The US has some of the cheapest energy in the civilized world. I’m not sure what to draw from that fact, but it is clear our energy system works pretty well for the end-user.
For a counterpoint, check out Germany’s expensive as fuck energy.
You have some of the world's cheapest electricity wholesale. You also have a huge variance in prices to end-user, with the people that complain on the internet being among the most expensive in the world... because, of course, people that get cheaper prices don't complain.
Also, yes, electricity in Germany is expensive as fuck.
It's also one of the oldest and poorly maintained for much of the country. As the data centers keep going up it's making it harder and harder to meet customers energy needs.
This argument has received responses calling me a Commie, a Tankie, and 'a would-be enslaver of humanity' from family, friends, and internet randoms alike.
For me it is that I just... sorta listened to Bill Nye in the 90s about carbon dioxide.
I am pretty sure 90% of people who get called tankies on Lemmy are not communists. Tankie-calling is by far the most obnoxious Lemmy community pastime. But I'll give them this, it's an extremely annoying word, much more annoying to be called than "fascist". We need an unjustifiably smug sounding pejorative for people who call everyone tankies, to call them in exchange so that they can see how not epic their insult is.
The key thing is that the insult needs to seem like you think it's really badass and brave of you to call them that, and it should seem like you think they're seething at you, when in reality it's a super lame insult. Like so:
"You're a tankie"
"Oh no the Tankie-twister has arrived!"
"Wtf kind of lame insult is that lol"
"Now you know how everyone else feels about being called tankies"
I mean, ACAB. I'm sure you can find human rights abuses anywhere you want to look.
But what does this have to do with decarbonization? Is China's production of photovoltaics materially more abusive than America's production of hydrocarbons?
Then they’re tankies.
Was George Bush Jr a Tankie when he invaded Iraq? Is Trump a Tankie for invading Venezuela?
Or is the whole Blood For Oil thing Based and Freedom-Pilled?
those who defend China and USSR as if they can’t do anything wrong
I've yet to see anyone - left, right, or center - that has suggested an entire country's worth of people has never done anything wrong in its history.
"Tankie" has a real, actual, honest to god historical definition. Its not just "people who liked the Soviet system more than the capitalist system". Its an explicit advocacy for non-interventionism during the Cold War. Specifically, it is British progressives who didn't want the UK sending support to Hungarian reactionaries during the 1956 revolt.
The British media portrayed any reluctance to intercede on behalf of anti-communists abroad as pro-Khrushchev puppets who wanted to see Russian tanks flatten all of Europe. That's what a "Tankie" is supposed to mean. It's a person accused (by anti-soviet British media) of wanting a Soviet conquest of the planet.
We need an unjustifiably smug sounding pejorative for people who call everyone tankies, to call them in exchange so that they can see how not epic their insult is.
A lot of people dont deserve a reply. Works great for me. I'm sure thats been me many times in the past. (And future)
No they wouldn't. Final consumer cost is based on what people WILL pay not what they WANT to pay. At the end of the day the overarching goal of capitalism is for 99% of the population to spend 100% of their earnings. You can't funnel all wealth to the 1% if the 99% are holding on to it.
Yes. It's like big telecom. When people install panels at home, power companies start inventing additional fees. If communities start looking for local grids, companies start lobbying to outlaw this.
The main problem with that is the large power consumption by industry. This is ensuring continued profits for the company and thereby weakens your influence, similar to hiring scabs.
In the short term, yes. The money you've saved is now considered "disposable income" and will be absorbed by the next person in line.
If a paycheck could make you wealthy, no one would give you a paycheck. A retirement account CAN make you wealthy but only after the machine has squeezed 40+ years out of you. But one way or another that money is leaving your hands and flowing back into the system.
Yes. BUT there are certain ways a government can help its citizens (and itself in most cases) by allowing them to be self sufficient that has nothing to do with electric companies or monopolies at all. The subsidies for solar panels were a great example of this. Depending on your personal needs, you could generate enough power to take yourself off the grid, and the government invested in your panels by way of those subsidies. In many cases the extra electricity from the panels that you don't use can go back into a grid to be used by someone else. Theoretically helping you and the government. There are, of course some issues with the system but speaking from experience it can absolutely work and work wonderfully.
Unfortunately Trump (of course) has killed these subsidies so that will not be a thing as of new years 2026.
Ok, sure. There are theoretical and convoluted ways to disconnect from the electric grid. You're still buying solar panels. Your out of pocket costs don't change. The river of money still flows into and out of your life. It's called currency for a reason. The whole system is designed to stop you from keeping your money.
The dark secret about money is that it only works when there's isn't enough for everyone. Despite what politicians want you to believe, you are SUPPOSED to live paycheck to paycheck- at least under a western capitalist economy. This is why poor people are both the most valuable citizens, and easiest to control. It's slavery with more steps.
I know your intentions are good, but this reads as a rather damning list of why a bunch of people are going to fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
There were recently a couple of bad gas leaks locally and it was an interesting reminder that there's these natural gas lines laid crisscrossing the northern US that are just explosions waiting to happen. There's been some nasty ones too
The unavoidable conclusion in today's world is that we need to be phasing out natural gas. It can't be cleanly turned off and back on, it's wildly dangerous if it leaks out due to poor install/maintaince or natural disasters, it can explode if someone happens to drill into a gas line (I know a guy who did internet installs and at the time he joked about how "yeah you just drill holes into folks homes to poke the cables through and hope you don't hear hissing after drilling") during a house fire it just feeds more extremely potent fuel into the fire until turned off. About the only benefit is when it's extremely cold out, such as when the destabilizing polar vortex whips through, natural gas is probably the most energy efficient option to keep homes and businesses inhabitable
Plus methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, even with the shorter lifetime. We seem entirely unable to reduce methane leaks or even measure them against natural gas usage.
But from a consumer perspective.
where I live, electricity is much more expensive than natural gas, maybe double the cost per unit of energy
and I pay even more for 75% renewables
I just got a heat pump installed for my addition. So far temps have gotten just a bit under freezing and it has no problems keeping up
But that adds up to a reality where the cost threshold is mid-40°F’s. While it may be an argument in favor of solar, I don’t have enough unshaded roof to generate more than half my usage
You can't say bad things about the government in China.
This might sound like an absurd restriction of free speech, but consider that it's also considered highly illegal in germany to ask for the abolishment of democracy. Many far-right groups do this, and the Verfassungsschutz (basically a kind of special police force) keeps a close eye on them because of that, calls them "verfassungsgefährdend" (going against the constitution). Monarchies like england had similar laws around 1900, where you could say everything except talk badly about the monarchy in power. That was known as the "english liberalism" because in many other countries, you could say even less. China does the same today, just that instead of the german constitution or the english monarchy it's the Communist Party.
What's the awful everything else? China has consistently some of the highest government satisfaction rates in the world
As a Spaniard, it's hard to conceive 90+% of the population being satisfied with the central government, everyone here hates our government and politicians.
Are you sure you're speaking for Chinese people when you criticize whatever "everything else" you refer to?
So 1.4 billion Chinese are essentially suffering Stockholm Syndrome from the evil Chinese Government, and their satisfaction rates have nothing to do with the consistently increasing living standards?
As a Spaniard, you should ask your parents and/or grandparents if in Franco's day they would really tell their real opinions about their government to some random person doing a poll.
Government satisfaction data in an autocracy is always going to be poluted because people fear their words might reach the ears of somebody in a position of authority and them being punished in some way for being critical of the government, so they keep it to themselves and share it at most with family and close friends.
(And this is before we even count the effects from people's main information sources being highly controlled in such regimes, so literally they might think other countries are shitholes compared to theirs because that's what newspapes and TV tell them. Even though people are quite a lot more cynical about the "news" in such regimes - one of the Soviet times jokes was "There is no pravda [truth] in the Pravda [the newspaper], there is no izvestia [news] in the Izvestia [another newspaper]" - such total control in aggregate still pushes public opinion to be better than otherwise).
People have no such need to keep their mouth shut in Democracies. Further, I would even say that in Democracies people are incentivised to be loudly critical - those who support a different political party than the one in power tend to be loudly critical purelly out of tribalism, same as they would criticize the other team in a footbal match even if that team was playing well.
All this to say that we don't really know how much people in China are satisfied or not with the authorities there because smart people living in a autocratic regime know better than to voice criticism of those in power, which polutes the data, whilst in Democracies political clubism also probably polutes the data but in the opposite direction.
Your comment can be wholly ignored by explaining to you that the surveys I refer to are done by western institutions like Pew Research, the University of California or the Ash Center for Democratic Governance (source).
You, as a westerner, believe your western propaganda that China is an antidemocratic autocracy where people can't give their political opinions freely. Chinese people simply don't feel that way as per any serious study, and your opinion can be safely ignored because it's based on your misunderstandings as a misled westerner.
I happen to live next door to Spain, in Portugal, and I did ask my parents and older friends (some of which who are very leftwing and were Communists back in the days of the Revolution) and back then in our own Fascism (which ran parallel to Spain's) nobody would tell their true opinion about the government to a stranger, much less a stranger claiming to be doing a poll for some university in a country which is viewed and views itself as an adversary of your own country.
