I agree. Obama set a goal for the US by executive order, and since it wasn't voluntary, he never needed to ask the Senate for a two-thirds vote to ratify. Though, I highly doubt it would have passed even with a majority of Democrats...similar to Byrd-Hagel after Gore signed Kyoto. Oddly enough, a NYT/CBS poll in 2015 showed that two-thirds of the respondents supported an agreement...if it were legally binding.

I don't think there's any way to force China to do much of anything. Carbon tariffs? Sure, it'd hurt them, but it would damage us just as much. I guess what sticks in my craw is that China comes out of this looking "clever and cool."

Good one there! "I know you are but what am I?!"

Trump is not afraid to lead? What's he leading in exactly?

An idiotic, poorly thought out travel ban that won't help anything?

Mouthing off to our allies, making us look like idiots? (Mexico will pay for the wall... wait, maybe not, but they'll pay 20% tariffs.... well actually the Americans will be the ones paying... sounds like a solid plan everyone!)

Appointing unqualified cabinet members? Rick Perry for energy secretary.... the department he wanted to destroy... the department that he had no idea manages our nuclear stockpiles... the department whose previous leader under Obama was a nuclear physicist. It's now Rick fucking Perry.

The only thing he's leading in is in being the most embarrassing statesman this country has ever seen, arguing with celebrities on Twitter like a child. This moron was actually ranting about Schwarzenegger and The Apprentice ratings in his National Prayer Breakfast speech. All he had to do was just recite a short passage from the bible or something. But nope, not him. He needs to ask like a 12 year old.

We have a 70-year-old man, who also happens to be THE PRESIDENT, who can't control himself and act the part. He really has a few screws loose. There's no other explanation. But we did give him the nuclear codes! Yaay!

Leader - my ass. (Besides, it's Bannon leading him anyway.)

If people are free (to work and make money) and markets are free (to sell european cars in the US eithout excessive tariffs) Volkswagen can sell more cars and make more money. So yeah, human rights matter.

That way they also create more jobs and pay more towards pensions and have money to make Superbowl ads, possibly the most expensive "free publicity" in the world.

Not the worlds' moral standard setters though, obviously, VW.

"Even with an anti-renewable government".

That's not really true. At both a Federal level (since 2005 under the Liberals) and state level, the government has offered large rebates/subsidies/feed-in tariffs to the public to encourage the uptake of solar power.

I believe some of these benefits are available to private businesses as well.

I wonder if Moore would have said the same things in Germany in the 1930s.

And so it begins.... the Trump apologists are already out in force, talking about how "this was a victory for the disenfranchised" and how "no-one was listening to these people".

Of course, we weren't listening to them, those people are fucking idiots. "We want our country back" -> "I want to go back to the 50s when white men had a job for life, and those damn women, gays, coloureds weren't so uppity".

Newsflash morons, your jobs aren't coming back. They're gone, and they're not even gone to Mexico or "Jy-na", they no longer exist. Robots do them. This is a real problem, it's coming for all of us (me included) and it's not going to be solved by protectionism or tariffs or walls or whatever other nonsense Trump has dreamed up.

And then there are the people talking about a call for "unity".

Fuck.
That.
Shit.

You do not have "unity" with racists, bigots and misogynists. We are not going to roll back centuries of progress because some uneducated fools feel threatened.

Women's rights, minority rights, LGBTQ rights, climate change... these things are not up for discussion or compromise. They are done, settled and off the fucking table. If you have a problem with that, you're wrong.

And while I'm no fan of religion, I'm even less of a fan of the idea of discriminating against people based solely on their religion. (Religion is not an excuse either; if someone does something stupid and/or evil in the name of your religion, it doesn't get you a free pass, but that's another story).

Bottom line: this isn't some "we're all the same deep down scenario".

If this year has shown anything, it's that we need protection from idiots being allowed to vote.

Yeah he embarrasses her with his stupidity, as he embarrasses me. So fake news picks a naive college student to debate, and when she starts putting her thoughts together to make a point he interrupts her like the condescending asshole that he is.

I'm sorry, but you wouldn't need the top 1% to pay nowhere near 90% in taxes to cover education. Just a made up number to make her look stupid as she didn't know how to answer it.

With a higher percent of more educated people, they as a whole would be making more money to contribute to the tax fund, increasing revenue.

And really Neil, rich people would leave the honey hole because we taxed them more? How about we start taxing and putting tariffs on companies that go into these third world countries for cheap labor to export products back here. Fuck em if they want to leave, they will no longer be "hoarding" the money and it would allow other companies to fill the void and thrive.

