Unfortunately badly overblow, the source is far too boostery (and riddled with combined Development and Techno-optimist distortion). Not to say that Sub-Saharan Africa [North Africa is a totally different situation] is not seeing a solar investment boom, but it's much more complex that the vision presented in Noah's source.
Witnessed similar development in Tonga and Fiji. Small scale solar with batteries, home by home. Financed by the government, with low cost monthly payments from the home, which also included repair/replacement in case of cyclones. No grid infrastructure required. Enough power for cell phones, maybe TV for a few hours a day. Granted, 3rd world - few refrigerators, no washing machines. But, the versatility and resilience was commendable.
Lack of massive solar and wind in US ought to be a national security issue. Centralized generation and distribution model is rife for disruption; read terror attacks or native greed. Remember Enron anyone? Decentralized solar and wind generation + battery storage with the grid as a network is a much more resilient, fault tolerant, and secure system. We have the technology. Why don't we deploy? Greed & Power.
Enron was a financial scam based on poorly designed power trading markets.
The economics of solar etc. that beat natural gas are the economics of at-scale industrial instlation for developed markets.
African cases where there is economics that work is due to horrible inefficiencies, not a repeal of economies of scale.
Small island cases are quite different but economies of scale remain critical for the transmission of power for time and storage arbitrage and there is nothing new about grid attack risk, however modern grid mangament make it difficult to take down a good grid - example of the Iberian case.
I can’t speak for every conservation organization but the peregrine fund brought the peregrine falcon back from the brink of extinction and is also bringing back the CA condor. Seems like a lot of conservation success is simply about starting funds and getting enough money to do breeding programs but maybe many are failing or lagging too idk
I fear the people who take the decisions are the wrong people. I read about a Congressional Committee hearing of the senior executives of the American motor car industry where someone asked how many of them had come to Washington in private jets? They all had come that way. We don’t have anything that rich in the UK but we seem stuck in a quagmire when it comes to decisions affecting anything other than private profit. A Lower Thames Crossing tunnel cost more in environmental reports than a Norwegian tunnel was built of a similar length.
Noah's comment re ICE (no one is setting policy) could be expanded to much of Trump admin. Combination of poor qualifications/experience coupled with propensity to grift leads to random policy (sometimes inadvertently good) mostly bad because it seldom incorporates any long term perspective and is not grounded by much expertise.
It is not only policy that should concern the American people. DOGE went through some departments with a pitchfork discharging people that were the agents of the future. He had no experience of security or foreign infiltration yet he discharged the people who would fill these posts in future. The next administration will discover these vacancies at a time when it will take years to train up people to fill them.
This is particularly true of Interior and Agriculture. I know those are departments that Noah isn’t as interested in, but it has genuinely been insane the degree to which they’ve been gutted.
To be fair, the UK is a lot smaller. Even from Detroit (where auto executives usually work) to DC is 500 miles. And that's only 1/6 of the distance across the US.
> A Lower Thames Crossing tunnel cost more in environmental reports than a Norwegian tunnel was built of a similar length.
That is an even worse problem that neo-liberal greed, since nobody (other than the environmental consultants) made any money off it; it's pure overhead wasted.
The UK's problem is that much of its state capacity was destroyed in the Thatcher era, allowing profiteering private consultants to use Singapore and Hong Kong as anecdotes to sell a hugely inefficient means of project delivery.
The desire of Cameron and Osborne to reduce the size of the State also reduced the capacity of the State to deal with modern problems of mental health. Over nine million people of working age are unemployed today because of anxiety. The State should look after people from cradle to grave and we failed to do so. Sure Start was literally cancelled by Cameron because it dealt mainly with the working class and, like the Child Trust Fund, was designed to help them when they needed help, and was abolished for that reason.
I ran some examples of a 1% to 2% national sales tax. It fully covers SS shortfalls along with Medicare in the early years. Over the years 2060 to 21000, it still covers SS and most of Medicare.
In the early years, there is an excess that could be directed at the deficit. This assumes no changes to benefits or beneficiaries. I hope that in the next 50 years, we might be able to make some changes to health care costs. If the birth rate declines and we do get more robotics, that would mean fewer people receiving benefits, with hopefully no severe drop in productivity.
