You downplay the antitrust issues of big tech. Nothing new, but here are some:
1. They are all conglomerates with sometimes completely different businesses (online retailer and cloud business, search engine and entertainment, hardware provider and apps ecosystem etc.) and will add more when they see opportunities. While this is not illegal, this does point to concentration of market power.
2. They buy competitors to try to control their market (a single company controls most social media).
3. They buy dozens of competing startups when they think they can add value to their business or see a potential threat.
4. They control internet platforms or ecosystems, making it harder for others to compete
5. They lock in consumers, (how easy is it to move to a different social medium when all your friends dont? ). While this is how the internet works, this is a huge advantage.
And while not a competition issue, they control our data, they control freedom of (hate) speech, can move elections, are addictive and have influence on our mental health that we are only beginning to understand.
Yes, they have been great for the US economy, are the envy of the world and I use them a lot.
But I dont think you can deny they have lots of (market) power, raising many issues. I would be surprised if we continue to accept this, maybe the US will, but the rest of the world?
The neo-Brandeisians are attacking market power as much as political power. Read the Lena Khan 2017 law review article on Amazon, the article that elevated her to head of the FTC. She and her fellow neo-Brandeisians are trying to break the hold that Bork’s focus only on current consumer prices has had on anti-trust decisions.
Most but not all of these new behemoths benefit from network effects and very large economies of scale, which is why they have been able to sustain their competitive advantages for so long. Noah, you know this.
Yeah the minute I saw Noah dismissing antitrust enforcement against big tech on the basis of no rise in the "price of software" my eyeballs rolled so far they fell out of my head.
Honestly it's takes like these that make me wonder about the entire rest of the piece.
Smith has become captured by the e/acc crowd intellectually and won’t say anything to criticize them. He goes to their parties and hobnobs with these billionaires.
The hard cut between political and market power is just conceptually untenable with corporations as large as Amazon & co. An unfortunate mistake that many trained economists, who like to theorize about economic relations as if they're somehow independent of our socio-political systems and the human lifeworld, tend to make.
People on the left actually quite liked Google, back in the days when their slogan still was 'Don't be Evil' and the people in charge still were somewhat idealistic nerds.
We're really not afraid of software, nor progress. What the left is afraid of is the fact that these giant institutional behemoths are void of moral considerations, and are in some cases led by outright sociopaths, backed by VC/PE people that somehow are even worse. In general I don't believe that legal incorporation means that respect for laws, nature or even social welfare is optional, whereas companies like Meta and Google have now developed into unavoidable monsters that don't even respect their own costumers or employees.
I think Varoufakis his take on Technofeudalism was quite interesting, even if you don't agree a 100% with what he says.
if you are just an average person, you see that to have a phone work you have to buy a new one every few years, when there is really nothing wrong with the phone you have, yet they stop working well. Planned obsolescence. You have two choices, ie no real choice.
There are constant meaningless upgrades to computers, two choices there as well. In fact, the upgrades usually make them worse for the average person because all they do is change how they work and add a lot of options you don't want or need.
You nailed it. What is to be done? Maybe nothing. Maybe Texas, the home of oil will just continue to build solar because it makes sense. And who knows it’s when and what peak oil is but there is no peak sun 🌞
Trump/GOP is hostile to renewables for only ONE reason: Big Oil/Coal is one of their top constituencies, and *pays* them big time to squelch the competition that is eating their lunch. Like Detroit's Big Three, who were hobbled by top-heavy and incompetent management--but pathetically tried to blame their ass-kicking by the Japanese on unions--Big Oil's GOP champions toss out specious reasons why renewables suck.
You misread the linked article, the only states with majority coal for electricity generation are WV, KY, MO, ND, UT, and WY. I don’t think the GOP is worried about losing voters in any of those states.
You also didn’t read the fine print of the other report, which says only $96 million was direct donations to the Trump campaign by employees of oil companies. Solar and wind are not replacements for oil, and I don’t know how much Big Gas gave to Trump, though Liberty Energy “donated” their founder and CEO after the fact to do time as Secretary of DOE.
And donations don’t matter much , Biden/Harris raised much more money, but even though they wasted much of it on celebrity endorsements it didn’t help them win.
Coal is primarily *produced* in states like WY, WV, and KY. Where it is indeed a very "big" deal by every economic--and political--metric. The first link demonstrated that the 20% of US electricity generation from coal is still highly significant.
My second comment was with regards to oil/gas donations to the GOP generally; not its current party leader specifically. Yale Climate tallied Fossil Fuel donations at the federal level for the 2023-24 election cycle exceeded $219 million, of which the vast majority went to GOP candidates. This total does not include spending on non-federal races. Perhaps those donations were just for giggles?
Big donors, such as those pesky billionaires, are only a problem if they donate to Republican candidates, which made them evil. The GOOD billionaires donate to Democrat candidates, which made them losers.
We live in (far western) WY. Our electricity has been super cheap for years because it came from Snake River hydropower plants. I'm no fan of dams and what they do to rivers. But, I am a fan of cheep "green" energy. As these dams our removed, we will rely more on gas/coal plants, so I am informed by the local utility
Peak oil means that recoverable oil runs out while we still need it, but that has long been disproven. For solar the problem, peak solar is at noon and the sun runs out once a day, for at least half the time. “We will just add batteries for storage”. Then include the cost of the batteries in your price forecasts, and the possibility of huge fires like the one at Moss Landing last week.
Just a random observation - there are big fires at oil refineries fairly often and it’s no big deal. It’s very common for auto manufactures to order owners not to park their vehicles indoors due to fire risk.
But somehow if it’s new technology people get all worked up about it despite being completely oblivious to all the times it happens with current technology.
When a fire happens at a refinery it may shut down the refinery for a while, but there are other refineries and storage tanks, so it doesn’t end up in the gasoline network being shutdown. If you have buildings full of lithium ion batteries that are supplying the grid in the future (there are minimal installations now because of the cost) it could result in the grid being shutdown which is a real time emergency.
I’m not against grid batteries, but the cost and fire danger of Lithium batteries is higher than the public should be forced to pay for. When cheaper Sodium or Iron Air batteries become production ready and cost effective, that would be when batteries should be used instead of gas for solar downtime.
I don’t think that is the definition of peak oil and I was being snarky about the phrase as you point out peak oil was predicted years ago but has not happened yet. Of course storage has to be included. My point was oil will run out eventually. Maybe 100 years. The sun millions of years
You usually respect Scott Alexander. He wrote very supportively of the vetoed AI safety bill. He also, quite frankly, seems to have far more contact with the people actually making AI. He is also not a huge fan of being Anti Tech.
Where do you actually disagree?
Also, 3 tech billionaires stood behind Trump at the inauguration... That seems important.
I got to his listing of the 11 assumptions, but the last one, “it will want to end humanity”, isn’t part of the standard AI doom argument at all. The standard argument is more like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice- the brooms didn’t *want* to drown Mickey Mouse, they just wanted to keep fetching water. Similarly, humans didn’t want to make the Yangtze dolphin go extinct - we just did enough things we did want that, oops, no more dolphins. The worry is that powerful AI has whatever interests it has, and humans become as likely to go extinct as other species are around us.
I mean, if the plot of a James Bond movie were "a small group of men are assembling many multiples of all human genius from the beginning of time and using it to pursue their own objectives without the ability of any government on Earth to restrain them", we would definitely cheer when Bond killed that group of men and blew up their data centers. Unlike the Yangtze dolphin, we can use our opposable thumbs when we need to defend ourselves from hubristic humans.
The small group of men would be unable to control the AI, and Bond would be unable to destroy it. Opposable thumbs are no match for vastly superior intellect.
I read this and it strikes me as less than convincing. He seems to be making an argument about poorly defined assumptions which is very true, but there is an implicit argument in his piece which is, "Until all of these are properly defined, the risk is not worth talking about"
Diseases killed millions before humans had an understanding of Germ theory. Not understanding how viruses worked in 1576 didn't make small pox "not deadly."
He also assumes that, because human intelligence is a combination of many separate biological systems, that artificial intelligence can't achieve something comparable. That seems like a big assumption.
Finally, he takes it as a given that the AI will want to trade with humans or, at least, find it too troublesome to kill us all. This assumes that the AI would need something from us and have meaningful resource constraints.
He raises good points but he hasn't shown that AI is safe.
You've mentioned it several times, but solar power isn't straight up superior to nuclear power. Different sources of energy aren't directly or easily comparable because there are so many different dimensions to compare them along. For example, solar power is not dispatchable, whereas nuclear power is dispatchable over a timescale of days.
