The more oil/gas you produce, the more likely the price will go down if simple economics hold true. But energy extraction is never that easy. Truth be told, there are probably not that many oil/gas reserves that can be cheaply extracted and oil refineries are very expensive and time consuming to build. It may take 30+ years of processing to have them make back their investment.

It's also weird Trump singled out the Saudis for keeping supply down and driving up prices. Though not really since Trump has courted the house of Saud for some time now. But it does bring up the possibility Trump/House of Saud drove up prices to hurt Democratic prospects during the last election now doesn't it?

I'd be most amused to question the drill baby drill about their thoughts on peak oil. Most sane people realize there's only so much oil left in the ground and tapping new reserves is becoming more expensive and more environmentally damaging (not considering CO2 impacts on climate). Would love to see how many of the drill baby drill folks believe in abiogenic petroleum generation, which is

Of course Trump colluded with foreign players to steal the election.
That is a fact and a given.

This energy decision profits Trump in some way.
How is the major correct question.

...fuel efficient major car in the 1950's and 1960s, the Volkswagen Beetle. Hitler directed Ferdinand Porsche to design that "people's car." He dedicated Volkswagen's first plant in 1937.

One can look it up.

None of this makes Hitler a good guy.

Sometimes the wrong people do the right thing for the wrong reasons.

The wind industry is neither cheap, nor "green" nor sustainable. It is entirely dependent on access to fossil fuels. The expenditure of trillions of dollars on it and the accompanying destruction and industrialization of precious wilderness has done nothing to address extreme global heating. In fact the rate of global heating is accelerating. Even the third derivative is positive.

The material requirements of the wind industry are odious, the embodied energy unacceptable, the reliability atrocious, and the infrastructure ridiculously short lived.

While, like any decent human being, I hold Trump in contempt, it has nothing to do with this action.

The real motive between the hyped inaccurate public perception of wind energy has nothing to do with opposition to fossil fuels. The claim is an add on and an inaccurate and dishonest one to boot. The real goal of wind hype was to attack the only scalable sustainable form of energy that is devoid of climate impact, nuclear energy.

I think I've had this argument with you before.

The most recently built and operating nuclear power plant is the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, which produces about 4.5 gigawatts of electricity. Total cost as far as I can tell was $48B just to construct it. I don't have much of an estimate of how much yearly costs are but considering the Limerick Nuclear Power Plant near me has 600 full time workers and another 1000+ workers onsite when the plant is refueled, I'd say day to day operations are expensive. And I'd add there's no real storage place for the waste. Most nuclear plants have "temporary" storage places. I guess there must be someplace to store the spent fuel but I suspect that aspect isn't cheap and has lots of public opposition.

The only way nuclear becomes economical (ability to pay for the cost of construction and operation) is if the plant runs half a century.

So the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW-C) project has the potential to generate 2.6 gigawatts and has an estimated cost of $10B. I'm not sure how much a wind farm costs to run once its operating but I'd guess it's not cheap to do maintenance and repairs compared to land-based wind mills. Estimated lifetime of the wind turbines is 30 years. And there are a lot of advances in turbine development. CVOW-C's pilot turbines installed about a decade ago produce 30-40% less than the ones being installed in the lease area now.

On construction cost alone, nuclear by my math is $32B/gigawatt versus $4B/gigawatt for CVOW-C.

I don't know how we'd finance a shift to nuclear given the costs. The Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant took almost 2 decades to construct. The CVOW-C project should be up and running in about 2 years. That's just construction time. I'm assuming the permit process for a nuclear plant is much longer than the one for CVOW-C, which probably took about 1-2 years to complete. I'd think its pretty safe to say that it would be many decades before a fleet of nuclear plants would be operational.

The United States once built more than 100 nuclear reactors in 25 years while providing one of the lowest electricity prices in the industrial world.

More than 90 of those reactors still are serving, saving human lives from air pollution and even more extreme global heating we are now experiencing on a burning planet.

The the nuclear manufacturing infrastructure that built these reactors, in a time when the most powerful computers in the world were weaker than a child's laptop, was deliberately vandalized by appeal to ignorance.

The Vogtle reactors will be operating at the dawn of the 22nd century, should humanity survive the success of rising ignorance having nothing to do with nuclear energy other than a feature of opposition to it. By that time every wind turbine on the planet will have been landfill for more than half a century, a vast material liability dumped on future generations along with a destroyed atmosphere, depletion of the world's best ores, and the industrialization of irreplaceable wilderness for a stupid affectation that wind and solar are "green." They are no such thing. They entrenched fossil fuels. The antinuke assholes in Germany are burning coal.

The assinine and dishonest rhetoric claiming that so called "renewable energy" is "cheap" usually stated by clueless bourgoisie conveniently relies on ignoring the internal and external costs of redundancy, almost exclusively provided by dangerous fossil fuels, the waste of which is dumped, with minimal and ineffective treatment, directly into the planetary atmosphere, where it is destroying it.

I often refer to antinukes, who worked tirelessly to destroy nuclear manufacturing because they are not too bright nor well educated, as "arsonists complaining about forest fires." Given that the planet is now literally in flames owing to their successful appeals to fear and ignorance, the metaphor is especially apt.

Every nuclear powerplant built on this planet is a gift to future generations. This includes the more than 50 built in China, where nuclear manufacturing functions at a high level, in this century.

