On the net out migration of the plains, this is a story I have lived and is not necessarily bad news. The county in Northwestern Minnesota where I was born is an agricultural breadbasket and yet the population peaked in 1940 while continuing to fall. All my life, 68 years, the vast majority of the residents have lived a comfortable life with all the modern amenities and good to excellent schools, so why leave. This really is a success story of the productivity explosion in farming since WW2 and a strong work ethic combined with good education. The labor needed per acre of farmland has dropped by 90% while yields per acre increased by 2 to 4 times. This is the classic job loss due to productivity. So what of the people? The vast majority of outmigration was and is not due to deprivation but opportunity. With good education and work ethic it was and is easy to leave the area for higher paying employment. Those who remain tend to be in farming at scale, in a business that taps into the economy outside the area, or simply choose to stay close to family. The two main drivers of out migration continue to be productivity in agriculture and a social/education foundation for success outside the area. Ironically those residents with below average education and skills have a higher net standard of living here than by migrating as housing costs especially are so much lower and the social safety net stronger than sunbelt states. How long can this go on? No one really knows but the urban/suburban magnet is still pulling strong.
The graphic is specifically for 2020-2024, so I am thinking more about short term drivers. I wondered about the decline in fracking over that time period, but I don’t think the map lines up well enough. It does line up pretty well with the biggest declines in the Ogallala. There may also be some drought/cattle issues going on.
Having grown up in NW OK, I am certain that a lack of bigger cities has absolutely nothing to do with emigration from the Western Plains in the early 20s. The population numbers are small to begin with and the graph shows percentages. Oil and/or agriculture are more likely drivers.
Having grown up in Iowa but moved to Boston, I was going to second most of this. The major driver is that the number of acres a farm family can farm has been steadily increasing, so "farm country" has fewer and fewer farmers. In much of farm country, people move to the towns and small cities to work in other productive industries. (As opposed to retail markets and support of the farming economy, which has more or less fixed employment.) But at the western edge of the wheat zone, the population density is already low enough that it's hard to sustain non-farming industry, so when people leave farms they move farther away.
There are also wet/dry cycles, including the several-year El Nino/La Nina cycle and the decades-long cycle. At the western edge of the wheat belt, farming is marginal and a dry decade can cause a lot of people to abandon their farms and move away.
Excellent to emphasize: "Remember, as much as certain smug intellectuals like to sneer at and dismiss the idea of economic growth and of GDP, for people in poor countries, GDP is everything, and growth is the utterly transformative. India has been doing a good job of transforming its people’s lives, and it deserves our praise, encouragement, and support."
and Indian progress has come with generally what the Lefty proggy sneer at as neo-liberal reforms loosening up the "License Raj"
Regarding Wind (speaking here as a real-world RE financier): that Twitter/X post opens with something stupid "I suspect the details might give away why the Trump administration seems so opposed to wind." - anyone suspecting that is giving idiotic levels of credence to an analytical coherence for Trump - he hates wind because he fought over it relative to a branded golf course and lost, and he's that petty and that dim. (there's zero economic policy rationality in actively sabotaging - notably via completely transparent and of dubious regulatory legality directives and orders - existing advancing wind asset developments even if one took an energy mix skepticism on wind.) such a suspicion is at best naive sane-washing if not at worse being an active dupe.
I think the overall neg side eval on wind there is excessive by far, although not untrue - certainly wind has a number of important scaling issues that solar PV doesn't and the asset-cost basis of wind installations has run into something of a wall in the way solar PV panels has not (also installation scaleability - harvesting more power (ceteris paribus) means taller mega-installs and the ability to cost-effectively scale that including the logistics of getting them in place is a much different problem than panels.
And some of his bads are... extremely dubious (intensity of rare-earths? Bad? Well amigo that's Elec Tech Stack )
Further the Poster later comment about wind & solar increasing system wide costs is... well suggestive of a person with a certain view as it were as a half-truth (depending).
I think there are legitimate points in there but there are a number of items that are quite to me deformed and questionable. [noting yes attributed to an anon German energy trader but follow-ups suggest more - not that the way Germany has done energy in past 15 years says great coherence, thanks to Grunen and some spinelessness of the general parties, as shutting nuclear
Solar doesn’t use rare earth minerals, which are central to the magnets used in wind power. The other parts of the electric tech stack use some for capacitors and fan magnets, but those are used just as much for wind as for solar. So I don’t see why you want to subtract this from the list of problems with wind power. I would also add in high rates of death for birds of prey, more dangerous installation and maintenance and because of their height more disruptive of beach and ocean views. I won’t add Trumps complaint about sound, but they are louder than solar panels.
Electric Tech Stack. Motors, batteries, etc. Rare earths as an objection - which is simply trying to shoe-horn in current PRC concerns is bullshit.
Bird death rates is bullshit - windows, cars, traffic, human's pet cats wandering around, are by far vastly deadlier to birds, orders of magnitude more deadly.
Disruptive of views is nimby bullshit and sheer idiocy.
More people die in gas and coal plants than wind installations so again sheer pretext making.
