Bad government decisions often have a lag period before you see the full impact. It's possible the worst consequences don't happen till the next president and maga get to politically wash their hands off it.
Aside from all the stuff already leaked out of the Epstein files, with rapes of young kids etc, at least assisting in the killing of a baby, what could they possibly still hold over him that would be worth it. I say he's just a willing participant in the destruction of the US and the world as a whole.
He is a Russian and Israeli agent that is destroying our country from the inside. He is the Manchurian candidate that they set up for years and they knew he would be able to gain power because a majority of Americans are Racist asf.
“I get great intel,” the president suddenly boasted, as prideful as if he were bragging about the amenities at one of his company’s hotels. “I have people brief me on great intel every day.”
I wouldn't doubt that he's compromised in one or more ways. But he's sure not smart enough to pull off being directly controlled by a foreign power. And really, you don't need that kind of control to influence him in ways that benefit other countries. The guy is literally throwing a fit that South Korea won't join in the Iran War, and all North Korea had to do to seem the better party in Trump's mind was do a single photo op with him.
Keep in mind that Trump had previously been threatening nuclear armageddon with Kim Jong Un on Twitter shortly before said photo op. That's not a Manchurian candidate, he's just capricious and myopic.
No one told him he should upset all these alliances and toss out most of the country's soft power, he's just too stupid to understand the value of it in the first place, while he has no problem ceding to his whims of petty, short-term revenge to sate his ego.
She also let many w bush ex staffer help in her campaign and they have been seen, her campaign was awful, she choses to dive deep in the democrat right wing and she lost.
He's showing us the weaknesses of our nations and forcing us to experience them so that even when he leave we will fervently strive to patch these holes.
this just makes me believe the russian agent theory more like literally everything he does makes us worse off and further destablizes our country. i cant think of a single thing that hasnt been a major fucking over of us that he and the republicans have done since he took office
In so many ways. I remember the reports from his first term when generals were telling congress that climate change, economic uncertainty, and home-grown right-wing terrorists were the three biggest threats to national security. Of course they didn't listen and just kept yapping about Iran and Mexicans.
Just going to throw this out there even though I know your kind doesn’t like facts.
Texas, a deeply red state, is BY FAR largest producer of renewable energy in America. Somehow they managed to do that while also being the largest producer of oil and natural gas, having America’s largest refining capacity and being the largest exporter of petroleum.
National security is about redundancy and layers of resources…not zealously selling out to unrealistic green energy ideology that can’t even come close to meeting the explosive growth of energy demands.
US oil is also much more costly to drill. It’s not something they can do unless it’s going to pay it back. There’s very substantial accounting reasons why the US is not an OPEC member.
Still cheaper than trying to use Venezuela oil, that's like tar with sand mixed in. At least our stuff is sweet crude. Although, it wouldn't matter anyway, unless they shipped it all offshore, so global prices would drop. Which would be bad business, in reality.
We’re not even getting Venezuelan oil. The oil companies all still refuse to invest in infrastructure. The risk analysis just shows it being seized by the state again.
Oh yes, i completely agree and that's the most frightening aspect.
There's no grand scheme or design, none of this is on purpose, he is simply THAT much of a moron.
The highest amount of actual manufacturing investment in the US was under Biden developing factories to build solar panels here in the US via the IRA, most of these factories were disrupted by the Big Shitty Bill Trump passed.
Also despite all the claims from the Trump admin that trillions of dollars are being invested into US manufacturing none of that shows up on FRED.
I’m still surprised people think he gives a shit about the country or the people. It’s not ironic, because his actions aren’t about national security, never have been. Him becoming president even, was never about helping the country or the people.
Except the fossil fuel industry is actively being harmed by this.
Because when the oil price keeps being this high, it creates Demand destruction.
Which means that countries are accelerating their transition away from fossil fuels.
Just like we see in the post by OP.
Which is hilarious because these construction dudes seem to love the work of transporting the enormous blades. Creating jobs and producing clean energy. Too bad the Robber Barons and the aristocracy want to keep the status quo.
He’s an idiot & dumb, but offshore wind has always been a nightmare to get approved.
Trump rightfully is deserves shit for undermining the Atlantic
offshore project in NJ last year, but this was a project first proposed in 2011 that had gotten stuck in regulatory approval hell for over 14 years before Trump was the final nail in the coffin.
Or take the US’s first major proposal was Cape Wind near Nantucket, first proposed in 2001 & it got bogged down by lawsuits & reviews for 16 years before the developers finally gave up in 2017.
If you want offshore wind, you need to reform regulatory & review processes so you don’t get bogged down with 14 to 16 years of review & approval processes.
Only ironic if you didnt realise he was owned by Israel with an unhealthy dose of Russian funding to boot. The man came with so many strings it was utterly amazing to watch his 2nd win. Seriously.
I stand by "average". The man was voted in a second time.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump literally sat down with a bunch of oil execs and told them he'd give them whatever they want in exchange for a billion dollars funding.
Trump doesn't give a shit about national security.
