I also wasn’t talking about individual solar. Utility solar is nearly always divided between manufacturing, installation, and the operator. The operator is the only one benefited by solar’s long term return on investment. Everyone else makes their money in construction, which is very much price competitive.

In my experience none of these groups however have even a fraction of the cash of a company like BP or Exxon Mobile, and what piles of cash they do have tends to be investment in rather than profit from. As it’s a lot harder to spend investors cash on buying regulators than it is to spend incoming profit on it this limits the amount that they can spend on such an endeavor.

There are also a lot more places banning utility scale solar and wind than are oil and gas, so delaying renewables rollout seems like an evidently effective strategy for limiting their lobbying power.

No, i’m thinking of solar.

Over decades a solar system will pay back itself many times over, but that’s irrelevant to the question of how big of a money pile can business throw at politicians in the here and now.

That’s determined by the profit margin for companies manufacturing and installing them, which tend to be rather thin given the highly competitive nature of the market. No solar installer anywhere near the profit that oil companies are raking in, and the people owning the panels are usually paying off the loan to install them, using the profits to build more capacity, or saving, not buying off politicians.

Without subsidies there would be far less profit for oil companies, which is exactly why it is so important for them to ‘reinvest’ some of their recent massive profits into continuing and expanding said subsidies and slowing down the adoption of alternatives. Buying off the government with its own money is a benefit since it leaves more for them.

Counterpoint, Alberta exists and low costs benefit the consumer, not the company. I am fully confident that the profit made by oil and gas is significantly more than the tight profit margins in renewables, which means far less money to throw at politicians. Oil and gas can therefore throw much more money at Trump and still be in the black on their ‘investment’, even if you ignore that Trump has deep ideological and political opposition to renewables.

2066, the require the run Natural Gas to every building in the state and don’t plan to stop polluting at any point measure, is however still on track to pass through.

Come on King county uncounted votes, we’re all relying on you now.

I’ve considered it, but as they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Given you have to pay interest on short positions and can only make as much as the stock falls by, if they can keep the grift going for another year or two the market could crash and you would still turn a loss.

It was created in its current form by the formal adoption of senate rule 22 in 1917, which would explicitly take a two thirds majority to edit or remove and if not removed would leave the filibuster on the books. It’s also worth noting that filibusters were incredibly rare in the 1800s, especially pre civil war, with its use to stall civil rights legislation mainly being a 1940s and later thing.

The procedure to go around rule 22 by rasing a point of order in contradiction to established precedent is commonly called the ‘nuclear option’ by everyone from the media to reformists discussing it, and is recognized as the only likely way short of the two thirds majority needed to amend rule 22 to get around the senate filibuster. I think the name is more than a little grandiose, but it is the commonly accepted name for the procedure.

My instance is here to say that we endorse this message.

A simple majority vote via the nuclear option could be undone just as quickly once things shifted, and from my understanding would never be an option in future if done once. To actually officially change the rules and eliminate the filibuster in a way that isn’t just procedural a two thirds majority is required.

Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.

While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.

Multiple opportunities, in the last few decades? To my knowledge the only point they had the votes to was that one three month period where they got the ACA though, before that was in the 70s when party line votes were pretty rare.

The US could do similar, but the Democrats couldn’t on account of all legislation in the last decade needing Republican approval to not get filibustered, and Republicans hating the idea of any subsidy that interferes with the “free market” outside of oil subsidies.

While the US government could absolutely be doing more in theory, in practice I think the climate legislation the Democrats have managed to get past Republican obstruction has been very impressive.

So what your saying is that given fuel makes up 3-5% of a commercial kitchen’s operating costs as per the Department of Energy, it would at worse add ten percent to the prices of kitchens that currently use natural gas instead of propane or electric? And that’s worse case, ignoring that Berkeley sure isn’t paying average kitchen labor costs given minimum wage there is nearly two and a half times the national average.

