sell new ones - you have two decades of lead time to start building your own domestically.
Except you burn the oil once and keep the solar panel and batteries for one or two decades
> Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though;
For now.
The majority of solar panels are made in China (85%), and they plan to invade Taiwan in just a few years, possibly as soon as 2027, at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production or defend Taiwan and cut ourselves off from the source of almost all manufactured products, and especially solar panels.
>and they plan to invade Taiwan in just a few years
Can you share your sources for that valuable intelligence? Military analysts would really be interested to learn that. Or is that form the same manufactured scaremongering genre as "Iran is 6 weeks away from building nuclear weapons" and "Iraq has WMDs" to justify endless defense spending, military interventions and warmongering.
> at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production
You can't just commandeer semi fabs like you're carjacking a Hyundai for a joyride. Semi fabs need constant parts and on-prem staff and always-on telemetry from ASML & friends to run. If that's gone, you're left with a very expensive warehouse that can't do shit.
Taiwan cannot make chips without western inputs and spare parts, so China taking over Taiwan or Korea or Japan doesn’t really give them access to making those chips.
Rather, in a case of such an acute confrontation, it denies their adversaries access to the highest-end chips, too.
But the solar panels we already have don't suddenly stop working, which is an important difference between sourcing solar panels from a potential enemy and sourcing raw fossil fuels from one. There's also nothing stopping the US or other trading partners from making solar panels, China is just the most convenient and cheapest source as it is for many other things. And to that point, the end of trade between the US and China would be incredibly damaging to both countries whether or not we buy solar panels from them now.
At least they haven't relaxed restrictions on sulfur dioxide emissions, etc.. yet. Making rain acidic again would be completely on brand for this administration.
We might want to at least on the high seas to combat global warming a bit.
The Gulf countries paid handsomely to get Trump in there to keep the United States as the buyer of last resort once the rest of the world goes renewable.
Problem is that installing a bunch of sick sons of bitches to do your bidding can backfire when those some morons lose a war to Iran in a matter of months.
Fossil fuel power plants are unfortunately still profitable for their owners (billionaires...). The cost of building them has mostly been written off a long time ago. None of this is about what is good for America in the long run...
I have to wonder if this is a play towards coal miners, who are part of the conservative base - and they need every vote they can get. Coal is an awful source of power, and a really big source of pollution.
I doubt they really care about coal miners’ actual votes. The US coal mining industry employs fewer than 50,000 people. I live in a major coal producing state and while it was an important industry in my grandparents’ time, these days it isn’t a particularly noteworthy share of our economy.
I would say if it’s specifically about coal at all, it’s more because of the GOP’s tendency toward weird nostalgic obsessions.
But is it stupid if you want to sell some fossil fuels in the short to medium term?
> - Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it
That's a baseless claim. For example, Germany has invested massively in solar but its electricity prices went up, not down.
> Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind
That's false. Coal power is cheaper than all of those. Solar and wind include costs for expensive battery backups since they are highly volatile.
And to make it clear: Climate change is very bad so coal plants are very bad. But that doesn't mean you can go around and claim that coal isn't cheap compared to things like solar+batteries. The fact that something is good doesn't imply that it is cheap.
This price of electricity is high because gas, which is still expensive, sets the price of electricity most of the time [1]. The levelized cost of electricity for solar (including batteries) and wind is cheaper than coal [2].
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-does-gas-set-the-price-of... [2] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
I will believe it when I see it. The only countries with both cheap and clean electricity are those that built out extensive nuclear or got lucky enough to have access to other forms of cheap base load like hydro / geothermal.
Australia would disagree: https://www.energy.gov.au/news/new-energy-plan-daily-window-...
As an Australian I can say that for me personally the free energy periods have been amazing and are an example of the functional free markets making life better for the average person.
Australia hasn't shot itself in the foot like EU's self inflicted policies.
Becaude, as we all know, taxpayer-funded == free.
And we banned nuclear, since it's scary.
It's not taxpayer funded, the grid has an overabundance of daytime solar that exceeds their capacity to store it.
Here in Queensland the state owns the regional electricity company, Ergon. ∴ most of what they do that doesn't generate money (such as doing free electricity rather than charging for it) is taxpayer-funded.
Germany's decommissioned nuclear, and subsequent concentration of base load in Russian gas-fired plants, is certainly a lede your post is doing its best to bury.
Or that Germany shares electricity with the EU, so that everyone is getting subjected to those pains with fuel sources being cut.
