Posted by DeepLogin 1 day ago
America is actively ceding the future to China, and our ruling class have no ideas left other than looting the place as it’s burning to the ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
> By 2025, coal accounted for approximately 54.6% of China's electricity generation
It says that China’s use of coal this year is increasing after a multi-year trend of leveling off or decreasing, mainly because China is using coal in place of LNG imports made more expensive due to the U.S. attacks against Iran.
The overall trend is very clear — China is expanding both its supply of electricity, and generation from renewable sources, at the same time. Which we should also be doing in the United States.
> 2025 also saw China commission 78 GW of new coal power capacity, which is more than India’s net coal power additions over a ten-year period from 2015 to 2024, even though India operates the world’s second-largest coal power fleet. https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/built-peak-coal-pow...
The last time the US built a large new coal operation was 13yrs ago. China has done great things with renewables and nuclear, but that's because they build absolutely everything available, which is why their energy is so much cheaper in China than North America and Europe. Which translates into manufacturing plants being much cheaper to run.
leonidasrup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290234
https://canada.citizensclimatelobby.org/media-release-ccl-ca...
NFTs never made sense. You're buying a short URL on a blockchain in the hopes that it'll somehow retain value. The URL could go bad, it could be pointed at something else, etc. But what NFTs did was induce demand for crypto, particularly Ethereum. That was the point.
For a long time I thought we went to war for oil. No, that's backwards. Our oil dependence exists to induce demand for weapons. I will once again refer to the article No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].
So when you see things like pollution limits being lifted on power plants because of data centers, know that the ultimate driving force is the sale of weapons.
Let me give a concrete example. If I drill a well in West Texas that produces, say, 1000 barrels per day ("bpd"). It doesn't produce that forever. As the pressure goes down, the daily production goes down. In the industry this is called the decline rate. For the Permian Basin, the decline rate of any oil well is typically 15-20% per year. So in year 2, that well will produce 800-850bpd. In year 3, it'll be ~650-700. In year 4 it'll be 500-550.
So if you rely on oil you constantly need to be building new wells to maintain your same production level. For the US, which produces 13-15Mbpd of oil, that means you need to add 2Mbpd of new wells every year just to maintain that level of production.
Oil wells, like any form of resource extraction, are excellent wealth concentrators. They make people rich. If I put up 1GW of solar panels then, apart from some cleaning and general maintenance, they're going to produce 1GW of electricity every year (with some variance for sunshine). Nobody gets rich from that. And nobody needs to go to war for that. Which means nobody gets rich from selling weapons to secure that oil.
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
nfts were about trying to make inherently not scare things scarce, and to try to get people involved in a ponzi scheme
the oil being drilled and mined is exceptionally useful, and people buy it even when you dont need to go to war or get weapons. War would still be happening in the middle east without oil, its a key trade route between Europe and Asia.
the oil dependence exists because it lets people get work and labour done without hiring labourers.
if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that, and whenever people start building giant solar farms in borth africa, we will see armed militas conquering each other for control over the profits
You're going to spend maybe a billion dollars to build your solar farm, maybe you get somebody to lend you the billion dollars at 4% annual interest for 10 years,
Your panels make maybe 1.5 TWh of electricity each year, you can sell that for maybe $50 per MWh, so that's $75M per year. But the interest on your loan was $40M, so after year one your owe $965M, after the ten year loan finishes you still owe almost $600M and your panels are now ten years old.
It's just a normal business venture, if you've got people who can execute and a favourable environment it should work, like if you opened a fast food chain, or a dry clean business or a distillery. This is completely different from resource owners, who instead are just granted ownership of a finite natural resource.
Please someone bring back people with critical thinking abilities.
It wasn't the Greens that decided this for Germany. It was our conservatives, the CDU/CSU. The latter had high-ranking officials literally threaten to step down, unless Germany exits nuclear energy production.
Ideology > common sense.
Ideology > critical thinking
