“Farewell,” the flag-waving Chinese children chanted to Donald Trump as he strolled along the red carpet back to Air Force One at the end of his summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing.
The US leader claimed he was leaving with a cluster of “fantastic” trade deals to sell US oil, jets and soya beans to China. That has not been confirmed by his smiling host, but one thing was crystal clear from the two days of meetings: the global balance of power is shifting, from the declining petrostate in the west to the rising electrostate in the east.
Or just the usual lust from a European intellectual – darn them damn Yankees?
Trump flew home to chaos – war with Iran, surging gas prices, spectacular unpopularity, friction with former allies and a 20th-century policy of “energy dominance” that seeks to turn back the clock
US is a net exporter. Higher fossil fuel prices benefits them.
a more useful – and maybe even hopeful – analysis needs to take into account the tectonic changes that are shaking not just the foundations of politics, but the very nature of human power, as the world shifts from molecules to electrons.
Sigh.
History has proven that when the dominant form of energy changes, there is often a shift in the global pecking order. We are now in the midst of one such transition as the epoch of petrol, predominantly produced in the United States, Russia and Gulf states, starts to give way to an era of renewables, overwhelmingly manufactured in China. But the outcome remains contested, and the process could be ugly. The new energy order is winning the economic and technological battle – wind turbines and solar panels were already producing record-cheap electricity even before the Iran war pushed up the costs of gas and oil-fired power plants. But the old petro-interests still have political, military and financial might on their side, and they are using that to try to turn back the energy clock.
Yep, usual European intellectual wankfest. So there’s a new tech in town, is there? Cool! So, the people who will get rich, who will have the power, will be the people who *use* the new tech best. Not who sell it, or make it, but who *use* it. From the failure to grasp that all other errors follow.
Sigh.
As a result, democracies across the planet are now threatened by what might be called fossil fuel fascism – an extremist political movement that breaks laws, spreads lies and threatens violence in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain markets for oil, gas and coal that would otherwise be replaced by cheaper renewables.
Oh, and a good dose of conspirazoid fantasies of course.
The new energy order is winning the economic and technological battle – wind turbines and solar panels were already producing record-cheap electricity even before the Iran war
And yet we have the most expensive electricity in the developed world. The whole thing is just nonsense.
Renewables are so amazing, cunts have to lie about them every day
China has massive economic problems. Its growth numbers are fantasy. Companies are going bust, notably Evergrande but also industrials. Xi is purging his army and government. Infrastructure which was flung up is falling down. They’re running out of oil and that matters, electrostate or not.
But overarching it all is the demographics, they are going to run out of Chinese people.
Its not even clear that Xi is in full control:
https://spectator.com/article/trump-needs-a-deal-but-xi-needs-it-more/
Maybe I should resurrect my guess that we will soon witness another era of Warring States. Or do nuclear bombs preclude that possibility?
Drones preclude it. The fighting elements of the British Army as it stands would be wiped out in a couple of months against any decent, drone-equipped enemy.
But if different Chinese warring states all had drones your argument fails, doesn’t it?
Well, you can’t legislate for lunatics (which is why I fully support Trump on Iran), and I’m assuming reasonable parity in technology and numbers, but in a state vs state war?
No.
It’s because different warring Chinese states all have drones that my argument succeeds.
I don’t think the drones would long be restricted to the battlefield.
How long would WWII have lasted if both sides had been equipped with drones of the sort that currently exist, never mind of the quality that are being developed, fire-and-forget things which can loiter for hours and eventually days, independently targeting people, and talking to each other like a giant brain?
Bomber Command is no longer losing 60,000 men, and it doesn’t actually need to reduce German cities to rubble, either – just target the soft bits like food, water, power, and people.
Meanwhile, a murmuration of 100,000 aerial Nazi murderbots is just arriving over London…
Would it even have started?
I suspect that the Russia-Ukraine contretemps would never have started had it been a bit more apparent to Putin what was round the corner.
It’s MAD, same as nukes.
