7 ms·

That is certainly true, but it's not a full explanation. I recently was at an information event from our local electricity provider about wind energy projects.

by hannob 3y ago

That is certainly true, but it's not a full explanation. I recently was at an information event from our local electricity provider about wind energy projects. And there are those people... There was a conversation going on like: "The people I talked to don't want these things." Event moderator: "What are the reasons?" Guy: "They simply don't want them." And I am pretty sure that was no fossil fuel lobbyist. It was just a guy who is against things. And there are plenty of those.

lynx23 3y ago
Yeah, its called free will, you know. I dont have to like everything, period.
- svnt 3y ago
  Most thinking people move beyond this position. An arbitrary position is no position at all.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    A weak opinion, strongly hold. Or some such.
throwaway60742 3y ago
People don't want to pay for it. The cost of the wind/solar project itself is not the full story - you also need energy storage, and that's very expensive. You also need to rebuild the electrical grid to handle the peak power output to be able to store it. In EU countries, at least part of these very significant costs are paid for by everyone - not just the company operating the wind/solar projects who profit from it. Some people don't want to have higher taxes just so a business gets profit.
- unglaublich 3y ago
  People pay billions in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, so we can just move those and leave taxes as they are.
  - throwaway60742 3y ago
    Not everyone does. Maybe people in the US, but most EU countries don't have any fossil fuel industry to subsidize. Where I live people are against solar/wind because they want to go nuclear.
    - svnt 3y ago
      Where you live you are subject to disinformation and nuclear is the last effort of delay and distraction. You could put up massive solar and wind farms next year. How long would it be until sufficient nuclear capacity came online?
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Going niclear is such a FUD anti-renewables campaign, it is almost loughable people still fall it. New nuclear plants take decades to build, and are extremely expensive. So no, no significant nuclear capacity increase. All that campaign does, is making it harder for renewables, and thus easier for fossil fuels. Quite ingenious so, if you think about it.
      - throwaway60722 3y ago
        They take A decade, not decades. You're the one spreading FUD. There are successful new nuclear projects built very quickly in EU. The only slow thing about nuclear is regulatory approval - hampered by EU that for many years didn't accept nuclear as "green". Is nuclear more expensive that rebuilding the electrical grid and building enough storage to handle the wind/solar peaks and use the energy later? I don't think it's so clear. The solar/wind power plant itself is not the full cost.
        hef19898 3y ago
        The Hinkley C site was approved in 2010, it is estimated to go live in 2028. It was laready two years late in May 2022, and already overshot the budget by 50% by then. As of February 2023, the delay increased by another 15 months (resulting in the 2028 go live) and costs increased again to now 32.7 billion pounds. And already in 2020, new wind and solar utility scale projects were cheaper per kWh than Hinkley, withbsolar becoming cheaper and cheaper every year (Moore's law is still valid there). Hinkley C is 3,260 MWe. In 2022 Europe installed a total of 41.4 GW of solar capacity, up from from 28.1 GW in 2021. That means more than 10x Hinkley C in a single year (2022), and cheaper per kWh. Facts to found here: https://api.solarpowereurope.org/uploads/5222_SPE_EMO_2022_full_report_ver_03_1_319d70ca42.pdf?updated_at=2022-12-19T08:21:34.541Z https://api.solarpowereurope.org/uploads/5222_SPE_EMO_2022_f... Nuclear is great stop gap until more renewablea are installed, not more not less. And before ypu start, no, the German nuclear plants couldn't be run any longer (maintenance, fuel, safety), run time has already been extended multiple times, and the last nuclear exit, the badly organized one, was put in place by tze conservative CDU let government (not that you go and blame the Greens for it).
- kjksf 3y ago
  If that's the reason then those people are misinformed. Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage. The cost advantage is not true everywhere but the future is clear. Coal and gas will not become cheaper. Solar and wind is most expensive today it'll ever be. Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead. And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes. Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.
  - throwaway60742 3y ago
    No way they are misinformed, look at German power mix. Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU. > Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage. That did not happen anywhere in Europe. New gas plants are being constructed right now, and coal powerplants had to be restarted when Germans dropped nuclear. > Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead. We need to decarbonize today though. People don't want to pay the high prices, so how does the drop happen? > And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes. Again, ask Germans about that. Their universal healthcare is going to get expensive soon if they continue on their "green" path. > Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars. Completely orthogonal, people mostly agree on that, but they (where I live) want to charge the electric cars from nuclear energy.
