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#oil#climate#solar#more#change#power#gas#pollution#greenhouse#energy

Discussion (71 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jmward01•18 minutes ago
There are a multitude of arguments against this:

- 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.

nine_k•9 minutes ago
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.

selectodude•10 minutes ago
The Gulf countries paid handsomely to get Trump in there to keep the United States as the buyer of last resort once the rest of the world goes renewable.

Problem is that installing a bunch of sick sons of bitches to do your bidding can backfire when those some morons lose a war to Iran in a matter of months.

totallymike•1 minute ago
This comments page, as so many on HN, is making me wish there was a way to slap obviously-bad-faith commenters into submission
reactordev•about 1 hour ago
Full steam ahead towards greenhouse gases, climate change, and +5degree temperatures. Why not?
bayindirh•about 1 hour ago
Because it'll create value.

Value which won't bring anything to anyone. I mean, a couple of people can be more richerer, but we and them won't have a planet to spend or enjoy these theoretical riches at the end.

So, no biggie.

reactordev•about 1 hour ago
Lobbyists lies a foot. “We can’t provide more power with these pesky regulations”
cyanydeez•19 minutes ago
Disaster capitalism is pretty much current AI is to future AI use
tosapple•about 1 hour ago
define 'climate pollution', this is all fine and well until they apply it to nuclear shielding.
layer8•38 minutes ago
Après nous, le déluge!
jeroenhd•about 1 hour ago
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.

rightnutwingjob•39 minutes ago
There’s no denying Climate Change is a big industrial-complex.

And now that the Data Centre Industrial Complex has come along it’s somewhat sidelined the Climate Change Industrial Complex*.

Funny how that happens.

pjc50•4 minutes ago
Well yes, every piece of industry ends up contributing to climate change, but data centers are the one that's having a massive expansion in the west.
bayindirh•29 minutes ago
> Climate Change is a big industrial-complex.

Can you tell us more about it, honestly, sounds interesting.

jmclnx•39 minutes ago
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.

blooalien•25 minutes ago
> It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren.

It's a cryin' shame these people don't care how much of a sucky life they are handing everyone's grandchildren, and not nearly enough people actually cared when we could have still done something about it...

sippingabonedry•35 minutes ago
> All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals

China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.

alexgieg•20 minutes ago
China is trying to become oil-independent by all means necessary. All their means of accessing oil go through geographic bottlenecks that could be weaponized against them in the event of military conflict. Coal, fissile materials, and sunlight are the alternatives they have access to, so they're going for all of those.

With some luck, the net effect will be fewer greenhouse gases than keeping themselves oil-dependent, though that isn't necessarily the, or even a, goal. If it happens, it'll be as a side effect.

layer8•31 minutes ago
China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online in 2025, but also 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind.
dyauspitr•34 minutes ago
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).
warumdarum•36 minutes ago
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.

sippingabonedry•42 minutes ago
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.

mbgerring•2 minutes ago
> the math doesn’t add up

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.

reactordev•41 minutes ago
Solar and wind is extremely reliable. What isn’t reliable is deployment of it.

Energy storage is required along with solar farms.

sippingabonedry•30 minutes ago
Until the sun goes down at night or the wind stops blowing. You ignored the word "output".

> Energy storage is required along with solar farms

How many batteries are we going to need for that? They literally just figured out how to get the child slaves in the Congo out of the supply chain with a shift to LFP.

jsbisviewtiful•30 minutes ago
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.
sippingabonedry•23 minutes ago
> 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?

infamia•12 minutes ago
This headline is rather sweeping considering the modest nature of the change, which is merely rolling back regulations to 2024 levels.
deepfriedchokes•12 minutes ago
If everyone votes, this will be overturned in a couple years.
debo_•4 minutes ago
Related: Citizen's Climate Lobby Canada laser talks booklet on planetary boundaries (link at bottom)

https://canada.citizensclimatelobby.org/media-release-ccl-ca...

eapressoandcats•22 minutes ago
The good news is the war with Iran has done more to curtail greenhouse gas emissions than basically anything domestically Trump can do.

Violently demonstrating the geopolitical liability of relying on Greenhouse Gasses is more compelling than more climate conferences apparently.

userbinator•10 minutes ago
Great to see the "climate crisis" scam is finally ending.
totallymike•7 minutes ago
I love it when idiots announce themselves
outside1234•19 minutes ago
Can’t wait for this to cost us 10 times more in bailing out underwater Florida
jmyeet•21 minutes ago
Fossil fuels are like NFTs. Hear me out.

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...

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EgregiousCube•about 1 hour ago
Worth noting that the limits being revoked have only been in place less than two years.
ourmandave•about 1 hour ago
Also worth noting that they are being revoked.
AlecSchueler•about 1 hour ago
Why is that notable?
mathisfun123•36 minutes ago
Because how else would you plant the seeds of doubt that this decision is fucked.
ck2•5 minutes ago
well, for the next 800 days

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

mathh•32 minutes ago
This is deeply outrageous and criminal. Every American should be ashamed.
csto12•24 minutes ago
I mean we elected an outrageous criminal into office. I think we are in a post-shame society.
yongjik•7 minutes ago
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

bethekidyouwant•about 1 hour ago
The 2024 standards required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions or shut down by 2039.

- wow 2039. So this already had no teeth. We can just pass this law again in 2029.

SomeHacker44•about 1 hour ago
Not a law. A regulation. If it were a law, it would have required Congress to change. Not that that would likely have stopped this administration.
fakedang•about 1 hour ago
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.
rayiner•26 minutes ago
I don't see the point of trying to redefine "pollution" to include CO2. We have been discussing climate change for decades, but it was only recently that people tried to shoehorn CO2 into category of "pollution." It just takes a category where society has some consensus and then shoehorns some new disputed idea into existing category. It's an end-run around the process of building consensus around the new thing.
Rygian•18 minutes ago
The first ever version of the "Greenhouse gas" wikipedia page lists COâ‚‚ as the first such gas (besides water vapor, obviously disregarded).

That page is from 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greenhouse_gas&ol...

pjc50•1 minute ago
IPCC first report was 1990, and the basic arithmetic of the atmosphere goes even further back.
rayiner•9 minutes ago
I'm talking about redefining the term "pollution," not the term "greenhouse gas."
watwut•15 minutes ago
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".
rayiner•8 minutes ago
> There is no redefinition, it was always part of definition.

Source?

rassimmoc•about 1 hour ago
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.
GreenVulpine•31 minutes ago
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.
dumberquestions•9 minutes ago
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.
sailfast•29 minutes ago
How does one move power plant pollution offshore to China?
collinmcnulty•29 minutes ago
This is absurd. The cheapest energy available is solar, which is becoming more true every day. If truly the goal was just to have cheap energy, solar buildout would be a huge component of the strategy.
efnx•28 minutes ago
So now as a planet we have to curb greenhouse gasses in the US _and_ China or India or whatever.