As a Portuguese I have a more nuanced view of these type of takes.
We invested _heavily_ and prematurely in renewable energies -- see my comment from a couple of years ago [0]. Since then, our energy prices were high for a while and now they're not much lower than the EU's average because all that investment needs to be amortized [1]. Two years ago, we ran a whole month on renewables [2]. Despite this, our increase in energy prices since the Iran war started has been dramatic and the price of everything has been going up significantly. I can't help but think about the ROI on all those renewables if they can't help make our lives easier at a time like this. I'd much rather we go nuclear.
Can you imagine prices falling during an energy crisis, high inflation and datacenter build outs? Well it’s happening and pretty drastically in Australia.
Does that comparison make sense? You're comparing investments into the national grid with energy prices set by international trade. Power is imported and exported all the time, and the lack of affordable fossil fuels abroad will put pressure on cheaper local prices.
I don't think going nuclear would've made a difference here. Someone is making a lot of money selling power locally for prices that only make sense in an international context. Whether that's done by wind farm operators or nuclear plants, the result will still be the same.
And yes, solar energy is not only greener (less CO2, less PM2.5), but also frees us from dependency on other countries. The future can be less centralized.
Some countries (Russia included) will lose their bargaining chip. Other countries (USA included) will lose the incentive to 'democratize' the Middle East.
And how will renewables like solar and wind wirk with Class 8 trucks, shipping, aviation or process heat or as feedstock? How have they worked in Germany, which has shut down her nuclear plants and Russian hydrocarbons?
I'm gonna be the annoying guy who points out the obvious thats being repeated again and again for the last 50 years...
For transport, trains! Trains of different sizes, shapes and designs, solve most of the transport issues. The fact that western countries are behind on this doesnt mean it's too late to start.
For heat, better insulation and heat pumps do wonders!
For feedstock maybe feeding animals is simply bot the way we should move forward.
And I say all this as a person who drives a gas car 70 miles every day, lives in an old house with bad insulation and eat meat several times a week
By feedstock, I mean the hydrocarbons that are required for the bulk chemicals, fertilizers, plastics, rubbers, detergents, pharmaceuticals etc. that we take for granted.
Half of the "heavy duty vehicles" (which I believe is roughly similar to the classification you are using) sold in China in December were electric. Between rapidly improving batteries and maturing technology for swapping batteries as a refuelling strategy electrification of trucks is the obvious and inevitable future. They are simply cheaper to operate.
Good for the Chinese. The rest of us do not have the upfront capital to purchase these trucks. And there is still the matter of fertilizer, concrete, bulk chemicals etc. And solar panels. There is a very good reason why solar psnel factories (like JinkoSolar run off coal or hydro and not solar power.
> The rest of us do not have the upfront capital to purchase these trucks.
We can afford what we can do. We don't need to do what we can afford. If we wanted to build and deploy electric trucks enmasse like China then we could do it, regardless of upfront capital.
We don't know that. Beijing might have been investing in them as insurance against its not being able to get enough diesel fuel to run an all-diesel fleet of trucks, so countries that are self-sufficient in oil shouldn't just blindly imitate Beijing's move.
We know that because we know how much they cost, how much they cost to operate, and the same for diesel trucks. The technology here isn't a bunch of state secrets.
Here you're just repeating the assertion I called into question ("they are simply cheaper to operate") -- or more precisely you are implying it (does your not repeating it outright mean you mean to slowly distance yourself from it??).
If you have evidence that there is a fleet of electric trucks anywhere (big enough to make a dent in China's transport needs) whose actual cost is less than a fleet of diesels doing the same work would have cost, then share it. If all you have to offer is "an examination of the relevant technologies by any competent analyst will of course find that the battery-powered fleet is cheaper", then I repeat my assertion.
How much impact do petrochemicals have on renewables? e.g. Ethylene used for plastics, propylene, butadiene for synthetic rubber and aromatics like benzene. Do renewables still exist at the same volume and cost without petrochemicals or when their costs sky-rocket during a war?
How many here have stocked up on solar panels, charge controllers, wire, terminal blocks, high current fuses, home grid batteries and such?
I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels. I thought the only thing that would save us from the scourge is if renewables were cheaper, but even with solar being cheaper than everything else, we're still deploying fossil fuels.
Is it because of the interests of fossil fuel companies and their lobbying, or am I missing some economic factor?
We're not really adding much more fossil fuel capacity. 88% of new capacity under construction in the US is renewable. Of the fossil fuel capacity that is being added, it's overwhelmingly coal-to-gas conversions and peaker plants that help to deal with the variability in renewable generation.
It will take a long time before the fossil fuel capacity we've already built gets phased out, and of course certain developing nations are still adding dirtier fuel sources, but renewables getting cheap is working.
Ahh, interesting, I didn't realize the current mix is because of legacy plants, but I guess it makes sense that it wouldn't all be phased out immediately.
Ultimately, the answer is fuel density. So, for long distance untethered travel, like planes. Beyond that, it's plastics production and chemical manufacturing.
We can switch to hydrogen for lots of stuff that requires carrying your fuel on your back, but some things get tougher because the density is just not the same as a hydrocarbon.
These are all surmountable (biodiesel, carbon capture->fuel cycles, bioreactors, etc), but they take time and money.
In the end, what will push us to get there are economic shocks. We're getting there, it's just painful.
No, that's fine, I get it that fossil fuels have incomparable density, but we're using them massively for stuff where density isn't that important. Anything inside a city, from transportation to homes to factories are already powered by electricity (or can be, e.g. cars), we're just inexplicably still using fossil fuels to create that electricity.
Slightly tangential, we bought a 2014 Nissan Leaf about 18 months ago, against howls of protest from parents-in-laws and brother- and sister-in-laws with all the regular electric car FUD you hear (can't drive interstate on a single tank, can't tow a trailer, will explode and burn your house down).
For our use-case, 95% of our trips are to the shops, to various kids sports, to school, to the bus/train station, visiting (local) family, and all are very short trips easily within the relatively short range of the Leaf: ~100km. We still have our existing cars, they just get used less in favour of the cheapest option for the job at hand.
Even with our son being newly able to drive independently (so essentially needing to have three cars, rather than two, on the go at any one time), over the 18 months of owning the Leaf we've saved about 25% of the purchase price of the Leaf in spending less on petrol (including the electricity cost to charge the Leaf - which gets charged using the solar panels during the day, but more commonly using cheaper grid electricity non-peak overnight - yes, likely primarily off fossil fuels but from what I've read is more energy efficient than using petrol to power the car).
My point being, analogous to the "right answer" being to only using energy-dense fuels when necessary, we use the cheaper electric vehicle option when applicable, and only burn the expensive stuff when the better option is unavailable.
P.S. Looking at buying a newer EV with longer range, so there are additional and more flexible "better options", plus coming up to having a daughter who is also able to drive unaccompanied (four cars? :grimacing face:)
I really don't understand how people offer "but that ten-hour trip I take once a year will be 40 minutes longer!" as criticism and completely ignore "my EV TCO will be half of an ICE".
Humans really do not like change, the problems you have now are swept under the rug but tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones.
This is definitely part of it. My personal opinion is that 'mechanical intelligence' is so intertwined with, cough, masculinity that EVs are a threat to these kinds of men at the very core of their being. There's so much 'identity' that people associate with the car they drive, the noise it makes, that they can take it apart and put it back together again despite its complexity.
The simplicity of the electric motor and the minimal servicing required of an electric car is potentially anathema to (toxic) masculinity. As is enforcing 'stopping driving for a rest and (literal) recharge'.
It's a super old school way of thinking, but aren't we in the midst of seeing exactly that bubbling up to the surface as far more entrenched in society than we thought it could be?
(May be overthinking this a bit, but the illogic from otherwise logical family members around EVs really twisted my mind into knots that I had to spend the time undoing)
> tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones
This is just cope. Clutching at the thinnest branches because that's the only thing on offer. It's the rationalisation of all of what I've mentioned above.
I will offer you a realistic answer - the uncertainty and need for planning are the killers.
An EV dropped my transportation fuel bills by 90% but even i will admit that an EV is a hassle. On any trip that exceeds the range of the car, we must identify EV chargers, then determine whether they are working and only then can we start counting the additional minutes.
In the winter, seeing the range of you car drop by 26% and not knowing where the next working charger is, is the #1 reason why we still have two cars. If i could eliminate one with access to better transit, it would be the EV, not the combustion car.
Legit question (and one that I need to answer for myself as well):
Would it be cheaper to keep the EV and rent a car for when you need to do longer trips? (also taking into account the additional hassle of renting a petrol/diesel car)
Only speaking for myself, I'd seriously consider renting a (combustion) car for an interstate driving holiday if it's a rare occurrence, like once a year or once every two years. It will become an exercise in accounting[0].
My silly-ish analogy is: I don't own a plane because I fly rarely enough that it's not worth buying a plane to allow me to fly wherever, whenever I want.
Sure, but this is just a temporary infrastructure issue that will be solved thoroughly as EVs become more popular. If you take long trips often, maybe it's not for you, but I personally only take trips longer than 200km or so once a year, if that, so I absolutely adore my EV and would never go back to ICE.
In Australia the answer is political lobbying, without a doubt.
We had an emissions trading scheme[0] in 2012 meant to help in a transition to clean energy sources that was aggressively lobbied against by Australia's largest polluters and lasted only 2 years before being repealed by the incoming government by labeling it a "tax" that citizens would pay for. This led to a decade of policy stagnation[1] where we could've been transitioning away from fossil fuels.
So while energy density is definitely a factor, political lobbying is absolutely a factor.
> by labeling it a "tax" that citizens would pay for.
Are the quotes here implying there wasn't a cost imposed on the public to artificially speed up a transition to green energy? Might as well be honest about it and say it's a "temporary sacrifice for the greater good" or something. Otherwise it's just another form of political spin.
The government of the day did not and never used the word "tax". They essentially turned pollution into a commodity, which could be traded between companies who wanted to pollute more and rewarded companies who transitioned to clean energy. See the primary Wikipedia article on emissions trading schemes[0] for more information.
The political opposition continuously spun it as a "tax", in an attempt to stir outrage and win the next election, which they succeeded in[1]. The incoming government was and still is largely funded by fossil fuel companies, so they repealed the scheme.
It was an enforcement of paying a (small) portion of the externalities as a result of the use of fossil fuels.
The "tax" was to be paid by the largest polluters, hence their lobbying against it. It wasn't something the citizens had to pay for unless the largest polluters decided to raise their prices as a result of this "tax".
Asking polluters to decrease their profits, as it becomes increasingly obvious that their profits are based on making life worse for the entire planet for the future, I think, is not too grand an ask. "That's how it has always been" is not a reason not to act to improve "how it could be".
