> fractured policy landscape in the US

are you saying that the EU is more uniform politically than the US?

When it comes to realizing an offshore wind farm, Europe doesn’t have the Byzantine multilevel and multiagency permitting process that the US does. Permitting delays and complexity are largely what’s holding back offshore wind in the US.

IMHO, US politics are extremely polarized. Politics elsewhere tend to be a much more nuanced spectrum, with large moderate bases.

There's a lot of money to be had by making sure Americans are divided and not united against corporate interests. In addition to limiting corporate lobbying (including fixing the lobbyist/regulator revolving door), campaign donations, etc, I would really like to see more research into how media and social media influence polarization, and perhaps some regulation around social media curation.

It's less about the polarization and more about the dominance of the hydrocarbon lobby. In Europe it just isn't as powerful.

It's the same story with a few lobbies - especially gun manufacturing and HMO.

The most successful lobbies may favor one side but they are pretty bipartisan.

I think perhaps this holds for specifically climate science and the politics around it.

Even the Conservatives in the UK are backing wind, with a goal of 40 GW recently announced.

Meanwhile in the US, even though conservative voters show majority support for clean energy in polls, conservative politicians sabotage clean energy policy, and work to convince voters against their clean energy views, because their campaign funds come from fossil fuel interests.

This leads to much less certainty for investors that policy will stay consistent long enough for projects to come to fruition. When a bought and paid for election destroys policy, like was recently exposed in Ohio, it keeps investors' money away.

https://www.energyandpolicy.org/utility-corruption/

The US has the more well-educated populace. A larger percentage of Americans have college degrees than in every EU country except Luxembourg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...

Completion of tertiary education =/= "well educated" necessarily. Consider the math and reading scores of our children, which lag behind many other countries. Consider the poor state of public schooling in urban and rural areas. There's also a cultural difference, many European areas may have a more pro-knowledge or pro-truth mindset, whereas "American values" are often incongruous with the actual facts established by science.

There's still coal in the UK and it is high quality compared to say Germany - but it was initially a political decision by Thatchers government to switch to Gas, to hobble the NUM.

You right that the federal nature of the USA is holding it back - might have been ok for 18th century rich farmers a twenty-first century supper power not so much.

> denier in chief

First time I'm hearing this reference. It's cute.

> [EU/UK has] a much more literate and well-educated populace

I'd like to agree that it's all well and good on this front in the EU, but recent developments like Brexit and the rise of identity politics stand as strong counter-arguments.

Isn't hackernews meant to be politics free? Would be great if there was at least one place we didn't need to read these tiresome comments from people who can't comprehend that others have different value systems.

If HN were politics free, we couldn't discuss our differences or maybe even know about them. To defend what I said, I think it's easy to argue that Brexit was rash and short-sighted (the campaigns were more or less based on lies) and identity politics are short-sighted more or less by definition (since cooperation is proportional to inclusiveness of identity). If you'd like to have a discussion, those are my arguments.

> Isn't hackernews meant to be politics free?

No, though there was a brief experiment in that direction in, IIRC, late 2016 that was aborted before it had run its planned one-week course.

Your name is dissident science, I'm guessing you're skeptical about the mainstream of science? So, tell us, what are your "different value systems" that support Trump's denial of climate science?

I don't think it's a stretch to call the current Commander in Chief a "Denier in Chief". When asked about climate during the two debates, he obfuscates and talks about forest floor litter or OPEC-negotiation for low gas prices. When asked about global warming, he claimed "It'll get colder". He can't come out and say fossil fuel combustion leads to atmospheric change that warms the planet. To say that would be to go against his party, which is pro-fossil fuel and takes big money from big energy companies (but the GOP is also pro-renewable, might I add, look at Iowa, TX, and many red states doing well on renewables).

Hackernews is supposed to be about technology, which is governed at its core by the objective reality of 0/1 binary transistors and the complex scientific/logical systems we've built to interact with that science. It's not a stretch to support science on this forum. If you're going against the grain of science, I'd say SUPPORT your position, don't just state your position and ask for moderator take-down of an opposing view.