American conservatives are contemptuous of solar and wind power but love nuclear power. They have no particular opinion, as near as I can tell, about tidal or geothermal power.
Why?
59 thoughts on “What’s the deal with conservatives and carbon-free energy?”
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You can't meter the sun or the wind.
Power plants currently have larger work forces, have more assets sunk into their construction, have a current revenue stream that is about to be disrupted, and are currently bringing in a lot of money. They also have the backing of their suppliers, minors, etc. In other words, they can bring some votes and gobs of money to the table to keep things as they are.
Virtually all electricity from wind is metered. Heck, it’s even big in Texas.
Bingo
The current US power grid is compatible with central station power generation. Wind and solar would require a different grid suited to a more distributed power generation. The so=called American conservatives are reluctant to spend money on additional transmission lines and the new power generating system that would likely dilute their control and their profits.
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It's you they hate, Kevin. And me, and "libs" generally. "Libs" of certain stripes have, in the recent past, opposed nuclear power. Libs of all stripes are enthusiastic about expanding solar and wind power generation. Tidal and geothermal currently have too small a media footprint to make a worthy culture war football. That's it. End of story. Oh, and there's Trump's deep and abiding love of birds (can you hear my eyes roll?).
This. A huge part of conservative policy these days is anchored on opposition. Since there is a significant portion of the left that opposes nuclear power, than it becomes safer to support it. I doubt that there is a ton of thought involved.
Many "conservatives" would do anything if it it seemed to piss off liberals.
100%
+1. They were even for some kind of carbon trading scheme until they realised it meant cooperating with the despised Greens. I'm frequently amazed at Kevin's lack of understanding of right-wing mentality.
Easy to predict the conservative position on any issue by just first noting the liberal view.
Many (45+) years ago, I was a staffer for a Democratic congressman. When he headed onto the House floor to vote, I noticed that he'd glance up at the big tote board that lists how each Member voted. When I asked him what he was looking for, he said, "I just look to see how [a notoriously conservative Member from Maryland's Eastern Shore] votes, and I vote the opposite way." 😉 So it works in both directions (although his tongue was partly in his cheek).
Andy Harris was in Congress 45 years ago? Who would have guessed?
But seriously, this is a reasonable strategy for the countless votes where you lack the bandwidth to develop an informed opinion. Your boss was just facetiously saying he was voting the party line. But for the issues (stipulating that any exist) for which a Congressman has an informed opinion? This is a really stupid approach.
Liberals/Democrats champion solar and wind power, so they must be evil.
Also too, R's corporate owners are heavily invested in fossil fuels, and solar/wind are the most promising replacements for petroleum.
Nuclear power is widely opposed on the left, so of course righties love it (also too: nuclear power is connected to things going boom, which righties love).
Yeah, it's this 100%. It's all about pwning the libs and nothing else. That's it.
Nuclear power also has a certain big dick energy to it, to the lizard-brained impulses that drive this behavior anyway. So of course that gives it a bonus.
Tidal and geothermal are just boring so don't get any attention. Neither can realistically be used to address the fossil fuel crisis because neither can be done at utility scale across the country.
Is it any more complicated than being against liberal preferences here?
The rural 'base' can see them and so they are easy to hate because they represent change and the libs.
Then Nantucket or Martha’s Vinyard should have welcomed the turbines.
It's hippy punching all the way down.
Powering everything with wind and solar is a pipe dream
https://www.mattball.org/2023/01/land-vs-renewable-fantasies.html
Matt, this estimate is ridiculously dismal and wrong. 13% of US energy came from wind or solar last year! And wind mills don't cover an 1/8 of "Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee put together" or solar panels cover an 1/8 of "Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts". Though to be fair, a large beach towel or an oversize truck can cover Rhode Island, America's most ridiculous state.
I’ve not looked at Matt’s link, but the question becomes how much more capacity is required to get to 100%.
And it wont just be another 8x. It will have to be very over-built to both have regional backstops for cloudy and still, and to charge storage.
The US can bring the mix of wind/solar up to 33% - 50% of electric production without any new tech or running into limits. So we are good for at least 10-20 more years.
After that, grid energy storage, grid interconnects, and demand shifting become important to keep increasing renewables without heroic measures. And work on solving these problems is well underway, both R&D and implementation. So by 2050 getting to 75-90% total renewable power (wind/solar/hydro/nuclear) will be practical and not cost more than electricity does today.
While I can't describe the path the US will take to 95% renewable energy today, there is no reason to reject it as a 'pipe dream'.
Let's assume your 13% is correct. Could you cite a few examples where wind/solar operated continuosly, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year at megawatt scale me. Please tell me, I'm fascinated.