But I could of course be completely wrong.
All God’s chillun got Drones
Lets add the context that renewables as a whole (solar wind, hydo, geothermal and the “iffy” biofues) represented 7.3% of global primary energy consumption for 2024. It may even be less than that now, as primary energy demand is increasing more than electricity generated from renewables.
So does China shut down at night ?
He blathers on about the triumph of clean energy and provides us with a photo showing PV cells stetching out as far as the eye can see. What is the environmental impact of these huge arrays ?
Another point he fails to make is much of Chinas grid is brand new, they could go straight to bulding the high capacity network that Britain and Germany ( especially ) can only do piecemeal. See also high speed trains.
It is like reading the paeans about the Soviet Union of the 1930s. All flowing fields of corn and all that ballett in the evening.
History has proven that when the dominant form of energy changes, there is often a shift in the global pecking order.
No it hasn’t.
I suppose there have been no more than two energy changes so far. If it was coal that fuelled the industrial revolution and put Britain on top for a while it must have been by our own efforts not colonialism. Colonialism relied on wind power, reliable ocean navigation. I do not believe the change to oil is what promoted the USA to top dog. It was probably trade, creation of a massive industrial base with a big home market. And tariffs. And nobody is going anywhere by renewables, it’s a fantasy.
The occasional global war helped a bit, while Ameica’s competitors were otherwise engaged.
If it was coal that fuelled the industrial revolution
It’s more that the industrial revolution fuelled coal. After we felled the native forests for warmth and cooking fires, coal started to displace wood. After the cheap, easy coal deposits near the surface were exhausted, we soon encountered the ancient problem of mines flooding. The first practical application for the steam engine being pumping water out of coal mines so we could have more coal.
Colonialism relied on wind power, reliable ocean navigation
We could say then the “dominant form of energy” was wind, but only for long distance transportation. Couldn’t cook your dinner with it or warm your hands over the mainsail.
So basically the single factor argument fails. Success is multi-factorial. And there have been many changes of the pecking order with energy not a factor at all.
Yes, it was just masturbation by the Guardian writer, priapic at the thought of the Chinese Communist Party and their shitty solar panels displacing those mean old “fossil fuel fascists” who voted Trump.
Ofc, in reality China is a nightmare for the environment and heavily dependent on dirty brown coal.
I blame the education system. It’s pitiful how few people know the laws of thermodynamics. I get the impression the average simpleton – Ed Miliband, say – thinks energy is created. They probably also think food comes from supermarkets.
The successful single factor argument is that human wellbeing correlates with the ubiquitous availability of cheap, useable energy.
Transportation energy sources are often the basis of a civilisation. When you are reliant on animal transport, you can only go as far as you can feed your animal while also carrying your animal’s feed. Ox carts is around three days and then you’ve fed the Oxen everything you’re carrying and have nothing left to trade. It’s the Rocket Formula in animal form. Once you break out of anmial labour you have sufficient surplus to generate more surpluses and trade further for better prices. Even just the first step of being able to access water transport can be a ten-fold surplus multiplier.
It was wind power if you’re talking about mechanically derived energy. Windmills for milling, pumping. various other applications.
And the first steam engines were at tin mines not coal.
Water wheels powered the early industrial mills.
Savery, was it? Newcomen’s atmospheric engine started work in the coal mine:
The earliest examples for which reliable records exist were two engines in the Black Country, of which the more famous was that erected in 1712 at the Conygree Coalworks in Bloomfield Road Tipton now the site of “The Angle Ring Company Limited”, Tipton.[11] This is generally accepted as the first successful Newcomen engine and followed by one built a mile and a half east of Wolverhampton.
Black Country? See! Slavery innit!!!1!
I volunteer at the oldest Smock Windmill in Britain (and therefore the world). I point out to visitors that you only find windmills where there’s no usable water – like the top of the Chilterns, or the Low Countries (which have plenty of water, but no head to get useful work out of it). If you’ve got flowing water – even if it’s just a trickle – you can dam it, create a mill lodge and you’ve got power on tap when you need it (and the energy density of water is also much higher than air).