Wind turbines drawbacks are the specificity of location and the issues of size and the logistical and asset cost escalation, those are real issues (and becoming very important binding constraints both for onshore and offshore). The rest is pretext searching bullshit cherry picking and inflating faux concerns.
The electric tech stack contains rare earths as I said, but when comparing solar to wind, rare earth minerals aren’t used in equipment unique to solar - unless the panels track the sun, in which case small motors are needed, but these are low power and slow and don’t need to use exotic materials. Wind turbines (as well as thermal power plants) require large generators that need strong magnets which solar does not.
I specifically said “birds of prey” which aren’t killed much by windows or traffic, and unless house cats are pumas those aren’t killing many eagles, hawks, falcons, owls or condors.
No, solar PV isn’t direct but every other part of the elect tech chain is and broadly the energy turbine chain. The idea that there is an objection over Rare Earths (which are not rare at all) usage just because wind turbines are well, electric turbines is nonsensical. What is the objection point? Chinese PRC current death grip on rare earths processing? That’s also the case in panels – and if one wants to Archy Conrern Trolling, one can hand-wring about panels and forced labor. It is an utter nonsense as an objection – a strategic sourcing concern is another matter but that’s not just wind, it’s the entire electrification drive.
Birds of Prey: False in that birds of prey entirely do have window deaths, e.g. in urban areas notably.
Further there are highway deaths as collateral damage – direct and indirect.
Electric lines- existing power infra – electrocution.
Baits and agricultural poisoning – direct and indirect (and agri-products bio-accumulation)
And nice little kitties human subisidized pets, preying on young birds, nests. Not the false framing of kitty on adult.
Wind turbines are trivial in comparison to any of these factors.
All that are orders of magnitude more important to all categories of bird death over wind turbines – pretending one is worried about bird deaths, birds of prey and that’s your concern point on wind is nothing more than wrapped up pretence. If one is really worried about bird deaths, or any subset of bird deaths – one would focus on actual major drivers of numbers and percentages, not hand-wringing about a marginal factor.
And for the record, I don’t even do wind myself, however pretence and Potemkin village irritate me.
Rare earths, bird deaths, and disruption of views are far less for wind than for many other things that are also worth doing. But they are some sort of cost, even if nothing like what haters want to say. I don’t think that solar or geothermal have anything similar to these sorts of drawbacks.
If one wishes to invent Concern Trolling points on solar, I assure you there are points. - land usage, micro-climate effects concerns, etc. etc.
Geothermal - whose cost points remain high outside of ideal areas (although w
- earthquake concerns
- groundwater contamination via boreholes [or using fracking tech which is the route for expanded geothermal beyond its historical limited sites - so one can add on every Lefty Greeny objection to fracking onto geothermal for 'non-traditional' sites]
Etc.
the Concern Trolls have many many points to hook hand-wringing on and notably finding hooks to hook in the always easy to hook Lefties ready to be worried about any order of 'impact
I agree, Trump isn't being driven by any economic rationality on wind. At the same time, killing off-shore wind in US is the economically smart move, especially when we have the land and windy locations to do onshore wind instead at a fraction of the price.
There is still zero plausible reason to kill offshore wind in places where it is already approved to move forward and generate energy, or in places where the wind farms are already mostly built... All of the arguments from the Trump admin related to wind have almost nothing to do with economics.
Further in this post by Noah, he isn't saying that we should kill off wind...
Why is *killing* offshore wind a good idea? If you think onshore wind is better, you should build that! But investors seem to think that offshore wind can also be profitable, even if it’s not as good as your plan. Why *kill* it rather than letter all the wind farms bloom?
It is in not an "economically smart move" - It is a stupid political move to kill off already progressing projects. Wasting capital.
An economically reasonable move for Off-shore to be competed on economic basis (and unless US changes its regulations (set not by Trump but by Biden & Co), it is self-handicapping to exclusion off-shore)
There is no way these things would have been built without the 30% tax credit from the IRA. There is no where in the world that produces cheaper offshore wind power than the onshore wind power on the continental US.
Perhaps yes, perhaps no for tax credit impact. However there is no good economic rational for what Trump did - both from regualtor as well as policy credibly point of view, in respect to the already going ahead and spending capital projects.
100% agree with you there. The Government should follow through with its promises, it really doesn't matter what the economics say. I was just chiming in that (for the US) offshore isn't great economically.
Ah well there - yes we are in full agreement, and most definately US Offshore as a push is of little sense if the US doesn't dump application of the Jones Act and other sundry self-imposed restrctions that inflate install costs for any off-shore - just use the damn nordics specialists ships for God's sake, if you can get an off-shore economics going then naturally the ships can follow... (and specialists etc etc.)
What Biden admin did was just outright stupid and cost-inflating.
Inflating your initial install costs isn't going to get you your cost-effective energy and is pure self-sabotage.
I would like you to maybe reach out to some Californians and former Californians to hear what they think.
“Home prices” are a huge issue as you mentioned. However, it’s the staggering weight of bureaucratic pressure that many people will no longer tolerate.
I cannot tell you how difficult it is to build anything here without months or years of grinding something through the permitting process and feeling like we serve a “permission class” that call themselves civil servants.
