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Power Politics

Bipartisan Consensus In Favor of Renewable Power Is Ending (arstechnica.com) 236

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the most striking things about the explosion of renewable power that's happening in the U.S. is that much of it is going on in states governed by politicians who don't believe in the problem wind and solar are meant to address. Acceptance of the evidence for climate change tends to be lowest among Republicans, yet many of the states where renewable power has boomed -- wind in Wyoming and Iowa, solar in Texas -- are governed by Republicans. That's partly because, up until about 2020, there was a strong bipartisan consensus in favor of expanding wind and solar power, with support above 75 percent among both parties. Since then, however, support among Republicans has dropped dramatically, approaching 50 percent, according to polling data released this week. [...] One striking thing about the new polling data, gathered by the Pew Research Center, is how dramatically it skews with age. When given a choice between expanding fossil fuel production or expanding renewable power, Republicans under the age of 30 favored renewables by a 2-to-1 margin. Republicans over 30, in contrast, favored fossil fuels by margins that increased with age, topping out at a three-to-one margin in favor of fossil fuels among those in the 65-and-over age group. The decline in support occurred in those over 50 starting in 2020; support held steady among younger groups until 2024, when the 30-49 age group started moving in favor of fossil fuels.

Democrats, by contrast, break in favor of renewables by 75 points, with little difference across age groups and no indication of significant change over time. They're also twice as likely to think a solar farm will help the local economy than Republicans are. Similar differences were apparent when Pew asked about policies meant to encourage the sale of electric vehicles, with 83 percent of Republicans opposed to having half of cars sold be electric in 2032. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of Democrats favored this policy. There's also a rural/urban divide apparent (consistent with Republicans getting more support from rural voters). Forty percent of urban residents felt that a solar farm would improve the local economy; only 25 percent of rural residents agreed. Rural residents were also more likely to say solar farms made the landscape unattractive and take up too much space. (Suburban participants were consistently in between rural and urban participants.) What's behind these changes? The single biggest factor appears to be negative partisanship combined with the election of Joe Biden. Among Republicans, support for every single form of power started to change in 2020 -- fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear. Among Democrats, that's largely untrue. Their high level of support for renewable power and aversion to fossil fuels remained largely unchanged. The lone exception is nuclear power, where support rose among both Democrats and Republicans (the Biden administration has adopted a number of pro-nuclear policies).

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Bipartisan Consensus In Favor of Renewable Power Is Ending

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  • by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Friday June 28, 2024 @10:38PM (#64586865)
    "I'm old and scared, what's tiktok, is it like crack, are the ni-"
  • by sonicmerlin ( 1505111 ) on Friday June 28, 2024 @10:43PM (#64586881)

    So in other words Republicans are far more easily swayed by anti-science propaganda and their connection to reality is fading even as global temperatures begin to exponentially ramp up.

    • by kick6 ( 1081615 )
      There's an alternate explanation: All the wind and solar is being installed in their states, and the realities of those installations is less cool than your narrative, from a distance, on how they're the best thing since sliced bread. In other words, their grasp on reality is increasing: the reality that renewable energy is only rainbow farting unicorns when the panels and turbines are "over there."
  • Weird sheep (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Friday June 28, 2024 @10:58PM (#64586907) Homepage

    There seems to be a weird sheep-like behaviour amongst people, exacerbated by social media.

    Back in the pre-social-media days, it was possible to choose positions by thinking about each issue carefully and deciding your own position on each issue. Now, it seems you have to buy into the whole basket of positions that everyone on your "side" does, otherwise you're seen as a traitor.

    So because the Republican consensus (it seems) is that renewable energy is bad, all the sheep feel they need to agree with that, even if renewable energy is actually a very conservative thing, in the purest sense of the meaning: It's less wasteful and it increases energy independence and resilience.

    I just don't get it.

    • Well I dunno 'bout that. We did have a war in which an imaginary line was drawn through the middle of the country and people on opposite sides of it had to fight each other to the death.
      • Yeah, it's not like the people on one side of that "imaginary line" were holding millions of people in slavery and were trying to secede because they feared the new president might free those slaves or something like that - it was just a fight over a line.

        • That's my point. "thinking about each issue carefully and deciding your own position on each issue" (to quote GP) has always been the exception to the rule. Even with the most substantive of issues at stake in the Civil War, the issue didn't determine which side people took - opinion and loyalty just happened to correlate almost perfectly with geographical latitude.
    • Social media nation.

      The recent debate highlights that democracy guarantees you get the president you deserve.
    • Possibly that's just how we thought the world worked but people had been sheep like all along? Maybe it's a thing about being younger - you spend time looking at the issues, reading through the ballot initiative's text, listening to debates, etc, and perhaps you think everyone else is doing the same?