If the Bush plan had gone through, we would have mucho mula. The S&P was 1254 in 2005. Friday, it closed at 6602. Today, we no longer have much of the surplus. infact the structural shortfall is estimated at 1.3% of GDP by ChatGPT.
I’m no economist, but I can add that, unlike the cretin in the Oval Office. Taxes are coming; a national sales tax is progressive. The rich spend more and buy more expensive items so they will pay more. Ex food, medicine, and shelter, this may be the least painful way to fix it.
The other option is to raise the taxes on SS and Medicare. I would also target the tax on those two programs and the debt. Populism is a virus, and our politicians' addiction to cutting taxes with little concern for the consequences will end. A fiscal or monetary crisis will force higher taxes.
“Taxes are coming; a national sales tax is progressive. The rich spend more and buy more expensive items so they will pay more. Ex food, medicine, and shelter, this may be the least painful way to fix it.”
Sales taxes are regressive. The Europeans have transfer mechanisms in their tax codes for lower income people hurt by the VAT. Lower income people consume at a much higher percentage of their income than wealthier people do, so they are disproportionately affected by sales taxes
We disagree. It is ok. Everybody pays taxes, living off borrowed money will destroy the economy. At some point there is no such thing as other peoples money.
You can argue that a regressive tax is better than massive deficit spending, and I would agree with you. But you can't argue that a sales tax is not regressive. That's just a fact.
So then it is pretty strange that blue progressive states rely on sales taxes for their revenue. We give tax credits for children and households that are poor. Exempting food, medical, and housing expenses takes much of what the poor spend off the table.
If you are telling me that more people will pay more taxes, yes, and you have both parties to blame. There is no way that the American people will be able to get out of paying more in taxes by only taxing the wealthy.
Total retail spending in the US was about $7 trillion in 2024 (including on food and services like restaurants) so a 2% tax on that would raise $140 billion or about 10% of what the government pays out in social security payments.
For reference the personal income tax brought in $2.4 trillion last year, so if you want to replace revenue that with a sales tax the rate would be need to be near 40%, not 2%, and would definitely hurt retail sales and consumers.
You could possibly use a federal sales tax to replace FICA tax revenue, but that is also $1.7 trillion last year so you need a rate 10x higher to just cover that.
If the US had used FICA tax revenue to buy 10% of the SP500 in 2005 it would have spent $1.6 trillion, but even then it spent over $500 billion in social security payments. The stocks went up by 5 times since then, but possibly would not be as high now since as more people are taking benefits, social security is now spending $1.3 trillion annually and under Bush’s plan would have to be now selling stocks to be able to make these payments meaning strong downward pressure on stock prices, social security they might not be where they are now.
This is what people forget about wealth taxes, when they are held in equities the collection of the tax reduces not only the prices of the payer, but also of everyone else holding the stock.
And yet has they held the stock 30 years and sold off some every month for ten years the market would t have boticed. Also you just be replacing old money for a nee forty year investment. If we don’t do something we’ll be rooting for boomers to get heart disease, diabetes, kidney et disease, obesity and cancer.
I remember Krugman’s critique of Bush’s SS privatization plan was that there was a shortfall in that particular design. But I think, especially with demographic challenges that mean fewer workers per retirees, it is insane to NOT have some sort of universal stock investment for old age. It could be a small percentage of SS goes to an age-cohort fund that - 40+ years later - is distributed on average gains? There must be a way we can take advantage of exponential stock price growth to lessen the tax burden.
There were two problems, one of which could have been easily mitigated. Fear of stock market losses, yes, if you had invested a portion of the funds taken in, which in 2005 were in surplus of the 40-year-olds and younger, you would have two and a half decades of growth. You could also have done what annuities do. A guaranteed return, you can invest in a variable annuity, which still has a guaranteed return.
Democrats opposed it reflexively because it was Bush. Democrats like guaranteed government-backed money. What is hysterical is that the guarantee is still backed up by taxes and a growing economy.
Let me propose a topic to explore: We've blockaded the Hillbilly Highway!
