Art of the Deal.
Instead, the best immediate hope for emissions reduction is China, ironically a vast consumer of coal that has frequently resisted binding carbon targets. Its accidental co-conspirator is Trump, an outright climate change denier. For the past 15 or so years, China has poured trillions of dollars in spending and tax breaks — often buttressed by tariffs and regulations — into renewable energy and other green tech, particularly electric vehicles.
As a massive net oil importer, it was driven more by energy security and strategic industrial policy than global environmental stewardship. Still, the planet should take its wins where it can get them. The increase in oil prices from the Iran war has acted as the world’s most unexpected carbon pricing scheme, with Trump being China’s best salesman. As data from the think-tank Ember shows, sales of green tech have shot up, including in the US, to replace demand for oil. The art of the deal, indeed.
It’s not necessarily being done in a way economists would endorse. You might disapprove of Chinese solar panels flooding the world market as state-subsidised overcapacity, or approve of it as production for a market where rising demand will match supply. Or, like me, you might simply not care either way as long as massively cheap panels are available. The positive externalities of low-cost renewable energy surely exceed the inefficiency from distorting market signals. (More complex technology with security implications, such as electric vehicles, is a harder question.)
Paul Krugman:
Yet here’s the irony: Donald Trump’s disastrous Iran war has delivered a huge boost for renewable energy around the world — except in the U.S.. Trump has so far done more to shift the global economy away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy than any other single individual in history.
Why do Trump and his gang hate green energy so much? The roots of their hatred range from the power of fossil fuel interests, to Trump’s petulant whine that wind turbines ruined the view from his Scottish golf course, to a general sense among right-wingers that clean energy threatens their masculinity.
What’s best for Americans has nothing to do with it. Thus, Trump lackeys justifying their hostility to renewables consistently make arguments even they must know are stupid. Consider, for example, an exchange last month between Doug Burgum, secretary of the interior, and Rep. Jared Huffman of California:
Burgum: All of these projects you’re describing in Nevada have one thing in common—when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity.
Huffman: Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter in the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of: It’s a battery.
Indeed. To get a clearer understanding of far battery technology has progressed in enabling the transition to renewables, let’s look at how the state of California sourced its electricity this past Wednesday. The chart below shows megawatts supplied at 15-minute intervals over the course of the day. The area shaded yellow represents daylight hours. The light blue line at the top is electricity generated by renewables, mainly solar power (with some wind and hydro as well). In addition to supplying energy for current consumption, renewables supply energy to batteries for nighttime consumption. The black line at the bottom is net electricity supply from batteries — which is negative when batteries are charging, positive when they’re being drawn down:
California — which would be the world’s 4th largest economy if it were a country — gets more than half of its electricity from renewables. It is rapidly becoming a state largely powered by the sun during daylight hours and powered by batteries during the night.
Burgum’s suggestion that solar is an unproven or unreliable technology is completely at odds with reality.
Nor is California the only economy that now makes substantial use of renewable energy. Burgum’s home state of North Dakota gets more than a third of its electricity from wind power (don’t tell Trump). In South Dakota wind supplies 57 percent of the electricity. And renewables generate a large share of electricity in many countries, including most big European economies. (France is the outlier, not because it relies on fossil fuels, but because it has large nuclear capacity.) Spain, for example, now relies heavily on a solar-plus-batteries system similar to that in California.
And when Trump went to war with Iran, nations that had already shifted toward renewable energy were very glad they had made the move.