alt Hacker NewsRegardless of the politics of the day, where is the long-term, popular will (or capacity) for a "green/electric" revolution in the US? We are massively dependent on fossil fuels, and our quality of life is too.
At the same time, we don't have China's industrial capacity or their stomach for massive state-driven subsidies. I don't see how you escape peak oil otherwise.
Replies
Your comment ignores how much corporate welfare the US already provides. Maybe the better question to ask is why the US government cares so much about making such a small amount of people more rich at the expense of not only the living population but future generations as well.
We absolutely have the capacity, it's just being given to already wealthy families to ensure their wealth is contained to themselves rather than the country.
IIRC, polls show most Americans support action on climate change. When it's politicized, then they oppose it.
I mean, to some extent, you're not wrong, but if a Democrat were in office right now, we wouldn't be actively fighting the rising tide of solar power.
At present, the bare economics of it, without any subsidies, put solar as the most cost-effective new power capacity to add.
Last year—2025, the first year of Trump's second term—something like 90% of all new generating capacity in the US was solar. Even with his active antipathy toward it.
There no longer needs to be a massive movement willing to pay more for energy just to get it decarbonized. All we need is for the fossil fuel industry and the people in its pay to get out of the way.
Oil is just one aspect of climate change, coal was far more important because there’s plenty of coal to case extrem harm.
The vast majority of new electricity generation installed in the US over the last 15 years has been wind and solar. That naturally results in fossil fuels being fazed out when existing power plants age and thus need to be replaced. 70% of US electricity came from fossil fuels in 2010, that dropped to 60% by 2020. More significantly it mostly swapped to natural gas which emits far less CO2/KWh than coal.
We could go faster but the tail end of the curve represents a small fraction of the CO2 vs the peak. Even natural gas is facing severe pressure from ultra cheap battery backed solar. More importantly natural gas power plants don’t last nearly as long so will get fazed out much faster.
EV’s are also about more than tailpipe emissions, making and transporting gasoline is quite harmful before it ends up in a gas tank.