Value which won't bring anything to anyone. I mean, a couple of people can be more richerer, but we won't have a planet to spend or enjoy these theoretical riches at the end.
I'm not clear what you mean. While nuclear waste is certainly a thing that could hurt the environment if mismanaged, impacting the climate isn't really a way that it does so. The shielding also seems like an unusual thing to focus on as opposed to the waste itself.
The USA is already holding the record for greenhouse gas pollution per capita and they elected the lunatic that raved about climate change being a hoax. I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier.
The fact these regulations didn't make it through the normal law making progress (senate/house) doomed it before it even took shape. With presidents like Trump undoing everything his predecessor(s) did just to feel powerful, legislation like this is doomed from that start.
Sorry but you can't have EVs everywhere, WA and CA banning natural gas for heat and cooking, WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power. The math does not add up.
Solar and wind output is not constant or reliable. NIMBYS sabotaged nuclear years ago. It takes how many years to bring a new plant online?
A lot of feel-good rules and regs were passed, pushing a massive shift to electric power, with no consideration as to where the additional power would come from.
You can't wave your arms like a Peanuts cartoon and have all that extra power appear, which is the logic that was used in passing many of these impractical regulations.
What an opinion to have when thus far evidence has concluded the opposite. Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors doesn’t make the anti-renewable parrots correct. There are situations where —at minimum- hybrid solutions are far more viable options but for many locations just those two solutions work very well.
> Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors
Speaking of infrastructure, how about pushing a mass rollout of EVs before giving a single consideration as to where the charging infra would come from?
Charging infra would only exist if there's demand for it, if you have a better solution for this catch-22 I'm all ears.
Though it looks like rolling out EVs before the charging network existed worked, there are thousands upon thousands of chargers now that there are enough vehicles to use them.
That seems like a pretty bad example considering the rising popularity of EVs has coincided with an enormous grown in available charging infrastructure to service the EV customer base. It's almost like human society can handle complex, interdependent systems as they change, either through deliberate organization or natural market incentives.
It's not like the current mix of electrical generation and fossil fuel distribution is some naturally occurring phenomenon or alien technology. It's an enormously complex and interdependent system we built. I'm pretty confident we can build new and different things.
There’s no way for you to know that. You don’t do the math. People like me, who work in the clean energy industry, do the math. The math works fine. You should try working as hard as the math does, instead of complaining.
> WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power.
Have a closer look at the hydro dams that have been removed for salmon habitat.
From what I've seen capacity was tens of MegaWatts [1] and some were just for irrigation. Meanwhile, large dams [2] are doing gigawatts.
Large dams also have negative environmental effects and maybe one day they'll get removed too, but accepting the tradeoff for large amounts of power makes more sense than destroying samon fishing to get irrigation water or a piddly amount of power.
Normally I would be concerned, but these days, we are well on our way to 3.5C. All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals.
It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren. Wait to see what happens when millions of desperate people living south of the 40th parallel start heading north in mass. No wall will stop that.
According to Al Gores movie (shown to US students) we were already supposed to be beyond 2C by now. When the ClimateGate "hide the decline" emails were released that also raised a few eyebrows. So saying the world is now going to 3.5C rings on deaf ears. That's not science that's just the fact of what actually happened so far.
Your narrative is repeated less and less because it isnt compelling.
My narrative is substantially different because the trend was correct and 1.4 vs 2.0 does not prove a negative.
The massive FUD and misinformation campaigns by industrialist operations, along with opportunist/capitalist denials and misdirection, has successfully confused enough of the US public to withold opinion on the matter. This has allowed politics to treat it as a marginal issue where there are 2 sides, rather than a morally catastrophic eventuality.
Because it stops society falling apart and regressing. Humanity is not some angelic, monolith stoic super species, which is just programmed wrong. Its half-sane monkeys which fall apart in a regression as soon as the surplus bribery stops and then try to sew the bakeries oven apart, so everyone has something to eat.
One can not create policies that destroy the thing they want to protect from a crisis to come, by inducing a different crisis by ignoring the material you work with. Trump is your doing, you brought this guy forth, by deindustrializing the west, by making western buisnesses unable to compete. Stop working with idealized paper-cut outs of people- and actually engage, with the species you got. And no, your good intentions and noble goals, do not entitle you to wing it.
And when there are cheaper, faster built, renewable sources of energy that the whole world is building out. I don’t think the lost time can be fixed post Trump (if he even gives up power that is).
It is usage of plants that matters, not number of plants.
Most of the new Chinese coal plants mostly have have low capacity factors. They are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar.
Many are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.
Many are also built to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.
More shortsighted, I-am-rich-and -old-so-ill-be-dead-before-the-earth-combusts, boomer bullshit! This is, as-per for the orange party, disgusting and blatantly corrupt. Anyone who defends this or simps for trump is a gd loser. Brain rot at its finest.
*my guess, this comment will be flagged and downvoted by HN elite as they always do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's because the technology is already there, if plants were willing to run at a bit of a higher OpEx and add some CapEx. Amine scrubbing coupled with decades-old technology like Rotary Packed Beds Reactors can already capture 90% of CO2 at minimum. The UAE's Ruwais facility already does this onsite and uses the captured CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery (aka fracking for the last bits of oil in wells). This has the benefit of sequestering CO2 while also not using water for fracking as an option.
I think this is good idea. I am not against combating climate change, but it can't come at the expanse of our economy. If you disagree stop using whatever device you are reading this on.
A thought is that from 'their' perspective the potential loss of power and status on the tip top of things is to them existential. Consider a certain Senator being wheeled into the Senate to vote. Why even subject ones self to that. Because to step down is annihilation. There was another Senator in 2023 being wheeled around the same way.
So all of this is performative asserting power in order to punish anyone seen as a threat to the current system.
