This hits close to home.

My family is trying to get few windmills installed on our farm, but there have been a lot of roadblocks. The biggest has been the predicably gross process of getting special dispensation to get around zoning issues. There are apparently a lot of new consulting firms that specialize in quashing windmill projects that will robo call local homeowners, and they’ve been working overdrive to fuck over every attempt at development (the farm is on the far outskirts of a major city, and so all the surrounding homeowners are annoying exurbanites).

And then on top of that, a lot of manufacturers of windmills seem to have dramatically cut their growth plans, both in response to the development pushback, but also in anticipation of a Republican takeover of the federal government and a corresponding reduction in any subsidies (still a major part of the business plan of any environmentally-friendly endeavor). And so even if you have the go-ahead to build, the lead time and prices are spiking… which is the opposite of what you want as a society if you actually want to deploy a lot of wind power, but is great for profits.

There is an unbelievable amount of potential windpower capacity in the US, as well as tons of capital that’s trying to chase returns. This is super basic stuff: generating more energy cheaply and cleanly lowers the costs of inputs for every other aspect of your economy, and without negative externalities that kick costs down the road. That China can build it, and the US can’t, really exposes the lie that somehow the American System is this dynamo of advancement in comparison to Collapsing China.