Coal isn't cheap. Specifically coal powerplants are not and it's got nothing to do with emissions. One of the pinch points in the Australian power grid has actually been that a bunch of coal plants are aging out and no private enterprise wants to even bother financing their replacement because it's a money loser compared to renewables build out.
Fortunately this is well on it's way to being solved by the massive battery build out which has happened which means evening peak electricity usage has declined enormously[1] - i.e the primary "sun not shining" point of the day is rapidly turning into an energy use low point for the grid (which makes sense: business powers down, people go home and their batteries which have been charging cover cooking - I have an induction cook top and a 10kw inverter covers everything).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/15/austr...
You are 100% right but I think your arguments will fall on deaf ears. Someone bribed Trump or one of his cronies to revoke pollution limits and they got it. What to do when rationality just isn't a factor in politics anymore?
> - Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.
Is not Germany an example of the opposite? I mean their decision to shut down nuclear plants while getting dependant on Russian supply of energy sources?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apr%C3%A8s_moi,_le_d%C3%A9luge
Translated to American: "fuck you, I got mine"
Full steam ahead towards greenhouse gases, climate change, and +5degree temperatures. Why not?
Because it'll create value.
Value which won't bring anything to anyone. I mean, a couple of people can be more richerer, but we and them won't have a planet to spend or enjoy these theoretical riches at the end.
So, no biggie.
Lobbyists lies a foot. “We can’t provide more power with these pesky regulations”
Disaster capitalism is pretty much current AI is to future AI use
define 'climate pollution', this is all fine and well until they apply it to nuclear shielding.
I'm not clear what you mean. While nuclear waste is certainly a thing that could hurt the environment if mismanaged, impacting the climate isn't really a way that it does so. The shielding also seems like an unusual thing to focus on as opposed to the waste itself.
'shielding', is applied to both the energy extraction process of fission activity AND the remnants.
you're definitely not clear on the meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_cruelty_is_the_point
Après nous, le déluge!
Normally I would be concerned, but these days, we are well on our way to 3.5C. All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals.
It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren. Wait to see what happens when millions of desperate people living south of the 40th parallel start heading north in mass. No wall will stop that.
> All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals
China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.
China is trying to become oil-independent by all means necessary. All their means of accessing oil go through geographic bottlenecks that could be weaponized against them in the event of military conflict. Coal, fissile materials, and sunlight are the alternatives they have access to, so they're going for all of those.
With some luck, the net effect will be fewer greenhouse gases than keeping themselves oil-dependent, though that isn't necessarily the, or even a, goal. If it happens, it'll be as a side effect.
Are you saying China is doing whatever it needs to do to satisfy its power needs, hands forced by geopolitics, and not pure altruism? Say it isn't so.
In a saner world, they wouldn't need to be wary of a catastrophic oil shortage due to another power deciding to cut off their access to oil. A saner world is achieved when all countries agree to an international system of rules and conflict resolution and abide by agreements, so things are predictable in the long term.
The less predictable things become, the faster everyone ramps up potential solutions to bad potential scenarios.
Some are trying to bring that sanity back. Others are trying to increase the chaos as much as they possibly can, and preferably more.
You can't bring back something that was never there
Not in an absolute sense, perhaps. But it was there enough to mostly function most of the time. And international life was more stable because of it.
is this supposed to refute the parent comment's point?
Complement.
> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.
China also invested significantly in technology like flue gas desulfurization 10-20 years ago, as well as other approaches which try to mitigate some of the impact of coal burning. So while bringing online coal power plants is obviously and can never be carbon neutral, a more appropriate comparison would be to measure the new plants' additional GHG and SLCP emissions, and compare that to the approach in the US.
China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online in 2025, but also 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind.
And coal is mostly flat, while electricity demand is going up.
https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/09/China-Energy-Tr...
(Page 14)
China mined more coal in 2025 then ever, but burned less in coal plans. Coal is slowly shifting from electricity production to synthetic oil and chemical production.
https://www.mining.com/web/chinas-coal-output-hits-record-in...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-top-coal-regi...
78 GW of coal is pretty damn near 78 GW. 315 GW of solar / wind capacity is nowhere near that level of utilization.
Would you mind sharing your source? AFAIK the coal plants are only backups, so it'd be very surprising if they're utilized as much as the solar capacity.
Which is easy to do when you live an authoritarian state with plenty of vast desert wastelands to erect solar/wind farms. Was there a village there last week? Not anymore, it was in the way. And best of all they can build it all with Uyghur forced labor. Accolades for China all around!
I don't see the USA building out that much solar in its vast desert wastelands.
Yes, and?
That's not really relevant to the topic at hand. No one has said that China is a utopia and paragon of human rights.
> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.