There's this idea in leftist thought, that in the end capital only ends up growing its relative power over labourers. Trump's policies, Climate Change, they all make everyone worse off in the absolute, but they end up giving capital more relative power over the rest of us.
Good to see some action away from "climate" regulations ruining the energy sector and making everything downstream more expensive. You can't have a booming industrial economy without cheap energy. And no, having strict regulations that just end up moving production offshore doesn't solve anything. It just moves to pollution to China or India or whatever.
We're already paying for and will continue to pay more for the downstream effects of climate change some way or the other, you just refuse to or are unable to look at the bigger picture.
Taxing carbon will affect everything, including private jets, and China is doing more for solar power than any other place in the world and they're also investing heavily in renewables and nuclear.
In any case, the solution to other countries not doing their parts is figuring out ways to incentivise and coordinate better outcomes, not giving up completely, giving up only makes sense if someone is in denial regarding the consequences.
It uses the term “greenhouse gas” to refer to CO2 and uses the term “air pollution” to refer to what people traditionally think of as air pollution. For example, in one place of says: “Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g., by air pollution).” So that’s treating “CO2 enrichment” (emissions) as distinct from “air pollution.”
I think you miss rayiner's point. He's not disputing whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas. He's saying that doesn't make it a "pollutant" as the term was understood at the time, say, the EPA was created. There was no congressional legislation that said that it was something the EPA was empowered to regulate. Then the EPA decided to regulate it anyway (and, yes, won the court case about whether it could). But it was still shoehorned in, as it was not considered a pollutant in the way that NO2 or particulates or chlorine were.
This is ridiculous. There is no redefinition, it was always part of definition. Seriously. The only end run around consensus are lies like "CO2 as polution is a novel thing".
In the 1990 IPCC report it talks about “greenhouse gasses” and also about “air pollution” but treats those as two distinct things: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_a.... For example, on page 97, it says “CO2 enrichment” may “enhance plant growth,” but that “enhanced levels of air pollution could also reduce this positive effect.” There’s it’s clearly talking about CO2 and air pollution as two different things that have opposite effects on plant growth.
CO2 can be pollution while still allowing plants to grow, plants use CO2 in their growth cycle, if you didn't know, they don't use other greenhouse gases to grow.
Page 9 lists CO2 as the first item in a list of greenhouse gases. I don't want to spend all day read this 37 year old report.
In what world are greenhouse gases not air pollutants?
Greenhouse gas refers to any type of gas that makes up our atmosphere. Air pollution are substances entering the atmosphere that degrade air quality and human health.
Therefore air pollution is always going to be a greenhouse gas, but not every greenhouse gas is going to be air pollution.
CO2 is the principle man-made GHG that all the others are compared against. CO2 is what the IPCC refers to as long-lived climate forcer, which are gases that have a warming effect on the scale of decades, fitting the definition of air pollution.
CO2 is a pollutant and has been for as long as humans have been pumping out tons of it into the atmosphere.
Yes the EPA should be able to regulate noise pollution too, unless maybe if another agency is doing that job.
No there is no issue to have that definition encompassing all of what in society causes damage to the open environment[1].
Note that your wording, "encompasses [...] all of society", does not correspond to my stance. It only encompasses what causes negative externalities in the way I defined.
[1]: damage should be defined relative to a severely detrimental impact to the biosphere or to human society. The environment is understood to be open as defined by not having clear boundaries that may, for example, keep the impact strictly contained within the limits of a volume property of the agent of this impact. Air is typically not contained in such a delimited volume, and is thus open environment. Water also flows freely and is connected to e.g. big bodies of water. And so on.
NFTs never made sense. You're buying a short URL on a blockchain in the hopes that it'll somehow retain value. The URL could go bad, it could be pointed at something else, etc. But what NFTs did was induce demand for crypto, particularly Ethereum. That was the point.
For a long time I thought we went to war for oil. No, that's backwards. Our oil dependence exists to induce demand for weapons. I will once again refer to the article No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].
So when you see things like pollution limits being lifted on power plants because of data centers, know that the ultimate driving force is the sale of weapons.
Let me give a concrete example. If I drill a well in West Texas that produces, say, 1000 barrels per day ("bpd"). It doesn't produce that forever. As the pressure goes down, the daily production goes down. In the industry this is called the decline rate. For the Permian Basin, the decline rate of any oil well is typically 15-20% per year. So in year 2, that well will produce 800-850bpd. In year 3, it'll be ~650-700. In year 4 it'll be 500-550.
So if you rely on oil you constantly need to be building new wells to maintain your same production level. For the US, which produces 13-15Mbpd of oil, that means you need to add 2Mbpd of new wells every year just to maintain that level of production.
Oil wells, like any form of resource extraction, are excellent wealth concentrators. They make people rich. If I put up 1GW of solar panels then, apart from some cleaning and general maintenance, they're going to produce 1GW of electricity every year (with some variance for sunshine). Nobody gets rich from that. And nobody needs to go to war for that. Which means nobody gets rich from selling weapons to secure that oil.
nfts were about trying to make inherently not scare things scarce, and to try to get people involved in a ponzi scheme
the oil being drilled and mined is exceptionally useful, and people buy it even when you dont need to go to war or get weapons. War would still be happening in the middle east without oil, its a key trade route between Europe and Asia.
the oil dependence exists because it lets people get work and labour done without hiring labourers.
if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that, and whenever people start building giant solar farms in borth africa, we will see armed militas conquering each other for control over the profits
> if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that
You're going to spend maybe a billion dollars to build your solar farm, maybe you get somebody to lend you the billion dollars at 4% annual interest for 10 years,
Your panels make maybe 1.5 TWh of electricity each year, you can sell that for maybe $50 per MWh, so that's $75M per year. But the interest on your loan was $40M, so after year one your owe $965M, after the ten year loan finishes you still owe almost $600M and your panels are now ten years old.