Hell, in such a setup people would loudly tell the foreigner (or local working for those foreigners) just how great their government was just in case that was some kind of sting operation by the secret police or what you said leaked out: back when even your neighbours could rat you out to the secret police for saying something critical of the regime, criticizing the regime to somebody claiming to be doing a "poll" like this was a good way to end up a political prisioner (and, unlike those hailing from the middle class, politicial prisioners from poorer families didn't get the velvet glove treatment, and most people were poor and working class).
So, it's strange you didn't ask such things from older people in the country you claim to hail from...
That and given how you phrased...
You, as a westerner, believe your western propaganda that China is an antidemocratic autocracy where people can’t give their political opinions freely. Chinese people simply don’t feel that way as per any serious study, and your opinion can be safely ignored because it’s based on your misunderstandings as a misled westerner.
all sounds a lot like you're not a Spaniard. Which would make your earlier statement:
As a Spaniard, it’s hard to conceive 90+% of the population being satisfied with the central government
a lie.
Guess who would try and pass themselves as a "westerner" to seem more trustworthy in a forum mostly frequented by "westerners" when defending China?
A propaganda astroturfer.
(Funilly enough, there's a ton of anti-China propaganda in the West, especially in the US, it's just that this time you seriously overplayed that as a card when you tried to whitewash your own propaganda with it)
PS: Oh and just to point out how much that "westerner bias" bollocks applies to me, just after I made that previous comment on your bullshit, I made an equally critical comment on some other muppet from the "other" side talking about "China's attrocities", and that comment of mine definitelly sounds like pro-China to any simpleton tribalist moron or propaganda sockpuppet.
My biggest "bias" in this is against Hipocrisy and Propaganda.
In a field of shit, pointing at a specific turd and shouting "Look at that shit" is at best redundant, at worst sleazy propagandistic and hipocrite bollocks.
China's present day level of support for atrocity is nothing compared with most of the West's active support (diplomatic, economic and even with weapons) for the the present day equivalent of the Nazis committing a Genocide in Gaza.
Even what Russia is doing in Ukraine (with the support of China) is nowhere close to that shit if measured in terms of civilian casualties as a percentage of the population (even if including military casualties, it's still well below the levels of bloodshed in Gaza).
We would need to go back to the time of Mao to find China supporting atrocities at such a level.
That "atrocities" flag is best waved from the top of the moral high ground, not from the top of a pile of Palestinian children's bones.
China has consistently some of the highest government satisfaction rates in the world
it's hard to conceive 90+% of the population being satisfied with the central government, everyone here hates our government and politicians.
You're so close to tripping over the fact that authoritarian governments can't be trusted to provide honest answers. Who wants to say you're unsatisfied when doing so could get you vanned?
I've given my sources in other comments and they're all western institutions. Your inability to believe them comes not from reasonable skepticism, but from western propaganda giving you cognitive bias against anything positive coming from China.
One of the biggest government contractors in China is the company that conducts polling.
How do you tell the difference between an authoritarian government and a government that is responsive to public sentiment but also happens to be on diplomatically shaky ground with your own leaders?
I mean I would be skeptical too of any piece of info that comes from China, but how does that coincide with only 44% of "Township" people being satisfied 10 years ago?
China has literally a fascist government. Authoritarians that seize corporate control for nationalistic interests while still deferring to original private property owners.
Cult of leadership is typical too. Which includes the satisfaction of citizens.
Makes me laugh when people here laud China. Especially when they're commies who fell for the lie that China is communism.
You can question the methodology, I've already given the sources in other replies if you're interested (which links to several different studies, all carried out by western organizations such as University of California or the Pew Research Institute). You're just not really interested, and you will reject the information because your cognitive bias tells you to.
Polls carried out by Pew Research, University of California and other western institutions. Too communist for you?
What happens when you speak ill of the government there?
For the most part nothing, you may argue there's a degree of censorship on Chinese social media, but if there were political prisoners for having "the wrong opinions" in China we wouldn't hear the end of it. There's nothing like Russia's Navalny in China.
They can't, if you have a functioning market economy.
There should be competition and renewables, due to their more decentralized nature even incite competition.
You seem to assume that mergers and acquisitions are not an essential part of a market economy. Left to their own devices, capitalists will always end up trying to form monopolies. You need a strong regulatory state to keep them in check. But then because they are inexorably pulled towards maximizing profitability, they will try to capture the state and deregulate. So, unless you go to a very aggressively anticapitalist set of policies a market economy will never be "functioning" for long.
I don't assume that, and I won't argue for an entirely free market. I also agree with your observation that accumulation happens, however we might have different views on how long that actually takes. Atm the shift to renewables is disrupting the accumulation we already have in the energy sector, because it requires very little capital to build your own little solar powerplant compared to a fossil or nuclear powerplant (or large hydro, btw.). Same thing for battery storage units. So with renewables, there's more potential for competition.
That might change again in the future through continued accumulation and shitty policies,
but my point is: as long as we don't have either monopolies or cartels and thusly competition in the market still exists, even large corporations can't simply dictate prices to increase their margins.
How about this: "a functioning market economy" is only possibly with strong overshight of a greater authority than "the Market", which puts the interests of citizens above the interests of businesses.
If left to their own devices the Free Market only ever exists in low barriers to entry and low economies of scale markets, like teddy bears or soap, not in markets were it's much harder for new entrants and being bigger is always better - and energy generation until recently was very capital intensive and required big power plants or dams located in very specific places so was not a flat-playing-field size-agnostic market and tended towards monopolies and cartels.
Even nowadays with solar, even in those countries were personal generation is viable unless governments have intervened and force it to be otherwise there are barriers for individuals and small companies to sell their self-generated power (for example were I live they get 1/4 of the price selling than they do buying), which are a mix of cost barriers to entry (the cost of a proper converter on top of the cost of the additional panels if you want to go beyond self-consumption), financial structures dominated by and best suited for large companies (mainly the wholesale and consumer markets being separate, with the large companies sitting in the middle and extracting rents from being an intermediary) and even regulatory barriers to entry (the product of governments activelly legislating and regulating to benefit the large energy companies).
No, no, you can't have green energy until corporations figure out how to make just as much money off it as they do fossil fuels. Don't worry though, they're innovating. Last summer some prick about had my dad convinced to pay him to put solar panels on his roof and then also continue paying for the power those panels generated.
Nuclear is also a good option. It has the potential to scale up to our generation needs faster than green energy, and it can still be environmentally clean when any byproduct is handled responsibly.
Do I trust my government (USA) to enforce proper procedure and handling? Not really… but I do think we’re less likely to have a nuclear accident in the present day. Modern designs have many more fail safes. And I think it’d still be much cleaner than burning fossil fuels.
I think they need to coexist, though. I think a goal in the far-future should be a decentralized grid with renewable energy sources integrated wherever they can be.
Basically the one nation I would have most trusted to handle nuclear safely, Japan, couldn't even do it. The issue these days is not that the plants themselves are unsafe, it's that we live on a active and changing planet, and accidents can and will always happen because of so-called acts of God. The problem is that nuclear, when it goes bad, tends to go mega ultra bad in ways that are very environmentally destructive and heinously expensive to clean up. So even if there is only 1/10000 the accident rate at nuclear plants that there are at other power plants, the consequences can be a million times worse.
Love me some Thorium! It doesn't address every natural-disaster type of concern as far as radiation leaks and environmental contamination, but is absolutely the better choice over Plutonium/Uranium in terms of meltdowns and nuclear waste.
Why is your model for nuclear Japan? China is the world's forefront of nuclear energy research and development, keeps expanding its capabilities, and has a clean record with no accidents.
Regardless, you're overestimating the damage that nuclear has done in comparison with other energy sources. You could have one Chernobyl per year and you wouldn't come close to the death toll coal or oil have worldwide. Regarding Fukushima for example, since you brought up Japan: some recent studies suggest that more people have died as a consequence of the upending of their lived by the evacuation of the whole region, than would have died according to realistic statistical models of radiation damage to humans. The main problem is that fossil fuel lobbies have successfully made people completely intolerant of radiation damage while they happily live in cities breathing in NO2 and particulate matter without one complaint.
Yeah one really nice thing about nuclear is it's very easy to safely hide all the waste away for 20-60 years and pretend it'll never leak or cause issues for anyone in the future, but then you get a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
Wow, an energy source which sometimes has increased cancer rates in its vicinity due to pollution? Thank golly all other energy sources don't have such problems!
Humans would never cheap out on health and safety, or reduce regulatory red tape just to try to bring costs (and maybe, though less likely, prices) down.
Unheard of.
Would you feel better about nuclear if we expanded these rebreeder reactors I've heard of (uses spent nuclear waate) to the point there is no spent fuel sitting around?
yeah if we could not stick shit in the ground that remains deadly for thousands of years, with containment solutions designed to last 20-60 years, that would be great. But we just keep pretending this stuff is cleaner than it is because we've learned how contain the waste safely for about a single human lifespan. But just read about the slow-motion disaster that are the US nuclear superfund sites and you'll see that you can put off the consequences of this waste for so many decades before it comes back around. And there is no waste-free nuclear tech at this point, just less wasteful.