And her point that was so rudely interrupted was spot on, "There is a population that is doing nothing to contribute to the progression of society"

And lastly, these are all moot points if we just quit dumping all our money into the military, and it's not even going to benefit our veterans, but to the select few who own these government contracts. Why do they NEVER Talk about that? Why do we have to continuously be engaged in some kind of war? Oh, that's right to convince people we need a bigger military budget, more spying...blah blah blah...unpatriotic if you don't agree...blah blah...scare people into some kind of threat..

I'm sorry this particular girl wasn't ready for this debate, she probably had a speech prepared they told her she could give.

I'm obviously talking Swahili here... What part of "do not have a choice" don't you understand? I don't get to set the tariffs or when the sun comes up, and batteries enough to load shift significantly in Aus are still in the 20-30 grand area. You are fortunate you live in a place where the energy company still allows you a reasonable price for the energy you produce. The acceptance you talk about is the same acceptance a hostage gives it's kidnapper when they have a gun held to their head... Perhaps you're even lucky enough to have multiple energy providers competing for your custom. In Aus, it's almost entirely single provider in the realm of electricity supply.

However, that's neither fucking here nor there when it comes to energy returns... Energy returned on energy does not once mention the word "dollars" or "money"...

A simple analogy would be using a thousand 200 dollar bicycles to pull a load or 1 200 thousand dollar prime mover. The bikes are cleaner, certainly, but once you pay the wages of 1000 people to ride them/feed them, give them accomodation etc (vs 1 guy in the truck), and then work out just how long those people can continuously ride, the cost of the fuel in the truck etc, the truck becomes the obvious answer. That's why we use trucks instead of team pulled wagons, they are just better suited to the task. The same counts for energy generation, we need a clean prime mover, and we're going to have to suck up the cost to do it. If we're going to save the world, we're going to have to make sacrifices in the form of paying more until someone invents clean abundant energy generation that is also cheap.

Your "double the return on coal" is completely unsubstantiated.

Of course solar PV is cleaner than coal, but you need to expend far more energy to generate 1 KW/h of PV energy than you do to generate 1 KW/h of coal energy... It's part of the reason why coal is cheaper than solar and why so much of the world still relies on it. Because people cannot see past their wallet to the bigger picture.

I would love if PV on roofs were the answer, just like it would be awesome if everyone could farm their own vegetables in their backyard. But we moved beyond subsistence living to mass production a long time ago because people realised it was a huge effort that paid relatively small returns. Residential solar PV is a convenient foil to keep people thinking that it's making a difference when we could be investing public dollars in to wind (more viable), nuke (more viable), solar thermal (more viable), wave (more viable), hydro etc. And a lot of those techs are probably going to be more expensive than solar PV. What did that Native American fellow say? 'When it's all gone to shit, will you eat money?'

Money being the only concern is what got us to where we are at the moment ffs... =)

You certainly have a choice in how you use the electricity.

I think YOU missed the point, if you can only sell your power for 8 c perkwh, and pay 36c per kwh, and you sell ALL the power you make, then buy it back later, YOU are subsidizing the power company, who makes 28c on every kwh you sell them. No one is subsidizing that 8c they pay(I would hope, 350% profit is already insane) so what "high feed in tariff" are you talking about?

The power grid is fairly smart, and takes into account the amount being produced by ALL sources, and shuts/ramps down those not needed. For you to be sending power when it's not required would require more PV generation than the entire grid uses, because ANY other generation could be put on hold until night. The certainly DO do this on a 'few hundred times per second' basis, at least here in the US. Solar generation may jump up and down on individual systems, but the total amount fed to the grid by all solar systems in an area is fairly stable, and doesn't jump radically from a cloud...come on.
Here, peak power is at peak temperature time, mid-late afternoon, when businesses turn up the AC and people get home, exactly when PV makes the most power, I can't speak for AU.
The point being that the grid CAN and DOES adjust rapidly to account for all generation methods, and it does already shift production because some of the need is supplied by PV.

Not so, the return on energy invested is at least double the return on coal in the long term...for the consumer, that's why you save money VS the electric company in the long term.
It's certainly not cheap or easy to deal with the waste in the US where the company(s) (and the taxpayer when it goes bankrupt) has to pay for destroying major river systems because of inevitable waste releases...as happened recently and repeatedly. Only if you ignore most of the actual costs of coal can you think it's cheaper, if you count all the costs, it's FAR more expensive.

