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I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be, but I'm still shocked to see things like this. And

I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be, but I'm still shocked to see things like this. And I'm fully aware of Trump's Scotland experience and how that contributed or directly led to this, but, still, shocked. And then I'm also shocked because I know that at least half, if not a good bit more, of US citizens are in agreement with this strategy. Not sure how I can still be shocked but here I am. And I say that not as some rabid renewables person. Just the insane binary thinking, regardless of the dollars and cronyism at work. There's zero room for nuance, which I guess is my biggest complaint about the world at large. Aside: people who think climate change will be the death of us all, and sooner than later, I get it, and I fully appreciate you pushing for a cleaner and more livable world. At this point I'm just going to sit in the corner and hope you, and China, figure it out and then it spreads quickly to the rest of the world, which I think at this point is pretty much a foregone conclusion barring a nuclear war (will refrain from commenting about how the likelihood of that has ticked up the past couple of weeks in an area teeming with (sarcastically shocked this time!) fossil fuels).

tasty_freeze 7mo ago
I'm always gobsmacked when Trump says things like, "We need to get rid of all the wind turbines! They are killing all the birds! Look at the foot of any tower and you'll see nothing but dead birds!" Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.
- harmmonica 7mo ago
  Never thought about it, but that's a great point and comparison. From quick Google search: 365 million and 988 million birds die every year from window collisions (that's US alone). Windmills/turbines: 140,000 and 679,000. Then if you do per windmill vs. per building obviously the windmills are going to "win," but it's the absolute that would seem to matter in this case. As you said, that has nothing to do with the actual preference for fossils vs. turbines, but a great point nonetheless.
  - hedora 7mo ago
    Per-windmill bird fatalities are much, much lower for new windmills. They made some cosmetic changes that scare the birds off. Also, it turns out that bird flight patterns are very stable from year to year, so they study flight patterns, and place the windmills out of the way.
    - harmmonica 7mo ago
      Yeah, see the reply I left with your sibling. I am in full agreement with you and wrote my comment way too quickly because I was trying to rebut the argument that windmills are in any way responsible for some crazy number of bird deaths.
  - tasty_freeze 7mo ago
    Domestic cats kill on the order of 100x as many birds as windmills do. Fossil fuels also kill millions of animals every year (not just birds), and harm the health of humans. Even ignoring the long-term effects of CO2, fine particulates cause respiratory problems, higher blood pressure, and can cause cancer. The tricky bit is you can draw a straight line from the burning of coal to any particular (heh heh) death, it is just a statistical shift in health outcomes. Anyway, all of that absolutely dwarf the birds getting killed by wind farms.
    - harmmonica 7mo ago
      Yeah, I'm your parent and I think I wrote that reply without reading it over because I was attempting to point out, with numbers, how absurd it is that anyone would say "windmills are bad because of how many birds they kill" as if that's a logical argument vs. the countless other things that kill birds en masse.
- foobarbecue 7mo ago
  And whales, don't forget the whales https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/trump-whale-wind-turbine-renewable-energy-misinformation https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/trump-whale-... and the noise causes cancer
- tdb7893 7mo ago
  Wind turbines are also miniscule compared to issues like pollution, land use, windows, and cats. Also you can track migration and turn them off at key times if it's a huge issue (this is part of the motivation for research I'm going to do later as part of my master's dealing with tracking hawk flocks via weather radar). Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him
- triceratops 7mo ago
  True Bird Lovers only care about bird fatalities from windmills. Oil spills, buildings, and cats don't register.
- tzs 7mo ago
  > Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext. This can be seen by the changes to the interpretation of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) his administration made in 2017 during his first term. Briefly, they said it only prohibited intentional killing of birds. So say I wanted to pave over some wetlands that are a crucial nesting grounds for some birds that are covered by the MBTA to build a parking lot. Before, the near universal interpretation of the MBTA by nearly everyone in any of the countries that are a party to the treaty (US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Russia) was that I can't put my parking lot there. Under the Trump interpretation as long as I'm not building my parking lot there to intentionally kill the birds I can do it. This was overturned in court in 2020. Just before leaving office in 2021 they tried to again make that the interpretation.
throwway120385 7mo ago
This might surprise you, but only a minority of eligible voters vote. So while it looks like 50% of people believe this is a good strategy and we should do it based on the percentage of people who voted for Trump, in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good. The problem is that few of those people vote. So in all seriousness, if we could get a significant fraction of the young people who are negatively impacted by these policies to actually vote against the people enacting them we could see real change. But if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on then nobody will do anything about it until it's too late and we're shooting at or throwing rocks at each other.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
  > if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on I don’t know if you can fix lazy. Turning out new voters basically happens once a generation. The rest tell themselves tales that their vote could never matter, and in doing that, subtly endorse the status quo.
  - tombert 7mo ago
    This is kind of why I ultimately find cynicism to be inherently lazy. This is coming from a very cynical (and often lazy) person. It takes no effort to be cynical, I can tell myself "everything sucks and I shouldn't care because nothing matters anyway" and justify not doing anything I want. I can justify not voting, I can justify not helping someone if I see them struggling on the street, I can justify not even improving myself. In the last couple years I have been trying my best to override my cynical tendencies because ultimately I think that they are bad for me. I vote in every election I am able to because even if it's infinitesimal, I at least tried to do something to avoid whom I deem bad people getting into office.
    - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
      Agree. And look, being cynical and just minding your own matters is fine. It means the system is working well enough for that person that doing anything isn’t actually worth it. But those people are also electorally—and more broadly, politically—irrelevant. So if you’re trying to do something, betting on them tends to be a losing pitch.
kakacik 7mo ago
People voted in repeatedly a visibly primitive person (plus quite a few other things but lets not go there now), then they get primitive behavior. An honest question - what the heck did you expect? Some sophisticated rational discussions instead of dumb ego tantrums?
- RealityVoid 7mo ago
  I would have expected them not to vote a primitive person. And the most shocking part is people pretending he's got some sort of master plan or that the rest of us are just not seeing his genius. Absolute cinema, I swear.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 7mo ago
      > No one wanted, since you guys started it, that fucking rock ape as the USA’s first woman president. You can't do that here. We've banned this account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- harmmonica 7mo ago
  Since you wrote "honest question" I feel like I should answer... I expected what's happening and I expect even worse in the future. And goes to show you (I!) can still be shocked even when you're expecting some pretty rough stuff.
leonidasrup 7mo ago
Don't underestimate the power of money spend by the U.S. oil,gas,coal industry. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network#Climate_change_and_use_of_fossil_fuels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network#Climate_change_an...
exceptione 7mo ago
> I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be, Don't fall for the political narratives, they are designed to distract you while the theft is taking place. The sponsors of the circus are rabidly cynical and pro-selfish. They are spreading the narratives, not believing in them. There is certainly a few conservatives in power who hold that the earth is only 6000 years old, who see no other option than burning down the town as a way to escape confrontation with progress and emancipation. But this is mainly what kleptocracy looks like. The narratives work though, that is the sad reality. News anchors and the public are stuck in a loop about "children being forced to change sex, woke, climate hoax, but her e-mails, but Biden, ...", anything but what is happening at the crime scene.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7mo ago
  Don’t leave us hanging, what exactly is happening at the crime scene?
  - hedora 7mo ago
    Read the news. - Trump received $4B in bribes last year. - Widespread arrests and murder / deportations of US citizens. - Federal agents routinely kidnap pregnant child abuse victims so they can be transported to Texas where they're denied health care + forced to carry their assailant's child to term. - Blowing up fishermen + using the footage in weird 80's movie montage propaganda films. - Installing censors at most news organizations in the US. And literally hundreds of comparably bad stories. They arrive at a rate of 2-3 per day, and have been for over a year.

tasty_freeze 7mo ago

I'm always gobsmacked when Trump says things like, "We need to get rid of all the wind turbines! They are killing all the birds! Look at the foot of any tower and you'll see nothing but dead birds!" Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.

harmmonica 7mo ago
Never thought about it, but that's a great point and comparison. From quick Google search: 365 million and 988 million birds die every year from window collisions (that's US alone). Windmills/turbines: 140,000 and 679,000. Then if you do per windmill vs. per building obviously the windmills are going to "win," but it's the absolute that would seem to matter in this case. As you said, that has nothing to do with the actual preference for fossils vs. turbines, but a great point nonetheless.
- hedora 7mo ago
  Per-windmill bird fatalities are much, much lower for new windmills. They made some cosmetic changes that scare the birds off. Also, it turns out that bird flight patterns are very stable from year to year, so they study flight patterns, and place the windmills out of the way.
  - harmmonica 7mo ago
    Yeah, see the reply I left with your sibling. I am in full agreement with you and wrote my comment way too quickly because I was trying to rebut the argument that windmills are in any way responsible for some crazy number of bird deaths.
- tasty_freeze 7mo ago
  Domestic cats kill on the order of 100x as many birds as windmills do. Fossil fuels also kill millions of animals every year (not just birds), and harm the health of humans. Even ignoring the long-term effects of CO2, fine particulates cause respiratory problems, higher blood pressure, and can cause cancer. The tricky bit is you can draw a straight line from the burning of coal to any particular (heh heh) death, it is just a statistical shift in health outcomes. Anyway, all of that absolutely dwarf the birds getting killed by wind farms.
  - harmmonica 7mo ago
    Yeah, I'm your parent and I think I wrote that reply without reading it over because I was attempting to point out, with numbers, how absurd it is that anyone would say "windmills are bad because of how many birds they kill" as if that's a logical argument vs. the countless other things that kill birds en masse.
foobarbecue 7mo ago
And whales, don't forget the whales https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/trump-whale-wind-turbine-renewable-energy-misinformation https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/trump-whale-... and the noise causes cancer
tdb7893 7mo ago
Wind turbines are also miniscule compared to issues like pollution, land use, windows, and cats. Also you can track migration and turn them off at key times if it's a huge issue (this is part of the motivation for research I'm going to do later as part of my master's dealing with tracking hawk flocks via weather radar). Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him
triceratops 7mo ago
True Bird Lovers only care about bird fatalities from windmills. Oil spills, buildings, and cats don't register.
tzs 7mo ago
> Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext. This can be seen by the changes to the interpretation of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) his administration made in 2017 during his first term. Briefly, they said it only prohibited intentional killing of birds. So say I wanted to pave over some wetlands that are a crucial nesting grounds for some birds that are covered by the MBTA to build a parking lot. Before, the near universal interpretation of the MBTA by nearly everyone in any of the countries that are a party to the treaty (US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Russia) was that I can't put my parking lot there. Under the Trump interpretation as long as I'm not building my parking lot there to intentionally kill the birds I can do it. This was overturned in court in 2020. Just before leaving office in 2021 they tried to again make that the interpretation.

