“Americans must learn to adjust to a lower standard of living,” he told the crowd before suggesting a specific solution to prices hiked by his tariffs, which he continues to insist are a success. “You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils…You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice.”
We’re in an age in which abundant natural sources of power are easier and easier to get electricity from and batteries keep getting better. Imagine telling someone in 1500 that you could store the power of a water wheel, and use it for your furnace or to replace your horse, and it’s at your demand.
Even with fossil fuel generation, batteries help solve one of the major pain in the ass problems: that input has to equal output. Grid scale batteries mean you can make a day’s power when it’s convenient for the generation side rather than having to have capacity and the labor to spin it up on standby.
The advances in battery technology and renewables in general really underscores what a pile of bullshit we are under in America. It’s time to shovel ourselves out of the shit!
We should have been the leaders in all of it. Hell on the academic research side we were a major player until this year. But we’ve spent the 21st century waffling between going all in on oil and trying to compromise our way into slowly weaning off it.
We seriously need the capacity to make long term investments in industries with capacity to cause long term global changes if we want to be a major power rather than just a collapsing empire. This wasn’t something nobody expected to happen. Carter put solar panels on the white house roof. Everyone knows fossil fuels are categorized as nonrenewable. This was as telegraphed as a bombing run after several days of dropping flyers warning of the need to evacuate.