Despite all of that, Electricitymaps predicts that they can generate 48% of their total energy from carbon-free sources at noon-hours.
Now, this is impressive, despite building 50 new coal plants in 2025 alone.
Last year France produced 94% of electricity from low-carbon sources, that is impressive.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/france#how-much-of...
China produced 41% of electricity from low-carbon sources last year.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-...
For me, both are equally impressive actually. Europe has some great clean-energy countries.
Interestingly Turkey passed 50% mark apparently. That's also an out of left field revelation for me.
This is not really very impressive in context, for two reasons. First, China generated 10,400 TWh in 2025 and France generated only 547 TWh. The 95% and 50% are being applied to different numbers, and the scales here just aren’t comparable. Second, nearly all of France’s power generation was built decades ago, and China’s was built very recently - and is still expanding rapidly in both nuclear and renewables. Comparing France to China is like comparing a 1970s solar powered bungalow to a gigafactory under construction.
coal usage has declined there the last two years. Would have declined even more this year, except for a certain very smart war.
Yet coal burning isn't going up in China. They also built more solar in 2025 than the US has in total. Also currently building 35+ reactors.
> It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren.
It's a cryin' shame these people don't care how much of a sucky life they are handing everyone's grandchildren, and not nearly enough people actually cared when we could have still done something about it...
According to Al Gores movie (shown to US students) we were already supposed to be beyond 2C by now. When the ClimateGate "hide the decline" emails were released that also raised a few eyebrows. So saying the world is now going to 3.5C rings on deaf ears. That's not science that's just the fact of what actually happened so far.
Why are you getting your information from movies?
Your narrative is repeated less and less because it isnt compelling.
My narrative is substantially different because the trend was correct and 1.4 vs 2.0 does not prove a negative.
The massive FUD and misinformation campaigns by industrialist operations, along with opportunist/capitalist denials and misdirection, has successfully confused enough of the US public to withold opinion on the matter. This has allowed politics to treat it as a marginal issue where there are 2 sides, rather than a morally catastrophic eventuality.
1.4 vs 2.0 is a massive miss because that diff isn't starting from 20 years ago, but rather a pre-industrial baseline. So the actual diffs are something more like +0.2 (actual) vs +0.8 (predicted) over that 20 ish year interval, and the prediction of the warming trajectory is off several times. (that is if the movie actually said that, which I didn't check).
Maybe you should check? Because we definitely weren't at +1.2°C warming in 2006.
The USA is already holding the record for greenhouse gas pollution per capita and they elected the lunatic that raved about climate change being a hoax. I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier.
The fact these regulations didn't make it through the normal law making progress (senate/house) doomed it before it even took shape. With presidents like Trump undoing everything his predecessor(s) did just to feel powerful, legislation like this is doomed from that start.
There’s no denying Climate Change is a big industrial-complex.
And now that the Data Centre Industrial Complex has come along it’s somewhat sidelined the Climate Change Industrial Complex*.
Funny how that happens.
Well yes, every piece of industry ends up contributing to climate change, but data centers are the one that's having a massive expansion in the west.
> Climate Change is a big industrial-complex.
Can you tell us more about it, honestly, sounds interesting.
US energy usage is flat in real terms since 2000 despite skyrocketing population growth. In per capita terms, it's plummeting.
China builds hundreds of coal plants a year while they are exempt from scrutiny.
Since 2000, how much production did the US offshore to China?
If this trend keeps going for a decade+, China might begin to approach US per-capita emissions.
Their coal burning isn't going up though.
Don't forget India as well
And when there are cheaper, faster built, renewable sources of energy that the whole world is building out. I don’t think the lost time can be fixed post Trump (if he even gives up power that is).
Because it stops society falling apart and regressing. Humanity is not some angelic, monolith stoic super species, which is just programmed wrong. Its half-sane monkeys which fall apart in a regression as soon as the surplus bribery stops and then try to sew the bakeries oven apart, so everyone has something to eat.
One can not create policies that destroy the thing they want to protect from a crisis to come, by inducing a different crisis by ignoring the material you work with. Trump is your doing, you brought this guy forth, by deindustrializing the west, by making western buisnesses unable to compete. Stop working with idealized paper-cut outs of people- and actually engage, with the species you got. And no, your good intentions and noble goals, do not entitle you to wing it.
Sorry but you can't have EVs everywhere, WA and CA banning natural gas for heat and cooking, WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power. The math does not add up.
Solar and wind output is not constant or reliable. NIMBYs sabotaged nuclear years ago. It takes how many years to bring a new plant online?
