For fossil-fuel companies, it's about control and extending the world's dependency on their products as far into the future as possible. The others are on their dole to one degree or another, when you consider that many of the edges in the graph in the article represent not only relationships, but also flows of money.

Is oil really that profitable to ignore the havoc it wreaks and will wreak on virtually every other industry, including itself when there is less money moving around to spend on oil and oil products?

I just don’t get it how being so objectively shortsighted is actually the corrupt greedy money position instead of ensuring the world as we know it doesn’t collapse and that the money printing machine doesn’t fall apart. But what do I know I guess.

There’s several competing flavors of it like the ones who think “the good” communist revolution will happen after society collapses vs the ones who want democracy to fall apart because they think monarchical societies are morally superior, but they all have the same line of thinking that “the collapse” is coming any day now and they want to accelerate when they say occurs

for example:

1) more expensive energy of any kind is extremely harmful to society

EDIT: more expensive energy reduces prosperity for everyone. Renewable energy can and should be competitive and cost effective.

2) automatic filing of taxes is more harmful long-term than individuals filing taxes manually

EDIT: automatic filing will lead to silent frictionless automatic tax increases, forever.

3) government funding of internet/broadband/etc is harmful

EDIT: picking winners is more harmful that makeing good public policies.

it's just hard to reason though the details, though it is worth the effort.

My point is that there could be valid viewpoints that are not self-serving/greed-based.

I'm not saying it's true - I have no idea. But it's at least a rational reason for opposing renewables, which otherwise seems to be very irrational.

Why would wind not be essential for it? Wind is free just like solar. Some places have amazing wind. Wind costs have declined dramatically so it’s a viable piece of the mix.

Not to say we shouldn't build more nuke plants, but they're extraordinarily expensive to build and have construction timelines measured in decades so it's nearly impossible to make them pencil out on a per-kwh basis when compared to wind or solar + batteries that can be deployed and commissioned in 6 months.

If Google's putting their money into it, I suspect there's more to the wind story than "wealth transfer from tax payers and consumers to the windmill people."

Wind power also has the benefit that it keeps the carbon in the ground and isn't contributing to the massive climate crisis that humanity and the earth's ecosystems are facing. And there's no direct waste from energy production.

Adding wind to the network does not make electricity prices go up (unless you do something stupid like shut down all your nuclear plants at the same time). That's nonsense. It's maybe not quite as cheap if you factor in the storage requirements to build up the grid "properly", but still cheaper than coal at the very least.

And windmills are profitable by themselves. And reduces foreign imports with increasing taxes on this goods. If we removed all subsidies coal would be the real affected.

I am not sure about property value but burning gas next to homes creating health problems to power Elon musk data centers surely doesn't help. The dark fumes from coal, gas or oil are going to affect it.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nrMSJOxI6Iqw6HRKtnvWjOkj3tp...

It's more precise, avoiding that strange construction, "science-based". If I understand correctly, linguists call these productive analogies (?), where we start producing more of them by analogy to some root, so:

Faith-based -> Community-based -> Evidence-based -> Plant-based -> Science-based

Or some other hypothetical inheritance chain.

Land-based wind power is OK-ish. It's susceptible to renewable droughts, but it's fine as long as it's just a part of the mix.

But the offshore wind power is pretty much the _only_ reliable renewable, outside of classic hydro and exotics like tidal power or geothermal. Offshore wind generators are pretty much guaranteed to always produce at least _some_ power due to diurnal wind patterns.