• Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    The USA should be making China-level investments in solar. They should be building their own companies and more tax dollars should go to solar than weapons.

    What are modern wars fought over? Energy.

    • Varyk@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 year ago

      More investment, for sure. That’s why I was so surprised with the green new deal, I had no suspicions that the US was actually going to start investing in its infrastructure and energy again.

      I don’t know what you mean by modern wars are fought over energy?

      The Russian-Ukraine war is about pride, territory and farmland, the genocides going on right now around the world are about race/pride, a lot of conflicts in sub-Saharan African countries about who gets to be the leader, which wars are you referring to specifically with regard to energy and what type of energy are you talking about?

        • Varyk@sh.itjust.worksOP
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          1 year ago

          I guess. They did say all modern wars, and those are a few wars that aren’t very modern, so I was wondering if there was some other situation they were referring to.

          I swear someone said something very like that in amovie I saw recently, but I cannot remember what the movie was.

      • Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Ahh, let me revise; I meant resources not just specifically energy.

        So in global political economic theory, wars over race/pride/territory are the superficial reasons for the war. The underlying cause is usually due to resources, or scarcity of. Consider that the people who start these wars are usually starting them because they want more resources. Russia invaded Ukraine because they want that territory in their sphere of influence, not the west’s. But there are a couple pipelines that run through Ukraine that generate several billion dollars a year in transit revenue for both Ukraine and Russia.

        Syria for example, the US instigated the Arab spring in that country and still occupies the eastern part so they can extract oil. The attempted coups in Bolivia was for Lithium mining rights. African ethnic rivalries are often over resources, etc.

        If everyone had enough, most people would be happy, and if they’re happy they wouldn’t be fighting wars.

    • ghost_laptop@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Honestly investing in just one type of green energy isn’t smart specially solar, they should go with all of them in case scientific development proves one is superior to the other and to diversify. Primarily nuclear but I assume they are going the solar way because it can generate more consumption because individuals need to buy their owm panels unlike nuclear where the State builds a plant. It is similar to the trains versus cars scenario.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Exactly. I live in a land-locked state that exports energy to a coastal state, and there’s a lot of unoccupied space between us and that coastal state. So it would be really easy to build a nuclear plant and bury the nuclear waste in an unoccupied area (we have a lot of that in the US). But we don’t because of FUD, which is super dumb.

            I really like renewables like solar and wind, but we need a solid base that can run constantly. It’s a lot easier and probably way more environmentally friendly to generate nuclear power than try to store a ton of excess power from renewable sources.

            • ghost_laptop@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Nuclear power is by far the best source of renewable energy, if you look at China’s plan to reach zero net emissions, for example, the want to use basically 40% nuclear and 40% solar, with the rest of the 10% from other various types (this of course can change if there are developments in some area) but nuclear right now is safe and effective. The only thing you need is to keep those plants in very good conditions, most nuclear disasters where caused by not having everything in the state it should and the technology of its time, we have much better knowledge now. The FUD is obviously propagandised by big oil companies because they know nuclear can replace them in the blink of an eye if we wouldn’t have useless politicians in place that leech off of lobbying in the congress.