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solar power
Ignoring Trump's Stupidity Long Enough to Imagine a Green, Equal Future
Now he and his team has enlarged their analysis to include the 21st century’s novel dilemma—that we are steadily and rapidly overheating the planet—and the result is this report, which I read in certain ways as the data-rich companion to Naomi Klein’s 2014 classic This Changes Everything, an investigation of whether it is possible to imagine prosperity without ruinous growth. Much has changed in the years since those volumes—most importantly, the plummeting price of solar and wind energy and of batteries to store that power has opened up a much larger escape hatch. And it’s from that premise that Piketty’s new work really proceeds.
There’s an ever-better case for taxing the hell out of billionaires even if all you do is bury the resulting money in a hole in the ground.
The Global Justice Project says that rapid decarbonization is a must, and that it needs to be paid for by the rich, and that that payment should come in the form of a global wealth tax and a global income tax, which funnel fairly large sums of money from the north to the south. They aim for a “sufficiency” world, in which all have enough and where the share of wealth owned by the richest 1% drops dramatically—a kind of globalized Sweden, I’d say, in which people work half the hours we do at present, and consume more education and healthcare and less stuff. They view it as an alternative to “degrowth” scenarios, and also to our current unrestrained growth model, and say that it leaves the world with lower temperatures than either of those schemes.:
To avoid climate catastrophes, we show that sufficiency is required: a structural transformation of the economy involving shorter working hours, a lower material footprint, a shift from material-intensive sectors toward relatively immaterial sectors such as education and health, and major changes in food systems and land use. Rapid decarbonization of energy systems is also necessary, as is the sharp compression of income and wealth inequality. This compression is both a social justice objective and a condition for financing necessary climate investment and human capital expenditure and for sustaining political support from bottom- and middle-income classes in both the North and the South.
Here’s a little diagram they provide of the basic outline.
I have a certain sympathy for the argument—expressed most pithily by David Roberts on Bluesky—that this kind of sky-castle architecture doesn’t amount to much; I too am more fascinated by the daily drumbeat of technological innovation. And I think that the accumulation of that innovation may undermine part of Piketty’s argument; I have a feeling that the investment required for decarbonization is going to be easier to come by, as the price for good stuff just keeps falling, and the economic logic of paying for fossil fuel becomes ever smaller.
But I also think that the climate crisis is not the only ecological threat we face, nor indeed the only threat period. I think it’s pretty clear that democracy can’t survive inequality; there’s an ever-better case for taxing the hell out of billionaires even if all you do is bury the resulting money in a hole in the ground. One possibility is that the mega rich will succeed in their current project of deliberalizing the planet, and we’ll all get to live in our own nasty little sovereignties; another is that the Bernie Sanderses resident in most parts of the world will figure out how to combine their efforts and that over time we’ll get something that looks a bit like what Piketty (or for that matter Kim Stanley Robinson in Ministry for the Future) imagines. One tell for me that this team is not entirely politically detached came in this paragraph about what would happen if America (or China) predictably refused to join in such a scheme:
If necessary, the Global Justice Platform can be implemented with an incomplete coalition of countries, including the absence of the US and/or China. According to our projections, the climate damages imposed by the US on other countries would be about 3% of world GDP per year, on average, over the 2026-2100 period if the US does not participate in the GJP. Under simplifying assumptions, other countries should impose a corrective tax of approximately 80% on all US exports to collect tax revenues approximately equivalent to the damage. Given the projected decline of the US share in world GDP—from 30% in 1945 to 15% in 2025 and 5-10% by 2100—it is likely that such tariffs would induce the US to join the GJP. The same conclusion applies to the case of China, but with a higher tariff (180% or more).
The report concludes that
A habitable, equal 21st century is materially possible. What stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but crucial work of building a coalition behind it.
I think that’s a worthy goal to keep in the back of our minds as we proceed with the daily work of building the infrastructure for this new world; every election is a chance to get us a little closer, by electing the kind of people who understand the need for this kind of compression of wealth.
But the infrastructure is the part we can do something about right now, and on that score there’s some equal mix of encouraging maddening news, all of it again on a large scale.
On the one hand, our farcical war in the Gulf continues to serve as the recruiting sergeant for the renewable revolution. As a Bloomberg team reports in a long and important essay, the Gulf War has been “Asia’s Ukraine”:
About two hours from Manila there’s a solar power plant capable of powering 60,000 homes. Surrounded by fields growing okra and eggplant, it had been sitting idle since August, waiting for a connection to the grid—stuck in a queue just like many other renewable energy facilities around the world as power networks struggle to catch up with rising electricity demand.