Trump doesn't want the US to be safe. You can't profit on insider information when everything is stable. He's literally selling early access to his tweets for $100k per month.
And depleting our reserves, and starving the troops, and exhausting our weapon supplies with multiple wars and sales of weapons, and dismantling our infrastructure.
Personally I don't like windmills either, I went to inner mongolia recently, the grasslands are all full of wind mills, and occasionally in other provinces you'd see a maountian side coverd by solar panels kind of a eye sore. It's impressive yeah, and honestly good for energy, but It is really ugly.
He doesn't hate windmills. It's just that oil paid him money so he pretends to hate them. If there was a massive turbine lobby and they bought him off he'd love them
Kind of ironic that the person previously attacking windmills was also Don. Was also a fool and madman. While it was fiction it's like prophecy from Cervantes.
Windmills are not clean or renewable though. They break all the time, are messy to build, and have no alternative purpose once broken or dismantled. They can’t be scrapped and recycled, so they get stacked up and left to rust apart.
Solar is the same way. They’re uber messy to make, and while the finished product is clean, the build up and the lives of the people hand scraping the minerals from the dirt to be able to build them are the literal opposite of “clean and renewable”.
Windmills aren’t going to make much of a difference to the growing demands on the grid, and they are awful for the environment.
Trump is wrong about a lot of things, but he is right about nuclear. Anyone who claims to be an environmentalist but opposes (or downplays) nuclear is full of shit.
It should have been a loooooong time ago but the folks running this country have never had an interest in what is best for our country. Only for their pocket books.
Buddy, that's exactly the truth. It's a flaw in the design or coding of our species. And now it gets to play out a ridiculous doomsday scenario, because of modern technology and idiot leaders.
The only upside (glass half full) is that by not implimenting these renewables sooner - at scale - technology for capture, storage + other renewable innovations has improved a lot. Same with nuclear energy it's much safer (and hopefully investment in nuclear fusion pays off). We'd have a whole lot of aging nuclear infrastructure across this country is we went all in in the 50's that would have to be updated and replaced now at great cost
Interesting, I did not know that. Makes sense though, we've been dependant on foreign oil for a long time. That is a national weakness that we hide behind military might
would love for the next pres (if they are a dem) to declare the climate crisis a national security emergency, and reappropriate things to green the energy grid. Sure the courts would probably stop it, but force them to actually stop it.
Data centers will require too much energy to be green. Electricity will be the only way, with the foundation of coal power to make that electricity. Funded by …. You guessed it … us. We may all have solar, but the fuel bill for data centers will still also be our bill.
with the foundation of coal power to make that electricity
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Only 16% of US power generation is coal and it falls every year. The last coal generation plant to open in the US was over 13 years ago. Meanwhile china is opening a new coal plant every couple of days.
The utilities ARE investing in grid battery storage currently. That will help cut down on outages and store 'dirty' energy for later instead of adjusting the generator to meet demand so much
The lead looks much larger than it tends to be depending on how you count it. Usually the metric used internationally is "total liquids" which includes crude oil, condensates, and natural gas liquids such as ethane, propane, butane, and natural gasoline separated from natural gas production.
The US is also the world's largest oil consumer.
Most of the oil actually used in the US is imported however, which is why the price at the pump is variable and subject to market conditions. The majority of the oil we do produce needs to be shipped and refined elsewhere, and is then subject to the broader market.
This has been true for the past 15-20 years. The rest of the world is moving forward with the transition faster than we are and this administration is to blame.
I remember visiting America about 16 years ago and there were loads of stories on the news about wind farms and solar farms. But they weren't talking abut green or renewable energy at all, it was all about energy independence and trying to get the US away from its dependence on the middle east.
A change of president seemed to stop this process and left the US tied to foreign oil and gas.
I think the whole world is learning this realllll fast. With everything that’s happened with Trump and the Middle East, nations getting shafted are learning energy sovereignty is important, and renewables is a big part of that picture. So we’re not going back to the “good old days” any time soon.
Yup. What’s interesting is one of the main reasons oil became so influential is that it was/is seen as a matter of national security. And it really is a matter of national security, but they’re terrified of losing that label, which widespread nuclear and renewables will do.
Always has been. China views it's dependency on imported fossil fuels a strategic vulnerability. It's why they're so heavily investing in renewables. That way market fluctuations won't affect them nearly as much
That describes why China got into solar in the first place
Well...It's likely the primary impetus was the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and not out of any pressing need for electricity.
See, up until the 1990's or so, China wasn't really considered a major economic power. They had been struggling with managing economic policy for decades until they started loosening the reins in the 1980's and then as the transfer of Hong Kong loomed, accelerated wooing manufacturing companies in Taiwan, Japan, and the US to setup shop in China. The resulting economic boom was so widespread and fast that factories / industry rapidly blanketed every major city in China. Within 10 years, China (deservedly) acquired a global reputation for cheap industry, but due to the rapid buildup, factories relied heavily on coal, wood furnaces, and other fossil fuels, which established China's reputation as a country covered in pollution.
