GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO OUR PROBLEMS.

Doomsday environmentalist Bill McKibben sees the sun shining in.  "We desperately need clean energy now."  His essay, though, is about anything but desperation.

In 2014, solar power “utility-scale solar provided a mere 9.25 GW (0.75%) of total installed US generating capacity.” Which is to say, less than one percent. But “by the middle of 2024, installed solar capacity had risen to 8.99% of total utility-scale capacity.”  (Add another few percent for rooftop distributed solar).

That still sounds like a relatively small percentage—under ten percent. But in fact what it means is that we’ve finally moved on to the steep part of an S curve, and if we can keep up anything like that pace of expansion it won’t be long before the numbers are truly incredible.

Count me among the skeptics. That "S curve" reference is to a logistic diffusion model, which is to say a market-based phenomenon that used to be grist for the applied economics mill.  What the government subsidizes, it gets more of, and in the past few years there's been a lot of printed money thrown at solar farms, and with a lot of that rooftop distributed solar being promoted by power companies, it's possible that the diffusion curve will flatten shortly.  There's evidence to the contrary from California, but California isn't Illinois or Minnesota or Alaska.

When something that provides one percent of your electricity doubles to two percent, that doesn’t mean much—but when something that supplies ten or twenty percent goes up by a third that’s actually quite a lot.  And more the next year.

For a long while, you could see this growth coming, but it hadn’t yet added up to enough to materially dent the use of coal and gas and oil. But that is starting to change. Here’s the most important number I can give you, supplied to me this afternoon by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, who has been keeping careful track of the California electric grid. As I wrote earlier, it’s been moving to renewable energy faster than almost anywhere in the country.

The solar is on a path, in California, to provide more electricity than the natural gas plants.  Whether that generalizes to other states remains to be seen, and with well-known businesses making a lot of noise as they leave California, there's going to be opportunity to write a lot of Minimal Publishable Units.

But in the middle of another scare story about Donald Trump, Mr McKibben inadvertently suggests that the best thing for the government to do is to go away.

All this is the premise for understanding why the fossil fuel industry is so freaked out about this year’s election. They can read these charts as easily as anyone, and they know what’s coming. If it keeps happening at this pace, it will quickly start reducing demand for their products—they have vast reserves of, say, natural gas in the Permian Basin that will stay there forever simply because there’s no market. They have to lock in customers right now, or else watch their whole business start to slowly, and then quickly, fade. And with that fade will come, inevitably, reduced political power. Right now they can still frighten politicians—hence the fact that Kamala Harris, with Pennsylvania on the line, has to insist she supports fracking. But four years from now, not so much.

And if Trump wins, there’s tons that he can do to slow the transition down. He can’t “kill wind,” as he has promised. But he can make it impossible for it to keep growing at the same rate—right now there are teams in the White House managing every single big renewable project, trying to lower the regulatory hurdles that get in the way of new transmission lines, for instance.

I'd be more sympathetic to his argument about diffusion if he offered similar evidence from Pennsylvania.  Or Texas.  And that bit about "regulatory hurdles?"  What good does a productive solar farm in a desert do if there's no economical way to send it to a server farm or a steel minimill or to move intermodal trains with it?  As far as that "reduced political power?"  Can you say rent-seeking, dear reader?  Maybe those libertarians with their silly notion that the best thing for government to do is to go away have a point.  It's within Mr McKibben's grasp, too.  "Economics insures that cheap power will eventually win out."

So mote it be.