The media isn't interested in the biggest technology story of the 2020s, the rapid transition to clean energy, because
1) it will destroy a bunch of oil based wealth and is a boring, competirive low margin business
2) it makes Democrats look good for helping it and they want Republicans to win
The powers that be are desperate that American voters not find out about this because so many of them profit from the Saudi's bonesaw regime and it's alliance with Trump bsky.app/profile/crai...
There is a one-two punch the administration is pulling off here. Not only accelerating the transition to clean energy but breaking oil’s ability to manipulate the market to defend its position. bsky.app/profile/chri...
I suspect what will happen is that Saudi Arabia realizes they are in a "use it or lose it" situation with their oil reserves and turns on the taps at full volume and puts all the other oil producers in expensive-to-extract regions out of business rapidly. But who knows bsky.app/profile/meze...
I worry that we haven't really seen exactly what the death throes of the oil wealth look like yet. They're not going to be able to stop the energy replacement, its moving too fast and its too far along, but there's so much money in oil still that I wonder how they'll try to take the economy hostage
So far the thing Saudi Arabia is going to try to transition away from reliance on oil profits is like "give Karim Benzema $200M to play soccer in empty stadiums" so I don't really have a lot of faith in their rationality going forward
you can actually see evidence of them starting on google maps. it's... pretty much just a big trench in the sand right now, but it does appear that they're really going all in on it. i guess they just really wanted to one-up the UAE's world islands in the pointless megaproject money-sink department
They've already severely downgraded completion timelines. They are bleeding money, and they miscalculated about billionaires investing in a murderous surveillance state project.
Hmm I'm not an expert but I believe SA has 1) a lot of sun and 2) a lot of sand. Sand is mostly silicon oxide. Solar panels are 75% glass and 5% silicon. Glass and silicon both come from sand. What I'm saying is: they should build a big city in a straight line.
Aside from the oil under their feet, the thousands of princes of the KSA do not actually know how to do anything! You can just look at how horribly the haij is managed
Their political constraints seem pretty harsh - they've got a huge constituency of very good boys who only know how to receive largess. How do you turn a ship that big when the money is still flowing?
yup they've tried shifting the economy a couple times in the prior decades and they've never been able to pull significant reforms b/c of entrenched interests
we have absolutely no problem thinking of texas oil money as basically lottery winnings because someone's grandpa happened to farm the right stretch of dirt, but somehow we think the saudi royal family aren't basically the same?
I hadn’t thought of it that way but maybe that’s actually strong evidence that oil producers think the market will be gone sooner rather than later - they’re pursuing short term high life over investment?
