Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure by Cory Doctorow

[justaprogressive]

No one is better at keeping hope alive than Rebecca Solnit, the historian and essayist whose Hope in the Dark got me through the first Trump administration and whose A Paradise Built In Hell inspired my novel Walkaway:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-built-in-hell-by-rebecca-solnit/

In her latest, "Truth, Consequences, Climate, and Demand Destruction," Solnit is nothing short of inspirational – not because she downplays the horror and misery of Trump and his war of choice in Iran, but because she tells us what we stand to salvage from the wreckage:

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/truth-consequences-climate-and-demand-destruction/

Solnit starts by explaining some of the (many, many) things that Trump doesn't understand. Principally, Trump doesn't understand the concept of "demand destruction," which is what happens when shortages prompt people to make durable, one-way changes in their behavior that permanently reduce the demand for fossil fuels.

High prices sometimes create demand destruction: for example, if a transient shortage in eggs pushes prices up, people might discover that they prefer tofu scrambles in the morning, so even when the price of eggs comes back down, they buy two dozen fewer eggs every month, forever.

Beyond high prices, shortages and rationing are far more likely to lead to demand destruction. In the 10 years following the 1970s oil crisis, US cars doubled in fuel efficiency, and the gas-guzzler didn't return until car manufacturers exploited the American "light truck" loophole to fill the streets with deadly SUVs:

https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-chicken-tax-and-other-ways-the-u-s-government-subsidizes-your-ford-f-150-444a5164c627

But to really max out on demand destruction, you need both rationing and a cheap, easily installed substitute, and that's what the Strait of Epstein crisis, along with solar and batteries, offers the world today. Solar is incredibly cheap, and getting cheaper every day. Batteries are also incredibly cheap, and they're getting cheaper too. For decades, fossil fuel apologists have insisted that we'll never stop setting old dead shit on fire because "the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow," but thanks to battery deployment in China and California (and more places very soon), the sun shines all night long:

https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electricity-Review-2026.pdf?ref=meditationsinanemergency.com

In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs:

https://thepolycrisis.org/01-demand-destruction-us-oil-is-not-winning-the-iran-war/

As Solnit writes, Trump's stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable and cruel blunder: Putin's quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung is leading the charge to transition the country to renewables, framing fossil fuels as an existential geopolitical risk.

Trump's demand destruction accelerates Putin's demand destruction: China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. In 2025, coal accounted for less than a third of the world's energy for the first time in modern history. 2025 was the year that solar and wind overtook coal globally.

Meanwhile, Trump and his oil baron buddies keep trying to make fetch happen. On the campaign trail, Trump told the oil industry that if they slipped him a $1b bribe, he would give them anything they wanted, and he's kept his promise. Trump will let Big Oil drill anywhere they like, from sacred sites like New Mexico's Chaco Canyon to the Arctic. He'll even let them take all of Venezuela's oil. The problem is that banks can see the demand destruction writing on the wall, and they are conspicuously declining to loan the oil companies the money they'd need to get that oil.

Truly, Trump's a machine for creating stranded assets at scale. As Solnit writes, that's because Trump has no strategic foresight; strategy being "the ability to plan for things to arise that may counter your agenda, so you can continue to pursue your agenda." Trump's a bully, and he's accustomed to intimidating his adversaries into capitulating. That's why Trump keeps making moves without ever thinking about the countermove he might provoke. He can't metabolize the strategic maxim that "the enemy gets a vote."

This is the GOP's whole vibe these days: "how dare you do unto me as I have done unto you?" Solnit points to GOP outrage in response to Democratic gerrymandering in blue states, which Democrats undertook in direct, explicit response to shameless gerrymandering in Texas and other red states. Solnit says that the GOP has "confused having a lot of power with having all the power" and is perennially surprised when their attacks on Iran and Minneapolis evince a reaction from the people in Iran and Minneapolis.