Operational renewable with storage facilities include:
Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility, Phase II is a 100 MW/400 Mwh facility in California
North Fork is a 100 MW facility in Texas
Bat Cave is another 100 Mwh facility in Texas
Saticoy is a 100 MW battery storage facility in California
Gambit Energy Storage is the Tesla 100 MW storage facility in Texas
RES Top Gun Energy Storage is a 30 MW storage facility in California
Bolster Substation Battery System is part of the Salt River Project in Arizona with 25 MW of storage capacity
FPL Manatee Energy Storage Center has 409 MW of storage capacity as part of a 900 MWh renewable facility in Florida
Blythe II Solar Energy Center has 115 MW of battery storage in California
Wilmot Energy Center has 30 MW of battery storage in Arizona
Current solar/wind/storage projects that are under construction or planned have about 10x of this capacity
Because on average, they're perennial fashion-victims who repeat whatever they think is the tribally-correct thing to say, and that's relentlessly exploited by the energy industry.
Next question?
"Because on average, they're perennial fashion-victims who repeat whatever they think is the tribally-correct thing to say"
Lots of that going around these days...
Tidal and Geothermal are big enough to be a threat, so the orders to hate them haven't been issued yet.
Kevin, when you reference wind and solar, you really must include storage.
Define "conservatives".
On the right (and left) you have a thin 5% or so driven by rationality, and a fat 95% driven by tribalism/resentment. (This is the basic reason for horseshoe theory; left and right resentment meet at the same place.)
The rightwing tribal antagonism has arisen over time starting, probably, with Gore, as a Democrat, making his movie.
BUT the "Green New Deal", which yutted a long wish list of lefty proposals onto "green energy" kicked the opposition into high gear. And this is understandable long as the loudest proponents of green insist on using green as a lever to restructure vast elements of society. Imagine, for example, if Republicans insisted on a "Green Family Deal" that would subsidize solar and electric cars – but only for "families consisting of a married man and woman, and two or more children"...
Look at, for example, Mercatus, as part of the rational 5%:
https://www.mercatus.org/economic-insights/expert-commentary/we-need-green-energy-we-dont-need-green-jobs
Some at Hoover are bullish on green energy (though I'd put Hoover at more ideological than Mercatus). Then by the time we get to Heritage or AEI we're in the 95% tribal stratum.
And it goes the other way, of course. The "theoretical left" may be theoretically in favor of renewable energy but the actually existing left is as eager to shut down any new proposed solar or wind facility as they are to shut down anything else.
It's unclear (to me anyway) who is against the generic "North American Platform Against Windpower" but every time I encounter a SPECIFIC project being opposed it's always some sort of "environmental" organization that's leading the protests., eg
https://www.app.com/story/news/local/land-environment/2022/12/08/nj-offshore-wind-projects-face-pushback-hearings-planned-for-december/69708849007/
Because they're bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry. So of course they're going to cheerlead for coal and badmouth renewables. I guess we can only hope that at some point, renewables get entrenched and powerful enough to purchase Republican politicians and then we'll start hearing about how wonderful wind and solar are.
I remember the anti-nuclear power people from the 1990s and later and can best compare them with the current anti-vaccine people. Back then, they were able to ignore the prospect of global warming, even though it was a known phenomenon. They had an amazing ability to find ways to nitpick proposals such as the long term storage facility in Nevada or the low level waste storage facility in the California desert Meanwhile, their approach to the known toxicities of coal-fired power was to demand that we stop using it. They chanted "wind, solar, geothermal" as if it were a religious service. What has been missing in the discussion is that we ought to be using all of the non-CO2 generating (and non-methane generating) sources and we ought to be investing scads of money in research as Kevin has said.
Trump certainly has said some strange things about wind power, but the concern over bird killing did not begin with him. But this has not stopped investors in Oklahoma or Texas from building wind farms, nor has it prevented rich liberals in Massachusetts from resisting.
Don't forget that these types love to file lawsuits and then draw out the legal proeedings as long as possible. That's so they point to the cost overuns and missing deadlines as a reason to oppose nuclear power. It's a deliberate tactice, as more than one highly placed in the movement have admitted. This is the old klll your parents and then plead for lenience on the grounds you're an orphan. These people are scum.
A friend in rural Wisconsin tells me that the Republicans there are very vocal in opposition to a solar farm being built there even though it means more money for the farmers whose land they use and good jobs for the installers and those doing upkeep.
Solar is the most benign, unobtrusive thing around. No moving parts, no emissions, it just sits there and produces electricity.
It's because solar and wind farms are something they can see and that reminds them of how they've fucked the planet, and, because to be a social conservative is to have no responsibility for anything, they're freaked out by it and react with violent contempt.
I have a wingnut cousin who is a retired engineer who absolutely hates electric cars and will seize on anything at all to be offended by them, usually conflating them with self-driving cars. He's currently all-in for hydrogen because it preserves all the existing industrial infrastructure of gasoline with little alteration --'and it's only byproduct is water'. Pointing out all that water vapor added to the atmosphere would just trap more heat doesn't seem an issue for him because it will be more than worth it to 'get past this EV fiasco'.
Adding water vapor to the atmosphere will not on net increase the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere. There's a process for removing excess water vapor from the atmosphere going on outside my window right now: it's called 'rain'. Nothing humanity can do about water vapor will compete with evaporation from more than 2/3rds of the earth's surface.
