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.
So, “green” energy is only cheaper if the government pays for it?
Not really a great argument.
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.
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.
They’re already paying for fossil fuels (7$ trillion worldwide)
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.
green alone isn’t going to support our society
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
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.
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.
No, you have it backwards. Fossil fuels were only cheaper because the government was heavily subsidizing it.
*is
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.
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.
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.
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.
thorium is nuclear too… (and doesnt seem to have the same runaway problems!)
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
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?
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).
And then he was yeeted out of the window
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
awful and effective?
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?
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.
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.
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?
“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…
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)
It’s great being comfortable while your government is committing atrocities. Cozy cozy!
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?
Waiting for the day someone finds a government who doesn’t commit atrocities.
China has consistently some of the highest government satisfaction rates in the world
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.
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.
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.
I think it would cost trillions of dollars to rebuild all houses to be smaller. Imagine the carbon footprint of that endeavor.
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.
Bold of you to assume the government cares about you at all.
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.
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.
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!
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.
heating bills runs close to $800 a month
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.
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.
Removed by mod
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?
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
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.
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?
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?
I should add, those who defend China and USSR as if they can’t do anything wrong are DEFINITELY tankies.
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.
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.
If you definition hasn’t evolved since the 50s
How do you read English?
The reciprocal word I’ve typically seen is “liberal”.
Do people get upset about that
That’s just tossing a hand grenade into any political discourse.
I am pretty sure 90% of people who get called tankies on Lemmy are not communists
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.
Probably an offshoot of just how many tankies there are on Lemmy. Some people are definitely getting caught in the crossfire.
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)
