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energy transition
Let’s (Not) Choose Sides and Fight
It would be harder to stoke homicidal zeal if everyone understood that behind all our hostilities is the simple, though stark, reality that humanity faces climate change and resource depletion.
Jul 23, 2025
In the course of human events there are times when everyone seems determined to pick sides and brawl. A prime example was the
First World War: Over a dozen countries divided into two camps—the Allied Powers and the Central Powers—and fought for four years, with 40 million casualties. Afterward, few seemed to agree on what the conflict had been about (probably the best explanation was that it had been over tensions between a fading colonial superpower, Britain, and a potential rival, Germany). World War II, which left 60 million dead, was in many ways a continuation of the same conflict, with the terms of surrender for the first war setting a 20-year fuse for the second (the punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty were partly a response to German demands at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, a reminder of how revenge echoes through history).
We appear to be sliding into a similar era, where a previously stable world order is failing and much of humanity seems to be preparing to divide and do battle. Many historians see the United States—which emerged as world hegemon after WWII—as a decaying imperial hub, now facing an increasingly organized battery of opponents.
This time, hovering above the potential fray are profound environmental shifts, including climate change, the disappearance of much of wild nature, and resource depletion. In 2024, global average temperature was 1.6°C above the preindustrial average, and the rate of warming is accelerating. We appear to be on course to reach 2°C of warming around 2035—an amount of heating that, according to a recent research paper, “The Future of the Human Niche,” by Tim Lenton and colleagues, might result in roughly a billion refugees.
As conflict approaches, mentally getting outside society’s collective miasma of hostile emotions might help our own mental well-being, while also improving the survival prospects for our species.
At the same time, global energy from fossil fuels is set to start its inevitable decline after 2030 due to a combination of climate policies and the accelerating depletion of oil, coal, and natural gas resources. Since energy from renewables won’t fully replace energy from fossil fuels, the result will be an overall decline in available energy, making economic contraction hard to stave off. Declining population in many countries will also present economic challenges. Energy transitions and economic disruptions both seem to correlate with international conflicts.
In this article, I’ll make a case for the increasing likelihood of conflict, internationally as well as domestically within the U.S,, and then consider some novel ideas about conflict. As we’ll see, either taking sides in an approaching battle, or refusing to do so, comes with a cost. We’ll also see why the tendency to choose sides and fight is not uniquely human, though humans have developed it into a specialty. Finally, we’ll explore how, as conflict approaches, mentally getting outside society’s collective miasma of hostile emotions might help our own mental well-being, while also improving the survival prospects for our species.
Nation Against Nation
Since 1945, the U.S. has been a military, financial, manufacturing, agricultural, scientific, and cultural global leader, acting in alliance with the United Kingdom, a selection of other European nations, and Japan. Much of the rest of the world supplied labor and resources at cut-rate prices and shouldered debt imposed by U.S.-led international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Prior to 1990, the Soviet bloc posed a military and ideological counterweight, but it collapsed, leaving the U.S. seemingly triumphant.
Decline is the eventual default path for empires, and the U.S. is adhering to that historical trend: It has depleted its domestic resources; increased its people’s economic inequality; built up staggering amounts of public and private debt; and pissed off a list of nations that it raided, demonized, invaded, or humiliated over the decades. The stage has been set for internal and external conflict.
Arguably the first round of that conflict started with the spectacular attacks of September 11, 2001, to which the U.S. responded with senseless and ultimately self-destructive invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those invasions happened to coincide with the plateauing of global conventional oil production, which was in turn the backdrop for, and a contributor to, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The U.S.-led international order appeared to be on increasingly shaky ground. It was at about this time that Brazil, Russia, India, and China (soon joined by South Africa) began holding meetings to build ties of trade and strategic cooperation under the rubric BRICS.
Instead of big, expensive weapons, smaller and cheaper drone and cyberweapons systems are likely to predominate.
Over the following 20 years, conflict was largely contained and imperial decline minimized as fracking made the U.S. once again the world’s foremost oil and gas producer. Meanwhile, China grew its economy rapidly, while oil-rich Russia under President Vladimir Putin became more authoritarian and looked for ways to regain its former superpower status.
Then, in 2016, Donald Trump landed on the American political stage. Among voters, he stoked long-festering white, rural working-class resentments resulting from growing domestic economic inequality and high rates of immigration; he ridiculed his country’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; and he decried globalization as a “rip-off” of American wealth. If U.S.-based globalist institutions (including the World Bank, the IMF, and USAID) were under fire previously, in the second Trump administration all are comatose or defunct. Using tariffs as a cudgel, Trump has introduced a nakedly nationalist, personal approach to international economic policy. Understandably, many formerly allied nations are looking to exit what’s left of the U.S.-led global order.
