I've done research on this when I was in grad school. Base load power for renewables is no where near enough to keep our societies functioning currently. The amount of raw metals and rare earth elements (copper, lithium, etc) needed to convert to full electrical (vehicles, infrastructure, industry, etc.) is astounding. For example it would take all copper global production currently for just UK to accomplish this right now.

Another problem is that electrical grids right now are no where near close to being able to support huge EV adoption. I'm sure you've heard of the problems France was having with shortages in electricity, or the pressure on electricity usage in UK when there was particularly hot days. This is currently when EV's are still a tiny, single % of all vehicles on the road. What happens if that number is 50%? Richest state in the US, California is asking people to ration electricity, so what happens when you have to plug in millions of electricity hungry EV's or you're going to try to convert massive industrial production away from coal/gas to electrical?

I agree self sufficiency is a good thing (big part of the reason I am pro-Russia in this war, as victory here opens up space for sovereignty worldwide), but it's also a long term project that Europe simply isn't up to.

France and Germany used to be able to build a nuclear plant from site selection to online in just 5-8 years, during the 1970s. They did this with state planning and robust industrial policy, state-owned enterprises with a dedicated workforce with inhouse technical expertise. None of that exists now. Not the SOEs, they're private. Not the industrial policy, it's made almost impossible by the EU and Euro. Not the state planning, everyone in their governments are neoliberals, bankers and 'poli sci' idiots.

And that's to build plants in 5 years, at best. 5 years is a looong ways away when you already have metals industries begging for help https://eurometaux.eu/media/qnhn5k30/non-ferrous-metals-ceo-letter-on-energy-crisis-06-09-2022.pdf:

Europe, if this sanctions regime continues, is probably fucked.

There is not enough LNG in the world to power European industry. Governors in the US also just penned a letter warning against too much LNG exports to Europe, as it's driving the price higher and they need it for themselves. You think America is going to power Europe at the expense of it's own political stability? Ridiculous.

Not even going to bother talking about solar panels. They cannot be brought online fast enough, even if every last watt of China's output was sent direct to Europe.

im continental europe most manufacturers are done like in germany and left the west

and even if you produce at home, where do the raw materials come from? rare earth elements are the simplest example, china has basically a monopoly there in both mining AND refining



its just not happening and some green party morons want to electrify the entire industry as well

industrial first world countries cant even reasonably cover the current demand, i looked it up yesterday morning and 3 small nuclear power plants produced more electricity than ~30.000 wind turbines and its still summer lol

so we are supposed to charge millions of EV's, supply for the chemical industry, metallurgical plants, production and keep houses warm etc on top of an already increasing demand with something that isnt even adequate right now

talking about the chemical industry, one guy i studied with works for the BASF and their folks say that their chemical plant in ludwigshafen alone would consume most of germanys entire electricity production at the moment if everything would have to run on electricity

its just not happening, period

This post was edited by JohnnyMcCoy on Sep 12 2022 01:09pm

There's a place for detaching(from a righteous desire to see a tyrant, who launched an unprovoked war, defeated by a nation standing up for it's sovereignty and freedom), so that you can accurately assess a situation, and weigh the US/Western interests appropriately. But to detach to an extent where you're just a robot analyzing the X's and O's like it's a football game seems, at best, to be morally problematic. Morality doesn't suddenly become irrelevant because the actors are nation-states instead of smaller groups/individuals.

And void has always been very sympathetic towards Russia, so I was legitimately curious as to whether he wanted Putin to win. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between people who claim to just be "realists" and/or "non-interventionists", and those that are Russophiles. And you can throw in the "kneejerk contrarian/anti-establishment" into that bucket as well.

This post was edited by IceMage on Sep 14 2022 01:35pm

Those detached viewpoints give you a better vantage for analyzing outcomes, which in turn let you weigh those moral consequences. After all, the only reason the ends 'don't justify the means' is because the ends are too myopic and those moral calculations incomplete. And similarly, myopic moralizing analysis often leads to equally bad outcomes. If the impact of US/Western foreign policy is sparking a geopolitical conflict which does not advance our country's interests in either short term or long term, which degrades the overall democratic liberties of the world, which results in many thousands of people dying needlessly, which wastes our treasure and maybe our blood, well then the real patriots and real humanists are the ones who stand up to the warhawk establishment

To reel in that abstraction, this is really just one more American foreign intervention following in the footsteps of a dozen before it that had similarly predictable outcomes. We knew before going into Afghanistan it would become a pointless quagmire. We knew before the Iraq war, we knew before Syria. Maybe we could argue that we were still optimistic before Vietnam but everything that's come after has just been the same pattern repeating itself. And this time around with Ukraine we didn't even have the superficial moral righteousness on our side. We weren't pointing at Uday and Qusay's rape dungeons or Assad's iron fist. We weren't supporting pro-democracy idealists rallying against a tyrant. The fact was we supported the overthrow of a democratic country when actual nazis overran its presidential compound, then after the ethnic russian east separated willingly, we supported a siege of them for 8 years. And that's a contrast worth making. Even when we had a superficial moral cause (liberated arab women with purple thumbs!), the balance of actual outcomes was obviously a net negative, a lose:lose for all involved. And a predictable one. Here its easy to see our short term loss, our long term loss, the lives being thrown away, and all in service of what exactly?

Basically, I'm saying the Iraq and Afghanistan and Syrian and Yemen and Libyan interventions all had better arguments than Ukraine going into them and anyone with a brain already knew they were mistakes before we started, yet here we are waving flags and saying 'slava ukraini' even when it means supporting neo-nazi war criminals. Hell, at least we could make the amoral argument for Iraq and Afghanistan as blood-for-oil schemes that cynically threw away lives to feed a war industry. We're tanking our economy with the Ukrainian intervention.

I see.

So, what you meant by "just analyze the facts fella, don't get involved in moral questions, or rooting for a good/better guy" is "let's basically adopt the Russian narrative(a couple steps short of the genocide of Ukrainians, the official Russian position), and use that as a platform for justifying American inaction".

I may have, in my last post, made a point about the difficulty distinguishing between Russophiles and... uh, whatever you're identifying as these days.

This post was edited by IceMage on Sep 14 2022 02:53pm

This must be truly hard for you and your kind to aknowledge but thats what you sound like.

i.e. if you disagree with someone in the topic explain your position, we have room for all positions here, provided its mature (and obv without images of dead bodies, racism and what not).

This post was edited by ferdia on Sep 14 2022 04:15pm

We are sending tens of billions in weapons so Ukraine can continue a war because it's convenient for us that as a result of this war arguably our number one (maybe number two?) geopolitical opponent will be weakened. Russia is in the wrong but what we're doing is also wrong from a moral perspective. We'd rather steer Ukraine into making unacceptable demands and give them enough firepower so the war could go on and on so one day maybe either Putin is deposed or Russia's military takes significant enough damage. At least people like thundercock are honest in saying things like we should be thankful Ukrainians are making this sacrifice for us. You think trading 6 figures in lives so to weaken an opponent is the moral side here?

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Sep 14 2022 05:47pm