This is the defective reasoning that caused Comrade Trump to hormuz the world into the full Gretacene. Whereas once the case for the energy transition was driven by activists who warned people about the future consequences of inaction, Trump has summoned up a new army of people who are worried about the present consequences of inaction: such as not being able to drive your car, use your gas stove, or fertilize your crops. Trump has summoned up another army of people, who are worried about the politics of oil, the fact that oil leads to wars and can be mobilized as a weapon when it is withheld from your country.

Activists couldn't deliver the energy transition on their own – but now there's a coalition that's driving rapid, irreversible change: activists concerned about the future of the planet, in coalition with economic actors concerned about the consequences of not being able to cook, heat your home, or keep the lights on; in coalition with national security hawks worried about the geopolitics of oil. That's Comrade Trump's three-part mobilization: human rights, finance, and national security, all insisting that the enemy gets a vote, and voting unanimously for a post-American world.

Last week marked the first Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels conference, attended by representatives from 54 countries who sidestepped the US- and China-dominated UN to ratify the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty Initiative, whose 18 signatories include Colombia, a major oil producer.

The world is moving on, and Trump continues to insist that he can roll back history to some imaginary era of a Great America. Every time this fails, he doubles down on his failures and sets the stage for more failure to come. Take Trump's decision to have the US blockade the Strait of Hormuz. Not only is this a powerful force for demand destruction – but, as Trita Parsi writes, it's also poison for Trump's own electoral fortunes in America:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-iran-blockade/

Trump won in 2024 by campaigning to improve Americans' cost of living. This is a powerful campaign strategy, and it's not limited to fascists, as Zohran Mamdani can attest. But for this to work, you actually have to reduce the cost of living once you take office, otherwise you will be hated and rejected and hampered in everything you do. The problem (for Trump – but not for Mamdani!) is that America's high cost of living is driven by corporate profiteering, and the only way to fix it is to make the rich poorer so as to make the poor richer:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/24/mamdani-thought/#public-excellence

If Trump had chosen to bullshit his way through the Iranian blockade of the strait, allowing the Iranians to collect a $2m toll per tanker (payable in Chinese renminbi!), well, oil would have gone up in price some, but the coming runaway inflation on food and fuel would have been substantially blunted. Instead, he decided to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" by adding a US blockade, which means that prices in the US are going to skyrocket, making his base furious and driving turnout for Democrats, along with support for more renewables, even among blood-red Republican rural Texas ranchers, who have had enough of "DEI for fossil fuels":

https://austinfreepress.org/renewables-are-now-the-costco-of-energy-production-bill-mckibben-says/

The renewables transition is now a self-licking ice-cream cone, a flywheel that only spins faster and faster. As Solnit writes, this is true notwithstanding the concerns by some climate advocates about the materials needed for the transition. Sure, there will be some extraction involved in mass electrification, and if that's done badly, it will involve stealing and destroying more land from poor and indigenous people. But we don't have to do it badly!

Meanwhile, not transitioning to renewables absolutely requires an endless cycle of incredibly destructive and genocidal extraction. Remember, fossil fuels are fuels, while renewables are infrastructure. Fuels need to be dug up and destroyed every year for so long as we insist on setting old dead shit on fire to survive. We dig up a lot of fossil fuels. The world consumes seventeen times more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet forever:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

The infrastructure of renewables – panels, batteries, transmission lines – requires materials that are often scarce and whose processing involves extremely harmful and polluting processes. But those materials are all recyclable: we don't recycle them today because we haven't prioritized doing so, not because it it technologically beyond our reach. In 2024, America saw its first all-solar powered solar panel recycling factory, which reclaimed 99% of the materials in a panel that was 20% efficient, and then used those materials to make two panels that were each 40% efficient:

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly

Trump shut that plant down, which means that other countries will get to recycle America's superannuated panels into modern, efficient ones and sell them back to America. America may have blocked any climate reparations for the poor world, but thanks to Comrade Trump, America's still going to end up paying them, in the form of windfall profits for countries whose cleantech economy is racing ahead of America's.