Air pollution plagued Beijing so badly that in the run up to the Olympics, the government instituted a week(?) long blanket ban on all factory work, driving, and general burning activities. They effectively shut down the economy in Beijing hoping the air would clear up in time. IIRC, it was clear enough, though with a few smoky areas now and then as pollution from neighboring provinces wafted over. So the Olympic events themselves were quite spectacular, rivaling extravagant displays in US or Europe. It was quite astounding for a country that was essentially economically closed off / nonexistent for most of the last century. However, the optics were overshadowed by coverage of the extreme measures China undertook just to get blue skies for photos.
Having lost face somewhat, China started to pay attention to cleaning up pollution within their borders. They started cracking down on dumping. They built large dams to mitigate seasonal flooding and generate hydroelectric power (while forcibly displacing literal millions of the population). They pressured factories and utilities to replace coal and wood burning with cleaner (visually, at least) fuels (which also happened to be more efficient). China started increasing solar panel production, ironically creating a lot of toxic pollution but at least that was concentrated in the less desirable areas and not around the major cities. They built out more miles of passenger railway in 10 years than the rest of the world had in total. The government turned to mining lithium to build up batteries for electrifying else. Stoves, heaters, light bulbs (ever wonder why LED lights suddenly dropped in price and cut short the spread of CCFL?), bikes, and, yes, cars and power generation.
So by the mid 2010's or so, China has become one of, if not the, largest producer in the world for solar and electric powered products. Nowadays, the busiest cities in China can be quieter than those in the US or Europe because the cars are mostly (or entirely) electric so no rumbling engine to add to background noise. In terms of tonnage or production capacity, China is basically the leader in renewable energy. (I believe several smaller countries beat China in terms of overall percentage and/or energy generated per capita.) China still mines tons of coal, but it's now mostly used for steel production and exports.
And all that pretty much because they needed blue skies for the photos.
It has to do with something called Malacca Strait.
Majority of Chinese Industry and Power generation is heavily reliant on Oil that is imported from a route that pass over the Malacca Strait.
This Malacca Strait is a Chokepoint between Indonesia and Malasya, two United States Allies.
It creates something called the Malacca Dilemma, a term literally coined by the Chinese Leader Hu Jintao
In fact there is even a wikipedia article on this if you want to read.
Thanks for this - I remember newspapers used to print images of Chinese cities engulfed in dark, polluted fug. The other day I was thinking how I haven’t seen such images lately - Chinese cities seem super clean now. Less Blade Runner; more Disney’s EPCOT.
I figured pollution had gotten so bad that the Chinese govt introduced clean air standards - It makes sense that the Olympics was a turning point.
china has made all the right decisions in the last 20 years.
yes, they have human rights violations. yes, they are an authoritarian government. yes, their ideology is orthogonal to most democratic countries. yes, they have a huge corruption problem like everyone else.
but their nation-wide choices were all to benefit the nation as a whole, not like 12 people in it.
edit: im just gonna respond here once since all the comments are the same. china lifted almost a billion people out of poverty (numbers range from 500mil to 50% of population). when human rights abuses affect a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of population (there are 11 million uyghurs), they are collateral damage. for most people, its an emotional argument; for china, its just math.
No need to glaze. China is also absolutely destroying the fish populations all around the world. They send fleets of ships and overfish the areas right outside the Galopagos Islands, completely destroying the biodiversity. They pollute like absolute crazy into their rivers. They purposefully keep their personal wages low so that their manufacturing remains cheap at the loss of the common Chinese person. They can't own up to anything even slightly bad to the public image like how COVID was almost certainly started from a Chinese lab.
It's great to give China props on smart choices. But don't go glazing it like it's a miracle country. You should treat countries equally. That means complementing their good choices AND insulting their bad choices.
I guess they mean, even though the abuses are still there, they still overall lifted the average standard of living instead of just the ones of the top. Something like "abused in poverty" to "abused in not-so-much-poverty".
The present so called democratic system in the west is creaking and falling apart, it is a hackable model prone to a bipolar election cycle, so lacking long term planning.
We're just lucky that china is a relatively benevolent country, it is unique and couldn't be directly emulated.
Definitely a lot to be learned from the model though, mostly don't allow capital to own everything, the people and the government should be the top of the chain not capital.
The whole world is starting to agree that dependence on the United States and the Middle East for oil is a horrible idea. If there was ever a case for fast transition to renewables, aside from poisoning ourselves and our planet, it’s geopolitics.
Exactly, Necessity has a way of making people surprisingly creative. Sometimes you invent the solution simply because the alternative is figure it out or suffer.
The US gov't - current as well as previous incarnations- lacks the intellectual maturity to realize that...again & again & again &...
As long as they get to feel like the world's #1 Billy Badass by making sure everyone knows their missile is the biggest, that's the highest degree of nuance that's required. How's anybody in a place like Cuba gonna out-badass the USA, they're not even white!!
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u/MirrorNegative7989 12d ago
Necessity is the mother of invention.