Those schemes always seemed to me like a whole lot of lipstick and pretty packaging on something that could just be pitched with more honesty, and without creating a maze of extra corporate accounting costs and loopholes. Just raise a tax to pay for investment in green energy that will eventually compete on price and be self-sustaining, while also providing lots of environmental benefits and potentially increase industrial competition with China.
The only reason a politician would come up with a complex carbon scheme like that is if they knew a tax would be unpopular with the public. Which mostly translates to a lack of good communication or a disregard for the public's intelligence.
Fuel density wouldn't be such an impactful attribute if the US military and geopolitical situation and strategy were different.
Fuel density is logistically important and the US geographical position means that density is more important to the US than other nations. In other words, if we forecast that we'll be fighting foreign wars, fuel transport is an logistical problem that optimises for density.
Fuel density matters to things like cars and semi-trucks. Right now you can’t build an electric version that can fully refuel in minutes. That makes fast, long-range travel impractical in an electric vehicle.
"It's called Megawatt charging because it delivers 1,000 kilowatts of electrical power at 1,000 volts, which is twice as powerful as the fastest chargers we have here in the United States."
Actually a few other HN threads have just discussed the latest Chinese electric cars that refuel in 5 minutes for a 250 miles range and which have a 500 miles range when fully charged.
That makes fast, long-range travel quite practical in an electric vehicle.
While this model greatly improves the charging speed, other electric cars introduced this year use sodium-ion batteries, which are heavier than lithium-ion batteries, but they have the advantage that in cold climates they do not lose either capacity or charging speed down to temperatures as low as minus 40 Celsius degrees, removing other limitation of electric cars.
So hydrocarbon fuels are likely to remain non-replaceable only in aircraft and spacecraft, where weight really matters.
However, hydrocarbon fuels can be synthesized from water and carbon dioxide, passing through syngas, by using solar energy, just not at a price competitive with fossil fuel.
Great question! Turns out there are. The U.S. Military's Abrams Tank Is Going Hybrid [1]. I'm sure we'll get some comments saying why it's a terrible idea[2].
tanks must represent like 0.001% of fuel consumption lol Road uses like cars, trucks and buses is 47% of all oil, and clearly an enormous fraction of that can be converted to use electricity instead
Aviation is a few percent of global emissions. All aviation.
It’s probably the hardest thing to replace but if we can’t we will be okay.
Long haul trucking and shipping and remote site power are probably the next hardest things, and maybe coal for metallurgy, but these are also small compared to emissions from electricity generation and routine car transit. The big sources can be completely converted.
> I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels.
These fit an energy niche that can't be replaced with any one thing. China is just now investing in an electric military, for instance. Shipping will remain difficult to electrify entirely (which is surmountable, but certainly not in production). Coal and natural gas plants provide on-demand power that is not straightforward to guarantee with renewable sources. And there are many (likely almost all) grids that are simply not up to the task of transmitting energy that used to be transmitted by physically moving fossil fuels. Air flight has no renewable alternative as of today—though, I suppose we technically do have renewable forms of jet fuel, it's extremely expensive.
& of course we will need byproducts for the forseeable future for fertilizer, materials, chip production, etc etc.
It'll take a couple generations. Of course we should be paying poor countries to not use fossil fuels, but instead we're trying to force switching back to fossil fuels ourselves for no explicable reason (as an american obv).
Time, production capacity, and materials. I’ve seen 1yr lead times on electric equipment to install charging stations. Copper supply issues with a huge rollout.
$150/barrel, much higher prices everywhere, less fertilizer, and less oil available could spur a faster turnover.
Renewables require power storage. Batteries are large, heavy, expensive, and the power dense ones have absolutely horrendous failure modes.
There are other storage options, but they require even more space than batteries.
Oil and gasoline require very little space, have easy to handle failure modes, and aren’t that expensive to operate. Not expensive enough to justify changing nationwide logistics and support.
It’s also far cheaper to keep using fossil fuels for a year than build out entirely new infrastructure.
I'm not sure the failure modes are too significantly different. I think it's likely you may consider them 'easy to handle' is because there's been years to learn how to handle these failure modes (which is a positive, but for reasons not inherent to the power source itself).
It's always far cheaper to keep status quo X than move to new thing Y. Until it isn't. Especially if you don't take into account externalities. Increased instances of flooding, cyclones, and wildfires gets pretty expensive pretty quickly. Losing ground to competitors can be fatally expensive in the long term.
Such things require the ability and will to think and prepare long-term, and it feels as if humanity has been migrating in the opposite direction since the 70's.
Oil doesn’t make self-oxidizing metal fires. You can easily put out an oil or gas fire with water and it will stay out once cooled off. You have to just let lithium batteries burn and even if you get them extinguished, there’s no where to store, transport, or recycle them safely because they reignite without warning at any temperature.
Yes, there are mitigations, but that doesn’t change how fundamentally dangerous they are. Gas tanks do not spontaneously ignite if punctured. Gas is easily cleaned up. Batteries become permanently unsafe and can catastrophically fail at any time with no warning.
Because the upside (with barely single digit margins if it exists) is mostly China and no one else being able to compete at that scale.
Something like skin in the game. US (low), EU(moderate), China (high), Global South (high with caveats to leapfrog but financing crunch always there)
Renewables need front loaded funding compared to Oil & Gas which are the incumbents that make them sticky.
Otherwise is a lot of US consumers were rational and only price minded they would've run TCO calculators on EV vs ICE for day to day use even without subsidies
That's the big mystery. We're told wind+solar are super cheap. Cheaper than everything. Cheap, cheap, cheap. You'd think, renewables being so cheap, it would rapidly displace all the expensive stuff.
But it does not. All sources of energy grow simultaneously, despite the plentiful anecdotes about limited regional shifts in specific markets.
So that creates doubt about the "cheap" claims. Such doubts, however, aren't generally welcome, and it's best to keep these thoughts to yourself, should they emerge. Carefully asking questions, as you've done, is the least damaging approach to coping with this apparent contradiction. I don't recommend ascribing it to nefarious conspiracies: that creates poor mental habits that don't end well.
In the meantime, there are concepts such as LCOE+ that deal with the real economics of energy supply and demand that can inform you on the matter. You'll want to be careful here, however. You'll encounter ideas that don't align well with preferred narratives and, if you're not careful with such knowledge, you might inadvertently peg yourself as being aligned with counter-narrative forces. And that's never good for kudos.
I mean, the US was deploying significantly more renewable energy projects during the last administration than ever before, but the corrupt trump administration stopped many of them immediately after reentering office.
The bureaucracy was moving the right direction - towards renewables - until the conservatives in this country deliberately changed strategy to emphasize fossil fuels again.
You can draw your own conclusions about motive, but this isn’t an accident.
I wasn’t even thinking about the US but consider this administration an interlude. I’m hearing other countries they’re putting the breaks on Chinese solar in an effort to build indigenous production capacity which is incredibly stupid. At least solar scales down so individuals can circumvent and get their own.
Cost, especially if bootstrapping as your more expensive electricity is used to make your still more expensive panels. If you are onshore production it would be far cheaper to bootstrap on Chinese panels.
They are growing all over the world at a phenomenal rate, but I think it just takes some amount of time. They have only been the cheapest option for a few years now.
And in the U.S., Republicans have done everything they can to hamstring the transition and destroy the billions of dollars invested by automakers into EVs prior to 2025. But even that can only postpone the transition.
Also they’re only the cheapest at the point of generation, you then need to transfer that energy where it’s needed, and when it’s needed (storage). Also manufacturing capacity for renewables infrastructure, vehicles, batteries, etc, etc, is constrained. And then there are products that can’t be substituted by renewables such as plastics, fertiliser, etc. So many factors. It can’t happen too soon, but it will take many decades.
How so? Spinning up or keeping online fossil fuel plants to power text extruding machines hardly aligns with the goal of switching to renewable energy.
> I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels.
Global politics.
Switching to renewables is seen as capitulation to China because of their lead in tech in this area, especially when you consider that renewables generally introduce battery dependence.
They don't even try to hide this anymore. Watch US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick at the WEF:
Not vocalized, but the obvious alternative: Instead be subservient to the USA and various allied Persian Gulf (and hijacked Latin American) countries who will keep pushing the petrol alternative until it literally runs dry, even if they have to do it at gunpoint.
So the problem is that we have a bunch of people making pronouncements about things they don't understand.
I would encourage anyone to look into what fossil fuels are actually used for because energy is only part of it. Some energy is for fuel (eg ships, planes) for which we currently have no substitute. A big chunk is electricity generation but there are so many other non-energy uses of fossil fuels eg fertilizers, construction, roads, plastics and other industrial uses.
China has undergone a decades long project to get to the point where they are the world leader (and almost sole supplier) of renewable energy tech. The plunging cost of solar happened because of China. This is a national project for them and no other country that I can think of has the willpower, organization and commitment for the deacdes-long quest to wean oneself off of fossil fuels.
Just between the rollout of EVs and power generation, you need a massive amount of infrastructure associated with it. Upgraded power lines, chargers, etc. Plus all the vehicles. Plus all the materials for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc. Those supply chains are completely dominated by China.
Just look at the LA to SF HSR project. This will likely take 20+ years and cost $100-200B, if it ever even happens. 20 years ago, China had a single HSR line in Shanghai to the airport. Now it has a 30,000+ mile network that carries 4M+ passengers a day and I've seen estimates that the entire network cost less than $1T. California HSR is 10-20% of that budget. For one line.
They reformed every level of government for this project. There is no expensive and corrupt procurement process for every city, every region, every line. They use the same rolling stock everywhere. Permitting for building the tracks and stations is streamlined. They make their own trains.
My point with this example is twofold:
1. EVs and electricity are only a fraction of the fossil fuel picture; and
2. Weaning ourselves off of that is a decades-long project in countries that have no track record or political will to pull that off.
Non-energy uses of fossil fuels are not problematic from the point of greenhouse emissions.
If we stop burning fossil fuels and get energy from renewable sources, the remaining hydrocarbons will probably be used for plastics, chemicals and so on. If they aren't burnt this is fine.
It also probably makes more sense to use fossil fuels for applications where density is critical such as aviation, offset with carbon capture, rather than to leave oil in the ground and synthesize jet fuel using renewable energy.
Cars and electriciy are the overwhelming majority of all fossil fuel use. Let’s just focusing on tranistioning them first, and we’ll be in so much of a better place. The rest can wait
The Chinese already have a 125e Small Modular PWR that would be excellent for small islands like those of the Caribbean. It is the Linglong-1 [0]. I believe the first one cost 800 million dollars. It will be interesting to see the price reductions as it goes into serial ptoduction.