A lot of feel-good rules and regs were passed, pushing a massive shift to electric power, with no consideration as to where the additional power would come from.
You can't wave your arms like a Peanuts cartoon and have all that extra power appear, which is the logic that was used in passing many of these impractical regulations.
> the math doesn’t add up
There’s no way for you to know that. You don’t do the math. People like me, who work in the clean energy industry, do the math. The math works fine. You should try working as hard as the math does, instead of complaining.
> WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power.
Have a closer look at the hydro dams that have been removed for salmon habitat.
From what I've seen capacity was tens of MegaWatts [1] and some were just for irrigation. Meanwhile, large dams [2] are doing gigawatts.
Large dams also have negative environmental effects and maybe one day they'll get removed too, but accepting the tradeoff for large amounts of power makes more sense than destroying samon fishing to get irrigation water or a piddly amount of power.
Especially at a time when electrical power use was trending down due to efficiency gains and offshoring manufacturing, and samon fisheries were in danger of failing, it made sense to remove dams that weren't terribly productive. And start considering actually doing the work to make the larger dams fish friendly, eventually.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161221064310/http://www.water....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam
Solar and wind is extremely reliable. What isn’t reliable is deployment of it.
Energy storage is required along with solar farms.
Until the sun goes down at night or the wind stops blowing. You ignored the word "output".
> Energy storage is required along with solar farms
How many batteries are we going to need for that? They literally just figured out how to get the child slaves in the Congo out of the supply chain with a shift to LFP.
There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example. It consists of heating something very big that holds a lot of heat and releases it slowly, then using that stored heat to generate electricity while it cools down. This isn't suitable for home use, but at the city scale, or larger, it's quite efficient:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage
> There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example.
Yeah, there's also pumped water storage, and other forms of gravity/kinetic storage, various means of chemical energy storage, and all kinda other neat battery-like ideas folks have been trying/using.
The UK has Dinorwig power station, a pumped hydro station capable of storing over 9 GWh of energy. This alone rivals the entire combined 10.5 GWh of battery storage across the whole country. It certainly seems much more feasible when you have the terrain to allow it.
Enough to store the energy between gaps, plus a buffer?
Batteries aren't exactly made from gold. Grid scale batteries especially, where weight and size doesn't matter as much, are totally viable on a mass scale.
Fear really IS the mindkiller! Stop being afraid and start educating yourself. You are on HN, you are supposed to be smart.
Smart people understand pragmatism, which means not throwing the baby out with the bath water in the name of ill thought-out feel-good measures.
You're not being pragmatic, you're being myopic. Our current energy systems are the result of deliberate complex work. It seems shortsighted to think it's somehow the only system that can ever be built just because other systems have new challenges to overcome.
That is literally what you are doing right now.
Oh yes, as opposed to the famously free from abuse oil and gas industry.
Fox brain alert!
We have batteries for this. See Texas and California.
This gets tiring. No, china has no electricity problem in the night and their share of solar is off the roof.
What an opinion to have when thus far evidence has concluded the opposite. Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors doesn’t make the anti-renewable parrots correct. There are situations where —at minimum- hybrid solutions are far more viable options but for many locations just those two solutions work very well.
> Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors
Speaking of infrastructure, how about pushing a mass rollout of EVs before giving a single consideration as to where the charging infra would come from?
Charging infra would only exist if there's demand for it, if you have a better solution for this catch-22 I'm all ears.
Though it looks like rolling out EVs before the charging network existed worked, there are thousands upon thousands of chargers now that there are enough vehicles to use them.
That seems like a pretty bad example considering the rising popularity of EVs has coincided with an enormous grown in available charging infrastructure to service the EV customer base. It's almost like human society can handle complex, interdependent systems as they change, either through deliberate organization or natural market incentives.
It's not like the current mix of electrical generation and fossil fuel distribution is some naturally occurring phenomenon or alien technology. It's an enormously complex and interdependent system we built. I'm pretty confident we can build new and different things.
Are you from the past?
I know HN has lots of American readers, so maybe they can explain.
Why aren't the vast majority of America's suburban single family dwellings using rooftop solar? Huge numbers of Americans live in these homes - they're not so much a thing, especially to this degree, in other countries and they seem basically ideal for rooftop solar.
Am I missing something here?
Rooftop solar in the US is incredibly expensive from most installers even as panel prices have come down and energy prices are typically low enough that the payoff time and up-front cost are seen as not worth it for many people. The US also has a lot of homes where (cheap) natural gas is used for cooking, heating, and hot water, which you'd have to continue paying for even after you installed solar panels or pay a lot of money to convert to electrical equivalents.