Instead of seeing them as substitutes, it's better to see different sources of power as complements. One of the best complements for solar and wind power is actually natural gas power. An optimally low carbon grid would actually have natural gas, because battery storage at the scale needed for pure solar and wind uses more carbon than natural gas to cover dark and windless periods in most parts of the world. Thinking of fossil fuel, nuclear and renewable energy as substitutes is an effect of framing energy policy as about climate rather than energy abundance that you correctly decry. We should be aiming for an optimal portfolio of all technologies that gives the best combination of cost, reliability, climate impact, risk, time to deployment, etc. rather than picking winners and sinners.
You are shouting into the void, Noah prefers to remain in the dark about how solar requires storage, and regularly glosses over the problems with batteries.
Batteries are getting cheaper and better at nearly the same rate that solar cells themselves are. Unless something drastically changes and breaks the trend this year, batteries + solar will be increadingly cheaper than other forms of power.
The cost curve isn’t close to solar cell costs reductions. In 2010 Lithium batteries were at $1200/kWh reducing to only $132/kWh in 2020 and back up to $139/kWh. Solar cell costs have gone down steadily, batteries have not.
Also, while Lithium makes sense for cars, grid storage is not mass or volume sensitive and should use other battery chemistry like Iron air or sodium which are cheaper per watt, but not per kg or m³
1. What are the sources for the battery cost there?
2. To my point about batteries getting cheaper, citing a nearly 90% price reduction in a decade as a way to refute it seems odd. I am curious about the 132 vs 139 and I am wondering if that is adjusted for inflation.
3. Also, did China stop innovating on this? Do their batteries cost 139/kWh?
Bottom line: Moss Ladning can (or could -- past tense now) deliver 3000MWh. That's comparable to a modern 1000MW CCGT natural gas plant or to the 950MW Edwards & Sanborn Project (in the Mohave Desert)... for 3 hours.
This US Govt publication is a great source of cost estimates for various power plants, solar systems, battery storage, etc. It's from 2020, but as a ballpark estimate, it's great.
A 1000MW large solar array (like Edwards Sanborn) costs about $1.3M/MW, or about $1.3B to build. A comparable CCGT plant (natural gas) is about 30% cheaper.
A 1000MW battery storage facility capable of delivering that level of power for 12 hours (to get through a single dark night) runs about $3M/MW -- 2-3 times as much as the cost of the underlying power plants to generate that power.
Noah resists the obvious conclusion with religious fervor: using current technology, grid level battery storage is a dead end.
Now, I don't know the math you did. In the 2020 document, they have 2 entries for Battery Storage and in 2025 they only have one. In 2020, the price per kWh for the 50 MW | 200 MWh was 347$ (421$ in 2024) and the price for the 50 MW | 100 MWh was 423$ (513$ in 2024).
Now, in the 2025 document they have only 1 entry for Battery storage. It is a 150 MW | 600 MWh and they calculate the cost at 436$. I think that means it has actually gotten a little bit cheaper in the intervening 4 years, but I could be reading this wrong.
Is it possible to do your calculations again with the 2025 document?
I hadn't seen the updated one, since I've been using the 2020 one for a few years. Thanks.
My math is pretty simple. If it costs $1.7M per MW to build a battery facility that can deliver that power level for 4 hours (which is what the 2025 document says) then it costs ~3X that to store 12 hours. (These are physical batteries, so the relationship of storage to space and cost is pretty much linear.) Thus, a 12 hour, 1000 MW storage facility would run $1.7M/MW * 3 * 1000 = $5.1B.
There's lots of variables and approximations in that, but even using the EIA's own numbers directly:
100 MW, 2 hours = $347 / kWh (2020 pg 143)
100 MW, 4 hours = $423 / kWh (2020 pg 147)
150 MW, 4 hours = $436 / kMh (2025 pg 158)
Regardless of all the hype and Noah's graphs extrapolating Li+ battery cost to near zero, the cost of actually building grid-level storage didn't change significantly between 2020 and 2024. The 10% increase in per kWh cost is likely mostly due to general inflation; in constant dollar cost per MWh, I suspect the latter two systems are almost identical.
Thanks for the update of one of my favorite energy documents though. :-)
And fusion will solve all our energy needs forever.
There's a lot of hurdles between theory, lab demo, small prototype, production demo, and mass production. Iron-air is, last time I checked, somewhere between step 2 and 3 of that process. Is there anyone that has a industrial scale, production prototype operating yet (something in the 1000MWh+ category)?
Again, it’s under contract to be built. The thing is, this technology uses cheap materials and a process well-known before its use with batteries. These battery farms in general are modular so scaling isn’t an issue. This isn’t fusion where it’s extreme physics.
The main issues with iron air batteries are weight (a non-issue for a ground installation, and iron is extremely abundant and available not just from the ground but from recycling - most steel comes from scrap these days for instance - and their efficiency is poor compared to lithium batteries (only 45% or so). But if you’re charging from solar where we already have excess capacity for much of the day in places like Texas and California, lower efficiency is less of an issue. Getting 45% efficiency is better than wasting it.
I don’t know how it compares to water-based storage (pump uphill during the day and let it flow down through turbines at night) but you’ve got to have water to pump it and those reservoirs take up space.
Finally, iron air batteries don’t pose a fire risk.
Water storage is great in terms of cost and efficiency, but the energy density sucks. I wonder how much land area it would take to power the entire CA state grid for 72 hours on nothing but pumped hydro?
I agree that iron air looks very promising, really the only technology capable of grid storage, and considering its weight, that's all it will ever be suited for. But my understanding is that density is precisely what makes it so effective at long-term storage.
At this point, it's still only theory and lots of hope though. The discovery of steel to the Bessemer process was centuries. I doubt iron-air will take that long, but I think counting on it to solve our grid storage problems anytime soon would be foolish. I'll change my mind when I see that "under contract to be built" facility actually hooked up to the grid and operating. Which is about the same time I'll change my mind about fusion energy too -- although, I agree, iron-air is further along the curve than fusion, which still hasn't even made step 2 in my list.
Thanks for the link to the Maine project. That's step 4, so let us hope it goes well.
Lithium ion did! I remember when I was younger that every electronic gadget used its own proprietary batteries, unless they were the standard AA or AAA, but now everything is lithium ion and we have devices that can even propel you around for hours on the charge they carry.
I think it is also underappreciated that you don't need one night of storage, you may need much more depending on your climate. In Europe that would be almost certainly at least a *week*. And that week would usually but not always avoid shortfalls. A week of overcast weather with not a lot of sun and wind is basically called “next winter”.
Or you have backup power plants, but now you're in the business of building and maintaining enough power plants to power your entire grid. That also doesn't seem optimal.
This is a great article, Noah. Like you, I wish more conservatives (my own tribe) were less doomer. I'm pretty optimistic about AI.
However, you have a habit of using a particular phrase that really grates on conservatives generally: "right-wing culture wars".
The culture wars are not right-wing. You only perceive them that way because you think the goodness of the left's cultural vision is mostly beyond question, so anyone who wants to upend it must be engaged in a "culture war". But history tells a very different story -- we are not the ones seeking to change the culture. We didn't legalize abortion by judicial fiat, or change a 3 millennia old definition of marriage the same way. We didn't change school curriculum to secularize it and, 30 years later, re-catechize it in the new rainbow religion. We didn't start pretending that men can get pregnant. Our "culture war" actions have been fundamentally defensive, responses to the legal and cultural changes being pushed by the Left. (Some so insane that even you and Matt and similar leftists struggle to defend them.) Are the people "standing athwart History yelling 'stop'" really the cause of our "culture wars"? By any objective measure of the last 60 years, the Left is winning this war.
Among conservatives, the phrase "right-wing culture war" brands the speaker as someone conservatives shouldn't trust. I encourage you to eliminate the partisan claim. This is also more accurate, since it takes 2 to tango, and the "culture war" exists because we have two rival cultures vying for supremacy in America. If only 1 side were pushing, there would be no war.
yeah, I agree with this, you see it even in these comments, the on fire liberals have become blindly self righteous and refuse to see their part in the problems. One commenter accused the right of disinformation, while we hear that two year olds know who they are, there is no such thing as men and women, all whites are white supremacists, the Oligarchs are the problem 75% of whom supported Harris, two of whom Biden gave the medal of freedom the same week he made that pronouncement, no one is teaching critical race theory when you're fourth grader comes home and asks, why are white people evil, Mommy?
There's big problems with truth on both sides, and I am not a conservative myself, for the record.
As Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it in her response to Biden's SOTU address a few years ago: "the divide in America is no longer between right and left but between normal and crazy." November 5th shoed that Americans (many not particularly conservative) have largely come to the same conclusion.
Hardware vs software is a neat attempt at a new angle, but I don't think it sticks. I can't see evidence of a systematic hardware/software bias in the decisions of the left or right. Your final paragraphs provide a more realistic assessment: it's simply about who is empowered, not any attribute of a new tech in and of itself.
Firstly, even the small set of examples provided are a stretch. Vaccines aren't "hardware" as conventionally understood, are they? You could maybe call them wetware. And Elon Musk has been welcomed into the Republican coalition without a problem despite that his companies are (rather unusually) all hardware companies. Trump loves rockets!
Nor are Democrats software-averse. Quite the opposite. Some Silicon Valley software firms are dominated by Democrats (largely IMHO because they instantly purge anyone found to be a Republican, as the left always do). But clearly, if Democrats had a problem with software per se, then this wouldn't be the case.
I think what we're seeing here doesn't need any high level abstractions to understand. Both sides fear technologies that they think will unfairly advantage their ideological opponents, and they're cool with technologies that won't. So Democrats fear anything related to free speech or information (AI, social media, big tech) because despite these firms being full of Democrats the party leaders have become fully Orwellian, believing that they must have an iron grip on information and narrative otherwise they will automatically lose. The Republicans meanwhile fear that Democrats are using bogus narratives about climate to forcibly de-industrialize the west, and that arguments for solar/wind are being made in bad faith as a consequence. They don't tend to have a problem with wind or solar itself beyond the aesthetic land use arguments (as you point out, there are huge buildouts in Texas), but because the "expert class" that tends to weigh in on power technologies is so compromised by left wing activism they have trouble working out whether renewables are genuinely competitive tech that people want or whether it's artificial demand driven by academic and Democrat grifting.
Dems don't fear free speech. They fear *alternative facts* speech masquerading as news, and influencing national policy: "Dems abort babies after birth." "The Haitians (illegals) are eating all the dogs and cats." "There's massive voter fraud."
The November Ipsos poll of likely GOP voters found that 85% got some/most/all of their news from FOX News, and that 80% of these believe that: a) Crime and unemployment are at near all-time highs; b) Inflation is as high as it was 2-3 years ago; c) We're in a recession.
If it weren't that GOP voters actually believe this nonsense, and vote accordingly, it'd almost be funny.
If Democrats don’t fear free speech, then why did Biden’s enforcers pressure FaceBook to remove posts about Covid origins or vaccine side effects, and Twitter to suppress news about the Hunter laptop?
I'm with Buzen here, Dems are limited free speech even more than the right and lying about it. There's a real lack of self reflection here based on simply demonizing the right. For example, most books banned at libraries, even now, are by the left. You would never know it reading the media.
It's all over if you look. Here's a recent twitter post from a librarian I know, and like her I have checked my local bookstores for certain best selling conservative titles, nowhere to be found, yet every obscure critical race theory title is there.
Here it is:
Jennifer Gingrich:
As a librarian, I can tell you that the only books being banned in public libraries are conservative books, and the librarians are the ones banning them. Public libraries in my city & state have thousands of books pushing LGBTQIA+ issues, but not a single copy of ANY gender critical books, even by left-wing feminist writers, despite many being at the top of Amazon's bestseller lists. They don't even have copies of books that hit #1 on the NYT bestseller lists, if they're conservative - there's not a single copy of any
@DouglasKMurray
book in
@PortPublicLibME
The American Library Association refuses to even send their customary letter of support to any public library defending the right to keep a conservative book on shelf. They still send it for left-wing books. ALA and PEN every year put out lists of 'banned books' but they leave out all of the right-wing titles so they can pretend that it's only the right that bans books. It isn't, by a long shot.
You are correct that First Amendment rights are at issue here. And there are obviously different interpretations of what exactly "truth" is, as opposed to opinion. The FOX News vs. Dominion Voting case proved that certain RW media outlets will maliciously lie for financial gain.
But unlike the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, FOX News has a long and storied track record of continually promoting mis- and dis-information. Including repeating Russian and Chinese Intelligence nonsense like the Hunter Biden laptop "conspiracy".
You aren't contradicting anything I said, just paraphrasing it. The Democrats fear free speech because they believe people will use it to say things that Democrats believe aren't true. What those things are is irrelevant.
Noah, I love you, but some things about this post are off-base.
First of all, "when land is available for solar, nuclear simply isn’t competitive at all." Saying "when land is available for solar" is like "assume a can opener." Sure, when plentiful land is available *in a location with low cloud cover and good sun exposure year-round*, then solar is awesome! I love solar! But there are plenty of people living in areas that are cloudy and/or too far north, for whom solar is not an option, unless you build thousands of miles of long-distance transmission lines. And even with locations that have good solar exposure *on average*, you're going to get cloudy days. We need backup power, and nuclear > fossil fuels.
Second, I don't like the whiff of both-sidesism in your post. "See, Democrats are against AI, and Republicans are against clean energy! Both sides fear the future! Both sides bad!"
There are legitimate reasons to fear AI. Several thinkers, including Nick Bostrom and Scott Alexander, have discussed at length the risk that AI becomes super-powerful and super-intelligent and kills us, because it has no use for us. I personally think these fears are overblown, but here's the problem - it's easy to laugh at these people and call them alarmist, but by the time we get enough evidence that AI is really dangerous, it may be too late to do anything about it.
In contrast, Trump/Republican opposition to clean energy is partly founded on legitimate concerns - unemployed coal miners, etc. - but mostly it's about hating the out-group (all those elitist liberals who care about climate change). Scientific evidence shows that climate change is a really big problem, and clean energy is the way to try to solve it without demanding degrowth and poverty. Opposition to clean energy is as spiteful as it is stupid. Abundant, clean energy should be considered a good thing regardless of whether you're a Democrat or a Republican!
Worth noting that the AI safety concerns are coming from people that are not generally anti-tech or anti-progress, I don't think it's accurate to be bundling these together. The AI safety concerns are mostly coming from a small group of people very involved in the space, desperately trying to get the rest of humanity to notice that we're about to dive off a cliff. For example, this includes two of the three "godfathers of AI": Geoff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.
If you invent something smarter than you are, it is not likely to keep you around.
Noah's takes on AI suffer from not understanding that "inventing a new species more capable than humans, whose goals would also benefit from the consumption of resources with which it is in competition with humans to secure" is a different category than inventing a better mousetrap.
On solar you're right and you're wrong. Solar is way cheaper than Nuclear. However, Solar + Batteries + Transmission lines + gas backup (when the batteries run out) is way more expensive than Nuclear. The cost is the total system, not just the generation.
I think Solar has a significant part to play for our electrical grid. But a part. Even with cheap batteries, you need to store enough power for weeks if you have no backup. And possibly for a year - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer (talk about mixed blessings - a volcanic explosion like that would reduce global warming, but seriously degrade solar power for a couple of years).
The reason California has the highest electricity prices in the lower 48 is that it is heavily Wind + Solar without sufficient backup. And one of their prime backups at present is coal plants. But they're out of state so California does not count them in its CO2 emissions.
Please take the total system picture into account for power. I do enjoy your posts and I think you're usually spot on, including Japan & Taiwan (I've worked in both). But on power, and you can't be an expert on everything, you're missing some key parts.
There's a simple reason why Democrats thought AI Safety was a concern: because AI really is potentially very dangerous. We're not at the "AI can build an engineered pandemic and kill billions of people" level of danger yet, but wouldn't it be better to have some laws in place before we actually are?
“Nuclear’s compactness makes it useful for some niche applications, but its high costs and lack of a learning curve means that when land is available for solar, nuclear simply isn’t competitive.”
But the “land available” for solar is in the backyards and communities of middle class Americans. Maybe it’s easy to idealize fields of solar panels out there in “flyover country” when you are young and urban, but, to get to your broader point, when you are a middle aged person with a mortgage and a home and roots in a real, specific place, a field of solar panels and noisy and visually intrusive windmills in your community is a very unpleasant shock. And when it is forced on your community by state and federal governments that override local opposition, like in my home state, yeah, you are destroying communities and making them feel powerless about it at the same time.
How could people NOT feel resentment?
Yes, I know change is part of human life, but this is very powerful, coastal people (“elites”) forcing unwanted changes on less powerful middle class people, and that creates a certain political dynamic that people like Trump exploit.
