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Comment by OutOfHere | Hacker News Reader

Trump has given a surprise gift to renewable energy worldwide, one that the sector should not fail to use.

A lot of the world tried to shift to renewables during the ~10-year-long 1970s embargo. They went straight back to sweet old oil afterwards. This isn't gonna last nearly as long. Don't get me wrong, I hope and pray that renewables get a boost out of this, but I don't think it's gonna happen.

Really not sure you can compare solar and wind energy from the 1970s to the highly efficient modern solar and wind solutions of today.

Really.

I suppose that the specifics of what I said were mistaken, but the general sentiment remains the same. It doesn't seem like this conflict will last as long as the embargo, and when one of the largest investors into new technologies has firmly refused to acknowledge the necessities of renewables, progress and adoption will certainly slow down.

"... when one of the largest investor into new technologies ..."

No. Sorry but China has not firmly refused to acknowledge the necessity of renewables. Quite the contrary, actually.

I specifically said "one of the largest", not just "the largest". The US is (was?) the second-largest investor in clean energy [0].

[0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-invest...

In the 1970s electric cars were not generally available and solar panels were 100 times more expensive than they are now. Today the world has the manufacturing capacity to install nearly a terawatt-peak of solar panels per year, at low cost, and millions of electric cars are shipping every quarter:

https://open-ev-charts.org/#global:electric-sales:quarter

It won't change rapidly in the US, because the current administration opposes renewables at every turn and keeps low cost BEVs out of the US, but most of the world's energy/oil needs are outside the US. This situation will accelerate a global process that was already gaining speed.

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