As of this year, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have joined the five original BRICS members. Together, the 10 member nations represent over 40% of the world’s population and 37% of the global economy. China now operates the world’s biggest development bank.
The rise of BRICS comes as the U.S. is at a crossroads in more than just politics. U.S. tight oil (which has been the main source of global petroleum production growth since 2010) is set to start its inevitable decline within the next year or so, according to the International Energy Agency. The peaking of U.S. shale gas will come close behind. Meanwhile, President Trump has done his best to undercut U.S. electrification and development of renewable energy (the fabled energy transition, undertaken mostly to blunt climate change). He is instead promoting the rapid development of energy-hungry AI and cryptocurrencies.
China, in contrast, is poised to profit from the energy transition: It leads in the export of all things electric and renewable, despite depending overwhelmingly on coal for its domestic energy. China far exceeds the U.S. in electricity generation (and therefore the potential for development of AI). As oil and gas run out, the transition will demand more minerals, many of which China controls.
Will there be war between the U.S. and its fraying alliance on one hand, and BRICS on the other? Currently there are visible flashpoints in the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Iran conflicts. On July 7, Trump posted the following on social media: “Any country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% tariff. There will be no exceptions to this policy.” He had previously threatened that any move to replace the U.S. dollar with a BRICS-backed international reserve currency would trigger 100% tariffs.
Given the apocalyptic potential of nuclear weaponry, the major powers wish to avoid direct all-out military engagement. What appears far more likely is a stairstep increase in strategic resource wars over minerals, water, and arable land, along with proxy conflicts to test alliances and probe weaknesses. Instead of big, expensive weapons, smaller and cheaper drone and cyberweapons systems are likely to predominate. However, there is always the possibility that limited skirmishes could metastasize.
Neighbor Against Neighbor
People are increasingly choosing sides not just internationally, but also within nations. I have written recently about the increase of political polarization in the United States and many European countries, and about the global decline in democracy and rise of autocrats.
Trends toward polarization and authoritarian rule are being driven by shifting demographics, by increasing inequality and economic precarity, and by new communication technologies (social media and AI) that amplify extreme beliefs. Each of these drivers is set to explode in dimension and impact. Ideology (e.g., capitalism versus socialism, or democracy versus autocracy) and religion will likely continue to provide people with immediate justifications for conflict, as deeper environmental and economic trends make conflict more likely.
Measured levels of civil violence have declined in recent decades, as discussed by Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. However, Pinker’s analysis misses two of the main causes of the relative calm that much of humanity has enjoyed since World War II: the immense wealth produced by fossil fuels, along with soaring levels of food production (likewise tied to fossil fuels). Pinker also downplays the degree to which daily average numbers of violent incidents can greatly shift during times of all-out war between major military-industrial powers. The fact that global violence was held in check by an imperial power for eight decades (a period sometimes called “Pax Americana,” in a nod to “Pax Romana” two millennia ago and the more recent “Pax Britannica”) says little about how durable this peace may be as that empire declines, as the world warms, and as fossil fuels deplete.
In the U.S. and some other countries, civil violence may increase in tandem with international conflict—or, as has happened repeatedly in history, war may serve to unify domestic sentiment against a common enemy. In either case, it is likely that nations will continue to see highly variable levels of internal strife, as is already the case: Jamaica’s level of violent crime is 350 times that of Singapore, and Norway is far less politically polarized than Argentina.
Belligerent Humans
It’s tempting to think that choosing sides and fighting is just a human thing. But wars do happen elsewhere in nature. Some species are natural enemies: Crows often cooperate to drive away hawks, which raid crow nests. And, in a few species, notably chimpanzees, individuals band together to attack other members of the same species. Chimp wars can be brutal. Animal conflicts are usually fought over scarce resources, access to potential mates, and territory.
However, because humans have language and advanced tool-making ability, we have developed fighting into a vastly more destructive enterprise. We use language to plan and coordinate attacks, and to demonize enemies—but also to negotiate peace. As for tools, while we humans have created technologies for every conceivable purpose, no field of endeavor has prompted more inventiveness than warfare. We have turned conflict into an art, science, philosophy, and business.
The trouble is, once we’ve declared war on nature, we all surely lose.
