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Putting an oil guy in charge of energy is going to push oil production up, prices down, and renewables out.
From foreign policy to climate change, Americans chose America over the world. Can’t hugely blame them, but other countries are not taking the same route.
That said, if, like me, you believe the learning curve of renewables is going to make solar much better on price than a barrel of oil in the near future, this isn’t terrible news. But Trump is pushing that timeline out by a few years, and a few years is meaningful when you acknowledge how much damage extreme weather events are causing around the world.
If you push oil prices down by a few dollars, but you get one extra hurricane which causes $50bn in damage, is it even worth it? 3 replies
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That's a false dichotomy.
Firstly because this chart is misleading. While China's emissions are a massive problem on their own, they are largely driven by all the manufacturing being done there on behalf of US consumers (i.e, the chart displays Chinese scope 1 emissions but not US scope 3 emissions, which have effectively been outsourced). Furthermore, the per-capita emissions of the US are still nearly twice those of China (i.e., the chart does not normalize for population and living standards). Lastly, the chart stops in 2021, but in 2022 China installed as much solar capacity as the rest of the world combined, then doubled it in 2023; they are effectively leading the green transition worldwide.
Second because we're discussing here the policy choices of the new US president-elect, not Xi Jinping's, whose stated platform has been to unlock additional drilling of "liquid gold" on public land, offering tax breaks to O&G companies, approving new pipelines, discontinue wind subsidies, and roll back EV policies 0 reply
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