That said, I know a lot of people who have recently installed solar panels on their roof and it's increasingly worth it from a financial perspective. The other thing worth noting though is that while cool, rooftop solar really isn't the best approach to installing solar capacity compared to grid scale solar farms on land which also tends to be abundant in the US.
The data that I've seen shows that the barriers to solar adoption for the average American home are high installation cost, low grid power cost, unfavorable net metering agreements for grid interconnect, and even some pushback from neighborhood committees (homeowners association aka HOA).
There are exceptions such as Hawaii where grid power is expensive and sunshine abundant, but the US is big, geographically diverse, and because of that adoption varies greatly on regional dynamics.
Tech workers located in South Africa and nearby regions suffer, because the power grid there is unreliable at best. Therefore, those workers may be required by employers to prove that they have arranged for reliable backup power and network connections in order to stay connected (nearly to the antipodes) and ensure that their performance is competitive with workers located in stable regimes with robust power grids and network backbones.
It may seem unfair or unnecessary for US employers to require US employees to have a UPS, solar array, a redundant network connection, etc. But if employers required these things up-front, surely some tech workers could step up to the challenge and perhaps even be distinguished from those who don't get it.
It’s expensive? We were quoted 60k last year. Maybe a scammy company but that’s a lot up front.
Some speculative answers based on what I know:
1. A lot of single family dwellings are occupied by renters. In this scenario, the renter has no ability to install rooftop solar, and the owner has no incentive to install rooftop solar because the renter is paying the energy bills. (The same goes for things like installing high-efficiency heat pumps etc.)
2. HOA regulations can block things like rooftop solar depending on where you live.
3. The up-front investment involved in rooftop solar can be prohibitive for many people. Things like tax incentives can help but we've been getting rid of those under the current administration, and tax incentives only go so far if your tax return is 6+ months away.
From the wording, it's not clear if the ruling (from 2024) had any impact on power plant running today, or newly built one (it seems like it was mandating carbon capture eventually.)
The "good" news is that coal plants are already suboptimal, economically. This is delaying the closure of existing plans, which is just absurd, but completely on brand for the political party that people voted in office, with complete knowledge of what would happen.
I suppose they also voted for "cheaper groceries" and "no more endless wars", but that will come any time soon.
This comments page, as so many on HN, is making me wish there was a way to slap obviously-bad-faith commenters into submission
Nothing like trying to be the tough guy on an message board....
Feeling called out huh
This headline is rather sweeping considering the modest nature of the change, which is merely rolling back regulations to 2024 levels.
you're comparing years, not standards. i hope you're just foolish and not intentionally disingenuous.
"The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039, which would have reduced carbon pollution by an estimated 1.38 billion metric tons through 2047"
Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.
My point is that after a large change, reversion to the mean should not be treated breathlessly, but viewed in a measured manner.
> Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.
This is an exaggeration that stretches credulity, since there have been strict limits for decades around secondary outputs that are required by power plant energy production effectively limiting production and emissions (which is the entire point).
The 2024 plan would have reduced annual CO₂ emissions by about 533 million metric tons by 2040. That's roughly equivalent to taking half of all U.S. passenger cars and light-duty trucks off the road.
With the rollback, that reduction will no longer occur. So, this is significant.
Imagine you’re driving headlong toward a cliff. Someone turns the steering wheel a little, not nearly enough, but it’s a small part of an attempt to steer away from the cliff.
Then somebody else comes along and steers back.
How measured should the reaction to this be?
If everyone votes, this will be overturned in a couple years.
Certainly this will benefit the citizens!
The good news is the war with Iran has done more to curtail greenhouse gas emissions than basically anything domestically Trump can do.
Violently demonstrating the geopolitical liability of relying on Greenhouse Gasses is more compelling than more climate conferences apparently.
This is cope. Oil, gas, and coal are dead, and with them, America’s control over the global financial system, and its political hegemony.
America is actively ceding the future to China, and our ruling class have no ideas left other than looting the place as it’s burning to the ground.
China invested heavily into oil, gas, and coal for energy. Their coal use is still expanding, just like their big investments in solar, wind, and nuclear. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-coal-power-ri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
> By 2025, coal accounted for approximately 54.6% of China's electricity generation
China became the manufacturing capital of the world because it doesn't have these regulations. It's time we caught up.
Crazy idea: Power Plants could still do the right thing.
Power Plants answer to the shareholders, hence…
Related: Citizen's Climate Lobby Canada laser talks booklet on planetary boundaries (link at bottom)
https://canada.citizensclimatelobby.org/media-release-ccl-ca...
