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The economics of renewable energy
In case anyone hasn't seen it,
I watched a discussion last week between Paul Krugman and some energy analyst who pointed out that if wind and solar energy technology keep improving at the current rate for another twenty years, they'll be so cheap we'll be saying "what do we do with all this electricity?" A world in which usable energy is not scarce -- not only has that never happened in US history, not in human history, but not even in the history of life on Earth. And we could easily live to see it.
And thank you, Donald Trump, for pushing the world in that direction. Prices of gasoline, diesel, fertilizer, etc. will drop slightly when the shooting stops in Iran (whenever that is), but newly-flowing oil through the Strait of Hormuz won't reach its destinations for at least a month after that, and oil wells that were shut down due to the war won't be fully up and running for at least a month, and it'll take at least a year to rebuild the physical damage to wells and refineries done by the war. So those prices won't return to "normal" for at least a year.
This war has made clear to every nation on Earth (except the US) that depending on fossil fuels is a sucker's game, making your economy hostage to random events and unpredictable autocratic states like Russia, Iran, and the United States. The nations that have made the most progress reducing their dependence on fossil fuels (Iceland, Tajikistan, Costa Rica, Norway, Sweden, China, Paraguay, Ethiopia, Denmark, France, Switzerland, New Zealand, UK, Germany, El Salvador, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan...) will thrive in the coming year, and those that haven't will scramble to catch up. If Donald Trump is still President, the US will be one of the last nations to acknowledge this reality; we'll be last in line to buy the technology from the Chinese (since we stopped building it ourselves) while the rest of the world enters a golden age of abundance.
I watched a discussion last week between Paul Krugman and some energy analyst who pointed out that if wind and solar energy technology keep improving at the current rate for another twenty years, they'll be so cheap we'll be saying "what do we do with all this electricity?" A world in which usable energy is not scarce -- not only has that never happened in US history, not in human history, but not even in the history of life on Earth. And we could easily live to see it.
And thank you, Donald Trump, for pushing the world in that direction. Prices of gasoline, diesel, fertilizer, etc. will drop slightly when the shooting stops in Iran (whenever that is), but newly-flowing oil through the Strait of Hormuz won't reach its destinations for at least a month after that, and oil wells that were shut down due to the war won't be fully up and running for at least a month, and it'll take at least a year to rebuild the physical damage to wells and refineries done by the war. So those prices won't return to "normal" for at least a year.
This war has made clear to every nation on Earth (except the US) that depending on fossil fuels is a sucker's game, making your economy hostage to random events and unpredictable autocratic states like Russia, Iran, and the United States. The nations that have made the most progress reducing their dependence on fossil fuels (Iceland, Tajikistan, Costa Rica, Norway, Sweden, China, Paraguay, Ethiopia, Denmark, France, Switzerland, New Zealand, UK, Germany, El Salvador, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan...) will thrive in the coming year, and those that haven't will scramble to catch up. If Donald Trump is still President, the US will be one of the last nations to acknowledge this reality; we'll be last in line to buy the technology from the Chinese (since we stopped building it ourselves) while the rest of the world enters a golden age of abundance.