Also worth noting that they are being revoked.

Because how else would you plant the seeds of doubt that this decision is fucked.

Because without noting that, "revoked" sounds like all limits are being removed, rather than that we're back to the 2024 limits.

Lobbyists lies a foot. “We can’t provide more power with these pesky regulations”

'shielding', is applied to both the energy extraction process of fission activity AND the remnants.

you're definitely not clear on the meaning.

Disaster capitalism is pretty much current AI is to future AI use

Because it'll create value.

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

Climate Change is a big industrial-complex.

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

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.

Enough to store the energy between gaps, plus a buffer?

Batteries aren't exactly made from gold. Grid scale batteries especially, where weight and size doesn't matter as much, are totally viable on a mass scale.

That is literally what you are doing right now.

You're not being pragmatic, you're being myopic. Our current energy systems are the result of deliberate complex work. It seems shortsighted to think it's somehow the only system that can ever be built just because other systems have new challenges to overcome.

Fox brain alert!

We have batteries for this. See Texas and California.

This gets tiring. No, china has no electricity problem in the night and their share of solar is off the roof.

The UK has Dinorwig power station, a pumped hydro station capable of storing over 9 GWh of energy. This alone rivals the entire combined 10.5 GWh of battery storage across the whole country. It certainly seems much more feasible when you have the terrain to allow it.

Oh yes, as opposed to the famously free from abuse oil and gas industry.

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.

Are you from the past?

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.

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.

Especially at a time when electrical power use was trending down due to efficiency gains and offshoring manufacturing, and samon fisheries were in danger of failing, it made sense to remove dams that weren't terribly productive. And start considering actually doing the work to make the larger dams fish friendly, eventually.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161221064310/http://www.water....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam

China mined more coal in 2025 then ever, but burned less in coal plans. Coal is slowly shifting from electricity production to synthetic oil and chemical production.

https://www.mining.com/web/chinas-coal-output-hits-record-in...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-top-coal-regi...

Yes, and?

That's not really relevant to the topic at hand. No one has said that China is a utopia and paragon of human rights.

I don't see the USA building out that much solar in its vast desert wastelands.

Would you mind sharing your source? AFAIK the coal plants are only backups, so it'd be very surprising if they're utilized as much as the solar capacity.

Not in an absolute sense, perhaps. But it was there enough to mostly function most of the time. And international life was more stable because of it.

Complement.

This is not really very impressive in context, for two reasons. First, China generated 10,400 TWh in 2025 and France generated only 547 TWh. The 95% and 50% are being applied to different numbers, and the scales here just aren’t comparable. Second, nearly all of France’s power generation was built decades ago, and China’s was built very recently - and is still expanding rapidly in both nuclear and renewables. Comparing France to China is like comparing a 1970s solar powered bungalow to a gigafactory under construction.

Yet coal burning isn't going up in China. They also built more solar in 2025 than the US has in total. Also currently building 35+ reactors.

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

China also invested significantly in technology like flue gas desulfurization 10-20 years ago, as well as other approaches which try to mitigate some of the impact of coal burning. So while bringing online coal power plants is obviously and can never be carbon neutral, a more appropriate comparison would be to measure the new plants' additional GHG and SLCP emissions, and compare that to the approach in the US.

coal usage has declined there the last two years. Would have declined even more this year, except for a certain very smart war.

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

If China (and India and …) sees the US and other industrialized doing nothing, why should they do anything?

The most straight-forward way of solving is either through cap-and-trade (like acid rain was dealt with) or 'carbon dividend' (which Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, Volker, etc endorsed):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...

Then you put a 'carbon tariff' on imports for any country that does not have a similar system (e.g., EU's CBAM).

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...

Maybe you should check? Because we definitely weren't at +1.2°C warming in 2006.

Why are you getting your information from movies?

Après nous, le déluge!

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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_cruelty_is_the_point

Don't forget India as well

Since 2000, how much production did the US offshore to China?

If this trend keeps going for a decade+, China might begin to approach US per-capita emissions.

Their coal burning isn't going up though.

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.

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.

Do you have children?

Translated to American: "fuck you, I got mine"

I mean we elected an outrageous criminal into office. I think we are in a post-shame society.

How does one move power plant pollution offshore to China?

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.

So now as a planet we have to curb greenhouse gasses in the US _and_ China or India or whatever.

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.

a booming industrial economy

Nothing more important than that!!

Why does it matter which of the harmful emissions from a smokestack count as "pollution"?

Because society uses labels to delineate the boundaries between different legal regimes and sources of authority, and adhering to those boundaries is important. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) can't point to the traffic on a fiber cable within a data center and say it falls within their jurisdiction because that's also "communications."

It's especially important in this context, because the half-century-old laws and regulations designed to control soot emissions from factory smokestacks is ill-suited to managing CO2 emissions. The fundamental premise of the Clean Air Act is that pollution can be controlled at the source with control technologies (RACT, BACT, etc.).

This focus on control technologies puts well-defined guardrails on the EPA. The EPA can't go around making big decisions about how factories work or what people produce. They can simply tell you to put the best reasonably available scrubbers on your factory. That approach completely breaks down when it comes to CO2, because there is no such thing as a "CO2 scrubber." Treating CO2 as a pollutant puts the EPA into a role of supervising the energy sector that the agency simply was never designed to do.

Right, but the 1990 IPCC report doesn’t use the term “pollution” to refer to CO2: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_a...

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 was battling global warming in Civ endgames in 1991...