Recently Vance has started tweeting that the Appalachians are tired of being left behind. Perhaps this is factually true -- Due to the extreme housing costs in the "blue cities", people in economically declining areas can no longer move to economically booming areas. People have done studies with results like "If everybody could move to the location where their skills were paid best, the GDP would increase by N trillion dollars."
This contrasts with just after WW II when the cities were booming and there was mass migration from poor areas (especially Appalachia) to the cities. So many people migrated down a couple of US highways that they came to be known as "the Hillbilly Highway". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Highway
This has the interesting possibility of being a point of agreement between the Right and the abundance movement, one that would actually make the country better.
“ICE has simply been unleashed on the country and told to go arrest and deport a bunch of people, with no thought given to which people to focus on deporting.”
And no thought given to who ICE is hiring. What type of background checks? Recently, an ICE agent was arrested by local police for soliciting sex from a minor. When the smoke clears, as it did after January 6, we’ll likely find ICE agents with criminal backgrounds. Recently, an ICE agent shot a woman five times while she was sitting in her car. Contrary to ICE’s claims, a vehicle driven by an ICE agent was driven into the woman’s car. ICE is creating war zones, but citizens are shooting video with smart phones, documenting ICE crimes.
The ICE item is probably representative of much of Trump action "In other words, the answer to “Who is making immigration policy?” is “no one”. There are no smart people in Washington, D.C. deciding whether a South Korean battery factory worker is a better person to arrest than an MS-13 gangster. ICE has simply been unleashed on the country and told to go arrest and deport a bunch of people, with no thought given to which people to focus on deporting. There’s no one driving this bus."
Which probably inclines us to short-term destruction but weak systematic impacts given by end of Trump II I think one can expect BushII type unpopularity from sheer incompetence.
W's privatization of Social Security left the investing to individuals. Had he proposed that the govt invest SS contributions as it does TSP for federal employees, he would have had a winner.
“ . . . While we debated environmental incentives, China was building the foundations of a new industrial order…” According to Trump climate change is a giant hoax. This is about power, political and corporate power. Who could forget when campaigning, Trump asked oil industry executives to give him $1 billion in exchange for elimination regulations?
Re 7 I'm not sure the energy framing vs the environmental framing would have made that much difference. The oil lobby would have opposed it on any account. China, not being rich in oil, and in fact dependent on world markets for it, was obviously going to see solar as an attractive option. Though they have coal, it is an obvious domestic environmental issue (Beijing smog) in a way it is not in the US (at least not in Washington DC!).
It’s true that China has other reasons to go electric, I don’t think oil company lobbying is why Americans don’t buy electric vehicles. I also don’t think that framing electric vehicles as environmental was what made them successful, the early one like Nissan Leaf had poor performance and (like the Toyota Prius) were marketed as green, but sales didn’t take off until Tesla made EVs that had better performance and comfort than ICE cars and were marketed as such. In China EVs compete mostly on convenience and technology, not economics, though the government provides subsidies.
If punk solar is all that Africa uses for electricity, they’re doomed to persistent subsidence poverty because industrial scale electricity will take even longer to build. You can’t have industrial production or even electric cars or trains if the only available electricity is from residential solar.
And if the solar setups don’t have batteries, then the solar isn’t very useful since because besides cooking (which is now mostly from wood, charcoal or dung burning causing harmful indoor particulate pollution) and cell phone charging the most needed uses are for refrigeration and lighting. And I don’t think an affordable solar panel setup is sufficient to run air conditioning which is the other thing people’s homes need in tropical climates.
The dramatic increase in solar panel installations in Pakistan and poor African countries is largely a phenomenon of better off private individuals and businesses bypassing their local public utilities with private grids of solar, battery, and diesel generator backup. This is putting a disproportionate burden on grid-reliant consumers as utilities raise prices to cover fixed costs. The Gulf News recently had an article using the term “utility death spiral” for Pakistan as June 2025 y-o-y utility electricity sales decreased by 2.8%. Similar dynamic in South Africa and Nigeria.
I think there's less of a problem than first appears. Building an electric supply for industry means basically electrifying the cities, and that's a *lot* easier and cheaper than electrifying rural areas. E.g. in the US, the cities were being electrified by 1900 but it took until 1940 or so to electrify farms.
