151–160 of 187 posts
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As a sidenote, I love that you reference 1973 as 01973. I suggest considering labeling even as 11973, based on some reasonable humanist-based information.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs
As a sidenote, I hate it, can someone explain where does it come from?
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Calling out a rather destructive take with just harsh NO is pretty high on the the hierarchy of disagreement. If you refer to the "bitch" statement that is quoting the person I replied to .... Their own comment seems heavily concerned with "being a bitch" which implies deep insecurity or trauma on their part .... Pretty typical maladaptive coping mechanism... Are all these extra words to say the same thing I already…
It’s a crude term, sure, but sums up a potential future where total dependence for critical materials leads to one nation being able to do relatively whatever she wants while the other is stuck taking terms as given. If you’d prefer “highly disadvantaged diplomatic, economic, and security situation” I can say that, but this is an internet comment not a freaking Brookings Institute report. Calling me an insane jingois…
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> Solar panels are different from oil in that their producers cannot turn them off Uhh they don’t last forever. So yeah. They can be controlled like oil if you are unable to make or source replacements.
They are conventionally warranted for 20 years, but that's just a guarantee they won't lose more than 20% from their nominal capacity over that time period. Silicon PV (the kind that dominates the market currently) continues to produce after that, continuing to degrade, but more slowly than in the first decade after installation. Many of the PV panels produced in the 01970s still work today. So embargoing or blockadi…
It means you can't replace panels destroyed and can't grow your energy production. If one side can and the other can't, that's a major problem.
> 20 years would be long enough for a functioning country to develop a solar-module industry from scratch
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best is today. We're twenty years ago.
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Security is not provided by having stuff, it's provided by having the capacity to make stuff. Importing now does not increase security. Edit: one thing the Trump-Vance administration has done is tear through the tissue-paper screen of "rules based international order" rhetoric, exposing to plain view that we live in a world of great powers and international anarchy. As we have always done, but somehow allowed ourselv…
You know what you need to make stuff? Energy. You need energy. And that's what the US government's fossil-fuel-subsidizing bullshit is denying you. Importing oil and gas now does not increase security, but importing PV modules does, because it gives you the capacity to produce energy from them for 20 years (module warranty period) or more likely 100 years (how long they'll actually work, though below the 80% of origi…
We aren't importing much oil and gas. Importing PVs is nice. Increasing domestic PV production is better. And in any case, we're installing record amounts of PV already [1]--the limiting factor is installation, not production.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/quarterly-solar-industry-u...
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They are conventionally warranted for 20 years, but that's just a guarantee they won't lose more than 20% from their nominal capacity over that time period. Silicon PV (the kind that dominates the market currently) continues to produce after that, continuing to degrade, but more slowly than in the first decade after installation. Many of the PV panels produced in the 01970s still work today. So embargoing or blockadi…
> embargoing or blockading PV exports to the US would be a threat that the US might start to produce less energy 20 or 30 years in the future It means you can't replace panels destroyed and can't grow your energy production. If one side can and the other can't, that's a major problem. > 20 years would be long enough for a functioning country to develop a solar-module industry from scratch The best time to plant a tre…
1. The embargo would have to last decades.
2. The US would have to sit on its hands for those decades and deliberately choose not to develop its own manufacturing capability.
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no, the commentator is simply proposing actually responding to the imperialism of China by protecting US assets and national security instead of rolling over and taking it because of misguided principles about free trade and intellectual property that the CCP has undermined for forty years to arrive in a position where they can undercut us on price through human rights abuses. It is China that is imperialist and that…
Eh. Nixon helped bring China into the global community and the economic ties help bring (hundreds of?) millions out of extreme poverty and built up a major trade partner. Now with China's success the very free trade policy between our countries needs to be adjusted and slowly dialed back towards fairness. The problem being there are plenty of actors whose motivation isn't "balancing what's best for my country and the…
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> embargoing or blockading PV exports to the US would be a threat that the US might start to produce less energy 20 or 30 years in the future It means you can't replace panels destroyed and can't grow your energy production. If one side can and the other can't, that's a major problem. > 20 years would be long enough for a functioning country to develop a solar-module industry from scratch The best time to plant a tre…
kragen's point is that worrying about solar panel embargos is unreasonable given the duration that panels last. An oil embargo is much more impactful to the US. A 6 month oil embargo would significantly harm the US despite our diversified energy infrastructure. A 6 month solar panel embargo wouldn't be a blip even if we were getting 100% of our energy from solar (+ battery storage, presumably). The panels we have wil…
An oil embarge is absolutely more impactful than a PV embargo. That doesn't mean the latter isn't a problem.