Sure hydro is a lot more pilotable, or better yet, batteries.
But actually, turning it off 100% is probably the least important property of pilotable plants : you almost never need that. What does matter, however, is that those plants can be engineered to generally follow the daily demand curve and France's plants can do that at the rate of about 1% per minute.
Thankfully that is going to happen anyway through simple economics. Fossil fuel extraction is functionally already a peak technology, out of which every bit of efficiency has been squeezed by over 100 years of frantic and lavishly funded scientific development, whereas solar, battery, and wind technologies have been absolutely plunging in $-per-Kw to deploy and have much much further to go. So governments can try to slow this down as much as they wish, but it's as much a fool's errand as trying to rescue the horse industry in about 1920.
Now as for the question of "why isn't this more efficient technology resulting in savings for, me, the consumer?" I can only encourage you to look at the entire history of extractive, investor-driven capitalism for the answer.
Yeah, oil used to be the cheapest energy source for most situations (with the notable exception of mass power generation, were coal - an environmental even worse fossil fuel - was cheaper), but over the last couple of decades due to pressure on both the supply side (the easilly and cheaply extractable stuff gone) and from competing energy sources (like solar and wind-generation) oil stopped being one of the cheapest energy sources and it was pushed into just those uses were its high energy density gave it an advantage (i.e. transportation).
With better battery technology even that advantage is being lost (so electric cars are becoming the standard), which leaves only some chemical synthesis processes as places were oil is the best option.
Coal was kind pushed out of most of its markets long ago (hence you don't see that many steam trains around) so it is mainly used in power generation, and the falling cost of solar is making coal uncompetitive in it.
Gas is a little behind oil, with its main uses being domestic heating and cooking - now transiting to electric - and power generation - where renewables are now cheaper.
The trend for fossil fuels has been obvious for decades but there is naturally a TON of inertia in the pricing changes actually resulting in the needed infrastructure changes to transition away from them plus the Economic interests which extract rents in those areas are very literally paying politicians to delay this change as much as possible hence phenomenons like many more rightwing political parties pushing anti-renewables policies.
Have you considered inventing a time machine, going back in time, becoming a general contractor, and then building your house but smaller? Smh, people won't go the slightest bit out of their way to make things better these days.
Not sure if you’re referring to USA, but the energy code in the US is quite strict. Since the 80s insulation has been required and in the last 20 years the code has tightened to be quite strict. Homes in Latin America have none, no energy code, and European housing stock predates these requirements. Doesn’t mean US homes don’t consume a ton of energy but they are probably way better insulated than average.
Hilariously my 1200 sq foot 125 year old home is much less energy efficient than my in-laws 3000 sq foot 3 year old home due to the greatly improved insulation and sealing practices in modern structures. On the other hand my house is so drafty I don't have to worry about things like mold growth due to improper vapor barriers nor the air becoming too stale due to insufficient circulation
Its not all about insulation though. A terrace has much less exterior wall than a row of spread out detached homes.
Some still insulate the party wall. but more for sound reasons. But the main advantage of terraces , fossil fuel-wise, is that the medium-density is more likely to give you a walkable grocery + other stuff and a somewhat useful bus service or other public transport.
Though modern suburbs here can be pretty sparse too with more detached homes.
Don't even have to invest. In my area, a 100% renewable supplier was about 30% more per KWH, all of that extra overhead was paid to keep old unprofitable coal plants online. That's capitalist efficiency for you.
Brother the only way it’s cheaper to source your own panels is if you buy them outright. Less than 50% of Americans have a savings account let alone 10k in disposable income.
If you take out a loan for the panels the payments equal what your electric bill would be and by the time you pay off the panels it’s time to replace them.
So you paid the same amount you thought you were going to pay, your bill didn't increase that whole time, your carbon footprint was lower and you didn't give any money to the ratfuckers? Where is the downside?
I had a whole thing about my setup here, but it was more than I want to share. Short version, panels are cheaper, easier to deal with, and longer lasting than you think. Most manufacturers guarantee 80% capacity after 30 years, area covered is more important than max output, there's no need to buy the whole thing at once, 3-5k no more than 1200 at a time over a few years can get a lot of people all they need
Not to mention that in certain countries they could also get better public services if they didn't need to spend money on a military sized for power projection into the Middle East ...
Not working great so far. I’m 100% for renewables and fuck fossil fuels, but despite the press about renewables finally being cheaper than fossil, it isn’t being passed to the consumer yet.
Depending on where you live this might be because of pricing regulations which require payments to be equal to the most expensive source used in a given period plus a preset margin. Some of the regulatory systems don't know how to cope with the differences in generation that come from renewables. ...not that they're great at managing the non-renewables these days either.
This is an absolute fact: the government refuses to invest in green energy because it produces too much energy and they’d have to give out power for free.
The UK isn't leading they way. They're dragged kicking and screaming because they no longer have access to cheap Russian fuel. They've made it into the 45% bracket, which is good but not exceptional.
Sweden, Finland and Denmark had the highest RES (Renewable energy source) shares among Member States in 2024 due to strong hydro industries (Sweden and Finland), wind power and wide use of solid biofuels for district heating. All of which are driven by public investment and administration.
UK drop off in carbon emissions over the last 40 years has largely been the result of deindustrialization and exporting of manufacturing abroad. They still consume a great deal of carbon per capita. They just do it by purchasing finished goods from overseas.
Also to add to what you wrote, another reason is that their North Sea oil reserves became pretty much depleted in the last decade or two with gas following it, which has pushed gas prices higher and hence pushed people to user more electricity (gas prices in Britain were famously low) and along with exporting all industry to places like China and Bangladesh that has naturally brought down Britain's direct CO2 emissions.
Yet another reason is that the Crown makes money from licensing space for offshore wind farms since they're the ones who officially own the seabed around Britain.
I used to live as an immigrant in Britain and, still today, it still never ceases to amaze me how so many of them keep falling for the "Britain is leading..." bullshit they're constantly fed by the media and politicians over there, not just in this but in pretty much everything (Brexit didn't happen in a vacuum).
Even my shitty shit country - Portugal - has long been beating Britain in this (as it's a much poorer country, badly managed and with lots of problems) purelly because even in the time of Salazar (the Fascist dictator) there was a lot of investment in Hydro-generation, which continued after the Revolution in 74 and expanded into Wind-generation (actual in-shore wind, because unlike in Britain the NIMBYs don't have the power to just push it to be the much more expensive offshore kind) and later Solar, so whilst Britain was mismanaging their North Sea reserves and burning oil and gas like there's no tomorrow (part of the reason why Norway has a massive sovereign fund and the UK does not - the Norwegians didn't just burn it like crazy and wasted the money of whatever was sold) my country was already generating a lot of its power from hydro and it just became more so since.
Shitty shit Portugal is now in the 75%+ bracket on renewables.
The idea that Britain is leading anybody in renewables adoption is hilariously wrong.
But the fossil fuel billionaires are bribing them now. What's the point of creating solar and wind billionaires in ten years time? Who knows who will be in power and collecting their bribes then.
Taking away (partially or completely) reliance upon carbon or nuclear energy will reduce costs and help save the planet. Like my solar set up, it costs less to run my home and workshop in summer than it does in winter.
This is really a huge oversimplification of a complex and nuanced topic. But the main thing worth mentioning is that your utility bills, in all likelihood, are already insanely cheap if you compare what you get to any other time in history. Like, keeping your home temperature at a perfectly pleasant temperature 24 hours per day probably costs you only a couple hours of labor each month. Compare this to gathering sticks in the forest and lighting a fire inside a mud hut - which, btw, also gives you lung cancer faster than cigarettes.
Should the government invest more in renewables? Yes, obviously. They should also fund the infrastructure necessary to make renewables work at scale, and research to improve renewable generation, transmission, and storage tech in order to close the gap between what is practical now and what we need to achieve. And while they are at it, they should introduce improved pricing schemes to head off increased wasteful usage. But will any of this actually have a direct impact on consumer pricing....? Probably not, since almost all utilities are already state owned or else heavily regulated. The cost of electricity is determined more by committee and political maneuvering than the actual price of, say, coal or solar on a day to day basis. The actual mechanism of paying for power to be generated and delivered to your house on demand is a combination of the price you pay per kwh, property taxes, government revenue in general, debt taken on by the government or utility, investments made in the past, etc. If you actually want a cheaper price per kwh, the solution is simply petitioning whatever regulatory body is in charge to lower it.
Of course, the problem with lower prices is that they encourage wasteful usage. If electricity becomes free, then aunt Ethel will start blasting the AC while leaving the windows open, because she likes to be comfortable while listening to the birds chirp. Without appropriate pricing schemes, people and companies will use up as much additional renewable capacity as is built as soon as you finish building it.
The average for the whole US during the winter is just under $1,000. That is around $250 a month. This is also not a "few" hours.
Central air can easily run +$200 a month during the summer.
I will admit I have a big house that is heated with diesel. My bill would be half that if I had a heat pump.