It's just a normal business venture, if you've got people who can execute and a favourable environment it should work, like if you opened a fast food chain, or a dry clean business or a distillery. This is completely different from resource owners, who instead are just granted ownership of a finite natural resource.
- Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it. If your argument is an economic one then jump onto the solar, wind and battery bandwagon.
- There are virtually no real short medium or long term gains economically here. Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind and its costs are rising while solar and wind continue to fall. Building new maximum pollution plants would drop that internalized cost but who in their right mind would fund something so obviously DOA?
- Obviously the externalized costs of greenhouse gas emissions are deeply undervalued in this move. Even if they are 'fake news' in the US, the rest of the world is finally starting to take them seriously. The US's diminished soft power means it won't be able to easily bully the world into allowing it to pollute without consequence and such an obviously hostile move means it will loose even more of its soft power by taking this position. So on the international level this means we burn a lot of political capital and gain nothing but decades of distrust and anger.
- Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.
- Oh yeah and, of course, climate change is real.
This continues the US down the path of being the best buggy whip maker in the world. Worse than that, the US is becoming an obnoxious buggy whip maker who's neighbors are starting to hope fails horribly and will help make that happen as moves like this continue. This is stupid at every scale and in every dimension.
The current wars in Europe and the Middle East paradoxically push the world towards non-fossil enery like few things did before. Both oil and natural gas prices have skyrocketed on global markets, and will likely rise more, as Ukraine continues to target Russian oil infrastructure, and Houtis continue to stymie Saudi oil exports.
Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though; at worst it takes longer to ship the key components from China to Europe around Africa.
The current wars in Europe and the Middle East could paradoxically push the world towards more domestic energy production, be it fossil or non-fossil energy.
For example in reaction to 1973 Arab oil embargo Carter boosted energy efficiency and solar and promoted coal.
"
"America indeed is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and my goal as President of the United States is to see on the world energy markets Arab oil replaced with Illinois coal," Carter told miners and employees of the Old Ben Coal Mine No. 25. He also boasted that the country would, "produce more coal in 1980 than has ever before been produced in the United States of America."
"
>The current wars in Europe and the Middle East could paradoxically push the world towards more domestic energy production, be it fossil or non-fossil energy.
Fossil fuel is still going strong and will probably stay so for the next 50 years. Like I just learned Taiwan makes most of its energy from coal and LNG and is set to denuclearize, which blew my mind given their cutting edge manufacturing economy, but kinda makes sense when you factor in their geography and geopolitics.
Global fossil fuel usage fell last year. We are on a trajectory to massively cut out fossil fuels and replace them with renewables. This was before global petroleum movement was blocked through the Strait. Check out the juicy details in the Ember 2026 report[0].
Some highlights:
Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth. For the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and only the fifth time this century, fossil generation did not rise, recording a small fall of 38 TWh (-0.2%).
The global fall in fossil generation was driven by a historic reversal in fossil trends in China and India, the largest and third-largest fossil power countries globally. 2025 was the first year this century when fossil generation fell in both countries. In China, it fell by 56 TWh (-0.9%), marking the first decline since 2015.
For the first time in 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix as continued rapid growth in solar and wind pushed the share of renewables above a third of global generation. Coal power dropped 63 TWh (-0.6%) in 2025, marking the first fall since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Combined with continued electricity demand growth, this meant coal fell below a third of global generation for the first time in history.
Fossil fuels are not used only for electricity production, they are also used for heating (low temp, high temp), feed stock for chemical proceses, combustion engines.
Before, say, 2022 or 2026 for that reason, oil, coal, lithium, silicon, iron, etc were mined, processed, and shipped as usual. By now, the production and shipping of oil and oil-based fuels, and, to a lesser extent, LNG is hampered by wars. The production and shipping of what is required to build solar, wind, and even nuclear power sources continues, mostly unaffected by the wars, which makes these power sources relatively (even) more attractive.
Sadly, it does not mean that EU or USA grew less dependent on China for solar panels, industrial chemicals, or a lot of other things. OTOH, they did not grow more dependent either.
> Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though;
For now.
The majority of solar panels are made in China (85%), and they plan to invade Taiwan in just a few years, possibly as soon as 2027, at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production or defend Taiwan and cut ourselves off from the source of almost all manufactured products, and especially solar panels.
It's fun watching the right wing try to square this circle. Especially in the UK where we import most of our fossil fuels.
We could have sovereign control over our energy supply with renewables and electrification. Yay, we become a great sovereign nation free to do whatever we want with our great British energy supply!
But no, the right wing answer is to develop a couple of gas fields in the north sea that would supply a tiny amount of actual energy requirements, and do nothing for prices as it all goes into a global trading platform.
I know the reason, it's hard to say no to all that money from the fossil industry, and walk back decades of indoctrinating your base at their behest. Even if it means making your country energy independent...
It's really sad comparing the UK with Norway. The latter did "drill baby drill" before it was cool, but almost exclusively for exports. Some of that money has been invested in rapid electrification - so that Norway can export even more!
Meanwhile, the left in the UK doesn't want to drill (so less money for electrification) while the right in the UK doesn't want to electrify (so less money due to more imports). Why doesn't anyone want to copy the Norwegian model?
- Norway had and still has a lot more oil in their part of the North Sea than the UK does
- Norway has a vastly smaller population than the UK; more than ten times smaller (5.6m versus 69m). Each Norwegian gets 10x more money coming in than they would as UK citizens, just from demographics.
