Turning Our Back on Clean Energy

I don’t understand what the current crop of political leaders thinks is going to happen in a world where China dominates proven clean energy technology, nobody besides the U.S. is engaging in a trade war with China, and a once-in-several-generations infrastructure buildout is in progress everywhere else that the U.S. is actively trying to shut down at home.

By the time the U.S. figures this out, there will be whole regions of the world currently without a power grid where people will be driving Chinese electric cars powered by Chinese solar and batteries. Those countries will have no incentive to participate in the U.S. financial system, since they won’t need U.S. dollars to purchase oil, and they will be entirely out of the reach of the mechanisms the U.S. uses to police other countries.

The scale of the extremely predictable disruption to the global political order will be huge. I work in the energy industry and I am, let’s say, an 80th percentile SME on this subject, but this is so obvious that I know other people must see this. I don’t understand what the plan is here.

Many Other countries are accelerating their transition the clean energy and electric transport.

This is yet another aspect the rest of the world will simply ignore the US and move forward without them.

For the first time in many decades, the US is becoming irrelevant, and it is doing that to itself, intentionally.

The main thrusts of opposition are for it being a seemingly forced imposition/push from some well to do environmental interest (think of the ones that you might see hobnobbing in Aspen that don’t have the same compliance cost exposure as the mass market) and “you’re holding it wrong” antagonization of those working with incumbent fuels and energy sources that want the conveniences from them in the contemporary options.

Another driver of note being the Appalachian region being viewed as a “wait out until they mostly drop dead” backwater to conquer. Even if coal has largely been sidelined, there is still a large and multigenerational resentment along those lines - especially for those asked to “learn to code”.

In terms of the Appalachian sentiment, you would have more success with just cutting huge unrestricted checks down there than to actually try to have another LBJ land in eastern Kentucky and try to appeal to a very conservative crowd (Martin County, specifically Inez being deeply so to where non-GOP voters are very rare to nonexistent).

This all makes sense when you realize Trump and his goons don't actually care about the economy, or energy, or whatever. They care about the culture war. Coal is right-coded, solar is left-coded, therefore we need more coal and less solar, regardless of what the actual facts are. It really is that dumb.