We humans also have more things to fight over than do other animals, thanks to language. Religion, money, trade, and political ideologies all derive from our talent for symbolic communication, and all provide justifications for organized mayhem.
Warfare has become so intensive that the casualties aren’t just other humans. Just one example: the Russia-Ukraine war is ruining soils and water sources, and threatens both wildlife and domesticated animals. The Ukrainian government and environmental journalists have described the damage as ecocide, and the consequences are forecasted to persist for centuries.
Indeed, humans’ relationship with the natural world is often described in martial terms. Earlier in the Industrial Revolution, prior to the emergence of the modern environmental movement, it was common to hear politicians and academics speak of the “conquest” not just of diseases but of nature generally. The trouble is, once we’ve declared war on nature, we all surely lose.
What If They Held a War and Nobody Came?
I came of age during the Vietnam War, and my generation was steeped in anti-war sentiment. It seemed easy then to think of all war as stupid. Things look different today if you happen to live in a country, like Ukraine, that’s being invaded (or, if you’re on the other side of the conflict, if you live in a nation, like Russia, that’s been vilified for decades by the global superpower). Similarly, within the U.S., neutrality looks like cowardice if you’re concerned that the nation is being taken over by authoritarian thugs (or, if you’re on the other side of the conflict, if you believe the country is being invaded by lawless immigrants). It’s not so easy to say, “Don’t fight,” when something apparently needs to be done to protect people you care about from an imminent threat.
I tend to side with the (perceived) oppressed over the (perceived) oppressor, and democracy over autocracy. But I also realize that the sides we choose are largely determined by geography and genes.
We can minimize the bloodshed if we never lose sight of our common humanity and creaturehood.
Understanding tends to blunt bloodlust. Humans are more likely to fight if they believe, “Those are bad people, they mean us harm, and we must kill them.” Once one starts inquiring deeply into the motives of the opposition, bloodlust tends to fade. Returning to the example of World War I: If more people had seen the conflict as “competition between a fading colonial superpower and a rising rival” and less as “a war of good against evil,” the public would have been less likely to endorse sending their sons into battle. Britain’s depiction of German soldiers as murderous Huns helped recruit soldiers; perhaps because Germany already had a larger standing army, its propaganda tended to be more matter-of-fact, often featuring graphs of German resources in comparison with those of other nations. Demonization worked for Britain and its allies, and it has become central to modern propaganda ever since (the Nazis adopted it in the 1930s and helped make it a science).
Today, it would be harder to stoke homicidal zeal if everyone understood that behind all our hostilities is the simple, though stark, reality that humanity faces climate change and resource depletion, and that living space is likely to become more constricted. Widespread acceptance of that framing might inspire efforts to share what’s left peacefully while reducing the consumption of the richest nations and individuals.
I’m not suggesting that we can all simply summon a “kumbaya moment” and avert the looming hostilities. Our deck of cards is stacked (in terms of history, resources, trends, and personalities) toward conflict. But we can minimize the bloodshed if we never lose sight of our common humanity and creaturehood—that is, if we continually make the effort to see the world through the eyes of not just our allies, but our enemies as well, and through the “eyes” of the animals, plants, and ecosystems that we currently dominate.
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Europe’s 21st-Century Goal Should Not Be to Follow the US Path to Global Power
Europe needs to spend more on its welfare states and on making the green transition fast and fair, not boosting its military prowess.
May 02, 2025
Should Europe embark on rearmament? Should it seek to replace the U.S. as a global power? Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou takes a stance on these critical issues in an interview with the independent French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri. He argues that Europe’s priorities should be on the social and ecological dimensions—unless the aim of the continent is to experience in full the militarism, war mongering, and dysfunctional social order that have defined the contemporary United States.
Alexandra Boutri: During his first few months in office, President Donald Trump has shown hostility towards U.S.’ closest allies, even threatened some of them, and is bent on overturning the global order. In the process of doing so, he has weakened the nation’s strengths, making in fact a mockery of U.S. soft power. What is he after?