This comment thread shows that, if anything, the Americans want this. If they released exhaust fume inhalers, the majority of the US population would willingly buy one and take hit after hit to disprove the myth of weird, alien things like "caring about the environment" while quietly wheezing about "but China..." to themselves.
Fossil fuels are like NFTs. Hear me out.
NFTs never made sense. You're buying a short URL on a blockchain in the hopes that it'll somehow retain value. The URL could go bad, it could be pointed at something else, etc. But what NFTs did was induce demand for crypto, particularly Ethereum. That was the point.
For a long time I thought we went to war for oil. No, that's backwards. Our oil dependence exists to induce demand for weapons. I will once again refer to the article No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].
So when you see things like pollution limits being lifted on power plants because of data centers, know that the ultimate driving force is the sale of weapons.
Let me give a concrete example. If I drill a well in West Texas that produces, say, 1000 barrels per day ("bpd"). It doesn't produce that forever. As the pressure goes down, the daily production goes down. In the industry this is called the decline rate. For the Permian Basin, the decline rate of any oil well is typically 15-20% per year. So in year 2, that well will produce 800-850bpd. In year 3, it'll be ~650-700. In year 4 it'll be 500-550.
So if you rely on oil you constantly need to be building new wells to maintain your same production level. For the US, which produces 13-15Mbpd of oil, that means you need to add 2Mbpd of new wells every year just to maintain that level of production.
Oil wells, like any form of resource extraction, are excellent wealth concentrators. They make people rich. If I put up 1GW of solar panels then, apart from some cleaning and general maintenance, they're going to produce 1GW of electricity every year (with some variance for sunshine). Nobody gets rich from that. And nobody needs to go to war for that. Which means nobody gets rich from selling weapons to secure that oil.
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
Im really not seeing the comparison.
nfts were about trying to make inherently not scare things scarce, and to try to get people involved in a ponzi scheme
the oil being drilled and mined is exceptionally useful, and people buy it even when you dont need to go to war or get weapons. War would still be happening in the middle east without oil, its a key trade route between Europe and Asia.
the oil dependence exists because it lets people get work and labour done without hiring labourers.
if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that, and whenever people start building giant solar farms in borth africa, we will see armed militas conquering each other for control over the profits
> if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that
You're going to spend maybe a billion dollars to build your solar farm, maybe you get somebody to lend you the billion dollars at 4% annual interest for 10 years,
Your panels make maybe 1.5 TWh of electricity each year, you can sell that for maybe $50 per MWh, so that's $75M per year. But the interest on your loan was $40M, so after year one your owe $965M, after the ten year loan finishes you still owe almost $600M and your panels are now ten years old.
It's just a normal business venture, if you've got people who can execute and a favourable environment it should work, like if you opened a fast food chain, or a dry clean business or a distillery. This is completely different from resource owners, who instead are just granted ownership of a finite natural resource.
Worth noting that the limits being revoked have only been in place less than two years.
Also worth noting that they are being revoked.
Why is that notable?
Because how else would you plant the seeds of doubt that this decision is fucked.
Because without noting that, "revoked" sounds like all limits are being removed, rather than that we're back to the 2024 limits.
Can’t wait for this to cost us 10 times more in bailing out underwater Florida
I'm so tired of this.
Please someone bring back people with critical thinking abilities.
Like the greens in Germany who decided it's best to shut down nuclear power plants?
It's eerie how often this lie gets repeated here.
It wasn't the Greens that decided this for Germany. It was our conservatives, the CDU/CSU. The latter had high-ranking officials literally threaten to step down, unless Germany exits nuclear energy production.
What does this have to do with being a fat, dumb, greedy asshole with no brains?
This is deeply outrageous and criminal. Every American should be ashamed.
I mean we elected an outrageous criminal into office. I think we are in a post-shame society.
How “conservative”, revolting people.
well, for the next 800 days
or can a dictator president do this at all without congress?
btw how many gallons of crude oil do you think the Epstein Memorial Ballroom can hold?
because we're going to need a new strategic oil reserve, he destroyed the current system by bottoming it out
The real irony is that, despite all this, Trump may accidentally become the greenest US president by driving up the price of oil for the whole world. For years to come.
I mean, anyone can say they're for the environment, but are you willing to start a war, lose a midterm, and murder a school full of kids to reduce your carbon footprint? /s
He should be awarded the FIFA Environment Protection prize.
The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039.
- wow 2039. So this already had no teeth. We can just pass this law again in 2029.
Not a law. A regulation. If it were a law, it would have required Congress to change. Not that that would likely have stopped this administration.
