At a federal level the US is moving backwards. But at a local and personal level, for the first time in generation, a huge number are waking up to the direct consequences of their dependency on the global oil markets and it's impacts their daily lives.
People in the US still don't like feeling like hostages, and this episode is a stark reminder of that.
The last geopolitical oil shocks of the 1970s resulted in huge efficiency increases in transportation and energy - this will likely do the same, but with current technologies.
We can go faster, as China demonstrates (~400GW of renewables deployed annually), and as someone who believes in climate change, I personally would like to go as fast as physics will allow.
Solar power is 10000x as hard to permit where I live. I was able to connect to the grid without anyone looking at it. Laterally just hooked up a 200amp secondary connection straight to the grid without anyone from the government batting an eye and on the power in the house went. If I wanted even a 200W solar panel it requires a code inspection, a marked roof plan (my house doesn't even have building plans, so how to even do this?), license, special solar bond, and a special warranty and then clearance from the power company.
Fuck that.
Many counties have made it so that solar only makes sense if you are wildcatting it out in some remote place where the planning and zoning fascists won't find you out. In such case you can install it for an order of magnitude cheaper and then it actually makes sense.
Meanwhile I can build a 200 foot tall oil derrick on my land with NO PERMIT WHATSOEVER because of course the oil companies had the political influence to exempt oil related infrastructure from requirements.
I've thought about it. My thought was a giant oil derrick with a bunch of utilities on it. I also thought about just making the entire house part of an oil derrick.
I cannot speak to where you live without knowing where you live, but https://www.gosolarapp.org/ was incubated by a DOE lab to streamline residential permitting with automation, and many states override local planning for permitting and siting utility scale solar.
As always, this is an OSI layer 8 people problem; if you can and want to, get involved.
Israel's not even close to being the biggest threat for the way of living in Europe.
This is because Israel's neighbours who they are attacking aren't in Europe, and also there's a lot of tourists in Europe that Israel would like to be visiting them, but the point isn't why, it's just that Israel are not themselves a threat to Europe.
USA's probably number 2 threat after Russia. But neither Israel's nor the USA's belligerence regarding Iran seems to be so much as painting a target on European backs this time around. Which may be because Iran noticed the USA threatening Europe, IDK.
- Israel foments conflicts and urges/pressurizes the US to fight them out on its behalf - already confirmed by General Wesley Clark who talked about the Seven Nation Plan.
- Refugees flee those conflicts and move to the closest nations providing asylum en masse - Turkey and then the EU.
- Israeli and other Jewish NGOs facilitate refugee migrations to Europe in the name of humanitarianism.
The US at least helps/used to help protect Europe via NATO. Israel doesn't.
None of those things are a "biggest threat for the way of living in Europe", which is what I was quoting from the now flagged comment from juliusceasar.
Not even with the asylum seekers arriving via Turkey; though as the Turkish leadership actively tried to use the flow of asylum seekers to extract concessions from Europe, IMO Turkey gets the blame for that.
The US indeed used to help protect Europe via NATO, but even back then (so, two years ago), the much bigger metaphorical footprint of the US vs. Israel means the US posed a bigger threat than Israel currently does just by mis-stepping.
Israel may be important to the US, but the nation is just not that potent in any direction in Europe.
Guess where the midlle-east mass migration comes from? Surely not from the US bombing the everliving shit out of folks living there and leaving us to deal with the fallout?
The only thing the US shows Europe is a cautionary tale of social decay and the consequences of letting Capital run their society.
I think it comes from the fact that Europe is a richer and better run society than the middle east is, along with modernity making it cheap and easy for people from the 3rd world to travel to rich western countries.
When? The French are to blame for Algeria an most of Africa, but Lebanon is the ex-french colony that suffered the less from French rule, and used to be a perfect example of multiculturalism before a nearby rogue state started putting their greasy hands everywhere.
Unless you talk about Lybia, but that's not ME (and yes, 80% of the French)
A country can be your largest trading partner and single biggest threat to sovereignty at the same time. Just ask Canadians.
I also take issue with the claim that Americans are freer or richer. The Iranian adventure, even were it to end immediately, has taken socialized medicine off the table for another generation of Americans, leaving typical Americans a lot poorer than salaries suggest. A ground invasion could easily bankrupt the U.S.. Meanwhile, Trump is trying to operate as a pre-Magna Carta king and the courts charged with stopping him are rapidly crumbling under pressure. This is a serious backslide into authoritarianism.
The irony about tRump is he sometimes says the quiet part out loud. He is a pathological liar yet at the same time he speaks truth. He revealed the USA's ruling Elite's desire to make Canada a vassal state. Arguably, the Canadian Elite did it when Brian Mulroney, (he was originally against it himself but the Business lobby told him otherwise: he dutifully complied with his donors), pushed and signed the free trade agreement: "I'm rolling the dice!". He was persuaded to put the decision to an election first. He won the majority of seats, but not the popular vote. He signed it anyway. Now, Canada finds itself in the position that his opposition warned about: that putting your eggs in one basket was taking a big risk that US wasn't going to be ruled by a Fascist Dictator.
But thanks to the Fascist Dictator Canadians have once again woken up to the folly of tying yourself so closely to a giant who goes rogue. The Republican Party should be deeply ashamed of themselves for kowtowing to tRump. Mind you, there is plenty of things the Republican Party should be ashamed about - they helped create the situation that would make the election of tRump possible - with their poverty inducing policies. The Republican Party is as loathsome as the Nazi Party.
And then there is the feckless Democrats. Absolutely useless.