ALL the power/energy needed to produce PV panels is reflected in their cost...100%.
Again, to be a bad way to reduce carbon pollution, you MUST assume it takes more carbon to make a panel VS the amount of carbon pollution it saves VS coal power production of the same amount of KWH. That's simply not the case by a long shot, so it does significantly reduce CO2 production, by around 20-30X vs coal. Even in Germany and Denmark, where it's often overcast, they found ....
"solar PV works out to about 50g of CO2 per kWh compared to coal's 975g of CO2 per kWh, or about 20x "cleaner."" In places with better weather, it can be up to 40X.
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/how-much-co2-does-one-solar-panel-create

Once again, my electric company doesn't pay me a dime, it trades me power based on peak and non peak hours. Yours on the other hand makes 350% profit on every kwh you produce. I save cash because making (and USING) my own power is FAR cheaper than buying (mainly) coal produced power from the electric company. No "high feed in tariff" required at all. No feed in tariff at all, in fact.
It obviously makes an inroad on reducing carbon because, beyond the panel's production and shipping, there's ZERO carbon, unlike coal which produces more carbon per 10 KWH than it likely took to make each of my 20 panels, meaning they pay off their carbon debt in about 100 hours of sunlight, and are total carbon savers for the rest of their 20 year lifespan.
If we're going to fix climate change, we need to be HONEST about energy production, not compare 150%-350% of the cost of one production source with 5% of another production source to be able to say the 5% source is better.

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! Nuke requires a jump in your bill (even with the HUGE government subsidies the nuke industry gets at every step), but it's better than home mounted PV which SAVES you >50% off your 20 year power costs without a taxpayer cent?!?!? Please think about that.

I'm not basing my figures or thoughts on any study, but on my own personal, long term, economic experience with a system.
As someone who purchased a solar system for purely economic reasons, and has found it to be a HUGE cost saver over buying coal/nuke power from the electric company, all without counting subsidies at all, and even considering I paid top dollar for my system and have battery backup (that produces nothing but cost thousands), I'll simply say you're completely wrong in your assessments based on my own dispassionate, no child having, purely economical experience and leave it there.
I'm happy saving 50% of every power/dollar, you are accepting of giving away around 80% of your power/dollars to the power company. That doesn't make solar unworthy, non-"green", or economically unviable, it makes it a TERRIBLE choice for YOU because you're doing it wrong, and your electric company is punishing you rather than incentivizing you.

The inference being that I have a choice..? =) We don't in Aus.

But you're missing the point, X >= 1 feed in tariffs are being subsidised by other users on the grid. You upload your power regardless of demand peaks (so you could be sending power when it really isn't required). Electricity companies are not going to massively drop production of regular power as it takes a considerable amount of time to spool up/down baseload production, and they are still going to switch on high cost gas turbines during peak load just in case a big old cloud blocks out the sun for an hour or so and solar production falls in a heap...

And peak usage times are usually ~8-9am (schools and business start up, switch computers and air con on etc) before solar production really kicks in, and later in the afternoon when it get's hotter, people are getting ready for dinner. If you have significant daylight savings time shifts, then you can certainly get better production when peak demand in the early evening is occurring. If the panels are facing west rather than east or north (because that's where you maximise production and make the most money... =)

As for "the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous", I didn't say that it did, just that it's return on that energy invested is comparatively poor. You coal analogy is patently wrong though. Depending on which source you go to, coal is anywhere from 30:1 to 50:1 for EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). It's cheap to obtain, burn and dispose of the waste, despite being toxic/radioactive.

eg. http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

When you talk about solar PV and the energy required to make it, you're not just talking about the production line, you're talking mining the silicon, purifying, the wasted wafers which aren't up to snuff, the cost of the workers and the power that goes in to building, transporting etc, lifetime maintenance, loss of production over time and disposal. The above link puts PV at the low 1.5-3:1 which is well beneath the roughly 7:1 required to sustain our modern society (and does not cover the massive increases in energy demand and consumption from developing countries). And as the author of the article notes, these are unbuffered values. If you add buffering to load shift, the sums get even worse.

"Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?"

I didn't say solar was a bad deal, I said it's a poor way to reduce carbon pollution. If the electricity company you are connected to is willing to pay high feed in tariffs to you and you save cash, that's great, but that doesn't automagically (intentional typo mean that solar PV is making any sort of serious inroads in to reducing carbon pollution.

If we're going to fix man made climate change, we need to be prepared to pay a far higher cost and worry less about our hip pockets. Nuke might not be economically viable without causing jumps in bills, but in terms of the energy output it provides over it's life time, it is one of the highest returns in energy for the energy invested in building it, paired with very low carbon emissions.

Obviously, the figures on EROEI depend on which article you read, as it's a very complex number to work out (and will always be an approximation), but it's fairly commonly acknowledged by people who do not have a vested interest in solar PV (vs low carbon power sources in general) that PV is a feel good technology that doesn't actually do a hell of a lot in terms of carbon reduction.