Considering most Americans were living paycheck to paycheck before this recent bout of inflation, I don't think most have any extra money to play around with anymore. It is time for tough decisions like keeping the house warm or eating things other than ramen.
Trust me, I have been eyeing a heat pump for awhile now.
The house is close to 4k square feet, but I do have 10 people living there so it is being well utilized. I also live in Alaska so we get entire months of sub 20 temperatures.
It is still hard to deal with when you get that fuel bill.
Sure, but the peaks and lows are gonna be steeper. We have that in Finland because we built a lot of wind power in the last 20 years and barely with great expense completed only a single nuke station.
Electricity costs are currently kinda ok https://eprice.info/ but they frequently go up to 20-30c/kWh when it gets colder and there's less wind.
Sigh, all I see is panacea thinking....I want dank memes.
But here's some reality for you that'll destroy my karma.
The market naturally drives energy toward the lowest price because buyers choose the cheapest reliable option and producers must compete. Inefficient sources fade while the most cost effective ones grow. This happens automatically through supply and demand.
Many green technologies, depend on heavy subsidies and huge upfront costs. They promise clean and limitless power, but the real costs of materials, storage, and maintenance make them far more expensive than they seem. This makes them feel less like practical solutions and more like a comforting promise being sold as a cure for everything.
If your energy company could create very cheap energy it would. It would mean higher profits.
Lmfao you speak with authority despite it being complete bullshit.
"Heavy subsidies and huge upfront costs" applies far far more to oil and gas than to anything else. It's only due to the massive amount of technological and economic inertia behind oil and gas that it is still around.
For building new power generation, utility-scale solar and onshore wind are now almost universally cheaper than new coal, oil, or gas-fired power plants. This threshold was passed in most of the world around the mid-2010s and has become undeniable in the 2020s.
Solar is now often cheaper than existing fossil fuel plants: In many regions, it's now cheaper to build and operate a brand-new solar farm than to just keep running an existing coal or gas plant.
"The market" doesn't operate like you get taught as a child. The vast majority of economic decisions are made by those in power to ensure they stay in power. It makes little sense for a business person to cannabalise their own industry. They have vertically integrated and are invested in the supply chain from start to finish, and there's no benefit to them for things to change. It's far easier to just impede competitors than change the course of behemoth corporations.
You opened by insulting me instead of addressing my point, which says more about your argument than mine.
Claiming solar is automatically cheaper ignores system level costs. Wind and solar need storage, backup, and major grid upgrades, and those costs are still high. That is why renewables depend on large subsidies and mandates, just as fossil fuels have historically.
If solar were truly cheaper in a complete sense, companies would switch on their own because profit is a powerful incentive. The fact that adoption still relies on policy pressure shows the picture is more complicated than the simple claim that fossil fuels only survive through inertia.
The perfect drug would cost exactly as much as a patient can produce while maintaining themselves. This is not an original or hypothetical example. Treatment is more profitable than cure.
That example is old, overused, and rarely true. For example: How many old filament lightbulbs do you see on the market today?
Many cures have made a lot of money in medicine. Iron lungs used to be expensive to maintain, but vaccines made them unnecessary.
There is plenty of fast and lasting profit in actually curing diseases. The demand for cures is enormous, so successful cures become some of the most valuable medical products ever created.
Examples from medical history where cures were profitable: 1) polio vaccine, 2) hepatitis c antiviral, 3) small pox vaccine, 4) antibiotics, and 5) H. pylori cure for stomach ulcers.
Interesting such an old, trite example went over your head. Classic for a reason and very true imo. Filament lightbulbs were engineered to burn out regularly and require replacement, that doesn't make the point you're going for. Broad spectrum antibiotics breed resistant strains and require new formulations, especially when aggressively marketed and overprescribed because more use=more money. Again not a great example. Vaccine development has historically been funded and promoted by government as a cost-effective way of maintaining a workforce, not exactly a shining endorsement of profit motive. I'm genuinely having a hard time believing you're dumb enough to make these arguments in good faith and kinda done here
Classic move—attacking me because your argument ran out of steam.
Your philistine viewpoint is still under researched and, frankly, unknowledgeable.
Your points don't make sense. Let's dig into bulbs, antibiotics and Vaccines from a $ perspective.
Filament light bulbs are gone because someone else sold a more efficient bulb and changed the market...and made boat load of cash and literally made filament bulbs extinct. $
Penicillin and later antibiotics cured deadly infections that once required long hospital stays. These cures transformed modern medicine and became some of the most profitable drugs ever sold.$
Lastly my Vaccines example, Smallpox required endless isolation facilities and caretaking. The vaccine eliminated an entire global disease. It was also massively funded, widely purchased, and financially successful for its creators.$
Reminder for anyone looking at this graph that nuclear is driven high by western incompetence, and nuclear prices actually continuously drop in places with competent governments like China
We’d spend money up front to build the green energy generation.
Distribution costs don’t go down, and tend to increase over time.
It would take a while to realize any savings on the consumer bills?
It depends how you do it. I invested in green energy with a heat pump and spend fuck all compared to some people I know in heating. With a home battery I could cut my energy down to about £300 a year. Dont even need solar for that.
See also: accessible health care. When the gov is the only consumer - ie no private monopoly and no dual-market slippery-slope - then healthcare becomes accessible and supported by regular income tax.
That's what holds US gas prices down, subsidies. Helping large scale things be possible is what a government should do. There's many things that wouldn't have happened without the government paying for it.
The kicker is that if they switched to green and took away paying for petroleum, things would collapse, as green alone isn't going to support our society. That's the dead end we've walked ourselves into. It's not one or the other, it's what can we supplement or phase out with a better solution. And that kind of work needs government support, from subsidies to regulations to a supervisor that directs the change vs. relying only on free market.
Let’s find out. When I started advocating for increased renewables, the expected limit was the grid destabilizing at 30% renewables. Now many places are there. I recently read a piece expecting the limit to be about 95% renewables based on scalability of todays grid storage. Were a long way from that, so let’s work toward it and see what improvements we can make along the way
Note: one of the more difficult areas to greenify will be the military, but imagine instead shrinking that as we no longer have to defend petrostates or fossil fuel trade routes
Sure, let's keep going towards the goal of better solutions. Even this meme doesn't say or imply that it has to be all green, and it simply can't. Some things need a high energy density or other features that unfortunately only petroleum has. It really is an amazing substance. That causes problems. Everything has a cost.
When the government subsidizes the shit out of the alternatives, yes. But also investing in research for better things means you get better things faster.
Why? The government has better purchasing power than any private corporation and most things, but especially infrastructure become more economic at a greater scale.
Another point is that utilities are natural monopolies, and that the government building and controlling the infrastructure would cut out the profit motive that is currently driving up the cost.
For example some counties have free public transport, in part because it's better for the economy as a whole. That wouldn't make sense if public transport is privately owned.
If "our" means on the US, you may have to take a look at your electricity monopolies for it to make any difference.
The US has some of the cheapest energy in the civilized world. I’m not sure what to draw from that fact, but it is clear our energy system works pretty well for the end-user.
For a counterpoint, check out Germany’s expensive as fuck energy.
You have some of the world's cheapest electricity wholesale. You also have a huge variance in prices to end-user, with the people that complain on the internet being among the most expensive in the world... because, of course, people that get cheaper prices don't complain.
Also, yes, electricity in Germany is expensive as fuck.
It's also one of the oldest and poorly maintained for much of the country. As the data centers keep going up it's making it harder and harder to meet customers energy needs.
This argument has received responses calling me a Commie, a Tankie, and 'a would-be enslaver of humanity' from family, friends, and internet randoms alike.
For me it is that I just... sorta listened to Bill Nye in the 90s about carbon dioxide.
I am pretty sure 90% of people who get called tankies on Lemmy are not communists. Tankie-calling is by far the most obnoxious Lemmy community pastime. But I'll give them this, it's an extremely annoying word, much more annoying to be called than "fascist". We need an unjustifiably smug sounding pejorative for people who call everyone tankies, to call them in exchange so that they can see how not epic their insult is.
The key thing is that the insult needs to seem like you think it's really badass and brave of you to call them that, and it should seem like you think they're seething at you, when in reality it's a super lame insult. Like so:
"You're a tankie"
"Oh no the Tankie-twister has arrived!"
"Wtf kind of lame insult is that lol"
"Now you know how everyone else feels about being called tankies"
Does the person deny the human rights violation of USSR and China? Then they're tankies. Simple as that.
I mean, ACAB. I'm sure you can find human rights abuses anywhere you want to look.
But what does this have to do with decarbonization? Is China's production of photovoltaics materially more abusive than America's production of hydrocarbons?
Was George Bush Jr a Tankie when he invaded Iraq? Is Trump a Tankie for invading Venezuela?
Or is the whole Blood For Oil thing Based and Freedom-Pilled?
I should add, those who defend China and USSR as if they can't do anything wrong are DEFINITELY tankies.
I've yet to see anyone - left, right, or center - that has suggested an entire country's worth of people has never done anything wrong in its history.