Most recently Russia and Iran's Hezbollah in Syria, and Yemen's civil war involving Iran's Houthis and Egypt/Saudi Arabia. The US was involved in the Syrian civil war but not responsible for most of the civilian destruction. People outside the region have this childish understanding of the ME where Iraq is the only thing that happened (conveniently also forgetting the much more brutal Iran-Iraq war).
And to further your point mass immigration into Europe isn't just recent; it's been happening for decades. For a while the Islamic state was encouraging attacks in Europe, and hundreds of people were killed by jihadists running cars through Christmas parades and similar events which peaked ~2016 and 2017. I think the largest was an attack in Nice, France on Bastille day killing 86 and injuring hundreds (https://grokipedia.com/page/2016_Nice_truck_attack) and another famous one I can think of was the christmas market attack in Berlin, killing 12 and injuring 56 (https://grokipedia.com/page/2016_Berlin_truck_attack). These were the result of economic immigration, unrelated to anything specific the US had done.
The power vacuum after the US messed up Iraq and Syria. Every single wave of mass migration towards Europe is the direct result of the US choosing to bomb the Middle East. That's also part of why this time around, everybody's quite this annoyed at America.
At least the US still has energy infrastructure, while the EU is forced to financially support Dictators in Tehran and Moscow to keep their economy from collapsing.
Oil is (close to) fungible, which means the higher prices in US fuel pumps are just as much financially supporting dictators in Tehran and Moscow as EU fuel pumps.
Ironically, the "close to" part is just enough to prevent the USA from isolating itself from the world market by refining and using what it currently exports.
Pretty sure the US does not buy energy from natural gas pipelines to Russia, neither are we shutting down all of our Nuclear Power Plants (like Germany) because it's green to import more gas ?
As an American I couldn't tell you what their logic is exactly.
> Pretty sure the US does not buy energy from natural gas pipelines to Russia, neither are we shutting down all of our Nuclear Power Plants (like Germany) because it's green to import more gas ?
Irrelevant. Natural gas isn't the only fossil fuel, the US trades oil on the global market, that oil trade cannot help but support all other petrostates.
To use the table that the chart is supposed to be based on, the peak of nuclear production in Germany was only about 60% of 2025's renewables, 284.6 TWh renewables in 2025 vs 169.6 TWh nuclear in 2000: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromerzeugung_in_Deutschland
If your energy policy was "hope the Ayatollah doesn't have a bad hair day", you didn't have an energy policy.
Europe could have left their nuclear power plants turned on. Or drilled in the north sea. Or built LNG import terminals. These were all policy choices that had nothing to do with the US or Israel.
Yeah, no. Merkel's deal to shut off the nuclear plants to make a coalition was 100% a blunder. Not only in hindsight, with the dependence on russian gas, but in general it was a blunder. Nuclear gives you steady energy in ways that renewables can't. We should absolutely do more renewables, but to shut off working nuclear was not good.
Nuclear is not that steady. Nuclear plants require a lot of water to cool things. And when a particular hot summer happens, rivers dry out and nuclear reactors have to scale down the power production or even be shutdown. And then they require quite significant maintenance periodically.
Granted, in Europe a hot dry summer is when solar is at its peak. So it is much lesser problem than a cold winter with a lot of cloudy days with no wind when nuclear energy is ideal.
Still from a perspective of 20 years ago with unknown prospects about renewables natural gas power stations were considered much more reliable and flexible power source compared with nuclear and way more cleaner than coal. Of cause, as long as one gets gas.
It is simply false that it was Merkel who decided to shut down nuclear power plants. The decision had been made over a decade earlier. She just accelerated the plan in the end after a previous unsuccessful attempt at rolling back part of it. It also wasn't even really her decision, it was the will of the people that sharply turned against nuclear after Fukushima, she just implemented it.
Well besides being 20 years too late. Germany's energy policy was basically do nothing to build renewables, close all nuclear plants and blindly trust Russia for decades...
Besides being a great friend of Putin one of Germany's previous chancellors was literally an openly paid Russian agent who didn't even try hiding it until 2022 (and who knows what "arrangements" he had before he left office...)
The planned graph is an almost straight line from 2005 to 2050, which it is following very closely in the best of German stereotypes.
A decade or so ago, this was described as:
while the German approach is not unique worldwide, the speed and scope of the Energiewende are exceptional
While they could've done better in a magical alternate universe where the population was not terrified of nuclear power, the transition has in fact been very fast.
> So you are implying the current economic mess Germany is in was planned?
Just the energy transition.
The economic mess isn't even mostly about the energy, it's a grandfathered (literally) fear of hyperinflation that means the state is terrified of borrowing even when that's a good thing, plus the infamous bureaucracy which they now plan to solve with a 200-step plan: https://www.dw.com/en/german-leaders-plan-to-cut-red-tape-in...
This is also fairly easy to spot with the GDP graph, which is a long term trend of "line go up", just never quite as fast as the US's line, and the recent dip is quite small compared to that growth: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
> i.e. they understood the risks of relying on Russia and made a conscience decision to build their plan for transitioning into renewables around it.
This was more due to the incorrect belief that nations which have an important trade relationship can use diplomacy to avoid conflict, i.e. Germany being an important customer of Russian oil means that Germany can make a credible threat to cause economic harm to Russia by ceasing to buy Russian oil if Russia does something dumb like invade Ukraine. Germany did in fact cause economic harm to Russia by ceasing (or massively reducing, I'm not clear) purchase of Russian oil, however it turned out that Russian leadership didn't care about economic harm to Russia.
