As a young adult during the Bush years, I felt strongly that we needed to take aggressive action to replace foreign oil dependence with new energy sources (renewables, nuclear, whatever, sign me up). Politically, I saw both a nationalistic reason for it, as well as the obvious environmental reasons. Paul Friedman's "Real Men Tax Gas" seemed like the right angle that cut across the ENTIRE political spectrum. Really, who can disagree with this?

But I could offer a concession, at the time, that the solutions were not off-the-shelf available.

Now? The bottom has fell out of the "we can't" argument. Solar just kept going down in price along with batteries. Anyone defending coal power is hardly doing so on the price argument. A solar-based economy is not familiar, no. We will have to build infrastructure that turns on and off daily and seasonally in response to electricity supply-and-demand balance. There are large engineering changes needed... but no cultural ones.

There's no day like today. The energy transition will benefit our friends and crush our enemies.

Because petrodollars. https://web.archive.org/web/20140104191101/http://en.m.wikip...