"Tankie" has a real, actual, honest to god historical definition. Its not just "people who liked the Soviet system more than the capitalist system". Its an explicit advocacy for non-interventionism during the Cold War. Specifically, it is British progressives who didn't want the UK sending support to Hungarian reactionaries during the 1956 revolt.
The British media portrayed any reluctance to intercede on behalf of anti-communists abroad as pro-Khrushchev puppets who wanted to see Russian tanks flatten all of Europe. That's what a "Tankie" is supposed to mean. It's a person accused (by anti-soviet British media) of wanting a Soviet conquest of the planet.
That's an interesting spin I have ever seen of whitewashing crimes of communist regimes. You're definitely a tankie.
If you definition hasn't evolved since the 50s it might be a little out of date. That definition could draw retirement at this point.
How do you read English?
The reciprocal word I've typically seen is "liberal".
That's just tossing a hand grenade into any political discourse.
Do people get upset about that
It's funny, because the term was coined back in the 1950s to describe British progressives who opposed NATO intervention in Eastern Europe.
If anti-interventionism is what passes the bar for Communism, I suspect Lemmy might be flush with the little red bastards.
A lot of people dont deserve a reply. Works great for me. I'm sure thats been me many times in the past. (And future)
Probably an offshoot of just how many tankies there are on Lemmy. Some people are definitely getting caught in the crossfire.
No they wouldn't. Final consumer cost is based on what people WILL pay not what they WANT to pay. At the end of the day the overarching goal of capitalism is for 99% of the population to spend 100% of their earnings. You can't funnel all wealth to the 1% if the 99% are holding on to it.
So you’re telling me if I found a way reach all my fellow power company customers we could strike and lower our power rates?
This is sounding like you're trying to do a socialism over here.
Sounds like you don't understand what socialism is
Many states have very regulated utility prices: you may need just a half dozen buddies and get appointed to the oversight board that approves rates
This guy politics.
Yes. It's like big telecom. When people install panels at home, power companies start inventing additional fees. If communities start looking for local grids, companies start lobbying to outlaw this.
The main problem with that is the large power consumption by industry. This is ensuring continued profits for the company and thereby weakens your influence, similar to hiring scabs.
In the short term, yes. The money you've saved is now considered "disposable income" and will be absorbed by the next person in line.
If a paycheck could make you wealthy, no one would give you a paycheck. A retirement account CAN make you wealthy but only after the machine has squeezed 40+ years out of you. But one way or another that money is leaving your hands and flowing back into the system.
In a free market, people will pay less for the same service if they can.
Capitalistic utility monopolies are a scam.
Yes. BUT there are certain ways a government can help its citizens (and itself in most cases) by allowing them to be self sufficient that has nothing to do with electric companies or monopolies at all. The subsidies for solar panels were a great example of this. Depending on your personal needs, you could generate enough power to take yourself off the grid, and the government invested in your panels by way of those subsidies. In many cases the extra electricity from the panels that you don't use can go back into a grid to be used by someone else. Theoretically helping you and the government. There are, of course some issues with the system but speaking from experience it can absolutely work and work wonderfully.
Unfortunately Trump (of course) has killed these subsidies so that will not be a thing as of new years 2026.
Ok, sure. There are theoretical and convoluted ways to disconnect from the electric grid. You're still buying solar panels. Your out of pocket costs don't change. The river of money still flows into and out of your life. It's called currency for a reason. The whole system is designed to stop you from keeping your money.
The dark secret about money is that it only works when there's isn't enough for everyone. Despite what politicians want you to believe, you are SUPPOSED to live paycheck to paycheck- at least under a western capitalist economy. This is why poor people are both the most valuable citizens, and easiest to control. It's slavery with more steps.
Imagine the savings to society with the energy independence from green energy
I know your intentions are good, but this reads as a rather damning list of why a bunch of people are going to fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
There were recently a couple of bad gas leaks locally and it was an interesting reminder that there's these natural gas lines laid crisscrossing the northern US that are just explosions waiting to happen. There's been some nasty ones too
The unavoidable conclusion in today's world is that we need to be phasing out natural gas. It can't be cleanly turned off and back on, it's wildly dangerous if it leaks out due to poor install/maintaince or natural disasters, it can explode if someone happens to drill into a gas line (I know a guy who did internet installs and at the time he joked about how "yeah you just drill holes into folks homes to poke the cables through and hope you don't hear hissing after drilling") during a house fire it just feeds more extremely potent fuel into the fire until turned off. About the only benefit is when it's extremely cold out, such as when the destabilizing polar vortex whips through, natural gas is probably the most energy efficient option to keep homes and businesses inhabitable
Plus methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, even with the shorter lifetime. We seem entirely unable to reduce methane leaks or even measure them against natural gas usage.
But from a consumer perspective.
But that adds up to a reality where the cost threshold is mid-40°F’s. While it may be an argument in favor of solar, I don’t have enough unshaded roof to generate more than half my usage
Reminder that China's competent government has done exactly this, and as a result they produce 93% of the world's solar photovoltaic panels.
Can we get the competency with out the whole... Everything else?
Or is our choice between awful and ineffective or awful and effective?
It is what it is. The world is arguably better with them than without
You can't say bad things about the government in China.
This might sound like an absurd restriction of free speech, but consider that it's also considered highly illegal in germany to ask for the abolishment of democracy. Many far-right groups do this, and the Verfassungsschutz (basically a kind of special police force) keeps a close eye on them because of that, calls them "verfassungsgefährdend" (going against the constitution). Monarchies like england had similar laws around 1900, where you could say everything except talk badly about the monarchy in power. That was known as the "english liberalism" because in many other countries, you could say even less. China does the same today, just that instead of the german constitution or the english monarchy it's the Communist Party.
It's bad to do green energy when you're Chinese because... ?
What's the awful everything else? China has consistently some of the highest government satisfaction rates in the world
As a Spaniard, it's hard to conceive 90+% of the population being satisfied with the central government, everyone here hates our government and politicians.
Are you sure you're speaking for Chinese people when you criticize whatever "everything else" you refer to?
"When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds soon follow"
John Dean
So 1.4 billion Chinese are essentially suffering Stockholm Syndrome from the evil Chinese Government, and their satisfaction rates have nothing to do with the consistently increasing living standards?
As a Spaniard, you should ask your parents and/or grandparents if in Franco's day they would really tell their real opinions about their government to some random person doing a poll.
Government satisfaction data in an autocracy is always going to be poluted because people fear their words might reach the ears of somebody in a position of authority and them being punished in some way for being critical of the government, so they keep it to themselves and share it at most with family and close friends.
(And this is before we even count the effects from people's main information sources being highly controlled in such regimes, so literally they might think other countries are shitholes compared to theirs because that's what newspapes and TV tell them. Even though people are quite a lot more cynical about the "news" in such regimes - one of the Soviet times jokes was "There is no pravda [truth] in the Pravda [the newspaper], there is no izvestia [news] in the Izvestia [another newspaper]" - such total control in aggregate still pushes public opinion to be better than otherwise).
People have no such need to keep their mouth shut in Democracies. Further, I would even say that in Democracies people are incentivised to be loudly critical - those who support a different political party than the one in power tend to be loudly critical purelly out of tribalism, same as they would criticize the other team in a footbal match even if that team was playing well.
All this to say that we don't really know how much people in China are satisfied or not with the authorities there because smart people living in a autocratic regime know better than to voice criticism of those in power, which polutes the data, whilst in Democracies political clubism also probably polutes the data but in the opposite direction.
Your comment can be wholly ignored by explaining to you that the surveys I refer to are done by western institutions like Pew Research, the University of California or the Ash Center for Democratic Governance (source).
You, as a westerner, believe your western propaganda that China is an antidemocratic autocracy where people can't give their political opinions freely. Chinese people simply don't feel that way as per any serious study, and your opinion can be safely ignored because it's based on your misunderstandings as a misled westerner.
I happen to live next door to Spain, in Portugal, and I did ask my parents and older friends (some of which who are very leftwing and were Communists back in the days of the Revolution) and back then in our own Fascism (which ran parallel to Spain's) nobody would tell their true opinion about the government to a stranger, much less a stranger claiming to be doing a poll for some university in a country which is viewed and views itself as an adversary of your own country.
Hell, in such a setup people would loudly tell the foreigner (or local working for those foreigners) just how great their government was just in case that was some kind of sting operation by the secret police or what you said leaked out: back when even your neighbours could rat you out to the secret police for saying something critical of the regime, criticizing the regime to somebody claiming to be doing a "poll" like this was a good way to end up a political prisioner (and, unlike those hailing from the middle class, politicial prisioners from poorer families didn't get the velvet glove treatment, and most people were poor and working class).
So, it's strange you didn't ask such things from older people in the country you claim to hail from...
That and given how you phrased...
all sounds a lot like you're not a Spaniard. Which would make your earlier statement:
a lie.
Guess who would try and pass themselves as a "westerner" to seem more trustworthy in a forum mostly frequented by "westerners" when defending China?
A propaganda astroturfer.