When the wind isn’t blowing (or blowing too hard) you can’t use your windmill (just as with today’s examples); watermills almost always have power available.
Nominative determinism, or the other way around?
We’ve traced (properly, using Parish Records – not ancestor.com) the Miller line back to 1600, but no actual millers have appeared – just yeoman farmers in and around Brindle (who left wills and therefore appear in the parish records).
“After we felled the native forests for warmth …” oh what balls. Popular balls but balls all the same.
You can’t eliminate British broadleaf woodland by felling trees – the bloody things grow back again. To eliminate it you need to dig out the stumps and stop all other regrowth, usually by converting the land to arable or pasture, or to construction sites.
Trees are crops.
Moreover nobody felled timber for fuel: you used underwood or branches or coppicing. Timber was far too valuable to burn, and too much work – you had to chop the trees down and then chop the timber up. Timber was reserved for construction (including ships).
Pendantic and loving it: I read about the medieval grand carrack “Michael”, of the old Scots Navy. Built under James IV, it was named for the Archangel because James hoped to launch a Scottish crusade to free Palestine from the Muslims.
It was said to have cost all the timber in Fife (!) except Falkland Wood, and more had to be imported from Norway. Not sure how accurate that is, but shipbuilding certainly was incredibly tree-hungry.
I helped build a trawler when I was a teenager (shortly after James IV); we used oak (perhaps British) for the keel and timbers, larch for the hull (carvel built) and pine for the deck.
Importing conifer wood had been British practice for centuries – from Norway and the Baltic especially. Later from Canada. In the Age of Sail you needed lots of softwood for masts and spars. I assume ocean-going ships, and especially warships, would use oak for the hull too but our trawler was an inshore trawler i.e. < 40′ so larch was OK – partly because if the weather was unusually rough local practice was to fish instead from a small drifter (“whammel boat”), after salmon and trout, whereas the trawlers were after shrimp and flat-fish.
She was the successor to the trawler on which I had gone a-fishing … but I’ve told this tale before. Heave ho, m’hearties!
As inferred from that, it was the ravenous consumption of timber for the navy that was the greater pressure to move to coal for fuel than burning down the forests. And timber for fuel was more valuable as charcole for coaking than as heat fuel.
In addition, the invention of the self-draughting brick chimney that allowed coal to be used for space heating without also burning the house down.
“And timber for fuel was more valuable as charcoal” Nobody used timber for fuel. I repeat, you used coppice wood or underwood or branches. Timber was far too valuable to use as fuel.
In fact, the industrial revolution started with water-mills powering the looms.
Ah.
Just repeated what you said elsewhere on here.
Doh.
Looms were also the birthplace of programming. Pretty sophisticated machines, looms.
They probably developed as a consequence of each other but Americas deep capital markets paid for a lot of that industrial base.
Coal was a part of it, but….
It’s rather the development of mechanical power from the steam engine through to internal combustion engines as the first revolution.
The second revolution was using that mechanical power to generate electric power.
Some people argue nuclear power as a third revolution, but it really isn’t. It’s just a different technology to generate electric power.
A nuclear power plant is really just a very powerful and efficient iteration of a steam engine driving a generator.
So we’ve had two “energy revolutions” , and something *very* nifty and fundamental will have to be invented to get a third.
Something in the order of the ability to manipulate and use the Higgs field.
Until then we’re “stuck” with expanding gases and toying with the EM field.
But nuclear fusion will be here at any moment!!
Still just a very fancy way to generate heat…
And honestly.. unless we manage to figure out a proper “room-temperature” superconducting ceramic we can produce at scale, *and* which has the characteristics needed for a economically feasible fusion reactor….
Not holding my breath for that one.
China is still mainly powered by coal.
Isn’t this just Thomas Solomon’s circular dominant civilisation theory: Greece, moves west to Rome, moves west to Britain, moves west to North America, moves west to Japan,it’s simply the next step: moves west to China. China need to be aware that they will be elipsed by India.