- Norway gambled by having the state directly invest in drilling (Statoil), while UK governments (both Labour in the 1960s and Conservative in the 1970s) refused to invest public money in drilling. Instead they let commercial companies find the money, the government merely licensed and taxed. The reason they did this was that Britain didn't have enough capital available to fund drilling at the time oil was discovered; it was the "sick man of Europe"
- Norway put its oil money into a state pension fund which continues to pay dividends today. Margaret Thatcher spent the oil money on rejuvenating the London Docklands, which admittedly did improve London's standing as the centre of global finance, which is what currently brings in most money for the UK. Perhaps if she didn't do that then financial companies might have moved elsewhere, we don't know that for sure. What we do know is she didn't spend it rejuvenating anywhere else in the country, like Scotland, Wales and Northern England after she shut the coal mines and steel mills and bought in foreign coal and steel.
My point is that there's no party in the UK that wants to drill as much as possible as well as burn as little as possible. It's either one or the other, never both like in Norway.
At least they haven't relaxed restrictions on sulfur dioxide emissions, etc.. yet. Making rain acidic again would be completely on brand for this administration.
Fossil fuel power plants are unfortunately still profitable for their owners (billionaires...). The cost of building them has mostly been written off a long time ago. None of this is about what is good for America in the long run...
> - Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it
That's a baseless claim. For example, Germany has invested massively in solar but its electricity prices went up, not down.
> Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind
That's false. Coal power is cheaper than all of those. Solar and wind include costs for expensive battery backups since they are highly volatile.
And to make it clear: Climate change is very bad so coal plants are very bad. But that doesn't mean you can go around and claim that coal isn't cheap compared to things like solar+batteries. The fact that something is good doesn't imply that it is cheap.
This price of electricity is high because gas, which is still expensive, sets the price of electricity most of the time [1].
The levelized cost of electricity for solar (including batteries) and wind is cheaper than coal [2].
> Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it
> That's a baseless claim. For example, Germany has invested massively in solar but its electricity prices went up, not down.
> This price of electricity is high because gas, which is still expensive, sets the price of electricity most of the time [1].
1) Am I missing something or the link you provided contradicts your claim? On a chart #2 in the article you can see Germany has only 24% of the times price of electricity set by gas, 24% is not "most of the time", right?
2) Even if that is true, and electricity prices in Germany are set by the price of gas most of the time, it seems like you didn't address the point in a previous message. If the goal is to have lower prices and the goal(outcome) is what really matters and renewables is the path to get there then why Germany electricity prices rose at the end? And were not all of those because of this ... because of that ... supposed to be a part of that path(plan)? They did the thing, invested in solar, what have they missed and why?
Germany's decommissioned nuclear, and subsequent concentration of base load in Russian gas-fired plants, is certainly a lede your post is doing its best to bury.
> Germany's decommissioned nuclear, and subsequent concentration of base load in Russian gas-fired plants, is certainly a lede your post is doing its best to bury.
Nuclear is good (no CO2 emissions and stable energy supply), but it's not cheaper than coal. Moreover, that the requirement for gas plants went up because of the volatility of solar and wind is certainly a lede your post is doing its best to bury.
Coal isn't cheap. Specifically coal powerplants are not and it's got nothing to do with emissions. One of the pinch points in the Australian power grid has actually been that a bunch of coal plants are aging out and no private enterprise wants to even bother financing their replacement because it's a money loser compared to renewables build out.
Fortunately this is well on it's way to being solved by the massive battery build out which has happened which means evening peak electricity usage has declined enormously[1] - i.e the primary "sun not shining" point of the day is rapidly turning into an energy use low point for the grid (which makes sense: business powers down, people go home and their batteries which have been charging cover cooking - I have an induction cook top and a 10kw inverter covers everything).
There could be other regulatory and tax hurdles to an Australian coal build-out. We know that coal is at least as cheap as nuclear, and that the electricity prices went up sharply when Germany replaced much of its nuclear energy with solar energy. Therefore coal is cheaper than solar. The mistake that most people make is that they don't include the highly expensive battery or gas backups during the night in the cost of solar.
Yes there could be but there aren't, because conservative state governments have had to resort to trying to subsidize coal power plant investment because no one wants to touch it.
Two things can be true: solar can be unable to provide reliable base load power, and it can be far more profitable investment return then building a coal fired power station.
Which is what has happened: and now, with the falling price of batteries, batteries are a far more profitable return then building a coal fired power station.
Coal is expensive: solar, other then some light cleaning costs, is one and done. There's few mechanical parts and no fuel costs and you can build it anywhere there's an electrical grid (which is everywhere).
Batteries are similar: sure they might degrade, but that's over 15 years. At the right time of day, charging them can be between free, and profit generating due to all the solar.
A coal power plant is gigantic. It can't be built anywhere - it needs to be physically proximal to either a port, or an actual coal mine (which the one's near Hunter Valley in NSW are - I've driven next to the train lines for them, for example), and usually a water source too for cooling. It's a large, maintenance intensive structure (the reason the ones we have are shutting down is the maintenance has gotten very expensive because the whole structure is aging out).
And after all that, it also needs fuel - throughout it's lifetime it will need to constantly buy fuel. But it won't constantly be profitable: most renewables have a massive advantage in that they can switch off from the grid nearly instantly. So renewables are far, far better at reacting to negative power pricing conditions then thermal power plants which cannot spin down that quickly: so a coal power plant (really any thermal power plant) will usually have to pay fines when power prices go negative, whereas while solar might not like shutting down, it can do so immediately (and batteries can just hoover up all that power and claim the credits).
Grid stability is a different department, quite literally, to power generating investment which is a commercial enterprise chasing return. And solar was better, and batteries are catching up quick (partly because negative prices mean your solar investment won't be able to bank a solid 6 hours of profitable sunlight without them). The new thing is also batteries for wind - DC couple grid batteries at wind plants, turning them into much more dispatchable generating assets.
You are 100% right but I think your arguments will fall on deaf ears. Someone bribed Trump or one of his cronies to revoke pollution limits and they got it. What to do when rationality just isn't a factor in politics anymore?