throwway120385 7mo ago

This might surprise you, but only a minority of eligible voters vote. So while it looks like 50% of people believe this is a good strategy and we should do it based on the percentage of people who voted for Trump, in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good. The problem is that few of those people vote. So in all seriousness, if we could get a significant fraction of the young people who are negatively impacted by these policies to actually vote against the people enacting them we could see real change. But if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on then nobody will do anything about it until it's too late and we're shooting at or throwing rocks at each other.

JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
> if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on I don’t know if you can fix lazy. Turning out new voters basically happens once a generation. The rest tell themselves tales that their vote could never matter, and in doing that, subtly endorse the status quo.
- tombert 7mo ago
  This is kind of why I ultimately find cynicism to be inherently lazy. This is coming from a very cynical (and often lazy) person. It takes no effort to be cynical, I can tell myself "everything sucks and I shouldn't care because nothing matters anyway" and justify not doing anything I want. I can justify not voting, I can justify not helping someone if I see them struggling on the street, I can justify not even improving myself. In the last couple years I have been trying my best to override my cynical tendencies because ultimately I think that they are bad for me. I vote in every election I am able to because even if it's infinitesimal, I at least tried to do something to avoid whom I deem bad people getting into office.
  - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
    Agree. And look, being cynical and just minding your own matters is fine. It means the system is working well enough for that person that doing anything isn’t actually worth it. But those people are also electorally—and more broadly, politically—irrelevant. So if you’re trying to do something, betting on them tends to be a losing pitch.

kakacik 7mo ago

People voted in repeatedly a visibly primitive person (plus quite a few other things but lets not go there now), then they get primitive behavior. An honest question - what the heck did you expect? Some sophisticated rational discussions instead of dumb ego tantrums?

RealityVoid 7mo ago
I would have expected them not to vote a primitive person. And the most shocking part is people pretending he's got some sort of master plan or that the rest of us are just not seeing his genius. Absolute cinema, I swear.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 7mo ago
    > No one wanted, since you guys started it, that fucking rock ape as the USA’s first woman president. You can't do that here. We've banned this account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
harmmonica 7mo ago
Since you wrote "honest question" I feel like I should answer... I expected what's happening and I expect even worse in the future. And goes to show you (I!) can still be shocked even when you're expecting some pretty rough stuff.

leonidasrup 7mo ago

Don't underestimate the power of money spend by the U.S. oil,gas,coal industry. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network#Climate_change_and_use_of_fossil_fuels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network#Climate_change_an...

exceptione 7mo ago

> I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be, Don't fall for the political narratives, they are designed to distract you while the theft is taking place. The sponsors of the circus are rabidly cynical and pro-selfish. They are spreading the narratives, not believing in them. There is certainly a few conservatives in power who hold that the earth is only 6000 years old, who see no other option than burning down the town as a way to escape confrontation with progress and emancipation. But this is mainly what kleptocracy looks like. The narratives work though, that is the sad reality. News anchors and the public are stuck in a loop about "children being forced to change sex, woke, climate hoax, but her e-mails, but Biden, ...", anything but what is happening at the crime scene.

TheSpiceIsLife 7mo ago
Don’t leave us hanging, what exactly is happening at the crime scene?
- hedora 7mo ago
  Read the news. - Trump received $4B in bribes last year. - Widespread arrests and murder / deportations of US citizens. - Federal agents routinely kidnap pregnant child abuse victims so they can be transported to Texas where they're denied health care + forced to carry their assailant's child to term. - Blowing up fishermen + using the footage in weird 80's movie montage propaganda films. - Installing censors at most news organizations in the US. And literally hundreds of comparably bad stories. They arrive at a rate of 2-3 per day, and have been for over a year.