University Prof. Says China Has the Perfect System for Forcing the Energy Transition. Sadly, He Isn't Wrong.

It’s a pretty safe bet Brett Christophers and I don’t agree on much. Mr. Christophers is a professor at the Institute of Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University in Sweden (a professor of exactly what, his bio doesn’t say), so that’s a pretty good tip-off. Academics and I tend to get along like West Texas Intermediate and water (he’s the water in this analogy, if you hadn’t guessed), so the odds are really high here.

For whatever reason, this professor of [something] at the Institute of Housing and Urban Research decided to weigh in on the energy transition recently, and the transition boosters at Time digital sort-of magazine decided to accommodate him. They did this by carrying an op/ed he wrote headlined, “Capitalism Can’t Solve Climate Change.”

Guess what? At least on the thesis described in that headline, he and I actually agree to some extent. Who could’ve guessed that?

He even gets part of the story right: China is outpacing the rest of the world in development of intermittent energy (wind and solar), although he dramatically overstates it when he says it is a fact that “almost all the incremental progress is currently being made in one country: China.” This is abject nonsense, of course - incremental progress is being made in the US, parts of Europe and other isolated pockets of the world.