Above, Republican congressperson Bob Inglis, right after he lost his South Carolina primary in 2010, in large part because he woke up to the science of climate change and said so.
He made some statements about the direction that climate denial and clean energy denial would lead us – and 15 years later we can begin to evaluate whether his vision was clear.
Worth noting that not only have the technological trends become clearer, the continued warming of the planet has only accelerated, even beyond what was predicted 15 years ago.
Thomas Friedman in New York Times (gift link):
The Chinese simply can’t believe their luck: that at the dawn of the electricity-guzzling era of artificial intelligence, the U.S. president and his party have decided to engage in one of the greatest acts of strategic self-harm imaginable. They have passed a giant bill that, among other craziness, deliberately undermines America’s ability to generate electricity through renewables — solar, battery and wind power in particular.
And why? Because they view those as “liberal” energy sources, even though today they are the quickest and cheapest ways to boost our electricity grid to meet the explosion of demand from A.I. data centers.
It is exactly the opposite of what China is doing. Indeed, Beijing may have to make July 4 its own national holiday going forward: American Electricity Dependence Day.
You cannot make this up: Even Saudi Arabia is doubling down on solar power to meet the needs of the A.I. data centers it wants to recruit from the West, while Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” actually does just the opposite. It quickly phases out tax credits enjoyed by utility-scale solar and wind — as well as electric vehicle tax credits. This virtually guarantees that China will own the future of solar energy, wind power and electric cars and trucks, as well as autonomous vehicles.
So, in one fell swoop, this bill will make your home hotter, your air-conditioning bill higher, your clean energy job scarcer, America’s auto industry weaker and China happier. How does that make sense?
It doesn’t. And the person in America who knows that best is actually Elon Musk. It is really sad to me that Musk, who is without question one of America’s greatest manufacturing innovators — having started globally leading companies making electric vehicles, renewable rockets, battery storage and telecommunications satellites — has discredited himself with so many voters because of his dalliance with Trump and because of his Department of Government Efficiency’s capricious cuts to the government work force. Because of that, many will not understand the vital truth that Musk has been shouting to his fellow Americans: Trump’s bill is “utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”
This is not complicated and this is what China knows: There has never been a more intimate connection than there is now between a nation’s ability to generate huge amounts of electricity at affordable prices (and in the cleanest way possible) and its ability to develop A.I. engines that consume huge amounts of electricity as they learn and generate answers that could give us the tools we need to cure diseases, discover new materials and even produce the holy grail of cheap, clean, climate-saving fusion energy.
…China’s clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond.
At the same time, in the United States, President Trump is pressing Japan and South Korea to invest “trillions of dollars” in a project to ship natural gas to Asia. And General Motors just killed plans to make electric motors at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y., and instead will put $888 million into building V-8 gasoline engines there.
The race is on to define the future of energy. Even as the dangers of global warming hang ominously over the planet, two of the most powerful countries in the world, the United States and China, are pursuing energy strategies defined mainly by economic and national security concerns, as opposed to the climate crisis. Entire industries are at stake, along with the economic and geopolitical alliances that shape the modern world.
The Trump administration wants to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels like oil and gas, which have powered cars and factories, warmed homes and fueled empires for more than a century. The United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas, offering the potential for what Mr. Trump has called an era of American “energy dominance” that eliminates dependence on foreign countries, particularly rival powers like China.
China is racing in an altogether different direction. It’s banking on a world that runs on cheap electricity from the sun and wind, and that relies on China for affordable, high-tech solar panels and turbines.
“It is really sad to me that Musk, who is without question one of America’s greatest manufacturing innovators — having started globally leading companies making electric vehicles, renewable rockets, battery storage and telecommunications satellites — has discredited himself with so many voters because of…”
No mention of his Nazism or drug use!
He’s probably just another Musk fanboi.
‘A.I. engines that .. could give us the tools we need to .. produce the holy grail of cheap, clean, climate-saving fusion energy’ Even AI cannae change the laws o’ physics – holding something 7x hotter than the sun’s core, using magnets cold enough to freeze air, with most of the energy produced being from super-energetic neutrons that can punch straight through just about anything: it’s a tough ask. AI is being tasked with something more in its wheelhouse, though – getting through the minutiae of licencing fission reactors, a process that, all going well, takes ten years and costs a billion dollars. One of the first reactors built in the US, Nine Mile Point in New York, was built in four and a half years, came on line in 1969, and has been pumping out reliable power ever since. How reliable? Annual energy availability factor has been from 99 to 100% every even-numbered year for the last decade. Odd numbered years they stop for a month to refuel, and have ‘only’ been getting around 89-95%. CO2 output per megawatt/hour about the same as onshore wind, if you don’t count the batteries you’d need to get wind anywhere within a mile of those figures. Relicencing NMP1 for another tranche of 20 years after its projected closure in 2029 would give nearly as much clean power as the whole New York State wind sector does .
The usual cherry picking. Ignores the many many disasters and near-misses of the Unholy Twinity of nuclear power and nuclear weapons that have happened while 9 mile point reactor has been running and other nukes have been delayed by decades, overrun budgets by tens of billions, and provided… oh, wait… less than 5% of the world’s energy. And unreliably, since no one can tell when any being built will be finished, they’re dependent on increasingly intermittent and destructive water bodies, and as the world’s reactors age, massive emergency safety shutdowns like France’s—from which it’s still recovering 4 years later, become more common. (40% of its 56 ~40 year old reactors were shut down; 5 others should have been, for severely degrading aquatic ecosystems, but who cares about that? It’s only the biological basis of all our lives.)
If anyone tries to get any significant amount of energy out of them, it will be a cataclysm only surpassed by now-certain climate and larger ecological crisis or nuclear war made far more likely by climate chaos. Nukes can’t help with that, can only make everything worse while further delaying the real solutions.