It’s not hard to look around America today and see signs of decay, corruption and decline. I thought of this yesterday when I saw this Semafor article on Egypt’s ambitious push to transition its electrical grid to renewables. The gist is that Egypt is trying to move from getting 10% to 45% of it electricity from renewables in two years. That’s a mind-bogglingly ambitious goal. But it’s not based on ideology or high-minded goals about limiting climate change or the situation you have in the U.S. where renewables — wind and solar — are somehow considered “woke.” Egypt doesn’t have that luxury, notwithstanding being geo-politically aligned with the major fossil fuel exporters. Fossil fuels are not only pricey, they make especially developing economies vulnerable to constant price shocks, whether it’s the Ukraine War, Iran War or the inflation spike coming out of COVID. Egypt is focused on wind power. And there’s no way to hit that ambitious two-year schedule without China, building China’s soft power and economic reach at the same time the U.S. seems determined to throw ours away.
The Semafor article says the U.S. is increasingly a petrostate while China is an electro-state. These phrases have no fixed meaning. I don’t think the U.S. is a petrostate since oil and gas don’t dominate its economy the way they do in the Gulf or Russia. But its economic decision-making and geopolitics are certainly based around oil and gas. And it’s not just a matter of focus or deployment of available resources. Over the last year the Trump administration has incurred significant economic losses to shut down wind farm projects. So we’re literally throwing away money, walking away from almost completed projects because the people guiding national economic policy think this is somehow “owning” Joe Biden or the libs. On that front, it’s often not clear how much of this push is from the fossil fuel industry or anti-climate transition ideologues or just the pet obsessions of an increasingly deranged president who is obsessively opposed to wind power probably because he thinks offshore wind turbines are eyesores for his nearby properties.
Here’s what I mean by the aura of decay and decline. We can do stupid things like this because our vast national wealth insulated us from the near-term consequences. That’s even more the case because the Trump-era political class is dominated by billionaires who have yet another layer of insulation. Egypt doesn’t have that luxury. They’re already rationing electricity usage because of the knock-on effects of the Iran War. What’s important though is the energy transition is happening regardless. The climate journalists I follow closely started saying a couple years ago that the climate transition horse has already left the barn. It’s over. We may have waited far too long. It may not happen as quick as we’d like. But now it’s being driven by simple economics. It’s cheaper. What’s more, in an increasingly chaotic world, domestically produced wind and solar are just more reliable.
This is the tableau of decay and decline. Egypt, a chronically underdeveloped country long afflicted by strong-manism and corruption, doesn’t have the luxury of letting ideology guide energy policy. They’re powering ahead with wildly ambitious plans to move to renewables. It’s almost certainly not about long-term concerns about the climate. It’s for the simple reason that it’s cheaper and more dependable. Meanwhile, energy policy in the U.S. is driven by the rantings of a senescent wannabe dictator whose speeches routinely dip into musings about wind turbines and birds. That is what decay and decline look like.
The US will never be a petrostate in the way Russia or Saudi Arabia are. The U.S. economy is vastly more diversified. But extractive economies are by definition low value-add industries which leave the rest of the economy underdeveloped and create a tendency toward autocracy. Solar and wind power, meanwhile, are both high tech products with all the secondary benefits high value-add and high tech-input industries generally bring the economy as a whole. These are all self-inflicted wounds. The American right may think they’re stamping out “woke” climate transition tech. But they’re not. That world is just passing us by. And China, in addition to reaping economic and tech benefits, is spreading its soft power and its politic-economic power around the globe.