> And if the solar setups don’t have batteries
Hmmm, I followed the link and the booster said that the systems do include batteries. (Of course, the price of batteries has come down a lot over the last years as well.)
I don't see solarpunk users causing the whole country to be left in subsistence mode, but creating more economic flow than now, which some folk will use to develop manufacturing -- which will be on grid. If a death spiral really does happen to the central utilities, their government could then buy them and operate them with losses and promote more gridless power then replace the old power stations with solar PV fields like in the US west that cover a few hundred acres and make more power than the old central stations. If that doesn't work for them, then yes, manufacturers would need to build their own solar fields to power their factories.
There is no benefit to the government investing in a sovereign wealth fund. The government has as much money as it wants. The question is whether government money flowing into the economy is inflationary or not—whether the source is fiat or investments makes no difference. Note that spending the Social Security trust fund money into the economy, as we currently are, is inflationary. But, to that point, we could print $10T into the SS trust fund to make it permanently solvent without any more inflationary effect than it currently has.
I am afraid I ahve to be a wet-blanket about the Skander Garroum post
The factoids presented are very much boosterism and cherry picking, and ignoring many data points that say the overall boostery transformation picture he paints is to date, false (that is not to say solar is not taking off in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is, but that picture there is highly disorted).
Most investment information I see reflects that mini-grids under PayGo are not successful at scale, although there are plenty of limited spot successes.
Take M-Pesa which he boosterishly cites. The M-Pesa model has struggled to replicate outside of its home region and has not proven to be anything like fully replicatable over past two decades across sub-Saharan Africa broadly for a complex mix of reasons. It's borderline dishonest to present M-PESA as he does (rather implying that this model has proven broadly SSA successful)
With new lower asset prices for the execution of small-scale solar for SelfGen and mini / regional grids the general limited investment success for solar mini-grid investment probably is going to improve but I would be from my direct experience in financing Solar (commercial) be extremely wary of the boostery picture painted there - especially the picture of of tiny installation PayGo
On other hand, industrial & commercial self-gen to mitigate grid dependency SSA commerial ventures - agribusinesses, commercial shops even small mfg - where economics are strangled by grid instability and need to draw on expensive diesel backup generation, that is clearly promising and economically - investment economics - feasible.
Decentralised self-gen for industrial zones (e.g. for a heavy agri-contintent where post-harvest loss from spoilage pre-retail distribution is eye watering 40-60%, often for temperature reasons) also. And perhaps to a lesser extent building off of stronger overall economics for commerce and industry, householding.
I am very suspicious about the study supposedly showing that a mass extinction is slowing or overblown. For one thing, we are facing an insect apocalypse. If our pollinators vanish, we are doomed.
I’m suspicious about people claiming we are in an extinction period without scientific evidence. For insects, studies show land based insects are dying off at about 1-2% (not species, but individuals) a year but freshwater insects (dragonflies , mayflies and midges) are increasing by about 1% a year. If this was dues to climate change why would these be differentiated? Most land insects are declining because of habit loss, and that isn’t from rising sea level (which has been minimal) but because of roads, buildings, trains, an$ other infrastructure including Noah’s beloved solar farms. And maybe the extra dragonflies have been eating more of the moths and other pollinators.
Well at least the Africa part was positive
Unfortunately badly overblow, the source is far too boostery (and riddled with combined Development and Techno-optimist distortion). Not to say that Sub-Saharan Africa [North Africa is a totally different situation] is not seeing a solar investment boom, but it's much more complex that the vision presented in Noah's source.
Witnessed similar development in Tonga and Fiji. Small scale solar with batteries, home by home. Financed by the government, with low cost monthly payments from the home, which also included repair/replacement in case of cyclones. No grid infrastructure required. Enough power for cell phones, maybe TV for a few hours a day. Granted, 3rd world - few refrigerators, no washing machines. But, the versatility and resilience was commendable.
Lack of massive solar and wind in US ought to be a national security issue. Centralized generation and distribution model is rife for disruption; read terror attacks or native greed. Remember Enron anyone? Decentralized solar and wind generation + battery storage with the grid as a network is a much more resilient, fault tolerant, and secure system. We have the technology. Why don't we deploy? Greed & Power.
