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Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

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Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#341

Post by maxglute »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #133
threethirtytwo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the event is Tiananmen Square. And on the moral axis, there is no ambiguity. It was a tragedy. People were killed for demanding political change. History does not need softening there, and I am not interested in doing that. But morality alone does not explain how the world actually unfolds. And using morality as a trump card to end the discussion only works if we pretend the world is clean, fair, and reversible.…

I love the opening of this comment, very poignant. I’m not convinced however that the conclusion follows from the setup. “The West” is more than just America. And America is very easy to condemn from a distance. Actually everything is easy to condemn from a distance. There’s more to disagree with in the second half, but I’ll stick to my biggest gripe: America’s founding is steeped in moral principles, from its very f…

> 1989, and the tension of “moral debt” is ever present, evidenced by its persistent censoring.

IMO mistake to frame censorship as a debt, when it's domestic investment in stability, just like policing or infra, or epidemiologic pathogen control. You don't stop investing in essential nation building. Simply part of domestic infosphere management against unwanted influence, which essentially all countries have recognized PRC is prescient. As for 6/4 specifically, future gens will look back and realize 3-4 digit deaths less than rounding error in terms of Chinese history, having 1000s yrs of events/context sharpens evaluation. Like how Mao 70% good, 30% bad evaluation will turn to 90% good, 10% bad, because what's a few 10s of millions starved to death when his engineering projects and industrialization efforts actually ended 1000s of years of reoccurring famine / Malthusian traps. It will be recognize as "price of future", i.e. retrospectives tend to evaluate empires less on carnage (which is assumed) but on the frameworks they leave behind.

>“The West” is more than just America.

The west is generally built on the same template as America, extractive exploitation of not only itself but others, aka, built off surplus blood and treasure from colonialism, except society indoctrinated to believe such is natural order and just. Generations pass, surplus snowballs to buy more rights and freedom and enable more introspection, where colonialism can be acknowledged as stain, but on the margins. West rarely acknowledge that often the fine line between able to experiment vs subsist is funded by foreign extractive surplus. Skewing global balance sheet of energy and resources enable building and experimenting and bribing peripheries, liberalism = luxury experiments derivative product of colonial surplus. We see how fast it erodes when physical resources contracts.

Regardless, when looting from another, the geopolitical balance sheet no longer remains domestic, like America, it starts geopolitical debts that likely can't be default without eventual consequence. Mistreated countries have long memories, and being mistreated, humiliated if you will (and we're not talking bout only PRC), those memories do not tend to soften with time, and can really only repaid in catharsis. AKA there maybe a day when global south develops/catches up and coerce the west pay their debts. It could be 100s of years from now or current events could hint interregnum where power shifts and debts are soon collected.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#342

Post by Hikikomori »

ecshafer wrote: post #339
koolba wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the reason why the courts are regularly ruling against the administration -- they're pretending to legal authority they don't have in the first place. Lower courts. The track record of this administration at the SCOTUS is 90%.

Lower courts have a lot more activist judges than SCOTUS. SCOTUS has fewer activist judges than they used to, and are now busy interpreting the law based on the constitution, not on what their own personal grievances are.

5 current scotus judges are part of the federalist society. Do you believe only "leftist" judges are activist judges?

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#343

Post by epistasis »

nebula8804 wrote: post #205
epistasis wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even bigger than the abandoned AP1000 reactors in South Carolina? That was about $5B of abandoned capital, IIRC. It was also a monument to IS incompetency, but at least those responsible went to prison for it. I doubt we would see the same for cancelling the wind projects.

Just as a side note: Recently it seems as if there is interest in finishing those projects as a result of data center energy needs. Your point still stands but just wanted to put that out there.

There's been talk for a long time about restarting construction on Virgil C Summer again, but it has never happened. I remember an interview with a Santee Cooper exec that was extremely withering on the prospects of it actually happening. I can't find it now, but here's a 2019 video from the then-new CEO about the people who were looking into restarting construction, that's far less withering:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq0LsX_fCm4

I'll believe it when it happens. Traditional 1GW nuclear like the AP1000 is just such a huge financial bite to make these days that the only orgs big enough to do it are large consortiums of large companies, or nation state.

It's a tough position because the AP1000 has a much better chance of reaching affordability than SMRs, but nobody wants to spend the $50B-$100B in capital to produce uneconomic nuclear reactors in order to maybe drive down the cost of construction so that future reactors will be economic.

It's a very different situation for funding than solar, because there's small scale use cases where expensive energy makes sense, in places that wires don't reach, etc. etc., on devices, etc., and that's what really drove a lot of the early development of solar manufacturing capacity. That got it to the point that Germany could do subsidies to really scale up the deployment of expensive energy, and since Germany spent that money, it's been smooth sailing for the rest of the world.