It would be much more politically viable, which would also be better for the planet in the long run, for this issue to become depoliticized by making the stakes less high for citizens. Yes, we need to reduce pollution. But making that a Grand Energy Transformation that Must Happen All Right Now, while thrilling to 24 year old activists, scares the shit out of normal people - and for very legitimate reasons.
It would be much more politically viable to just conceptualize and market clean energy as one component among many that is part of a long term, steady process of *climate mitigation* through increasingly better control of pollution in all areas. This should be pitched as a process of maintenance and updating that is slow, practical, and ongoing - more efficient tech for fossil fuels AND gradual increases in wind and solar where it shows success and makes sense.
Maybe that doesn’t give young progressives much excitement or deep meaning, but it would actually result in better stewardship of resources and care for the climate in the long run, and would be more stable.
Renewable energy should also make sense. It makes sense to put solar panels on rooftops or in barren deserts and windmills in isolated, non-scenic or already heavily urbanized areas with lots of wind - and noise and lights and generally concentrated human artificiality already. Kind of hard for someone in a city to argue that they are bothered by windmill noise or it ruins their view. It makes sense for urban people, especially in warm climates, to drive electric cars.
It does not make sense to raze public forests in Gaylord, Michigan for a solar field. It does not make sense to make people who drive a lot in cold climates go all electric - we need hybrids. For a town to convert peaceful cornfields and meadows behind people’s two acre residential yards that they have mortgages on or own outright, places where locals hunt and fish or just enjoy the quiet, places that people intentionally moved to for this lifestyle… well, it just pisses people off.
Cities have always been not just loud and crowded, but the they have also always been somewhat transient, with huge populations of immigrants, young people, single people, and creatives. Cities are places where you expect a lot of change and development. That is part of their dynamism.
And maybe that is why it is so hard for young, dynamic urbanites to understand why their ideals don’t translate. When you bring “transformative change” to small towns and suburbs, you are breaking a quiet social contract by which middle class, homeowner centric communities are places people can go to to set down roots and experience a certain lifestyle with a reasonable guarantee of stability that is central to the American Dream.
And for what gain? Are solar fields in cloudy small town Michigan going to save the planet, or just lead to more Trump?
"Why did some Democrats want to hobble AI? Again, the most likely explanation is that they were concerned with limiting the power of the tech businesspeople who created the AI."
That's quite a narrow view compared with the serious concern of tech researchers themselves on the potential dangers of AI. I found Suleman's (of move 37 fame)" The Coming Wave" and Harari's "Nexus" well thought out and compelling. When an AI judgment can negatively affect someone and an explanation for the judgment is literally impossible that is a problem. Etc. I would love to hear your opinions on what these authors have to say.
Democrats and liberals in America "fear the future" because approximately half the country appears to be terminally idiotic about fossil fuels, renewable energy, electrification and climate change, and because it now appears that tech leaders who "seemed" to be rational and reasonable on this issue have all decided to get in bed with the idiots in exchange for some political power and the chance to play at unregulated AI in order to achieve world domination from inside a public corporation (which will then be taken private). Americans more broadly "fear" AI because as the ambitions of the creeps from Aspergers Alley become clear, they recognize that there is absolutely nobody left with the political power to prevent them from extending their walled gardens to encompass every aspect of every American's life -- restricting, channeling, directing, and controlling decisions based entirely on the interests of the few who sit atop these empires with only obsequious vassals on their BODs and easily bribe-able money monsters controlling the shares (unless they themselves do via supermajority voting provisions). As the age of Artificial Super-Intelligence dawns we see the greedy ghouls laughing about AI "alignment", replacing any calls for AI safety with bravado and "male energy". We are witnessing the culmination of human intellectual endeavor and what could be the long dreamed-for key to ending scarcity and human suffering turned over to the most sinister, selfish, self-aggrandizing, uncaring and explicitly anti-human cabal of creeps in the history of capitalism. Americans fully understand that these mistakes of nature would rather put all of us in a vat of soylent green or attach us to the matrix to power their data centers than make eye contact with any us. They are gleefully racing toward a future that does not include us, let alone our children or grandchildren, and they are giddy with the realization that all they had to do was to buy an orange-tinted a-hole on the cheap to secure that future for themselves. "Fear" of the AI overlords is not enough. Hatred is the place to start, followed by public ownership and control of the tools they would use to oppress us.
"Scott Wiener, a California Democrat whose ideas I almost always endorse and respect"
Holy fuck!!! Wiener is the most despicable person on Planet Earth!!!
Wiener is responsible for the hideous legislation taking kids away from parents who do not consent to their children being mutilated and sterilized after they have been groomed by the transqueer cult, so-called "trans state sanctuary" laws.
Wiener is responsible for the CA law stopping police from investigating sex trafficking:
"Police chiefs and mayors across the state are criticizing a new law is limiting their ability to crack down on sex and human trafficking operations."
Weiner just proposed suing the oil companies for the wildfire. All I could think is, here goes my electric and gas even higher. Weiner is a tool. He's the worst politician in Ca.
Suing them for the effects of climate change which they knew their industry was causing and lying about it is necessary and welcome like suing the tobacco companies for denying their products were causing diseases and cancer.
All that is going to happen is that people in CA are going to pay more for gas, and we already have the highest gas prices in the country. It's just a blame game, what good is going to do? They need to focus on solving our problems, get the water we need, and forests cleaned up. Do we get to sue the state legislature for not doing their jobs right? Let's start with Weiner.
From your own writing: “… the internet and the smartphone, once heralded as tools of liberation and individual empowerment, might actually represent a hyper-centralized panopticon that gives totalitarians unprecedented levels of surveillance and control over personal behavior…”
Your software/hardware framing presents the two as equivalent issues, but the “software” concern is really about the control of information, which represents a legitimate threat (as you yourself argue).
Just finished reading a history of the Ottoman Empire. A great empire that found it difficult to change with the times. The sultans banned the printing press, the Janissaries elite military corps resisted modernization because it jeopardized their position in society. Eventually their more modern European peers carved them up. This historical pattern of resistance to change is one that I hope the U.S. doesn't repeat.
I thought the problem with printing was in part because Islam's iconoclasm had caused calligraphy to become a major artform in Muslim cultures, and politically powerful calligraphers naturally saw printing as a threat to their influence?
(And to be fair, the cursive-only Arabic script is a nightmare to print: even modern computers have difficulty with it.)
I've been meaning to read that one too! To be more precise, I read a book about the history of Istanbul/Constantinople, which of course focuses on the Ottoman Empire after they conquered the city.
Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World
Wonderful. My family is from there, so I'm going to add that to my reading list. I've read so many books about the city but somehow still enjoy reading more.
You downplay the antitrust issues of big tech. Nothing new, but here are some:
1. They are all conglomerates with sometimes completely different businesses (online retailer and cloud business, search engine and entertainment, hardware provider and apps ecosystem etc.) and will add more when they see opportunities. While this is not illegal, this does point to concentration of market power.
2. They buy competitors to try to control their market (a single company controls most social media).
3. They buy dozens of competing startups when they think they can add value to their business or see a potential threat.
4. They control internet platforms or ecosystems, making it harder for others to compete
5. They lock in consumers, (how easy is it to move to a different social medium when all your friends dont? ). While this is how the internet works, this is a huge advantage.
And while not a competition issue, they control our data, they control freedom of (hate) speech, can move elections, are addictive and have influence on our mental health that we are only beginning to understand.
Yes, they have been great for the US economy, are the envy of the world and I use them a lot.
But I dont think you can deny they have lots of (market) power, raising many issues. I would be surprised if we continue to accept this, maybe the US will, but the rest of the world?
The neo-Brandeisians are attacking market power as much as political power. Read the Lena Khan 2017 law review article on Amazon, the article that elevated her to head of the FTC. She and her fellow neo-Brandeisians are trying to break the hold that Bork’s focus only on current consumer prices has had on anti-trust decisions.
Most but not all of these new behemoths benefit from network effects and very large economies of scale, which is why they have been able to sustain their competitive advantages for so long. Noah, you know this.
Yeah the minute I saw Noah dismissing antitrust enforcement against big tech on the basis of no rise in the "price of software" my eyeballs rolled so far they fell out of my head.
Honestly it's takes like these that make me wonder about the entire rest of the piece.
Smith has become captured by the e/acc crowd intellectually and won’t say anything to criticize them. He goes to their parties and hobnobs with these billionaires.
The hard cut between political and market power is just conceptually untenable with corporations as large as Amazon & co. An unfortunate mistake that many trained economists, who like to theorize about economic relations as if they're somehow independent of our socio-political systems and the human lifeworld, tend to make.