Gone are the days of small contractors building spec homes for sale and making a living in the margins. Only mass scale builders can afford to develop land, sit on it for years and then navigate state and city codes to get approval and often “grants” to build more “urban dense” neighborhoods with cheaply built homes that are worth half of what they cost to build and are sold for.
It’s a nightmare now. I think we’re passing 1100 new laws a year. A year! Who can keep up? Navigate that? And who benefits?
Yes, housing is expensive. But so is supporting the bureaucracy that never suffers for its overly invasive and painfully grifting behavior.
I'm a Californian and can attest to both the high cost and burdensome bureaucracy of residing in the Golden State. But with a household income in the 95th percentile nationally, I am (for the moment, at least) compensated well enough to continue living here. But at the same time, I live a decidedly middle-class lifestyle despite my income. I dine at restaurants once or twice a month at most but cook at home the rest of the time. I have not paid for a vacation since 2018, with all my paid time off being of the "staycation" variety. I drive a 2013 Toyota Prius that has been fully paid off since 2018. I loathe the process of shopping and half of my wardrobe is from middle school, so it's not like I'm pouring money into fast fashion. I contribute fully to my 401K each year but I don't save much outside of that. And I'm single and have no kids. How do families live here? Living as simply as I do on the income I have and still not being able to grow my savings outside of retirement is a damning indictment of CA housing policy.
Life long Californian who moved to FL last year due to the draw of warm sandy white beaches, and to a secondary effect depressing cultural scene (SF) and high taxes.
Oh, and we are both retired. Living in the most expensive city in the country living on savings just makes no economic sense.
One thing to consider about labor, is that American labor has mostly lost all Overtime pay. Under FLSA, for decades, OT made up a significant contribution of pay. Now, employers use part-time employees, can send them home early to timely management direct labor variable cost. This labor productivity extends to "classifying" more employees as "Exempt" from FLSA Overtime rules. So more "labor", works for free past 40hrs/week or 8hr/day.
This free labor productivity capture is pretty significant.
“Whether that’s enough to get Russia to stop its campaign of conquest is anybody’s guess.” I’ll bite - no it is not. The Kremlin is backed into a corner and winning is the only option to remain in power. They obviously can’t win, other wise they would have by now so prolonging is the only option to remain in their cushy positions. After everything that’s been said and done, peace won’t do the trick. It existential for their leadership - actually for one man. And the culture has an astonishingly high tolerance for a shittty existence.
I just listened to your recent podcast. It was interesting because I felt you tackled the AI argument a little differently than you do in writing. One thing that struck me more than usual was that you seem to underestimate the power of AI. And potentially I am in the minority here in both believing in the extreme power of AI, being generally optimistic (given the proper path), but also being existentially terrified - like standing at the top of a terrifyingly steep and beautiful cliff. It's likely that all well-documented knowledge fields will be irrelevant within the next decade. Then the undocumented ones will become documented, and they too will go. The last hold-outs will be hands-on-jobs, but that will only last until robotic articulating sausages are perfected. Then we just become irrelevant sacks of watery meat, some kind of outmoded bio-cybernetic progenitor.
As it currently stands we are looking at the potential enshittification of humanity. And it can feel a little like gaslighting to talk about robot friends and ignore that it is at least possible that within the next decade all human work will be meaningless. And I agree that may be exciting and good for humans in the long term, but I live in now, and I would like to live my full life in relative peace without being killed early in the transience of the biggest revolution humanity has ever seen.
If the government starts funding scientific research outside the universities, that could be a game changer for breaking the hold university's have on our culture. It's time to free knowledge from the university
Will lead to better scientists too. It's a miserable career path that scares people away. I always liked science but never gave it a thought as a career because I would rather take a bullet than work in academia.
India is no longer a "poor, basket case" of a country. As Noah says:
'Even relatively low-income people in India now tend to own a fridge, a motorbike (or car), a mobile phone, and a TV. That was not true a decade ago.
Remember, as much as certain smug intellectuals like to sneer at and dismiss the idea of economic growth and of GDP, for people in poor countries, GDP is everything, and growth is the utterly transformative. India has been doing a good job of transforming its people’s lives, and it deserves our praise, encouragement, and support.'
Which is why I am writing my Substack series on India. I don't think a lot of people really understand what goes on there. It is not like any other place on the planet.
A key advantage for wind is that it produces much more energy than solar per unit transmission resource consumed. Since transmission is the binding constraint in US, wind is still promising. Additionally, whereas solar resource is really poor in the upper midwest and Northeast, wind resource is abundant.
The industry is evolving towards trifectas- solar, wind and batteries combined under a single transmission interconnection. Trifecta capacity factor (annual energy production per unit transmission resource consumed) is higher than combined cycle gas power plants, and less expensive
To transmit energy from generation power plants to loads, there needs to be sufficient transmission capacity to deliver the energy to the load under the most stressful conditions of the years (storms, fires, cold snaps, etc.)
However building transmission is also the hardest job in the power industry. The reason is that you need consent and permits for every jurisdiction or person or landowner that is in the vicinity of the transmission line. To build a 500 mile transmission line you need consents from hundreds of even thousands of landowners, communities and jurisdictions. This process takes decades while billions of dollars of investment is at risk due to the consent process.