So all in all nowhere near a large enough price hike to kill all demand for large restaurants in the city even by the worst case figures of a company lobbying against it.

You realize that natural gas distribution networks don’t exist everywhere and that even in the highly built up US they tend to only serve cities, towns, and nearby suburbs, right? Everywhere else uses propane or electric.

You should probably go tell the millions of commercial kitchens in places that don’t have natural gas that they don’t exist then.

Of course there is an alternative, as the article is arguing implicitly, you ban mining and other unsightly industrial activities in rich areas with strong environmental and safety laws, and outsource it to poor nations without the political leverage to strongly regulate mining companies. This objectively results in far, far more environmental damage, but that environmental damage is contained to highly populated areas full of poor people you don’t have to think about.

I really wish more environmentalists were pushing for potentially environmentally hazardous processes to be moved to areas with strong regulation and environmental protection laws, instead of just pushing them onto poor people, but unfortunately a lot of people seem to be so (purposely) disconnected from the industrial processes necessary to make everything from wind turbines and trains down to the food that appears on the shelves that they view the mining and manufacturing of these things as completely unconnected to these things themselves appearing in their lives.

As to solar, payback is usually 7-15 years depending on overhead costs, while most panels are still at 80% output in 20 to 25 years. Batteries don’t last as long as panels when being used to near capacity, but they’ll still do about half the lifespan of the panels. Batteries prices are also falling about as quickly as panel prices, with us now being in the neighborhood of 100 dollars per kwh of storage.

I also think it’s a bit of a misnomer, especially on this instance, to consider these things completely dead and worthless at 80% effectiveness, especially when that is still far more effective than a brand new top of the line one a decade ago. I think that there are a lot of people in the world who wouldn’t mind the system taking up 25% more space if they could get them much cheaper, it’s just that much like EV battery range, a lot of people are finding that they don’t really need to replace the thing away at 80% capacity in the first place.

Typically not for more than a few hours when it comes to in service track, and management actively despises those maintenance windows even when it’s necessary to the continued existence of the track, much less a third party startup.

There is a reason why even when the entire track and ballest on a main line are wiped out by a natural disaster it will usually be up and running again in a few days.

As such I would expect any non experimental contracts between the startup and the railway to come with not insignificant financial penalties if they interfere with service, such as requiring a shutdown of the track for repairing the panels being subjected to said harsh environment, thusly either delaying fixing the panels for the next scheduled major maintenance window in a few years or else like most railway inspections doing the work an an active line between trains.

When the competition is a large open field of dirt that can be accessed at any time for maintenance, can leave the panels up for decades, is centrally located for easy grid access, and requires far less frequent cleaning, I just don’t see how this startup is going to outperform.

Don’t forget that maintaining all this means people working directly in the track trying to fix high voltage electrical issues while dodging trains and hoping dispatch doesn’t forget about them, or that ballast(the gravel between the ties) needs to be renewed regularly, much less all the things like realignment and rail grinding that use specialized machinery that needs to go right in the space between the rails.

This means that those panels are going to have to be removed and installed often, at best vastly increasing wear and tear on them as compared to a fixed installation, and adding the risk that a failure in the pickup/deployment process could scrap a significant number of panels if not caught immediately.

Or that the hard part of installing solar panels is the wireing, inverting, and grid interconnection, all of which are just made that much harder by having to have electricians doge trains.

Look, if there really is absolutely no possible available space, like say desert, farmland, roofs, parking lots, yards, fences, well just put the panels up on a simple metal frame over the railway, maybe even integrate the catenary hangers if your feeling daring.

This at least provides some benefit to running the railway by keeping snow and leaves off the tracks to some extent while also keeping the panels out of the way of running the railroad.

But have you considered how much worse the poor NIMBY’s views out their windows will be, why you might even see something more interesting than desert, the horror./s

If it is it’s not current, as the storm has dropped to a category 3 as it neared land. We were up to 171mph a few days ago as it was building though, so it may just be a forecast from around then.