Never heard of Thomas Solomon but sounds like bollox. Britain if you include the Empire were dominant until WW2 & Japan virtually a US subsidiary after. Japan had a regional dominance either side of 1900
Britain was never dominant in the way that Rome was: it was merely the strongest among half-a-dozen competing (and occasionally collaborating) empires.
Agree that it sounds like bollox Greece co-existed with Indian and Chinese and, for a period, Egyptian civilisations; there was a millennium between the fall of Rome and the rise of England.
The Empire certainly controlled more geography & population than the Romans.Or anyone else.And had more military dominance for its times. Because it controlled the worlds sea routes. Not a factor in Roman times. But a vastly different sort of Empire. Built more on trade than conquest. It actually did very little conquering. Didn’t need to. It was also accidental. The result of private trading initiatives.
“Never heard of Thomas Solomon”
Can’t find the quote after a few minutes’ googling. If I find it I’ll note it for future reference, but it was one of those “oooo… weird” things. Without further reserch I don’t know if it falls into one of those “both Wilson and Trump had Scottish grandmothers and spent the last two years of their presidency in a coma” sort of things.
Bollocks…. there’s no end to the stupidity of that “theory”…
If only because it builds on the Romantic notion of Greco-Roman “inheritance” of “dominance” by “Western Civilisation”.
Frankish propaganda, perpetuated by the Church and picked up by the Starry Eyed Bien Pensants of the 17th and 18th century.
You know…. Morons..
spectacular unpopularity,
But we were told Trump had that the day he was elected. With not only a majority of the States but also the popular vote.
“So, the people who will get rich, who will have the power, will be the people who *use* the new tech best. Not who sell it, or make it, but who *use* it. ”
Ah yes, because the Arabs are so poor due to all the oil and gas they pull out of the ground.
If one country (ie China) controls the production of energy via the manufacture and sale of the tech that produces the energy then they hold the whip hand not the users.
Yeah, but renewables are optional. Not necessary. They’ve made a big investment in stuff no-one has to buy, that isn’t a whip hand it’s a hostage to fortune. Just look at what’s happening to their electric car industry.
Renewables can never be more than supplemental. Intermittency and low energy density make them unsuitable for primary power generation.
Starkly obvious to all but government and Guardian writers.
Are Arabs rich? The vast majority of them are dirt poor goat fuckers.
The Arabs are “rich” in the same way medeaval Englishmen were “rich”. A few hundred nobs with all the wealth, and millions of peasants eating mud for breakfast.
Was about to make the point the Arabs aren’t generally that rich if you look at how developed their economies actually are (not just how many $ they flog oil and gas for, but how diversified their trade is, what else they produce, measures of productivity per capita outside the oil trade etc) but bis has made that point already.
More importantly, the Arabs had far more control over global energy by producing the oil we were all thirsty for than whatever country produces solar panels would have.
In the long run there’s nothing to stop manufacture simply moving elsewhere, there isn’t much secret sauce to all this – it’s just that China is a nice cheap place to manufacture stuff. With oil it’s harder for production to shift as not everywhere has it – though even with oil, some countries saw fit to develop their domestic oil production in response to Arab political pressure over oil. Just meant potentially more expensive oil or new techniques being required.
In the short run, cutting off supply of panels just stops rollout of solar, it doesn’t stop the panels already sold from producing energy. And countries that use solar are going to have alternative generation means too, to cope with extended periods without sunny days. So they’re much less in a vice than if relying on a potentially hostile country for their energy on a day to day basis, like the West used to do with Arab oil.
it doesn’t stop the panels already sold from producing energy.
For a while. Something everybody seems to ignore is that PV has a working life. From the day they’re put in they start degrading in output. I believe the early ones reduced to 50% over 10 years. I think current fleet is considerably better but they’re far from everlasting. Will China continue cheap to manufacture? At the moment that’s a deterrent to other countries manufacturing. There’s certainly no guarantee they’ll always be a cheap source of power.
