Solar Power Boom Times in Global Economy

 Against all the big bad things happening on the planet (and despite all the best efforts of the Republican-led Congress in recent weeks), this [unprecedented expansion in solar energy production] is a very big and hopeful thing, which a short catalogue of recent numbers demonstrates:

• It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next.

• That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.

• Last year, ninety-six per cent of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewables, and in the United States ninety-three per cent of new generating capacity came from solar, wind, and an ever-increasing variety of batteries to store that power.

• In March, for the first time, fossil fuels generated less than half the electricity in the U.S. In California, at one point on May 25th, renewables were producing a record hundred and fifty-eight per cent of the state’s power demand. Over the course of the entire day, they produced eighty-two per cent of the power in California, which, this spring, surpassed Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.

• Meanwhile, battery-storage capability has increased seventy-six per cent, based on this year’s projected estimates; at night, those batteries are often the main supplier of California’s electricity. As the director of reliability analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation put it, in the CleanTechnica newsletter, “batteries can smooth out some of that variability from those times when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.” As a result, California is so far using forty per cent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did in 2023, which is the single most hopeful statistic I’ve seen in four decades of writing about the climate crisis.

• Texas is now installing renewable energy and batteries faster than California; in a single week in March, it set records for solar and wind production as well as for battery discharge. In May, when the state was hit by a near-record-breaking early-season heat wave, air-conditioners helped create a record demand on the grid, which didn’t blink—more than a quarter of the power came from the sun and wind. Last week’s flooding tragedy was a reminder of how vulnerable the state is to extreme weather, especially as water temperatures rise in the Gulf, producing more moisture in the air; in late June, the director of the state’s utility system said that the chances of emergency outages had dropped from sixteen per cent last summer to less than one per cent this year, mostly because the state had added ten thousand megawatts of solar power and battery storage. That, he said, “puts us in a better position.”

• All this is dwarfed by what’s happening in China, which currently installs more than half the world’s renewable energy and storage within its own borders, and exports most of the solar panels and batteries used by the rest of the world. In May, according to government records, China had installed a record ninety-three gigawatts of solar power—amounting to a gigawatt every eight hours. The pace was apparently paying off—analysts reported that, in the first quarter of the year, total carbon emissions in China had actually decreased; emissions linked to producing electricity fell nearly six per cent, as solar and wind have replaced coal. In 2024, almost half the automobiles sold in China, which is the world’s largest car market, were full or hybrid electric vehicles. And China’s prowess at producing cheap solar panels (and E.V.s) means that nations with which it has strong trading links—in Asia, Africa, South America—are seeing their own surge of renewable power.

• In South America, for example, where a decade ago there were plans to build fifteen new coal-fired power plants, as of this spring there are none. There’s better news yet from India, now the world’s fastest-growing major economy and most populous nation, where data last month showed that from January through April a surge in solar production kept the country’s coal use flat and also cut the amount of natural gas used during the same period in 2024 by a quarter. But even countries far from Beijing are making quick shifts. Poland—long a leading coal-mining nation—saw renewable power outstrip coal for electric generation in May, thanks to a remarkable surge in solar construction. In 2021, the country set a goal for photovoltaic power usage by 2030; it has already tripled that goal.

• Over the past fifteen years, the Chinese became so skilled at building batteries—first for cellphones, then cars, and now for entire electric systems—that the cost of energy storage has dropped ninety-five per cent. On July 7th, a round of bidding between battery companies to provide storage for Chinese utilities showed another thirty per cent drop in price. Grid-scale batteries have become so large that they can power whole cities for hours at a time; in 2025, the world will add eighty gigawatts of grid-scale storage, an eightfold increase from 2021. The U.S. alone put up four gigawatts of storage in the first half of 2024.

Bill McKibben @ NY-er

So astonishingly positive of a story I'm still looking for cracks thinking they got to be there, right? 

What about the Chinese dominated rare earth minerals, lithium, mining elements I really know nothing about but thought I understood were essential to solar panel production? Isn't their scarcity a big obstacle? (Isn't their scarcity why Grump is talking about taking over Greenland and Canada?) Nope. Some think with rapid gains in solar technology all the minerals needed will be mined and circulating in the global economy by 2050. To produce the solar power needed will require transitioning about half the corn fields of the midwest to solar but this would not threaten food security and is quite doable, infers McKibben; depending on how the voters in Iowa feel about this, I cautiously suppose. 