Enron was a financial scam based on poorly designed power trading markets.
The economics of solar etc. that beat natural gas are the economics of at-scale industrial instlation for developed markets.
African cases where there is economics that work is due to horrible inefficiencies, not a repeal of economies of scale.
Small island cases are quite different but economies of scale remain critical for the transmission of power for time and storage arbitrage and there is nothing new about grid attack risk, however modern grid mangament make it difficult to take down a good grid - example of the Iberian case.
and conservation!
That part I’m skeptical of. This is such an outlier study, I would love to see it replicated.
I can’t speak for every conservation organization but the peregrine fund brought the peregrine falcon back from the brink of extinction and is also bringing back the CA condor. Seems like a lot of conservation success is simply about starting funds and getting enough money to do breeding programs but maybe many are failing or lagging too idk
I’ve seen some amazing conservation successes, but on a scale of dozens of species, as opposed to tens of thousands.
Yeah my understanding is the 1700-1900 time frame saw massive extinction
I fear the people who take the decisions are the wrong people. I read about a Congressional Committee hearing of the senior executives of the American motor car industry where someone asked how many of them had come to Washington in private jets? They all had come that way. We don’t have anything that rich in the UK but we seem stuck in a quagmire when it comes to decisions affecting anything other than private profit. A Lower Thames Crossing tunnel cost more in environmental reports than a Norwegian tunnel was built of a similar length.
Noah's comment re ICE (no one is setting policy) could be expanded to much of Trump admin. Combination of poor qualifications/experience coupled with propensity to grift leads to random policy (sometimes inadvertently good) mostly bad because it seldom incorporates any long term perspective and is not grounded by much expertise.
It is not only policy that should concern the American people. DOGE went through some departments with a pitchfork discharging people that were the agents of the future. He had no experience of security or foreign infiltration yet he discharged the people who would fill these posts in future. The next administration will discover these vacancies at a time when it will take years to train up people to fill them.
Yes, arguably the worst thing Trump has done is to downsize competence/integrity out of government. Will take a very long time to repair.
This is particularly true of Interior and Agriculture. I know those are departments that Noah isn’t as interested in, but it has genuinely been insane the degree to which they’ve been gutted.
> We don’t have anything that rich in the UK
To be fair, the UK is a lot smaller. Even from Detroit (where auto executives usually work) to DC is 500 miles. And that's only 1/6 of the distance across the US.
> A Lower Thames Crossing tunnel cost more in environmental reports than a Norwegian tunnel was built of a similar length.
That is an even worse problem that neo-liberal greed, since nobody (other than the environmental consultants) made any money off it; it's pure overhead wasted.
The UK's problem is that much of its state capacity was destroyed in the Thatcher era, allowing profiteering private consultants to use Singapore and Hong Kong as anecdotes to sell a hugely inefficient means of project delivery.
The desire of Cameron and Osborne to reduce the size of the State also reduced the capacity of the State to deal with modern problems of mental health. Over nine million people of working age are unemployed today because of anxiety. The State should look after people from cradle to grave and we failed to do so. Sure Start was literally cancelled by Cameron because it dealt mainly with the working class and, like the Child Trust Fund, was designed to help them when they needed help, and was abolished for that reason.
How is having the US Government invest in the US economy effectively different than having a tax system that increases revenue as the economy grows?
Corporations actively try to reduce their tax burden, while they actively try to maximise their returns.
In one case you are working against the economy, in the other you are working in sync
Noah,
I ran some examples of a 1% to 2% national sales tax. It fully covers SS shortfalls along with Medicare in the early years. Over the years 2060 to 21000, it still covers SS and most of Medicare.
In the early years, there is an excess that could be directed at the deficit. This assumes no changes to benefits or beneficiaries. I hope that in the next 50 years, we might be able to make some changes to health care costs. If the birth rate declines and we do get more robotics, that would mean fewer people receiving benefits, with hopefully no severe drop in productivity.