As a result, the problem to solve is to maximize the use of existing transmission to meet increased electricity demand
I’m still not sure I understand what that means. Is this the idea? A power installation needs enough transmission capacity to transmit power at the rate of peak production (noon on a sunny summer day for solar, highest wind speeds for wind). Solar generates zero power half the time, and less than the peak almost all the time, so it only sends about 25-30% of the power that the transmission capacity is capable of. But wind is almost always generating some power, and in good places the wind is close to constant, so it can get closer to half of the transmission capacity on average. Is that right?
If so, then can’t you fix that if solar panels get cheap, by just putting in less capacity than you would need to transmit peak power production? You’d be wasting some generation that never gets transmitted, but you’d have a lot more time that you’re maxing out your transmission capacity.
A 100 MW solar plant with 25% capacity factor will produce (100 MW x 8760 hours x 0.25) = 219,000 MWh in a year
A 100 MW wind plant with 45% capacity factor will produce (100 MW x 8760 hrs x 0.45) = 394,000 MWh in a year
We pair solar power plants with battery power plants so that the batteries can charge from the solar energy and discharge in the evening.
Assume hypothetically, wind capacity factor is 50% and solar capacity factor is 25%.
In that case, to produce equivalent energy as 100 MW of wind, you would need 200 MW solar and atleast 100 MW battery. This is a total of 300 MW, i.e. 3x nameplate equipment.
Alternatively, you could combine 100 MW wind + 100 MW solar + 100 MW battery under the same 100 MW transmission interconnection and operate at 75% capacity factor, which is higher than a combined cycle natural gas plant.
People point to the pandemic as some kind of marker for overhiring in tech but IMO overhiring has been going on since the end of the financial crisis due to increased investments in tech in the zero percent interest rate environment. If you look at some of the top tech companies, the revenue is still concentrated in some areas and most employees are working in BUs that don’t make any money. Ever since Musk blew up Twitter and showed that you don’t need so many employees to run an app/web company, there’s been an increased focus on efficiency.
I'm with Noah and don't agree with Kolko's take absolving Trump and AI of blame for low hiring. Anecdotally, my company has effectively entered a hiring freeze for the better part of 18 months and it's 100% because 1) AI is capable of performing entry-level tasks in my industry and 2) we don't want to invest in hiring when Trump can fu*k the economy on a whim. Jed points to timing in making his argument as if business decision makers are incapable of being forward thinking. News flash, Jed, most big decisions made today are done with tomorrow in mind. And in California, hiring is a very big decision because of how expensive and cumbersome it is to fire a bad hire.
People are leaving CA for many reasons, none related to how beautiful or nice it is to live here.
What I’ve personally seen is:
* People at companies about to go public moving to TX for lower taxes
* Housing certainly is expensive here
I think the employment rates are linked to this. Remote work is most feasible in software. It follows that those workers can be in other countries. Combine a massive shift toward outsourcing with a mentality of significant overhiring in the 2010s (I was practically flogged to hire faster - it always felt nuts!), and I think that explains what we’re seeing.
Of course, CEOs are gonna say they’re implementing AI, not that all their software is being built in Egypt now.
If you wanna talk about tariffs, let’s tariff the shit out of outsourcing American labor. Make it cost 50% more to hire a SWE or support rep somewhere else and you’ll see Americans getting jobs again.
TL;dr: The difference in California's population in 2020 vs 2025 is fewer than 13,000 people in a state of almost 40 million. Would we prefer population growth? Yes -- in both high and low-skilled professions. Do we have a massive housing problem? For sure. Are there compositional shifts underway? Always. Should we worry about a weakening of tech clustering? Yes -- and Hollywood as well. We were, after all, once an aerospace state.
But are people "fleeing" California in large numbers? No. And we count these our people pretty carefully.
Worth noting: total net population changes use births and immigration to camouflage domestic migration losses of ~140k to ~250k per year. These are large enough to reshape regions, labor markets, and politics—even when immigration and births keep the overall population afloat.
Another topic in metascience funding is prizes. XPrize has a long track record as a private organization, and I can even remember John McCain campaigning on a $300 million prize for battery technology. I'm personally interested in the XPrize Healthspan prize, which has a target of 10-20 years of restored capacity in muscle, cognitive, and immune function, and was happy when Jamie Justice was announced as the director.
It seems in this case the CCP is acting prudently in the interest of the Chinese nation’s power and economic health, in preventing their business elite class from treasonously shipping off their productive capacity overseas to play labor arbitrage against their own people. They know very well what happened to us in the west with the China Shock and don’t intent to simply let India do the same to them without a fight.