The path for nuclear is not as clear as it was for solar.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#344

Post by array_key_first »

ecshafer wrote: post #339
koolba wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the reason why the courts are regularly ruling against the administration -- they're pretending to legal authority they don't have in the first place. Lower courts. The track record of this administration at the SCOTUS is 90%.

Lower courts have a lot more activist judges than SCOTUS. SCOTUS has fewer activist judges than they used to, and are now busy interpreting the law based on the constitution, not on what their own personal grievances are.

They're interpreting the law based on how much they can contort the constitution to divert as much power to King Trump as possible while not completely thrashing their credibility.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#345

Post by array_key_first »

barbazoo wrote: post #196
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There'll be a ton of people running, any of which I think would be highly competitive against Vance: Walz, Pritzker, Newsom, Chris Murphy, Harris, Josh Shapiro, etc. But I think Mark Kelly is likely to be a top-tier candidate from the jump. He's not my favorite of the bunch, necessarily, but I'd consider putting money on him being the Democratic nominee in 2028.

Interesting you say Newsom. Interesting, interesting very interesting. It’s just interesting you bring up Newsom. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gavin-newsom-short-circu...

What is this meant to prove or not prove? Or is it just, like, a little bit funny?

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#346

Post by array_key_first »

rootusrootus wrote: post #115
carefulfungi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird to see this so downvoted on the same day that Trump asked republicans to "Nationalize" elections in 15 places. Whatever that means. > “Republicans should say, ‘We want to take control of this. We need to take control of voting in at least 15 places.’ Republicans should nationalize voting,” [Trump] said on the podcast of former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, which was relaunched on Monday.

> Whatever that means It means Trump is sucking the oxygen out of the room. Again. I wish we would quit reacting to every stupid thing he says.

The whole reason we're in this mess is because not enough people took him seriously.

As a rule, Trump supporters treat him like a buffoon, a liar, and instigator. The only people who seem to believe Trump are his opponents.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#348

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tialaramex wrote: post #326
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes 40 votes to prevent the other party from putting something in a bill that you're willing to do a government shutdown to prevent. That's probably a good thing. Consider what would be happening right now, when the Republicans have >50 but not >60, if that meant they could actually do whatever they want. And the difference between 49 and 51 is still pretty damn important because "majority" has a lot of procedur…

As you've seen, over, and over, and over again, this is their own internal rule they've changed it before and they can just change it again with a simple majority, the so-called "nuclear option". None of this has any actual weight, it's all theatre. Which doesn't mean it lacks consequences, but they could at any time just sweep it aside and they choose not to. Ironically, one thing the Senate does constitutionally ne…

> As you've seen, over, and over, and over again, this is their own internal rule they've changed it before and they can just change it again with a simple majority, the so-called "nuclear option".

It's called the "nuclear option" because actually using it is mutually-assured destruction. They're not so stupid that they can't foresee ever being in the minority again when changing a rule where that consideration is the blatantly obvious cost.

Somehow the Democrats were that stupid and did it for judicial nominations and both parties can see how that came back to bite them.

> Which means that so long as Republicans have enough votes and apparently still believe loyalty to one corrupt rotting bag of shit is their purpose in life he can't be impeached.

The real purpose of impeachment is for when there is widespread consensus that someone so pressingly needs to be removed from office that it can't wait until the next election. It's for when they're so bad even their own side won't stand for it, not for when you hate the other party's President and catch a slight majority in the midterms.

But if you retake the legislature then maybe consider adding some new restraints on executive power to those hefty must-pass omnibus bills. It might be worth doing something about the problem in general instead of just that one specific jerk?

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#349

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

array_key_first wrote: post #344
ecshafer wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lower courts have a lot more activist judges than SCOTUS. SCOTUS has fewer activist judges than they used to, and are now busy interpreting the law based on the constitution, not on what their own personal grievances are.

They're interpreting the law based on how much they can contort the constitution to divert as much power to King Trump as possible while not completely thrashing their credibility.

Importantly, they're using the shadow docket so that they don't need to decide officially, as that would bind their hands with a future Democratic administration.

Like, whatever happened to the Major Questions Doctrine?

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#350

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

graemep wrote: post #317
exe34 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any ideas why they might not wish to?

I think they have adopted a common ideology. The people in the parties have become more similar over the years, as have the voters they appeal too. A few decades ago a very high proportion of Labour politicians were former trade union leaders, for example. Conservative voters tended to be more rural and more affluent. Now a very high proportion are professional politicians who have never really done anything else. Th…

> Now a very high proportion are professional politicians who have never really done anything else. They are all people who have done well through the status quo and do not want to change anything.

I really dislike that this is a thing. Politics should not be a profession. That being said, the obvious way of fixing this (term limits) would just end up giving more power to the civil service bureaucracies, which has problems.

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