In the near term, however, Americans will blame everything except man-made pollution for the fallout from climate change.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not just more cost-effective for new power.
The operating expenses for a given coal plant are greater than the buildout cost for the equivalent solar+battery plant.
It no longer makes financial sense for coal plants to continue existing in almost all cases. This isn't some environmentalism thing, it's strictly hard math. Fossil energy is no longer viable without taxpayers keeping it on life support.
It's how everyone is YIMBY until something is happening near them and suddenly they're all NIMBY.
History is full of examples, but maybe not explanations, of the type of behavior coming out of the current administration in the US. They’re not particularly special, or extraordinary, by any measure. They’ve simply made the decision to hit the “defect” button over and over again like a teenage boy discovering porn for the first time.
And since the adults that preceded them were reasonable and responsible, they built up plenty of rules and norms, creating many opportunities to now hit “defect”.
- Various Roman emperors overextending and destroying what their predecessors slowly built
- Indigenous peoples (especially the Americas) allying with colonial forces to defeat other indigenous enemies (won the battle, lost the war)
- Brexit
- Perhaps the most documented regime of all time, 1930s and 40s Germany. Specific event? The eastern offensive
- Royal lineages have plenty of examples, like Louis XVIThe indiginous people's choices can't be understood without knowing their political context in regard to other indigenous people and the colonial powers.
The status quo's power rests on its institutions, stability, and the fact that it is the social norm - generally humans are tied to social norms and attack anything that violates them. The challenger, to succeed, needs to disrupt the institutions, stability, and norms, and one tactic is to just constantly attack them, regardless of the consequences, as a means to the end of taking down the status quo and gaining power.
There's not much history left. What we're seeing right now is people getting ready to win the end game of civilization. The oligarchs are well aware of the myriad existential threats to our civilization (and species) and are playing the game to make sure they're the last person alive living in comfort.
History will increasingly be told by powerful, oligarchical, modern warlords.
Someone commented along the lines of "I never thought the people bringing about the destruction or the planet would be such dweeby dorks."