That's because the technology is already there, if plants were willing to run at a bit of a higher OpEx and add some CapEx. Amine scrubbing coupled with decades-old technology like Rotary Packed Beds Reactors can already capture 90% of CO2 at minimum. The UAE's Ruwais facility already does this onsite and uses the captured CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery (aka fracking for the last bits of oil in wells). This has the benefit of sequestering CO2 while also not using water for fracking as an option.
I don't see the point of trying to redefine "pollution" to include CO2. We have been discussing climate change for decades, but it was only recently that people tried to shoehorn CO2 into category of "pollution." It just takes a category where society has some consensus and then shoehorns some new disputed idea into existing category. It's an end-run around the process of building consensus around the new thing.
It is not weird at all.
A completely useful (and consistent with the modern usage of the word) definition of "pollution" can be worded as:
"anthropogenic alteration of the open environment with negative consequences on ecosystems or society".
Have you heard about noise pollution? Match it with the definition above.
CO2 emitted by combustion from human activities is orders of magnitude more than what any natural biological process emits.
Now you can see why CO2 emitted by fossil fuels combustion is, by any logic, pollution.
The first ever version of the "Greenhouse gas" wikipedia page lists CO₂ as the first such gas (besides water vapor, obviously disregarded).
That page is from 2002.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greenhouse_gas&ol...
besides water vapor, obviously disregarded
Don't be so sure about "obviously" when they start talking about "water vapor emissions"...
I'm talking about redefining the term "pollution," not the term "greenhouse gas."
Carbon dioxide atmospheric pollution has been acknowledged since literally the 1800s. What era are you from? Are you 200 years old?
Did we call it “pollution” back then or something else? That is, did we lump CO2 conceptually into the same category as soot from coal plants and things like that?
Society uses labels to group things together so that we can treat similar things similarly for various purposes. For example, when we talk about “education” we usually mean teaching kids in schools or colleges. Of course, there’s lots of other things you can call “education.” But if the Department of Education comes in and says it’s going to regulate technical presentations at software conferences because that’s also “education,” then you’d say: “that’s not what people mean by the word education in this context.” That is, we have a consensus about what “education” encompasses and what it doesn’t for purposes of government regulation, and seminars at conferences falls outside that understanding.
Yes, labels matter; so let's take a step back and ask why you're fighting this argument? Why does it matter which of the harmful emissions from a smokestack count as "pollution"?
> Why does it matter which of the harmful emissions from a smokestack count as "pollution"?
Because society uses labels to delineate the boundaries between different legal regimes and sources of authority, and adhering to those boundaries is important. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) can't point to the traffic on a fiber cable within a data center and say it falls within their jurisdiction because that's also "communications."
It's especially important in this context, because the half-century-old laws and regulations designed to control soot emissions from factory smokestacks is ill-suited to managing CO2 emissions. The fundamental premise of the Clean Air Act is that pollution can be controlled at the source with control technologies (RACT, BACT, etc.).
This focus on control technologies puts well-defined guardrails on the EPA. The EPA can't go around making big decisions about how factories work or what people produce. They can simply tell you to put the best reasonably available scrubbers on your factory. That approach completely breaks down when it comes to CO2, because there is no such thing as a "CO2 scrubber." Treating CO2 as a pollutant puts the EPA into a role of supervising the energy sector that the agency simply was never designed to do.
IPCC first report was 1990, and the basic arithmetic of the atmosphere goes even further back.
Right, but the 1990 IPCC report doesn’t use the term “pollution” to refer to CO2: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_a...
It uses the term “greenhouse gas” to refer to CO2 and uses the term “air pollution” to refer to what people traditionally think of as air pollution. For example, in one place of says: “Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g., by air pollution).” So that’s treating “CO2 enrichment” (emissions) as distinct from “air pollution.”
I was battling global warming in Civ endgames in 1991...
I think you miss rayiner's point. He's not disputing whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas. He's saying that doesn't make it a "pollutant" as the term was understood at the time, say, the EPA was created. There was no congressional legislation that said that it was something the EPA was empowered to regulate. Then the EPA decided to regulate it anyway (and, yes, won the court case about whether it could). But it was still shoehorned in, as it was not considered a pollutant in the way that NO2 or particulates or chlorine were.
This is ridiculous. There is no redefinition, it was always part of definition. Seriously. The only end run around consensus are lies like "CO2 as polution is a novel thing".
> There is no redefinition, it was always part of definition.
Source?
You need a source showing you that greenhouses gasses aren't pollution?
The thing that is also known as "air pollution"?
