Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: June 10, 2025
The worldwide electrotech revolution!
RMI has a great new article on the accelerating worldwide electrotech revolution!
Tell the Senate to keep America competitive in an electrifying world!
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Reasons For Hope
A team of energy analysts from the renowned Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) recently published an excellent new article reframing the discussion of the ongoing worldwide shift to clean energy.
“New energy tech is growing consistently, and with increasing impact. Today, the world invests twice as much in new energy technologies as it does in fossil fuels. In 2024 alone, the increase in solar generation matched the entire electricity demand of Germany. In China, nearly half of all new car sales are electric. Electrotech is accelerating so quickly that China may have already hit peak fossil fuel demand this year—and with China, so too will the world.”
—”Rewiring the energy debate,” by RMI analysts
Economics and geopolitics are driving this accelerating adoption of “electrotech” solar, wind, batteries, and EVs, because these technologies have several inherent advantages that are making them a better and better upgrade over fossil fuels.
Using electricity for power, transport, heating, and industry is fundamentally more efficient than burning fossil fuels, which loses much of its available energy as waste heat. Burning fossil fuels to produce electricity has only 30-40% efficiency compared to wind and solar’s 100%, while an internal combustion engine has 25-40% efficiency compared to an EV’s 80-90%!
Another fundamental point is that solar, wind, and batteries get cheaper and cheaper the more they get built and used (due to learning better manufacturing techniques), which is why they’ve seen exponential price declines while fossil fuels haven’t.
As the superior technologies of clean electricity rapidly become cheaper than the outdated incumbent of fossil fuels, human civilization’s upgrade to electrotech is inevitable. This reshapes the world, with widespread implications for national security and economic competitiveness.
“The electrotech view is a strategic one. It sees the energy transition as driven by more efficient technologies, with economics that improves through manufacturing scale and modular design, and a natural tendency to empower their users. This is far from a radical idea—it’s how most successful technologies have advanced and scaled, in energy and elsewhere…
The electrotech revolution isn’t all sunshine and opportunity—there are serious risks to falling behind. While future energy systems may no longer depend on fuel, they will depend on software, control systems, and digital infrastructure. If countries don’t develop those themselves, they’ll end up reliant on others—and vulnerable to them. Civilian electrotech also has clear military spillovers, as seen with the rapid rise of drones and autonomous systems. And if AI turns out to be as energy intensive as many expect, the nations that can scale renewable power and battery backup the fastest will hold a decisive strategic advantage.”
—”Rewiring the energy debate,” by RMI analysts
China isn’t centering their economy on electrotech manufacturing and export because they’re devoted to fighting climate change. They’re doing it because solar panels, batteries, and EVs are efficient, scalable technologies that keep getting better and cheaper as you produce more of them, and producing and deploying a lot of them provides substantial geopolitical and military advantages from energy independence to drone manufacturing capacity.
In America, the House Republican budget proposal that would repeal clean energy tax credits amounts to a self-sabotaging screwup of world-historical proportions. A recent report from the Energy Innovation think tank has calculated that this proposed reconciliation bill’s attacks on clean energy would decrease U.S. GDP by $1.1 trillion through 2034! The economy, prosperity, and security of the United States will suffer severely if we hobble our own fast-growing clean energy industries due to partisan polarization and ideological pique at a time of transformative global electrification.
The Senate must act to safeguard America’s future and prevent the repeal of clean energy tax credits!