Modern civilization requires semiconductors, concrete, asphalt, fertilizer, and plastics to function. Never mind aviation and marine fuel to function. All of these require hydrocarbons. As long as that is the case, renewable power will continue to be a niche.
Even during WWII Germany had to synthesize much of its hydrocarbon fuel.
Also after the war there has been large-scale production of synthetic hydrocarbons, but eventually this was abandoned due to the low price of fossil oil.
It is possible to synthesize hydrocarbons from syngas, which can be made from carbon dioxide and water, with solar energy. If the carbon dioxide is extracted from air, that requires much more energy than when a concentrated source of CO2 is available, but with essentially free solar energy it would still be feasible.
Obviously, this will not be done as long as cheaper fossil hydrocarbons are offered. However the use of fossil hydrocarbons for plastic, asphalt or other applications that do not release CO2 is not harmful.
> Obviously, this will not be done as long as cheaper fossil hydrocarbons are offered. However the use of fossil hydrocarbons for plastic, asphalt or other applications that do not release CO2 is not harmful.
The issue with any fuel/feedstock production is not just the financial cost but the amount of energy returned on the energy invested. A modern civilization (like Japan) requires 10:1. Synfuels made using the method you described are 1:1 - they provide as much energy as it takes to make them.
Yeah, remember how the energy crises in the 70s served as a wake-up call and made us switch to renewable energy? Me neither. In fact, AIUI, the main consequence was the significant increase of the global oil extraction.
The technologies we’re adopting now were significantly developed by post 70s research funding. The cars people drive are massively more efficient, the houses we live in, and the appliances we buy for the same reason.
What up call for whom? The USA is a net fossil fuel exporter. China is still heavily dependent on fossil fuel imports (as well as fertilizer produced from natural gas) and those imports would be interdicted in any major conflict. Of course the Chinese leadership is well aware of that vulnerability and taking steps to mitigate it.
The U.S. exports fossil, yes, but we import a huge amount as well because many of our refineries aren’t setup to process light sweet crude and it’s also often cheaper to buy oil, refine, and use it on the coast than it is to move it across the country from somewhere in the Dakotas.
If we had a war with China, it’d go much worse given their much greater resources and knowledge of how to hit those import routes for maximum impact.
Renewable energy just has bad marketing. Instead of just emphasizing their environmental benefits, everyone forgot that they’re also a stop gap for any issues with other sources of energy. China gets it. It’s the same reason why EVs are so important: they give us energy source flexibility. An EV can run on anything that creates electricity which includes coal, nuclear, natural gas, oil, in addition to renewables
Everyone should look at what's happening in Australia. Australia has 50% more solar per capita than China and utterly dwarfs the USA and Europe on a per capita basis. Because of this Australians have consistently falling power prices.
You'll note on that link in 1 year prices have gone from $87 to $50. Pretty much all attributable to the massive grid connected battery installations and renewable rollouts which had minimal subsidies. They were merely encouraged by policy which created a shorter time for grid price changes and arbitration allowing high response batteries to drive grid efficiencies. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...
It's straightforward economics at this point. Want cheaper prices? Demand what Australia has.
I am speaking from a position of total ignorance, so this is probably a dumb take, but I don't see why rich nations[1] don't simply subsidize mass nuclear energy production as state policy. The two main issues with nuclear are unit cost (solvable if you build dozens/hundreds in serial production) and financing (a reactor with a 30 year payback period is much more viable with 3.5% sovereign financing compared to 8% private bonds). France did it 50 years ago with more primitive reactor designs. China is currently doing it somewhat halfheartedly. I bet if the U.S. committed to $2 trillion to one standardized design and heavily used eminent domain, America would have knocked electricity costs down by half within a decade.
[1] Honestly probably only really viable in China and the U.S. plus maybe South Korea; nuclear is unpopular in Japan after Fukushima, and I doubt the E.U. would be able to coordinate everything. Everyone else is probably too poor outside of petrostates, which have the whole petro thing going on.
> I don't see why rich nations[1] don't simply subsidize mass nuclear energy production as state policy
> Honestly probably only really viable in China and the U.S. plus maybe South Korea
Because it costs a lot of money.
For example, India quietly (by HN and Reddit standards) passed a nuclear energy megabill in December which has a TAM of $214 Billion [0]. French (EDF), American (Westinghouse, Holtec, GE Vernova Hitachi), Russian (Rosatom), and Korean (Hyundai) JVs with Indian Public (NPTC, BHEL) and Private (Tata, L&T, Jindal Group) players are now able to build and distribute nuclear energy without dealing with an older SOE and can subsidize the buildout [1] using Green Bonds, which gives them access to around $56 Billion in capital [2] with an added .
These players will also be eligible for India's $2.5 Billion SMR subsidy [3]. This also helps India's $160 Billion data center buildout [4] which is being subsidized by the Indian government [5], and piggybacks on India's $205 Billion infrastructure buildout [6].
Other countries can do that as well, but if they are fine spending tens to hundreds of billions of dollars - that's where the blocker arises, but most of the players with this technology are now backlogged with orders from this buildout in India and other existing and in-progress buildouts.
> outside of petrostates, which have the whole petro thing going on
The UAE [7] is participating in financing India's nuclear buildout as part of their defense pact.
The U.S. spends $500 billion a year on electricity[1]. $2 trillion dollars worth of bonds to lower the price per kWh is modest, especially given that it would enable new tax revenue from manufacturing and chemical production, where electricity is usually the highest input cost, even in China.
> The U.S. spends $500 billion a year on electricity
But the American energy industry has negative net margins [0], which makes buildouts difficult without significant state support as the American energy industry is operating at a loss after operations cost are included.
> $2 trillion dollars worth of bonds to lower the price per kWh is modest
Land and Liability.
The upfront cost to build is significantly higher in the US because land is privately owned. On the other hand, India's federal and state governments are subsidizing land purchases for nuclear reactors as part of the SHANTI Act. The only other large economy doing something similar is China.
Furthermore, liability has remained a major issue in the US. India [1] and China [2] both gave nuclear operators a broad liability shield which externalizes the cost of a nuclear accident, especially for SMRs as they cap out in the $30-50 million range in India and China.
If the US can provide a similar liability shield beyond what is already on the books, buildout would be much faster, but this is politically untenable as can be seen with the data center buildout. Imagine the attack ads - "Trump"/"Newsom"/"Vance"/"Pritzker" are poisoning innocent Americans while in the pocket of Wall Street and BigTech. A growing number of Americans view any kind of infrastructure buildout as a subsidy for rich people, almost as if there was an ongoing social media campaign for years that has solidified this sentiment amongst Americans [3].
The big capital players at this point in this space are the US, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Russia, and France. All the other 6 (even Russia) have blocked Chinese access to initiatives and subsidizes for domestic nuclear buildouts, and Russia is also blocked from 4 of them.
That said, the US has quietly started similar initatives as well, like the $80 Billion SMR buildout [4] but HN will never give Trump a win.
I keep thinking this war will both be written down as one of the Trump administration worst mistakes while also being the catalyst for a clean(er) energy revolution. We can.. do it all, but there has been a lack of will and incentive. These incentives are strong.
during the beginning of the last Iraq war, I was at a social event and somehow ended up saying that 'at least this is been so obviously foolish that it should cause us to really think twice about doing anything like it again', and someone 20 years my senior turned to me from another conversation and said 'we said the same thing about Vietnam'
People get complacent thinking the system just keeps working no matter what, and not that a lot of effort from talented people goes in to to keeping it working. So they vote in a total moron and discover the good times aren't innate.
I guess someone right after the Great War / the war to end all wars could be forgiven for thinking people wouldn’t be trying that again anytime soon.
What I would consider different this time is that I think the US is in the looting stages of collapse and will be unable to credibly fight such a war even if a minority wanted to.
I have a bit of a conspiracy theory about Trump starting the Iran war as a grift to get $200B appropriated only to abandon the region and have the money disappear.
This war will likely go down as the dumbest geopolitical move in US history (so far, at least). And I don't think it's even close. I cannot overstate the significance of it. I think historians will mark this as at least the symbolic end of American Empire. And I don't say that lightly. It will redefine the geopolitical landscape for the rest of the century.
If we're talking about renewables, one has to talk about China [1]:
> In 2024 alone, China installed 360 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar capacity. That’s more than half of global additions that year, and it brings total installed capacity to 1.4 terawatts (TW) – that’s roughly a third of the entire world’s 4.5 TW
And in 2025 [2]:
> Clean-energy sectors contributed a record 15.4tn yuan ($2.1tn) in 2025, some 11.4% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) – comparable to the economies of Brazil or Canada.
and
> In 2025, China achieved another new record of wind and solar capacity additions. The country installed a total of 315GW solar and 119GW wind capacity, adding more solar and two times as much wind as the rest of the world combined.
China has decided long ago that this was of national security interest and it has become a national project to move to renewable energy in a way that I don't think any other country is capable of and on a scale that's hard to conceptualize.
Europe and the US have shown themselves to be completely incapable of planning long term and acting in national interest with regards for fossil fuels. There's no poliitical will. Both are captured by the interests of enriching the billionaire class in the short term. When it all goes to shit, which it will, they'll all leave and/or the rest of us will pay for this lack of foresight.
At some point we're going to have to have a conversation about the destructive toxicity of conservatism. There's been no bigger brake on progress of all kinds, and the ends have always been corrupt, self-serving, and small-minded.
The Chinese system is hyper conservative, essentially fascist, it’s not actually socialist in any way, shape or form. It’s also hyper capitalist, with minimal regulation or consumer rights. The top levels of the ‘communist’ party is now packed with billionaires. What regulation there is, is mostly aimed at maintaining party control and prestige.
Both unchecked conservatism and unchecked socialism are toxic. Unchecked anything is toxic. That’s human nature, yet (to simplify massively) we still need both conservative and socialist elements in a balanced society.
Just looking at the US, one can certainly point fingers at conservatism (rightly so) but I think that's missing the forest for the trees. Why? Because the so-called opposition party, the Democratic Party, is complicit is everything that's happened to get us to this point.
The problem isn't conservatism per se. It's neoliberalism (IMHO). Even more broadly, it's capitalism. There's a meme in this space that basically goes something like "when you learn about capitalism, you become either a communist or a liar".
I read something recently about how people fetishize the 1950s, particularly on the political right. A big part of what made that possible was exploitation. Obviously we had a permanent underclass since segregation was still alive and well. A lot of these "middle class" families had "help" or "a girl". But another form of exploitation was oil. We were basically stealing oil from the Middle East for pennies on the dollar.
And then Iran came out and said "maybe we don't want you to steal our oil", we couped their government, we installed our own puppet government, we continued stealing oil and this all ultimately lead to the 1970s oil crisis and the Iranian Revolution. And here we are.
Back to the US political landscape, just look at the "opposition" to this war. It's either nonexistent or it's process-based ("Congress should've approved it"), not substantive. No mainstream political force is saying what we should be saying, which is that our Middle East policy is a crime, the sanctions on Iran were and are a crime and that continued exploitation of this region is unsustainable.
The Iran war hasn't even been the dumbest geopolitical move in the past year.
The US torpedoed its system of alliances which it has spent decades building and maintaining. It through the global economy and its own into turmoil repeatedly in an attempt to extort its friends as much as its adversaries. It betrayed Ukraine for the sake of Russia. It threatened military action against its allies to conquer territory. It rejected the concept of international law which underpinned its position as global hegemon.
Honestly the Iran war isn't even that bad. While it displays the absolute absence of forethought that this administration applied to the situation, that's at least something America can get back with new leadership. The previous blunders which laid bare the unreliability of the US as a partner on the other hand have done irreparable harm.
USA is not even content with attacking one country at a time.
Now there is also the blockade of Cuba that intercepts their imports of oil and has created serious problems there with food and services. This cannot be considered as anything else as an act of war, even if a war is not declared.
Besides the blockade, USA has also threatened with an attack. With the harm done indiscriminately to most Cuban citizens by the blockade, it is even harder for USA to pretend that they are the good guys, while they use their might to attack without any justification a country too weak to present any kind of danger for USA.
You're only saying that because this is only 3 weeks old. Things are going to get a lot worse. If this ended tomorrow, the direct impact will be felt for years before we go back to "normal". And the geopolitical changes are going to be seismic.
First, it's been exposed that the US cannot defend Israel despite spending $1 trillion a year on "defense", billions if not trillions on missile defence and the presence of multiple carrier groups in the region. This alone rewrites regional geopolitics in the coming decades.
Second, the US has exerted influence on the region with a security guarantee that's like NATO on steroids. It's a protection racket (like NATO). We give despotic regimes weapons and we dictate policy, get bases in the region and get the use of terriotiral waters and airspace for whatever we want, basically. But by starting this war of choice, we've shown that there's no security guarantee at all for the Gulf states.
Now, these states will continue to align with the US for purely selfish reasons. For example, Saudi Arabia will do so to maintain the House of Saud, the royal family's control of the country. Many Saudis would prefer this not to be the case but were Saudi Arabia to break from the US, the regime would inevitably fall (IMHO). So they can't abandon the US. But this will only go so far as some of these regimes may fall anyway in a prolonged conflict (eg Bahrain).
Third, the military options here are dire. Militarily, the Strait cannot be reopened. The only military options are retreat or escalation. Trump has threatened to blow up power plants. If he does that, Iran will blow up desalination plants. Or the pipeline that supplies 30-40% of Israel's energy (from Azerbijan through Turkey). The escalation ladder inevitably leads to the use of nuclear weapons by Israel and/or the US, which is untenable.
Fourth, we haven't even begun to feel the impacts yet. Yes, gas prices are higher. That's only the beginning. Utility and food prices are going to spike. Higher diesel costs mean higher transportation. Higher bunkers costs will hit shipping costs. We're likely to see a repeat of 2021-2022 era inflation, if not worse.
If the Strait opened tomorrow, most of those things are already baked in for the next few years.
Fifth, countries are undergoing a sort of "energy nationalism". China, for eample, has stockpiled huge amounts of oil and stopped exported refined petroleum products. Other countries have done similar. This is going to have an outsized impact on countries completely dependent on energy imports, which includes most of Asia.
Sixth, the downstream effects go well beyond secondary products like fertilizer. For example, helium and other materials for chipmaking in Taiwan.
Lastly, this has massively strengthened Russia's position. You will likely see the lifting of sanctions and conceding of territory in Ukraine as an almost -inevitable consequence of an oil supply shock, particularly as LNG prices go up and we hit a heating crisis in Europe.
You are correct that the US has been destroying alliances but it's this war of choice that's going to make that really bite. Iran negotiated in good faith to end the 12 day war, which only ended because of missile interceptor shortages, a problem that's going to take years to address.
This time around Iran has had no choice but to make the consequences of a war of aggression so dire that the US and Israel never think about doing this again.
Also, North Korea demonstrated that the only way to get the US to leave you alone is to have nuclear weapons. The previous Ayatollah had a fatwa against nuclear weapons. Well, the US and Israel killed that guy in his house with his family. Iran now really has no choice but to develop nuclear weapons to guarantee their security. And I can't blame them.
I like to give Australia as the better example. Way ahead of everyone else on a per capita basis (50% more GW of solar installed per capita than China).
It's all based on governance led by research (in particular the CSIRO, the Australian government's politically isolated research department) where the CSIRO wrote a peer reviewed report mathematically demonstrating the cheapest way to improve grid reliability and lower prices. This indicated various ways to encourage solar and battery build outs. The Australian senate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate) which is made up of many many parties due to preferential voting passed laws enabling this and here we are.
I think that it's true that China's beating the USA in government competence but they are far far from the ideal. In fact China looks really bad compared to any competant government of the world. It just looks good compared to the USA.
Perhaps so. And yet a couple decades ago when the war against Iraq turned into a quagmire, many political pundits also marked that as the end of the American Empire. And yet today the USA remains the sole globally dominant superpower. Our time will end eventually but we should be skeptical of any predictions on timing.
Empires don't die overnight, generally. Empires die slowly, violently.
We spent an estimated $8 trillion on so-called "War on Terror". The Taliban were in charge of Afghanistan before we started. They're in charge now. For $8T. 1% of that would end homelessness. 1% of that annually would be free college. I would mention universal healthcare but that would actually save money vs what we now spend so I'm not sure how you count that.
The kind of transformation China has seen in recent decades is what you're talking about with $8 trillion.
A despite the 20 year quagmire that was Iraq and Afghanistan, IMHO this war on Iran is an even bigger geopolitical clown show and will be more consequential to the end of American Empire.
For the common man, this is all true. For the people “running the show” it was probably money well spent. The “War on Terror” brought not just erosion but full-on assault on people’s rights and privacy. It is perfectly acceptable by just about every American to have their junks touched and toothpaste confiscated to board the airplane to fly 80 miles from say DC to Richmond. Everyone is tame now, accepting whatever this new reality is that everyone lives in. There is military on the streets of DC, masked agents running around the country and myriad of other bullshits our grandparents would be rolling in their graves if they knew…
It’s not just about energy, but also industrial (think neon, helium) and agricultural inputs (nitrogen, urea). Even if energy was solved, there’s not really replacements for these. Well, regenerative agriculture but not sure that will feed as many people.
The nitrogen comes from the air - we're perfectly capable of capturing it using renewables.
It's probably one of the last things to be created that way because it's one of the places where methane is used more efficiently than burning it... But fundamentally there's no issue here except energy availability and a short term supply shock.
But making plastics using renewable energy and fossil hydrocarbons for feedstock does not exacerbate the greenhouse effect, unless you burn them when you've finished with them.
Arguably plastics are a stable, cheap and useful carbon sink and if climate is the overriding ecological priority we should be making as many as we can and recycling as few as possible.
This is false, you can make many plastics without fossil sources (pla, bio-pet, bio-abs, etc). The only challenge is cost and scale - it's cheaper and easier to use existing processes.
As a Portuguese I have a more nuanced view of these type of takes.
We invested _heavily_ and prematurely in renewable energies -- see my comment from a couple of years ago [0]. Since then, our energy prices were high for a while and now they're not much lower than the EU's average because all that investment needs to be amortized [1]. Two years ago, we ran a whole month on renewables [2]. Despite this, our increase in energy prices since the Iran war started has been dramatic and the price of everything has been going up significantly. I can't help but think about the ROI on all those renewables if they can't help make our lives easier at a time like this. I'd much rather we go nuclear.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37719568
[1]: https://eco.sapo.pt/2026/03/11/precos-da-eletricidade-e-gas-...
[2]: https://www.portugalglobal.pt/en/news/2024/april/renewable-e...
Portugal needs battery storage.
It’s the best bang for buck. Australia, one of the world leaders in grid connected battery storage and it’s a reason prices keep falling there. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/19/power...
Can you imagine prices falling during an energy crisis, high inflation and datacenter build outs? Well it’s happening and pretty drastically in Australia.
Does that comparison make sense? You're comparing investments into the national grid with energy prices set by international trade. Power is imported and exported all the time, and the lack of affordable fossil fuels abroad will put pressure on cheaper local prices.
I don't think going nuclear would've made a difference here. Someone is making a lot of money selling power locally for prices that only make sense in an international context. Whether that's done by wind farm operators or nuclear plants, the result will still be the same.
> I'd much rather we go nuclear.
I think/hope you mean "I'd rather we adopt/use nuclear energy."
I don't think anyone was at risk of misunderstanding their intent...
See a wider perspective on how energy sources shape geopolitics: "The pivot" by Charlie Stross https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45621074.
And yes, solar energy is not only greener (less CO2, less PM2.5), but also frees us from dependency on other countries. The future can be less centralized.
Some countries (Russia included) will lose their bargaining chip. Other countries (USA included) will lose the incentive to 'democratize' the Middle East.
And how will renewables like solar and wind wirk with Class 8 trucks, shipping, aviation or process heat or as feedstock? How have they worked in Germany, which has shut down her nuclear plants and Russian hydrocarbons?
Please - tell us.
I'm gonna be the annoying guy who points out the obvious thats being repeated again and again for the last 50 years...
For transport, trains! Trains of different sizes, shapes and designs, solve most of the transport issues. The fact that western countries are behind on this doesnt mean it's too late to start.
For heat, better insulation and heat pumps do wonders!
For feedstock maybe feeding animals is simply bot the way we should move forward.
And I say all this as a person who drives a gas car 70 miles every day, lives in an old house with bad insulation and eat meat several times a week
By feedstock, I mean the hydrocarbons that are required for the bulk chemicals, fertilizers, plastics, rubbers, detergents, pharmaceuticals etc. that we take for granted.
And you still need trucks for last mile haulage.
> Please - tell us.
No need of sarcasm here. Or going the route of a false dichotomy.
Again, not all dependencies can be eliminated. But it is better to have less dependencies.
Closing nuclear plants in Germany was a disaster, and here we agree.
One of those dependencies w.r.t large solar panel buildouts, will be charcoal. [0] And lots of it.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335083312_Why_do_we...
> Class 8 trucks
Half of the "heavy duty vehicles" (which I believe is roughly similar to the classification you are using) sold in China in December were electric. Between rapidly improving batteries and maturing technology for swapping batteries as a refuelling strategy electrification of trucks is the obvious and inevitable future. They are simply cheaper to operate.
Good for the Chinese. The rest of us do not have the upfront capital to purchase these trucks. And there is still the matter of fertilizer, concrete, bulk chemicals etc. And solar panels. There is a very good reason why solar psnel factories (like JinkoSolar run off coal or hydro and not solar power.
> The rest of us do not have the upfront capital to purchase these trucks.
We can afford what we can do. We don't need to do what we can afford. If we wanted to build and deploy electric trucks enmasse like China then we could do it, regardless of upfront capital.
>They are simply cheaper to operate.
We don't know that. Beijing might have been investing in them as insurance against its not being able to get enough diesel fuel to run an all-diesel fleet of trucks, so countries that are self-sufficient in oil shouldn't just blindly imitate Beijing's move.
We know that because we know how much they cost, how much they cost to operate, and the same for diesel trucks. The technology here isn't a bunch of state secrets.
Here you're just repeating the assertion I called into question ("they are simply cheaper to operate") -- or more precisely you are implying it (does your not repeating it outright mean you mean to slowly distance yourself from it??).
If you have evidence that there is a fleet of electric trucks anywhere (big enough to make a dent in China's transport needs) whose actual cost is less than a fleet of diesels doing the same work would have cost, then share it. If all you have to offer is "an examination of the relevant technologies by any competent analyst will of course find that the battery-powered fleet is cheaper", then I repeat my assertion.
How much impact do petrochemicals have on renewables? e.g. Ethylene used for plastics, propylene, butadiene for synthetic rubber and aromatics like benzene. Do renewables still exist at the same volume and cost without petrochemicals or when their costs sky-rocket during a war?
How many here have stocked up on solar panels, charge controllers, wire, terminal blocks, high current fuses, home grid batteries and such?
I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels. I thought the only thing that would save us from the scourge is if renewables were cheaper, but even with solar being cheaper than everything else, we're still deploying fossil fuels.
Is it because of the interests of fossil fuel companies and their lobbying, or am I missing some economic factor?
We're not really adding much more fossil fuel capacity. 88% of new capacity under construction in the US is renewable. Of the fossil fuel capacity that is being added, it's overwhelmingly coal-to-gas conversions and peaker plants that help to deal with the variability in renewable generation.
It will take a long time before the fossil fuel capacity we've already built gets phased out, and of course certain developing nations are still adding dirtier fuel sources, but renewables getting cheap is working.
Ahh, interesting, I didn't realize the current mix is because of legacy plants, but I guess it makes sense that it wouldn't all be phased out immediately.
>> certain developing nations are still adding dirtier fuel sources
I'd look at this from a more nuanced viewpoint of certain nations still adding sovereign fuel sources.
Read: India / China and coal
Ultimately, the answer is fuel density. So, for long distance untethered travel, like planes. Beyond that, it's plastics production and chemical manufacturing.
We can switch to hydrogen for lots of stuff that requires carrying your fuel on your back, but some things get tougher because the density is just not the same as a hydrocarbon.
These are all surmountable (biodiesel, carbon capture->fuel cycles, bioreactors, etc), but they take time and money.
In the end, what will push us to get there are economic shocks. We're getting there, it's just painful.
No, that's fine, I get it that fossil fuels have incomparable density, but we're using them massively for stuff where density isn't that important. Anything inside a city, from transportation to homes to factories are already powered by electricity (or can be, e.g. cars), we're just inexplicably still using fossil fuels to create that electricity.
The US grid is still 57% coal and gas.
Slightly tangential, we bought a 2014 Nissan Leaf about 18 months ago, against howls of protest from parents-in-laws and brother- and sister-in-laws with all the regular electric car FUD you hear (can't drive interstate on a single tank, can't tow a trailer, will explode and burn your house down).
For our use-case, 95% of our trips are to the shops, to various kids sports, to school, to the bus/train station, visiting (local) family, and all are very short trips easily within the relatively short range of the Leaf: ~100km. We still have our existing cars, they just get used less in favour of the cheapest option for the job at hand.
Even with our son being newly able to drive independently (so essentially needing to have three cars, rather than two, on the go at any one time), over the 18 months of owning the Leaf we've saved about 25% of the purchase price of the Leaf in spending less on petrol (including the electricity cost to charge the Leaf - which gets charged using the solar panels during the day, but more commonly using cheaper grid electricity non-peak overnight - yes, likely primarily off fossil fuels but from what I've read is more energy efficient than using petrol to power the car).
My point being, analogous to the "right answer" being to only using energy-dense fuels when necessary, we use the cheaper electric vehicle option when applicable, and only burn the expensive stuff when the better option is unavailable.
P.S. Looking at buying a newer EV with longer range, so there are additional and more flexible "better options", plus coming up to having a daughter who is also able to drive unaccompanied (four cars? :grimacing face:)
I really don't understand how people offer "but that ten-hour trip I take once a year will be 40 minutes longer!" as criticism and completely ignore "my EV TCO will be half of an ICE".
Humans really do not like change, the problems you have now are swept under the rug but tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones.
> Humans really do not like change
This is definitely part of it. My personal opinion is that 'mechanical intelligence' is so intertwined with, cough, masculinity that EVs are a threat to these kinds of men at the very core of their being. There's so much 'identity' that people associate with the car they drive, the noise it makes, that they can take it apart and put it back together again despite its complexity.
The simplicity of the electric motor and the minimal servicing required of an electric car is potentially anathema to (toxic) masculinity. As is enforcing 'stopping driving for a rest and (literal) recharge'.
It's a super old school way of thinking, but aren't we in the midst of seeing exactly that bubbling up to the surface as far more entrenched in society than we thought it could be?
(May be overthinking this a bit, but the illogic from otherwise logical family members around EVs really twisted my mind into knots that I had to spend the time undoing)
> tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones
This is just cope. Clutching at the thinnest branches because that's the only thing on offer. It's the rationalisation of all of what I've mentioned above.
I will offer you a realistic answer - the uncertainty and need for planning are the killers.
An EV dropped my transportation fuel bills by 90% but even i will admit that an EV is a hassle. On any trip that exceeds the range of the car, we must identify EV chargers, then determine whether they are working and only then can we start counting the additional minutes.
In the winter, seeing the range of you car drop by 26% and not knowing where the next working charger is, is the #1 reason why we still have two cars. If i could eliminate one with access to better transit, it would be the EV, not the combustion car.
Legit question (and one that I need to answer for myself as well):
Would it be cheaper to keep the EV and rent a car for when you need to do longer trips? (also taking into account the additional hassle of renting a petrol/diesel car)
Only speaking for myself, I'd seriously consider renting a (combustion) car for an interstate driving holiday if it's a rare occurrence, like once a year or once every two years. It will become an exercise in accounting[0].
My silly-ish analogy is: I don't own a plane because I fly rarely enough that it's not worth buying a plane to allow me to fly wherever, whenever I want.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQPIdZvoV4g&t=137
Sure, but this is just a temporary infrastructure issue that will be solved thoroughly as EVs become more popular. If you take long trips often, maybe it's not for you, but I personally only take trips longer than 200km or so once a year, if that, so I absolutely adore my EV and would never go back to ICE.
In Australia the answer is political lobbying, without a doubt.
We had an emissions trading scheme[0] in 2012 meant to help in a transition to clean energy sources that was aggressively lobbied against by Australia's largest polluters and lasted only 2 years before being repealed by the incoming government by labeling it a "tax" that citizens would pay for. This led to a decade of policy stagnation[1] where we could've been transitioning away from fossil fuels.
So while energy density is definitely a factor, political lobbying is absolutely a factor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Pollution_Reduction_Sch...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/0a453f5c-e859-4300-9355-46822c451...
> by labeling it a "tax" that citizens would pay for.
Are the quotes here implying there wasn't a cost imposed on the public to artificially speed up a transition to green energy? Might as well be honest about it and say it's a "temporary sacrifice for the greater good" or something. Otherwise it's just another form of political spin.
The government of the day did not and never used the word "tax". They essentially turned pollution into a commodity, which could be traded between companies who wanted to pollute more and rewarded companies who transitioned to clean energy. See the primary Wikipedia article on emissions trading schemes[0] for more information.
The political opposition continuously spun it as a "tax", in an attempt to stir outrage and win the next election, which they succeeded in[1]. The incoming government was and still is largely funded by fossil fuel companies, so they repealed the scheme.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Australian_federal_electi...
It was an enforcement of paying a (small) portion of the externalities as a result of the use of fossil fuels.
The "tax" was to be paid by the largest polluters, hence their lobbying against it. It wasn't something the citizens had to pay for unless the largest polluters decided to raise their prices as a result of this "tax".
Asking polluters to decrease their profits, as it becomes increasingly obvious that their profits are based on making life worse for the entire planet for the future, I think, is not too grand an ask. "That's how it has always been" is not a reason not to act to improve "how it could be".
Those schemes always seemed to me like a whole lot of lipstick and pretty packaging on something that could just be pitched with more honesty, and without creating a maze of extra corporate accounting costs and loopholes. Just raise a tax to pay for investment in green energy that will eventually compete on price and be self-sustaining, while also providing lots of environmental benefits and potentially increase industrial competition with China.
The only reason a politician would come up with a complex carbon scheme like that is if they knew a tax would be unpopular with the public. Which mostly translates to a lack of good communication or a disregard for the public's intelligence.
Fuel density wouldn't be such an impactful attribute if the US military and geopolitical situation and strategy were different.
Fuel density is logistically important and the US geographical position means that density is more important to the US than other nations. In other words, if we forecast that we'll be fighting foreign wars, fuel transport is an logistical problem that optimises for density.
Fuel density matters to things like cars and semi-trucks. Right now you can’t build an electric version that can fully refuel in minutes. That makes fast, long-range travel impractical in an electric vehicle.
https://insideevs.com/news/758625/byd-megawatt-charging-demo...
"It's called Megawatt charging because it delivers 1,000 kilowatts of electrical power at 1,000 volts, which is twice as powerful as the fastest chargers we have here in the United States."
Actually a few other HN threads have just discussed the latest Chinese electric cars that refuel in 5 minutes for a 250 miles range and which have a 500 miles range when fully charged.
That makes fast, long-range travel quite practical in an electric vehicle.
While this model greatly improves the charging speed, other electric cars introduced this year use sodium-ion batteries, which are heavier than lithium-ion batteries, but they have the advantage that in cold climates they do not lose either capacity or charging speed down to temperatures as low as minus 40 Celsius degrees, removing other limitation of electric cars.
So hydrocarbon fuels are likely to remain non-replaceable only in aircraft and spacecraft, where weight really matters.
However, hydrocarbon fuels can be synthesized from water and carbon dioxide, passing through syngas, by using solar energy, just not at a price competitive with fossil fuel.