On the net out migration of the plains, this is a story I have lived and is not necessarily bad news. The county in Northwestern Minnesota where I was born is an agricultural breadbasket and yet the population peaked in 1940 while continuing to fall. All my life, 68 years, the vast majority of the residents have lived a comfortable life with all the modern amenities and good to excellent schools, so why leave. This really is a success story of the productivity explosion in farming since WW2 and a strong work ethic combined with good education. The labor needed per acre of farmland has dropped by 90% while yields per acre increased by 2 to 4 times. This is the classic job loss due to productivity. So what of the people? The vast majority of outmigration was and is not due to deprivation but opportunity. With good education and work ethic it was and is easy to leave the area for higher paying employment. Those who remain tend to be in farming at scale, in a business that taps into the economy outside the area, or simply choose to stay close to family. The two main drivers of out migration continue to be productivity in agriculture and a social/education foundation for success outside the area. Ironically those residents with below average education and skills have a higher net standard of living here than by migrating as housing costs especially are so much lower and the social safety net stronger than sunbelt states. How long can this go on? No one really knows but the urban/suburban magnet is still pulling strong.
The graphic is specifically for 2020-2024, so I am thinking more about short term drivers. I wondered about the decline in fracking over that time period, but I don’t think the map lines up well enough. It does line up pretty well with the biggest declines in the Ogallala. There may also be some drought/cattle issues going on.
Having grown up in NW OK, I am certain that a lack of bigger cities has absolutely nothing to do with emigration from the Western Plains in the early 20s. The population numbers are small to begin with and the graph shows percentages. Oil and/or agriculture are more likely drivers.
Having grown up in Iowa but moved to Boston, I was going to second most of this. The major driver is that the number of acres a farm family can farm has been steadily increasing, so "farm country" has fewer and fewer farmers. In much of farm country, people move to the towns and small cities to work in other productive industries. (As opposed to retail markets and support of the farming economy, which has more or less fixed employment.) But at the western edge of the wheat zone, the population density is already low enough that it's hard to sustain non-farming industry, so when people leave farms they move farther away.
There are also wet/dry cycles, including the several-year El Nino/La Nina cycle and the decades-long cycle. At the western edge of the wheat belt, farming is marginal and a dry decade can cause a lot of people to abandon their farms and move away.
Excellent to emphasize: "Remember, as much as certain smug intellectuals like to sneer at and dismiss the idea of economic growth and of GDP, for people in poor countries, GDP is everything, and growth is the utterly transformative. India has been doing a good job of transforming its people’s lives, and it deserves our praise, encouragement, and support."
and Indian progress has come with generally what the Lefty proggy sneer at as neo-liberal reforms loosening up the "License Raj"
Regarding Wind (speaking here as a real-world RE financier): that Twitter/X post opens with something stupid "I suspect the details might give away why the Trump administration seems so opposed to wind." - anyone suspecting that is giving idiotic levels of credence to an analytical coherence for Trump - he hates wind because he fought over it relative to a branded golf course and lost, and he's that petty and that dim. (there's zero economic policy rationality in actively sabotaging - notably via completely transparent and of dubious regulatory legality directives and orders - existing advancing wind asset developments even if one took an energy mix skepticism on wind.) such a suspicion is at best naive sane-washing if not at worse being an active dupe.
I think the overall neg side eval on wind there is excessive by far, although not untrue - certainly wind has a number of important scaling issues that solar PV doesn't and the asset-cost basis of wind installations has run into something of a wall in the way solar PV panels has not (also installation scaleability - harvesting more power (ceteris paribus) means taller mega-installs and the ability to cost-effectively scale that including the logistics of getting them in place is a much different problem than panels.
And some of his bads are... extremely dubious (intensity of rare-earths? Bad? Well amigo that's Elec Tech Stack )
Further the Poster later comment about wind & solar increasing system wide costs is... well suggestive of a person with a certain view as it were as a half-truth (depending).
I think there are legitimate points in there but there are a number of items that are quite to me deformed and questionable. [noting yes attributed to an anon German energy trader but follow-ups suggest more - not that the way Germany has done energy in past 15 years says great coherence, thanks to Grunen and some spinelessness of the general parties, as shutting nuclear
Solar doesn’t use rare earth minerals, which are central to the magnets used in wind power. The other parts of the electric tech stack use some for capacitors and fan magnets, but those are used just as much for wind as for solar. So I don’t see why you want to subtract this from the list of problems with wind power. I would also add in high rates of death for birds of prey, more dangerous installation and maintenance and because of their height more disruptive of beach and ocean views. I won’t add Trumps complaint about sound, but they are louder than solar panels.
Ahem
Electric Tech Stack. Motors, batteries, etc. Rare earths as an objection - which is simply trying to shoe-horn in current PRC concerns is bullshit.
Bird death rates is bullshit - windows, cars, traffic, human's pet cats wandering around, are by far vastly deadlier to birds, orders of magnitude more deadly.
Disruptive of views is nimby bullshit and sheer idiocy.
More people die in gas and coal plants than wind installations so again sheer pretext making.
Wind turbines drawbacks are the specificity of location and the issues of size and the logistical and asset cost escalation, those are real issues (and becoming very important binding constraints both for onshore and offshore). The rest is pretext searching bullshit cherry picking and inflating faux concerns.
The electric tech stack contains rare earths as I said, but when comparing solar to wind, rare earth minerals aren’t used in equipment unique to solar - unless the panels track the sun, in which case small motors are needed, but these are low power and slow and don’t need to use exotic materials. Wind turbines (as well as thermal power plants) require large generators that need strong magnets which solar does not.