(Funilly enough, there's a ton of anti-China propaganda in the West, especially in the US, it's just that this time you seriously overplayed that as a card when you tried to whitewash your own propaganda with it)
PS: Oh and just to point out how much that "westerner bias" bollocks applies to me, just after I made that previous comment on your bullshit, I made an equally critical comment on some other muppet from the "other" side talking about "China's attrocities", and that comment of mine definitelly sounds like pro-China to any simpleton tribalist moron or propaganda sockpuppet.
My biggest "bias" in this is against Hipocrisy and Propaganda.
It's great being comfortable while your government is committing atrocities. Cozy cozy!
Waiting for the day someone finds a government who doesn't commit atrocities.
In a field of shit, pointing at a specific turd and shouting "Look at that shit" is at best redundant, at worst sleazy propagandistic and hipocrite bollocks.
China's present day level of support for atrocity is nothing compared with most of the West's active support (diplomatic, economic and even with weapons) for the the present day equivalent of the Nazis committing a Genocide in Gaza.
Even what Russia is doing in Ukraine (with the support of China) is nowhere close to that shit if measured in terms of civilian casualties as a percentage of the population (even if including military casualties, it's still well below the levels of bloodshed in Gaza).
We would need to go back to the time of Mao to find China supporting atrocities at such a level.
That "atrocities" flag is best waved from the top of the moral high ground, not from the top of a pile of Palestinian children's bones.
Are you talking about the EU-supported genocide of Palestinians?
They might've meant USA.
You're so close to tripping over the fact that authoritarian governments can't be trusted to provide honest answers. Who wants to say you're unsatisfied when doing so could get you vanned?
I've given my sources in other comments and they're all western institutions. Your inability to believe them comes not from reasonable skepticism, but from western propaganda giving you cognitive bias against anything positive coming from China.
One of the biggest government contractors in China is the company that conducts polling.
How do you tell the difference between an authoritarian government and a government that is responsive to public sentiment but also happens to be on diplomatically shaky ground with your own leaders?
I mean I would be skeptical too of any piece of info that comes from China, but how does that coincide with only 44% of "Township" people being satisfied 10 years ago?
China has literally a fascist government. Authoritarians that seize corporate control for nationalistic interests while still deferring to original private property owners.
Cult of leadership is typical too. Which includes the satisfaction of citizens.
Makes me laugh when people here laud China. Especially when they're commies who fell for the lie that China is communism.
Surveyman: Hello random Chinese friendo, how is life under the glorious CCP?
Random Chinese friend: Can't complain.
Surveyman: China has consistently some of the highest government satisfaction rates in the world
You can question the methodology, I've already given the sources in other replies if you're interested (which links to several different studies, all carried out by western organizations such as University of California or the Pew Research Institute). You're just not really interested, and you will reject the information because your cognitive bias tells you to.
Remind me. What happens when you speak ill of the government there? You think that might affect polls?
Ill freely admit China has many strengths... but it is definitely authoritarian also.
Polls carried out by Pew Research, University of California and other western institutions. Too communist for you?
For the most part nothing, you may argue there's a degree of censorship on Chinese social media, but if there were political prisoners for having "the wrong opinions" in China we wouldn't hear the end of it. There's nothing like Russia's Navalny in China.
Would companies make it cheaper or would they keep the price and pocket the profit?
They can't, if you have a functioning market economy. There should be competition and renewables, due to their more decentralized nature even incite competition.
You seem to assume that mergers and acquisitions are not an essential part of a market economy. Left to their own devices, capitalists will always end up trying to form monopolies. You need a strong regulatory state to keep them in check. But then because they are inexorably pulled towards maximizing profitability, they will try to capture the state and deregulate. So, unless you go to a very aggressively anticapitalist set of policies a market economy will never be "functioning" for long.
I don't assume that, and I won't argue for an entirely free market. I also agree with your observation that accumulation happens, however we might have different views on how long that actually takes. Atm the shift to renewables is disrupting the accumulation we already have in the energy sector, because it requires very little capital to build your own little solar powerplant compared to a fossil or nuclear powerplant (or large hydro, btw.). Same thing for battery storage units. So with renewables, there's more potential for competition.
That might change again in the future through continued accumulation and shitty policies, but my point is: as long as we don't have either monopolies or cartels and thusly competition in the market still exists, even large corporations can't simply dictate prices to increase their margins.
How about this: "a functioning market economy" is only possibly with strong overshight of a greater authority than "the Market", which puts the interests of citizens above the interests of businesses.
If left to their own devices the Free Market only ever exists in low barriers to entry and low economies of scale markets, like teddy bears or soap, not in markets were it's much harder for new entrants and being bigger is always better - and energy generation until recently was very capital intensive and required big power plants or dams located in very specific places so was not a flat-playing-field size-agnostic market and tended towards monopolies and cartels.
Even nowadays with solar, even in those countries were personal generation is viable unless governments have intervened and force it to be otherwise there are barriers for individuals and small companies to sell their self-generated power (for example were I live they get 1/4 of the price selling than they do buying), which are a mix of cost barriers to entry (the cost of a proper converter on top of the cost of the additional panels if you want to go beyond self-consumption), financial structures dominated by and best suited for large companies (mainly the wholesale and consumer markets being separate, with the large companies sitting in the middle and extracting rents from being an intermediary) and even regulatory barriers to entry (the product of governments activelly legislating and regulating to benefit the large energy companies).
I'm confused, how does this help shareholders?
No, no, you can't have green energy until corporations figure out how to make just as much money off it as they do fossil fuels. Don't worry though, they're innovating. Last summer some prick about had my dad convinced to pay him to put solar panels on his roof and then also continue paying for the power those panels generated.
Nuclear is also a good option. It has the potential to scale up to our generation needs faster than green energy, and it can still be environmentally clean when any byproduct is handled responsibly.
Do I trust my government (USA) to enforce proper procedure and handling? Not really… but I do think we’re less likely to have a nuclear accident in the present day. Modern designs have many more fail safes. And I think it’d still be much cleaner than burning fossil fuels.
I think they need to coexist, though. I think a goal in the far-future should be a decentralized grid with renewable energy sources integrated wherever they can be.
Basically the one nation I would have most trusted to handle nuclear safely, Japan, couldn't even do it. The issue these days is not that the plants themselves are unsafe, it's that we live on a active and changing planet, and accidents can and will always happen because of so-called acts of God. The problem is that nuclear, when it goes bad, tends to go mega ultra bad in ways that are very environmentally destructive and heinously expensive to clean up. So even if there is only 1/10000 the accident rate at nuclear plants that there are at other power plants, the consequences can be a million times worse.
thorium is nuclear too...... (and doesnt seem to have the same runaway problems!)
Love me some Thorium! It doesn't address every natural-disaster type of concern as far as radiation leaks and environmental contamination, but is absolutely the better choice over Plutonium/Uranium in terms of meltdowns and nuclear waste.
Why is your model for nuclear Japan? China is the world's forefront of nuclear energy research and development, keeps expanding its capabilities, and has a clean record with no accidents.
Regardless, you're overestimating the damage that nuclear has done in comparison with other energy sources. You could have one Chernobyl per year and you wouldn't come close to the death toll coal or oil have worldwide. Regarding Fukushima for example, since you brought up Japan: some recent studies suggest that more people have died as a consequence of the upending of their lived by the evacuation of the whole region, than would have died according to realistic statistical models of radiation damage to humans. The main problem is that fossil fuel lobbies have successfully made people completely intolerant of radiation damage while they happily live in cities breathing in NO2 and particulate matter without one complaint.
Yeah one really nice thing about nuclear is it's very easy to safely hide all the waste away for 20-60 years and pretend it'll never leak or cause issues for anyone in the future, but then you get a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
Wow, an energy source which sometimes has increased cancer rates in its vicinity due to pollution? Thank golly all other energy sources don't have such problems!
Humans would never cheap out on health and safety, or reduce regulatory red tape just to try to bring costs (and maybe, though less likely, prices) down. Unheard of.
Would you feel better about nuclear if we expanded these rebreeder reactors I've heard of (uses spent nuclear waate) to the point there is no spent fuel sitting around?
yeah if we could not stick shit in the ground that remains deadly for thousands of years, with containment solutions designed to last 20-60 years, that would be great. But we just keep pretending this stuff is cleaner than it is because we've learned how contain the waste safely for about a single human lifespan. But just read about the slow-motion disaster that are the US nuclear superfund sites and you'll see that you can put off the consequences of this waste for so many decades before it comes back around. And there is no waste-free nuclear tech at this point, just less wasteful.
Also you can vastly reduce the amount of battery capacity needed by having pilotable sources of energy like nuclear, hydro, geothermy and such
Except nuclear is not very pilotable. More than Solar or Wind. But can't really be turned off either
Sure hydro is a lot more pilotable, or better yet, batteries.
But actually, turning it off 100% is probably the least important property of pilotable plants : you almost never need that. What does matter, however, is that those plants can be engineered to generally follow the daily demand curve and France's plants can do that at the rate of about 1% per minute.
Bold of you to assume the government cares about you at all.