Then the Iran war cut off the Philippines’ supply of imported liquefied natural gas. Immediately, the government cut fuel taxes and offered free bus rides to the public. Then a few weeks later, as the Strait of Hormuz remained blocked, officials began deploying policies toward a deeper, more structural plan to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels.
One strategy was to fast track more than 30 renewable plants by the end of April. One of those was that 125-megawatt solar plant, built by Citicore Renewable Energy Corp, which is now supplying clean energy to the grid. It is “good timing,” said Joselito Ernst Cañete, operations manager at Citicore, just as electricity demand increases to power air conditioners during the peak summer months.
What happened in the Philppines isn’t an isolated example. With their energy supplies threatened, countries across Asia and Europe have chosen to speed up deployment of renewables and electrification.
Meanwhile, the cheerful solar guru Danny Kennedy chimed in from a conference in Singapore where he found the Western politicians and analysts way behind the Asian curve. I will quote from his account at some length because it’s important:
Philippines. After declaring a national energy emergency in March, the government activated a whole-of-government mandate for energy security. Regulatory bottlenecks for renewables are being dismantled. Rooftop solar inquiries are up 500% since the crisis began. This is not a green ambition. This is a survival response.
Vietnam. The country has revised its power development plan, targeting a minimum of 47% renewable electricity generation by 2030. Vietnam is already the region’s largest EV market, and its government has expanded EV tax incentives in direct response to the Iran War’s impact on fuel prices. HSBC recently extended $4 billion in clean-tech financing to Chinese firms, much of it flowing into EV and solar exports to Vietnam and ASEAN.
Indonesia. Beyond the factory I visited in Batam, the government is engineering a broad fiscal shift—expanding EV incentives with a target of 2 million electric cars and 12 million electric two-wheelers on the road by 2030. With the world’s largest nickel reserves, Indonesia is positioning itself to replace diesel imports with a domestic battery ecosystem. The logic is national sovereignty as much as climate policy. We’ve also talked about their 100GW solar archipelago plans.
Thailand. Advanced its net zero target by 15 full years, to 2050. Solar generation surged 72% in 2025. The country is adding 50 GW of renewables and 14 GW of energy storage by 2037. A major 1 GW module supply deal between China’s GCL-SI and Thailand’s Getz Energy was just signed to support that buildout.
Singapore itself. Already scaled solar to 1.7 GW and is executing multi-gigawatt cross-border subsea clean electricity cables from Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam—with a requirement that developers bundle storage at origin for 24/7 firm power delivery. Singapore, to its credit, is acting. The conference, perhaps, just needed a bigger window.
We already know China and India—the two largest energy consumers in Asia—reached a historic tipping point together in 2025. For the first time, fossil fuel generation fell in both countries simultaneously: China down 0.9%, India down 3.3%. These are not small numbers. These are inflection points.
And yet even as this good news is happening, the Chinese are also beginning to shutter many of the solar panel factories that are at the heart of this revolution, because they’re not making enough money. This is, on the hand, understandable, and on the other entirely maddening—these factories are the single most important industrial asset on Earth—they are factories for lowering the temperature of the Earth. As readers are doubtless painfully aware, I’ve been beating this drum for a good long while, but I’m glad to see others joining in. Adam Tooze, the interesting bricoleur in charge of the Chartbook newsletter, wrote in the FT this week, it would be understandable if we were talking about some mundane commodity like cement:
But solar panels? Since when were solar panels just another commodity? They are a technological miracle. They make us into farmers of the sun. For the past half century, research labs around the world, starting in the 1970s with NASA spin-offs and the big US energy research push under Jimmy Carter, have been straining to reach this point. Together with batteries, which are also rapidly approaching the point of excess supply, they are the key to a sustainable future.
As Tooze points out, it cost China very little in subsidies ($18 billion) to build this behemoth (though one should probably add in the subsidies that, say, Germany provided to its citizens to buy the early models, underwriting the startup of China’s engineering miracle).
I’ve long argued that on a rational world, trying everything it could to head off the worst of global warming, we would “globalize” these factories, running them 24/7 and then piling up the panels on every railroad siding and wharf on the planet so that people could come take them away. This would be, I think, a backdoor way of achieving a fair amount of what Piketty has in mind, far messier than his global scheme but somewhat more plausible. By some calculations, 10 years production from those plants would produce enough panels to provide all the power the world currently uses.
If my sense that the coming El Niño will revive the world’s focus on the climate crisis—well, this is the easiest possible route forward. And it comes not just with more power, but with different power. Elon Musk may be rushing his IPO for data centers in space or whatever the heck he’s currently selling, but some of us will hole up here on Earth, quite sufficient with the solar panels in our yards.