People on the left actually quite liked Google, back in the days when their slogan still was 'Don't be Evil' and the people in charge still were somewhat idealistic nerds.
We're really not afraid of software, nor progress. What the left is afraid of is the fact that these giant institutional behemoths are void of moral considerations, and are in some cases led by outright sociopaths, backed by VC/PE people that somehow are even worse. In general I don't believe that legal incorporation means that respect for laws, nature or even social welfare is optional, whereas companies like Meta and Google have now developed into unavoidable monsters that don't even respect their own costumers or employees.
I think Varoufakis his take on Technofeudalism was quite interesting, even if you don't agree a 100% with what he says.
if you are just an average person, you see that to have a phone work you have to buy a new one every few years, when there is really nothing wrong with the phone you have, yet they stop working well. Planned obsolescence. You have two choices, ie no real choice.
There are constant meaningless upgrades to computers, two choices there as well. In fact, the upgrades usually make them worse for the average person because all they do is change how they work and add a lot of options you don't want or need.
This is going to be the case with most vehicles soon which is annoying.
Totally agree. Comparing scrutiny of big tech to scrutiny of solar is hilarious.
You nailed it. What is to be done? Maybe nothing. Maybe Texas, the home of oil will just continue to build solar because it makes sense. And who knows it’s when and what peak oil is but there is no peak sun 🌞
Trump/GOP is hostile to renewables for only ONE reason: Big Oil/Coal is one of their top constituencies, and *pays* them big time to squelch the competition that is eating their lunch. Like Detroit's Big Three, who were hobbled by top-heavy and incompetent management--but pathetically tried to blame their ass-kicking by the Japanese on unions--Big Oil's GOP champions toss out specious reasons why renewables suck.
Trump is hostile to the net zero technologies that "environmentalists" are _not_ hostile to and vice versa. Case in point: nuclear.
Solar and wind don’t replace oil, and there is no longer a big coal, so your theory has holes in it.
Coal still accounts for 20% of US electrical generation, and coal mining is still way "big" in WY, WV, CO, MT: https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/state-electricity-generation-fuel-shares
Gasoline/diesel engines are still 92.1% of US autos.
Big Oil spent $445 million on GOP this election cycle: https://truthout.org/articles/big-oil-spent-445-million-to-influence-2024-elections/
You misread the linked article, the only states with majority coal for electricity generation are WV, KY, MO, ND, UT, and WY. I don’t think the GOP is worried about losing voters in any of those states.
You also didn’t read the fine print of the other report, which says only $96 million was direct donations to the Trump campaign by employees of oil companies. Solar and wind are not replacements for oil, and I don’t know how much Big Gas gave to Trump, though Liberty Energy “donated” their founder and CEO after the fact to do time as Secretary of DOE.
And donations don’t matter much , Biden/Harris raised much more money, but even though they wasted much of it on celebrity endorsements it didn’t help them win.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/11/04/trump-vs-harris-fundraising-race-harris-outraised-trump-3-to-1-with-last-pre-election-report/
Coal is primarily *produced* in states like WY, WV, and KY. Where it is indeed a very "big" deal by every economic--and political--metric. The first link demonstrated that the 20% of US electricity generation from coal is still highly significant.
Why exactly do you not believe money influences elections? There's actually something like a 96% correlation between donations received and victory in House races, and 83% in Senate races. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/
My second comment was with regards to oil/gas donations to the GOP generally; not its current party leader specifically. Yale Climate tallied Fossil Fuel donations at the federal level for the 2023-24 election cycle exceeded $219 million, of which the vast majority went to GOP candidates. This total does not include spending on non-federal races. Perhaps those donations were just for giggles?
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/01/the-fossil-fuel-industry-spent-219-million-to-elect-the-new-u-s-government/
Big donors, such as those pesky billionaires, are only a problem if they donate to Republican candidates, which made them evil. The GOOD billionaires donate to Democrat candidates, which made them losers.
We live in (far western) WY. Our electricity has been super cheap for years because it came from Snake River hydropower plants. I'm no fan of dams and what they do to rivers. But, I am a fan of cheep "green" energy. As these dams our removed, we will rely more on gas/coal plants, so I am informed by the local utility
They do in conjunction with electric cars...
Only if you charge in the daytime or windy nights, and less than 10% of cars don’t run on petroleum.
Peak oil means that recoverable oil runs out while we still need it, but that has long been disproven. For solar the problem, peak solar is at noon and the sun runs out once a day, for at least half the time. “We will just add batteries for storage”. Then include the cost of the batteries in your price forecasts, and the possibility of huge fires like the one at Moss Landing last week.
Just a random observation - there are big fires at oil refineries fairly often and it’s no big deal. It’s very common for auto manufactures to order owners not to park their vehicles indoors due to fire risk.
But somehow if it’s new technology people get all worked up about it despite being completely oblivious to all the times it happens with current technology.
When a fire happens at a refinery it may shut down the refinery for a while, but there are other refineries and storage tanks, so it doesn’t end up in the gasoline network being shutdown. If you have buildings full of lithium ion batteries that are supplying the grid in the future (there are minimal installations now because of the cost) it could result in the grid being shutdown which is a real time emergency.
I’m not against grid batteries, but the cost and fire danger of Lithium batteries is higher than the public should be forced to pay for. When cheaper Sodium or Iron Air batteries become production ready and cost effective, that would be when batteries should be used instead of gas for solar downtime.
I agree with you on the downside risks of lithium vs. the new sodium batteries.
But Peak Oil is not a disproven theory; only the first estimation of when it supposedly occurred.
I don’t think that is the definition of peak oil and I was being snarky about the phrase as you point out peak oil was predicted years ago but has not happened yet. Of course storage has to be included. My point was oil will run out eventually. Maybe 100 years. The sun millions of years
You usually respect Scott Alexander. He wrote very supportively of the vetoed AI safety bill. He also, quite frankly, seems to have far more contact with the people actually making AI. He is also not a huge fan of being Anti Tech.
Where do you actually disagree?
Also, 3 tech billionaires stood behind Trump at the inauguration... That seems important.
David Pinsof thinks “AI Doomerism is Bullshit”
https://www.everythingisbullshit.blog/p/ai-doomerism-is-bullshit?utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
I am not equipped to adjudicate this issue. Will be interesting to see if Scott responds directly to David’s essay.
I got to his listing of the 11 assumptions, but the last one, “it will want to end humanity”, isn’t part of the standard AI doom argument at all. The standard argument is more like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice- the brooms didn’t *want* to drown Mickey Mouse, they just wanted to keep fetching water. Similarly, humans didn’t want to make the Yangtze dolphin go extinct - we just did enough things we did want that, oops, no more dolphins. The worry is that powerful AI has whatever interests it has, and humans become as likely to go extinct as other species are around us.
I mean, if the plot of a James Bond movie were "a small group of men are assembling many multiples of all human genius from the beginning of time and using it to pursue their own objectives without the ability of any government on Earth to restrain them", we would definitely cheer when Bond killed that group of men and blew up their data centers. Unlike the Yangtze dolphin, we can use our opposable thumbs when we need to defend ourselves from hubristic humans.
The small group of men would be unable to control the AI, and Bond would be unable to destroy it. Opposable thumbs are no match for vastly superior intellect.
Different movie, and intellect without thumbs gets you back to whales and dolphins...
Some more pushback here https://substack.com/@everythingisbullshit/note/c-89288956
Thanks for the link.
I read this and it strikes me as less than convincing. He seems to be making an argument about poorly defined assumptions which is very true, but there is an implicit argument in his piece which is, "Until all of these are properly defined, the risk is not worth talking about"
Diseases killed millions before humans had an understanding of Germ theory. Not understanding how viruses worked in 1576 didn't make small pox "not deadly."
He also assumes that, because human intelligence is a combination of many separate biological systems, that artificial intelligence can't achieve something comparable. That seems like a big assumption.
Finally, he takes it as a given that the AI will want to trade with humans or, at least, find it too troublesome to kill us all. This assumes that the AI would need something from us and have meaningful resource constraints.
He raises good points but he hasn't shown that AI is safe.
Appreciate your assessment and will keep it in mind as I continue to work my way through it.
You've mentioned it several times, but solar power isn't straight up superior to nuclear power. Different sources of energy aren't directly or easily comparable because there are so many different dimensions to compare them along. For example, solar power is not dispatchable, whereas nuclear power is dispatchable over a timescale of days.