Thankfully that is going to happen anyway through simple economics. Fossil fuel extraction is functionally already a peak technology, out of which every bit of efficiency has been squeezed by over 100 years of frantic and lavishly funded scientific development, whereas solar, battery, and wind technologies have been absolutely plunging in $-per-Kw to deploy and have much much further to go. So governments can try to slow this down as much as they wish, but it's as much a fool's errand as trying to rescue the horse industry in about 1920.
Now as for the question of "why isn't this more efficient technology resulting in savings for, me, the consumer?" I can only encourage you to look at the entire history of extractive, investor-driven capitalism for the answer.
Yeah, oil used to be the cheapest energy source for most situations (with the notable exception of mass power generation, were coal - an environmental even worse fossil fuel - was cheaper), but over the last couple of decades due to pressure on both the supply side (the easilly and cheaply extractable stuff gone) and from competing energy sources (like solar and wind-generation) oil stopped being one of the cheapest energy sources and it was pushed into just those uses were its high energy density gave it an advantage (i.e. transportation).
With better battery technology even that advantage is being lost (so electric cars are becoming the standard), which leaves only some chemical synthesis processes as places were oil is the best option.
Coal was kind pushed out of most of its markets long ago (hence you don't see that many steam trains around) so it is mainly used in power generation, and the falling cost of solar is making coal uncompetitive in it.
Gas is a little behind oil, with its main uses being domestic heating and cooking - now transiting to electric - and power generation - where renewables are now cheaper.
The trend for fossil fuels has been obvious for decades but there is naturally a TON of inertia in the pricing changes actually resulting in the needed infrastructure changes to transition away from them plus the Economic interests which extract rents in those areas are very literally paying politicians to delay this change as much as possible hence phenomenons like many more rightwing political parties pushing anti-renewables policies.
Lower prices? Yeah, I’m sure they’ll get right on that…
Maybe it would also be much cheaper if "your" houses were a bit smaller and had proper insulation...
I wish!! Unfortunately, I didn't build my house.
Have you considered inventing a time machine, going back in time, becoming a general contractor, and then building your house but smaller? Smh, people won't go the slightest bit out of their way to make things better these days.
I think it would cost trillions of dollars to rebuild all houses to be smaller. Imagine the carbon footprint of that endeavor.
Not sure if you’re referring to USA, but the energy code in the US is quite strict. Since the 80s insulation has been required and in the last 20 years the code has tightened to be quite strict. Homes in Latin America have none, no energy code, and European housing stock predates these requirements. Doesn’t mean US homes don’t consume a ton of energy but they are probably way better insulated than average.
Hilariously my 1200 sq foot 125 year old home is much less energy efficient than my in-laws 3000 sq foot 3 year old home due to the greatly improved insulation and sealing practices in modern structures. On the other hand my house is so drafty I don't have to worry about things like mold growth due to improper vapor barriers nor the air becoming too stale due to insufficient circulation
Both Europe and US are big enough to have a huge variety in building codes for different climates in different states/countries.
Its not all about insulation though. A terrace has much less exterior wall than a row of spread out detached homes. Some still insulate the party wall. but more for sound reasons. But the main advantage of terraces , fossil fuel-wise, is that the medium-density is more likely to give you a walkable grocery + other stuff and a somewhat useful bus service or other public transport.
Though modern suburbs here can be pretty sparse too with more detached homes.
They don't want it to be cheaper. This is a nice upwards funnel of wealth for them.
What’s the context of the painting?
Norman Rockwell. He did paintings of Americana. This one is about the civic duty to speak up or something
Reverse image search is a powerful tool
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Speech_(painting)
Holy shit, I always just assumed it was John Brown
It does look just like John Brown
He looks real good, for having been a’mouldering in the grave for 70 years!
Which reverse image search do you use? I use Tineye.
Lemmy be damned, but I usually just use lens in chrome.
A reminder that https://slrpnk.net/c/memes exists. I'm crossposting this there, as it's totally on point. The stupid '!' thing wasn't working for me.
Didn't auto-complete for me either, but: ![email protected]
Don't even have to invest. In my area, a 100% renewable supplier was about 30% more per KWH, all of that extra overhead was paid to keep old unprofitable coal plants online. That's capitalist efficiency for you.
Fuck your government, cover your roof in panels and enjoy. Simple as
Brother the only way it’s cheaper to source your own panels is if you buy them outright. Less than 50% of Americans have a savings account let alone 10k in disposable income.
If you take out a loan for the panels the payments equal what your electric bill would be and by the time you pay off the panels it’s time to replace them.
So you paid the same amount you thought you were going to pay, your bill didn't increase that whole time, your carbon footprint was lower and you didn't give any money to the ratfuckers? Where is the downside?
It’s not lower. Most electric bills are lower in the winter. You’d pay more in the winter months.
I had a whole thing about my setup here, but it was more than I want to share. Short version, panels are cheaper, easier to deal with, and longer lasting than you think. Most manufacturers guarantee 80% capacity after 30 years, area covered is more important than max output, there's no need to buy the whole thing at once, 3-5k no more than 1200 at a time over a few years can get a lot of people all they need
because of nationalism, i cannot.
And then he was yeeted out of the window
Not to mention that in certain countries they could also get better public services if they didn't need to spend money on a military sized for power projection into the Middle East ...
Not working great so far. I’m 100% for renewables and fuck fossil fuels, but despite the press about renewables finally being cheaper than fossil, it isn’t being passed to the consumer yet.
Depending on where you live this might be because of pricing regulations which require payments to be equal to the most expensive source used in a given period plus a preset margin. Some of the regulatory systems don't know how to cope with the differences in generation that come from renewables. ...not that they're great at managing the non-renewables these days either.
This is an absolute fact: the government refuses to invest in green energy because it produces too much energy and they’d have to give out power for free.
Truth, but the fossil fuels industry lobbies A LOT to keep your bills high and their pockets overflowing.
Legal bribing, if you will.
The UK is leading the western world in renewables in many ways, yet our bills are some of the most expensive.
The UK isn't leading they way. They're dragged kicking and screaming because they no longer have access to cheap Russian fuel. They've made it into the 45% bracket, which is good but not exceptional.
Sweden, Finland and Denmark had the highest RES (Renewable energy source) shares among Member States in 2024 due to strong hydro industries (Sweden and Finland), wind power and wide use of solid biofuels for district heating. All of which are driven by public investment and administration.
UK drop off in carbon emissions over the last 40 years has largely been the result of deindustrialization and exporting of manufacturing abroad. They still consume a great deal of carbon per capita. They just do it by purchasing finished goods from overseas.
Of late, they've also been rebuilding their old dirty energy economy to power AI datacenters.
Also to add to what you wrote, another reason is that their North Sea oil reserves became pretty much depleted in the last decade or two with gas following it, which has pushed gas prices higher and hence pushed people to user more electricity (gas prices in Britain were famously low) and along with exporting all industry to places like China and Bangladesh that has naturally brought down Britain's direct CO2 emissions.
Yet another reason is that the Crown makes money from licensing space for offshore wind farms since they're the ones who officially own the seabed around Britain.
I used to live as an immigrant in Britain and, still today, it still never ceases to amaze me how so many of them keep falling for the "Britain is leading..." bullshit they're constantly fed by the media and politicians over there, not just in this but in pretty much everything (Brexit didn't happen in a vacuum).
Even my shitty shit country - Portugal - has long been beating Britain in this (as it's a much poorer country, badly managed and with lots of problems) purelly because even in the time of Salazar (the Fascist dictator) there was a lot of investment in Hydro-generation, which continued after the Revolution in 74 and expanded into Wind-generation (actual in-shore wind, because unlike in Britain the NIMBYs don't have the power to just push it to be the much more expensive offshore kind) and later Solar, so whilst Britain was mismanaging their North Sea reserves and burning oil and gas like there's no tomorrow (part of the reason why Norway has a massive sovereign fund and the UK does not - the Norwegians didn't just burn it like crazy and wasted the money of whatever was sold) my country was already generating a lot of its power from hydro and it just became more so since.
Shitty shit Portugal is now in the 75%+ bracket on renewables.
The idea that Britain is leading anybody in renewables adoption is hilariously wrong.
How many nuclear plants?
Commie.
But the fossil fuel billionaires are bribing them now. What's the point of creating solar and wind billionaires in ten years time? Who knows who will be in power and collecting their bribes then.
Taking away (partially or completely) reliance upon carbon or nuclear energy will reduce costs and help save the planet. Like my solar set up, it costs less to run my home and workshop in summer than it does in winter.
This is really a huge oversimplification of a complex and nuanced topic. But the main thing worth mentioning is that your utility bills, in all likelihood, are already insanely cheap if you compare what you get to any other time in history. Like, keeping your home temperature at a perfectly pleasant temperature 24 hours per day probably costs you only a couple hours of labor each month. Compare this to gathering sticks in the forest and lighting a fire inside a mud hut - which, btw, also gives you lung cancer faster than cigarettes.
