Convincing Joe Public to understand yesterday switching to those is in their best interest is also necessary and very hard to do.
Mission Acomplished.
Interruptions of supply cause people to get antsy. They start looking for alternatives. A drought leads to a surge in well-points and bore holes. Rainwater collection goes up. Electricity outages lead to generators, solar and so on, all easily installed at domestic level.
Food shortages lead to more strategic agriculture choices. Oil shortages start to make EVs more attractive. This is the first major interruption in oil supply since the 70s. I start to think the next car I buy will be electric. I already have solar so it makes sense.
The biggest way to change society is to make the perception that supply is precarious or expensive. Long after the drought ends, the lessons remain.
The leading climate-denier voice , who rails against clean energy, has also caused a world-wide understanding of how precarious our oil supply is. That lesson will stick, regardless of your politics.
I'm weak on recollection as to when PV and wind started their big price plummet, but it was certainly in the 2010s.
It's still not too late for ... everyone.
In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.
PHEVs will maximize available battery supply to the most electrification of transport.
I also think home solar+storage should be heavily subsidized, because you don't need to do nearly as much grid adaptation and, keeping with national security, it makes communities much more disaster resilient if homes are somewhat power independent and they can charge a vehicle for trips.
(for the young'uns this is a reference to the also-senseless Iraq War, which had a follow on effect of distracting from this issue in favor of solipsistic entitlement and the adoption of SUVs. but looking back wistfully, at least the government and media didn't insult us by not even manufacturing a casus belli)
The bar has been set so low that talking about it is seen as success now.
Sometimes I think the only way we'll really make meaningful progress is if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so.
Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point. They can also help build economies of scale, and take advantage of the myriad economic benefits of renewables that other countries are leaving on the table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
Sugar cane doesn't require replanting every year either, like corn does.
Plants are actually not a good converter of solar energy to chemical energy though. They capture a few percent of it.
Solar cells are able to capture about 10 times that, a much smaller footprint.
I remember reading
https://www.amazon.com/Hubberts-Peak-Impending-Shortage-Revi...
in the early 2000s which was about the coming peak of conventional oil production and it turned out to be wrong in the sense that we knew in the 1970s that there were huge amounts of oil and gas in tight formations that we didn't know how to exploit. People were trying to figure out how to do that economically and had their breakthrough around the time that book came out so now you drive around some parts of Pennsylvania and boy do you see a lot of natural gas infrastructure.
I remember being in my hippie phase in the late 1990s and having a conversation with a roughneck on the Ithaca Commons who was telling me that the oil industry had a lot of technology that was going to lift the supply constraints that I was concerned about... he didn't tell me all the details but looking back now I'm pretty sure he knew about developments in hydrofracking and might even have been personally involved with them.
If you think about it, once you build a solar panel, it just produces power for the next 20-30 years. Then you buy another one and replace it. To get oil or natural gas, you need to drill a well. That well requires constant labor. What many don't seem to know is that oil wells decline in production over time. It's called the "decline rate". For the Permian Basin (source of the US shale revolution), the decline rate is 15-20% per year. So a well producing 1000bpd (barrels per day) will be producing ~500bpd in 3 years. That means you have to constantly be drilling new wells.
Oil wells (and resource extractors like mines in general) are great wealth concentrators. Solar panels are not. So the point of that quote is that a limited resource creates wealth and is limited but also war is profitable (for the weapons manufacturers) so every incentie lays in continued fossil fuel use because it's constantly minting new billionaires.
One thing I'll add here is that there are a lot of energy usages for fossil fuels for which we have no alternative. Aviation is a big one. To some extent, so is truck freight (although China is busy electrifying this too [2]). There are a lot of non-energy uses too eg plastics, industrial, chemicals, construction. So fossil fuels aren't going away anytime soon but we sure could take a leaf out of Chin's commitment to renewable energy [3][4][5].
Instead we get nonsense like warnings to Europe of a dangerous dependency on Chinese clean tech [6].
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
[2]: https://prospect.org/2026/04/29/aftermath-china-electrifying...
[3]: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/12/china-adding-more-re...
[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-m...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping_Thought_on_Ecologic...
[6]: https://renewablesnow.com/news/europe-getting-dangerously-re...
adrianN•43m ago
jbmchuck•19m ago