We did. Most of the oil and gas there has now been removed and sold. Oil production peaked in 1999, gas in 2001.
If the same place, the North Sea specifically, was filled with wind farms, it could supply about half of the EU's electricity.
(If all the waters around the British Isles had wind farms, it becomes 140% of current EU total primary energy consumption or 660% of the electricity consumption, assuming I did the substitution efficiency multiplier right).
Trump might ironically end up being the guy that pushes society over the green energy tipping point.
EVs were all the rage a few years ago, but they were expensive and gas prices collapsed. However if we get another $5-$6/gal gut punch, a lot of people will probably say "You know what? I'm done with this shit."
For much of my late teens and early 20s, I was hearing about people using vegetable oil as a substitute for diesel. If that still works, there may be some additional impact that both limits the fuel price and increases food prices: https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/272515844?_gl...
To the point of the comment you're replying to, US cars are infamously inefficient compared to European cars, and also there's that old quote about how "In the US 100 years is a long time, while in Europe 100 miles is a long way", so the US can still get a price shock even with cheaper fuel than the UK/EU.
Vegetable oil will cause long-term damage in modern diesel engines with direct injection or common rail injection systems. Older indirect injection diesel engines could tolerate it much better because of the pre-combustion stage.
Well Trump doesn't exactly have the sufficient work ethic, mental acuity or sense of purpose to as much damage (and hopefully not more than a handful of years left on this earth in general to end up having to shot himself in a bunker).
If a participant in a war, in good faith, wants to negotiate long-term cessation of hostilities, they wouldn't kill the leaders of the other side. Because who the fuck will you negotiate with after? Who surrenders? That's why historically people don't do that in wars. Israel/The US just want to destroy Iran as a nation state. Thinking that there are going to be any talks with someone with a mandate from the Iranian people in weeks or months is misguided. This is a decades-long thing. We better buckle up.
> If a participant in a war, in good faith, wants to negotiate long-term cessation of hostilities, they wouldn't kill the leaders of the other side.
Assassination of leaders is very common in war.
Nobody claims the US wanted to negotiate a cease fire with the old regime, they want to negotiate it with whatever phoenix rises from its ashes.
> Because who the fuck will you negotiate with after? Who surrenders? That's why historically people don't do that in wars.
You negotiate with the power structure that remains, it could be equally oppressive figures from the same organizations, it could be opposition leaders, it could be labor unions, it could be whomever locally consolidates power. Put public keys on the shells and rockets. One can not credibly claim lack of agency while firing rockets and drones. Old enough to fire? Old enough to get hit!
I just described a protocol to identify who is in power, administration-agnostic Pentagon can demand the Iranians hold a crypto party bootstrap their own web of trust and forward the keys through physicists then IAEA. The web of trust can be established before any voting or alliance forming.
If Iran predelegated all hostilities in the event of regime decapitation, they effectively sent their troops (and population) on a never ending suicide mission.
The longer power vacuum persists the more casualties result.
Ultimately it is more in the interest of both Iran regime and population to even bootstrap this web of trust without Pentagon demanding it!
> Israel/The US just want to destroy Iran as a nation state. Thinking that there are going to be any talks with someone with a mandate from the Iranian people in weeks or months is misguided. This is a decades-long thing. We better buckle up.
Why does establishing the local power nexus necessarily take decades? The faster it is unambiguously established, the faster negotiation can actually start.
I believe you are fundamentally misunderstanding the actors and their motivations here, in a similar way to the US administration (which also explains this incredibly self-sabotaging war in the first place).
1) The US and Israel have repeatedly assassinated Iranian negotiators when they did come to the table. Who's gonna want to negotiate at this point and put themselves on the kill list next? The repeated shady dealings have ruined the reputation of the US as a party one can even negotiate with.
2) You have to understand that Iranian leadership (but also big parts of society!) are actually religious nuts. It's not all for show. They believe that their sacrifice on the earthly sphere will be rewarded in the afterlife. Their considerations aren't immediate material wealth and well-being the same way they are for the Americans. They're willing to endure this long-term pain for what they see as the longer-term reward of punishing the Great Satan.
From the Iranian perspective, they are winning and keeping at it is the rational move.
The US navigated itself into a no-win situation, driven by misguided illusions of imperial power, hubris and (in the case of Hegseth) toxic masculinity.
> 1) The US and Israel have repeatedly assassinated Iranian negotiators when they did come to the table. Who's gonna want to negotiate at this point and put themselves on the kill list next? The repeated shady dealings have ruined the reputation of the US as a party one can even negotiate with.
"coming to the table" is an expression conveying sincere negotiation. One can physically or telecomatically "come to the table" without actually coming to the table!
Consider how North Korea kept pretending coming to the table until it was too late! Perhaps you want another North Korea in the middle east, but I believe most on HN don't!
I would even say that publically confessing what was done to Mahsa Amini (both internationally and domestically) for a prolonged period would be a precondition for accepting ceasefire conditions.
You can not reliably negotiate with a counterparty that is lying in your face.
2) Iranian leadership perfectly understands what they did to Mahsa Amini for example. They can't seriously believe they will go to this afterlife, if they felt they had nothing to hide they would be open about it and portray without shame what they did to her. They use religion the same way the Inquisition used religion: as a loyalty indicator. The actions of such actors in Iran are better explained by those of someone who became complicit (intentionally or by the trickery and pressure of others) and from then on feel aligned by a survival mechanism to keep the skeletons in the closet.