Should the government invest more in renewables? Yes, obviously. They should also fund the infrastructure necessary to make renewables work at scale, and research to improve renewable generation, transmission, and storage tech in order to close the gap between what is practical now and what we need to achieve. And while they are at it, they should introduce improved pricing schemes to head off increased wasteful usage. But will any of this actually have a direct impact on consumer pricing....? Probably not, since almost all utilities are already state owned or else heavily regulated. The cost of electricity is determined more by committee and political maneuvering than the actual price of, say, coal or solar on a day to day basis. The actual mechanism of paying for power to be generated and delivered to your house on demand is a combination of the price you pay per kwh, property taxes, government revenue in general, debt taken on by the government or utility, investments made in the past, etc. If you actually want a cheaper price per kwh, the solution is simply petitioning whatever regulatory body is in charge to lower it.
Of course, the problem with lower prices is that they encourage wasteful usage. If electricity becomes free, then aunt Ethel will start blasting the AC while leaving the windows open, because she likes to be comfortable while listening to the birds chirp. Without appropriate pricing schemes, people and companies will use up as much additional renewable capacity as is built as soon as you finish building it.
My heating bills runs close to $800 a month in the Winter. That is more than a few hours of labor.
Hence why I said "in all likelihood". There are always exceptions to the rule. Apparently you are one of them.
The average for the whole US during the winter is just under $1,000. That is around $250 a month. This is also not a "few" hours.
Central air can easily run +$200 a month during the summer.
I will admit I have a big house that is heated with diesel. My bill would be half that if I had a heat pump.
Considering most Americans were living paycheck to paycheck before this recent bout of inflation, I don't think most have any extra money to play around with anymore. It is time for tough decisions like keeping the house warm or eating things other than ramen.
You are spending WAY too much per month on heat. Upgrade the insulation in your home and seal air leaks.
Also, do not use resistive heat. It is the most expensive heating solution by a wide margin.
Trust me, I have been eyeing a heat pump for awhile now.
The house is close to 4k square feet, but I do have 10 people living there so it is being well utilized. I also live in Alaska so we get entire months of sub 20 temperatures.
It is still hard to deal with when you get that fuel bill.
Sure, but the peaks and lows are gonna be steeper. We have that in Finland because we built a lot of wind power in the last 20 years and barely with great expense completed only a single nuke station.
Electricity costs are currently kinda ok https://eprice.info/ but they frequently go up to 20-30c/kWh when it gets colder and there's less wind.
Sigh, all I see is panacea thinking....I want dank memes.
But here's some reality for you that'll destroy my karma.
The market naturally drives energy toward the lowest price because buyers choose the cheapest reliable option and producers must compete. Inefficient sources fade while the most cost effective ones grow. This happens automatically through supply and demand.
Many green technologies, depend on heavy subsidies and huge upfront costs. They promise clean and limitless power, but the real costs of materials, storage, and maintenance make them far more expensive than they seem. This makes them feel less like practical solutions and more like a comforting promise being sold as a cure for everything.
If your energy company could create very cheap energy it would. It would mean higher profits.
Lmfao you speak with authority despite it being complete bullshit.
"Heavy subsidies and huge upfront costs" applies far far more to oil and gas than to anything else. It's only due to the massive amount of technological and economic inertia behind oil and gas that it is still around.
For building new power generation, utility-scale solar and onshore wind are now almost universally cheaper than new coal, oil, or gas-fired power plants. This threshold was passed in most of the world around the mid-2010s and has become undeniable in the 2020s.
Solar is now often cheaper than existing fossil fuel plants: In many regions, it's now cheaper to build and operate a brand-new solar farm than to just keep running an existing coal or gas plant.
"The market" doesn't operate like you get taught as a child. The vast majority of economic decisions are made by those in power to ensure they stay in power. It makes little sense for a business person to cannabalise their own industry. They have vertically integrated and are invested in the supply chain from start to finish, and there's no benefit to them for things to change. It's far easier to just impede competitors than change the course of behemoth corporations.
You opened by insulting me instead of addressing my point, which says more about your argument than mine.
Claiming solar is automatically cheaper ignores system level costs. Wind and solar need storage, backup, and major grid upgrades, and those costs are still high. That is why renewables depend on large subsidies and mandates, just as fossil fuels have historically.
If solar were truly cheaper in a complete sense, companies would switch on their own because profit is a powerful incentive. The fact that adoption still relies on policy pressure shows the picture is more complicated than the simple claim that fossil fuels only survive through inertia.
You wanna mention fossil fuel subsidies too?
Im open to hearing your argument.
Energy (read: oil) companies don't invest in "green energy" for the same reason pharma companies don't research cures
You forget capitalism is about making money first and foremost. Ask your self if there's money in a cure for anyone in the market.
The perfect drug would cost exactly as much as a patient can produce while maintaining themselves. This is not an original or hypothetical example. Treatment is more profitable than cure.
That example is old, overused, and rarely true. For example: How many old filament lightbulbs do you see on the market today?
Many cures have made a lot of money in medicine. Iron lungs used to be expensive to maintain, but vaccines made them unnecessary.
There is plenty of fast and lasting profit in actually curing diseases. The demand for cures is enormous, so successful cures become some of the most valuable medical products ever created.
Examples from medical history where cures were profitable: 1) polio vaccine, 2) hepatitis c antiviral, 3) small pox vaccine, 4) antibiotics, and 5) H. pylori cure for stomach ulcers.
Interesting such an old, trite example went over your head. Classic for a reason and very true imo. Filament lightbulbs were engineered to burn out regularly and require replacement, that doesn't make the point you're going for. Broad spectrum antibiotics breed resistant strains and require new formulations, especially when aggressively marketed and overprescribed because more use=more money. Again not a great example. Vaccine development has historically been funded and promoted by government as a cost-effective way of maintaining a workforce, not exactly a shining endorsement of profit motive. I'm genuinely having a hard time believing you're dumb enough to make these arguments in good faith and kinda done here
Classic move—attacking me because your argument ran out of steam.
Your philistine viewpoint is still under researched and, frankly, unknowledgeable.
Your points don't make sense. Let's dig into bulbs, antibiotics and Vaccines from a $ perspective.
Filament light bulbs are gone because someone else sold a more efficient bulb and changed the market...and made boat load of cash and literally made filament bulbs extinct. $
Penicillin and later antibiotics cured deadly infections that once required long hospital stays. These cures transformed modern medicine and became some of the most profitable drugs ever sold.$
Lastly my Vaccines example, Smallpox required endless isolation facilities and caretaking. The vaccine eliminated an entire global disease. It was also massively funded, widely purchased, and financially successful for its creators.$
I really hope you're at least getting paid to post this badly my dude
Reminder for anyone looking at this graph that nuclear is driven high by western incompetence, and nuclear prices actually continuously drop in places with competent governments like China
We’d spend money up front to build the green energy generation. Distribution costs don’t go down, and tend to increase over time. It would take a while to realize any savings on the consumer bills?
It depends how you do it. I invested in green energy with a heat pump and spend fuck all compared to some people I know in heating. With a home battery I could cut my energy down to about £300 a year. Dont even need solar for that.
Yes. All of my problems are the government's fault.
Well that's a rediculous mischaracterization. All my problems are capitalism and how it influences the government's fault.
If only the government would government me out of this!
So, "green" energy is only cheaper if the government pays for it?
Not really a great argument.
sure it is. governments have more leverage than private actors when doing projecting and costing, and can amortise things more economically.
See also: accessible health care. When the gov is the only consumer - ie no private monopoly and no dual-market slippery-slope - then healthcare becomes accessible and supported by regular income tax.
No, you have it backwards. Fossil fuels were only cheaper because the government was heavily subsidizing it.
*is
That's what holds US gas prices down, subsidies. Helping large scale things be possible is what a government should do. There's many things that wouldn't have happened without the government paying for it.
The kicker is that if they switched to green and took away paying for petroleum, things would collapse, as green alone isn't going to support our society. That's the dead end we've walked ourselves into. It's not one or the other, it's what can we supplement or phase out with a better solution. And that kind of work needs government support, from subsidies to regulations to a supervisor that directs the change vs. relying only on free market.
Let’s find out. When I started advocating for increased renewables, the expected limit was the grid destabilizing at 30% renewables. Now many places are there. I recently read a piece expecting the limit to be about 95% renewables based on scalability of todays grid storage. Were a long way from that, so let’s work toward it and see what improvements we can make along the way
Note: one of the more difficult areas to greenify will be the military, but imagine instead shrinking that as we no longer have to defend petrostates or fossil fuel trade routes
Sure, let's keep going towards the goal of better solutions. Even this meme doesn't say or imply that it has to be all green, and it simply can't. Some things need a high energy density or other features that unfortunately only petroleum has. It really is an amazing substance. That causes problems. Everything has a cost.
Plastics
When the government subsidizes the shit out of the alternatives, yes. But also investing in research for better things means you get better things faster.
They're already paying for fossil fuels (7$ trillion worldwide)
Why? The government has better purchasing power than any private corporation and most things, but especially infrastructure become more economic at a greater scale.
Another point is that utilities are natural monopolies, and that the government building and controlling the infrastructure would cut out the profit motive that is currently driving up the cost.
A government's concern is not in a single area.
For example some counties have free public transport, in part because it's better for the economy as a whole. That wouldn't make sense if public transport is privately owned.