And your first paragraph pretty much spells out why solar PV is a dud investment for small plant/home plant if it were completely unsupported by a plethora of mechanisms designed to make it viable financially (and that's before even considering whether the energy cost is significantly offset by the energy produced), not to mention trying to make time to do things when your PV production is high so that you're not wasting it.

I try to load shift as much as possible, even went so far as to have most of the array facing the west where we'll scrape out some extra power when we're actually going to use it (eg. in the afternoon, particularly for running air conditioners in summer), but without feed in tariffs that are 1:1 with energy purchase prices and government subsidies on the installation of the system, the sums (at least in Australia) just do not ever come close to making sense.

But as I said in the first paragraph, that is all financial dickering, it has nothing to do with actual energy used vs energy generated. There is no free energy, you have to spend energy to make energy. You have to buil a PV array, pay for the wages of the people who install it, transport costs etc etc. They all drain energy out of the system. And most people in places where feed in tariffs are either on parity with the cost of purchasing energy when your PV isn't producing align their solar arrays with the ideal direction for greatest generation of energy that they can get the best profit for, not for generation of energy when energy demands spike.

The consequences of this are that at midday, energy is coursing in to the grid and unless your electricity provider has some capacity for extended storage and load shifting (eg. pumped hydro, large scale battery arrays), it's underutilised. Come peak time in the afternoon when people get home, switch on cooling/heating, start cooking etc when PV's production is very low, the electricity company still has to cycle up gas turbines to provide the extra power to get over that peak demand, and solar does little to offset that.

So carbon still get's pissed away every day, but as long as PV owners get a cheaper bill, it's all seen to be working like a charm... ; )

The energy current efficiency panels return is only on an order of 2-3x the energy input, which is barely enough energy returned to support a subsistence agrarian lifestyle (forget education, art, industrialisation). There's a reason that far better utilisation of coal and oil via steam heralded the massive breakthrough of industrialisation, it's because coal has close to a 30 to 1 return on energy invested. Same with petrochemicals, incredibly high return on energy.

The biggest advances in human civilisation came with the ability to harness energy more effectively, or finding new energy sources which gave high amounts of energy in return for the effort of obtaining them and utilising them. Fire, water (eg. mills etc), carbon sources, nuclear and so on. Even if you manage to get 95% efficiency on the panels for 100% of their lifetime (currently incredibly unlikely), you're only turning that number in to 8-12x the energy invested compared to 25-30x for coal/petro, 50x+ for hydro and 75-100+x for gen IV nuke reactors.

Heh, no, I said we are capped at 5 KW/h input, our product midsummer is around 35-40 KW/h @ 8 cents per, or $2.80 paid to us (assuming no rain/clouds, winter is closer to 5-12 KW/h per day). Then from 5pm-about 6am, we buy energy back at 36 cents an hour. And as the wife and I are both working during the day, we use the bulk of our energy between 5-12pm, meaning any profit we make during the day is completely overwhelmed (eg. 20 KW/h @ 36 cents = $7.20). I live in Australia where the days of 45 cent feed in tariff are long gone (and further, it's a false economy where non solar users are subsidising that tariff for the few fortunate enough to take advantage of it).

Even with the 4 grand gov. rebate (my system ended up costing ~$12,000 AUD for 6KW), it's not likely to make the money back prior to the end of life for the panels (25 years) if electricity prices keep rising without the feed in keeping pace. Add a battery system so you can load shift from daily production to cover nightly usage (where the real cost kicks in) means that you'll be running at a significant loss over the same period, as you'll probably have to replace lead batteries at least twice over the life time of the panels. Even if hydrogen fuel cells or some form of Li Ion battery becomes far cheaper, it's still loss making for the owner, subsidised to boot and the cheap manufacturing is because the panels are produced in China where even the most efficient of factories are utilising enormous amounts of carbon resourced energy, materials that are carbon intensive to make and manufacture etc.

I'm not saying solar is bad because I want it to be, I'm saying it's very easy to sell to people to make them feel better, but like any "too good to be true" story, there's a hell of a lot more beneath the surface than most people realise.

As for nuke and hydro, yep, they have downsides, but they are the most effective sources of energy in terms of return on energy invested that we have available to us at the moment. And the damage of hydro, if it replaces coal burning facilities, might be significantly less than the damage from allowing GW to continue to run unabated.

This is a copy paste from WIkipedia, but it is fairly accurate.