C. J. Polychroniou: It is not easy to offer a straightforward explanation for Trump’s actions. Doing so would suggest that this unstable wannabe dictator has an overarching global strategy. But nothing could be further from the truth. Trump is neither a thinker nor a strategist. Look at his on-again, off-again tariff policy. It was just a bet that went bad. That said, I also don’t think that he came to office with a strategy to upend the global order. He is not against global capitalism. He is just trying, but failing so far, to force a change in trade terms that would be overwhelmingly favorable to U.S. interests and in the way that international institutions behave. And he must be delusional to think that he runs the world. As we have seen, for instance, scores of countries retaliated against Trump’s tariffs and China forced the U.S. into retreat. Moreover, Trump’s ratings are very low not only in the U.S. but around the globe. Perhaps only in Israel, where a unique form of far-right extremism is prevalent, can Trump claim to be a popular leader. He is extremely unpopular in Europe, “even in countries with a strong far-right voter base,” as Jeremy Shapiro and Zsuzsanna Végh pointed out in a recent commentary in the European Council on Foreign Relations. But you are right in saying that he has already succeeded in making a mockery of U.S. soft power. No one trusts the U.S. anymore. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that the world sees Trump as an infantile narcissist, though a very dangerous one. Indeed, why U.S. voters opted to give Trump a second chance is one of the most mind-boggling political phenomena in the modern history of politics. Probably more irrational than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continuing to win elections in Israel.
Do we really want Europe in the 21st century to become yet another global empire?
Alexandra Boutri: One would have expected Europe’s far-right to be fully aligned with Trump and his MAGA movement. But that isn’t the case. Why not?
C. J. Polychroniou: Trumpists in the U.S. and European right-wing extremists do share certain common ideological traits. Both camps are against immigrants, (especially Muslim immigrants) and pro-climate policies and want to rollback LGBTQ+ rights. Nonetheless, there are some striking differences. America’s far-right is animated by white supremacy and anti-governmental extremism. The European far-right, on the other hand, emerged as a major political force only during the time of the euro crisis and the Syrian refugee crisis, both of which erupted in 2011. However, while European far-right parties see the European Union (E.U.) as a bureaucratic monster that undermines the national identity of a member state, they favor a strong national state with welfare benefits and healthcare services, but only for native citizens. Their view of the state has its roots in the history of fascism. Here, the state engages in a comprehensive takeover of economic and social life. A fascist state is an authoritarian state, but not all authoritarianisms are fascist. Of course, in today’s world, the extent to which far-right parties in Europe are committed to a fascist welfare state needs to be questioned as most of them are not simply pro-capital but have embraced the main tenets of neoliberalism. They may be opposing the consequences of neoliberalism but, as odd as this may sound, they do not reject neoliberalism itself.
That said, there are also clear differences among the different European far-right parties. Some of them, like Italy’s far-right party Brothers of Italy, are Euroskeptic rather than anti-E.U. Indeed, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has defended Italy’s fascist past but is a very calculating leader, has shown no interest in undermining the E.U. and has even positioned herself as a mediator between Europe and the United States. Meloni has also sided with Ukraine, is backing NATO, and described Trump’s tariffs as “a mistaken choice.”
Alexandra Boutri: Isn’t the E.U. a bureaucratic monster?
C. J. Polychroniou: There is a lot about the E.U. that deserves harsh criticism. But let’s not forget that some of the E.U.’s shortcomings and failures have been the result of the overwhelming influence exercised in decision-making processes by some powerful member states. Germany has dominated the E.U., and how this came to be the case is too long of a story to cover here. Suffice to say that while Germany may have been a driving force behind European integration, it has also been the principal stumbling block to a fiscal union and to the boosting of the E.U.’s social dimension. In fact, only just recently Germany eased off on its national fiscal rule, the “debt break.” But the irony here is that Germany may not be able to use its new national borrowing space under the E.U. fiscal rules that Germany itself had historically insisted on.
Alexandra Boutri: How likely is it that Europe will be able to replace the U.S. as a global power?
C. J. Polychroniou: It’s not expected to happen in the near future even with Trump’s disruptions of the global economy. A new E.U. needs to be built before Europe can become a global power in the true sense of the word, let alone replace the U.S. as a global hegemon. First, a fiscal union for the euro is a prerequisite for the E.U.’s ability in tackling future challenges and to foster convergence. Second, a standing common E.U. force is needed so Europe can not only defend itself without the U.S. but be a meaningful player in the global chessboard. As far as I can tell, there is no political determination among today’s European leaders for the successful realization of any such project. And I am not sure whether such a project is practical or desirable. The U.S. is a global empire, with some 750 overseas military bases costing $66 billion annually. Do we really want Europe in the 21st century to become yet another global empire? I am not even in support of Europe’s rearmament project, which will cost over 800 billion euros. European leaders really need to have their heads examined if they sincerely believe that their capitals are under threat by Putin’s Russia. This is Cold War mentality 2.0. Europe needs to spend more on its welfare states and make the green transition fast and fair, not boost military spending. Unless, of course, the ultimate goal of the continent is to experience in full the disastrous economic and social order that has taken hold across U.S. society and take pleasure in waging illegal and catastrophic wars.
