Hacker News Reader

Comment by typeofhuman | Hacker News Reader

The current administration does not want to relieve the pressure. They are against oil/lng. They openly oppose the industry and want everyone to be driving electric cars and have windmills powering everything.

View on HN

Good? I mean, has nothing been learned from the oil crisis in the 70s? If you don't want your economy held hostage, electrify it and use clean energy domestically produced to power it. The US has had ~50 years to plan for this.

Make carbon more expensive and rebate that to folks by income (carbon tax). Push people away from fossil fuels, and then you won't be held hostage by fossil producers in the future. Cheap oil isn't a right.

Couldn't the people who own the windmills just as easily hold the country hostage as you put it? Who do you think is paying to build and operate these things?

Investors? Coal plants could be hypothetically be shut down and hold the economy hostage too. Not sure your point.

> Couldn't the people who own the windmills just as easily hold the country hostage as you put it?

It’s easier to enforce American political will on a wind farm in Texas than a pump in Saudi/Siberia.

It is just as easy to enforce American political will on a wind farm in Texas as it is on a oil refinery in Texas.

Presumably the windmills would be domestic and not foreign.

Good point. I made a faulty assumption.

A lot of windmill farms are popping up offshore, however.

Offshore within the territorial waters of the US, so again they can't hold their customers hostage.

Even those are not in international waters, so I don't see how this makes any difference.

I would be curious if you could point to a foreign offshore wind farm connected to the US grid. I've never heard of this. Presumably they're all within US controlled territorial water.

Interesting to see this playing out.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/25/texas-chinese-wind-farm...

https://www.politico.eu/article/chinese-wind-farm-investment...

They literally could not, because they're within US legal jurisdiction (being physically in the US), emergency powers can be used when life or liberty at threatened to keep them operating while the disputes are resolved likely through the courts.

One of the great things about electricity is that its sources are highly substitutable - the end uses don't care whether their energy comes from wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, natural gas, etc.

Also, the inherent intermittency of wind and solar makes it even harder for generators to hold the market hostage, as they don't control the timing when they generate power. To curtail energy supply would be to undermine the economics of the capital investments into these projects, as it would be missed revenue.

That same reasoning applies to the current large oil companies who aren't really doing everything they can to increase production because doing so would bring them a lower rate of profit.

I wish that was the case but their entire approach to war in Ukraine triggering a European energy crisis is selling American LNG to them. And they've been begging American oil companies to pump more oil

I wish that were true, but it is not. The Biden admin has expanded drilling and has been generally pro-oil, despite their green rhetoric.

How do you explain Biden signing an EO the first day in office to shutdown the Keystone pipeline.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com