The US can very much find progress, depending on their level or lack of respect for international law, in the sense of civil disobedience (sometimes you break rules to improve a situation): regardless of legality, how would Iranian high society react if US progressively bombs neighborhoods starting from the richest neighborhoods (with sufficient advance warning). As you turn the elites homeless they either display the homeless fate to the next echelon of high society of what would happen to them, or they take the housing of the next echelon of high society for themselves... This puts pressure on exactly the people who were calling the shots in Iran. Legal? not at all! About as legal as signing chemical weapons conventions treaty and then applying hydrogen cyanide on Mahsa Amini...
None of this is relevant, because you still incorrectly assume the US is the one coming at this from a position of strength and capable of extracting concessions.
The world economy, the oil price, the reality in Hormuz and the Iranian regime disagree with you. None of what you propose is capable of changing this.
If the US were to bomb neighborhoods, it would strengthen the resolve of Iranians. Hard power is not an effective solution for the problem the US created.
The inquisition parallel is somewhat apt, but more accurate would be the crusades. Christians took the risk of death because of their religious beliefs, the same is the case here.
Lets take a step back: the reason governments sponsor things like basic science research, solar panel development, space projects etc. Is because they are high risk and capital intensive. The reason industry doesn't do it is because it is too long term. The economy mostly concerns itself with short term incentives and threats. That the world economy votes economically to let Iran be, is just short term financial security, it ignores the threats that Iran poses.
Obviously lots of possibilities exist, for example in the most absurdist scenario, the US demands that Iran evacuates, and announces nuclear carpet bombing plenty ahead of time. Likely? No. Possible? Yes. Iran can not do the same (yet), and the US would like to keep it that way, they don't want another North Korea. They understand the long term price. If other nations refuse to drop their fossil fuel habits, they can either pay the premium price (directly or indirectly by helping secure the Strait of Hormuz) or drop their fossil fuel habits. It's unsustainable in the long run anyway...
What's wrong with another North Korea? They've been much better behaved on the global stage than the US has been. I'd much rather have another North Korea than any state after America's image.
I also strongly disagree with you equating war crimes and R&D.
this isn't a poll about what you or I believe, it's pointing to the existence of at least one lower-noise avenue than the ones pursued
observe that your position is not verifiable by the world at large, while cryptographically signed messages would be veriable by us individuals across the whole world.
one may counter that the US could make up a large number of fake crypto key / Iranian associations; but surely to the extent that Iran has a functioning regime, surely it could use the IAEA as a channel to communicate the Iranian cryptographic key observations like:
* Khamenei confirms meeting Aragchi in person and Aragchi has chosen such and such a public key
* Aragchi confirms meeting Khamenei in person and Khamenei has chosen such and such a public key
* and so on for all players interested in participating in confirming the present regime or establishing a new one amidst chaos.
(if you don't have control over your physicists at a nuclear power plant, then you don't have control over your regime)
I don't oppose anything. The protocol can't be followed if the white house is making things up (which they've been doing since the beginning of this war -- remember we've already "won" multiple times?). It's great that you have a protocol for verifying identity, that's a great cryptography use-case. It doesn't help when the person talking is just lying though, hence there's no proof available, cryptographic or otherwise.
The IAEA is an international body, IF your interpretation was correct and my proposal were followed we'd see messages by Iran that verify such and such public keys for such and such figures and functionaries in Iran (through IAEA), with Trump claiming without proof that they made concessions, since in your scenario it should be in Trumps proclaimed interest to publish such a signed message, so it would help in the case that Trump were lying. Protocol instructs to ignore any communications by counterparty that was not signed. Unsigned communications don't count as happened.
> I don't understand how both the international community as well as say US is dealing with the Iran / Straight of Hormuz crisis.
I don't understand how Americans mistakenly keep referring to the Strait of Hormuz as the Straight of Hormuz in spite of English being their first language.
A comment about ongoing war is replied with spelling pedantics?
Yes while even mapmakers etc during 1500-1700's sometimes used "Straight", the subsequent standardizations in English selected "Strait" as the standard spelling.
How would you know if English is or isn't my first language?
That sounds extremely dangerous; you cannot add PV (or any secondary source) in the US and connect it to utility power without it being done by an electrician and inspected by the city.
I'm shocked that safety-conscious Europe—especially Germany, known for its strict rules—would allow this.
Or is this more AliExpress garbage with a German flag glued to it?
> That sounds extremely dangerous; you cannot add PV (or any secondary source) in the US and connect it to utility power without it being done by an electrician and inspected by the city.
This is factually inaccurate. Utah was the first to legalize plug in solar, and 17 other states have legislation pending to do so. It sounds like you are unaware of regulations around islanding in both Europe and the US. This is a solved problem.
> The biggest regulatory concern – energizing lines during an outage and putting line workers at risk – is not really an issue, since inverters are covered by UL 1741, and have “anti-islanding” capability.
UL 3700 specifically addresses plug in solar risks and mitigating them.
I have a set of solar panels and a "hydronic" heat pump, despite living all the way up at 56N in the maybe-Europe UK. We also have access to both cheap Chinese EVs and the increasingly acceptable EU ones, like the Renault 5.
The only reason people skip the iPhone here is because it is directly associated with being an asshole. Sent from my heatpump-heated home in the Julian Alps.
EVs are still a bit underwhelming wrt range - ideally either 450miles/700km or 5 minute 20->80% recharge at an acceptable price (35k EUR) should be the norm. For cities it doesn't matter but for longer vacation trips it's a must, nobody wants to waste 3 hours on a 1100km trip recharging. Chinese EVs might be able to deliver it at this price point (BYD) but EU adds additional (up to) 45% in extra fees to penalize Chinese EV makers and to prevent collapse of EU car makers.