    - svnt 3y ago
      Germany’s repeated renewables efforts were long subject to the fact that Germany was Russia’s European project to keep fossil fuels going as long as possible. No other European country with as much technical competence has inexplicably failed so hard at renewables over and over. Now Germany is experiencing a transition in market conditions that is uncomfortably quick.
theK 3y ago
I have a pet theory about that. The theory is that it is not the facts or the topic of Eco-Things. I think generally we are at a point where it is too easy for normal people to be against things and eco friendly things are just the lowest hanging fruit. Normal people nowadays are much more stressed with the world at large, overstimulated by doomscrolling all night, obesse or unhealthy, locked in some financial treadmill, etc, etc... In such a situation it is easy to see a wind farm next door as an attack on your landscape or the needs of EV mobility as overly complicated and so on and so on. So its not the facts that matter, it is the lives of the 80% of the population that have just taken a dive for the worst over the last 20 years. EDIT: preface
- myspy 3y ago
  Hence why the gap between the poor and the richest people must be closed. Take the money from the billionaires and use it to rebuild the middle class and lift up the lower class.
- okr 3y ago
  It is easy to judge other people, why they have a nimby opinion. Show me your property, if it has windmills or photovoltaic on them. Then it would be an intellectually honest conversation.
  - itishappy 3y ago
    That sounds hypocritical. If you're against wind and solar on some principle, I'd hope you apply that to your own life, not just others.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
A 5 whys analysis will likely get to "people benefiting from fossil fuel pollution not being costed in" one or two steps back from that guy who doesn't even know why he objects to wind power.
svnt 3y ago
I think it is mostly a confusion of identity. We are used to the people pushing against technological progress being someone other than older and somewhat tech-capable men. These people have been holding out and formed their arguments back when they first learned about renewables, which was twenty or more years ago. Technology has continued to progress but their positions ossified early. Now that the future they denied is here we are seeing vanilla guilt-backed rationalizing. We just aren’t used to seeing it from these guys because they were always excited back when technological progress generally proved them right.
- hef19898 3y ago
  I read a comment lately along the lines of "80% of conservative outrage is caused by understanding how things work fornthe very first time". There is some truth to it.
  - lstodd 3y ago
    Which is as insightful as "80% of progressive outrage is caused by not understanding how things work at all". The is some truth to this too.
pydry 3y ago
>And I am pretty sure that was no fossil fuel lobbyist. It was just a guy who is against things. And there are plenty of those. That's how all propaganda functions. Fossil fuel/nuclear lobbyists pump ideas into the heads of the easily duped via mass media at a range of different intellectual levels and then the readers will absorb it like it was their own idea and echo it back. The only difference between the upper and the lower intellectual levels of propaganda is that the upper level of propaganda might rely more on logical consistency, misdirection and attempts to make the reader feel smart while the lower levels will rely more on repetition of a simple message.
hbossy 3y ago
I think it's just coming from experience. They remember how every past attempt at making cars eco-friendly eventually resulted in worse personal experience via taxes, prices and worse repairability, so any new one gets a "no" by default.
- natmaka 3y ago
  This. And this is generic: since the first oil shock (50 years ago) many Western nations were nearly always bathing into some economic crisis, therefore many think that experience shows that any attempt, on any front, leads to a new downturn. It also seems true when it comes to innovation: an innovation today becomes/creates a problem tomorrow.
jandrese 3y ago
The ugly truth is that propaganda works, especially over long time periods. The fossil fuel industry has been funding propaganda for decades now, longer than most people have been alive. They commissioned studies about climate change in the 50s and knew exactly what was going to happen and how it would affect their businesses so they got ahead of it with continuous ad campaigns and political activism. This has been going on for so long we are now in an era where for a sizable percentage of the population truth no longer matters. That was the long term goal all along, once climate change became otherwise undeniable the people would be disassociated from reality and still support the fossil fuel industry.