One of the most striking parts of this explosion in solar technology story is how wrong the forecasters have gotten this growth. Fifteen years ago conventional economic wisdom said solar would never be cheap enough to be viable in free markets. McKibben shares that the closest forecasts to the meteoric growth in solar have come not from industry, who have obstructed green energy development at every step, but from environmentalists and even they underestimated the scales of the growth noted above. 

China is obviously leading this boom and transition. Maybe one of the most hopeful aspects of this story is how in the real economy there's all kinds of evidence of open trade and cooperation between China and the US and other parts of the world expanding solar together. 

That's not what we get from the current gov and in a lot of media, which tends to framing the relationship between the US and China as always adversarial, win/lose, zero sum, the new cold war 2.0 battle of world superpowers. 

For instance, the republicans are actually doubling down on drill baby drill, as if in direct opposition to China's green energy boom. But is there any long game to this strategy beyond garish TV/online spectacle fueled by Big Oil? I did semi-recently learn in some Vaclav Smil books that some material production will likely resist or be more difficult to transition off fossil fuels, like heavy metals, steel, military weapons, airplanes. If this still holds, maybe Grump's braintrust figures they've lost the coming green energy economy so they are banking instead on fossil fuels to retain significant power in the coming century, particularly because of their likely long-run importance to military production. 

It would certainly make sense the US would have to maintain a solid position in fossil fuel production until the relevant national security questions are resolved. Still not clear why this strategic position would require hostile attacks on alternative energy production that benefits everyone? 

Except as a crony capitalist gift to Big Oil! 

So much of Grump 2.0 appears so incompetent and destructive, so obviously fueled by hysterical racist panic that it is hard to imagine how it can last or even survive the disasters it only seems to know how to make worse. Like attacks on FEMA?! Why would anyone oppose FEMA helping people in weather disasters?   

I don't know but on the bright side it appears solar energy production is booming in spite of all the opposition and beyond anyone's predictions. And decarbonizing our energy system remarkably quickly. 

Yay for our side: Future humanity!  

Environmental rule-shredding at the EPA will put lives at risk, ex-EPA heads say.

 Three former Environmental Protection Agency leaders sounded an alarm on Friday, saying rollbacks proposed by the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, endanger the lives of millions of Americans and abandon the agency’s dual mission to protect the environment and human health.

Zeldin said on Wednesday he planned to roll back 31 key environmental rules on everything from clean air to clean water and climate change. The former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy called Zeldin’s announcement “the most disastrous day in EPA history.”

“What this administration is doing is endangering all of our lives – ours, our children, our grandchildren,” added Christine Todd Whitman, who led the EPA under George W Bush. 

AP @ The Guardian 

This techno-feudal war lord stuff going on at the EPA sounds more like a prequel to the Road Warrior franchise than anything else. Grump wants to be King of Gastown! 

And, recall, the Associated Press is the long-standing news organization that is now banned from White House press conferences because they won't call the Gulf of Mexico what Grump is calling it now. So now the AP is part of the resistance. Bet me the Grump admin is strictly ordered to use Pocahontas when referring to Senator Warren. Like the first 2016-2020 edition, Grump is already inexplicably recruiting hard for the opposition and resistance. 

I still maintain that at least half of all this, Grump winning the election, stems from Big Biz resistance to government efforts to address climate change (and the other half due probably to Lina Khan's antitrust and minimum wage pressures and IRS reforms). Or to put it another way: these are the relevant economic factors for the 8 out of 10 billionaires that supported Grump. 

The problem is not just that markets have failed to confront climate change, a problem largely of their own making. But they have actively sabotaged and obstructed efforts by governments to protect the environment. Read Private Empire by Steve Coll for one big case example. Big Biz knows the coming energy transition means reducing the burning of fossil fuels, and in general will mean more regulations and taxes and government planning to incentivize the coming energy transition. This threatens their profit margins. And they also know their argument that environmental reforms and regulations are bad for the economy, a Chamber of Commerce staple for going on a half century, is losing its persuasive steam as it becomes increasingly clear that GNP growth in the neoliberal free market fundamentalist period of the last half century, 1980 to 2025, is nearly half what it was during the New Deal liberal period, 1935 to 1980. 