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.

besides water vapor, obviously disregarded

Don't be so sure about "obviously" when they start talking about "water vapor emissions"...

It's a pollutant in quantities such as emitted by human activities, always orders of magnitude more than what any terrestrial life form emits through respiration.

This GHG is emitted (alongside methane, by the way), by humans, in such quantities that it severely impacts the thermal balance of the planet, and threatens an extinction-event comparable to what only large asteroids are usually capable of.

You don't have to read the whole report, just search for how it uses the words "greenhouse gases" and "air pollution." The IPCC treats those as being two distinct things.

For example, on p. 55.

"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)"

That clearly refers to "air pollution" as an example of "other environmental factors"--something different from "CO2 enrichment" (rising CO2 levels). The report uses the same terminology on pp. 88 and 97. Throughout the report, it treats "greenhouse gasses" as it's own category that can interact with "air pollution"--but is different from air pollution.

[delayed]

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.

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.

Can’t wait for this to cost us 10 times more in bailing out underwater Florida

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.

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.

Except you burn the oil once and keep the solar panel and batteries for one or two decades

You burn a barrel of oil once. A solar panel lasts for 20+ years. After you have installed it, if China announces they will no longer sell new ones - you have two decades of lead time to start building your own domestically.

But we are not buying oil or gas. We are buying hardware that will generate electricity for decades.

I do hope the US turns around. As I see it, we (western countries) have aligned values and it's better for us all (US included) to stick together.

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.

Rather, in a case of such an acute confrontation, it denies their adversaries access to the highest-end chips, too.

and they plan to invade Taiwan in just a few years

Can you share your sources for that valuable intelligence? Military analysts would really be interested to learn that. Or is that form the same manufactured scaremongering genre as "Iran is 6 weeks away from building nuclear weapons" and "Iraq has WMDs" to justify endless defense spending, military interventions and warmongering.

at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production

You can't just commandeer semi fabs like you're carjacking a Hyundai for a joyride. Semi fabs need constant parts and on-prem staff and always-on telemetry from ASML & friends to run. If that's gone, you're left with a very expensive warehouse that can't do shit.

I asked Claude, and now I know that there are nice, basically undetectable, plausibly deniable ways to render solar panels useless within months, or, with some preparation, days. It seems that open-source, carefully scrutinized panel controller firmware may be critically important.

Yup. The best thing Trump did for Climate Change was to start a war with Iran.

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...

We might want to at least on the high seas to combat global warming a bit.

But is it stupid if you want to sell some fossil fuels in the short to medium term?

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...

Here in Queensland the state owns the regional electricity company, Ergon. ∴ most of what they do that doesn't generate money (such as doing free electricity rather than charging for it) is taxpayer-funded.

Australia hasn't shot itself in the foot like EU's self inflicted policies.

As an Australian I can say that for me personally the free energy periods have been amazing and are an example of the functional free markets making life better for the average person.

Or that Germany shares electricity with the EU, so that everyone is getting subjected to those pains with fuel sources being cut.

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).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/15/austr...

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 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?

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.

Then somebody else comes along and steers back.

How measured should the reaction to this be?

If everyone votes, this will be overturned in a couple years.

He should be awarded the FIFA Environment Protection prize.

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

Related: Citizen's Climate Lobby Canada laser talks booklet on planetary boundaries (link at bottom)

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

Feeling called out huh

China became the manufacturing capital of the world because it doesn't have these regulations. It's time we caught up.

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.

What does this have to do with being a fat, dumb, greedy asshole with no brains?

It's eerie how often this lie gets repeated here.

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.

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.

Power Plants answer to the shareholders, hence…

How “conservative”, revolting people.

It’s expensive? We were quoted 60k last year. Maybe a scammy company but that’s a lot up front.

Some speculative answers based on what I know:

1. A lot of single family dwellings are occupied by renters. In this scenario, the renter has no ability to install rooftop solar, and the owner has no incentive to install rooftop solar because the renter is paying the energy bills. (The same goes for things like installing high-efficiency heat pumps etc.)

2. HOA regulations can block things like rooftop solar depending on where you live.

3. The up-front investment involved in rooftop solar can be prohibitive for many people. Things like tax incentives can help but we've been getting rid of those under the current administration, and tax incentives only go so far if your tax return is 6+ months away.

Tech workers located in South Africa and nearby regions suffer, because the power grid there is unreliable at best. Therefore, those workers may be required by employers to prove that they have arranged for reliable backup power and network connections in order to stay connected (nearly to the antipodes) and ensure that their performance is competitive with workers located in stable regimes with robust power grids and network backbones.

It may seem unfair or unnecessary for US employers to require US employees to have a UPS, solar array, a redundant network connection, etc. But if employers required these things up-front, surely some tech workers could step up to the challenge and perhaps even be distinguished from those who don't get it.

Rooftop solar in the US is incredibly expensive from most installers even as panel prices have come down and energy prices are typically low enough that the payoff time and up-front cost are seen as not worth it for many people. The US also has a lot of homes where (cheap) natural gas is used for cooking, heating, and hot water, which you'd have to continue paying for even after you installed solar panels or pay a lot of money to convert to electrical equivalents.

That said, I know a lot of people who have recently installed solar panels on their roof and it's increasingly worth it from a financial perspective. The other thing worth noting though is that while cool, rooftop solar really isn't the best approach to installing solar capacity compared to grid scale solar farms on land which also tends to be abundant in the US.

Certainly this will benefit the citizens!