by hannob 3y ago

lynx23 3y ago

Yeah, its called free will, you know. I dont have to like everything, period.

svnt 3y ago
Most thinking people move beyond this position. An arbitrary position is no position at all.
- hef19898 3y ago
  A weak opinion, strongly hold. Or some such.

throwaway60742 3y ago

People don't want to pay for it. The cost of the wind/solar project itself is not the full story - you also need energy storage, and that's very expensive. You also need to rebuild the electrical grid to handle the peak power output to be able to store it. In EU countries, at least part of these very significant costs are paid for by everyone - not just the company operating the wind/solar projects who profit from it. Some people don't want to have higher taxes just so a business gets profit.

unglaublich 3y ago
People pay billions in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, so we can just move those and leave taxes as they are.
- throwaway60742 3y ago
  Not everyone does. Maybe people in the US, but most EU countries don't have any fossil fuel industry to subsidize. Where I live people are against solar/wind because they want to go nuclear.
  - svnt 3y ago
    Where you live you are subject to disinformation and nuclear is the last effort of delay and distraction. You could put up massive solar and wind farms next year. How long would it be until sufficient nuclear capacity came online?
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Going niclear is such a FUD anti-renewables campaign, it is almost loughable people still fall it. New nuclear plants take decades to build, and are extremely expensive. So no, no significant nuclear capacity increase. All that campaign does, is making it harder for renewables, and thus easier for fossil fuels. Quite ingenious so, if you think about it.
    - throwaway60722 3y ago
      They take A decade, not decades. You're the one spreading FUD. There are successful new nuclear projects built very quickly in EU. The only slow thing about nuclear is regulatory approval - hampered by EU that for many years didn't accept nuclear as "green". Is nuclear more expensive that rebuilding the electrical grid and building enough storage to handle the wind/solar peaks and use the energy later? I don't think it's so clear. The solar/wind power plant itself is not the full cost.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        The Hinkley C site was approved in 2010, it is estimated to go live in 2028. It was laready two years late in May 2022, and already overshot the budget by 50% by then. As of February 2023, the delay increased by another 15 months (resulting in the 2028 go live) and costs increased again to now 32.7 billion pounds. And already in 2020, new wind and solar utility scale projects were cheaper per kWh than Hinkley, withbsolar becoming cheaper and cheaper every year (Moore's law is still valid there). Hinkley C is 3,260 MWe. In 2022 Europe installed a total of 41.4 GW of solar capacity, up from from 28.1 GW in 2021. That means more than 10x Hinkley C in a single year (2022), and cheaper per kWh. Facts to found here: https://api.solarpowereurope.org/uploads/5222_SPE_EMO_2022_full_report_ver_03_1_319d70ca42.pdf?updated_at=2022-12-19T08:21:34.541Z https://api.solarpowereurope.org/uploads/5222_SPE_EMO_2022_f... Nuclear is great stop gap until more renewablea are installed, not more not less. And before ypu start, no, the German nuclear plants couldn't be run any longer (maintenance, fuel, safety), run time has already been extended multiple times, and the last nuclear exit, the badly organized one, was put in place by tze conservative CDU let government (not that you go and blame the Greens for it).
kjksf 3y ago
If that's the reason then those people are misinformed. Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage. The cost advantage is not true everywhere but the future is clear. Coal and gas will not become cheaper. Solar and wind is most expensive today it'll ever be. Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead. And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes. Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.
- throwaway60742 3y ago
  No way they are misinformed, look at German power mix. Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU. > Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage. That did not happen anywhere in Europe. New gas plants are being constructed right now, and coal powerplants had to be restarted when Germans dropped nuclear. > Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead. We need to decarbonize today though. People don't want to pay the high prices, so how does the drop happen? > And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes. Again, ask Germans about that. Their universal healthcare is going to get expensive soon if they continue on their "green" path. > Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars. Completely orthogonal, people mostly agree on that, but they (where I live) want to charge the electric cars from nuclear energy.
  - svnt 3y ago
    Germany’s repeated renewables efforts were long subject to the fact that Germany was Russia’s European project to keep fossil fuels going as long as possible. No other European country with as much technical competence has inexplicably failed so hard at renewables over and over. Now Germany is experiencing a transition in market conditions that is uncomfortably quick.

