Comment by mcswell
5 hours ago
Donald Trump: "Drill, baby, drill!"
American oil companies: "It doesn't pay, oil prices are too low to make drilling worth while."
Donald Trump: "War, baby, war!" (Oil prices go up)
The rest of the world: "Renewables!"
Five or ten years from now, when renewables have largely replaced oil, gas and coal in most of the world, the US will be the only major country still using fossil fuels. And the rest of the world will be better off; the US, not so much.
I wish I shared your optimism, but for fossil fuels to become irrelevant in ten years we’d need to ban the sale of ICE cars and fossil heating today. Not to mention industrial uses of fossil fuels.
Did horses need to be banned for them to become irrelevant? The next car I buy voluntarily won't be ICE.
Heating is slower to change, but new homes and buildings could come with solar walls and ceilings.
No (I think?), but every ICE sold today will still be on the road in ten years. The average car in Germany is about nine years old for example. And the vast majority of new cars sold are still not electric. If you want the majority of the cars on the road be electric in ten years you really need to stop selling ICEs today.
It’s no coincidence that everything from energy sources to civil rights to military strategy to trade policy struggle to evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period.
> evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period
Four out of our last five Presidents were born within 4 years of each other [1]. Three (Bush Jr., Clinton and Trump) were born in 1946.
Good news: 2024 was probably the last election where Boomers’ vote share was above 25%. In 2028, a significant number of states, including California and Texas, will have fewer than 20% of votes cast by Boomers. (194 EVs in 2028 and, using 2020 Census numbers, a further 243 EVs in ‘32.)
[1] https://www.loriferber.com/amp/research/presidential-facts-s...
I’m not convinced the changing demographics are going to change much in the way of electoral outcomes. It could just as easily be that conservatism is just a function of age, and GenX-ers will be voting more or less the same as the boomers did.
I’d love to be proven wrong on this.
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That could make plastics even more cheaper. We need to encourage bio degradables before that happens
This is exactly what I came to post. It's like Trump was designed in a lab to destroy the US :-(
He was a hand grenade of identity and economic grievance thrown into the glassware shop of the federal government. He slashed, burned, grifted, and shot a missile into an elementary school. The worst president in history?
Vince may be.
Fossil fuels hopefully aren't going anywhere.
We should absolutely stop burning them, though.
For instance, modern medicine requires petroleum and there's no real alternatives at this time.
Doesn’t the term “fuel” imply they are burnt? Genuine question, I’m not native speaker
Fuel is simply a noun for a source of energy, it doesn't need burning for something to be fuel. Look at nuclear fuel - it doesn't burn.
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I like to cope optimistically that Trump is actually the God Emperor Leto II from Dune, the omniscient and visually hideous tyrant-messiah who is engineering the circumstances to “teach humanity a lesson they will remember in their bones”, and this is all his Golden Path to force humanity to grow wiser after his demise.
This is actually happening in a sense; because of Donald Trump, the entire world knows what it's like to live with an abusive narcissistic parent / partner now. Whether we get wise is yet to be seen.
So far that has emboldened other abusive narcissistic “parents”, unfortunately