US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3753

If there's a War on Coal, it's increasingly clear which side is winning.

Wind turbines and solar panels accounted for more than two-thirds of all new electric generation capacity added to the nation's grid in 2015, according to a recent analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy. The remaining third was largely new power plants fueled by natural gas, which has become cheap and plentiful as a result of hydraulic fracturing.

It was the second straight year U.S. investment in renewable energy projects has outpaced that of fossil fuels. Robust growth is once again predicted for this year.

And while Republican lawmakers in Washington have fought to protect coal-fired power plants, opposing President Barack Obama's efforts to curtail climate-warming carbon emissions, data show their home states are often the ones benefiting most from the nation's accelerating shift to renewable energy.

Leading the way in new wind projects are GOP strongholds Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, home to some of the leading critics of climate science and renewable energy incentives in Congress. Republican-dominated North Carolina trails only California in new solar farms, thanks largely to pro-renewables polices enacted years ago under a Democratic legislature.

The most dramatic change has been seen in the plummeting cost of emissions-free wind energy, which has declined by two-thirds in the last six years thanks to the availability of cheaper, more efficient turbines. An annual analysis by the investment firm Lazard determined that wind energy is now the lowest-cost energy source, even before federal green-energy tax incentives are factored in.

"We are entering the era of renewables," former Vice President Al Gore said Thursday at the Climate Action 2016 conference in Washington. "It's a very exciting new reality."

Billions of dollars in private equity are going to construct massive new renewables projects, especially in the Sun Belt and Great Plains. Thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines are also under construction to send power from the wind and sun from the sparsely populated areas where it is collected to the urban centers where it's needed.

Even with the surge in new projects, energy from such renewable sources as wind, solar and water accounted for only about a tenth of total U.S. power generation last year.

Still, the U.S. leads the world in wind energy with about 48,800 utility-scale turbines operating across the country, generating enough electricity to power about 20 million homes. By 2030, the Energy Department estimates wind will provide a fifth of the nation's electricity.

On May 06 2016 12:20 LegalLord wrote:

I mean, all her previous FP interventions (the ones that she helped to spearhead, such as Yugoslavia and Libya) have been pretty disastrous by all accounts. She has a lot of FP experience, and most of it is mired in failures. Even the article you posted (which gives her a tremendous amount more credit than she deserves) gives the general perception of her FP tenure as a generally ineffective one ridden with blunders.

It's too bad that the Republicans are worse so there really isn't much of a choice here.

On May 06 2016 16:24 GreenHorizons wrote:
So Hillary was in California trying to use yesterday to get some Hispanic/Latinx cred and ended up drawing bigger crowds in protest than she did to her event.

A Trump vs Hillary election could be even more devastating than anyone imagined. Both candidates are well on their way to drawing much larger crowds in protest of their candidacy than in support of it. Americans may lose their already waning faith in our electoral system altogether, then it's anyone's guess what comes next.

+ Show Spoiler +

On May 06 2016 17:48 Velr wrote:



Uhm, does anyone care if she is the stronger candidate in some nationwide polls? She is the candidate that wins/won the preliminaries, Bernie isn't.
Was this preliminarie truely fair? No, all the little scandals you don't get tired of posting aside, the media coverage alone was clearly ignoring Bernie for way too Long.

The simple fact of the matter is, that Hillary has more votes than Bernie, that there is a very vocal minority(!!!) that can't see this won't change that.


I would have been very happy if Bernie made it, but seriously, stop this crusade, it makes you look horrible.

On May 06 2016 17:52 GreenHorizons wrote:

Who would get more Independent/non-Democrat voters, Bernie or Hillary?

The third reason is, contrary to what you just implied, that Hillary is a significantly stronger general candidate election than Sanders. There is a reason why GOP operatives have actually been defending Sanders throughout the primary: they believe that he would be far easier to beat in the general election. Sanders and his supporters constantly point to polls showing he tends to fare better against Republican candidates than Hillary, but those polls cannot take into account the onslaught of GOP ads and propaganda on Sanders that would happen between his nomination and the election. He has countless weaknesses that have barely been touched upon in this primary, but on which Republicans would jump the instant he'd be nominated. He's a self-described socialist who spent his honeymoon in the USSR, praised communist regimes, defended bread lines against the American free market, praised the youth in Cuba and China while criticizing the youth in the US, he's apparently never had a steady job before he was 40, his only steady employment has been in government, he used to call himself "clearly anti-capitalistic", he declared he opposed charities (arguing he was in favor of government programs instead, but if you think the GOP will provide context you're delusional), he used to support a government takeover of commercial television stations, he attended a Sandinista rally in Nicaragua in which the crowd chanted “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die”, he used to write stories about women getting raped, etc. etc. I am genuinely having a hard time picturing a candidate the GOP would love to run against more. I know that many of Sanders' policy goals are indeed popular in the US population, but his means to get there are not necessarily (his tax increases would apply to more than the "millionaires and the billionaires"), and the GOP's attacks on him would destroy him. Most people love what is inside of the Affordable care act, but how it was branded by the GOP made it unpopular. And the ACA isn't even socialist. Having Sanders as a candidate would likely significantly hurt the Democrats' chances, both with regards to the White House and in down-ballot races, as many political scientists have argued. He is seen as quite far to the left (and that perception would be magnified tenfold by GOP attacks), and general election voters tend to vote to a considerable extent for people they see as ideologically close to them. And this is all image -- I'm not even getting into his inability to defend the practicality of his platform. He's pretty much only been pushed on this by the NY Daily News, and he crumbled when faced with basic questions on his own plans.

Clinton, meanwhile, has already faced every single attack the GOP can think to dig up on her, and she's still standing. Are her unfavorables higher than Sanders'? Sure, precisely because she's been a GOP target for decades while Sanders has been completely spared. And that's why with the party uniting behind her, her favorable/unfavorable rating will go up instead of down -- GOP attacks will be nothing new, while she'll be able to respond to those attacks on the national stage, and make her case with Obama, Bill, Warren, and hopefully Sanders, defending her. I'm not saying it'll be a cakewalk, but she's much better suited to deal with GOP smears, and attract moderate voters, than Sanders is.

On May 06 2016 16:55 SpiritOfChicago wrote:
Murica will get the President they deserve, be it Trump or Clinton and with that, will be going down.

On May 06 2016 13:52 LegalLord wrote:

Libya: Overthrew a pretty bad dictator, turned a nation that was stable by comparison into a black hole. So bad that Obama cited it as one of his worst policy decisions in his tenure as presidency (no shit? but maybe his highly experienced SoS should have used her experience to tell him what would happen when you create a power vacuum). Incidentally, that tends to lead to even more death and atrocities than just choosing to do nothing.

Atrocity prevented!

I could go on about how stupid many of the decisions she spearheaded were, as there is a lot to criticize that could be seen even before the fact, but if "preventing atrocities" is the best you can come up with to justify stupid FP then I see no point.

On May 06 2016 14:11 LegalLord wrote:
Sure, it was in a bad state before the intervention. Perhaps you're trying to say that that justifies making the whole situation worse?

Intervention without a good plan for "the day after" is just adding fuel to the fire. That, at the very least, should be self evident.


Somewhat different in that rather than doing very little to replace the old government, in Iraq the US just executed the transition poorly.