The US's dependence on oil is counterintuitive.

[toobfreak]

You need a better education. Solar power is endless, as long as the sun continues to shine, and it's doesn't cost anything.

Nothing except the cost of making all of the panels, repairing and maintaining them, converting their electricity to AC, storing it in batteries, phase aligning it with the grid, and transmitting it. Yep, doesn't cost a thing.

Ditto the wind. This is the part that oil companies hate.

Yep, wind is endless, except when it stops blowing and the sun goes behind a cloud or sets. Yep, endless. Meanwhile, there are literally thousands of products essential to industry, machinery, pharmaceuticals, make up, consumer goods, food, etc., that all come from oil byproducts you cannot make with wind or solar.

Seems like you just need an education.

 

[EdwinAMartin]

Nothing except the cost of making all of the panels, repairing and maintaining them, converting their electricity to AC, storing it in batteries, phase aligning it with the grid, and transmitting it. Yep, doesn't cost a thing.


Yep, wind is endless, except when it stops blowing and the sun goes behind a cloud or sets. Yep, endless. Meanwhile, there are literally thousands of products essential to industry, machinery, pharmaceuticals, make up, consumer goods, food, etc., that all come from oil byproducts you cannot make with wind or solar.

Seems like you just need an education.

But but those solar panels and windmills all fly themselves to thier sites and don't need trucks n stuff, too, right?

 

[toobfreak]

But but those solar panels and windmills all fly themselves to thier sites and don't need trucks n stuff, too, right?

Those windmills cost a fortune to make, are terribly expensive to replace, look horrible and kill birds left and right. No one wants a wind farm in their backyard.

 

[EdwinAMartin]

Those windmills cost a fortune to make, are terribly expensive to replace, look horrible and kill birds left and right. No one wants a wind farm in their backyard.

For solar to be effective it would have to be pit in deserts and cover a whole of square miles, and to reach the east coast cities it would lose most of its energy anyway. It's a ridiculous scheme. Windmills break down frequently, pretty much a joke also.

 

[Dorian Mode]

They are powering those vehicles with coal fired electric plants. Is that the solution to this problem you want? We certainly have the coal for it.

Every time you convert energy from one form to another you lose a large portion of it to entropy and heat. Burning coal to produce electricity for EVs is not very smart.

Anyway, EVs are not out problem anymore, data generation is. We barely have enough energy to power all the data centers that support our advanced society now, and energy needs will rise exponentially. We need to start thinking about a next generation computing system not based on simple electrical switches and instead based on something more powerful and less energy hungry. Stuff like photonic computing.

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

You need a better education. Solar power is endless, as long as the sun continues to shine, and it's doesn't cost anything. Ditto the wind. This is the part that oil companies hate.

When I was staying with my friend off grid, we used to laugh when the electrical power went out in the valley. Because even when it's cloudy, there was still enough sunlight to power our solar.

Solar power is endless, as long as the sun continues to shine, and it's doesn't cost anything. Ditto the wind.

And that's why Germany and the UK have ridiculously expensive electricity, all their free endless power.

DURR

 

[toobfreak]

Every time you convert energy from one form to another you lose a large portion of it to entropy and heat. Burning coal to produce electricity for EVs is not very smart.

True, but therein lies the hidden evil to EV cars, you see, simply igniting a naturally produced combustible into pure explosive chemical energy as a gas that you carry around yourself in your fuel tank and merely have to pump to the engine to set off, is a far more direct and efficient manner of producing energy than the EV car is when you consider that for the EV to operate, it really isn't independent at all like an IC car but part of a 'system' comprised of a power generating plant far away which might be hydro, coal, nuclear or even a little wind or solar, then it has to be stepped up to a very high voltage and transmitted across the country on high tension power lines, stepped back down to the charging station or your house which then has to convert all of that back in a DC current to charge this ginormous lithium battery you must carry around weighing half the weight of your very heavy car, it is only then that EV green electric car energy becomes this beautiful, simple system of just driving an electric motor off a battery.

 

[martybegan]

Nobody was "forcing" electric vehicles on people. You're the like the morons who, seeing an automobile on the streets would yell "Get a horse!".

You'd be wailing about all of the blacksmiths and carriage makers being put out of work, and screaming that cars will never be practical until there are gas stations on every corner. Run out of gas in the middle of nowhere and then what do you do.

Green energy is the future, and Donald Trump is taking your economy backwards.