You should not be spending that much time at a charger. Tech Connextras (the sister channel to Technology Connections) just did a video about a real-life road trip in slightly below freezing temperatures.
It's standard to charge from 10->80% or even less like 20->60% when doing road trips. People that don't own EVs assume that it's always 0->100%. However, even in a gas vehicle you'd never start at 0% (I'd fill up at 25%->100%).
The result is that you spend significantly less time charging than you expect. For me, it's usually 10 to 15 minutes per stop. Sometimes it's as long as 20. But that's generally after about 2 to 3 hours of driving.
It's actually funny because I've owned my EV since 2018 and my parents STILL try to insist that I can't do road trips in it. Even though I visit them pretty frequently and do 6 hour trips pretty regularly.
The other thing that is commonly missed is that you spend almost no time charging most of the time. It's only road trips where you spend any time waiting for a charge. That's because you are (likely) charging your car at home. The video referenced even shows that it's possible to do that with just a 120V outlet available.
Now how much time do you waste on a 700 mile road trip the way you recharge? I suspect something around 1-2 hours extra time. Compare it with gas station's 20 minutes overall including a short toilet break. For rapid charging you also need an expensive EV, whereas any gasoline clunker would do "fast tank filling".
> Now how much time do you waste on a 700 mile road trip the way you recharge?
About 2 hours. And as luck would have it, I also did that trip with an ICE. My non-driving time added about an hour.
> Compare it with gas station's 20 minutes overall including a short toilet break.
Which you still need to do at least a couple of times driving 700 miles. Also, that's 10 hours of driving, you need more than just a single 20 minute break for that much driving.
> For rapid charging you also need an expensive EV,
If you are making 700 mile trips, you'll need an EV with decent range anyways. All of those support fast charging.
Actually, all EVs I'm aware of support fast charging. The slowest I know of is the leaf, but even that supports 50kW charging.
Look, if you are in the business of doing a weekly 700 mile drive in the snow pulling a loaded trailer, don't get an EV. You have my blessing. Most people aren't doing anything like that. My 700 mile round trip happens twice a year, roughly, and the added 1 hour over an ICE is no big deal. Distances more than that, and I'm probably flying.
So you are essentially agreeing with me that the tech is not there yet - either it underperforms compared to ICE or it's much more expensive when it matches ICE. In other words, I should wait a few years until it catches up price-wise or convenience-wise. I don't really care about luxury or "driving inside a smartphone" experience, but just need something reliable that doesn't hinder me. Wasting 2 extra hours on a 10h hour trip is too much; I typically try to do it as quickly as possible to have more time for target activities.
I can stay longer and work remotely from there as well. Anyway, why do you care what exactly do I do? I simply need the range or super fast recharging as non-negotiable items.
1 in 4 vehicles sold globally last year were EVs, and they are >50% of the monthly sales in China, the largest market in the world. EVs are mostly solved, even though they will continue to rapidly improve, both range and charging infrastructure. Norway is at ~100% monthly EV sales, other countries will get there eventually.
Importantly, we should expect to go faster as EV sales reach a point where combustion sales have declined to a level where they can no longer support combustion vehicle manufacturers as a going concern. Peak global combustion auto sales occurred in 2017.
The trend is clear but right now they aren't able to replace ICE cars due to what I mentioned above. Either they lack range/recharging convenience or they don't but are too expensive. They need a few more years of scaling or EU to stop penalizing Chinese EVs.
ICE =! NEVs (which includes BEVs and PHEVs, with BEVs still the majority). If folks want to buy PHEVs until BEVs steamroll them, whatevs, the BEV cost decline and uptake curves speak for themselves. Combustion isn't getting cheaper anytime soon.
People in the US still don't like feeling like hostages, and this episode is a stark reminder of that.
The last geopolitical oil shocks of the 1970s resulted in huge efficiency increases in transportation and energy - this will likely do the same, but with current technologies.
The economics of it are just too good. Adding grid connectivity seems to be the bottleneck right now.
https://electrek.co/2026/03/25/eia-new-solar-wind-storage-ca...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufactur...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-tak...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/were-harvesting-t...
https://www.brightsaver.org/publicly-filed-states
> Solar power makes up 51% of the planned 2026 capacity additions, followed by battery storage at 28% and wind at 14%.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi...
https://www.cfr.org/articles/china-is-planning-decades-ahead...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/10/1119941/china-en...
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-renewable-photo-essay
https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202601/30/cont...
Fuck that.
Many counties have made it so that solar only makes sense if you are wildcatting it out in some remote place where the planning and zoning fascists won't find you out. In such case you can install it for an order of magnitude cheaper and then it actually makes sense.
Meanwhile I can build a 200 foot tall oil derrick on my land with NO PERMIT WHATSOEVER because of course the oil companies had the political influence to exempt oil related infrastructure from requirements.
(joking, but wow that really does highlight how absolutely dysfunctional US regulation is, no wonder everyone over there hates their government)
As always, this is an OSI layer 8 people problem; if you can and want to, get involved.
Especially for the economy and safety.
This is because Israel's neighbours who they are attacking aren't in Europe, and also there's a lot of tourists in Europe that Israel would like to be visiting them, but the point isn't why, it's just that Israel are not themselves a threat to Europe.
