Last month, out of more than 11,000 new passenger vehicles registered in Norway, only around 150 had internal consumption engines. The rest were fully electric. In mainland Europe as a whole, EV sales are up 51 percent from a year ago.
The global energy transition — the shift from fossil fuels to electrotech, which uses solar, wind and batteries to power an electrified economy — is accelerating. It’s now clear that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz marks an inflection point: the global green energy curve, which was already on a rapidly rising trajectory, has suddenly become even steeper. “Investors,” reports the Financial Times, “are piling into clean energy funds.”
This acceleration isn’t just a consequence of soaring fossil fuel prices. It is also the result of the worldwide realization that, with the end of Pax Americana, depending on imported hydrocarbons is a risk not worth taking. The United States cannot be relied on to keep sea lanes open when cheap drones can take out an oil tanker or a major pipeline. Even relying on oil and gas from America itself is dangerous, since one never knows when an erratic U.S. government – now under the control of a twice-elected malignant narcissist — will try to use energy as a tool of coercion.
Despite the perversity of its causes, the current acceleration of electrotech is overwhelmingly positive for the world as a whole. It will slow climate change and reduce pollution. It will diminish the power of anti-democratic petrostates and limit the vulnerability of the world economy to disruptions at choke points like Hormuz. It will democratize access to cheap energy sources in places like Africa.
There is another positive consequence of the clean energy boom: the diminishment of the carbon coalition — the interest groups and ideologues who hate renewable energy and want the world to keep burning fossil fuels. That coalition currently controls the Trump administration’s energy policy. But this is only the latest stage in the corruption of U.S. politics by fossil fuel interests. When we decry the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act, we should always remember that the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel oligarchs essentially created the Roberts court.
And now we have petrostate oligarchs making naked corruption great again by lining the pockets of the Trump family.
Trump’s own views about energy are defined by petulance and delusions. Wind power kills birds and drives whales crazy! China — which last year added three times as much wind capacity as the rest of the world combined — doesn’t actually use the turbines it has installed! (It does.)
But Trump’s energy officials are barely less delusional than their boss. Last month Chris Wright, Trump’s energy secretary, dismissed the rise of renewable energy as a failed project:
The result has been 10 or 20 years of just massive investment in energy that wasn’t helpful in better energizing the world. Wasn’t helpful in lifting people out of poverty. Wasn’t helpful in expanding access to energy. In fact, I believe it’ll go down as the greatest malinvestment in history.
Meanwhile, last year solar and wind power accounted for 99 percent of the growth in world electricity supply, while generation using fossil fuels declined:
Let’s not pretend that hostility to the energy transition has anything to do with faith in free markets or the desire to keep energy cheap. Trump and his minions are actively trying to stop the expansion of green energy even when it’s profitable. In the latest development, the administration is using bogus national security concerns to block the development of wind power:
Now the administration has held up a large number of onshore wind projects under development on private land, citing national security concerns. These wind farms typically have to undergo a review by the Pentagon before being built to ensure that their turbines won’t interfere with military radar or flight paths. In the past, those reviews have been fairly straightforward, but they have ground to a halt in recent weeks, and the Pentagon has canceled some meetings with developers.
Fortunately, America is not the world. We account for less than 20 percent of world electricity generation. So Trump’s policies can’t stop the global energy transition. Indeed, as a result of the Iran debacle, Trump’s presidency has been a net positive for the global green energy revolution.
Trump and the fossil-fuel cabal may be able to extract a few billion dollars in profits by keeping America stuck in a dirty-energy past. But in so doing they will also ensure that the United States is left behind, and that the future belongs to China.