News and information from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)
(This list may get expanded as necessary.)
Unless they're the only sources, please also avoid The Sun, Daily Mail, any "thinktank" type organization, and non-Lemmy social media (incl. Substack). Don't link to Twitter directly, instead use xcancel.com. For Reddit, use old:reddit:com
(Lists may get expanded as necessary.)
We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.
If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 7 or 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.
If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the admin that applied the rule (check modlog first to find who was it.)
Hey ChatGPT, make me two dozen Facebook pages with Union Jack flags and names like "I love the good old days" and fill them with oil industry propaganda.
Then create about 500 accounts with English sounding names and reply to those with comments about Ed Miliband being useless, and how much you miss the smell of coal.
SOLAR PANELS COOK 5000 BIRDS PER YEAR AND ARE UNSUSTAINABLE BECAUSE OT TAKESATERIALSTO BUILD THEM PLEASE DO NOT LOOK INTO HOW MUCH MATERIALS OIL TAKES TO USE.
I fucking hate the anti-progress Facebook bots on every fucking post and news article.
Oh no, I typed this in the wrong box, how do I delete?
Hahahahaha this got me way harder
The government added that plug-in solar panels, which homeowners can install on balconies, would be available within shops over the coming months.
We have those balcony solar systems here in Germany with several millions of installations. Let me tell you: They do work. They are great. They are cheap. And they will help to keep your energy bill down and have a ROI of only a few years. They are called balcony solar, but you do not have to install them on a balcony. If you have one, great. But you can also put them somewhere in your garden or just onto your wall or even on your roof. They are just normal solar panels with a small inverter that you just plug into your normal power socket.
Heat pumps, solar panels and passive house thermal performance should have been code a long time ago.
And batteries. Arguably batteries would have the biggest impact out of all of those; turn every household into a virtual power plant and the grid can self balance, especially during peak usage.
The government is also dragging its feet on V2G which would allow your EV to act as an additional giant battery that can feed the grid and your home when usage is high, then top it back up overnight.
There's been a big storm in the UK, so wind is generating fuckloads of energy right now, to the point where energy providers are having to pay people to use electric - all that cheap power could be filling up batteries instead.
As a home owner I'd be thanking you too as I really can't make ROI on solar within an acceptable timescale where TOU tariffs make it alot easier with a home battery (I'd caveat not a given for some use cases).
This is coming from someone that has had solar pv for almost 2 decades now.
Politicians do not have any interest in policies that will cost money now and give benefits after they're out of office.
Imagine productively responding to a problem instead of flipping out, throwing up your hands and then doing nothing?
Wild.
Nah how about i pay you a billion dollars not to build wind turbines on my coast.
I accept cashier's checks from all major banks.
I could not as well. But as I wanted to build double the generators, I'd settle with two billions for doing nothing?
For numerous reasons….Why wasn’t this put in place decades ago?
Fundamentally, the reason is capitalism. Money is power, so under democracy, the state is for sale. Labour ministers met fossil fuel lobbyists 500 times in first year of power, analysis shows.
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
Rare UK w
By the way, Germany just raised the power limit for plug-in solar to 7 Kilowatts, and apparently tries to give incentives to using batteries.
I don't think that's quite true. You can have up to 7 kW panels, but only feed in 800 W - the rest has to go into batteries.
A sensible policy, honestly. It'll help Britain become more independent from the Middle East and other petrol-heavy states.
You would THINK all of the most xenophobic people on this planet would be more than gung ho about eliminating our dependency on other countries and their resources, but apparently not so much. Probably because they know they can start a war and make even more money.
It's about more than dependency. The petrodollar is key to US/Western hegemony. Unless renewables can give the US/West a similar assymmetric advantage over the rest of the world, the ruling class here is going to hesitate to embrace it.
Every damn time there is a global oil shock the right wing voters are shocked and outraged that US prices go up too. They think the US should somehow be immune because we are net exporters. They don't get that it's the oil companies that are the net exporters, not the US populace.
All while taking money from the US to station in their bombing runs. Interesting.
The US under Trump:
I thought about writing something like "it's ironic that Trump might inadvertently save the world by forcing everyone else to react to his attempts to destroy it," but I don't want to give him even that much credit.
You don't get it. All this is Trump 5D chess (or old folks home bog standard checkers, I don't remember which) making a deal to steer the world into renewables. Deal maker in chief.
"Beautiful, clean coal!"
Seems wasteful not to cover one whole roof with panels (possibly replacing the sheet metal entirely) and connect them to one big inverter to power four homes. Splitting the needed amount of panels and inverters for every house wastes lots of installation work and makes every roof uglier.
Seems wasteful to require solar panels on homes shaded by trees or aligned the wrong way.
"Possibly replacing the sheet metal entirely" tells me you've never been to the UK...
Why not? look at all the sheet metal roofs in the picture!
Those are probably roof tiles.
The comment you were replying to was almost certainly being sarcastic, least not due to the exclamation mark instead of a question mark.
That too is a sign of Britishness! :)
Why would you do that? It's easier to install solar for one home than for multiple homes at once. If you mash together multiple tenants and homeowners into one energy system, you start having a lot of additional problems. They have to finance the installation together, they have to do contracts about who gets what amount of power when, they have to do billing, and so on. If you have your own solar system on your own roof, that's easy. Everything else is simply not happening. So for example, what happens when one homeowner doesn't want to have solar or can't afford it?
and makes every roof uglier.
Tbh, solar panels are not the ugly factor in thenpicture you posted.
This is the way forward.
They should require all new communities to have a large scale battery for the area as well. There are a bunch of options that could help power the community if something goes wrong, and the solar could top up the communities battery as well.
It should be more affordable having 1 for the area vs 1 small one for each house.
Also every new substation could have a battery added.
Decentralizing everything like this would be huge for national security.
Juuuuust as planed! This is EXACTLY what I thought would happen! I am so so wet right now...
I'm not saying that it's a bad policy, but this is something that is going to have long-term impact more than short-term.