Instead of seeing them as substitutes, it's better to see different sources of power as complements. One of the best complements for solar and wind power is actually natural gas power. An optimally low carbon grid would actually have natural gas, because battery storage at the scale needed for pure solar and wind uses more carbon than natural gas to cover dark and windless periods in most parts of the world. Thinking of fossil fuel, nuclear and renewable energy as substitutes is an effect of framing energy policy as about climate rather than energy abundance that you correctly decry. We should be aiming for an optimal portfolio of all technologies that gives the best combination of cost, reliability, climate impact, risk, time to deployment, etc. rather than picking winners and sinners.
You are shouting into the void, Noah prefers to remain in the dark about how solar requires storage, and regularly glosses over the problems with batteries.
Batteries are getting cheaper and better at nearly the same rate that solar cells themselves are. Unless something drastically changes and breaks the trend this year, batteries + solar will be increadingly cheaper than other forms of power.
The cost curve isn’t close to solar cell costs reductions. In 2010 Lithium batteries were at $1200/kWh reducing to only $132/kWh in 2020 and back up to $139/kWh. Solar cell costs have gone down steadily, batteries have not.
Also, while Lithium makes sense for cars, grid storage is not mass or volume sensitive and should use other battery chemistry like Iron air or sodium which are cheaper per watt, but not per kg or m³
1. What are the sources for the battery cost there?
2. To my point about batteries getting cheaper, citing a nearly 90% price reduction in a decade as a way to refute it seems odd. I am curious about the 132 vs 139 and I am wondering if that is adjusted for inflation.
3. Also, did China stop innovating on this? Do their batteries cost 139/kWh?
It does have some downsides though: https://apnews.com/article/battery-storage-plant-fire-california-moss-landing-7c561fed096f410ddecfb04722a8b1f8
That's about 250 miles from my house. I wouldn't want one next door.
Michael Magoon did a great piece on the costs of grid-level battery storage and specifically the Moss Landing storage facility last month.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/utility-scale-batteries-are-as-expensive
Bottom line: Moss Ladning can (or could -- past tense now) deliver 3000MWh. That's comparable to a modern 1000MW CCGT natural gas plant or to the 950MW Edwards & Sanborn Project (in the Mohave Desert)... for 3 hours.
This US Govt publication is a great source of cost estimates for various power plants, solar systems, battery storage, etc. It's from 2020, but as a ballpark estimate, it's great.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capital_cost_AEO2020.pdf
A 1000MW large solar array (like Edwards Sanborn) costs about $1.3M/MW, or about $1.3B to build. A comparable CCGT plant (natural gas) is about 30% cheaper.
A 1000MW battery storage facility capable of delivering that level of power for 12 hours (to get through a single dark night) runs about $3M/MW -- 2-3 times as much as the cost of the underlying power plants to generate that power.
Noah resists the obvious conclusion with religious fervor: using current technology, grid level battery storage is a dead end.
This interesting. I am curious why you pointed to the 2020 document. The 2025 one is out https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capital_cost_AEO2025.pdf
Now, I don't know the math you did. In the 2020 document, they have 2 entries for Battery Storage and in 2025 they only have one. In 2020, the price per kWh for the 50 MW | 200 MWh was 347$ (421$ in 2024) and the price for the 50 MW | 100 MWh was 423$ (513$ in 2024).
Now, in the 2025 document they have only 1 entry for Battery storage. It is a 150 MW | 600 MWh and they calculate the cost at 436$. I think that means it has actually gotten a little bit cheaper in the intervening 4 years, but I could be reading this wrong.
Is it possible to do your calculations again with the 2025 document?
I hadn't seen the updated one, since I've been using the 2020 one for a few years. Thanks.
My math is pretty simple. If it costs $1.7M per MW to build a battery facility that can deliver that power level for 4 hours (which is what the 2025 document says) then it costs ~3X that to store 12 hours. (These are physical batteries, so the relationship of storage to space and cost is pretty much linear.) Thus, a 12 hour, 1000 MW storage facility would run $1.7M/MW * 3 * 1000 = $5.1B.
There's lots of variables and approximations in that, but even using the EIA's own numbers directly:
100 MW, 2 hours = $347 / kWh (2020 pg 143)
100 MW, 4 hours = $423 / kWh (2020 pg 147)
150 MW, 4 hours = $436 / kMh (2025 pg 158)
Regardless of all the hype and Noah's graphs extrapolating Li+ battery cost to near zero, the cost of actually building grid-level storage didn't change significantly between 2020 and 2024. The 10% increase in per kWh cost is likely mostly due to general inflation; in constant dollar cost per MWh, I suspect the latter two systems are almost identical.
Thanks for the update of one of my favorite energy documents though. :-)
They also burst into flames and leave heavy metals in the surrounding environment, as those of us who live near Monterey County just learned.
Iron-air batteries are what will make mass renewable energy storage possible.
And fusion will solve all our energy needs forever.
There's a lot of hurdles between theory, lab demo, small prototype, production demo, and mass production. Iron-air is, last time I checked, somewhere between step 2 and 3 of that process. Is there anyone that has a industrial scale, production prototype operating yet (something in the 1000MWh+ category)?
Again, it’s under contract to be built. The thing is, this technology uses cheap materials and a process well-known before its use with batteries. These battery farms in general are modular so scaling isn’t an issue. This isn’t fusion where it’s extreme physics.
The main issues with iron air batteries are weight (a non-issue for a ground installation, and iron is extremely abundant and available not just from the ground but from recycling - most steel comes from scrap these days for instance - and their efficiency is poor compared to lithium batteries (only 45% or so). But if you’re charging from solar where we already have excess capacity for much of the day in places like Texas and California, lower efficiency is less of an issue. Getting 45% efficiency is better than wasting it.
I don’t know how it compares to water-based storage (pump uphill during the day and let it flow down through turbines at night) but you’ve got to have water to pump it and those reservoirs take up space.
Finally, iron air batteries don’t pose a fire risk.
Water storage is great in terms of cost and efficiency, but the energy density sucks. I wonder how much land area it would take to power the entire CA state grid for 72 hours on nothing but pumped hydro?
I agree that iron air looks very promising, really the only technology capable of grid storage, and considering its weight, that's all it will ever be suited for. But my understanding is that density is precisely what makes it so effective at long-term storage.
At this point, it's still only theory and lots of hope though. The discovery of steel to the Bessemer process was centuries. I doubt iron-air will take that long, but I think counting on it to solve our grid storage problems anytime soon would be foolish. I'll change my mind when I see that "under contract to be built" facility actually hooked up to the grid and operating. Which is about the same time I'll change my mind about fusion energy too -- although, I agree, iron-air is further along the curve than fusion, which still hasn't even made step 2 in my list.
Thanks for the link to the Maine project. That's step 4, so let us hope it goes well.
Hopefully, but new battery technologies are perennially on the horizon but have not arrived.
This one’s already been prototyped and an operational installation has been ordered.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/long-duration-energy-storage/form-energy-set-to-build-worlds-biggest-battery-in-maine
Lithium ion did! I remember when I was younger that every electronic gadget used its own proprietary batteries, unless they were the standard AA or AAA, but now everything is lithium ion and we have devices that can even propel you around for hours on the charge they carry.
I think it is also underappreciated that you don't need one night of storage, you may need much more depending on your climate. In Europe that would be almost certainly at least a *week*. And that week would usually but not always avoid shortfalls. A week of overcast weather with not a lot of sun and wind is basically called “next winter”.
Or you have backup power plants, but now you're in the business of building and maintaining enough power plants to power your entire grid. That also doesn't seem optimal.
This is a great article, Noah. Like you, I wish more conservatives (my own tribe) were less doomer. I'm pretty optimistic about AI.
However, you have a habit of using a particular phrase that really grates on conservatives generally: "right-wing culture wars".
The culture wars are not right-wing. You only perceive them that way because you think the goodness of the left's cultural vision is mostly beyond question, so anyone who wants to upend it must be engaged in a "culture war". But history tells a very different story -- we are not the ones seeking to change the culture. We didn't legalize abortion by judicial fiat, or change a 3 millennia old definition of marriage the same way. We didn't change school curriculum to secularize it and, 30 years later, re-catechize it in the new rainbow religion. We didn't start pretending that men can get pregnant. Our "culture war" actions have been fundamentally defensive, responses to the legal and cultural changes being pushed by the Left. (Some so insane that even you and Matt and similar leftists struggle to defend them.) Are the people "standing athwart History yelling 'stop'" really the cause of our "culture wars"? By any objective measure of the last 60 years, the Left is winning this war.