The fact that antinukes don't give a flying fuck about future generations, that they are unwilling to spend a dime to leave them a legacy of functioning infrastructure, rings true through every disgusting penny pinching argument that "nuclear is too expensive" line of more crap handed out like a very toxic, rote and nonsensical chant. "Too expensive" for whom? The future generations required to live on our garbage? The inherently immoral chant disgusts me in the deepest part of my cynical and dying soul.

There is nothing of a sense of decency left on this planet. Ignorance is transcendent now; the cult of antinukism being the tip of the iceberg.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

Have a nice weekend in the collapsing United States.

So my cost construction cost numbers and construction times are off? I've been down this rabbit hole with you before. And got the same response from you. You haven't addressed the construction costs and operation costs of nuclear power. What will this cost and how will you pay for it? I'll note that you recognize public sentiment, but you're dismissive of it.

The Earth's CO2 levels (if you believe the Earth is 4-5 billion years old, and support plate tectonics "theory&quot have been much higher in the past than today. During the Carboniferous, CO2 was 1000+ ppb, there were ice age cycles and life was thriving. The fossil record shows quick changes in CO2 levels (on the geologic stage) have contributed to mass extinctions but life carries on.

The real danger in climate change is its potential impact on our financial system. The arguments have always pitted the fossil fuel industry against the insurance/financial industry. The notion that this is a big government power grab has been a mass distortion by the RW media forces. Our society relies on an operating financial system that could easily collapse under the impact of climate change; that's the true threat to our way of life, not rising CO2 levels themselves.

I'm hopeful that future generations will be able to adopt and address this issue. At some point fossil fuels will become too expensive to support our current system. Both on extraction costs and the increase in insurance rates and potential body blows to our banking system (due to catastrophic environmental event loses). Free from political interference, the market is our true correction method.

Last edited Sun Jan 26, 2025, 01:00 PM - Edit history (1)

...the safety and health of future generations, or bizarre penny pinching nonsense about the construction costs of energy infrastructure that will be in operation for 80 years as opposed to less than 20 years for the wind crap that's been hyped only to drive extreme global warming faster and faster and faster.

I repeat, the United States once built more than 100 commercial nuclear reactors while providing the lowest cost electricity in the industrial world.

I am going to note that the human race has squandered trillions of dollars on this reactionary solar and wind scam for no positive effect on addressing the destruction of the planetary atmosphere, other than making things get worse faster:

I'm not chanting slogans. I'm fucking paying attention: Coda to the Disastrous 2024 CO2 Readings at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory: The Worst December Ever Recorded.

From a previous post in my 2024 series of observations of the disastrous 2024 readings at the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory something called "data" which includes a graphic, and a link, to how much money has been squandered on solar and wind junk, not counting the fucking fossil fuel redundancy and junk included, nor the cost of the destruction of the planetary atmosphere it did nothing to prevent:

The Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa: Yet Another Update 12/08/2024

Since I personally have a low opinion of the intellectual capabilities of people who oppose nuclear energy, who think we can mine the planet's ocean floor and destroy all its wilderness for a reactionary return to dependence of our energy supplies on the weather, abandoned in the late 19th and early 20th century for a reason, I'll reproduce the graphic, since many people can't read (or, like shit for brains antinuke Benjamin Sovacool, think) very well:

The amount of money spent on so called "renewable energy" since 2015 is 4.12 trillion dollars, compared to 377 billion dollars spent on nuclear energy, mostly to keep vapid cultists spouting fear and ignorance from destroying the valuable nuclear infrastructure we still have.



IEA overview, Energy Investments.

The graphic is interactive at the link; one can calculate overall expenditures on what the IEA dubiously calls "clean energy."

We are using more fossil fuels than ever:



IEA World Energy Outlook 2024
Table A.1a: World energy supply Page 296

Now I hear a lot of idiotic whining about the Vogtle reactors from clueless people who can't acknowledge the history of the US nuclear system, still the largest in the world, but soon to be passed by China because ignorance won. Seventy percent of the costs went to building the first reactor, and what was learned in the process, to build back better a nuclear manufacturing infrastructure, and what was learned from building the first resulted in only 30% of the costs for the second resulted from building the second. Were the trend allow to continue we'd be in better shape.

A nuclear infrastructure requires a highly educated workforce, highly skilled construction teams, but most importantly, the intellectual and moral strength to give a shit about the future. A country possessing these features will be strong and healthy.

I really, really, don't want to hear about extreme global heating from people who whine about the costs of nuclear energy, the only hope left for the future of this planet. I regard such people as a big part of the cause of this disaster, and clearly, like the assholes in Germany, they couldn't care less about the topic. They're not paying attention. They're clueless. They have no appreciation of the cost, only some of which is financial, of destroying the planetary atmosphere. The status quo, which include bulldozing wilderness for solar and wind farms, is clearly unsustainable; the planet is in flames.

Nuclear energy saves lives, and has prevented about two full years of carbon dioxide releases at the current rapidly rising rate:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

It follows that opposing nuclear energy kills people.

Without nuclear energy's contribution over the last 70 years of highly successful operations, this in an atmosphere of stupid catcalls, as opposed to the insane sun and wind worship cultural environment of idiotic cheering by reactionaries, we'd be looking at carbon dioxide concentrations in the planetary atmosphere at around 440 ppm, as opposed to the 427 ppm we saw in 2024, and the 430 ppm we are now sure to see in 2025.

Have a pleasant Sunday.

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