Fuck your government, cover your roof in panels and enjoy. Simple as
In FL, even if your home fully self sustains on solar and batteries, by law you still have to pay the power company $36 a month to be connected to the grid you don’t want to be a part of.
I left FL… over a year ago.
Here’s the other kicker… a huge chunk of Republican campaign funding comes from the power companies. FL residents are essentially being forced to fund the campaigns of people that seek to rule over them, not represent them.
because of nationalism, i cannot.
They don’t want it to be cheaper. This is a nice upwards funnel of wealth for them.
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.
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.
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 wanna mention fossil fuel subsidies too?
Lower prices? Yeah, I’m sure they’ll get right on that…
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?
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.
“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)
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.
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 …
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.
How many nuclear plants?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
Imagine the savings to society with the energy independence from green energy
- shut down most of the continent wide natural gas distribution infrastructure
- shut down most of the continent wide gasoline distribution infrastructure
- cut way back on the military when we no longer have to protect oil kingdoms
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
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.
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.
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.