Unlike a fossil fuel economy, a cleantech sector does not require that your country have access to some difficult to find, unevenly distributed reservoir of old dead shit or even rare minerals. Not only is lithium far more common than once believed, it's also being phased out for use in batteries and replaced by sodium, the world's sixth-most abundant element:

https://cen.acs.org/energy/energy-storage-/Sodium-ion-batteries-Should-believe/103/web/2025/11

Lithium is set to join cobalt, a notorious conflict mineral, in the cleantech revolution's rear-view mirror as a transitional material used in early, primitive batteries and no longer required.

A post-carbon future is a post-petrostate future is a post-American future. It will run on solar and wind and batteries, which can be brought online cheaply and quickly, every time demand-destruction surges, using materials that are widely distributed around the world. It won't be a nuclear future, and not just because nuclear materials are (like oil) concentrated according to accidents of geography, nor merely because fissiles are geopolitically catastrophic (like oil). Nuclear plants take at least a decade to bring online, which means that they will always arrive ten years after some future Comrade Trump-type kicks off another orgy of demand destruction, and by the time we turn them on, the world will have already bought, improved and recycled two generations of batteries and panels.

(Image: Stefan Müller (climate stuff), CC BY 2.0)

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/#hormuzed-into-the-gretacene

*I'm only going to say this ONCE.

*As with his bestselling books Cory gives his articles away, favoring dissemination over profits!

[Fiendish Thingy]

1. I love me some optimism supported by facts, reason and evidence.

I just hope the trend of demand-destruction finally persuades Mark Carney to jump on the renewables bandwagon, instead of whistling past the fossil fuel graveyard. At least he reinstated the EV incentives, a year after I bought my plug-in hybrid…

BTW- Doctorow gives his best selling books away? Where?

[justaprogressive]

2. Heh! Several places...

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/3826
https://archive.org/search?query=cory+doctorow+books&and%5B%5D=subject%3A%22science+fiction%22]
https://en.onread.com/writer/Doctorow-Cory-7028]

...but the motherlode is Here: https://craphound.com/] including every book he's written!

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
https://craphound.com/homeland/download/


He's a true star in Economics and optimistic tech writing. esp. regarding copyright.

Of note his time with the EFF:

Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for four years,[1] helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before leaving the EFF to pursue writing full-time in January 2006; Doctorow remained a Fellow of the EFF for some time after his departure from the EFF Staff.[1][16] He was named the 2006–2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, sponsored jointly by the Royal Fulbright Commission,[17] the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the University of Southern California (USC) Center on Public Diplomacy. The professorship included a one-year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, United States.[1][18] He then returned to London, but remained a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow]

The other half of the coin are his numerous Science Fiction novels which are great fun
for thinking people.

Thus far I have read:

The Bezzle
The Lost Cause
Red Team Blues

I'd recommend "Little Brother"

A series:
Little Brother. Tom Doherty Associates. 2008. ISBN 978-0-7653-1985-2.
Homeland. Tor. 2013. ISBN 978-0-7653-3369-8.
Attack Surface. Head of Zeus. 2020. ISBN 978-1-8389-3996-0.

[hunter]

3. I'm generally in tune with Cory Doctorow's observations but he's dead wrong here.

This kind of "demand destruction" is going to kill people.

Anybody who claims solar power is going to magically displace fossil fuels is full of shit.

Solar power is EXPENSIVE and dependent on fossil fuels for it's economic viability.

I challenge anyone promoting solar power to move to a sunny place and build a totally off-grid home powered entirely by solar. Throw in an electric car too. Tell me how much it costs. Tell me how reliable it is. ( A backup generator powered by fossil fuels is cheating. Propane heating and cooking is cheating. )

These problems with solar are the same at any scale.

California has already reached the point of diminishing returns with solar power. Adding more solar power and batteries to our power grid will only increase the price of our electricity without a proportionate decrease in it's carbon intensity.

Nuclear powered France has affordable electricity with a very low carbon intensity. Electricity in California's gas-wind-solar-battery powered utopia is six to seven times dirtier than electricity in France, and significantly more expensive.