I want to tell you to stop being a moron, but its against this site's TOS.
In the 1990 IPCC report it talks about “greenhouse gasses” and also about “air pollution” but treats those as two distinct things: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_a.... For example, on page 97, it says “CO2 enrichment” may “enhance plant growth,” but that “enhanced levels of air pollution could also reduce this positive effect.” There’s it’s clearly talking about CO2 and air pollution as two different things that have opposite effects on plant growth.
Is the IPCC also “morons?”
Do you have zero critical thinking skills?
CO2 can be pollution while still allowing plants to grow, plants use CO2 in their growth cycle, if you didn't know, they don't use other greenhouse gases to grow.
Page 9 lists CO2 as the first item in a list of greenhouse gases. I don't want to spend all day read this 37 year old report.
In what world are greenhouse gases not air pollutants?
You don't have to read the whole report, just search for how it uses the words "greenhouse gases" and "air pollution." The IPCC treats those as being two distinct things.
For example, on p. 55.
> "Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g. by air pollution)"
That clearly refers to "air pollution" as an example of "other environmental factors"--something different from "CO2 enrichment" (rising CO2 levels). The report uses the same terminology on pp. 88 and 97. Throughout the report, it treats "greenhouse gasses" as it's own category that can interact with "air pollution"--but is different from air pollution.
In a world as of a couple years ago, when nobody called CO2 “air pollutant”.
It's a pollutant in quantities such as emitted by human activities, always orders of magnitude more than what any terrestrial life form emits through respiration.
This GHG is emitted (alongside methane, by the way), by humans, in such quantities that it severely impacts the thermal balance of the planet, and threatens an extinction-event comparable to what only large asteroids are usually capable of.
But that is a lie. CO2 was air polutant 30 years ago 20 years ago and basically forever.
It is only in the post-truth society of right wing anti-climate influencers that apparently someone tries to redefine the terms to exclude it.
Yes (I agree with you, I am just trying to rephrase to make your point even more punchy).
It has been a pollutant as soon as it has started to be emitted at large scale through combustion, in particular of fossil fuels.
People who deny it are usually very brain-washed by far-right/alt-right propaganda, which tries to hammers into their brains that "it's just the same stuff that you exhale when you breathe".
They don't understand (or rather, they haven't been told!) that the scales are incommensurate.
I have also vaguely noticed that it started being called pollution sometime this century. "Huh, that's new", I thought. Not particularly surprising, though. Of course that timespan is almost 30 years, so my concept of recent change might be getting stretched.
But yeah, more familiar pollutants are dirty or caustic or radioactive, and chew holes in things or give you lung diseases or poison the wildlife, things like that, so it was a little jarring. Though I suppose we had CFCs, they didn't do anything directly harmful either.
If it was always this way, explain why the IPCC's seminal report on climate change uses the phrases "CO2 enrichment" (rising CO2 levels) and "air pollution" as if they're two different categories?
> 2.2.4 Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g. by air pollution).
Help me parse this according to your understanding that "CO2 was an air pollutant 30 years ago." If CO2 is a subcategory of "air pollution," then it makes no sense to list "air pollution" as an example of "other environmental factors." It wouldn't be grammatical. The report uses this basic sentence structure, referring to "CO2 enrichment" as one thing in distinction to "other environmental factors" including "air pollution" several times. Explain to me how that's consistent with your position?
I think this is good idea. I am not against combating climate change, but it can't come at the expanse of our economy. If you disagree stop using whatever device you are reading this on.
Do you have children?
Good to see some action away from "climate" regulations ruining the energy sector and making everything downstream more expensive. You can't have a booming industrial economy without cheap energy. And no, having strict regulations that just end up moving production offshore doesn't solve anything. It just moves to pollution to China or India or whatever.
We're already paying for and will continue to pay more for the downstream effects of climate change some way or the other, you just refuse to or are unable to look at the bigger picture.
Tell China and India to stop building coal plants first, and also ban private jets, and then we can talk.
Taxing carbon will affect everything, including private jets, and China is doing more for solar power than any other place in the world and they're also investing heavily in renewables and nuclear.
In any case, the solution to other countries not doing their parts is figuring out ways to incentivise and coordinate better outcomes, not giving up completely, giving up only makes sense if someone is in denial regarding the consequences.
How does one move power plant pollution offshore to China?
> a booming industrial economy
Nothing more important than that!!
This is absurd. The cheapest energy available is solar, which is becoming more true every day. If truly the goal was just to have cheap energy, solar buildout would be a huge component of the strategy.
So now as a planet we have to curb greenhouse gasses in the US _and_ China or India or whatever.