Trump's Iran War Is Transforming the Psychological Meaning of Fossil Fuels
Deep enough that it was able to survive the emerging problems it created. When pollution dimmed cities in the 1960s, that gave rise to the first Earth Day—and to the catalytic converters and the smokestack filters that reduced the problem enough that it never challenged hydrocarbon dominance: We could have our cake and breathe it too. The oil shocks of the 1970s threatened that dominance in the targeted US but didn’t quite topple it; the Reagan program of dramatically increased drilling, and the extension of America’s military shield to the Middle East, gave us enough sense of safety that we stayed on course.
Rising fears about climate change seemed set to tarnish fossil fuel—after all, it now threatened an end to the physical future of our civilizations—but the effects of global warming have in the early stages been sporadic and local, and when the heatwave fades or the fire goes out or the flood recedes we’ve generally reverted back to the perceived and comforting inevitability of fossil fuel. It’s what we’ve known, and hence we’ve put up with a lot to keep the relationship going.
Donald Trump has managed to break the two-century-old grip of fossil fuel on the human imagination.
But there’s been nothing sporadic or local about the effects of this war. As tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz slowed and then stopped, the effects have been dramatic, immediate, and global. In Thailand farmers report they can’t find diesel to keep the pumps that irrigate rice paddies running; in Myanmar, as fertilizer prices soar, the World Food Program has warned that food production costs could double compared with last year’s harvest, in a country where a quarter of the population is already facing acute hunger. There are things we can change to cut energy use (the Thai prime minister said AC units should be set at 80°F, and that bureaucrats should stop wearing neckties “except for ceremonies”) but other customs are harder to rearrange: Bodies are piling up at Thai temples because they’re out of fuel for cremations. In Bangladesh, the prime minister has turned off most of the lights in his office, and economic life is changing by the week:
“I used to do 15 trips a day. Now I spend hours just looking for a pump that’s open, and sometimes I go home empty,” said Sohel Sarker, 38, a ridesharing biker in Dhaka. “I don’t know from one day to the next whether I’ll find fuel.”
These anecdotes add up to much more. As a team from the Financial Times concluded after a global inventory of the shifts:
High fuel prices and shortages force consumers to buy fewer goods. Businesses invest less and governments conserve scarce resources, causing economies to experience weaker growth. The enduring disruption of an energy shock can trigger the destruction of demand, driving economies toward stagnation and recession.
But that’s the macro level. At the micro level, it’s as much about psychology as anything else. The Guardian published an excellent account of how fuel shortages are affecting daily life around the world, and I found myself thinking about the words of another Thai, Teerayut Ruenrerng, owner of a mobile grocery truck:
At about midday, I return home from my morning selling session. I’ll pass three gas stations on the way and stop at each one. Sometimes I can get fuel, sometimes I can’t. Sometimes they will only give me 300 baht or 500 baht (US$9.15 to US$15.25) worth. At lunchtime I take a break, and sleep for about an hour. I start work at midnight.
If I’m able to fill up a full tank, I can relax because I know I don’t need to search for gas for at least three days and it’s guaranteed I can go out and sell. But if I can’t find any, I start to get stressed and panic about what I’ll do if I can’t get fuel.
Here’s an interior designer in Sydney:
It’s frightening, because you don’t know how long it’s going to go on for.
I just started looking for jobs, because I don’t know whether people are even going to want to spend money on renovating right now, or are going to want a designer. I’m pretty much throwing everything at it, which I think is part of the panic setting in.
And here’s a warehouse worker in Delhi:
As I get ready for work, my eyes keep returning to the gas stove. I last ate yesterday afternoon, some lentils with chapatis. It has been more than a day. I am very hungry, but there is only enough gas left for four or five meals. I hold back, saving it for worse days. There are a couple of cucumbers and tomatoes. I will cut them, add salt, and eat that, and save one more day.
Now, just think of that for a moment. The gas stove, to an Indian, is suddenly a symbol of scarcity, deprivation, fear. The stuff that supplies it comes from somewhere distant over which he has no control—if President Donald Trump gets an idea, or the Islamic Republican Guards get an idea, then the flow on which it depends can stop, and then he goes hungry, counting how many meals his canister might still contain. Multiply this by a few billion people and a few key facets of each life—dinner, commute, heat, cold—and you end up with a profoundly different mindset.