I have to wonder if this is a play towards coal miners, who are part of the conservative base - and they need every vote they can get. Coal is an awful source of power, and a really big source of pollution.
I doubt they really care about coal miners’ actual votes. The US coal mining industry employs fewer than 50,000 people. I live in a major coal producing state and while it was an important industry in my grandparents’ time, these days it isn’t a particularly noteworthy share of our economy.
I would say if it’s specifically about coal at all, it’s more because of the GOP’s tendency toward weird nostalgic obsessions.
> - Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.
Is not Germany an example of the opposite? I mean their decision to shut down nuclear plants while getting dependant on Russian supply of energy sources?
you're comparing years, not standards. i hope you're just foolish and not intentionally disingenuous.
"The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039, which would have reduced carbon pollution by an estimated 1.38 billion metric tons through 2047"
Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.
My point is that after a large change, reversion to the mean should not be treated breathlessly, but viewed in a measured manner.
> Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.
This is an exaggeration that stretches credulity, since there have been strict limits for decades around secondary outputs that are required by power plant energy production effectively limiting production and emissions (which is the entire point).
The 2024 plan would have reduced annual CO₂ emissions by about 533 million metric tons by 2040. That's roughly equivalent to taking half of all U.S. passenger cars and light-duty trucks off the road.
With the rollback, that reduction will no longer occur. So, this is significant.
Imagine you’re driving headlong toward a cliff. Someone turns the steering wheel a little, not nearly enough, but it’s a small part of an attempt to steer away from the cliff.
The real irony is that, despite all this, Trump may accidentally become the greenest US president by driving up the price of oil for the whole world. For years to come.
I mean, anyone can say they're for the environment, but are you willing to start a war, lose a midterm, and murder a school full of kids to reduce your carbon footprint? /s
The linked article doesn’t say what you think it does.
It says that China’s use of coal this year is increasing after a multi-year trend of leveling off or decreasing, mainly because China is using coal in place of LNG imports made more expensive due to the U.S. attacks against Iran.
The overall trend is very clear — China is expanding both its supply of electricity, and generation from renewable sources, at the same time. Which we should also be doing in the United States.
Leveling off means it's declining as a percentage share of all energy usage... but China's total energy usage has grown massively during that time, and so has investment in coal business which has kept up with demand. See in chart form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_China#/media/...
> 2025 also saw China commission 78 GW of new coal power capacity, which is more than India’s net coal power additions over a ten-year period from 2015 to 2024, even though India operates the world’s second-largest coal power fleet. https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/built-peak-coal-pow...
The last time the US built a large new coal operation was 13yrs ago. China has done great things with renewables and nuclear, but that's because they build absolutely everything available, which is why their energy is so much cheaper in China than North America and Europe. Which translates into manufacturing plants being much cheaper to run.
It wasn't the Greens that decided this for Germany. It was our conservatives, the CDU/CSU. The latter had high-ranking officials literally threaten to step down, unless Germany exits nuclear energy production.
How? Most of the power plants had already been decommissioned! The CDU had years and years to stop it. The Greens only had the option to prolong the lifetime of the last power plants, which they did.
This comment thread shows that, if anything, the Americans want this. If they released exhaust fume inhalers, the majority of the US population would willingly buy one and take hit after hit to disprove the myth of weird, alien things like "caring about the environment" while quietly wheezing about "but China..." to themselves.
From the wording, it's not clear if the ruling (from 2024) had any impact on power plant running today, or newly built one (it seems like it was mandating carbon capture eventually.)
The "good" news is that coal plants are already suboptimal, economically. This is delaying the closure of existing plans, which is just absurd, but completely on brand for the political party that people voted in office, with complete knowledge of what would happen.
I suppose they also voted for "cheaper groceries" and "no more endless wars", but that will come any time soon.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 377 ms ] threadValue which won't bring anything to anyone. I mean, a couple of people can be more richerer, but we won't have a planet to spend or enjoy these theoretical riches at the end.
So, no biggie.
you're definitely not clear on the meaning.
The New Yorker published Tom Toro's one-panel comic/cartoon in 2012, and here we are in 2026:
* https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
The fact these regulations didn't make it through the normal law making progress (senate/house) doomed it before it even took shape. With presidents like Trump undoing everything his predecessor(s) did just to feel powerful, legislation like this is doomed from that start.
And now that the Data Centre Industrial Complex has come along it’s somewhat sidelined the Climate Change Industrial Complex*.
Funny how that happens.
Solar and wind output is not constant or reliable. NIMBYS sabotaged nuclear years ago. It takes how many years to bring a new plant online?
A lot of feel-good rules and regs were passed, pushing a massive shift to electric power, with no consideration as to where the additional power would come from.
You can't wave your arms like a Peanuts cartoon and have all that extra power appear, which is the logic that was used in passing many of these impractical regulations.
Speaking of infrastructure, how about pushing a mass rollout of EVs before giving a single consideration as to where the charging infra would come from?
Though it looks like rolling out EVs before the charging network existed worked, there are thousands upon thousands of chargers now that there are enough vehicles to use them.
It's not like the current mix of electrical generation and fossil fuel distribution is some naturally occurring phenomenon or alien technology. It's an enormously complex and interdependent system we built. I'm pretty confident we can build new and different things.
There’s no way for you to know that. You don’t do the math. People like me, who work in the clean energy industry, do the math. The math works fine. You should try working as hard as the math does, instead of complaining.
Have a closer look at the hydro dams that have been removed for salmon habitat.
From what I've seen capacity was tens of MegaWatts [1] and some were just for irrigation. Meanwhile, large dams [2] are doing gigawatts.
Large dams also have negative environmental effects and maybe one day they'll get removed too, but accepting the tradeoff for large amounts of power makes more sense than destroying samon fishing to get irrigation water or a piddly amount of power.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161221064310/http://www.water....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam
It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren. Wait to see what happens when millions of desperate people living south of the 40th parallel start heading north in mass. No wall will stop that.
