Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
Hopescrolling, #climate edition
What's likely to happen now that the US has completely discredited itself on climate? That makes it more likely that there will be significant climate progress, not less, because the only credible remaining mode of progress is conversion driven by direct economic cost.
First, a post I wrote in 2011, probably the most accurate prediction I ever made:
http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2011/07/infrastructuralism.html
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
As mentioned in this post, converting to renewable power is really a communal decision, and governments like them or not are how our societies make communal decisions. Ideally, the conversion would go: people pressure -> governments decide -> command-and-control replacement.
That didn't happen because our governments are in fact not responsive to people pressure. By now it's clear that this will never happen.
So what are the alternate paths?
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
The post I wrote in 2011 goes through the so-far accurate reasons why technocrats can't disguise a governmental decision as an economic one through carbon taxes or tradable permits. Geoengineering is so far a fantasy and the more we learn about it the less effective it seems like it will be.
So the path left is conversion to renewable power based only on renewable power plus batteries becoming cheaper than fossil in straightforward market terms.
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
Luckily, one becoming cheaper than the other has pretty much already happened. There are some battery improvements yet to be made but they are already in the pipeline. OK, success! Success done almost completely by China, with some initial help from Germany.
But it matters very much how *fast* this happens. For it to happen more quickly, countries that are large fossil fuel producers with a lot of political power have to lose that power.
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
Countries can delay a transition based purely on economics by:
* paying expensive subsidies to their own extractive industries
* putting up tariff barriers on renewable products made elsewhere to try to defeat installations in their country
* using military and diplomatic power to sabotage trade
The US was doing this, and was always going to do this no matter who was in charge. Both Biden and Trump put tariffs on Chinese renewable equipment in place.
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
So what will speed up this transition? What will do it is the destruction of the neoliberal world system, which protects the power of oil producing countries, along with the destruction of US influence. And again -- we appear to be in the middle of a resounding success!
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
But a group of countries can not really stand against a change in the world technological base. As countries that don't have domestic fossil fuels convert, a point will be reached where not only their domestic power is cheaper but the products they make with that power will be cheaper and they will only want to buy things that use that power.
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