      But perhaps there's a little truth there. People were always in their own camps, but they weren't so divided. This family is always Republican, that one is always Democrat (and the kids possibly just keeping

    • Re:Weird sheep (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @12:03AM (#64587019)

      So because the Republican consensus (it seems) is that renewable energy is bad, all the sheep feel they need to agree with that, even if renewable energy is actually a very conservative thing, in the purest sense of the meaning: It's less wasteful and it increases energy independence and resilience. I just don't get it.

      Nobody has anything against renewable energy, so long as it is a cheap and reliable as what they had before.

      • Re: Weird sheep (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ToasterMonkey ( 467067 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @09:09AM (#64587525) Homepage

        Nobody has anything against renewable energy, so long as it is a cheap and reliable as what they had before.

        Nobody, other than the guy crying about windmill cancer and getting electrocuted by sharks, making it part of his political strategy to be against renewables, for reasons that don't matter beyond winning.

        This is where we insert the I don't pay attention to what he says, I don't watch the news, the media lies, he was just joking, etc etc while daily dosing on TikTok and YouTube shorts of rehashed trumkinism that is most definitely against anything other than oil.

        I saw in real time how the fingers got pointed at renewables during the freeze in Texas. Natural gas generation and delivery frozen, points fingers at windmills. Oh and the shift in sentiment started to shift in 2020? Well no fucking shit, it's a political strategy.

        Nobody is irrationally against renewables, my ass. Don't look up!

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Nobody has anything against renewable energy, so long as it is a cheap and reliable as what they had before.

        Except NIMBYs, and BANANAs.

        • NIMBYs hate everything, not just turbines and solar, but also nuclear, hydro dams, transmission lines and basically modern society in general.
      • Nobody has anything against renewable energy, so long as it is a cheap and reliable as what they had before.

        Then why are (especially) older republicans so mad about solar and wind?

        https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp... [arstechnica.net]

        That's literally what the article is about.

        • So people seem to get consistently more skeptical with age that it will be as cheap and reliable as it was before. Maybe lived experience plays a part.
  • No, wait, I did see part of this coming. I saw a big shift in Democrat policy as Andrew Yang was running in the 2020 Democrat primaries for POTUS and he kept saying nice things about nuclear power. This forced other candidates to respond. Well, most candidates had to respond since Biden seemed to keep real quiet on any specific policy and somehow he got away with that. I recall Warren being asked about nuclear power and gave an idiotic middle-of-the-road reply, or maybe it was more like a split-the-baby

  • First: Energy Density. Middle-aged and older right-leaning people tend to be aware of many years of hype about this or that "clean" miracle energy source, and the fact that they NEVER pan-out as actual replacements for fossil fuels - for the simple reason that fossil fuels pack a LOT of energy into a small space. Solar and wind are rather diffuse, and they're not constant or reliable, so they require storage systems (batteries) which bring along their own set of problems. There's simply nothing optimal abou

    • by zekica ( 1953180 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @03:46AM (#64587265)
      I agree mostly, but you forgot to say that every part of the energy industry externalizes costs - all three types: fossil fuels externalize CO2 and other pollution, nuclear externalizes storage (and thus decentivizes breeder reactors) and renewables externalize toxic rare metal mining/recycling. In a free market, ideally you would require that all costs are internal.
      • I agree mostly, but you forgot to say that every part of the energy industry externalizes costs - all three types: fossil fuels externalize CO2 and other pollution, nuclear externalizes storage (and thus decentivizes breeder reactors) and renewables externalize toxic rare metal mining/recycling. In a free market, ideally you would require that all costs are internal.

        Requiring that costs be internalized is the antithesis of a free market. The choice of which impacts must be measured, how those impacts are measured, how that is translated into costs, and how those costs are assessed back to the provider are all decisions by which a government picks the winners and the losers in a market. Which is why I'm all for a carefully regulated and decidedly non-free energy market.

  • >"What's behind these changes?"

    The biggest reasons for the changes are the state of the economy, inflation, and the national debt. Ask the right questions and you might get answers that reveal this. Everything is now too expensive, including energy, and people are hurting and want a way out. A major motivation for renewables is energy independence- something that is very good for security, reducing conflict, and reducing uncertainty/volatility, something everyone is in favor of. Easy to support in ti

  • In some sense it doesn't matter whether you care about climate change and the consequences of burning fossil fuels; often renewables are the best choice from a purely economic perspective.

  • They rhetorically supported wind and solar when it cost them nothing, but now that it actually displaces fossil fuels, suddenly it's a left-wing conspiracy of Satan to make their grandsons gay.
  • topping out at a three-to-one margin in favor of fossil fuels among those in the 65-and-over age group

    I guess they think that, if they have been breathing the damn fumes all their lives, why should the next generation be exempt from it?

  • by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Saturday June 29, 2024 @08:12AM (#64587471)
    The ethos of Republicanism is selfishness. They don't care about anything that isn't going to benefit them directly. The older they get, the less they care about the future of the planet ... it has nothing to do with them.
  • Make something into a political totem/virtue signal/tribal marker, and ... people start treating it like one. What a surprise!

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