Overall, the Northern population was growing much more quickly than the Southern population, which made it increasingly difficult for the South to continue to influence the national government. By the time of the 1860 election, the heavily agricultural southern states as a group had fewer Electoral College votes than the rapidly industrializing northern states. Lincoln was able to win the 1860 Presidential election without even being on the ballot in ten Southern states. Southerners felt a loss of federal concern for Southern pro-slavery political demands, and their continued domination of the Federal government was threatened. This political calculus provided a very real basis for Southerners' worry about the relative political decline of their region due to the North growing much faster in terms of population and industrial output.

***************
There were other factors, such as various tariffs and the fact that there was a large push to forbid new states to permit slavery, which would further limit the voting power of the South.

I'm intrigued by the different strategies they seem to have taken with regards to different markets.

The US market has been covered here already. Living off the grid, buffer for power outages, etc.

But they appear to market the Powerwall as a decentralized buffer system for our regional/national grid, as a means to shave off the spikes in power usage at times when both wind and solar fail to meet expectations. Seems like a virtual power plant of Powerwalls would be an alternative to gas turbine plants. Add some pumped-storage hydroelectricity in Norway and the Alps, and the need for standby power plants would be vastly reduced.

Additionally, they are probably aiming at the time when diminishing feed-in tariffs for PV panels make it more attractive to charge batteries instead of feeding into the grid.

However, even if they manage to sell only a handful of Powerwalls, it'll force all the other players to get off their fat asses for once. Politics managed to kill the local solar industry and the big players came up with fuck all in terms of meaningful innovation over the last years.
Yes, I'm looking at you, Siemens!

@radx

The liquidity/insolvency line is just a fancy way of asking for more money than is being provided. As I said, I expect once structural reform is fully implemented, the ECB (tacitly instructed by Germany et al) will take a much more active role in buying the debt of these countries but it's not at that stage yet. The problem is they've been slow to sell off assets, reform government and reduce public employment to levels demanded.

Again what you propose is easing that eliminates the pressure to reform, which is the intent of the troika/Germany as I see it. I just don't see any of those things happening. As I mentioned before, Greece's debt has largely stopped rising and GDP has been edging upwards since 2010 and is now positive:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/government-budget-value
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/gdp-growth

As far as running surpluses, I would argue if everyone was nearly as zealous as Germany, then the deficit/surplus gap between countries would narrow - which would be the best outcome globally. As you'd probably know Germany's attitude towards fiscal stability and inflation is fairly hawkish given its history with hyperinflation. But it has clearly served them well when their bond yields didn't spike during the euro crisis because of a shortage of funds.

I wouldn't characterise it as beggar thy neighbour, that's generally reserved for active measures to prevent trade from other countries (such as through tariffs or subsidies). Instead Germany from what I've read, has carved out a competitive niche for itself with it's Mittelstand. I don't know Germany history particularly here, but I assume it led to companies in industries like retail which can't compete globally reducing or being bought out.

I would compare it to what happened here in Australia with the car industry when government support for it vanished. In our case at least, the only reason the industry existed for the past couple of decades is because of that support and it should never have been propped up by the government in the first place. I don't see that really being any different to typewriters being replaced by computerisation, whale oil being replaced by fossil fuels or US manufacturing going to China (and now leaving to other areas of Asia).

Coming back to trade surpluses, for similar reasons to Germany, most Asian countries also run large trade surpluses because of their history with capital flight in the Asian financial crisis of 97. This is despite many of them developmentally being far behind Greece let alone Germany or France. There has been no Asian crisis this time around and investment into these countries (like Malaysia, the Phillippines, Vietnam and China) has hardly been low over the past 10 years.

I'm not a huge fan of QE as a policy either. Part of the problem is central banks like the ECB weren't designed with the intent of using QE, merely adjusting interest rates, let alone any direct purchases of bonds. I was a big fan of what they did here in Australia where they just gave a one off wad of money to everyone who is earning an income. We ended up avoiding a recession entirely, although our economy was doing quite well at the time.

In effect that's more fiscal policy and I can imagine it being difficult to implement in the EU across countries in an even way. Merkel is certainly too hawkish overall. Policy along those lines, unbiased investment via the EIB or let alone just implementing QE earlier (like the US did) would have helped everyone.

The same man who tells you that he does not want to see the government interfere in business-and he means it, and has plenty of good reasons for saying so-is the first to go to Washington and ask the government for a prohibitory tariff on his product. When things get just bad enough-as they did two years ago-he will go with equal speed to the United States government and ask for a loan; and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation is the outcome of it. Each group has sought protection from the government for its own special interest, without realizing that the function of government must be to favor no small group at the expense of its duty to protect the rights of personal freedom and of private property of all its citizens. - FDR