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Tesla Has Same Problem as Big Oil: Its Time Has Come
In the end, despite major victories for the fossil fuel industry in recent days, Elon Musk's very bad week shows there's possibly a much brighter future ahead for the rest of us.
Mar 22, 2025
It must have seemed like a huge week for the fossil fuel industry: as the Wall Street Journal put it yesterday (and you could sense the headline writer’s glee), “The fossil fuel industry gets its revenge on green activists.”
The oil-and-gas industry is landing blow after blow against climate activists.
The Trump administration has cranked out approvals of major projects to ship liquefied natural gas from the Gulf Coast and killed a host of climate-related initiatives. Meanwhile, Texas billionaire Kelcy Warren has won a nearly $700 million verdict against Greenpeace that could spell the end of the group’s U.S. presence.
Hell, the Trump administration is trying to resurrect coal, and in what’s doubtless considered a back-slapping prank around the West Wing it just named a fracking executive to run the Department of Energy’s renewables office. Meanwhile, Musk’s vandals fired the quite brilliant chief scientist at NASA, doubtless because her work involved protecting the planet’s climate—Katherine Calvin was, among other things, the head of Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so good sport to Jackie Robinson her.
All of this is deeply stupid and damaging. And yet, despite all that, there must have been a few shivers that ran down the spines of both Elon Musk and oil executives last week when they read a piece of news from China.
Here’s the story, as told by Bloomberg. Chinese automaker BYD (their slogan, at least in English, is ‘Build Your Dreams”) announced on Tuesday that its new cars—available in April for $30,000 if you’re in a place where you can buy one—will recharge in five minutes. Or, roughly, the time it takes to fill your tank with gasoline.
From “more features for no more price” and “smart driving for all,” BYD can now add “charging as fast as refueling” to its marketing slogans, potentially helping it to capture more share from legacy automakers and more direct rivals like Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc.
How did they do this? Here are a bunch of words I don’t fully understand:
BYD cites its “all liquid-cooled megawatt flash charging terminal system.”
In addition, to match the ultra-high power charging, BYD has self-developed a next-generation automotive-grade silicon carbide power chip. The chip has a voltage rating of up to 1500V, the highest to date in the car industry.
In tandem, BYD on Monday launched its flash-charging battery. From the positive to the negative electrode, the cell contains ultra-fast ion channels, which BYD says reduces the battery’s internal resistance by 50%.
There’s also a mass-produced 30,000 RPM motor. Luo Hongbin, BYD senior vice president, said the motor “not only significantly boosts a vehicle’s speed, but also greatly reduces the motor’s weight and size, enhancing power density.”
But I can translate it into English. BYD did not waste its time giving Nazi salutes. It didn’t buy a social media platform so it could make obscure marijuana jokes and make fun of poor people. It didn’t devote itself to helping a nincompoop win the presidency and then decide it would be exhilarating fun to fire a bunch of government workers. Instead, BYD did, you know, engineering.
It’s gotten so bad that even true believers like Dan Ives, one of Tesla’s biggest shareholders, have suggested Musk might want to go back to, you know, work.
It must sting for Musk to watch that kind of progress, especially on a week when he had to recall all 46,000 cybertrucks (and thus disclose for the first time that he’d only sold 46,000 cybertrucks) in order to keep them from dropping parts on the road. It turns out they’d stuck the trim on the plug-ugly things with the wrong glue—now they’re going to replace it with an adhesive that is “not prone to environmental embrittlement.” When owners drive their sad vehicles back to the dealers for repairs (not during a rainstorm, because that apparently causes rusting), they’ll likely encounter one of the hundreds of protests that have broken out across the country. (I confess to being quite proud of my sign at our local demonstration last Saturday)
It’s gotten so bad that even true believers like Dan Ives, one of Tesla’s biggest shareholders, have suggested Musk might want to go back to, you know, work. I mean, Musk has cut the value of his company in half in the last couple of months. But never fear—last night he assembled the company’s workers for a pep talk. Robo-taxis coming soon! As they have been since 2016!