Me searching for the electric tanks. ¯ \ _ ༼ •́ ͜ ʖ •̀ ༽ _ / ¯
Edit: I found them :D
I do not know if any such tanks are in production, but there where experimental electric tanks, just not with batteries, but with turbogenerators.
Great question! Turns out there are. The U.S. Military's Abrams Tank Is Going Hybrid [1]. I'm sure we'll get some comments saying why it's a terrible idea[2].
1. https://insideevs.com/news/784805/abrams-m1e3-hybrid-tank-vi...
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484044
They didn’t make it past the drones.
and I wonder which blown up tank would pollute the environment more
I don't really think that's really high up on military priorities list. But happy to be proven wrong on that.
tanks must represent like 0.001% of fuel consumption lol Road uses like cars, trucks and buses is 47% of all oil, and clearly an enormous fraction of that can be converted to use electricity instead
Aviation is a few percent of global emissions. All aviation.
It’s probably the hardest thing to replace but if we can’t we will be okay.
Long haul trucking and shipping and remote site power are probably the next hardest things, and maybe coal for metallurgy, but these are also small compared to emissions from electricity generation and routine car transit. The big sources can be completely converted.
> I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels.
These fit an energy niche that can't be replaced with any one thing. China is just now investing in an electric military, for instance. Shipping will remain difficult to electrify entirely (which is surmountable, but certainly not in production). Coal and natural gas plants provide on-demand power that is not straightforward to guarantee with renewable sources. And there are many (likely almost all) grids that are simply not up to the task of transmitting energy that used to be transmitted by physically moving fossil fuels. Air flight has no renewable alternative as of today—though, I suppose we technically do have renewable forms of jet fuel, it's extremely expensive.
& of course we will need byproducts for the forseeable future for fertilizer, materials, chip production, etc etc.
It'll take a couple generations. Of course we should be paying poor countries to not use fossil fuels, but instead we're trying to force switching back to fossil fuels ourselves for no explicable reason (as an american obv).
Time, production capacity, and materials. I’ve seen 1yr lead times on electric equipment to install charging stations. Copper supply issues with a huge rollout.
$150/barrel, much higher prices everywhere, less fertilizer, and less oil available could spur a faster turnover.
Fingers crossed.
Renewables require power storage. Batteries are large, heavy, expensive, and the power dense ones have absolutely horrendous failure modes.
There are other storage options, but they require even more space than batteries.
Oil and gasoline require very little space, have easy to handle failure modes, and aren’t that expensive to operate. Not expensive enough to justify changing nationwide logistics and support.
It’s also far cheaper to keep using fossil fuels for a year than build out entirely new infrastructure.
I'm not sure the failure modes are too significantly different. I think it's likely you may consider them 'easy to handle' is because there's been years to learn how to handle these failure modes (which is a positive, but for reasons not inherent to the power source itself).
It's always far cheaper to keep status quo X than move to new thing Y. Until it isn't. Especially if you don't take into account externalities. Increased instances of flooding, cyclones, and wildfires gets pretty expensive pretty quickly. Losing ground to competitors can be fatally expensive in the long term.
Such things require the ability and will to think and prepare long-term, and it feels as if humanity has been migrating in the opposite direction since the 70's.
Oil doesn’t make self-oxidizing metal fires. You can easily put out an oil or gas fire with water and it will stay out once cooled off. You have to just let lithium batteries burn and even if you get them extinguished, there’s no where to store, transport, or recycle them safely because they reignite without warning at any temperature.
Yes, there are mitigations, but that doesn’t change how fundamentally dangerous they are. Gas tanks do not spontaneously ignite if punctured. Gas is easily cleaned up. Batteries become permanently unsafe and can catastrophically fail at any time with no warning.
Because the upside (with barely single digit margins if it exists) is mostly China and no one else being able to compete at that scale.
Something like skin in the game. US (low), EU(moderate), China (high), Global South (high with caveats to leapfrog but financing crunch always there)
Renewables need front loaded funding compared to Oil & Gas which are the incumbents that make them sticky.
Otherwise is a lot of US consumers were rational and only price minded they would've run TCO calculators on EV vs ICE for day to day use even without subsidies
In the UK, wind is super volatile and isn't viable without LNG. You can have two weeks without wind several times a year. So more wind means more LNG.
> am I missing some economic factor?
That's the big mystery. We're told wind+solar are super cheap. Cheaper than everything. Cheap, cheap, cheap. You'd think, renewables being so cheap, it would rapidly displace all the expensive stuff.
But it does not. All sources of energy grow simultaneously, despite the plentiful anecdotes about limited regional shifts in specific markets.
So that creates doubt about the "cheap" claims. Such doubts, however, aren't generally welcome, and it's best to keep these thoughts to yourself, should they emerge. Carefully asking questions, as you've done, is the least damaging approach to coping with this apparent contradiction. I don't recommend ascribing it to nefarious conspiracies: that creates poor mental habits that don't end well.
In the meantime, there are concepts such as LCOE+ that deal with the real economics of energy supply and demand that can inform you on the matter. You'll want to be careful here, however. You'll encounter ideas that don't align well with preferred narratives and, if you're not careful with such knowledge, you might inadvertently peg yourself as being aligned with counter-narrative forces. And that's never good for kudos.
> All sources of energy grow simultaneously, despite the plentiful anecdotes about limited regional shifts in specific markets.
Do you have a source for that? What I can find points to the opposite:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67005
And globally:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/breakdown-of-...
My hope is that it’s bureaucratic inertia. There really is little excuse. Especially with super high voltage power lines becoming more affordable.
I mean, the US was deploying significantly more renewable energy projects during the last administration than ever before, but the corrupt trump administration stopped many of them immediately after reentering office.
The bureaucracy was moving the right direction - towards renewables - until the conservatives in this country deliberately changed strategy to emphasize fossil fuels again.
You can draw your own conclusions about motive, but this isn’t an accident.
I wasn’t even thinking about the US but consider this administration an interlude. I’m hearing other countries they’re putting the breaks on Chinese solar in an effort to build indigenous production capacity which is incredibly stupid. At least solar scales down so individuals can circumvent and get their own.
I am curious what the drawbacks are for building indigenous photovoltaic production?
Cost, especially if bootstrapping as your more expensive electricity is used to make your still more expensive panels. If you are onshore production it would be far cheaper to bootstrap on Chinese panels.
Renewables are heavily subsidized. Fossil fuels are heavily lobbied for. The result is inertia.
They are growing all over the world at a phenomenal rate, but I think it just takes some amount of time. They have only been the cheapest option for a few years now.
And in the U.S., Republicans have done everything they can to hamstring the transition and destroy the billions of dollars invested by automakers into EVs prior to 2025. But even that can only postpone the transition.
Also they’re only the cheapest at the point of generation, you then need to transfer that energy where it’s needed, and when it’s needed (storage). Also manufacturing capacity for renewables infrastructure, vehicles, batteries, etc, etc, is constrained. And then there are products that can’t be substituted by renewables such as plastics, fertiliser, etc. So many factors. It can’t happen too soon, but it will take many decades.
Demand from data centers isn’t helping anything.
Demand for electricity is irrelevant, it's the supply we have to solve.
How so? Spinning up or keeping online fossil fuel plants to power text extruding machines hardly aligns with the goal of switching to renewable energy.
The solution seems simple, though: Just don't do that.
"We shouldn't want to use the energy in that way" doesn't really seem like anything.
> I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels.
Global politics.
Switching to renewables is seen as capitulation to China because of their lead in tech in this area, especially when you consider that renewables generally introduce battery dependence.
They don't even try to hide this anymore. Watch US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick at the WEF:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY0t0h1gXzk
Explicitly stated: Don't be subservient to China.
Not vocalized, but the obvious alternative: Instead be subservient to the USA and various allied Persian Gulf (and hijacked Latin American) countries who will keep pushing the petrol alternative until it literally runs dry, even if they have to do it at gunpoint.
The real issue was calling them fossil fuels.
So the problem is that we have a bunch of people making pronouncements about things they don't understand.
I would encourage anyone to look into what fossil fuels are actually used for because energy is only part of it. Some energy is for fuel (eg ships, planes) for which we currently have no substitute. A big chunk is electricity generation but there are so many other non-energy uses of fossil fuels eg fertilizers, construction, roads, plastics and other industrial uses.
China has undergone a decades long project to get to the point where they are the world leader (and almost sole supplier) of renewable energy tech. The plunging cost of solar happened because of China. This is a national project for them and no other country that I can think of has the willpower, organization and commitment for the deacdes-long quest to wean oneself off of fossil fuels.
Just between the rollout of EVs and power generation, you need a massive amount of infrastructure associated with it. Upgraded power lines, chargers, etc. Plus all the vehicles. Plus all the materials for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc. Those supply chains are completely dominated by China.
Just look at the LA to SF HSR project. This will likely take 20+ years and cost $100-200B, if it ever even happens. 20 years ago, China had a single HSR line in Shanghai to the airport. Now it has a 30,000+ mile network that carries 4M+ passengers a day and I've seen estimates that the entire network cost less than $1T. California HSR is 10-20% of that budget. For one line.
They reformed every level of government for this project. There is no expensive and corrupt procurement process for every city, every region, every line. They use the same rolling stock everywhere. Permitting for building the tracks and stations is streamlined. They make their own trains.
My point with this example is twofold:
1. EVs and electricity are only a fraction of the fossil fuel picture; and
2. Weaning ourselves off of that is a decades-long project in countries that have no track record or political will to pull that off.
Non-energy uses of fossil fuels are not problematic from the point of greenhouse emissions.
If we stop burning fossil fuels and get energy from renewable sources, the remaining hydrocarbons will probably be used for plastics, chemicals and so on. If they aren't burnt this is fine.
It also probably makes more sense to use fossil fuels for applications where density is critical such as aviation, offset with carbon capture, rather than to leave oil in the ground and synthesize jet fuel using renewable energy.
Cars and electriciy are the overwhelming majority of all fossil fuel use. Let’s just focusing on tranistioning them first, and we’ll be in so much of a better place. The rest can wait
I'm pretty sure that natural gas is a significant component of plastic manufacture.
Plastic ain't going anywhere, anytime soon (although many people wish it would).
It's 100% economic corruption and populist/fascists forcing it down everyone's throat through extreme manipulation. yes...
We might always need some for various materials and industrial process, but wasting it on ground transportation is beyond absurd at this point.
I would argue a nuclear one as well. Energy independence and abundance should rely on a number of sources of energy.
The Chinese already have a 125e Small Modular PWR that would be excellent for small islands like those of the Caribbean. It is the Linglong-1 [0]. I believe the first one cost 800 million dollars. It will be interesting to see the price reductions as it goes into serial ptoduction.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-start-commerci...