I specifically said “birds of prey” which aren’t killed much by windows or traffic, and unless house cats are pumas those aren’t killing many eagles, hawks, falcons, owls or condors.
No, solar PV isn’t direct but every other part of the elect tech chain is and broadly the energy turbine chain. The idea that there is an objection over Rare Earths (which are not rare at all) usage just because wind turbines are well, electric turbines is nonsensical. What is the objection point? Chinese PRC current death grip on rare earths processing? That’s also the case in panels – and if one wants to Archy Conrern Trolling, one can hand-wring about panels and forced labor. It is an utter nonsense as an objection – a strategic sourcing concern is another matter but that’s not just wind, it’s the entire electrification drive.
Birds of Prey: False in that birds of prey entirely do have window deaths, e.g. in urban areas notably.
Further there are highway deaths as collateral damage – direct and indirect.
Electric lines- existing power infra – electrocution.
Baits and agricultural poisoning – direct and indirect (and agri-products bio-accumulation)
And nice little kitties human subisidized pets, preying on young birds, nests. Not the false framing of kitty on adult.
Wind turbines are trivial in comparison to any of these factors.
All that are orders of magnitude more important to all categories of bird death over wind turbines – pretending one is worried about bird deaths, birds of prey and that’s your concern point on wind is nothing more than wrapped up pretence. If one is really worried about bird deaths, or any subset of bird deaths – one would focus on actual major drivers of numbers and percentages, not hand-wringing about a marginal factor.
And for the record, I don’t even do wind myself, however pretence and Potemkin village irritate me.
Rare earths, bird deaths, and disruption of views are far less for wind than for many other things that are also worth doing. But they are some sort of cost, even if nothing like what haters want to say. I don’t think that solar or geothermal have anything similar to these sorts of drawbacks.
If one wishes to invent Concern Trolling points on solar, I assure you there are points. - land usage, micro-climate effects concerns, etc. etc.
Geothermal - whose cost points remain high outside of ideal areas (although w
- earthquake concerns
- groundwater contamination via boreholes [or using fracking tech which is the route for expanded geothermal beyond its historical limited sites - so one can add on every Lefty Greeny objection to fracking onto geothermal for 'non-traditional' sites]
Etc.
the Concern Trolls have many many points to hook hand-wringing on and notably finding hooks to hook in the always easy to hook Lefties ready to be worried about any order of 'impact
I agree, Trump isn't being driven by any economic rationality on wind. At the same time, killing off-shore wind in US is the economically smart move, especially when we have the land and windy locations to do onshore wind instead at a fraction of the price.
There is still zero plausible reason to kill offshore wind in places where it is already approved to move forward and generate energy, or in places where the wind farms are already mostly built... All of the arguments from the Trump admin related to wind have almost nothing to do with economics.
Further in this post by Noah, he isn't saying that we should kill off wind...
Absolutely.
Why is *killing* offshore wind a good idea? If you think onshore wind is better, you should build that! But investors seem to think that offshore wind can also be profitable, even if it’s not as good as your plan. Why *kill* it rather than letter all the wind farms bloom?
It is in not an "economically smart move" - It is a stupid political move to kill off already progressing projects. Wasting capital.
An economically reasonable move for Off-shore to be competed on economic basis (and unless US changes its regulations (set not by Trump but by Biden & Co), it is self-handicapping to exclusion off-shore)
There is no way these things would have been built without the 30% tax credit from the IRA. There is no where in the world that produces cheaper offshore wind power than the onshore wind power on the continental US.
Perhaps yes, perhaps no for tax credit impact. However there is no good economic rational for what Trump did - both from regualtor as well as policy credibly point of view, in respect to the already going ahead and spending capital projects.
100% agree with you there. The Government should follow through with its promises, it really doesn't matter what the economics say. I was just chiming in that (for the US) offshore isn't great economically.
Ah well there - yes we are in full agreement, and most definately US Offshore as a push is of little sense if the US doesn't dump application of the Jones Act and other sundry self-imposed restrctions that inflate install costs for any off-shore - just use the damn nordics specialists ships for God's sake, if you can get an off-shore economics going then naturally the ships can follow... (and specialists etc etc.)
What Biden admin did was just outright stupid and cost-inflating.
Inflating your initial install costs isn't going to get you your cost-effective energy and is pure self-sabotage.
Thank you Noah. This was great.
I would like you to maybe reach out to some Californians and former Californians to hear what they think.
“Home prices” are a huge issue as you mentioned. However, it’s the staggering weight of bureaucratic pressure that many people will no longer tolerate.
I cannot tell you how difficult it is to build anything here without months or years of grinding something through the permitting process and feeling like we serve a “permission class” that call themselves civil servants.
Gone are the days of small contractors building spec homes for sale and making a living in the margins. Only mass scale builders can afford to develop land, sit on it for years and then navigate state and city codes to get approval and often “grants” to build more “urban dense” neighborhoods with cheaply built homes that are worth half of what they cost to build and are sold for.
It’s a nightmare now. I think we’re passing 1100 new laws a year. A year! Who can keep up? Navigate that? And who benefits?
