The Cleantech Revolution Will Not Be Led By Petrostates – CleanTechnica

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A reader made a comment a couple of days ago that really caught my eye. “The energy transition can not be stopped, but clearly it will not be led by petro-states .. funny in a way that we expected it to,” he wrote.

Indeed. Yes, indeed.

A lot of good cleantech progress did come out of the US — solar cell inventions, battery inventions, early solar power support, EV progress. However, if we are honest, the US is a petrostate, and the organs and influence of the fossil fuel industry have kicked into gear to block cleantech progress in the country, and even globally.

This sort of swings back and forth, but the influence of the extremely large and powerful fossil fuel industry seems to win more than it loses. I just wrote about some of the ways the fossil-fuel-funded Republican Party has taken a sledgehammer to cleantech industries this year so far. Even with Elon Musk donating a few hundred million dollars to the Trump campaign, Trump and team have turned around and thoroughly assaulted Tesla’s core mission.

Even when we seem to be making significant progress on EVs and clean, renewable energy, sooner or later, Republican politicians claw back control of the US and frequently reverse that progress.

So, even while 32% of new car sales in China’s giant auto market are fully electric, and Europe is not too far behind it, EV share of the US auto market is below 10%. China is not controlled by its oil & gas industry. The handles of power are not turned by oil & gas billionaires and executives. And without that warping of the public good and warping of the market, China has been free to accelerate forward and lead on electric vehicles. It’s a similar situation in most of Europe.

Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the US, though, how could we expect that they would be leaders in cleantech? There is too much money and power entrenched in oil — and, unfortunately, political leaders are not independent enough from that money and power. Quite the contrary.

So, we have to expect China and Europe will continue to lead. However, there’s much more to the world than the markets mentioned so far. There are nearly 200 countries around the world. The vast majority of them are not petrostates. Few of them are huge countries, but some are, and all the rest of them still add up to something enormous together. For the ones that are not also petrostates, why would they remain captive to and dependent on the big oil countries of the world? Why would they be as slow to financially unwind from oil & gas as petrostates? Why would they continue to let foreign countries and foreign companies act like leeches on their economies, sucking up money to send back home to their obscene bank accounts?

Unfortunately, petrostates still have so much power that they are delaying progress any chance that they get. The following was included in a press release published on CleanTechnica earlier today: “Negotiations at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) have ended in the postponement of the vote to adopt the landmark Net-Zero Framework (NZF) for a year. This comes after a week of pressure and delay tactics from the United States, Saudi Arabia and a number of other countries. The delay undermines years of work on the IMO’s plan to cut shipping’s greenhouse gas emissions, says T&E.” Ah, yes, petrostates petrostating. No matter what petrostates do, though, they can’t delay progress forever.