David Roberts tweets an eternal truth:
Pols who genuinely cared about energy independence would be going gangbusters for renewables (& building domestic battery supply chains). But the ones who say it most are the fossil fuel shills, which shows they care about the FF industry, not independence. Shocker.
— David Roberts (@drvolts) March 22, 2021
Even if you think climate change is just a progressive hoax, there's really no reason to oppose renewable energy. At the very least, it produces fewer air pollutants than fossil fuels, which everyone can agree is a good thing. And the industry as a whole would provide as many jobs as the fossil fuel industry if it were the same size. So why not support the hell out of it?
What you'd expect under normal circumstances is that senators from big coal and oil states might oppose renewable energy for purely parochial reasons, but that's a small fraction of all senators. And anyway, if this were truly about protecting the fossil fuel industry, conservatives would oppose nuclear power too. But they don't. They're all for it.
When you put this all together, what you have is this: Republicans oppose wind and solar; support nuclear; and support coal and oil. What kind of sense can you make of this?
Only one: they oppose whatever liberals support and support whatever liberals oppose. Rolling coal, baby. That's it. Own the libs. Welcome to the modern GOP.
With the Republican party, it's tribalism all the way down.
It's about structural accessibility. Fossil fuel power and nuclear power (along with hydro) have high up-front costs that only big companies can afford. Solar and even wind power are accessible enough that individuals and small groups can invest in it and are no longer customers for those big corporations. If you put solar on your house, not only are they out all the money you would have otherwise paid them, but in many places they are also on the hook to pay you for any extra power you generate. It's about Big Energy and the preservation of power... rich people are more than willing to spend 99 cents to avoid giving you the whole dollar.
@Jessie
👍🏽
Republican support for fossil fuels is a good example of the iindustrial strength greed- gullibility complex.
...they oppose whatever liberals support and support whatever liberals oppose.
That's certainly part of it. Environmentalism is a hippie thing, ergo it must be opposed regardless of the cost to oneself. Slowly poisoning your family with polluted tap water is a small price to pay for defeating the commies.
But I think there's more to it than that, something atavistic, something emotionally underdeveloped. They perceive renewable energy, and environmentalism generally, as feminine, as passive, as accommodating the world rather than dominating it, and also as clever and conniving, like wimpy nerds. Coal and oil are manly forms of energy, dug and drilled by manly men in simple, understandable ways, with big steel tools, and burned in great manly steel furnaces built by mighty manly industrialists, etc.
Biden was talking about COVID vaccines and masks, but he really hit it on the head when he said Republican attitudes are Neanderthal (and yes, in fact he probably was being unfair to Neanderthals, but everyone got the point).
Perceptive!
Social conservatives have the emotional maturity of 14 year olds.
I love this comment!
not everyone agrees less pollutants. remember gohmert said more CO2 is great, because it's what plants crave. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/louie-gohmert-climate-house-speaker/
i meant "less pollutants are good" but i don't seem to have the ability to edit a comment anymore.
@kahner
Comment editing could be made possible, but somebody doesn't want to set it up.
Louie Gohmert cuts the impressive figure of a locally famous kohlrabi farmer, so he knows about all kinds of gasses.
"it's what plants crave"
I thought that was Brawndo.
I personally feel it's all about the money. By that I mean the money that the fossil fuel industry has thrown at the problem, which they've known about for a long time. I'm sure there's been an very substantive effort to paint renewables in a bad light, and for these guys, any attack that works is a good attack. So "hippy" or "feminine" are just things that work, and for these money guys, that's what they care about.
I don't think we should tear our hair out about the specifics of the attack because of this. You know, hand wringing about whether we are being too "feminine" or "hippy". This is, at root, about money.
Yup. It's about the money, and pwning or trolling the libs is a side bonus.
Granted, they COULD be making tons of money in renewables if they got in on the ground floor. But they want money now vs. probably more money later. It's myopic as f.
It's a cultural gender thing. When boys are about 10 years old, they learn that icky things scare the girls or make them go "Ewww!." And if icky things scare YOU or make you go "Ewww", that means you are a scaredy-cat sissy boy. When boys grow up to be men, some of us get over that and learn that responsibility matters more than that stupid shit you thought was "manly" when you were an adolescent, but unfortunately a LOT of men never make that transition, especially in our arrested-development pop culture. So now "clean energy" is for girls. Men admire a man who is "not afraid to get his hands dirty," and that sensibility is extrapolated to things like energy. They despise renewable energy for the exact reason we need it: because it's clean! That makes it "girl" energy, as opposed to dirty energy, which is manly energy.