Yes, housing is expensive. But so is supporting the bureaucracy that never suffers for its overly invasive and painfully grifting behavior.
I'm a Californian and can attest to both the high cost and burdensome bureaucracy of residing in the Golden State. But with a household income in the 95th percentile nationally, I am (for the moment, at least) compensated well enough to continue living here. But at the same time, I live a decidedly middle-class lifestyle despite my income. I dine at restaurants once or twice a month at most but cook at home the rest of the time. I have not paid for a vacation since 2018, with all my paid time off being of the "staycation" variety. I drive a 2013 Toyota Prius that has been fully paid off since 2018. I loathe the process of shopping and half of my wardrobe is from middle school, so it's not like I'm pouring money into fast fashion. I contribute fully to my 401K each year but I don't save much outside of that. And I'm single and have no kids. How do families live here? Living as simply as I do on the income I have and still not being able to grow my savings outside of retirement is a damning indictment of CA housing policy.
Life long Californian who moved to FL last year due to the draw of warm sandy white beaches, and to a secondary effect depressing cultural scene (SF) and high taxes.
Oh, and we are both retired. Living in the most expensive city in the country living on savings just makes no economic sense.
As a cyclist, I’m very much in favor of using up all the wind lol.
One thing to consider about labor, is that American labor has mostly lost all Overtime pay. Under FLSA, for decades, OT made up a significant contribution of pay. Now, employers use part-time employees, can send them home early to timely management direct labor variable cost. This labor productivity extends to "classifying" more employees as "Exempt" from FLSA Overtime rules. So more "labor", works for free past 40hrs/week or 8hr/day.
This free labor productivity capture is pretty significant.
But Trump cut taxes for overtime and tips and now the AZ governed wants to expand that to the state too. Silly tax policies.
“Whether that’s enough to get Russia to stop its campaign of conquest is anybody’s guess.” I’ll bite - no it is not. The Kremlin is backed into a corner and winning is the only option to remain in power. They obviously can’t win, other wise they would have by now so prolonging is the only option to remain in their cushy positions. After everything that’s been said and done, peace won’t do the trick. It existential for their leadership - actually for one man. And the culture has an astonishingly high tolerance for a shittty existence.
For real, is there a time since Putin has come into power that the Kremlin doesn't double down on decisions, no matter how bad?
I just listened to your recent podcast. It was interesting because I felt you tackled the AI argument a little differently than you do in writing. One thing that struck me more than usual was that you seem to underestimate the power of AI. And potentially I am in the minority here in both believing in the extreme power of AI, being generally optimistic (given the proper path), but also being existentially terrified - like standing at the top of a terrifyingly steep and beautiful cliff. It's likely that all well-documented knowledge fields will be irrelevant within the next decade. Then the undocumented ones will become documented, and they too will go. The last hold-outs will be hands-on-jobs, but that will only last until robotic articulating sausages are perfected. Then we just become irrelevant sacks of watery meat, some kind of outmoded bio-cybernetic progenitor.
As it currently stands we are looking at the potential enshittification of humanity. And it can feel a little like gaslighting to talk about robot friends and ignore that it is at least possible that within the next decade all human work will be meaningless. And I agree that may be exciting and good for humans in the long term, but I live in now, and I would like to live my full life in relative peace without being killed early in the transience of the biggest revolution humanity has ever seen.
If the government starts funding scientific research outside the universities, that could be a game changer for breaking the hold university's have on our culture. It's time to free knowledge from the university
Will lead to better scientists too. It's a miserable career path that scares people away. I always liked science but never gave it a thought as a career because I would rather take a bullet than work in academia.
India is no longer a "poor, basket case" of a country. As Noah says:
'Even relatively low-income people in India now tend to own a fridge, a motorbike (or car), a mobile phone, and a TV. That was not true a decade ago.
Remember, as much as certain smug intellectuals like to sneer at and dismiss the idea of economic growth and of GDP, for people in poor countries, GDP is everything, and growth is the utterly transformative. India has been doing a good job of transforming its people’s lives, and it deserves our praise, encouragement, and support.'
Which is why I am writing my Substack series on India. I don't think a lot of people really understand what goes on there. It is not like any other place on the planet.
A key advantage for wind is that it produces much more energy than solar per unit transmission resource consumed. Since transmission is the binding constraint in US, wind is still promising. Additionally, whereas solar resource is really poor in the upper midwest and Northeast, wind resource is abundant.
The industry is evolving towards trifectas- solar, wind and batteries combined under a single transmission interconnection. Trifecta capacity factor (annual energy production per unit transmission resource consumed) is higher than combined cycle gas power plants, and less expensive
To transmit energy from generation power plants to loads, there needs to be sufficient transmission capacity to deliver the energy to the load under the most stressful conditions of the years (storms, fires, cold snaps, etc.)
However building transmission is also the hardest job in the power industry. The reason is that you need consent and permits for every jurisdiction or person or landowner that is in the vicinity of the transmission line. To build a 500 mile transmission line you need consents from hundreds of even thousands of landowners, communities and jurisdictions. This process takes decades while billions of dollars of investment is at risk due to the consent process.