> embargo would have to last decades.
My point is it wouldn't. An embargo would immediately limit America's ability to grow its energy base and replace e.g. panels destroyed closer to China (or hell, on the homeland through presumably sabotage). If you're at war and your energy is capped while your enemy's isn't, that's a strategic problem. Waiting for that predictable problem to manifest versus cauterising it today is madness.
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During "snowmageddon" and similar winter outages fossil fuel shoulder load also broke down, since the dynamic pricing market doesn't pay to keep spinning capacity, and the plants couldn't start up, which is why the cost curves went berserk: the price pressure escalated to try and incentivize production, but the production wasn't to be had. (The JIT nature of Texas LNG logistics also played its part; some gas turbines…
build better houses, and in process lower your household energy need BY INCREASING comfort. BREEAM / Passive house.... In passive house in norway (alaska of europe) you can be 3 days without electricity(or gas or any other heating medium) and in coldest of cold days you do not need to put sweater on, because it is still comfortable, heat is not escaping as fast. so there is deregulation of market and there is not edu…
build better houses, use saving in energy to buy more things. hard capitalism. but no that is bad. :)
socialism inside of a energy market is good for people raised in capitalism. makes no sense to me.
lowering households energy need 100% in instant is like providing 25% more energy generation for everything else.
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I think you are misguided because of a true belief in "the system". The problem is systems often fail to handle bad-faith actors who intentionally abuse them. Absent a higher system, we lack good means to address this. But the system is not a moral good and we don't owe it to anyone or anything to maintain arbitrary rules when our enemies are using them to hamstring us and threaten our citizens, liberties, and way of…
I live in Argentina, so my belief in "the system" is that it's comprehensively rigged. Also, a friend of mine was raped by the police under the US-backed last Argentine dictatorship, so I'm not super enthusiastic about dictatorships like the PRC, nor about LatAm being inside the US's sphere of influence. This dumping stuff is nonsense. If you investigate more deeply than reading PR, you'll come to the same conclusion…
And you're assuming being stuck under the thumb of an illiberal regime hostile to our beliefs and way of life, a regime with a long history of violating basic liberties, of mass murder, and of ethnic (han) supremacy, would stop at trade concessions. I don't believe we could reach a point where we could make tolerable policy changes to appease the PRC.
I don't think it's an issue of us being blind. There are plenty of contributing factors. For one, we are terrible at industrial policy and it's ridden with recapture. E.g. Ford shutting down a battery plant because the UAW demanded (and gov't generally supported) the fact that they'd have to re-hire and re-train tons of UAW employees at the new factory. This is objectively not the way to handle what we believe to be a critical energy supply issue. The fact that it's become incredibly difficult to produce solar panels or batteries competitively, both due to higher wages and more stringent regulations than one would find in china. This is exacerbated by decades of conspiracy to wink-and-nod at illegal immigration suppressing investment in automation, meaning catch-up would be painful and take time. Etc.
There's also the fact that, as it stands now, we cannot replace our grid with renewables. It's also much easier to make a large chunk of it nuclear, but the environmental/clean energy groups have mostly been captured by nuke-hating tree-huggers for half a century now. Objectively you do not want to make all your generation wind/solar because your storage requirements are much higher, because the LCOE numbers people use in their calculations (Lazard's are popular) are notoriously bad, and because storage tech either isn't there yet or is cost-prohibitive.
I am very frustrated by people who 1. try to reduce this to "one simple thing" that they happen to support, and likely supported long before and apart from current issues, 2. people who see it as an opportunity for recapture, and 3. the head-in-the-sand denialists who just don't know or care that America's position and people are threatened by the way things are headed.
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Security is not provided by having stuff, it's provided by having the capacity to make stuff. Importing now does not increase security. Edit: one thing the Trump-Vance administration has done is tear through the tissue-paper screen of "rules based international order" rhetoric, exposing to plain view that we live in a world of great powers and international anarchy. As we have always done, but somehow allowed ourselv…
You know what you need to make stuff? Energy. You need energy. And that's what the US government's fossil-fuel-subsidizing bullshit is denying you. Importing oil and gas now does not increase security, but importing PV modules does, because it gives you the capacity to produce energy from them for 20 years (module warranty period) or more likely 100 years (how long they'll actually work, though below the 80% of origi…