My narrative is substantially different because the trend was correct and 1.4 vs 2.0 does not prove a negative.
The massive FUD and misinformation campaigns by industrialist operations, along with opportunist/capitalist denials and misdirection, has successfully confused enough of the US public to withold opinion on the matter. This has allowed politics to treat it as a marginal issue where there are 2 sides, rather than a morally catastrophic eventuality.
One can not create policies that destroy the thing they want to protect from a crisis to come, by inducing a different crisis by ignoring the material you work with. Trump is your doing, you brought this guy forth, by deindustrializing the west, by making western buisnesses unable to compete. Stop working with idealized paper-cut outs of people- and actually engage, with the species you got. And no, your good intentions and noble goals, do not entitle you to wing it.
China builds hundreds of coal plants a year while they are exempt from scrutiny.
If this trend keeps going for a decade+, China might begin to approach US per-capita emissions.
Most of the new Chinese coal plants mostly have have low capacity factors. They are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar.
Many are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.
Many are also built to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.
*my guess, this comment will be flagged and downvoted by HN elite as they always do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- wow 2039. So this already had no teeth. We can just pass this law again in 2029.
So all of this is performative asserting power in order to punish anyone seen as a threat to the current system.
In any case, the solution to other countries not doing their parts is figuring out ways to incentivise and coordinate better outcomes, not giving up completely, giving up only makes sense if someone is in denial regarding the consequences.
Nothing more important than that!!
That page is from 2002.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greenhouse_gas&ol...
It uses the term “greenhouse gas” to refer to CO2 and uses the term “air pollution” to refer to what people traditionally think of as air pollution. For example, in one place of says: “Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g., by air pollution).” So that’s treating “CO2 enrichment” (emissions) as distinct from “air pollution.”
Don't be so sure about "obviously" when they start talking about "water vapor emissions"...
Source?
The thing that is also known as "air pollution"?
I want to tell you to stop being a moron, but its against this site's TOS.
Is the IPCC also “morons?”
CO2 can be pollution while still allowing plants to grow, plants use CO2 in their growth cycle, if you didn't know, they don't use other greenhouse gases to grow.
Page 9 lists CO2 as the first item in a list of greenhouse gases. I don't want to spend all day read this 37 year old report.
In what world are greenhouse gases not air pollutants?
Greenhouse gas refers to any type of gas that makes up our atmosphere. Air pollution are substances entering the atmosphere that degrade air quality and human health.
Therefore air pollution is always going to be a greenhouse gas, but not every greenhouse gas is going to be air pollution.
CO2 is the principle man-made GHG that all the others are compared against. CO2 is what the IPCC refers to as long-lived climate forcer, which are gases that have a warming effect on the scale of decades, fitting the definition of air pollution.
CO2 is a pollutant and has been for as long as humans have been pumping out tons of it into the atmosphere.
A completely useful (and consistent with the modern usage of the word) definition of "pollution" can be worded as:
"anthropogenic alteration of the open environment with negative consequences on ecosystems or society".
Have you heard about noise pollution? Match it with the definition above.
CO2 emitted by combustion from human activities is orders of magnitude more than what any natural biological process emits.
Now you can see why CO2 emitted by fossil fuels combustion is, by any logic, pollution.
No there is no issue to have that definition encompassing all of what in society causes damage to the open environment[1].
Note that your wording, "encompasses [...] all of society", does not correspond to my stance. It only encompasses what causes negative externalities in the way I defined.
[1]: damage should be defined relative to a severely detrimental impact to the biosphere or to human society. The environment is understood to be open as defined by not having clear boundaries that may, for example, keep the impact strictly contained within the limits of a volume property of the agent of this impact. Air is typically not contained in such a delimited volume, and is thus open environment. Water also flows freely and is connected to e.g. big bodies of water. And so on.
Violently demonstrating the geopolitical liability of relying on Greenhouse Gasses is more compelling than more climate conferences apparently.
NFTs never made sense. You're buying a short URL on a blockchain in the hopes that it'll somehow retain value. The URL could go bad, it could be pointed at something else, etc. But what NFTs did was induce demand for crypto, particularly Ethereum. That was the point.
For a long time I thought we went to war for oil. No, that's backwards. Our oil dependence exists to induce demand for weapons. I will once again refer to the article No one goes to war over a solar panel [1].
So when you see things like pollution limits being lifted on power plants because of data centers, know that the ultimate driving force is the sale of weapons.
Let me give a concrete example. If I drill a well in West Texas that produces, say, 1000 barrels per day ("bpd"). It doesn't produce that forever. As the pressure goes down, the daily production goes down. In the industry this is called the decline rate. For the Permian Basin, the decline rate of any oil well is typically 15-20% per year. So in year 2, that well will produce 800-850bpd. In year 3, it'll be ~650-700. In year 4 it'll be 500-550.
So if you rely on oil you constantly need to be building new wells to maintain your same production level. For the US, which produces 13-15Mbpd of oil, that means you need to add 2Mbpd of new wells every year just to maintain that level of production.
Oil wells, like any form of resource extraction, are excellent wealth concentrators. They make people rich. If I put up 1GW of solar panels then, apart from some cleaning and general maintenance, they're going to produce 1GW of electricity every year (with some variance for sunshine). Nobody gets rich from that. And nobody needs to go to war for that. Which means nobody gets rich from selling weapons to secure that oil.