If the Bush plan had gone through, we would have mucho mula. The S&P was 1254 in 2005. Friday, it closed at 6602. Today, we no longer have much of the surplus. infact the structural shortfall is estimated at 1.3% of GDP by ChatGPT.
I’m no economist, but I can add that, unlike the cretin in the Oval Office. Taxes are coming; a national sales tax is progressive. The rich spend more and buy more expensive items so they will pay more. Ex food, medicine, and shelter, this may be the least painful way to fix it.
The other option is to raise the taxes on SS and Medicare. I would also target the tax on those two programs and the debt. Populism is a virus, and our politicians' addiction to cutting taxes with little concern for the consequences will end. A fiscal or monetary crisis will force higher taxes.
“Taxes are coming; a national sales tax is progressive. The rich spend more and buy more expensive items so they will pay more. Ex food, medicine, and shelter, this may be the least painful way to fix it.”
Sales taxes are regressive. The Europeans have transfer mechanisms in their tax codes for lower income people hurt by the VAT. Lower income people consume at a much higher percentage of their income than wealthier people do, so they are disproportionately affected by sales taxes
We disagree. It is ok. Everybody pays taxes, living off borrowed money will destroy the economy. At some point there is no such thing as other peoples money.
You can argue that a regressive tax is better than massive deficit spending, and I would agree with you. But you can't argue that a sales tax is not regressive. That's just a fact.
But any economist agrees with Seneca that sales taxes are regressive.
But they can be made less regressive with a rebate structure, and excluding food and medicine.
exactly
So then it is pretty strange that blue progressive states rely on sales taxes for their revenue. We give tax credits for children and households that are poor. Exempting food, medical, and housing expenses takes much of what the poor spend off the table.
If you are telling me that more people will pay more taxes, yes, and you have both parties to blame. There is no way that the American people will be able to get out of paying more in taxes by only taxing the wealthy.
Total retail spending in the US was about $7 trillion in 2024 (including on food and services like restaurants) so a 2% tax on that would raise $140 billion or about 10% of what the government pays out in social security payments.
For reference the personal income tax brought in $2.4 trillion last year, so if you want to replace revenue that with a sales tax the rate would be need to be near 40%, not 2%, and would definitely hurt retail sales and consumers.
You could possibly use a federal sales tax to replace FICA tax revenue, but that is also $1.7 trillion last year so you need a rate 10x higher to just cover that.
Sounds like a case of 'not only but also'.
If the US had used FICA tax revenue to buy 10% of the SP500 in 2005 it would have spent $1.6 trillion, but even then it spent over $500 billion in social security payments. The stocks went up by 5 times since then, but possibly would not be as high now since as more people are taking benefits, social security is now spending $1.3 trillion annually and under Bush’s plan would have to be now selling stocks to be able to make these payments meaning strong downward pressure on stock prices, social security they might not be where they are now.
This is what people forget about wealth taxes, when they are held in equities the collection of the tax reduces not only the prices of the payer, but also of everyone else holding the stock.
And yet has they held the stock 30 years and sold off some every month for ten years the market would t have boticed. Also you just be replacing old money for a nee forty year investment. If we don’t do something we’ll be rooting for boomers to get heart disease, diabetes, kidney et disease, obesity and cancer.
I remember Krugman’s critique of Bush’s SS privatization plan was that there was a shortfall in that particular design. But I think, especially with demographic challenges that mean fewer workers per retirees, it is insane to NOT have some sort of universal stock investment for old age. It could be a small percentage of SS goes to an age-cohort fund that - 40+ years later - is distributed on average gains? There must be a way we can take advantage of exponential stock price growth to lessen the tax burden.
There were two problems, one of which could have been easily mitigated. Fear of stock market losses, yes, if you had invested a portion of the funds taken in, which in 2005 were in surplus of the 40-year-olds and younger, you would have two and a half decades of growth. You could also have done what annuities do. A guaranteed return, you can invest in a variable annuity, which still has a guaranteed return.
Democrats opposed it reflexively because it was Bush. Democrats like guaranteed government-backed money. What is hysterical is that the guarantee is still backed up by taxes and a growing economy.
"What is hysterical is that the guarantee is still backed up by taxes and a growing economy."