Modern PV does degrade too but can produce something like 90% of nameplate power after 25 years (bit better for higher quality PV and bit under 90% for lower quality). Inverters may need replacing more than once in that timespan.
There’s no credible threat of a solar PV embargo like there was an oil embargo. And PV isn’t cheap due to Chinese goodwill. It’s pretty well understood tech, mass production makes it cheaper, and “learning by doing” means the price trends downwards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning-by-doing_(economics)
The price of the PV itself is now so low that it’s pretty irrelevant, and even if manufacture switches to USA or India and prices rise it won’t matter very much. The big costs are in deployment, connecting to the grid (which often means netork upgrades) etc.
Modern PV does degrade too but can produce something like 90% of nameplate power after 25 years
Isn’t that something you’re going to find out in 25 years? I bought some for the off grid house in the mountains. They were claimed to have a 20 year life expectancy. I gave up with them after 8. They were producing so little juice it wasn’t worth replacing the batteries.
My answer to solar farms is buy yourself a catapult. There’s some great chinese ones. Work on the same principal as a modern compound bow with pulleys & that. They’ll sling half an ounce over 300 meters
It’s not rocket science to assess life cycles and degradation curves. It’s not a field that’s specific to PV either. There are plenty of engineering labs that can do it. Fwiw, some long established PV designs really have shown 0.5% annual degradation in real world conditions over 20 years. Degradation rates have improved as manufacturers compete to provide better warranties. (And for obvious reasons, average performance is typically much better than warrantied.) Very new designs might only have a few years of data from actual installations, but degradation curves are understood well enough for sensible extrapolation and labs will subject them to “accelerated ageing”.
In practice slow death by degradation is not the only failure mode, as it seems you are aware! Catastrophic damage due to storms (not just wind, also think bad hail storms) will kill some panels prematurely. Operators of large installations will typically model degradation and failure modes in detail and pay for specialist insurance. That’s where most of the PV market is, and they will demand a lot of data from the manufacturer. Obviously things are are different and quality tends to be poorer in the consumer retail market.
“In the short run, cutting off supply of panels just stops rollout of solar, it doesn’t stop the panels already sold from producing energy. “
That point remains to be confirmed. Its entirely possible that every solar panel the Chinese have ever sold to the West could be remotely turned into the equivalent of a silicon brick if they so chose. We have no idea what back door controls they have installed in the tech they’ve sold us.
*IF* the chinese had actually done that, there’d already have been a hacker group who’d found and exposed it , if only for the LuLz…
And really.. those panels themselves don’t have all that much controlling electronics in them.
The *inverters* they feed into are another matter, but since those are already generally part of a “smart” setup, they’re expected to Phone Home, and under scrutiny for that to begin with.
No fluffy white cat to be stroked here…
Tbf there are reports of backdoors in some Chinese PV kit if you search about for it. I’d be more worried about them deliberately causing a surge to damage the grid than bricking the PVs themselves. But that’s not something you do in a trade dispute. It’s something you do when you don’t even care whether anyone ever buys from you again, cyber-MAD, and it wouldn’t just be PV tech that’s the risk given how much of the supply chain involves China. The flip side is the Ukrainians have found out the risks of relying on a few large thermal power plants, and have been moving to greater use of PVs because decentralisation is more resilient. Fortunately it’s not China who have a beef with them.
“starts to give way to an era of renewables, overwhelmingly manufactured in China” using coal power.
Talking of our friends across the pond, and for those with time to listen, Steve Hilton – now a septic, and standing for Governor of California – is well worth hearing here in conversation with Winston Marshall.
Rumors of our demise are grossly exaggerated.
Rumours of your demise have collectable antique value.
Someone should warn Murphy he has an imitator. Imipotater?
If you say so, I guess – but around here, it’s the folks trying to prevent fossil fuel development that are attacking infrastructure, threatening workers, and burning construction camps.