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
nfts were about trying to make inherently not scare things scarce, and to try to get people involved in a ponzi scheme
the oil being drilled and mined is exceptionally useful, and people buy it even when you dont need to go to war or get weapons. War would still be happening in the middle east without oil, its a key trade route between Europe and Asia.
the oil dependence exists because it lets people get work and labour done without hiring labourers.
if you put up 1GW of solar panels, you will definitely get rich off of that, and whenever people start building giant solar farms in borth africa, we will see armed militas conquering each other for control over the profits
You're going to spend maybe a billion dollars to build your solar farm, maybe you get somebody to lend you the billion dollars at 4% annual interest for 10 years,
Your panels make maybe 1.5 TWh of electricity each year, you can sell that for maybe $50 per MWh, so that's $75M per year. But the interest on your loan was $40M, so after year one your owe $965M, after the ten year loan finishes you still owe almost $600M and your panels are now ten years old.
It's just a normal business venture, if you've got people who can execute and a favourable environment it should work, like if you opened a fast food chain, or a dry clean business or a distillery. This is completely different from resource owners, who instead are just granted ownership of a finite natural resource.
- Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it. If your argument is an economic one then jump onto the solar, wind and battery bandwagon.
- There are virtually no real short medium or long term gains economically here. Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind and its costs are rising while solar and wind continue to fall. Building new maximum pollution plants would drop that internalized cost but who in their right mind would fund something so obviously DOA?
- Obviously the externalized costs of greenhouse gas emissions are deeply undervalued in this move. Even if they are 'fake news' in the US, the rest of the world is finally starting to take them seriously. The US's diminished soft power means it won't be able to easily bully the world into allowing it to pollute without consequence and such an obviously hostile move means it will loose even more of its soft power by taking this position. So on the international level this means we burn a lot of political capital and gain nothing but decades of distrust and anger.
- Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.
- Oh yeah and, of course, climate change is real.
This continues the US down the path of being the best buggy whip maker in the world. Worse than that, the US is becoming an obnoxious buggy whip maker who's neighbors are starting to hope fails horribly and will help make that happen as moves like this continue. This is stupid at every scale and in every dimension.
Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though; at worst it takes longer to ship the key components from China to Europe around Africa.
For example in reaction to 1973 Arab oil embargo Carter boosted energy efficiency and solar and promoted coal.
" "America indeed is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and my goal as President of the United States is to see on the world energy markets Arab oil replaced with Illinois coal," Carter told miners and employees of the Old Ben Coal Mine No. 25. He also boasted that the country would, "produce more coal in 1980 than has ever before been produced in the United States of America." "
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/29/1158426645/jimmy-carters-envi...
New coal gasification projects in India
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-clears-4-billi...
Fossil fuel is still going strong and will probably stay so for the next 50 years. Like I just learned Taiwan makes most of its energy from coal and LNG and is set to denuclearize, which blew my mind given their cutting edge manufacturing economy, but kinda makes sense when you factor in their geography and geopolitics.
Some highlights:
[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...This year, oil and gas are projected to fall as a whole, although coal is still expected to grow:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-fossil-fuel-emis...
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/co2-em...
Fossil fuels are not used only for electricity production, they are also used for heating (low temp, high temp), feed stock for chemical proceses, combustion engines.
Except you know, all the actual mining and manufacturing of those things, which isn't in the west but mostly in China.
Sadly, it does not mean that EU or USA grew less dependent on China for solar panels, industrial chemicals, or a lot of other things. OTOH, they did not grow more dependent either.
For now.
The majority of solar panels are made in China (85%), and they plan to invade Taiwan in just a few years, possibly as soon as 2027, at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production or defend Taiwan and cut ourselves off from the source of almost all manufactured products, and especially solar panels.
We could have sovereign control over our energy supply with renewables and electrification. Yay, we become a great sovereign nation free to do whatever we want with our great British energy supply!
But no, the right wing answer is to develop a couple of gas fields in the north sea that would supply a tiny amount of actual energy requirements, and do nothing for prices as it all goes into a global trading platform.
I know the reason, it's hard to say no to all that money from the fossil industry, and walk back decades of indoctrinating your base at their behest. Even if it means making your country energy independent...
Meanwhile, the left in the UK doesn't want to drill (so less money for electrification) while the right in the UK doesn't want to electrify (so less money due to more imports). Why doesn't anyone want to copy the Norwegian model?
- Norway had and still has a lot more oil in their part of the North Sea than the UK does
- Norway has a vastly smaller population than the UK; more than ten times smaller (5.6m versus 69m). Each Norwegian gets 10x more money coming in than they would as UK citizens, just from demographics.
- Norway gambled by having the state directly invest in drilling (Statoil), while UK governments (both Labour in the 1960s and Conservative in the 1970s) refused to invest public money in drilling. Instead they let commercial companies find the money, the government merely licensed and taxed. The reason they did this was that Britain didn't have enough capital available to fund drilling at the time oil was discovered; it was the "sick man of Europe"
- Norway put its oil money into a state pension fund which continues to pay dividends today. Margaret Thatcher spent the oil money on rejuvenating the London Docklands, which admittedly did improve London's standing as the centre of global finance, which is what currently brings in most money for the UK. Perhaps if she didn't do that then financial companies might have moved elsewhere, we don't know that for sure. What we do know is she didn't spend it rejuvenating anywhere else in the country, like Scotland, Wales and Northern England after she shut the coal mines and steel mills and bought in foreign coal and steel.
No, you could not.
That's a baseless claim. For example, Germany has invested massively in solar but its electricity prices went up, not down.
> Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind
That's false. Coal power is cheaper than all of those. Solar and wind include costs for expensive battery backups since they are highly volatile.
And to make it clear: Climate change is very bad so coal plants are very bad. But that doesn't mean you can go around and claim that coal isn't cheap compared to things like solar+batteries. The fact that something is good doesn't imply that it is cheap.
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-does-gas-set-the-price-of... [2] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
> That's a baseless claim. For example, Germany has invested massively in solar but its electricity prices went up, not down.
> This price of electricity is high because gas, which is still expensive, sets the price of electricity most of the time [1].
