The bar has been set so low that talking about it is seen as success now.

Sometimes I think the only way we'll really make meaningful progress is if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so.

I'm weak on recollection as to when PV and wind started their big price plummet, but it was certainly in the 2010s.

It's still not too late for ... everyone.

In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.

PHEVs will maximize available battery supply to the most electrification of transport.

I also think home solar+storage should be heavily subsidized, because you don't need to do nearly as much grid adaptation and, keeping with national security, it makes communities much more disaster resilient if homes are somewhat power independent and they can charge a vehicle for trips.

Maybe he has been installed by the renewable energy sector actually to get the whole world onto renewables as soon as possible.

Of course, they had to give up on or delay America’s renewable future, but that may be a small Price to pay, and anyways renewables are growing in the U.S. despite the administration’s frankly insane efforts to block it

If you think about it, once you build a solar panel, it just produces power for the next 20-30 years. Then you buy another one and replace it. To get oil or natural gas, you need to drill a well. That well requires constant labor. What many don't seem to know is that oil wells decline in production over time. It's called the "decline rate". For the Permian Basin (source of the US shale revolution), the decline rate is 15-20% per year. So a well producing 1000bpd (barrels per day) will be producing ~500bpd in 3 years. That means you have to constantly be drilling new wells.

Oil wells (and resource extractors like mines in general) are great wealth concentrators. Solar panels are not. So the point of that quote is that a limited resource creates wealth and is limited but also war is profitable (for the weapons manufacturers) so every incentie lays in continued fossil fuel use because it's constantly minting new billionaires.

One thing I'll add here is that there are a lot of energy usages for fossil fuels for which we have no alternative. Aviation is a big one. To some extent, so is truck freight (although China is busy electrifying this too [2]). There are a lot of non-energy uses too eg plastics, industrial, chemicals, construction. So fossil fuels aren't going away anytime soon but we sure could take a leaf out of Chin's commitment to renewable energy [3][4][5].

Instead we get nonsense like warnings to Europe of a dangerous dependency on Chinese clean tech [6].

[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...

[2]: https://prospect.org/2026/04/29/aftermath-china-electrifying...

[3]: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/12/china-adding-more-re...

[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-m...

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping_Thought_on_Ecologic...

[6]: https://renewablesnow.com/news/europe-getting-dangerously-re...