USA's probably number 2 threat after Russia. But neither Israel's nor the USA's belligerence regarding Iran seems to be so much as painting a target on European backs this time around. Which may be because Iran noticed the USA threatening Europe, IDK.
- Refugees flee those conflicts and move to the closest nations providing asylum en masse - Turkey and then the EU.
- Israeli and other Jewish NGOs facilitate refugee migrations to Europe in the name of humanitarianism.
The US at least helps/used to help protect Europe via NATO. Israel doesn't.
Not even with the asylum seekers arriving via Turkey; though as the Turkish leadership actively tried to use the flow of asylum seekers to extract concessions from Europe, IMO Turkey gets the blame for that.
The US indeed used to help protect Europe via NATO, but even back then (so, two years ago), the much bigger metaphorical footprint of the US vs. Israel means the US posed a bigger threat than Israel currently does just by mis-stepping.
Israel may be important to the US, but the nation is just not that potent in any direction in Europe.
The only thing the US shows Europe is a cautionary tale of social decay and the consequences of letting Capital run their society.
Unless you talk about Lybia, but that's not ME (and yes, 80% of the French)
Freer to bend over for ICE thugs, or is there some other definition of freedom that you’ve meant?
> especially when Europe is currently fighting a war in Ukraine
Ukraine is fighting war in Ukraine with financial support of Europe. Big difference.
> and struggling to handle mass middle-east immigration
Caused by US bombing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_intervention_in_the_Sy...
I also take issue with the claim that Americans are freer or richer. The Iranian adventure, even were it to end immediately, has taken socialized medicine off the table for another generation of Americans, leaving typical Americans a lot poorer than salaries suggest. A ground invasion could easily bankrupt the U.S.. Meanwhile, Trump is trying to operate as a pre-Magna Carta king and the courts charged with stopping him are rapidly crumbling under pressure. This is a serious backslide into authoritarianism.
But thanks to the Fascist Dictator Canadians have once again woken up to the folly of tying yourself so closely to a giant who goes rogue. The Republican Party should be deeply ashamed of themselves for kowtowing to tRump. Mind you, there is plenty of things the Republican Party should be ashamed about - they helped create the situation that would make the election of tRump possible - with their poverty inducing policies. The Republican Party is as loathsome as the Nazi Party.
And then there is the feckless Democrats. Absolutely useless.
The power vacuum after the US messed up Iraq and Syria. Every single wave of mass migration towards Europe is the direct result of the US choosing to bomb the Middle East. That's also part of why this time around, everybody's quite this annoyed at America.
Also please, use serious sources.
The most prominent victim of this appears to be the US president himself.
I know that Trump is the equivalent of a hallucinating LLM, but you can’t just ignore his words whenever convenient.
Cope harder. The US doesn't offer a single example of being better than the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
The USA really hasn't been doing well lately.
Ironically, the "close to" part is just enough to prevent the USA from isolating itself from the world market by refining and using what it currently exports.
As an American I couldn't tell you what their logic is exactly.
Irrelevant. Natural gas isn't the only fossil fuel, the US trades oil on the global market, that oil trade cannot help but support all other petrostates.
Also, if you're talking about Germany in particular, renewables have significantly exceeded the peak share of nuclear power: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:StromerzeugungDeutschlan...
(Kernenergie == nuclear)
To use the table that the chart is supposed to be based on, the peak of nuclear production in Germany was only about 60% of 2025's renewables, 284.6 TWh renewables in 2025 vs 169.6 TWh nuclear in 2000: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromerzeugung_in_Deutschland
Europe could have left their nuclear power plants turned on. Or drilled in the north sea. Or built LNG import terminals. These were all policy choices that had nothing to do with the US or Israel.
Yeah, no. Merkel's deal to shut off the nuclear plants to make a coalition was 100% a blunder. Not only in hindsight, with the dependence on russian gas, but in general it was a blunder. Nuclear gives you steady energy in ways that renewables can't. We should absolutely do more renewables, but to shut off working nuclear was not good.
Granted, in Europe a hot dry summer is when solar is at its peak. So it is much lesser problem than a cold winter with a lot of cloudy days with no wind when nuclear energy is ideal.
Still from a perspective of 20 years ago with unknown prospects about renewables natural gas power stations were considered much more reliable and flexible power source compared with nuclear and way more cleaner than coal. Of cause, as long as one gets gas.
Besides being a great friend of Putin one of Germany's previous chancellors was literally an openly paid Russian agent who didn't even try hiding it until 2022 (and who knows what "arrangements" he had before he left office...)
Germany's been a pioneer in incentivizing personal solar installations.
It was too little and too late and Germany only got serious about it when there were no longer any other options.
> personal solar installations
It was entirely insignificant back then and growth pretty much entirely stopped between 2012 and 2018.
The country looks pretty on-schedule to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_transition_scenari...
vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschland.sv...
A decade or so ago, this was described as:
While they could've done better in a magical alternate universe where the population was not terrified of nuclear power, the transition has in fact been very fast.For a more detailed graph showing the scale of nuclear vs. renewable, including the period you're criticising in particular, page 12: https://web.archive.org/web/20160602074457/https://www.agora...
i.e. they understood the risks of relying on Russia and made a conscience decision to build their plan for transitioning into renewables around it.
Just the energy transition.
The economic mess isn't even mostly about the energy, it's a grandfathered (literally) fear of hyperinflation that means the state is terrified of borrowing even when that's a good thing, plus the infamous bureaucracy which they now plan to solve with a 200-step plan: https://www.dw.com/en/german-leaders-plan-to-cut-red-tape-in...