The tragic part is billionaires would rather support a fascist authoritarian state, a dictatorship, than accept any increased financial responsibility for climate change or face antitrust or living wage union pressures. They see government, other than securing and protecting private property, as extraneous to profit seeking efficiencies of building a business and making a fortune; something to be evaded or  minimized with austerity measures (cut gov spending, higher interest rates). Big Biz is essentially hostile to any democratic claims (taxes, regulations, living wages) on their business interests. I'm not saying it has to be this way, there are really existing social democracies (EU, Canada, Japan). But this has been more or less the posture of the merchant classes, capitalists, classical liberals, free marketeers, ordoliberals, neoliberals, and corporate rule, i.e., hostility towards democratic claims on private wealth, since the Bourgeoisie Revolution in England in the 17th century. 

And also bonus for the Christian Nationalist cause the billionaire that steps up is a Neo-Nazi and an extreme bigot asshole. Making all of this rhyme ominously with the way business interests in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s turned to fascist authoritarian state rule rather than compromise with labor unions and communists. 

And this failure of capital, business elites, the Mellons, the Hoovers, Laissez-faire, to compromise with labor, yes, to appease labor, Keynes believed, I might add, led to police-state crackdown regimes like fascism in Italy and Germany. 

The Right Response to China's EV Subsidies

According to Gernot Wagner and Shang-Jin Wei, Economists at the Columbia Business School: 

Some of the Chinese government’s EV subsidies are justified, both on the supply and the demand sides. They can represent the best option for internalizing positive learning-by-doing and scale externalities, and for helping producers climb the learning curve and slide down the cost curve beyond what the market would deliver on its own. That is especially true for batteries, a key input in the EV supply chain. The patent system provides crucial incentives for private innovation, but it does so highly imperfectly. Research and development has positive social spillovers, making it deserving of taxpayers’ support. Targeted demand subsidies are similarly justified, because they speed up EV adoption, helped by positive learning-by-doing and network externalities. The latter calls for direct support for an increase in the number of charging stations, itself deserving of direct subsidies (though over time, policymakers should phase down subsidies and instead increase gasoline taxes). While the success of Chinese EVs has spooked Western car manufacturers, some of the pain is self-inflicted. Having bet on massive gas-guzzlers for too long, they delayed the all-but-inevitable switch to EVs. But that’s not all: Chinese EVs are cheaper for the same reason that most everything manufactured in China tends to be cheaper than American or European products. Introducing EV tariffs in response to intense lobbying by Western car manufacturers might make for good election-year politics. After all, taxing one’s own citizens – including via carbon taxes – is politically difficult, while “taxing” others is sometimes viewed more favorably, especially by those with lower trust in government. But while some tariffs, like Europe’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), are eminently justifiable, because they specifically address the negative carbon externality, those aimed at Chinese EVs or other products such as solar panels, which are crucial for the global green transition, are not. A much better idea is to subsidize domestic manufacturing, an approach reflected in the US Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and in targeted EU subsidies. Some of these subsidies can be justified simply as a politically feasible, second-best alternative to carbon pricing, including as a stepping stone toward pricing policies.

The Right Response to China's EV Subsidies, Project Syndicate

Economic Development and Technological Innovation Need Government Support

"The United States government has subsidized and protected the new technologies that have dominated each phase of its economic development. In the 19th century, it protected railroad investors from losses, and relied on hefty import duties to protect northern factories. In the 20th century, the American government aided automobile makers by subsidizing oil production and road-building, supplemented for many years by different tariffs."

Biden's Tariffs Are a Good Idea, Zachary D. Carter, Slate  

Alexander Hamilton writes an often overlooked (I hadn't heard of it anyway) report in 1791 opposing Laissez-faire political economy and initiating a school of thought in American history known as Infant Industry Theory. IIT maintains that transformative technologies require active and ongoing government support in order to survive against a status quo that is inevitably stacked against them; primarily stacked in defense of already existing markets and market positions. Sounds kind of obvious when stated plainly but to free market fundamentalists this is sacrilegious talk. Also, conservative libertarians (other side of the market fundamentalist coin) are probably not surprised to be hearing such radical statism coming from Hamilton. They've never forgiven him for National banks. 

Carter expects the EV tariffs combined with the Inflation Reduction Act will spur green innovation and development in the domestic automobile industry. Hope so but I fear the tariffs might enable more industry foot-dragging, trying to max out fossil fuel profit returns before transitioning to the slimmer margins available producing EVs. 

