Turning Our Back on Clean Energy
paulkrugman.substack.comI don’t understand what the current crop of political leaders thinks is going to happen in a world where China dominates proven clean energy technology, nobody besides the U.S. is engaging in a trade war with China, and a once-in-several-generations infrastructure buildout is in progress everywhere else that the U.S. is actively trying to shut down at home.
By the time the U.S. figures this out, there will be whole regions of the world currently without a power grid where people will be driving Chinese electric cars powered by Chinese solar and batteries. Those countries will have no incentive to participate in the U.S. financial system, since they won’t need U.S. dollars to purchase oil, and they will be entirely out of the reach of the mechanisms the U.S. uses to police other countries.
The scale of the extremely predictable disruption to the global political order will be huge. I work in the energy industry and I am, let’s say, an 80th percentile SME on this subject, but this is so obvious that I know other people must see this. I don’t understand what the plan is here.
> I don’t understand what the current crop of political leaders >thinks<
There's your problem.
One could say even that they are trying to hasten the fall of one empire to avoid a protracted period of wars for dominance before the next one rises.
They are incapable of governing so they need to be elected purely on the basis of culture war issues, which pits them against scientific facts in a few key areas. Most of them are only there to fill their pockets as much as possible, they do not care in the slightest about a long term perspective.
Many Other countries are accelerating their transition the clean energy and electric transport.
This is yet another aspect the rest of the world will simply ignore the US and move forward without them.
For the first time in many decades, the US is becoming irrelevant, and it is doing that to itself, intentionally.
This all makes sense when you realize Trump and his goons don't actually care about the economy, or energy, or whatever. They care about the culture war. Coal is right-coded, solar is left-coded, therefore we need more coal and less solar, regardless of what the actual facts are. It really is that dumb.