This is exactly why, in my climate advocacy work, I avoid using the terms "clean" and "dirty." We can't afford to have half the population rejecting a necessary energy transition because they think it makes them girly.
That's a good point but it should be possible to counter some of this childhood bias by emphasizing that renewables give us "independence" while fossil fuels leave us under the control of foreigners.
The fact that the GOP operates at the level of cultural tropes and psychological appeals is sometimes frustrating, as the lizard brain sometimes wins out over the enlightened-self-interest brain! But overall I think it's a positive, as Americans are fundamentally very practical people who judge life and politicians by material gains, and the Democrats have a huge advantage when it comes to just making life better for people.
Oh, and along these lines, Biden's "Neanderthal" line was a mistake, Instead he should have criticized Texas for "surrendering" too early to the virus.
To paraphrase the great Marx as in Groucho “whatever we are for, their against it! Since the day we first commenced it, they were against it”. Sums up the modern GOP.
But Texas leads the nation in wind generation and is second in total renewable generation. Conservatives don't turn down a good deal regardless of their politics. It's when its not a good deal that you get a lot of pushback.
They may love that renewable energy dollar, but they sure were quick to falsely blame wind turbines for the devastating cold weather power grid failure in TX. Because KD's right - it's cultural war, not economic disagreement.
I’m surprised they didn’t come out and say oh we didn’t winterize, but instead did BS culture war stuff. But it sort of worked in deflecting blame. But only sort of as people who Pauly attention see it for what it was.
A renewable energy grid is more complicated and therefore, less reliable than ff only grid.
It's not that much more complicated, and much of the complication is due to the problem of bringing large FF generation facilities on and off line quickly. Failing some sort of storage capacity, my totally uneducated guess is some sort of "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Steam Turbines" would fill the bill. However, I'd also guess that an electrolysis facility that could take excess renewable electricity and store it as hydrogen for future use in a fuel cell or through combustion makes more sense. IIRC, there are a couple of fairly large scale demonstration projects being built.
conservatives would have to admit that this is the 21st century, not the 19th. they seem to have skipped a 100 years or so ...
A Republican is a whore who's paid for lying, but a huge number of them don't know that and are actually Republicans because they recognize that lying in this way can cause a lot of harm they can get away with, and injuring others gives them an incredible boner they are paid to have so everything works out swell.
Knee-jerk anti-environmentalism.
As someone in the energy business, I think there are a lot of contributors to this phenomenon but the primary cause is simply tribalism. There's plenty of money to be made in the renewables business (and it has its own share of shady operators), but endorsing renewables is viewed as a concession to the Libs, and that's unacceptable.
“So why not support the hell out of it?” Perhaps renewables are a razor, but fossils are blades?
I don't know about "liberals" but I support essentially all means of generating electricity without burning fossil fuels; hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, and nuclear.
My guess is that FF and big operations like nuclear power plants own more Republican congresscritters than windmills and solar cell operations do.
Who has the lobbyists?
The nuclear power industry exists because of lobbying. And we still need them for a few more decades since they run relatively CO2 free. Disposal will still be a mess, but not that much more of mess than it is already.
Fossil fuels--not only does it have lobbyists, but the myriad of taxes help. Gasoline taxes provide a lot of income--even if they have not kept up with inflation and do not cover all the costs of road repair. Gas stations provide a lot of jobs. Garages, auto parts shops, oil changes, etc., provide a lot of jobs, tax money, and sponsor local little league teams. It's an entire ecosystem unto itself, including emission testing. That will be disrupted.
Electric cars--self service consists of charging, filling windshield washer fluid, and checking tire pressure (ok maybe not that anymore).
But much like Beavis n' Butt-head, the oil they found was really sewage.
"I support oil and gas so America can be energy independent!"
No foreign nation can stop the sun from shining on America, no foreign nation can block the wind from blowing across America.
^^^At the very least, it produces fewer air pollutants than fossil fuels, which everyone can agree is a good thing.^^^
Really?
I read the other day that some right wingers have taken to kitting out their giant SUVs and trucks with exhaust systems that belch out huge billows of black smoke, simply for the purpose of "owning the libs."
These people are seriously ill.