- 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.
Full steam ahead towards greenhouse gases, climate change, and +5degree temperatures. Why not?
show comments
totallymike
This comments page, as so many on HN, is making me wish there was a way to slap obviously-bad-faith commenters into submission
show comments
phtrivier
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.
infamia
This headline is rather sweeping considering the modest nature of the change, which is merely rolling back regulations to 2024 levels.
show comments
deepfriedchokes
If everyone votes, this will be overturned in a couple years.
eapressoandcats
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.
bentt
Crazy idea: Power Plants could still do the right thing.
show comments
mbgerring
This is cope. Oil, gas, and coal are dead, and with them, America’s control over the global financial system, and its political hegemony.
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.
show comments
tavavex
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.
debo_
Related: Citizen's Climate Lobby Canada laser talks booklet on planetary boundaries (link at bottom)
Can’t wait for this to cost us 10 times more in bailing out underwater Florida
jmyeet
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.
This is deeply outrageous and criminal. Every American should be ashamed.
show comments
bamboozled
How “conservative”, revolting people.
Grimeton
I'm so tired of this.
Please someone bring back people with critical thinking abilities.
show comments
ck2
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
yongjik
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
show comments
bethekidyouwant
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.
show comments
EgregiousCube
Worth noting that the limits being revoked have only been in place less than two years.
show comments
rayiner
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.
show comments
GreenVulpine
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.
show comments
rassimmoc
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apr%C3%A8s_moi,_le_d%C3%A9luge
Full steam ahead towards greenhouse gases, climate change, and +5degree temperatures. Why not?
This comments page, as so many on HN, is making me wish there was a way to slap obviously-bad-faith commenters into submission
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.
This headline is rather sweeping considering the modest nature of the change, which is merely rolling back regulations to 2024 levels.
If everyone votes, this will be overturned in a couple years.
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.
Crazy idea: Power Plants could still do the right thing.
This is cope. Oil, gas, and coal are dead, and with them, America’s control over the global financial system, and its political hegemony.
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.
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.
Related: Citizen's Climate Lobby Canada laser talks booklet on planetary boundaries (link at bottom)
https://canada.citizensclimatelobby.org/media-release-ccl-ca...
Can’t wait for this to cost us 10 times more in bailing out underwater Florida
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...
This is deeply outrageous and criminal. Every American should be ashamed.
How “conservative”, revolting people.
I'm so tired of this.
Please someone bring back people with critical thinking abilities.
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
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 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.
Worth noting that the limits being revoked have only been in place less than two years.
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.
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.
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.