ICE vehicles replaced horses and carriages naturally because ICE vehicles were the superior product. EV's are not superior to ICE vehicles at this point for all current uses.

States have mandated the end of sales of new ICE vehicles by the 2030's. That isn't forcing?

 

[Dorian Mode]

True, but therein lies the hidden evil to EV cars, you see, simply igniting a naturally produced combustible into pure explosive chemical energy as a gas that you carry around yourself in your fuel tank and merely have to pump to the engine to set off, is a far more direct and efficient manner of producing energy than the EV car is when you consider that for the EV to operate, it really isn't independent at all like an IC car but part of a 'system' comprised of a power generating plant far away which might be hydro, coal, nuclear or even a little wind or solar, then it has to be stepped up to a very high voltage and transmitted across the country on high tension power lines, stepped back down to the charging station or your house which then has to convert all of that back in a current to charge this ginormous lithium battery you must carry around weighing half the weight of your very heavy car, it is only then that EV green electric car energy becomes this beautiful, simple system of just driving an electric motor off a battery.

EVs only make sense if you can generate and store your own electricity. Getting energy from the grid will always be wasteful until the entire grid is furnished by renewables, but with today's technology there is no way we can produce all the energy we need from renewables. That will probably not happen in our lifetimes.

As an aside, we should probably inform our corrupt tree huggers that the war on oil is over and the climate change hoax is over. Now the toxic environmentalists are yelling at Trump to flood Cuba with oil. Not green energy, oil. Oil is the new green energy for them.

 

[Nostra]

Those windmills cost a fortune to make, are terribly expensive to replace, look horrible and kill birds left and right. No one wants a wind farm in their backyard.

And the blade life is just a few years. They are clogging landfills.

Green, huh?

 

[Nostra]

Solar power is endless,

Solar power ends every day at sunset, you blithering nincompoop.

 

[Dorian Mode]

And the blade life is just a few years. They are clogging landfills.

Green, huh?

It really is a shame we haven't figured out how to capture all the heat coming off of neo-leftists as they continuously rage against Trump, even in their sleep. That energy would be so abundant that it would be worthless to meter and charge for it, plus we could all drive Teslas and build all the enormous enormous data centers we need for advanced AI. And if we ever needed even more energy, we just put photos of Trump out in public. We could furnish the world's energy needs if wanted.

 

[toobfreak]

EVs only make sense if you can generate your own electricity.

Which of course is never the case. Only in extreme, experimental models, have they even come close to any sort of personal transport vehicle that ran directly off sunlight, which really sucks if you live in a cloudy city.

As an aside, we should probably inform our corrupt tree huggers that the war on oil is over and the climate change hoax is over.

I don't know what to say about oil, neither, DM. We have literally built our entire society and technology out of the discovery and uses for fossil oils, gasoline, petroleum, and plastics; but by some estimates, we might have as little as 50 years natural supply left from the Earth projected from current demands.

Seems like we are running into a crossroads of sorts and green energy has an awfully big gap to fill.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Every country that draws from the bathtub suffers from price shocks, but the United States suffers more than its peers. The U.S. economy has a high oil intensity; it consumes a lot of oil to produce each dollar of its gross domestic product. America’s economy is more than 40 percent more oil-intensive than China’s, even though China is a net oil importer and sources much of its oil from Persian Gulf countries, including Iran. The European Union’s economy is half as oil-intensive as America’s. Even Russia, a petrostate, is about 20 percent less reliant on oil per unit of economic output than the United States is.

China is still a developing country in many ways. Developing countries tend to consume more oil than fully industrialized ones. But China also recognized its strategic vulnerability to oil shocks years ago and has been methodically decreasing it — not with warships but with electric vehicles and high-speed electric rail. Chinese gasoline consumption appears to have peaked in 2023, far earlier than analysts expected. According to an analysis by BloombergNEF, some two-thirds of electric vehicles sold worldwide are purchased in China, and within the next year, China’s E.V. sales are projected to exceed the entire U.S. car market.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/opinion/iran-war-trump-oil-prices.html

The solution to this problem isn't more oil production. It's less oil consumption. Less oil consumption being the opposite of trump's goal. He of the "drill, baby, drill" camp.

Is it surprising he has positioned the US in exactly the wrong way? No. Because when it comes to strategery (thanks George) Don's tends to be impulsive, self-indulgent, ignorant, and non fact based. But he does know his bread has been buttered by legacy oil company donations. Remember his offer during the campaign?

