Windmill, Columbia River Gorge. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
As the petroleum-run global economy continues to implode from war, pollution, and oligarchic meddling, a localized new-energy infrastructure is being built with clean, cheap, and safe renewable energy – 85% of all installations last year – led by China’s world-leading manufacturing of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, wind turbines (WTs), and electric vehicles (EVs). The global electric grid capacity is almost 10 terawatts, more than 40% of which is now renewable (3 TW solar, 1.3 TW wind), a fourfold increase in two years.
Control of oil and gas reserves dictated the economic and political order of the twentieth century. Thanks to silicon, lithium, and the rare-earth elements (REEs), the twenty-first century is being reoriented by China as sales of PV solar panels, EVs, and lithium-ion batteries are all up (the “new three”). While the United States continues to cede power to maintain a failing, petroleum-fuelled global economy, the Asian century is already here: more than 80% solar panel manufacturing, 70% REE processing, and 60% of new car sales, while almost twice as many Chinese patents were granted in 2024 than in the US.
The US-Iran War could generate more than $1 trillion in extra revenue for the oil industry in 2026 – ($90-$60)/barrel x 36 billion barrels/year – but new paths to energy independence are being established. Amid debilitating global oil price shocks, old supply models are no longer beholden to the usual petroleum exporters: OPEC, the US, and Russia. Solar and wind excludes foreign control as the world turns to local power generation to survive and compete. That and reducing energy use wherever possible as wary customers turn from brown to green.
According to the International Energy Agency, the increase in low-emission power generation last year had already outstripped electricity supply growth, almost all of which was solar and wind as coal- and oil-fuelled power generation dropped. Even more energy dominoes have begun falling since the start of the US-Iran war, aided by rising gasoline prices, as much as 30% in the US and Europe. Reaching 20 million new car sales (roughly 25%) in 2025, increased EV adoption is also putting a dent in global petroleum sales.
Although Tesla’s Model Y is still the top-selling EV at 6% of sales, the world’s top three EV selling brands in 2025 were BYD (19%), Tesla (8%), and Geely (6%). Fewer burnt hydrocarbons means fewer greenhouse gas emissions and pollution on our streets that contributes to 7 million deaths per year. A 2026 Lancet Planetary Health study using California satellite data showed that even minimal EV adoption lowers air pollution, reducing tailpipe emissions (NO2 and PM10) – for every extra 200 EVs, NO2 emissions drop 1.1%. A 2008 National Library of Medicine study on London traffic showed that congestion pricing reduced emissions and raised life expectancy.
Sales of e-buses are also up, following China’s lead in Shenzhen, a former fishing village and first “special economic zone,” which boasts over 16,000 zero-emission (ZE) buses. European public bus systems are all getting an electric makeover, helping to decarbonize our streets and the economy.
According to T&E, six out of ten new buses in 2025 in the EU were ZE (56% EV, 4% fuel cell), while five countries now have 100% ZE city buses (Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, and Slovenia) and six others 90% (the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Finland, Belgium, Lithuania, and Romania). Spurred on by the 2024 Olympics and progressive green policies of former Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, who championed more green space, cycle lanes, and ZE vehicles, Paris now has over 1,000 electric city buses.
Charging anxiety is no longer an issue as performance continues to improve – lower costs, higher energy density, and longer cycle life. The world’s number-one battery maker CATL announced a 1,500-km range with its high-nickel cathode and low-expansion silicon-carbon anode Qillin battery (topping BYD’s 1,000-km-range Blade battery) and is also developing a 12,000 Wh/kg lithium-air battery (lithium metal anode and oxygen cathode) with 40 times the energy density of current Li-ion batteries that almost equals gasoline. Unethically mined cobalt is also being phased out in the latest lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries.
Batteries aren’t only for transportation, but also provide intermittency mitigation, real-time grid resilience, and energy arbitrage. A Massachusetts vehicle-to-grid (V2G) pilot project will charge three dormant school e-bus batteries this summer at night and sell the stored energy back to the grid the next day, possibly covering the charging costs during the school year. Made from common sea salt, newly developed sodium-ion batteries may also be a cheaper, greener grid-storage backup than lithium-ion batteries.
It’s been a long road to electrification: Alessandro Volta (1799, electrochemical battery), Michael Faraday (1831, electromagnetic induction), Thomas Edison (1882, Pearl Street coal-fired power station) to name just three early electrical pioneers. With the help of Nikola Tesla’s electric dream, George Westinghouse built on Edison’s genius at Niagara Falls in 1895, doubling American power generation. The famous cataract transmitted electricity 22 miles to Buffalo, inaugurating the electric grid and the twentieth century. As the grid expanded, so did a global population, quadrupling to over 8 billion today.