Nuclear is near dead if the new geothermal tech from fracking works out.
20 years from now and billions of dollars over budget? Or by variety do you mean wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro?
In the West you mean? The Asians seemto have this particular industrial aspect somewhat under control.
Modern civilization requires semiconductors, concrete, asphalt, fertilizer, and plastics to function. Never mind aviation and marine fuel to function. All of these require hydrocarbons. As long as that is the case, renewable power will continue to be a niche.
Fossil hydrocarbons are not really needed.
Even during WWII Germany had to synthesize much of its hydrocarbon fuel.
Also after the war there has been large-scale production of synthetic hydrocarbons, but eventually this was abandoned due to the low price of fossil oil.
It is possible to synthesize hydrocarbons from syngas, which can be made from carbon dioxide and water, with solar energy. If the carbon dioxide is extracted from air, that requires much more energy than when a concentrated source of CO2 is available, but with essentially free solar energy it would still be feasible.
Obviously, this will not be done as long as cheaper fossil hydrocarbons are offered. However the use of fossil hydrocarbons for plastic, asphalt or other applications that do not release CO2 is not harmful.
> Even during WWII Germany had to synthesize much of its hydrocarbon fuel.
Germany [0], as well as Apartheid South Africa (SASOL), and now China, synthesized that fuel from coal. Which is itself a fossil fuel.
[0] https://warhistory.org/@msw/article/synthetic-production-of-...
> Obviously, this will not be done as long as cheaper fossil hydrocarbons are offered. However the use of fossil hydrocarbons for plastic, asphalt or other applications that do not release CO2 is not harmful.
The issue with any fuel/feedstock production is not just the financial cost but the amount of energy returned on the energy invested. A modern civilization (like Japan) requires 10:1. Synfuels made using the method you described are 1:1 - they provide as much energy as it takes to make them.
It’s really not niche anymore. It’s the dominant form of new electrical power generation and has been for a few years.
https://www.publicpower.org/system/files/documents/Americas-...
right now the main real renewable is solar, solar , is almost controlled by china, another country to start the war quite soon :) sure.
the wake up call for EU , US , and rest of the west that is not happening, that national interest is a real thing. Not a fiction.
Yeah, remember how the energy crises in the 70s served as a wake-up call and made us switch to renewable energy? Me neither. In fact, AIUI, the main consequence was the significant increase of the global oil extraction.
The technologies we’re adopting now were significantly developed by post 70s research funding. The cars people drive are massively more efficient, the houses we live in, and the appliances we buy for the same reason.
Honestly the tech wasn’t there yet then. It sure is now.
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47437516 Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence (reuters.com)
~3 days prior, 447+ commments
More a decentralized energy wake-up call. Though in practice that's probably the same thing.
If there is ever a war with China, that will be a fossil fuel wake-up call, at least she it comes to solar panels and batteries.
What up call for whom? The USA is a net fossil fuel exporter. China is still heavily dependent on fossil fuel imports (as well as fertilizer produced from natural gas) and those imports would be interdicted in any major conflict. Of course the Chinese leadership is well aware of that vulnerability and taking steps to mitigate it.
The U.S. exports fossil, yes, but we import a huge amount as well because many of our refineries aren’t setup to process light sweet crude and it’s also often cheaper to buy oil, refine, and use it on the coast than it is to move it across the country from somewhere in the Dakotas.
If we had a war with China, it’d go much worse given their much greater resources and knowledge of how to hit those import routes for maximum impact.
The Iran War crisis is a billionaire alignment problem wakeup call, too.
Renewable energy just has bad marketing. Instead of just emphasizing their environmental benefits, everyone forgot that they’re also a stop gap for any issues with other sources of energy. China gets it. It’s the same reason why EVs are so important: they give us energy source flexibility. An EV can run on anything that creates electricity which includes coal, nuclear, natural gas, oil, in addition to renewables
Also solar and wind are much more often on time and on budget.
Everyone should look at what's happening in Australia. Australia has 50% more solar per capita than China and utterly dwarfs the USA and Europe on a per capita basis. Because of this Australians have consistently falling power prices.
Think about that. Falling power prices during high inflation with an energy crisis at a time when datacenters are being built out everywhere. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-19/power-prices-fall-but...
You'll note on that link in 1 year prices have gone from $87 to $50. Pretty much all attributable to the massive grid connected battery installations and renewable rollouts which had minimal subsidies. They were merely encouraged by policy which created a shorter time for grid price changes and arbitration allowing high response batteries to drive grid efficiencies. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...
It's straightforward economics at this point. Want cheaper prices? Demand what Australia has.
> First they’ll take our gasoline cars then our guns!!!
Courtesy of Fox News.
I am speaking from a position of total ignorance, so this is probably a dumb take, but I don't see why rich nations[1] don't simply subsidize mass nuclear energy production as state policy. The two main issues with nuclear are unit cost (solvable if you build dozens/hundreds in serial production) and financing (a reactor with a 30 year payback period is much more viable with 3.5% sovereign financing compared to 8% private bonds). France did it 50 years ago with more primitive reactor designs. China is currently doing it somewhat halfheartedly. I bet if the U.S. committed to $2 trillion to one standardized design and heavily used eminent domain, America would have knocked electricity costs down by half within a decade.
[1] Honestly probably only really viable in China and the U.S. plus maybe South Korea; nuclear is unpopular in Japan after Fukushima, and I doubt the E.U. would be able to coordinate everything. Everyone else is probably too poor outside of petrostates, which have the whole petro thing going on.
> I don't see why rich nations[1] don't simply subsidize mass nuclear energy production as state policy
> Honestly probably only really viable in China and the U.S. plus maybe South Korea
Because it costs a lot of money.
For example, India quietly (by HN and Reddit standards) passed a nuclear energy megabill in December which has a TAM of $214 Billion [0]. French (EDF), American (Westinghouse, Holtec, GE Vernova Hitachi), Russian (Rosatom), and Korean (Hyundai) JVs with Indian Public (NPTC, BHEL) and Private (Tata, L&T, Jindal Group) players are now able to build and distribute nuclear energy without dealing with an older SOE and can subsidize the buildout [1] using Green Bonds, which gives them access to around $56 Billion in capital [2] with an added .
These players will also be eligible for India's $2.5 Billion SMR subsidy [3]. This also helps India's $160 Billion data center buildout [4] which is being subsidized by the Indian government [5], and piggybacks on India's $205 Billion infrastructure buildout [6].
Other countries can do that as well, but if they are fine spending tens to hundreds of billions of dollars - that's where the blocker arises, but most of the players with this technology are now backlogged with orders from this buildout in India and other existing and in-progress buildouts.
> outside of petrostates, which have the whole petro thing going on
The UAE [7] is participating in financing India's nuclear buildout as part of their defense pact.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-08/india-see...
[1] - https://powermin.gov.in/sites/default/files/Seeking_comments...
[2] - https://www.climatebonds.net/news-events/press-room/press-re...
[3] - https://www.trade.gov/market-intelligence/india-energy-small...
[4] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2227953&re...
[5] - https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/01/india-offers-zero-taxes-th...
[6] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-06-12/india-...
[7] - https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/india-uae-annou...
The U.S. spends $500 billion a year on electricity[1]. $2 trillion dollars worth of bonds to lower the price per kWh is modest, especially given that it would enable new tax revenue from manufacturing and chemical production, where electricity is usually the highest input cost, even in China.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62945
> The U.S. spends $500 billion a year on electricity
But the American energy industry has negative net margins [0], which makes buildouts difficult without significant state support as the American energy industry is operating at a loss after operations cost are included.
> $2 trillion dollars worth of bonds to lower the price per kWh is modest
Land and Liability.
The upfront cost to build is significantly higher in the US because land is privately owned. On the other hand, India's federal and state governments are subsidizing land purchases for nuclear reactors as part of the SHANTI Act. The only other large economy doing something similar is China.
Furthermore, liability has remained a major issue in the US. India [1] and China [2] both gave nuclear operators a broad liability shield which externalizes the cost of a nuclear accident, especially for SMRs as they cap out in the $30-50 million range in India and China.
If the US can provide a similar liability shield beyond what is already on the books, buildout would be much faster, but this is politically untenable as can be seen with the data center buildout. Imagine the attack ads - "Trump"/"Newsom"/"Vance"/"Pritzker" are poisoning innocent Americans while in the pocket of Wall Street and BigTech. A growing number of Americans view any kind of infrastructure buildout as a subsidy for rich people, almost as if there was an ongoing social media campaign for years that has solidified this sentiment amongst Americans [3].
The big capital players at this point in this space are the US, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Russia, and France. All the other 6 (even Russia) have blocked Chinese access to initiatives and subsidizes for domestic nuclear buildouts, and Russia is also blocked from 4 of them.
That said, the US has quietly started similar initatives as well, like the $80 Billion SMR buildout [4] but HN will never give Trump a win.
[0] - https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
[1] - https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publication...
[2] - https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubccommun...
[3] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
[4] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/westinghouse-megadea...
I keep thinking this war will both be written down as one of the Trump administration worst mistakes while also being the catalyst for a clean(er) energy revolution. We can.. do it all, but there has been a lack of will and incentive. These incentives are strong.
On the up side, perhaps this disaster will make it clear that WWIII won’t be a cakewalk and we can avoid an even more disastrous war with China.
during the beginning of the last Iraq war, I was at a social event and somehow ended up saying that 'at least this is been so obviously foolish that it should cause us to really think twice about doing anything like it again', and someone 20 years my senior turned to me from another conversation and said 'we said the same thing about Vietnam'
People get complacent thinking the system just keeps working no matter what, and not that a lot of effort from talented people goes in to to keeping it working. So they vote in a total moron and discover the good times aren't innate.
I guess someone right after the Great War / the war to end all wars could be forgiven for thinking people wouldn’t be trying that again anytime soon.
What I would consider different this time is that I think the US is in the looting stages of collapse and will be unable to credibly fight such a war even if a minority wanted to.
I have a bit of a conspiracy theory about Trump starting the Iran war as a grift to get $200B appropriated only to abandon the region and have the money disappear.
Ukraine was too...
This war will likely go down as the dumbest geopolitical move in US history (so far, at least). And I don't think it's even close. I cannot overstate the significance of it. I think historians will mark this as at least the symbolic end of American Empire. And I don't say that lightly. It will redefine the geopolitical landscape for the rest of the century.