But here's the most basic problem:

The human species has trapped itself in a corner. Our population would not have grown to more than eight billion people if we hadn't had access to high density energy resources -- historically these are coal, oil, and gas. Possibly the most important application of these high density energy resources is the synthesis of nitrogen fertilizers. Half the fixed nitrogen circulating in earth's biosphere is synthetic, even the nitrogen in your organic garden. This synthetic nitrogen gets turned into food which is turned into people. This synthetic nitrogen is you.

And that's not all of it.

Renewable energy cannot support the existing population. Full stop.

Unfortunately, if we don't quit fossil fuels billions of us are going to suffer and die by global heating.

Like it or not, nuclear power is the only alternative high density energy resource we've got, the only one capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely.

The energy "transition" is a deadly lie, just another bullshit way of denying what's euphemistically called "climate change."

If we don't quit fossil fuels we are toast. All these solar and wind "farms" are not going to save us, they will only prolong our dependence on the fossil fuels that will ultimately destroy our civilization and whatever is left of the earth's natural environment as we have known it.

[AZJonnie]

4. So you're telling me you don't believe this?

"The world consumes seventeen times more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet forever:"?

So, not only build all the solar panels and windmills and install them and upgrade the world's electrical grids and create all the batteries and build out the charging infrastructure, but ALSO "electrify" the world's diesel trucks and harvesters (and all the world's other heavy equipment) and jet airplanes and container ships, etc? For the energy-cost equivalent of THREE WEEKS worth of fossil fuels?

Yeah, I don't think so.

Even if we massively built out nuclear, I personally don't think the carbon pollution problem is solvable w/o the worlds population dying back to probably the 3-4B person range and those remaining living with a significantly reduced standard of living, on average. And even then I think the Earth's 6th mass-extinction event is baked into the cake due to the pollution already generated.

[hunter]

5. I don't think nuclear power will save the wold.

But it might make the inevitable crash more survivable.

So called "renewable energy" won't.

These articles are always written from the wrong perspective anyways. It's not about the affluent neighbor who can call someone up to have a $50,000 solar system installed on their property and then go out and buy a new Tesla.

The median household income worldwide is about $3,000 annually. A reliable twenty amp electric circuit, a few lights, a phone charger, an electric rice cooker or inductive hotplate... those things are civilization. Indoor plumbing and modern sewage treatment systems are civilization too. If we are able to maintain our world civilization we'll be better able to avoid the rapidly approaching climate catastrophe. It has to be all hands on deck. If civilization collapses, then yes, there will be a rapid and very horrible die-off of the human population.

The quickest, most effective, and least expensive way to accomplish this kind of civilization is by building big power plants. China knows this and is building coal fired power plants, nuclear power plants, and huge hydroelectric projects, possibly just as fast as they can. For all the talk of Chinese non-hydro "renewable energy" it's still a small fraction of the overall power supply. China is also doing it's best to reduce its dependence on imported oil and gas, for obvious reasons. Mostly they are doing that with coal. China imports coal, but that is easily stockpiled as a buffer against political instabilities beyond it's border. So is nuclear fuel.

In the last ten years coal has gone from supplying about 80 exajoules of China's primary energy to 90 exajoules. In comparison solar and wind energy are only a small fraction of that, about 5 exajoules, as I recall. (It's difficult to find the actual number in all the hype.) For a few brief moments every year solar and wind power exceed the output of China's thermal plants and everyone cheers but that's pretty meaningless. To maintain a stable economy electricity production must be continuous. Even with batteries this places a limit on what solar and wind are capable of. At a certain point adding additional wind and solar becomes a problem of diminishing returns and rapidly increasing prices for electricity.

To me the worst thing about wind and solar is the land use. Rooftop solar, parking lot solar, those don't bother me any more than all the other crap of our consumerist society. Bulldozing many square miles of previously undeveloped land for a few megawatts of intermittent energy bothers me a lot. Ripping apart the land for the massive volume of materials required to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, inverters, and batteries bothers me a lot. We're not going to save the world by trashing it.