There's a lot to like in this Monday column by the Professor, including his takedown of fracking (just read; I'm not going to get into it here).
I want to focus on his point about Solyndra, the failed energy company that Movement Conservatives are failing to turn into Obama's Whitewater, though not for lack of trying.
Here's Krugman on what really happened to Solyndra (in his opinion, of course; my emphasis):
Solyndra’s failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn’t keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.Moore's Law is the technology principle that the cost of computing power (technically, transistors) is cut in half about every two years. (For most of us, it means we can buy double the computer at the same price, since software never needs less computer to function. GP's Law: However big your computer, your software will use all of it and then some.)
This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.
And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.
The point Krugman makes leads thinking types in several directions.
One is, where did that lowering of the cost come from? Answer: Economies of scale caused by increased manufacturing — in China (because, you know, the ignorant and easily led at home have a never-ending need to beat back hippie culture).
The other is a little harder to say briefly, so I'll probably expand on it in another post. The short form is that the mark of a dying empire is that it clings to the source of energy that once made it great (Holland and wind; Britain and coal; America and ... well, oil).
In contrast, the mark of an emerging empire is that it embraces the next great source of energy, since it usually has no great ties to the last one (that would be China and solar).
In the final stages, the dying empire becomes heavily nostalgic for those good old-energy days. At that point, you can start baking for the funeral after-party.
Krugman's take on this is less historical and more immediate: A "large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels" and that could sink us. (Unlike Obama and that pesky Koch-Bros Keystone pipeline decision ... ahem.)
There is a way out of this mess, but it involves activism. Maybe we could Occupy the Road to the Future, while we're at it. Happy motoring!
GP