But if the BYD announcement was a reminder that Musk is a poseur, the deeper threat probably comes for Big Oil. Because if you can put 400 kilometers worth of juice in a car in five minutes, the last even slightly good reason for buying an internal combustion vehicle vanishes. Yeah, you still need a fast charger—and BYD is building 4,000 of them across China. But it feels like writing on the wall: Chinese demand for gasoline dropped in 2024, and analysts see it going down almost five percent a year between now and 2030. As the International Energy Agency explained last week,
Electric vehicles currently account for about half of car sales in China, undercutting 3.5% of new fuel demand in 2024... China has been providing subsidy support to purchases of so-called “new energy vehicles” (NEVs) since 2009, promoting its automotive manufacturing industry, and reducing air pollution. A trade-in policy, introduced in April 2024 and expanded in 2025, continues to drive growth in China’s EV sales. Meanwhile, highly competitive Chinese automakers are also making gains in international markets.
America’s oil companies decided they could make more money from fossil fuel than from embracing renewables—they’ve decided to let the Chinese win the solar energy battle, reckoning that they can use their political power to keep the world hooked on hydrocarbons. In some ways it’s working—they helped buy Trump his presidency and he’s giving them what they want. In particular, he’s been shaking down foreign countries to buy more of their Liquefied Natural Gas to avoid tariffs.
But oil is a global commodity, and the perfect example of marginal pricing. If China is going to be using less gasoline—well, the price of oil is going to drop. That’s bad news for American producers—as Trump’s biggest industry fundraiser Harold Hamm explained
U.S. shale needs much higher oil prices than $50 per barrel, and even higher than the current WTI Crude price in the high $60s, for a “drill, baby, drill” boom, oil tycoon and Trump campaign donor Harold Hamm told Bloomberg last week.
“There are a lot of fields that are getting to the point that’s real tough to keep that cost of supply down,” Hamm told Bloomberg Television in an interview.
The fracking revolution is wearing down—wells are sputtering towards empty faster than expected, and if prices are depressed it will make less economic sense to drill baby drill, no matter what our new king demands. As David Wethe and Alix Steel reported his week
Shale operators are slowing production growth after years of drilling up their best locations. At this week’s CERAWeek by S&P Global energy conference in Houston, executives for some of the largest US shale companies forecast US oil production will peak in the next three to five years.
I’m beginning to think you can imagine a world where the U.S. builds tariff walls around its borders, prevents the easy development and spread of technology like EVs and heat pumps, and manages to become an island of internal combustion on an increasingly electrified world. That’s a depressing vision, though nowhere near as depressing as the U.S. imposing that vision on the rest of the world, something that’s going to get harder: if you were any other country (Canada, say) would you tie yourself to the U.S. for any critical product? If you had a choice? And everyone has a choice, because the sun shines and the wind blows everywhere. As the economists at IEEFA said this week, even the expensive “just energy transition partnerships” with emerging Asian nations may survive Trump’s desertion.
Given the current U.S. administration’s priorities and ambitions to “drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas, the withdrawal from JETP can be viewed as favorable for the energy transition. The program’s complexities and transformative potential demand the involvement of a “coalition of the willing.” The original countries (including the European Union), private sector partners, and philanthropies still support JETP and want to realize the mechanism’s potential. In the case of Indonesia, Germany has quickly stepped in to fill the U.S.’s vacated leadership role. Japan has reaffirmed its co-leadership role and remains committed to Indonesia’s USD20 billion JETP. Despite the U.S. exit, critical financing and support for the program remains.
Here’s a great interactive map from the New York Times of what the solar and wind boom looks like from outer space. It shows the burst of development in China—but also Turkey. And it doesn’t even capture the small-scale home by home and factory by factory spread of solar that seems to be speeding up exponentially over the last year.
It may even be hard to stomp out all this goodness here at home. Case in point: the Utah (!) legislature this week became the first in the country to (unanimously!) pass a law enabling “balcony solar,” the small-scale arrays that brought solar power to a million and a half German apartments last year.
The legislation exempts these systems from several requirements:
- No technical interconnection requirements.
- No technical interconnection agreement.
- Utilities cannot mandate approval, charge fees, or require additional controls or equipment beyond what is integrated into the system.
Plug and play, baby!
Indeed, if you want a sign for the future, here’s one: Chinese authorities are pulling back on a plan to let BYD build a new car plant in Mexico. Why? Because they’re afraid that people like Musk—an unimaginative pol, not an engineering genius—will steal their cool new tech.
Those respective authorities in China fear that BYD’s advanced (and in many cases, leading) technology could more easily end up in the possession of US competitors through Mexico, as the US neighbors to the south would gain unrestricted access to the Chinese automaker’s technology and production practices. Those powers went as far as to suggest that Mexico could even assist the US in gaining access to BYD’s technology.
It’s bad news for America that our country has lost its technological edge. It may be good news for the planet, though.
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