As a result, the problem to solve is to maximize the use of existing transmission to meet increased electricity demand
How does wind consume less transmission resource than solar? Is it by being more constant over time?
Hey Kenny! Wind produces more energy per MW transmission capacity. Wind has a capacity factor of 35%-45%. Solar has a capacity factor of 25%-33%.
Land is not the binding constraint in US, transmission capacity is the binding constraint.
I’m still not sure I understand what that means. Is this the idea? A power installation needs enough transmission capacity to transmit power at the rate of peak production (noon on a sunny summer day for solar, highest wind speeds for wind). Solar generates zero power half the time, and less than the peak almost all the time, so it only sends about 25-30% of the power that the transmission capacity is capable of. But wind is almost always generating some power, and in good places the wind is close to constant, so it can get closer to half of the transmission capacity on average. Is that right?
If so, then can’t you fix that if solar panels get cheap, by just putting in less capacity than you would need to transmit peak power production? You’d be wasting some generation that never gets transmitted, but you’d have a lot more time that you’re maxing out your transmission capacity.
Kenny, your understanding is correct.
A 100 MW solar plant with 25% capacity factor will produce (100 MW x 8760 hours x 0.25) = 219,000 MWh in a year
A 100 MW wind plant with 45% capacity factor will produce (100 MW x 8760 hrs x 0.45) = 394,000 MWh in a year
We pair solar power plants with battery power plants so that the batteries can charge from the solar energy and discharge in the evening.
Assume hypothetically, wind capacity factor is 50% and solar capacity factor is 25%.
In that case, to produce equivalent energy as 100 MW of wind, you would need 200 MW solar and atleast 100 MW battery. This is a total of 300 MW, i.e. 3x nameplate equipment.
Alternatively, you could combine 100 MW wind + 100 MW solar + 100 MW battery under the same 100 MW transmission interconnection and operate at 75% capacity factor, which is higher than a combined cycle natural gas plant.
People point to the pandemic as some kind of marker for overhiring in tech but IMO overhiring has been going on since the end of the financial crisis due to increased investments in tech in the zero percent interest rate environment. If you look at some of the top tech companies, the revenue is still concentrated in some areas and most employees are working in BUs that don’t make any money. Ever since Musk blew up Twitter and showed that you don’t need so many employees to run an app/web company, there’s been an increased focus on efficiency.
I'm with Noah and don't agree with Kolko's take absolving Trump and AI of blame for low hiring. Anecdotally, my company has effectively entered a hiring freeze for the better part of 18 months and it's 100% because 1) AI is capable of performing entry-level tasks in my industry and 2) we don't want to invest in hiring when Trump can fu*k the economy on a whim. Jed points to timing in making his argument as if business decision makers are incapable of being forward thinking. News flash, Jed, most big decisions made today are done with tomorrow in mind. And in California, hiring is a very big decision because of how expensive and cumbersome it is to fire a bad hire.
People are leaving CA for many reasons, none related to how beautiful or nice it is to live here.
What I’ve personally seen is:
* People at companies about to go public moving to TX for lower taxes
* Housing certainly is expensive here
I think the employment rates are linked to this. Remote work is most feasible in software. It follows that those workers can be in other countries. Combine a massive shift toward outsourcing with a mentality of significant overhiring in the 2010s (I was practically flogged to hire faster - it always felt nuts!), and I think that explains what we’re seeing.
Of course, CEOs are gonna say they’re implementing AI, not that all their software is being built in Egypt now.
If you wanna talk about tariffs, let’s tariff the shit out of outsourcing American labor. Make it cost 50% more to hire a SWE or support rep somewhere else and you’ll see Americans getting jobs again.
It is worth putting the California migration story in perspective. See state data here: https://dof.ca.gov/media/docs/forecasting/Demographics/estimates/PressRelease_July2025.pdf.
TL;dr: The difference in California's population in 2020 vs 2025 is fewer than 13,000 people in a state of almost 40 million. Would we prefer population growth? Yes -- in both high and low-skilled professions. Do we have a massive housing problem? For sure. Are there compositional shifts underway? Always. Should we worry about a weakening of tech clustering? Yes -- and Hollywood as well. We were, after all, once an aerospace state.
But are people "fleeing" California in large numbers? No. And we count these our people pretty carefully.
Worth noting: total net population changes use births and immigration to camouflage domestic migration losses of ~140k to ~250k per year. These are large enough to reshape regions, labor markets, and politics—even when immigration and births keep the overall population afloat.
Another topic in metascience funding is prizes. XPrize has a long track record as a private organization, and I can even remember John McCain campaigning on a $300 million prize for battery technology. I'm personally interested in the XPrize Healthspan prize, which has a target of 10-20 years of restored capacity in muscle, cognitive, and immune function, and was happy when Jamie Justice was announced as the director.
It seems in this case the CCP is acting prudently in the interest of the Chinese nation’s power and economic health, in preventing their business elite class from treasonously shipping off their productive capacity overseas to play labor arbitrage against their own people. They know very well what happened to us in the west with the China Shock and don’t intent to simply let India do the same to them without a fight.