It is, truly, too depressing to have to witness Trump’s re-ascendancy, compounded equally by the utterly despicable attempt on his life and by Biden’s accelerating descent into senility. Exactly when the whole of humankind most needs the USA committed to its sustainable future rather than its extinction.
So, let’s banish all that – not least by celebrating an all-but Trump-proof benign revolution unfolding in our midst!
Precisely because I know that it’s not all about the technology, I tend to write rather less about what’s happening here than I should.
By way of making partial amends, let’s start with one gob-smacking statistic. According to the Global Energy Monitor, China now has twice as much solar and wind under construction as THE WHOLE OF THE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED! Which includes 8 times as much as the USA.
This is not a blip. This is a trend – which President Biden has failed to make any kind of impact on over the last three and a half years, despite his much-touted Inflation Reduction Act.
(And please don’t default at this point by telling me that China is also building dozens of new coal-fired power stations every year. It isn’t, as it happens (though with 1.3 billion citizens, a 100% renewable electricity system is still some way away!), but it’s going as fast as it possibly can).
I suspect people don’t properly internalise statistics like these either because they want to keep China on the naughty step, or they have literally no idea of the speed with which the renewables revolution (prefigured most powerfully in China) is about to show up statistically all over the world. So do please check out the Executive Summary of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s new report, “Clean Technology Revolution” – it will, honestly, tell you all you need to know about the now inevitable “carbon crash and solar dawn”. https://rmi.org/insight/the-cleantech-revolution/
RMI focuses on three exponential shifts that the incumbent oil and gas industries have consistently underestimated: the sheer volume of new solar under construction; the share of EV sales; and battery sales globally.
It also points out the significance of China becoming the world’s first “electrostate“ – not just domestically, but in terms of its already huge export markets. Witness the panic in both the EU and the USA at the inability of their car manufacturers to deal with their Chinese competitors. This demonstrates the huge geopolitical implications of every aspect of this meta-shift.
And this will be most important in the world’s poorer countries. The extraordinary (and continuing) reduction in costs of both solar and batteries makes it entirely feasible that poorer countries could leapfrog into the solar age without incurring any further dependence on new fossil fuels – just so long as the rich world seizes hold of this astonishing moment by completely overhauling its approach to climate finance. Starting in CoP29 in Azerbaijan in a few months time.
It’s not just one think tank saying this. So too is the International Energy Agency. Even the Economist and a host of independent experts. As my good friend Paul Gilding put it in a recent blog of his on this very theme:
https://www.paulgilding.com/cockatoo-chronicles/carbon-crash-solar-dawn-24
“The carbon crash will not occur after demand has dramatically fallen. It will occur when the market believes demand is going to fall – in a time frame that means current production assets and those under development no longer make financial sense. Hence the term “stranded assets”. Renewable energy, including batteries but particularly solar, is at a critical Inflexion point where it will grow so fast it will dominate power production. Competitive today, it will keep getting exponentially cheaper and better, with far-reaching consequences – some obvious, like driving electrification, and some surprising and yet to be realised”.
It’s not unreasonable to think that Ed Miliband (our new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero) seriously gets this story. He’s hit the ground running so fast as to induce a collective apoplectic meltdown amongst the Telegraph’s editorial team – for instance, by giving the go-ahead to three huge new solar farms in the East of England (stalled by the Tories for years), while simultaneously opening up the way for new onshore wind.
And you’d be a complete fantasist to suppose that the proposal for a new coal mine in Cumbria is heading for anywhere other than oblivion. Labour Ministers have already accepted that there was an “error in law” in the Conservative government’s previous decision to grant planning permission – on the grounds that this decision did not consider the millions of tonnes of CO2 that would be emitted as a consequence of that coal being burnt.
So, here’s the analogy: here in the UK, we’ve just banished all those climate blues accrued over the last 14 years of constant Tory indifference and incompetence – including six years of David Cameron’s grotesque hypocrisy, three years of Boris blather, and 18 months of Truss’s and Sunak’s deplorable and divisive climate denialism. More progress has been made in the last two weeks than in the last five years since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister.
We can take some comfort from this. We may well get Trump as US President for another four years. It looks more and more likely. It will indeed be dreadful beyond belief. It will set back so many of our hopes and causes.
On the climate front, he can take the USA out of the game, as he did first time around; he can slow things down; he can extend the lifespan of today’s dying fossil fuel industries; he can make the task of ensuring some kind of stable future for humankind a lot whole lot harder than it already is.
BUT there’s literally NOTHING he can do, on a global basis, to halt the renewables revolution surging forward day by day, all around the world.