1) Am I missing something or the link you provided contradicts your claim? On a chart #2 in the article you can see Germany has only 24% of the times price of electricity set by gas, 24% is not "most of the time", right?
2) Even if that is true, and electricity prices in Germany are set by the price of gas most of the time, it seems like you didn't address the point in a previous message. If the goal is to have lower prices and the goal(outcome) is what really matters and renewables is the path to get there then why Germany electricity prices rose at the end? And were not all of those because of this ... because of that ... supposed to be a part of that path(plan)? They did the thing, invested in solar, what have they missed and why?
Not true. Gas backups are only needed for solar and wind. Gas replaces only battery backups here, which would be even more expensive.
> which is still expensive, sets the price of electricity most of the time [1].
That's why solar and wind are expensive.
> The levelized cost of electricity for solar (including batteries) and wind is cheaper than coal [2].
Not true. You have to include the required gas backups during the night or calm winds.
Nuclear is good (no CO2 emissions and stable energy supply), but it's not cheaper than coal. Moreover, that the requirement for gas plants went up because of the volatility of solar and wind is certainly a lede your post is doing its best to bury.
Fortunately this is well on it's way to being solved by the massive battery build out which has happened which means evening peak electricity usage has declined enormously[1] - i.e the primary "sun not shining" point of the day is rapidly turning into an energy use low point for the grid (which makes sense: business powers down, people go home and their batteries which have been charging cover cooking - I have an induction cook top and a 10kw inverter covers everything).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/15/austr...
Two things can be true: solar can be unable to provide reliable base load power, and it can be far more profitable investment return then building a coal fired power station.
Which is what has happened: and now, with the falling price of batteries, batteries are a far more profitable return then building a coal fired power station.
Coal is expensive: solar, other then some light cleaning costs, is one and done. There's few mechanical parts and no fuel costs and you can build it anywhere there's an electrical grid (which is everywhere).
Batteries are similar: sure they might degrade, but that's over 15 years. At the right time of day, charging them can be between free, and profit generating due to all the solar.
A coal power plant is gigantic. It can't be built anywhere - it needs to be physically proximal to either a port, or an actual coal mine (which the one's near Hunter Valley in NSW are - I've driven next to the train lines for them, for example), and usually a water source too for cooling. It's a large, maintenance intensive structure (the reason the ones we have are shutting down is the maintenance has gotten very expensive because the whole structure is aging out).
And after all that, it also needs fuel - throughout it's lifetime it will need to constantly buy fuel. But it won't constantly be profitable: most renewables have a massive advantage in that they can switch off from the grid nearly instantly. So renewables are far, far better at reacting to negative power pricing conditions then thermal power plants which cannot spin down that quickly: so a coal power plant (really any thermal power plant) will usually have to pay fines when power prices go negative, whereas while solar might not like shutting down, it can do so immediately (and batteries can just hoover up all that power and claim the credits).
Grid stability is a different department, quite literally, to power generating investment which is a commercial enterprise chasing return. And solar was better, and batteries are catching up quick (partly because negative prices mean your solar investment won't be able to bank a solid 6 hours of profitable sunlight without them). The new thing is also batteries for wind - DC couple grid batteries at wind plants, turning them into much more dispatchable generating assets.
I would say if it’s specifically about coal at all, it’s more because of the GOP’s tendency toward weird nostalgic obsessions.
Is not Germany an example of the opposite? I mean their decision to shut down nuclear plants while getting dependant on Russian supply of energy sources?
"The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039, which would have reduced carbon pollution by an estimated 1.38 billion metric tons through 2047"
Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.
> Before the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, the federal limits were much weaker—and for existing power plants, there was effectively no operative federal CO₂ limit at all.
This is an exaggeration that stretches credulity, since there have been strict limits for decades around secondary outputs that are required by power plant energy production effectively limiting production and emissions (which is the entire point).
With the rollback, that reduction will no longer occur. So, this is significant.
Then somebody else comes along and steers back.
How measured should the reaction to this be?
https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-does-the-world-need-carbon-ca...
I mean, anyone can say they're for the environment, but are you willing to start a war, lose a midterm, and murder a school full of kids to reduce your carbon footprint? /s
or can a dictator president do this at all without congress?
btw how many gallons of crude oil do you think the Epstein Memorial Ballroom can hold?
because we're going to need a new strategic oil reserve, he destroyed the current system by bottoming it out
https://canada.citizensclimatelobby.org/media-release-ccl-ca...
America is actively ceding the future to China, and our ruling class have no ideas left other than looting the place as it’s burning to the ground.
It says that China’s use of coal this year is increasing after a multi-year trend of leveling off or decreasing, mainly because China is using coal in place of LNG imports made more expensive due to the U.S. attacks against Iran.
The overall trend is very clear — China is expanding both its supply of electricity, and generation from renewable sources, at the same time. Which we should also be doing in the United States.
> 2025 also saw China commission 78 GW of new coal power capacity, which is more than India’s net coal power additions over a ten-year period from 2015 to 2024, even though India operates the world’s second-largest coal power fleet. https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/built-peak-coal-pow...
The last time the US built a large new coal operation was 13yrs ago. China has done great things with renewables and nuclear, but that's because they build absolutely everything available, which is why their energy is so much cheaper in China than North America and Europe. Which translates into manufacturing plants being much cheaper to run.
leonidasrup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290234
Please someone bring back people with critical thinking abilities.
It wasn't the Greens that decided this for Germany. It was our conservatives, the CDU/CSU. The latter had high-ranking officials literally threaten to step down, unless Germany exits nuclear energy production.
Ideology > common sense.
Ideology > critical thinking
The "good" news is that coal plants are already suboptimal, economically. This is delaying the closure of existing plans, which is just absurd, but completely on brand for the political party that people voted in office, with complete knowledge of what would happen.
I suppose they also voted for "cheaper groceries" and "no more endless wars", but that will come any time soon.