theK 3y ago

I have a pet theory about that. The theory is that it is not the facts or the topic of Eco-Things. I think generally we are at a point where it is too easy for normal people to be against things and eco friendly things are just the lowest hanging fruit. Normal people nowadays are much more stressed with the world at large, overstimulated by doomscrolling all night, obesse or unhealthy, locked in some financial treadmill, etc, etc... In such a situation it is easy to see a wind farm next door as an attack on your landscape or the needs of EV mobility as overly complicated and so on and so on. So its not the facts that matter, it is the lives of the 80% of the population that have just taken a dive for the worst over the last 20 years. EDIT: preface

myspy 3y ago
Hence why the gap between the poor and the richest people must be closed. Take the money from the billionaires and use it to rebuild the middle class and lift up the lower class.
okr 3y ago
It is easy to judge other people, why they have a nimby opinion. Show me your property, if it has windmills or photovoltaic on them. Then it would be an intellectually honest conversation.
- itishappy 3y ago
  That sounds hypocritical. If you're against wind and solar on some principle, I'd hope you apply that to your own life, not just others.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

A 5 whys analysis will likely get to "people benefiting from fossil fuel pollution not being costed in" one or two steps back from that guy who doesn't even know why he objects to wind power.

svnt 3y ago

I think it is mostly a confusion of identity. We are used to the people pushing against technological progress being someone other than older and somewhat tech-capable men. These people have been holding out and formed their arguments back when they first learned about renewables, which was twenty or more years ago. Technology has continued to progress but their positions ossified early. Now that the future they denied is here we are seeing vanilla guilt-backed rationalizing. We just aren’t used to seeing it from these guys because they were always excited back when technological progress generally proved them right.

hef19898 3y ago
I read a comment lately along the lines of "80% of conservative outrage is caused by understanding how things work fornthe very first time". There is some truth to it.
- lstodd 3y ago
  Which is as insightful as "80% of progressive outrage is caused by not understanding how things work at all". The is some truth to this too.

pydry 3y ago

>And I am pretty sure that was no fossil fuel lobbyist. It was just a guy who is against things. And there are plenty of those. That's how all propaganda functions. Fossil fuel/nuclear lobbyists pump ideas into the heads of the easily duped via mass media at a range of different intellectual levels and then the readers will absorb it like it was their own idea and echo it back. The only difference between the upper and the lower intellectual levels of propaganda is that the upper level of propaganda might rely more on logical consistency, misdirection and attempts to make the reader feel smart while the lower levels will rely more on repetition of a simple message.

hbossy 3y ago

I think it's just coming from experience. They remember how every past attempt at making cars eco-friendly eventually resulted in worse personal experience via taxes, prices and worse repairability, so any new one gets a "no" by default.

natmaka 3y ago
This. And this is generic: since the first oil shock (50 years ago) many Western nations were nearly always bathing into some economic crisis, therefore many think that experience shows that any attempt, on any front, leads to a new downturn. It also seems true when it comes to innovation: an innovation today becomes/creates a problem tomorrow.

jandrese 3y ago

The ugly truth is that propaganda works, especially over long time periods. The fossil fuel industry has been funding propaganda for decades now, longer than most people have been alive. They commissioned studies about climate change in the 50s and knew exactly what was going to happen and how it would affect their businesses so they got ahead of it with continuous ad campaigns and political activism. This has been going on for so long we are now in an era where for a sizable percentage of the population truth no longer matters. That was the long term goal all along, once climate change became otherwise undeniable the people would be disassociated from reality and still support the fossil fuel industry.