That China can now produce an EV that costs about $10,000 and another that can go 1300 miles on one charge is a Big Fail, and should be a humiliating embarrassment, for Tesla and the domestic automobile industry. But most coverage in the mainstream media I see is about how China "unfairly" subsidizes their EV industry. The meaning of "unfairly" here is pure free market myth bullshit. Perhaps US subsidies that go to fossil fuel industries ought to instead be going to EV production and infrastructure or that'd be "unfairly" too?!

Laissez-faire, Neoclassical, or free market capitalism, always rigged against workers, or labor, and all the while the envious model of economic growth in the world, is now being shown up by State capitalist China. And, as if beating us soundly in economic growth year-in-year-out for going on three decades were not bad enough, China is now blowing us off the road in technological innovation, the other thing the free marketeers are always boasting no one can do better. 

Meanwhile, corporate rule in the US actually obstructs and sabotages government efforts to address climate change. And has shown little awareness to date that this is a colossal losing strategy in a long-run that looms closer by the day. Just yesterday Grump promised, if elected, to stop immigration and "burn baby burn." Not to mention all the other horribles that will ensue if that miscreant is re-elected, this will accelerate authoritarian China's position in global affairs and will isolate and ruin America's. 

Secretive court system has awarded over 100bn of public money to private corporations

"The modern ISDS [Investor-State Dispute Settlement] system is widely viewed as an outcrop of efforts to prevent former colonies in the global south from appropriating or nationalising industrial concerns after independence. The Office of the US Trade Representative even lauds ISDS as a peaceful alternative to the gunboat diplomacy of the 19th century. But it has largely evolved to constrain national pushes for social and environmental regulation that could adversely affect investor ambitions.

Fabian Flues, of the PowerShift NGO, which co-compiled the analysis, said: “The injustice is glaringly obvious: countries in the global south are the main victims of ISDS, while corporations from Europe and North America benefit. It transfers public money into the hands of a few corporations and their shareholders. This has to stop. It is high time for countries everywhere to leave the treaties that include ISDS so that they can build a fair and sustainable future.”

Secretive court system thwarts green reforms, The Guardian

We can't afford to be climate doomers, by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian

If the scientists say we can overcome climate change then why are so many people doomy about it, asks the always very smart and hopeful-without-being-sappy Rebecca Solnit? 

(BTW, her book, A Paradise Built In Hell, is an excellent history and another, Wanderlust, a sort of literary history of walking, one of my favorite books ever.) 

Anyway, my hot take on why so many people might trend doomy on climate change: 

B/c, for one big reason, the forces against climate change reform are the richest and most powerful corporate interests in the world. Big Oil and Wall Street. And everyone or nearly everyone depends on their economy; for jobs, housing, food, savings, etc. 

Big Oil and the Billionaires, the people who run the economy, tell us environmental reforms threaten economic growth and security. And what threatens the Captains of Industry threatens Us, we naturally fear.

We don't want to cook the planet but we need jobs. Ack! 

Now I don't believe this Chamber of Commerce bs for a minute but I certainly recognize the fear in the question: is whatever X factor good or bad for the economy? It matters. Many live with a fear that they're a few paychecks away from homeless destitution or other untold hardships. What if big biz people take their toys (jobs!) and go home, go full-hoarder austerity and wait out the "mob anarchy" (people asking for living wages, basically) in their island fortress redoubts? Too Big To Fail, etc. 

It's scary. 

But my contention is that the historical evidence is mounting that strategic government regulation of the economy, higher taxes on wealth, more spending on community infrastructure, and Democratic administrations since Roosevelt are more pro-economic growth, pro-jobs, and pro-prosperity than the monopolizing free market corporate rule of the Repuglicans, and this is on top of the fact the latter are also horrible bigots and the last people on earth that ought to be telling anyone else how to live their lives. 

My point: With the Dems there is hope, even if it is being strained, in adapting to climate change while minimizing the humanitarian catastrophes coming and, really, already here. But there is no such hope-- all climate doomers or climate deniers, same diff-- w/ Trump and the MAGA Repugs. The problem isn't climate doomers so much as a climate dooming political party.  

Vote Blue No Matter Who! Please and thank you. 

The Conservative Crusade to Burn, Baby, Burn

Bankrolled by mysterious donors, a little-known group named Consumers’ Research has emerged as a key player in the conservative crusade to prevent Wall Street from factoring climate change into its investment decisions.

WaPo By Steve Mufson