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by jqpabc123 23 days ago
‘the abundance of [AI] will be limited by the abundance of energy’.

And the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.

4 comments

You don’t even need to mention the long-term sustainability benefits of renewable energy. It is simply the dominant option economically. Dollars in, watts produced, fossil energy can’t touch it.

Politics is merely a downstream effect of the root of the problem: corruption and regulatory capture. Regression into the authoritarian petrostate pattern.

That's true, but it's bipartisan policy. The Trump admin obviously is fighting wind, though solar is just too useful to be able to be stopped even by them. But it's also popular among environmentalists to fight solar projects https://v2.courthousenews.com/greens-fight-mojave-desert-sol...

And Indian Point in NY is the classic example of how nuclear was supposed to be replaced by renewables but was replaced by gas (and many solar installations in NY were blocked so we're not coincidentally here): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/20/nuclear-...

So, it's political in that our policy is in line with what most people want: fewer renewable generation stations. But there's no outside enemy to conquer here. We've just collectively decided on this equilibrium.

Who is opposing renewable energy? Texas is projected to top California as the state with the largest amount of solar before the end of the Trump administration.
> Who is opposing renewable energy?

The current US admin:

Trump’s Multi-Pronged Attack on Renewable Energy https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?par...

but they are slowly being beaten back:

Trump admin abandons fight against wind energy as clean energy output surges - https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/trump-admin-abandons...

The Trumpian adventures in Iran have wrong footed his fossil fuel buddies and slowed his Don Quixote roll against giant scary windmills for now.

He hates wind turbines because he simply doesn't like how they look, and couldn't stop them next to one of his golf courses.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo

And he hates solar because???

If you look at the overall picture, it's clear that he opposes anything not carbon based. And cost isn't a rational reason for it.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/20/trump-says-us-will-not-appro...

If there was an oil refinery that looked exactly the same as a turbine from the outside, I would bet that he would love how those would look. The root cause is something else. Hmmm...
> And the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.

What isn't "purely political?"

Everything is political in the world, unfortunately.