Let's All Thank Donald Trump For Speeding Up The Clean Energy Transition. He'll HATE That!
Be sure to remind him every chance you get.
Donald Trump’s stupid Iran war keeps causing gasoline prices to go up, with US prices averaging $4.54 per gallon at the moment I wrote this, although it’s more like $5.50 in Chicago, per Robyn. Prices are up 24 cents from last week, 41 cents over last month’s average, and a buck-forty from last year. Diesel fuel, which has a direct impact on the costs of everything that gets trucked anywhere, averaged $5.64 this week, too. And don’t even get us started on the price of jet fuel, which is why my personal Gulfstream jet is grounded, along with the fact that I don’t have one.
As I’ve mentioned, I have to look up those prices, because it costs pretty much the same to charge my electric car today as it did before the war, although the local utility is seeking a three percent rate increase starting in June. I say this not to gloat, at least not only to gloat, but because one of the great things about clean energy is that in general, its costs aren’t as variable as fossil fuels, and not subject to sudden supply disruptions by idiot dictator-wannabees.
In a not-unrelated development, Trump’s dumb war appears to be accelerating the rest of the world’s transition to clean energy and electrification of buildings and transportation, as Paul Krugman points out (among many others this week). Investors are “piling into clean energy funds,” the Financial Times tells us just above its paywall. Even beyond the disruptions to the 20 percent of oil that travels through the Strait of Hormuz, Krugman points out, Trump’s erratic moods are even making our own economic partners leery of buying US oil and gas exports.
In defiance of Trump’s war on renewable energy, the booming transition from fossil fuels to electrotech — clean power generation and more stuff that runs on electricity — will be
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.
The world is switching over to clean power, finally, not primarily for the sake of stopping global warming, though that’s kind of necessary, but primarily because it makes the most economic and political sense. It’s more stable and cheaper, hooray!
Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let us know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.
Mind you, Trump is still dead-set against renewables, and as The New York Times reports (gift link), his weird war against wind power has taken a new twist, with the Pentagon holding up what had been routine security reviews of offshore wind farms, not for any legitimate war reasons, but because it’s a black hole of inaction that somebody decided could be used to stop wind development permits from going forward at all. It’s yet another example of the Steven Millerizing of government: use formerly-routine parts of the federal bureaucracy to harm your enemies, like clean energy, even if it also drives up electric bills for your supporters. Not a problem for Trump; since he’ll simply lie that wind energy drives up costs.
Fortunately, the US only accounts for about 20 percent of the world’s electricity generation, so even as Trump tries to hobble clean energy development here, the rest of the world is going cleaner and less expensive, and at some point after Trump may even let us rejoin them if we ask nicely.
Here’s a really encouraging development: Even if Trump’s stupid war pushes some countries like Japan and South Korea to ramp up their use of coal to meet short-term demand, analysts at the energy think tank Ember don’t see that being anything more than a brief upward blip, because coal is dying everywhere due to its high costs. It’s more likely that the Iran War will keep driving faster adoption of clean energy, with at most a minor increase in coal use in some countries — very much like what happened in Europe following Russia’s war on Ukraine. And heck, we can even hope that this time, PragerU won’t make a shitty video claiming that climate change is just mean kids bullying innocent lovers of coal, but set in Japan.
Even Poland, which in 2000 generated most of its electricity with coal, is now down to just 50 percent coal, with a quarter of its electricity coming from wind and solar. Whatever happens in Iran, there’s simply no likelihood of a long term “return to coal” anywhere. The shit’s simply too expensive and too dirty.
Around the world, there’s more and more awareness that clean energy, especially solar and storage, can meet the needs of developing countries that up to now have been fossil fuel importers. Data from Ember indicated that
in 2024 ~75% of the global population (predominantly in Asia, Europe, and Africa) lived in countries that were net fossil fuel importers (notably the US is a net fossil fuel exporter and has been since 2019).
The total cost of these imports? $1.7 trillion.
From this perspective, clean tech (EVs, solar, batteries) is all about energy security. You don’t need to constantly replenish flows of solar panels and EVs the way you do fossil fuels.
Of course, for all these encouraging developments, we should be very clear on one thing: Donald Trump hates clean energy, so we should remind him at every opportunity how much he’s moving the energy transition forward.
It’s your OPEN THREAD.
[Paul Krugman / Nuance Matters / NYT (gift link) / Carbon Brief / Guardian]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or make a one-time (or recurring) donation with this here button.
You know how young children have the ability to screech loud enough to shatter glass?
There's one kid that runs around my apartment building with their siblings.
It echoes off the walls and this child sounds like a velociraptor combined with a rage virus infected zombie.
It is creepy as fuck.
I will not leave my apartment when the little mutant is rampaging around the halls.
How many cat people identify with this?
https://substack.com/profile/155618292-ziggywiggy/note/c-254932412?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc