There is no energy shortage. The sun shines. The wind blows. The tides roll. We live on a molten rock.
At the start of this decade, when I first began covering the War Against Oil, and changed the sub-head of this blog to reflect that, I believed the key to victory was bringing enough investment to the space, public and private, so that the cost of renewable energy would fall below that of fossil fuels.
It’s happened.
Crossover happened just as I expected, in 2016. The cost of energy from solar panels is now lower than that from burning coal. The cost of energy from windmills is now falling below that of burning natural gas.
The only thing keeping fossil fuels alive in the big utility model is the sunk cost of infrastructure. When that proves unreliable, as it did in Puerto Rico a few years ago, it’s replaced by solar power, batteries, and micro-grid technology, just as Al Gore predicted two decades ago.
What Al and I underestimated was the financial and political strength of that infrastructure. Lyndon Johnson used oil to gain political power. George W. Bush was an oilman. Donald Trump is a slave to the oil power.
All the problems of the world, all the things that led to Trumpism, are the work of oilagarchs, regimes that control vast pools of oil and gas, and which are leveraging that into total control of society, and of a very limited future.
Think about it. Russia runs on oil. Saudi Arabia runs on oil. Iran runs on oil. Venezuela runs on oil. Nigeria runs on oil. Mexico and Canada run on oil. Under Trump, the United States runs on oil. If the oil power were defeated, the vacuum would eventually be filled. The world would go on. The planet would be saved.
But that is a political struggle. The technological battle has been won, and renewables will keep getting cheaper, the materials needed to power it increasingly substitutable. The economic battle has been won. Coal is dead, oil is moribund, and natural gas is in glut as the markets it depends on turn to renewable power sources, especially efficiency.
It is the political struggle that remains to be won.
While I’ve focused on oil as a generational power, its influence does go back over 1 ½ centuries, as Rachel Maddow notes in her book “Blowout.” As the use of each “fraction” from refining has come to its day – paraffin for guns, kerosene for light, gasoline and diesel for cars, asphalt for roads – the power of oil over the larger economy has only increased.
The political demand of oil can be summed up in one word – stability. As John D. Rockefeller taught us as far back as the 1860s, oil is profitable only with scaled infrastructure, with pipelines and refineries. This requires national control and even international control over the profits, which have been great enough to keep everyone paid-off and happy.
That’s what renewable energy really threatens, profits. The oil sheikhs treated solar energy as just another form of oil early in the decade. They invested in scaled solar systems, and electric lines, to bring this power to market, as they had oil. But now they are realizing that the world of the future isn’t based on solar and oil, but solar or oil. They’re scaling back.
The House of Saud can do that. It’s as absolute in its power as Louis XIV. Its royal family even looks Bourbon, its palaces all Versailles with Arabic names.
The other oilagarchs must work within national or international systems that would gladly follow the positive economics of solar and wind into a new day. Putin only seems like an absolute monarch in Russia. If he were as powerful as you think, the Soviet Union would be back together.
The same constraints operate in Nigeria and the U.S. They even operate in Canada, where the oil power recently overthrew the government of Alberta, has Justin Trudeau in its grip, and promises to take over the whole country at the next opportunity.
The Oilagarchs may seem secure. They’re not.
The question becomes, what will push them over the edge and who will do the pushing?
Technologists, and those who follow them like me, look to the invisible hand. The Cloud Czars were quick to jump on the solar energy bandwagon. Most cloud data centers today are powered by a combination of solar power, wind power, and batteries. Heat from computers is an energy source that can be re-used to drive turbines or purify water.
The Czars have been moving into the political game slowly, but we know where they stand. Democrats dominate in northern California and in Washington state. Every city where technology dominates turns blue as if by magic. That’s true even in the south, where I live. Georgia and North Carolina remain red only because their governments defy democracy, a Jim Crow order that is going nationwide.
This defiance of democracy is like the oilagarch’s defiance of capitalism. It springs from the same source, the need to defend the power oil gives them over their people, and neighboring people. Take it away all at once – blockade the Strait of Hormuz – and the global economy would collapse.
It’s true. Take out all fossil fuels from the economic equation, all at once, and a deep, deep depression will come over the world.
This is the economic question that now dominates the world’s politics. The cost of replacing oil with renewable power, however, declines every day. New technology, reducing that cost even further, continues to be developed, and continues to come onto the market.
At some point, these two lines intersect. The cost of replacing oil entirely becomes bearable. The revolution comes, the lights go out for a time, but they come back.
If the world today seems poised on a precipice, there it is. My advice to the world is jump.
