The National Security Case for Renewable Energy
If there may be one silver lining in Donald Trump’s war on Iran—for my money, the most purely deranged action by an American president in history, and that is saying something—it’s that it will likely speed up the renewable-energy transition. With oil prices spiking, nations around the world are being clubbed over the head, again, with the great vulnerability oil dependence imposes on them.
There is a workable alternative being deployed across the globe: solar and wind power. Progress has not been nearly fast enough to fully offset oil dependence—in fact, oil consumption is at record highs—but renewables can theoretically replace the vast majority of oil needs right now.
And in the process, nations can protect themselves from relying on a rickety energy supply system anchored in an exceptionally unstable part of the world, not least because the global hegemon has a nasty habit of starting wars of aggression for no reason.
The security argument for renewables is obvious. While oil comes from a handful of countries, many of which are mercurial dictatorships, and must be continually transported great distances by ship, pipeline, and truck, the sun shines and the wind blows everywhere, for free. Not all countries are equally well-suited to renewables, of course, but sun and wind do tend to compensate for each other, as the wind tends to blow harder the further north or south you go, as well as during the winter.
The crushing oil shocks of the 1970s proved beyond any question the security risk of oil. As President Carter said in a speech celebrating his installation of a solar water heater at the White House in 1979: “Solar energy will not pollute our air or water. We will not run short of it. No one can ever embargo the sun or interrupt its delivery to us.”
The crushing oil shocks of the 1970s proved beyond any question the security risk of oil.
The problem back in the ’70s was that solar panels were hideously expensive—a whopping $42 per watt (in 2024 dollars) when Carter gave his speech. That is why his plan was focused on funding research, development, business strategy, and so on to get prices down, with the goal of hitting a 20 percent renewable share of all energy use by the end of the century.
Alas, that effort was largely repealed by President Reagan, who also ripped the solar water heaters off the White House roof. One wonders where the solar market would be today if the American conservative movement were not so saturated with willfully stupid buffoons in the pocket of Big Oil.
Fast-forward to 2024 and solar panel prices have fallen by more than 99 percent, to just 26 cents per watt, and technological progress continues to charge ahead. Factory processes are still being streamlined and automated. New perovskite panel designs with large upgrades in efficiency are hitting the market.
Battery prices are if anything falling even faster than solar prices, down about 93 percent just since 2010. Wind prices have also come down, though not as fast.
The solar-battery combination has unlocked a true technological revolution. It does much to solve the intermittency problem: Despite the reality that the sun goes down at night, storing up power in the battery allows users to run off a solar grid at any time. In most of the world, solar plus batteries is likely the cheapest form of consistent, 24/7 power on the market, and prices are predicted to fall even more over time. What’s more, they carry the tremendous benefit of price security. Because the fuel is free, virtually the entire cost is up front. Once your panels, turbines, and/or batteries are installed, that’s it for roughly 15–25 years. That guarantee is very valuable.
All this has touched off a global rush to install wind, solar, and batteries, as well as replace gas-powered cars with electric vehicles. Progress has been fastest in Asia, above all China, which has consistently installed more renewable energy than the entire rest of the world put together, and more than half of new cars are now EVs. Europe and even Africa are coming along as well.
Alas, even in China the energy transition is not nearly far enough along to avoid a brutally painful economic hit from the Trump energy shock. Chinese oil demand is not projected to fall seriously until the 2030s, and some of its most promising markets for solar and battery exports are in the Middle East, ironically enough. As The Economist details, Asia writ large is seeing a full-blown energy panic as severe shortages and price spikes take hold.
But wherever renewables have been installed, they are turning out to be security gold. Experts tell E&E News that the Trump shock is certain to entrench China’s renewable focus, and it’s not hard to see why. When the dust clears, all nations with the slightest scrap of sense will be spending every available penny on energy security, meaning renewables. You’d have to be a complete clod, a world-historical imbecile, a man evincing such staggering stupidity that it calls his very sentience into question, to not get it.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump is that dumb. Last year, he signed a repeal of most of President Biden’s climate policy, which cut solar investment by 14 percent last year, and wind by perhaps 15 percent. New offshore wind investments, against which Trump has a bizarrely personal grievance, have been almost totally halted. Something like $35 billion in renewable projects were canceled in 2025, or more than ten times as much as the previous two years put together. Yanking EV production and purchase subsidies eight years before they were scheduled to expire crashed sales and dealt a heavy, potentially fatal blow to American automakers.
Trump thinks he understands the centrality of industrial production to national security: He’s bought stakes in critical minerals and semiconductor facilities, and used national security considerations to impose or threaten to impose tariffs on aluminum, steel, computer chips, pharmaceuticals, copper, lumber, and in his first term, washing machines. But there’s been no crusade by Trump to invoke national security to promote the production and installation of domestic renewable energy, the most critical vulnerability we now face.
In fact, it’s been just the opposite. Trump forgot to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve despite loudly promising to do so. Then he started a war on Iran without any clear idea why, and according to Sen. Chris Murphy’s (D-CT) account of a classified Senate briefing, without any plan for how to respond if Iran carried out the most obvious retaliation in the history of warfare, namely blocking the Strait of Hormuz, which carries one-fifth of global oil production.
It may end up being worse than the 1970s oil shocks, except instead of oil-producing states punishing the West for supporting Israel, America is punishing itself and the world for electing the biggest moron in the entire country. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make stupid.
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