Are low prices a crude awakening for climate activists?

[True Blue Door]

21. Yup. Or coal, or gas.

It's obvious when you think about it - the Sun is a giant ball of free fusion energy hanging in the sky half the time. We already burn its energy in the form of fossilized organisms either fed directly by it or fed by things that are (or that fed on those), so why not cut out the Middlesaurus Tex and just go straight to the source?

The amount of economic activity that will flow from solar is unimaginable in human history. Neither oil nor coal has ever been cheap or ubiquitous enough to provide a meaningful analogy for what's going to happen.

And because - and this is an important fact that has to be stressed again - solar is a technology rather than a fuel, any bottlenecks anywhere in its feedstock supply chain can be sidestepped with innovation. There are so many different variously efficient configurations; and the elements that go into any given type of panel are so uniformly distributed around the world; that long-term monopolism is impossible.

There will never be a solar OPEC. If China overplays its current rare metals dominance, everyone else on Earth would simply dig into their own ground to get them, or innovate ways to use less of them, or both.