Among conservatives, the phrase "right-wing culture war" brands the speaker as someone conservatives shouldn't trust. I encourage you to eliminate the partisan claim. This is also more accurate, since it takes 2 to tango, and the "culture war" exists because we have two rival cultures vying for supremacy in America. If only 1 side were pushing, there would be no war.
yeah, I agree with this, you see it even in these comments, the on fire liberals have become blindly self righteous and refuse to see their part in the problems. One commenter accused the right of disinformation, while we hear that two year olds know who they are, there is no such thing as men and women, all whites are white supremacists, the Oligarchs are the problem 75% of whom supported Harris, two of whom Biden gave the medal of freedom the same week he made that pronouncement, no one is teaching critical race theory when you're fourth grader comes home and asks, why are white people evil, Mommy?
There's big problems with truth on both sides, and I am not a conservative myself, for the record.
As Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it in her response to Biden's SOTU address a few years ago: "the divide in America is no longer between right and left but between normal and crazy." November 5th shoed that Americans (many not particularly conservative) have largely come to the same conclusion.
Hardware vs software is a neat attempt at a new angle, but I don't think it sticks. I can't see evidence of a systematic hardware/software bias in the decisions of the left or right. Your final paragraphs provide a more realistic assessment: it's simply about who is empowered, not any attribute of a new tech in and of itself.
Firstly, even the small set of examples provided are a stretch. Vaccines aren't "hardware" as conventionally understood, are they? You could maybe call them wetware. And Elon Musk has been welcomed into the Republican coalition without a problem despite that his companies are (rather unusually) all hardware companies. Trump loves rockets!
Nor are Democrats software-averse. Quite the opposite. Some Silicon Valley software firms are dominated by Democrats (largely IMHO because they instantly purge anyone found to be a Republican, as the left always do). But clearly, if Democrats had a problem with software per se, then this wouldn't be the case.
I think what we're seeing here doesn't need any high level abstractions to understand. Both sides fear technologies that they think will unfairly advantage their ideological opponents, and they're cool with technologies that won't. So Democrats fear anything related to free speech or information (AI, social media, big tech) because despite these firms being full of Democrats the party leaders have become fully Orwellian, believing that they must have an iron grip on information and narrative otherwise they will automatically lose. The Republicans meanwhile fear that Democrats are using bogus narratives about climate to forcibly de-industrialize the west, and that arguments for solar/wind are being made in bad faith as a consequence. They don't tend to have a problem with wind or solar itself beyond the aesthetic land use arguments (as you point out, there are huge buildouts in Texas), but because the "expert class" that tends to weigh in on power technologies is so compromised by left wing activism they have trouble working out whether renewables are genuinely competitive tech that people want or whether it's artificial demand driven by academic and Democrat grifting.
Dems don't fear free speech. They fear *alternative facts* speech masquerading as news, and influencing national policy: "Dems abort babies after birth." "The Haitians (illegals) are eating all the dogs and cats." "There's massive voter fraud."
The November Ipsos poll of likely GOP voters found that 85% got some/most/all of their news from FOX News, and that 80% of these believe that: a) Crime and unemployment are at near all-time highs; b) Inflation is as high as it was 2-3 years ago; c) We're in a recession.
If it weren't that GOP voters actually believe this nonsense, and vote accordingly, it'd almost be funny.
If Democrats don’t fear free speech, then why did Biden’s enforcers pressure FaceBook to remove posts about Covid origins or vaccine side effects, and Twitter to suppress news about the Hunter laptop?
That's not fear of free speech, it's fear of malicious bullshit being spread for political advantage to eager idiots for money.
I assume by “eager idiots for money” you mean Hunter Biden.
Learn to read a simple English sentence, then get back to me.
I'm with Buzen here, Dems are limited free speech even more than the right and lying about it. There's a real lack of self reflection here based on simply demonizing the right. For example, most books banned at libraries, even now, are by the left. You would never know it reading the media.
Source please on banned books.
It's all over if you look. Here's a recent twitter post from a librarian I know, and like her I have checked my local bookstores for certain best selling conservative titles, nowhere to be found, yet every obscure critical race theory title is there.
Here it is:
Jennifer Gingrich:
As a librarian, I can tell you that the only books being banned in public libraries are conservative books, and the librarians are the ones banning them. Public libraries in my city & state have thousands of books pushing LGBTQIA+ issues, but not a single copy of ANY gender critical books, even by left-wing feminist writers, despite many being at the top of Amazon's bestseller lists. They don't even have copies of books that hit #1 on the NYT bestseller lists, if they're conservative - there's not a single copy of any
@DouglasKMurray
book in
@PortPublicLibME
The American Library Association refuses to even send their customary letter of support to any public library defending the right to keep a conservative book on shelf. They still send it for left-wing books. ALA and PEN every year put out lists of 'banned books' but they leave out all of the right-wing titles so they can pretend that it's only the right that bans books. It isn't, by a long shot.
https://x.com/fem_mb/status/1879323453884428603
You are correct that First Amendment rights are at issue here. And there are obviously different interpretations of what exactly "truth" is, as opposed to opinion. The FOX News vs. Dominion Voting case proved that certain RW media outlets will maliciously lie for financial gain.
But unlike the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, FOX News has a long and storied track record of continually promoting mis- and dis-information. Including repeating Russian and Chinese Intelligence nonsense like the Hunter Biden laptop "conspiracy".
You aren't contradicting anything I said, just paraphrasing it. The Democrats fear free speech because they believe people will use it to say things that Democrats believe aren't true. What those things are is irrelevant.
Noah, I love you, but some things about this post are off-base.
First of all, "when land is available for solar, nuclear simply isn’t competitive at all." Saying "when land is available for solar" is like "assume a can opener." Sure, when plentiful land is available *in a location with low cloud cover and good sun exposure year-round*, then solar is awesome! I love solar! But there are plenty of people living in areas that are cloudy and/or too far north, for whom solar is not an option, unless you build thousands of miles of long-distance transmission lines. And even with locations that have good solar exposure *on average*, you're going to get cloudy days. We need backup power, and nuclear > fossil fuels.
Second, I don't like the whiff of both-sidesism in your post. "See, Democrats are against AI, and Republicans are against clean energy! Both sides fear the future! Both sides bad!"
There are legitimate reasons to fear AI. Several thinkers, including Nick Bostrom and Scott Alexander, have discussed at length the risk that AI becomes super-powerful and super-intelligent and kills us, because it has no use for us. I personally think these fears are overblown, but here's the problem - it's easy to laugh at these people and call them alarmist, but by the time we get enough evidence that AI is really dangerous, it may be too late to do anything about it.
In contrast, Trump/Republican opposition to clean energy is partly founded on legitimate concerns - unemployed coal miners, etc. - but mostly it's about hating the out-group (all those elitist liberals who care about climate change). Scientific evidence shows that climate change is a really big problem, and clean energy is the way to try to solve it without demanding degrowth and poverty. Opposition to clean energy is as spiteful as it is stupid. Abundant, clean energy should be considered a good thing regardless of whether you're a Democrat or a Republican!
Worth noting that the AI safety concerns are coming from people that are not generally anti-tech or anti-progress, I don't think it's accurate to be bundling these together. The AI safety concerns are mostly coming from a small group of people very involved in the space, desperately trying to get the rest of humanity to notice that we're about to dive off a cliff. For example, this includes two of the three "godfathers of AI": Geoff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.
If you invent something smarter than you are, it is not likely to keep you around.
Noah's takes on AI suffer from not understanding that "inventing a new species more capable than humans, whose goals would also benefit from the consumption of resources with which it is in competition with humans to secure" is a different category than inventing a better mousetrap.
On solar you're right and you're wrong. Solar is way cheaper than Nuclear. However, Solar + Batteries + Transmission lines + gas backup (when the batteries run out) is way more expensive than Nuclear. The cost is the total system, not just the generation.
I think Solar has a significant part to play for our electrical grid. But a part. Even with cheap batteries, you need to store enough power for weeks if you have no backup. And possibly for a year - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer (talk about mixed blessings - a volcanic explosion like that would reduce global warming, but seriously degrade solar power for a couple of years).
And Wind is of no help. It's randomly intermittent so you can't depend on it. And at present where the backup for it is SCGT, the Wind + SCGT emits more CO2 than replacing the whole thing with a CCGT - https://liberalandlovingit.substack.com/p/the-math-wind-energy-is-a-false-solution
The reason California has the highest electricity prices in the lower 48 is that it is heavily Wind + Solar without sufficient backup. And one of their prime backups at present is coal plants. But they're out of state so California does not count them in its CO2 emissions.
