Abundance

by Ezra Klein

Seventy years ago, the New York Times had anticipated that America’s solar energy revolution would lead to “limitless energy.” But rather than treat limitless clean energy as a project of national urgency, the US treated solar panels as a trifling inessential, with no long-term plan to make or deploy them at scale. And we lost decades of progress because of it. In Germany, between 1990 and 2015, the share of electricity production that came from renewable energy like solar rose from about 3.5 percent to 30 percent.42 But in the US over the same period, solar’s share of electricity stagnated. These were wasted decades, which we are paying for in the form of more modern pollution, more dependency on fossil fuels, less total energy, and more expensive electricity bills.