Albert Einstein started the modern solar ball rolling as he did in so many other fields (existence of atoms, relativity, energy-mass equivalence, the laser) with the first of his four 1905 Annalen der Physik papers that described the photoelectric effect. Bell Labs did the rest, beginning in 1939 with electrochemist Russel Ohl, who generated electricity for the first time in a positive- and negative-doped, light-sensitive p-n silicon device that Walter Brattain noted was the first time “anybody had ever found a photovoltaic effect in elementary material.”
Brattain, Bill Shockley and John Bardeen built on Ohl’s solid-state p-n diode, winning the 1956 Nobel Prize for the “transistor effect,” while Daryl Chapin, Gerald Pearson, and Calvin Fuller created the first modern solar cell in 1954, which The New York Times noted was “made of strips of silicon, a principal ingredient of sand” and could realize “one of man’s most cherished dreams – the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the sun.” Indeed, one hour of sunlight on earth is equivalent to global energy consumption in a year.
Change takes time, early adopters subject to the vagaries of the new before lower costs generate higher adoption, a.k.a. the “virtuous cycle.” The German SPD parliamentarian Hermann Scheer noted that “A new idea will firstly become denounced as ridiculous, secondly there are many fights against it, and finally all people were in favor of it from the early beginning.” Scheer was responsible for the 2000 German Renewable Energy Act that prioritized an avant-garde approach to energy technology via consumer subsidies, grid buybacks, and feed-in tariffs, helping to transform Germany into a world-leading solar provider in a country that averages as much sun as Alaska.
In 1956, the solar cell was so expensive, even Bell Labs couldn’t afford it ($1,650 per watt). By the time of Telstar – the first telecommunication satellite in 1962 with 14 watts in 3,600 solar modules – a solar cell cost $300/W, but would eventually become affordable in large utility-scale PV solar farms and smaller rooftop panel arrays. In 1975, 2 GW of solar cells were installed globally at $106/W; last year 3,000 GW were installed at under 10 cents/watt. Since 2010, solar panel costs have dropped over 80%, while the largest solar farm is now 5 GW, located in China’s most westerly region Xinjiang. Change is slow until it isn’t.
The US-Iran war will be remembered for two things: the United States failing to assert control over the global oil supply and the rest of the world insulating their economies from future oil shocks by turning to renewables. In the wake of another disastrous American war over oil, the global opposition grows as consumers tire of conflict and the ongoing mismanagement of government funds. Local control over everyday energy also leads to more political and economic stability as household use becomes decentralized.
Despite Donald Trump’s attempts to prop up a dying fossil-fuel industry via global instability and increased American oil and gas exports, more countries are rethinking old energy policies. On the back of its world-leading green makeover, China has reduced greenhouse gas emissions 10 years earlier than planned. Solar power plus storage can meet 90% of India’s grid because of lower battery costs. Last year, Pakistan was the second-largest importer of solar panels, while net-metering has grown tenfold in two years thanks to inexpensive PV panels.
Other developing countries are also advancing the green revolution. Indonesia wants to replace diesel power plants with a 100-GW solar plus battery energy system, beginning with a 13-GW rollout. Almost 10% of Malawi’s grid power now comes from two first-ever PV solar plants. Ethiopia plans to reach half a million EVs by 2030, starting with over 100 EV buses operating in the capital Addis Ababa.
Individual American states are also becoming greener by the day – wind power is the number-one energy producer in a number of states, led by Iowa (73%), Oklahoma (63%), Kansas (60%), and South Dakota (60%), while solar power in Texas surpassed coal for the first time in 2026. The Japanese company TOYO is planning a $375-million 1.5-GW solar-cell manufacturing plant in Texas, already a “solar manufacturing hotspot” as utility-scale solar continues to surpass fossil fuels.
Elsewhere, older wind farms are being “returbined” to increase productivity without needing new site selection, permits, or land rights, estimated at 160 GW of capacity in the US alone. In one West Virginia site, 132 WTs were reduced to 78 yet added 71 MW. Plug-in balcony solar, fences, and awnings are reimagining the way consumers generate electricity as building-integrated PV expands, while storage batteries are now following the same exponential trends as solar cells to cover intermittency and facilitate bi-directional prosumption.
As the United States looks to celebrate 250 years of independence this summer, two other events in 1776 were as far-reaching, each being tested to the limit in a dawning American democracy: Adam Smith’s capitalist handbook The Wealth of Nations and James Watt’s general-purpose steam engine that made possible the Industrial Revolution and global capitalism. However, 2039 may be a more worthy year to celebrate: the 100th anniversary of the p-n junction at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The sun shines for us all today and tomorrow!
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John K. White.