I don't think Hydrogen will be that useful as an energy storage medium because it's next to nothing in terms of energy density; how much energy can you store in a unit volume. H2 is the lightest molecule possible, and the only ways to get a lot of it in a small volume is to increase the pressure or drop the temperature, and both of those carry their own risks and energy costs.
Come on, Kevin. Conservative positions on everything else are arbitrary and inconsistent, why should carbon free energy be any different? Remember, this is the party whose platform in the last presidential election was: "whatever the former guy feels like".
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They're against every thing liberals are for as some of you have pointed out, but the nuclear part of it gives them license to wedge some people off and to always have an excuse why to not engage.
This is the same with everything they do. They take a stupid position and couple it with a decent one and then attack you for not having the decent one ignoring the stupid one.
Sure, I'd love it if the DSA quit pushing Ewok village futures that clearly couple stopping global warming with either the de facto dismantling of industrial society, but that's what they do.
Fortunately, the Biden administration and now finally Newsom have figured out that there probably aren't enough windmills and solar panels that we could ever make to get the job done, especially with such a shit grid.
I am not a conservative, but I do work with/speak with several conservatives. The basic line I hear is: 'solar, wind and conservation will never be adequate for 24/7/365 national power.'
Nuclear is mentioned because, despite being a 24/7/365 power source, some, not all Democrats don't support its expansion: something like, 'if you really believed in green energy you would support nuclear and you don't.'
Tidal or geothermal power, I think, are not topical because neither side sees these forms of energy as a significant portion of the future energy mix.
As others have pointed out, the opposition to solar and wind is mostly about performative Owning The Libs. This does not usually translate into actual action in opposition to solar and wind power, and in fact several red states - chief among them Texas - have had massive build-outs of solar and wind power.
With nuclear power, it's about 75% Owning The Libs and 25% libertarian "We could have had flying cars if it wasn't for the EPA!" fantasy. It's telling to me that the open fossil fuel shills have gotten on the "pro-nuclear to own the libs" bandwagon as well - these folks do not see nuclear power as a threat in the way they obviously do with solar and wind power.
There's obviously a bit of nuance. If you live near a proposed solar utility site in the countryside, you can get a lot of opposition from folks with bad beliefs about solar and wind power (spread by fossil fuel shills), folks with concerns about the loss of farmland, new exurbanites who are angry that they moved away from it all just for it to follow them there, and so forth.
And nuclear power did genuinely suffer from hefty regulatory burden - although I doubt it would have been profitable even with a more favorable regulatory regime, and it's notable that the industry actually regulates itself to a much higher standard than required. More generally, a number of laws have made it much more difficult to do large-scale infrastructure and construction projects, because activist groups can weaponize the permitting process against them in lawsuits permitted by the NEPA law.
Nuclear power and other stuff involving radiation are uninsureable. The insurance companies won't touch them. (I found this out from sad personal experience.) This means that the Federal Government -- yes, YOUR Federal Government, financed by you, the little guy taxpayer who lacks the expensive stable of "creative" accountants and tax lawyers -- will provide all the liability coverage for a nuclear power installation, whether fission or in a possible future, fusion. That's basically infinite money in the event you, the plant operator, screw up or scuzz off.
That's a lot of FREE MONEY! Not to mention externalized risks! Diminished responsibilities! What's not to love for a "free market" (ha!) con?
And also, it pwns the Libz.
Uh, tell me, I'm curious: How many people have died in the United States as a result of an accident in a nuclear power plant?
I'm long past trying to understand the conservative rationale for or against anything. To understand their ideas you need to marinate in Fox News for a few years then saute your hair until it spontaneously combusts.
There is a bit of simple-minded logic in not favoring wind or solar because they're unreliable.
They oppose solar and wind because they are the forms most championed by the left. They love nuclear because the left usually opposes it. And they don't care about tidal and geothermal because the left doesn't care much about them, as in they don't push for more of it. Not because they oppose them, but primarily because both forms are very geography dependent, so they can't be championed as an alternative in most places like solar and wind can.
Conservatives think they're clever and they're stumped that no one appreciates it,
https://i.redd.it/x9op42e32iba1.jpg
Youngkin plans to give a nuclear powerplant to the SW Virginia people who gave him their votes. Whether or not it happens, that is one idea of his to replace coal jobs. And in the meantime, he has tried illegal means of canceling the regional power policy approved during Northam's administration.
I don’t think conservatives can really trust their own place in the world if they’re not causing damage to other people or the environment. Do they even exist if nothing has to give way to their desires?
Because lefty hippies were against it. Simple as that.
This one is easy:
1 - Hillary Clinton sold all of our uranium to Russia.
2 - Nukular... Newclear? Whatever... Those things run on uranium.
3 - Republicans LOVE Russia, so anything that sends more money to Putin is GOOD!
Plus windmills cause cancer, and solar means you can't watch TV at night.
This is not a representative example of course, but in my experience there are just as many conservatives opposing nuclear power as those who are liberal. And contrariwise, there are just as many liberals who approve of nuclear power as those who are conservative. IOW, this is not a well-posed question.