Trump pressed oil executives to give $1 billion for his campaign, people in industry say​

Former President Donald Trump asked oil industry executives last month to donate $1 billion to aid his campaign to retake the White House, three people familiar with the conversation told POLITICO — a request that campaign finance experts said appeared troubling but is probably legal.

The request, first reported Thursday by The Washington Post, occurred during a meeting of industry executives at the former president’s home in Palm Beach, Florida.

The oil industry has a long list of policy actions it would want Trump to take, including dismantling parts of President Joe Biden’s green agenda and rolling back pollution regulations that threaten to crimp their profits. As POLITICO reported Wednesday, oil executives are also preparing some highly specific requests for Trump, including executive orders they hope he would sign if reelected.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-executives-campaign-finance-00157131

LIke the MIC, the Oil industry looks for every opportunity to maximize profits especially at the expense of the People

In China, they don't have that problem

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Who's next after Cuba? War mongering boomer. Very hawkish. Not what Trump promised us. Boomer.

Jared's Spidey Sense is thinking Turkey

 

[toobfreak]

And the blade life is just a few years. They are clogging landfills.
Green, huh?

Perfect, free, clean energy forever according to Dragonlady!

 

[Nostra]

Perfect, free, clean energy forever according to Dragonlady!

And…..the sun never goes down.

 

[Dorian Mode]

Which of course is never the case. Only in extreme, experimental models, have they even come close to any sort of personal transport vehicle that ran directly off sunlight, which really sucks if you live in a cloudy city.

But if you have a solar array on your roof and large batteries to store solar energy, and live in the desert, then charging an electric car makes sense. Few have such systems and live in a desert.

I don't know what to say about oil, neither, DM. We have literally built our entire society and technology out of the discovery and uses for fossil oils, gasoline, petroleum, and plastics; but by some estimates, we might have as little as 50 years natural supply left from the Earth projected from current demands.

Seems like we are running into a crossroads of sorts and green energy has an awfully big gap to fill.

I'm an engineer by training. Solar can eventually produce a lot of energy, but at the moment it will never be anything but supplemental. Much of the world is resigning to the fact that we need to start using nuclear energy again, maybe with alternative radioactive isotopes that aren't useful in weapons and are much safer than uranium. Thorium comes to mind. Anyway, the universe is awash in excessive energy, we just can't economically tap into it.

 

[sealybobo]

But if you have a solar array on your roof and large batteries to store solar energy, and live in the desert, then charging an electric car makes sense. Few have such systems and live in a desert.


I'm an engineer by training. Solar can eventually produce a lot of energy, but at the moment it will never be anything but supplemental. Much of the world is resigning to the fact that we need to start using nuclear energy again, maybe with alternative radioactive isotopes that aren't useful in weapons and are much safer than uranium. Thorium comes to mind. Anyway, the universe is awash in excessive energy, we just can't economically tap into it.

I always think it's funny when I watch Mountain Men and I see these guys using wind and solar power. These guys are clearly conservative men living in RED states. And they go on and on about how much wind and solar has helped them. One guy explained how much work it took to get gas out to his property. Now with solar and wind turbines, he doesn't need to haul gas anymore.

In other words, the people these things help the most are rural Republicans living in remote places.

Solar power is rapidly growing, accounting for over 7% of U.S. electricity generation in 2024, enough to power over 41 million homes. It led all energy sources in new capacity additions for five consecutive years, representing 69% of new capacity in early 2025, with major generation hubs in California and Texas.

• The U.S. has over 248 GW of solar capacity, with a new project installed every 54 seconds in 2024.
• Types of Solar: Utility-scale solar represents about 69–72% of generation, while small-scale solar (rooftop/community) accounts for approximately 28–31%.

The U.S. aims for solar to meet 33% of electricity demand by 2050


If we don't stop using gas and coal and start using wind and the sun, we are idiots.

 

[Soupnazi630]

LIke the MIC, the Oil industry looks for every opportunity to maximize profits especially at the expense of the People

In China, they don't have that problem

Completely false.

The oil industry works under a complicated business model. They know that their highest profits come not from increasing prices but from keeping the supply at a level where they can sell it to nearly everyone for a reasonable price. When the supply is interfered with the price goes up due to natural causes of scarcity. This is problematic for the oil companies because then fewer people drive and their profits will eventually diminish.

China simply tells everyone what to do and they have no choice.