If we're talking about renewables, one has to talk about China [1]:
> In 2024 alone, China installed 360 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar capacity. That’s more than half of global additions that year, and it brings total installed capacity to 1.4 terawatts (TW) – that’s roughly a third of the entire world’s 4.5 TW
And in 2025 [2]:
> Clean-energy sectors contributed a record 15.4tn yuan ($2.1tn) in 2025, some 11.4% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) – comparable to the economies of Brazil or Canada.
and
> In 2025, China achieved another new record of wind and solar capacity additions. The country installed a total of 315GW solar and 119GW wind capacity, adding more solar and two times as much wind as the rest of the world combined.
China has decided long ago that this was of national security interest and it has become a national project to move to renewable energy in a way that I don't think any other country is capable of and on a scale that's hard to conceptualize.
Europe and the US have shown themselves to be completely incapable of planning long term and acting in national interest with regards for fossil fuels. There's no poliitical will. Both are captured by the interests of enriching the billionaire class in the short term. When it all goes to shit, which it will, they'll all leave and/or the rest of us will pay for this lack of foresight.
[1]: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/12/china-adding-more-re...
[2]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-drove-more...
At some point we're going to have to have a conversation about the destructive toxicity of conservatism. There's been no bigger brake on progress of all kinds, and the ends have always been corrupt, self-serving, and small-minded.
The Chinese system is hyper conservative, essentially fascist, it’s not actually socialist in any way, shape or form. It’s also hyper capitalist, with minimal regulation or consumer rights. The top levels of the ‘communist’ party is now packed with billionaires. What regulation there is, is mostly aimed at maintaining party control and prestige.
Both unchecked conservatism and unchecked socialism are toxic. Unchecked anything is toxic. That’s human nature, yet (to simplify massively) we still need both conservative and socialist elements in a balanced society.
Just looking at the US, one can certainly point fingers at conservatism (rightly so) but I think that's missing the forest for the trees. Why? Because the so-called opposition party, the Democratic Party, is complicit is everything that's happened to get us to this point.
The problem isn't conservatism per se. It's neoliberalism (IMHO). Even more broadly, it's capitalism. There's a meme in this space that basically goes something like "when you learn about capitalism, you become either a communist or a liar".
I read something recently about how people fetishize the 1950s, particularly on the political right. A big part of what made that possible was exploitation. Obviously we had a permanent underclass since segregation was still alive and well. A lot of these "middle class" families had "help" or "a girl". But another form of exploitation was oil. We were basically stealing oil from the Middle East for pennies on the dollar.
And then Iran came out and said "maybe we don't want you to steal our oil", we couped their government, we installed our own puppet government, we continued stealing oil and this all ultimately lead to the 1970s oil crisis and the Iranian Revolution. And here we are.
Back to the US political landscape, just look at the "opposition" to this war. It's either nonexistent or it's process-based ("Congress should've approved it"), not substantive. No mainstream political force is saying what we should be saying, which is that our Middle East policy is a crime, the sanctions on Iran were and are a crime and that continued exploitation of this region is unsustainable.
The Iran war hasn't even been the dumbest geopolitical move in the past year.
The US torpedoed its system of alliances which it has spent decades building and maintaining. It through the global economy and its own into turmoil repeatedly in an attempt to extort its friends as much as its adversaries. It betrayed Ukraine for the sake of Russia. It threatened military action against its allies to conquer territory. It rejected the concept of international law which underpinned its position as global hegemon.
Honestly the Iran war isn't even that bad. While it displays the absolute absence of forethought that this administration applied to the situation, that's at least something America can get back with new leadership. The previous blunders which laid bare the unreliability of the US as a partner on the other hand have done irreparable harm.
USA is not even content with attacking one country at a time.
Now there is also the blockade of Cuba that intercepts their imports of oil and has created serious problems there with food and services. This cannot be considered as anything else as an act of war, even if a war is not declared.
Besides the blockade, USA has also threatened with an attack. With the harm done indiscriminately to most Cuban citizens by the blockade, it is even harder for USA to pretend that they are the good guys, while they use their might to attack without any justification a country too weak to present any kind of danger for USA.
You're only saying that because this is only 3 weeks old. Things are going to get a lot worse. If this ended tomorrow, the direct impact will be felt for years before we go back to "normal". And the geopolitical changes are going to be seismic.
First, it's been exposed that the US cannot defend Israel despite spending $1 trillion a year on "defense", billions if not trillions on missile defence and the presence of multiple carrier groups in the region. This alone rewrites regional geopolitics in the coming decades.
Second, the US has exerted influence on the region with a security guarantee that's like NATO on steroids. It's a protection racket (like NATO). We give despotic regimes weapons and we dictate policy, get bases in the region and get the use of terriotiral waters and airspace for whatever we want, basically. But by starting this war of choice, we've shown that there's no security guarantee at all for the Gulf states.
Now, these states will continue to align with the US for purely selfish reasons. For example, Saudi Arabia will do so to maintain the House of Saud, the royal family's control of the country. Many Saudis would prefer this not to be the case but were Saudi Arabia to break from the US, the regime would inevitably fall (IMHO). So they can't abandon the US. But this will only go so far as some of these regimes may fall anyway in a prolonged conflict (eg Bahrain).
Third, the military options here are dire. Militarily, the Strait cannot be reopened. The only military options are retreat or escalation. Trump has threatened to blow up power plants. If he does that, Iran will blow up desalination plants. Or the pipeline that supplies 30-40% of Israel's energy (from Azerbijan through Turkey). The escalation ladder inevitably leads to the use of nuclear weapons by Israel and/or the US, which is untenable.
Fourth, we haven't even begun to feel the impacts yet. Yes, gas prices are higher. That's only the beginning. Utility and food prices are going to spike. Higher diesel costs mean higher transportation. Higher bunkers costs will hit shipping costs. We're likely to see a repeat of 2021-2022 era inflation, if not worse.
If the Strait opened tomorrow, most of those things are already baked in for the next few years.
Fifth, countries are undergoing a sort of "energy nationalism". China, for eample, has stockpiled huge amounts of oil and stopped exported refined petroleum products. Other countries have done similar. This is going to have an outsized impact on countries completely dependent on energy imports, which includes most of Asia.
Sixth, the downstream effects go well beyond secondary products like fertilizer. For example, helium and other materials for chipmaking in Taiwan.
Lastly, this has massively strengthened Russia's position. You will likely see the lifting of sanctions and conceding of territory in Ukraine as an almost -inevitable consequence of an oil supply shock, particularly as LNG prices go up and we hit a heating crisis in Europe.
You are correct that the US has been destroying alliances but it's this war of choice that's going to make that really bite. Iran negotiated in good faith to end the 12 day war, which only ended because of missile interceptor shortages, a problem that's going to take years to address.
This time around Iran has had no choice but to make the consequences of a war of aggression so dire that the US and Israel never think about doing this again.
Also, North Korea demonstrated that the only way to get the US to leave you alone is to have nuclear weapons. The previous Ayatollah had a fatwa against nuclear weapons. Well, the US and Israel killed that guy in his house with his family. Iran now really has no choice but to develop nuclear weapons to guarantee their security. And I can't blame them.
I like to give Australia as the better example. Way ahead of everyone else on a per capita basis (50% more GW of solar installed per capita than China).
If the big powers of the world had any competence a country with 0.5% of the worlds population would not be 3rd in total of grid connected battery storage and 8th in solar (note in total, not per capita). https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country for links.
Because of what Australia has done consumer power prices keep falling, even with the Iran war and datacenter build outs https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-19/power-prices-fall-but...
It's all based on governance led by research (in particular the CSIRO, the Australian government's politically isolated research department) where the CSIRO wrote a peer reviewed report mathematically demonstrating the cheapest way to improve grid reliability and lower prices. This indicated various ways to encourage solar and battery build outs. The Australian senate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate) which is made up of many many parties due to preferential voting passed laws enabling this and here we are.
I think that it's true that China's beating the USA in government competence but they are far far from the ideal. In fact China looks really bad compared to any competant government of the world. It just looks good compared to the USA.
Perhaps so. And yet a couple decades ago when the war against Iraq turned into a quagmire, many political pundits also marked that as the end of the American Empire. And yet today the USA remains the sole globally dominant superpower. Our time will end eventually but we should be skeptical of any predictions on timing.
You seem to have missed since then the massive transformation of China.
Empires don't die overnight, generally. Empires die slowly, violently.
We spent an estimated $8 trillion on so-called "War on Terror". The Taliban were in charge of Afghanistan before we started. They're in charge now. For $8T. 1% of that would end homelessness. 1% of that annually would be free college. I would mention universal healthcare but that would actually save money vs what we now spend so I'm not sure how you count that.
The kind of transformation China has seen in recent decades is what you're talking about with $8 trillion.
A despite the 20 year quagmire that was Iraq and Afghanistan, IMHO this war on Iran is an even bigger geopolitical clown show and will be more consequential to the end of American Empire.
For the common man, this is all true. For the people “running the show” it was probably money well spent. The “War on Terror” brought not just erosion but full-on assault on people’s rights and privacy. It is perfectly acceptable by just about every American to have their junks touched and toothpaste confiscated to board the airplane to fly 80 miles from say DC to Richmond. Everyone is tame now, accepting whatever this new reality is that everyone lives in. There is military on the streets of DC, masked agents running around the country and myriad of other bullshits our grandparents would be rolling in their graves if they knew…
It’s not just about energy, but also industrial (think neon, helium) and agricultural inputs (nitrogen, urea). Even if energy was solved, there’s not really replacements for these. Well, regenerative agriculture but not sure that will feed as many people.
The nitrogen comes from the air - we're perfectly capable of capturing it using renewables.
It's probably one of the last things to be created that way because it's one of the places where methane is used more efficiently than burning it... But fundamentally there's no issue here except energy availability and a short term supply shock.
The nitrogen in generated fertiliser comes from the air, it’s the hydrogen in the process that comes from natural gas.
You can theoretically get it from water instead, but the energy cost is something like 3-4 times as high. It may be feasible at some point.
Also, you can't make plastics out of wind power or out of solar, you still need the "petro-" that's part of the petrochemical industry.
You can use solar to convert CO2 into syngas and do a Fischer-Tropsch synthesis followed by polymerization to get plastics.
But making plastics using renewable energy and fossil hydrocarbons for feedstock does not exacerbate the greenhouse effect, unless you burn them when you've finished with them.
Arguably plastics are a stable, cheap and useful carbon sink and if climate is the overriding ecological priority we should be making as many as we can and recycling as few as possible.
This is false, you can make many plastics without fossil sources (pla, bio-pet, bio-abs, etc). The only challenge is cost and scale - it's cheaper and easier to use existing processes.
You can make plastics out of cellulose, which is available from plant sources or organic (algae) bioreactors.
It would take a while to retool the plastics industry to use organic sources, but it's not at all impossible.
Using renewables means you're burning up less of your plastic feedstocks.
Plastic packaging can be substituted. Engineered plastics are a tiny fraction of petroleum.