EDIT: energy consumption from renewables, not installed capacity
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&hideCo...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-solar?tab=char...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-electricity-per-capi...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-ge...
Do I misunderstand?
On solar - China installed 93 GW in May 2025 alone - this exceeds the US' combined solar additions over the three years from 2022 to 2024.
The US' total solar additions, even over 10 years (92.7 GW), would still be lower than China’s cumulative capacity additions in recent years. China installed 277 GW in 2024 alone.
The US simply does not lead the world in solar and wind per capita, trailing countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, and Australia in both generation (10th at 1,889 kWh) and capacity (~957–1,125 watts).
The whole point of the current American efforts about oil seems to be reinvigorating economic growth. Oil supply chains are a lot easier to manipulate into growth strategies than renewables.
Countries that have leapfrogged into energy independence are doing great but thats not hustle. They’re ensuring their isolation for years to come.
And to be clear that may not be a bad thing for them.
But I think even ascribing economic growth as the intent is generous. The economy was already growing vigorously. Most of the policies we're seeing now are performative posturing.
Seems the United States is now trapped in the same dilemma. It can’t let go of those fat oil profits to embrace the new —but rapidly improving— renewable tech, even if it’s clear that that’s where the market for energy is heading. I.E., the big company (or nation) must sabotage some of their current profit centers in order to remain long term competitive.
(Reposting a comment I made on nytimes article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/climate/china... )
Although, given that the majority of the country is uninhabited. I imagine, it is an ideal place for solar.
Amazing place, highly recommend to visit.
It is a technological marvel, similar in comparison to designing and building an F-35 fighter jet or anything else.
It requires custom Hardware Accelerators designed at a chip level, on top of decades of algorithmic refining of video encoder decoders in stuff like gstreamer or ffmpeg, refining video streaming at inconsistent cellular data networks, various ISPs doing shenanigans with ports, etc. Storing and ingesting that much video data at "Free" initial pricing, streaming that much data to viewers, building analytics algorithms to pair advertisements with watchers, to get a high enough conversion rate to make ads economically viable enough while having minimal number of ads per vids.
Even an infinite money printer like google would struggle were it not for systematically solving technology at all levels from hardware, to chip design, to algorithms, to network level tuning, to frontend device optimizations, etc.
And has been made possible by only the cumulative effort of humankind to build such advanced sophisticated systems in the palm of our devices such that even a normie average iphone 16e has more compute capacity than early 1990s or so, much more.
It is a miracle, in every shape and form.
It's also a massive attention sink that burns both copious amounts of energy and the world's attention span to earn some clicks and ad dollars.
It's a mixed bag.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&hideCo...
That's to say that no, countries and governments do not behave like companies.
He gives examples of the Dutch and wind power (sailing); Great Britain and coal; and America and petroleum. He also predicted China's ascendency as the next player willing to leverage new technologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...
The US's addiction to "fat oil profits" goes back over a hundred years, and that's what the NYTimes author argues is driving the current administration's push to keep those profits going. Whether there actually are such profits is a different question.
This is exactly the behavior of the big companies in "The Innovators Dilemma": continuing to try and squeeze profits out of the dying old paradigm. (IBM clinging to hardware and mainframes, US motorcycle manufacturers not embracing small sport bikes, etc.) That's to say that, yes, countries and governments can indeed behave like companies.
Those companies optimize for corporation profit. If the US was optimizing for societal wealth or government revenue they would be pushing the country into renewables.
On reality many big corporations get corrupt management that destroy corporate profit and optimize for the managers personal wealth. Those ones act like the US is acting. But that's not the behavior that book is about.
energy is a time accelerator. You can do more, produce more, using energy.
all of our "wealth" is due to our application of energy. Maintaining and increasing wealth both require energy.
Some people look at the relationship between wealth and energy. And there's more than one way to look at it. I found this interesting for a really big picture perspective.
That's why I question whether it's actually a "miracle". I don't mean to suggest that it's not quite the feat to make something like that exist, but I see it as more of a representation of where we're at technologically, rather than some sort of improbable, inexplicable thing that otherwise shouldn't be. The fact that the response to my post seems to clearly understand how it exists kinda-sorta supports that, IMO - you can draw a clear path towards understanding how it came to be.