In the very short run, that may mean that countries like India lurch toward coal—fairly cheap, and fairly easily available. The forecast for May and June in India is even hotter than usual before the monsoon descends, and according to Bloomberg the country is preparing to burn more of the black rocks to keep air conditioners running. Even a few years ago, that would have been the country’s only real recourse: belt-tightening, and shifting to a different fossil fuel. But the Trumpian revelations about the undependability of fossil fuel come at a significant moment in human history, a moment when we have—again, suddenly—a very different choice. As David Fickling reports:
With the LNG [liquefied natural gas] drought pushing up electricity prices and photovoltaics providing a cheaper, easier alternative, a boom in rooftop solar is far more likely than a return to coal. Don’t look under the ground for the solution to the LNG crisis. The answer is in the skies.
Here’s a chart worth looking at, from the think tank Ember. It requires a bit of explaining. The old story about clean energy—that is, the story of the last five years—is that it was cheaper to operate than fossil fuel power, because the fuel (sunshine) was free, but that the upfront costs were higher because you had to build those solar panels. But now it’s so cheap to build the solar panels that from the jump it make sense to switch. That gray band at the bottom is the price of the fossil fuel system, and that orange line is solar with batteries, which provides the same reliable power. Again, this is the upfront cost—in the long run, of course, the solar system is hugely cheaper, because, again, the sun delivers the energy for free when it rises above the horizon.
Anyway, let’s think about India and stoves again. For a long time if you wanted to cook your food in India, you needed to go out and gather firewood or dung, something that took a long time (and was a chore usually assigned to women). When you burned it, you had to tend the fire carefully, and you (and your kids) breathed a lot of bad stuff. There have been many attempts to supply alternative cookstoves, but they never worked very well. But now—well, now, the government is moving quickly to boost production and import of induction cooktops. An induction cooktop—I’m simmering chowder on mine as I write—produces heat for cooking without much electricity, and that electricity can be supplied by solar panels and batteries, which are cheap. Suddenly the stuff we want from energy comes more easily, more dependably, and more affordably from the sun and wind.
This is happening, all of a sudden, everywhere and with everything. Here’s a Pakistani farmer explaining why, with a solar panel to run his irrigation pump, he no longer cares about the supply of gas from the Gulf:
“Now, I don’t care if the prices of diesel increase,” he says, proudly pointing to the sun above. “As long as there is this sun, I can grow my watermelons.”
In Europe, the online marketplace Olx reported a huge jump in inquiries about electric vehicless—for instance, in France (up 50%), Portugal (up 54 percent), Romania (up 40%), and Poland (up 39%). From Jakob Steinschaden, news exported a total of 120,083 electric and hybrid vehicles in March 2026, an increase of 65% compared to March 2025. The Washington Post reported yesterday that shares in China’s biggest battery maker had jumped by nearly a third since the war began:
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto said in March that his government would build 100 gigawatts of solar power in the next two years. Philippines’ state-owned pension is offering loans of up to $8,300 for members to buy and install solar power for their homes.
When Abraham Maslow first detailed the hierarchy of human needs, he put our physiological needs—food, shelter—at the bottom, and just above them our need for stability and security. There have been critiques of his theory, but the basic idea stands. What’s curious about renewable energy is that it’s always filled higher-order desires—for belonging, for esteem—better than fossil fuel; poll after poll shows that pretty much everyone understands that, all things equal, it’s better not to pollute the air. But now clean energy fills those most basic psychological requirements better too.
Think of the amount of money the fossil fuel industry has spent over the years to invest oil and gas with psychological power: Who could forget, for instance, the campaign that Rebecca Leber uncovered years ago that paid cash to influencers to gush about the homeyness of cooking with gas.
“#cookingwithgas makes food taste better,” says Camille, an LA-based foodie who poses artfully with her spatula, to her 16,700 followers.
But that’s not what cooking with gas means any more. Now it means wondering about the supply. The sun already provides us with warmth, with light, and via photosynthesis our supper—we have a pretty good psychological relationship with the sun already. When it comes out, we smile. And so the idea that it will happily supply us with all the power we need won’t be a hard sell.
Security fears keep ordinary people awake at night, but also elites. Here’s Frank Elderson, a member of the board of the European Central Bank, writing Tuesday in the bank’s official blog, and in the bloodless language of bureaucrats he says: More sun now:
Europe cannot eliminate geopolitical risk, but it can significantly reduce its exposure to it. The most effective way to do that is by cutting reliance on imported fossil fuels and accelerating an orderly shift to home‑grown clean energy. If Europe were to meet its sustainable energy targets, the link between domestic energy prices and volatile global energy markets would weaken substantially.
Donald Trump has managed to break the two-century-old grip of fossil fuel on the human imagination. As he explained to the GOP House caucus last month, “No other president can do some of the shit I’m doing.”
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