This is also fairly easy to spot with the GDP graph, which is a long term trend of "line go up", just never quite as fast as the US's line, and the recent dip is quite small compared to that growth: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
> i.e. they understood the risks of relying on Russia and made a conscience decision to build their plan for transitioning into renewables around it.
This was more due to the incorrect belief that nations which have an important trade relationship can use diplomacy to avoid conflict, i.e. Germany being an important customer of Russian oil means that Germany can make a credible threat to cause economic harm to Russia by ceasing to buy Russian oil if Russia does something dumb like invade Ukraine. Germany did in fact cause economic harm to Russia by ceasing (or massively reducing, I'm not clear) purchase of Russian oil, however it turned out that Russian leadership didn't care about economic harm to Russia.
We did. Most of the oil and gas there has now been removed and sold. Oil production peaked in 1999, gas in 2001.
If the same place, the North Sea specifically, was filled with wind farms, it could supply about half of the EU's electricity.
(If all the waters around the British Isles had wind farms, it becomes 140% of current EU total primary energy consumption or 660% of the electricity consumption, assuming I did the substitution efficiency multiplier right).
Guess what's getting built?
EVs were all the rage a few years ago, but they were expensive and gas prices collapsed. However if we get another $5-$6/gal gut punch, a lot of people will probably say "You know what? I'm done with this shit."
People around me are expecting to see diesel at £2/l soon.
To the point of the comment you're replying to, US cars are infamously inefficient compared to European cars, and also there's that old quote about how "In the US 100 years is a long time, while in Europe 100 miles is a long way", so the US can still get a price shock even with cheaper fuel than the UK/EU.
[1](https://archive.ph/NLJWJ)
The World works in mysterious ways.
Assassination of leaders is very common in war. Nobody claims the US wanted to negotiate a cease fire with the old regime, they want to negotiate it with whatever phoenix rises from its ashes.
> Because who the fuck will you negotiate with after? Who surrenders? That's why historically people don't do that in wars.
You negotiate with the power structure that remains, it could be equally oppressive figures from the same organizations, it could be opposition leaders, it could be labor unions, it could be whomever locally consolidates power. Put public keys on the shells and rockets. One can not credibly claim lack of agency while firing rockets and drones. Old enough to fire? Old enough to get hit!
I just described a protocol to identify who is in power, administration-agnostic Pentagon can demand the Iranians hold a crypto party bootstrap their own web of trust and forward the keys through physicists then IAEA. The web of trust can be established before any voting or alliance forming.
If Iran predelegated all hostilities in the event of regime decapitation, they effectively sent their troops (and population) on a never ending suicide mission.
The longer power vacuum persists the more casualties result.
Ultimately it is more in the interest of both Iran regime and population to even bootstrap this web of trust without Pentagon demanding it!
> Israel/The US just want to destroy Iran as a nation state. Thinking that there are going to be any talks with someone with a mandate from the Iranian people in weeks or months is misguided. This is a decades-long thing. We better buckle up.
Why does establishing the local power nexus necessarily take decades? The faster it is unambiguously established, the faster negotiation can actually start.
1) The US and Israel have repeatedly assassinated Iranian negotiators when they did come to the table. Who's gonna want to negotiate at this point and put themselves on the kill list next? The repeated shady dealings have ruined the reputation of the US as a party one can even negotiate with.
2) You have to understand that Iranian leadership (but also big parts of society!) are actually religious nuts. It's not all for show. They believe that their sacrifice on the earthly sphere will be rewarded in the afterlife. Their considerations aren't immediate material wealth and well-being the same way they are for the Americans. They're willing to endure this long-term pain for what they see as the longer-term reward of punishing the Great Satan.
From the Iranian perspective, they are winning and keeping at it is the rational move.
The US navigated itself into a no-win situation, driven by misguided illusions of imperial power, hubris and (in the case of Hegseth) toxic masculinity.
"coming to the table" is an expression conveying sincere negotiation. One can physically or telecomatically "come to the table" without actually coming to the table!
Consider how North Korea kept pretending coming to the table until it was too late! Perhaps you want another North Korea in the middle east, but I believe most on HN don't!
I would even say that publically confessing what was done to Mahsa Amini (both internationally and domestically) for a prolonged period would be a precondition for accepting ceasefire conditions.
You can not reliably negotiate with a counterparty that is lying in your face.
2) Iranian leadership perfectly understands what they did to Mahsa Amini for example. They can't seriously believe they will go to this afterlife, if they felt they had nothing to hide they would be open about it and portray without shame what they did to her. They use religion the same way the Inquisition used religion: as a loyalty indicator. The actions of such actors in Iran are better explained by those of someone who became complicit (intentionally or by the trickery and pressure of others) and from then on feel aligned by a survival mechanism to keep the skeletons in the closet.
The US can very much find progress, depending on their level or lack of respect for international law, in the sense of civil disobedience (sometimes you break rules to improve a situation): regardless of legality, how would Iranian high society react if US progressively bombs neighborhoods starting from the richest neighborhoods (with sufficient advance warning). As you turn the elites homeless they either display the homeless fate to the next echelon of high society of what would happen to them, or they take the housing of the next echelon of high society for themselves... This puts pressure on exactly the people who were calling the shots in Iran. Legal? not at all! About as legal as signing chemical weapons conventions treaty and then applying hydrogen cyanide on Mahsa Amini...
The world economy, the oil price, the reality in Hormuz and the Iranian regime disagree with you. None of what you propose is capable of changing this.
If the US were to bomb neighborhoods, it would strengthen the resolve of Iranians. Hard power is not an effective solution for the problem the US created.