Exactly - just like your investment plan it's not the free money glitch you think it is. Both require taking from workers in the future.
Was Bush right about Social Security? A little context: Bush proposed this prior to the Financial Crisis. Wouldn’t that have been a nice start.
Let me propose a topic to explore: We've blockaded the Hillbilly Highway!
Recently Vance has started tweeting that the Appalachians are tired of being left behind. Perhaps this is factually true -- Due to the extreme housing costs in the "blue cities", people in economically declining areas can no longer move to economically booming areas. People have done studies with results like "If everybody could move to the location where their skills were paid best, the GDP would increase by N trillion dollars."
This contrasts with just after WW II when the cities were booming and there was mass migration from poor areas (especially Appalachia) to the cities. So many people migrated down a couple of US highways that they came to be known as "the Hillbilly Highway". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Highway
This also contrasts the situation David Brooks reported from Franklin County, Penn. in 2001. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/one-nation-slightly-divisible/376441/ In those days, housing in the cities was substantially cheaper and if someone in Red America really wanted to get the maximum pay, they could. Now they're cut out.
This has the interesting possibility of being a point of agreement between the Right and the abundance movement, one that would actually make the country better.
“ICE has simply been unleashed on the country and told to go arrest and deport a bunch of people, with no thought given to which people to focus on deporting.”
And no thought given to who ICE is hiring. What type of background checks? Recently, an ICE agent was arrested by local police for soliciting sex from a minor. When the smoke clears, as it did after January 6, we’ll likely find ICE agents with criminal backgrounds. Recently, an ICE agent shot a woman five times while she was sitting in her car. Contrary to ICE’s claims, a vehicle driven by an ICE agent was driven into the woman’s car. ICE is creating war zones, but citizens are shooting video with smart phones, documenting ICE crimes.
The ICE item is probably representative of much of Trump action "In other words, the answer to “Who is making immigration policy?” is “no one”. There are no smart people in Washington, D.C. deciding whether a South Korean battery factory worker is a better person to arrest than an MS-13 gangster. ICE has simply been unleashed on the country and told to go arrest and deport a bunch of people, with no thought given to which people to focus on deporting. There’s no one driving this bus."
Which probably inclines us to short-term destruction but weak systematic impacts given by end of Trump II I think one can expect BushII type unpopularity from sheer incompetence.
W's privatization of Social Security left the investing to individuals. Had he proposed that the govt invest SS contributions as it does TSP for federal employees, he would have had a winner.
It would have been a winner in the scenario we lived through.
“ . . . While we debated environmental incentives, China was building the foundations of a new industrial order…” According to Trump climate change is a giant hoax. This is about power, political and corporate power. Who could forget when campaigning, Trump asked oil industry executives to give him $1 billion in exchange for elimination regulations?
Re 7 I'm not sure the energy framing vs the environmental framing would have made that much difference. The oil lobby would have opposed it on any account. China, not being rich in oil, and in fact dependent on world markets for it, was obviously going to see solar as an attractive option. Though they have coal, it is an obvious domestic environmental issue (Beijing smog) in a way it is not in the US (at least not in Washington DC!).
It’s true that China has other reasons to go electric, I don’t think oil company lobbying is why Americans don’t buy electric vehicles. I also don’t think that framing electric vehicles as environmental was what made them successful, the early one like Nissan Leaf had poor performance and (like the Toyota Prius) were marketed as green, but sales didn’t take off until Tesla made EVs that had better performance and comfort than ICE cars and were marketed as such. In China EVs compete mostly on convenience and technology, not economics, though the government provides subsidies.
If punk solar is all that Africa uses for electricity, they’re doomed to persistent subsidence poverty because industrial scale electricity will take even longer to build. You can’t have industrial production or even electric cars or trains if the only available electricity is from residential solar.
And if the solar setups don’t have batteries, then the solar isn’t very useful since because besides cooking (which is now mostly from wood, charcoal or dung burning causing harmful indoor particulate pollution) and cell phone charging the most needed uses are for refrigeration and lighting. And I don’t think an affordable solar panel setup is sufficient to run air conditioning which is the other thing people’s homes need in tropical climates.