Please take the total system picture into account for power. I do enjoy your posts and I think you're usually spot on, including Japan & Taiwan (I've worked in both). But on power, and you can't be an expert on everything, you're missing some key parts.
regards - dave
There's a simple reason why Democrats thought AI Safety was a concern: because AI really is potentially very dangerous. We're not at the "AI can build an engineered pandemic and kill billions of people" level of danger yet, but wouldn't it be better to have some laws in place before we actually are?
https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/deadly-by-default
“Nuclear’s compactness makes it useful for some niche applications, but its high costs and lack of a learning curve means that when land is available for solar, nuclear simply isn’t competitive.”
But the “land available” for solar is in the backyards and communities of middle class Americans. Maybe it’s easy to idealize fields of solar panels out there in “flyover country” when you are young and urban, but, to get to your broader point, when you are a middle aged person with a mortgage and a home and roots in a real, specific place, a field of solar panels and noisy and visually intrusive windmills in your community is a very unpleasant shock. And when it is forced on your community by state and federal governments that override local opposition, like in my home state, yeah, you are destroying communities and making them feel powerless about it at the same time.
How could people NOT feel resentment?
Yes, I know change is part of human life, but this is very powerful, coastal people (“elites”) forcing unwanted changes on less powerful middle class people, and that creates a certain political dynamic that people like Trump exploit.
It would be much more politically viable, which would also be better for the planet in the long run, for this issue to become depoliticized by making the stakes less high for citizens. Yes, we need to reduce pollution. But making that a Grand Energy Transformation that Must Happen All Right Now, while thrilling to 24 year old activists, scares the shit out of normal people - and for very legitimate reasons.
It would be much more politically viable to just conceptualize and market clean energy as one component among many that is part of a long term, steady process of *climate mitigation* through increasingly better control of pollution in all areas. This should be pitched as a process of maintenance and updating that is slow, practical, and ongoing - more efficient tech for fossil fuels AND gradual increases in wind and solar where it shows success and makes sense.
Maybe that doesn’t give young progressives much excitement or deep meaning, but it would actually result in better stewardship of resources and care for the climate in the long run, and would be more stable.
Renewable energy should also make sense. It makes sense to put solar panels on rooftops or in barren deserts and windmills in isolated, non-scenic or already heavily urbanized areas with lots of wind - and noise and lights and generally concentrated human artificiality already. Kind of hard for someone in a city to argue that they are bothered by windmill noise or it ruins their view. It makes sense for urban people, especially in warm climates, to drive electric cars.
It does not make sense to raze public forests in Gaylord, Michigan for a solar field. It does not make sense to make people who drive a lot in cold climates go all electric - we need hybrids. For a town to convert peaceful cornfields and meadows behind people’s two acre residential yards that they have mortgages on or own outright, places where locals hunt and fish or just enjoy the quiet, places that people intentionally moved to for this lifestyle… well, it just pisses people off.
Cities have always been not just loud and crowded, but the they have also always been somewhat transient, with huge populations of immigrants, young people, single people, and creatives. Cities are places where you expect a lot of change and development. That is part of their dynamism.
And maybe that is why it is so hard for young, dynamic urbanites to understand why their ideals don’t translate. When you bring “transformative change” to small towns and suburbs, you are breaking a quiet social contract by which middle class, homeowner centric communities are places people can go to to set down roots and experience a certain lifestyle with a reasonable guarantee of stability that is central to the American Dream.
And for what gain? Are solar fields in cloudy small town Michigan going to save the planet, or just lead to more Trump?
"Why did some Democrats want to hobble AI? Again, the most likely explanation is that they were concerned with limiting the power of the tech businesspeople who created the AI."
That's quite a narrow view compared with the serious concern of tech researchers themselves on the potential dangers of AI. I found Suleman's (of move 37 fame)" The Coming Wave" and Harari's "Nexus" well thought out and compelling. When an AI judgment can negatively affect someone and an explanation for the judgment is literally impossible that is a problem. Etc. I would love to hear your opinions on what these authors have to say.
Democrats and liberals in America "fear the future" because approximately half the country appears to be terminally idiotic about fossil fuels, renewable energy, electrification and climate change, and because it now appears that tech leaders who "seemed" to be rational and reasonable on this issue have all decided to get in bed with the idiots in exchange for some political power and the chance to play at unregulated AI in order to achieve world domination from inside a public corporation (which will then be taken private). Americans more broadly "fear" AI because as the ambitions of the creeps from Aspergers Alley become clear, they recognize that there is absolutely nobody left with the political power to prevent them from extending their walled gardens to encompass every aspect of every American's life -- restricting, channeling, directing, and controlling decisions based entirely on the interests of the few who sit atop these empires with only obsequious vassals on their BODs and easily bribe-able money monsters controlling the shares (unless they themselves do via supermajority voting provisions). As the age of Artificial Super-Intelligence dawns we see the greedy ghouls laughing about AI "alignment", replacing any calls for AI safety with bravado and "male energy". We are witnessing the culmination of human intellectual endeavor and what could be the long dreamed-for key to ending scarcity and human suffering turned over to the most sinister, selfish, self-aggrandizing, uncaring and explicitly anti-human cabal of creeps in the history of capitalism. Americans fully understand that these mistakes of nature would rather put all of us in a vat of soylent green or attach us to the matrix to power their data centers than make eye contact with any us. They are gleefully racing toward a future that does not include us, let alone our children or grandchildren, and they are giddy with the realization that all they had to do was to buy an orange-tinted a-hole on the cheap to secure that future for themselves. "Fear" of the AI overlords is not enough. Hatred is the place to start, followed by public ownership and control of the tools they would use to oppress us.
"Scott Wiener, a California Democrat whose ideas I almost always endorse and respect"
Holy fuck!!! Wiener is the most despicable person on Planet Earth!!!
Wiener is responsible for the hideous legislation taking kids away from parents who do not consent to their children being mutilated and sterilized after they have been groomed by the transqueer cult, so-called "trans state sanctuary" laws.
Wiener is responsible for the CA law stopping police from investigating sex trafficking:
"Police chiefs and mayors across the state are criticizing a new law is limiting their ability to crack down on sex and human trafficking operations."
https://abc7news.com/ca-loitering-law-sex-trafficking-sb-357-workers/12910562/
Wiener is very embodiment of pure evil. No more awful human being has ever been born.
Maybe the person who just yesterday took away HiV medication from millions of people.
Weiner just proposed suing the oil companies for the wildfire. All I could think is, here goes my electric and gas even higher. Weiner is a tool. He's the worst politician in Ca.
Suing them for the effects of climate change which they knew their industry was causing and lying about it is necessary and welcome like suing the tobacco companies for denying their products were causing diseases and cancer.
All that is going to happen is that people in CA are going to pay more for gas, and we already have the highest gas prices in the country. It's just a blame game, what good is going to do? They need to focus on solving our problems, get the water we need, and forests cleaned up. Do we get to sue the state legislature for not doing their jobs right? Let's start with Weiner.
"Do we get to sue the state legislature" Did you not take civics or were getting your dick sucked in class and got distracted?
you sound like a nice person, maybe we should leave running the state to you
From your own writing: “… the internet and the smartphone, once heralded as tools of liberation and individual empowerment, might actually represent a hyper-centralized panopticon that gives totalitarians unprecedented levels of surveillance and control over personal behavior…”
Your software/hardware framing presents the two as equivalent issues, but the “software” concern is really about the control of information, which represents a legitimate threat (as you yourself argue).
Just finished reading a history of the Ottoman Empire. A great empire that found it difficult to change with the times. The sultans banned the printing press, the Janissaries elite military corps resisted modernization because it jeopardized their position in society. Eventually their more modern European peers carved them up. This historical pattern of resistance to change is one that I hope the U.S. doesn't repeat.
I thought the problem with printing was in part because Islam's iconoclasm had caused calligraphy to become a major artform in Muslim cultures, and politically powerful calligraphers naturally saw printing as a threat to their influence?
(And to be fair, the cursive-only Arabic script is a nightmare to print: even modern computers have difficulty with it.)
That sounds correct from what I read. Another example of politically powerful factions resisting change.
I just bought "The Ottomans"? Which book were you reading?
I've been meaning to read that one too! To be more precise, I read a book about the history of Istanbul/Constantinople, which of course focuses on the Ottoman Empire after they conquered the city.
Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World
Wonderful. My family is from there, so I'm going to add that to my reading list. I've read so many books about the city but somehow still enjoy reading more.