The inquisition parallel is somewhat apt, but more accurate would be the crusades. Christians took the risk of death because of their religious beliefs, the same is the case here.
Obviously lots of possibilities exist, for example in the most absurdist scenario, the US demands that Iran evacuates, and announces nuclear carpet bombing plenty ahead of time. Likely? No. Possible? Yes. Iran can not do the same (yet), and the US would like to keep it that way, they don't want another North Korea. They understand the long term price. If other nations refuse to drop their fossil fuel habits, they can either pay the premium price (directly or indirectly by helping secure the Strait of Hormuz) or drop their fossil fuel habits. It's unsustainable in the long run anyway...
I also strongly disagree with you equating war crimes and R&D.
There's your answer.
this isn't a poll about what you or I believe, it's pointing to the existence of at least one lower-noise avenue than the ones pursued
observe that your position is not verifiable by the world at large, while cryptographically signed messages would be veriable by us individuals across the whole world.
one may counter that the US could make up a large number of fake crypto key / Iranian associations; but surely to the extent that Iran has a functioning regime, surely it could use the IAEA as a channel to communicate the Iranian cryptographic key observations like:
* Khamenei confirms meeting Aragchi in person and Aragchi has chosen such and such a public key
* Aragchi confirms meeting Khamenei in person and Khamenei has chosen such and such a public key
* and so on for all players interested in participating in confirming the present regime or establishing a new one amidst chaos.
(if you don't have control over your physicists at a nuclear power plant, then you don't have control over your regime)
Why would you oppose a protocol that vindicates the correctness of your interpretation if you are so certain that you are right?
Perhaps because you don't feel very certain that you are right...
I don't understand how Americans mistakenly keep referring to the Strait of Hormuz as the Straight of Hormuz in spite of English being their first language.
Yes while even mapmakers etc during 1500-1700's sometimes used "Straight", the subsequent standardizations in English selected "Strait" as the standard spelling.
How would you know if English is or isn't my first language?
It's thoroughly practical, especially with energy prices being what they are now.
Unclear what Apple's pricing policy has to do with this,.
I'm shocked that safety-conscious Europe—especially Germany, known for its strict rules—would allow this.
Or is this more AliExpress garbage with a German flag glued to it?
https://hackaday.com/2026/03/31/solar-balconies-take-europe-...
This is factually inaccurate. Utah was the first to legalize plug in solar, and 17 other states have legislation pending to do so. It sounds like you are unaware of regulations around islanding in both Europe and the US. This is a solved problem.
> The biggest regulatory concern – energizing lines during an outage and putting line workers at risk – is not really an issue, since inverters are covered by UL 1741, and have “anti-islanding” capability.
UL 3700 specifically addresses plug in solar risks and mitigating them.
Resources on the topic below:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/03/27/the-theory-and-practi...
https://solarunitedneighbors.org/resources/what-to-know-abou...
https://www.ul.com/news/ul-solutions-debuts-testing-and-cert...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NANIjW3yGsFhpNTzvg30kMHo...
https://permitpower.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2026/01/...
https://www.cesa.org/resource-library/resource/plug-in-solar...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-tak...
https://www.brightsaver.org/publicly-filed-states
https://www.digikey.com/en/articles/anti-islanding-and-smart...
"What unplanned EV road trips in cold weather (5°F/-15°C) are actually like these days" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebGLFVzvdfM
It's standard to charge from 10->80% or even less like 20->60% when doing road trips. People that don't own EVs assume that it's always 0->100%. However, even in a gas vehicle you'd never start at 0% (I'd fill up at 25%->100%).
The result is that you spend significantly less time charging than you expect. For me, it's usually 10 to 15 minutes per stop. Sometimes it's as long as 20. But that's generally after about 2 to 3 hours of driving.
It's actually funny because I've owned my EV since 2018 and my parents STILL try to insist that I can't do road trips in it. Even though I visit them pretty frequently and do 6 hour trips pretty regularly.
The other thing that is commonly missed is that you spend almost no time charging most of the time. It's only road trips where you spend any time waiting for a charge. That's because you are (likely) charging your car at home. The video referenced even shows that it's possible to do that with just a 120V outlet available.
About 2 hours. And as luck would have it, I also did that trip with an ICE. My non-driving time added about an hour.
> Compare it with gas station's 20 minutes overall including a short toilet break.
Which you still need to do at least a couple of times driving 700 miles. Also, that's 10 hours of driving, you need more than just a single 20 minute break for that much driving.
> For rapid charging you also need an expensive EV,
If you are making 700 mile trips, you'll need an EV with decent range anyways. All of those support fast charging.
Actually, all EVs I'm aware of support fast charging. The slowest I know of is the leaf, but even that supports 50kW charging.
Look, if you are in the business of doing a weekly 700 mile drive in the snow pulling a loaded trailer, don't get an EV. You have my blessing. Most people aren't doing anything like that. My 700 mile round trip happens twice a year, roughly, and the added 1 hour over an ICE is no big deal. Distances more than that, and I'm probably flying.
That's a bad faith reading of my comment. Do better.
So for 2 days of doing such activity you'll spent 20 hours in a car?
Importantly, we should expect to go faster as EV sales reach a point where combustion sales have declined to a level where they can no longer support combustion vehicle manufacturers as a going concern. Peak global combustion auto sales occurred in 2017.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47459145 (citations)
> “Electric cars” include battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/02/03/global-ev-sales-leaders...
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-car-sales-battery-p...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/car-sales