The dramatic increase in solar panel installations in Pakistan and poor African countries is largely a phenomenon of better off private individuals and businesses bypassing their local public utilities with private grids of solar, battery, and diesel generator backup. This is putting a disproportionate burden on grid-reliant consumers as utilities raise prices to cover fixed costs. The Gulf News recently had an article using the term “utility death spiral” for Pakistan as June 2025 y-o-y utility electricity sales decreased by 2.8%. Similar dynamic in South Africa and Nigeria.
I think there's less of a problem than first appears. Building an electric supply for industry means basically electrifying the cities, and that's a *lot* easier and cheaper than electrifying rural areas. E.g. in the US, the cities were being electrified by 1900 but it took until 1940 or so to electrify farms.
> And if the solar setups don’t have batteries
Hmmm, I followed the link and the booster said that the systems do include batteries. (Of course, the price of batteries has come down a lot over the last years as well.)
I don't see solarpunk users causing the whole country to be left in subsistence mode, but creating more economic flow than now, which some folk will use to develop manufacturing -- which will be on grid. If a death spiral really does happen to the central utilities, their government could then buy them and operate them with losses and promote more gridless power then replace the old power stations with solar PV fields like in the US west that cover a few hundred acres and make more power than the old central stations. If that doesn't work for them, then yes, manufacturers would need to build their own solar fields to power their factories.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/26/1113802/china-ai-data-centers-unused
There is no benefit to the government investing in a sovereign wealth fund. The government has as much money as it wants. The question is whether government money flowing into the economy is inflationary or not—whether the source is fiat or investments makes no difference. Note that spending the Social Security trust fund money into the economy, as we currently are, is inflationary. But, to that point, we could print $10T into the SS trust fund to make it permanently solvent without any more inflationary effect than it currently has.
I am afraid I ahve to be a wet-blanket about the Skander Garroum post
The factoids presented are very much boosterism and cherry picking, and ignoring many data points that say the overall boostery transformation picture he paints is to date, false (that is not to say solar is not taking off in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is, but that picture there is highly disorted).
Most investment information I see reflects that mini-grids under PayGo are not successful at scale, although there are plenty of limited spot successes.
Take M-Pesa which he boosterishly cites. The M-Pesa model has struggled to replicate outside of its home region and has not proven to be anything like fully replicatable over past two decades across sub-Saharan Africa broadly for a complex mix of reasons. It's borderline dishonest to present M-PESA as he does (rather implying that this model has proven broadly SSA successful)
With new lower asset prices for the execution of small-scale solar for SelfGen and mini / regional grids the general limited investment success for solar mini-grid investment probably is going to improve but I would be from my direct experience in financing Solar (commercial) be extremely wary of the boostery picture painted there - especially the picture of of tiny installation PayGo
On other hand, industrial & commercial self-gen to mitigate grid dependency SSA commerial ventures - agribusinesses, commercial shops even small mfg - where economics are strangled by grid instability and need to draw on expensive diesel backup generation, that is clearly promising and economically - investment economics - feasible.
Decentralised self-gen for industrial zones (e.g. for a heavy agri-contintent where post-harvest loss from spoilage pre-retail distribution is eye watering 40-60%, often for temperature reasons) also. And perhaps to a lesser extent building off of stronger overall economics for commerce and industry, householding.
I am very suspicious about the study supposedly showing that a mass extinction is slowing or overblown. For one thing, we are facing an insect apocalypse. If our pollinators vanish, we are doomed.
https://www.livescience.com/animals/insects/a-looming-insect-apocalypse-could-endanger-global-food-supplies-can-we-stop-it-before-its-too-late
I’m suspicious about people claiming we are in an extinction period without scientific evidence. For insects, studies show land based insects are dying off at about 1-2% (not species, but individuals) a year but freshwater insects (dragonflies , mayflies and midges) are increasing by about 1% a year. If this was dues to climate change why would these be differentiated? Most land insects are declining because of habit loss, and that isn’t from rising sea level (which has been minimal) but because of roads, buildings, trains, an$ other infrastructure including Noah’s beloved solar farms. And maybe the extra dragonflies have been eating more of the moths and other pollinators.