But unfortunately, Donald Trump isn't in charge of ratfucking the solar transition. That role will fall to much smarter people from the fossil fuel industry, the same people who masterminded decades of climate denial. They're *scarily good* at their jobs.

From the fossil fuel industry's perspective, the problem with solar isn't that it's different from oil and coal.

26/

Big Carbon isn't shy about capex - they're always blowing millions on cool, eye-wateringly expensive new gadgets for sucking old dead things out of the land and sea.

The problem is that the sun shines *everywhere*. The fossil fuel industry is many things - ardent génocidaires bent on the extinction of the human race for profit - but what they are above everything else is *rent-seekers*.

27/

The whole point of an extraction economy is to control a key factor of production so that other people need to come to you in order to do everything else. The ideal oil economy consists of a series of holes in the ground surrounded by people with guns, owned by a cartel that chokes off supply to maximize profits while leaving a highly visible share of the world's population shivering in the dark as a warning to anyone complaining about their prices.

28/

Fossil fuels are valuable because they are a *chokepoint* on the entire productive economy. Anyone who's seen the Mad Max documentaries knows how this goes: even the most mid, paunchy, straw-haired boomer with volcanic bacne and shitty dress-sense can seize power over the whole population if he controls the supply of one of life's essentials.

29/

The fossil fuel industry is a magnet for people who love a chokepoint. These people are born tollboth operators and they never stop hunting for turnpikes. They are landlords for ancient corpses, charging the whole world rent to keep the lights on. They are chokepoint-trophic. You can't be a warlord amid plenty - why would anyone get down on all fours and volunteer to be your footstool if they can get everything they need over the next hill?

30/

I think there's a collision looming between these rent-seeking missiles and the ever-cheaper, ever-better solar world. Eventually, these garbage people will stop trying to halt renewables, and they'll start looking to *own* them.

You can already see the first stirrings of this: the more daring carbon barons are starting to flirt with geothermal and nuclear, and they're awfully fond of hydroelectric.

31/

Whatever the merits or demerits of these technologies, they have the (dubious) advantage that they are amenable to rent-extraction. To put up a dam, you need to own the land around the river. To run a nuke, you need to own a uranium mine.

Even geothermal is ineluctably place-based: there are lots of places where a borehole will hit something hot and bubbly, but it's an expensive proposition with a big, fat capital moat that limits competition.

32/

Anyone can slap a solar panel on their roof - but you can't dig a geothermal borehole in your back yard with a garden spade.

It's hard to find a chokepoint for *the sun*, but you know what has a *lot* of chokepoints? *Technology*. Remember, solar isn't a fuel, it's a technology. When big companies use technological chokepoints to screw their customers and competitors, we call that *enshittification*:

us.macmillan.com/books/9780374…

33/

There's already *tons* of enshittification that's oozed into the cleantech sector. EV manufacturers like to boast that their cars are "software-based." Practically speaking, that means that when the manufacturer goes bust, all the cars sitting in inventory are permanently bricked:

pluralistic.net/2024/10/10/sof…

34/

Tesla is the greatest enshittifier the car world has ever seen, with scams that make Dieselgate look like amateur-hour. Imagine selling an EV and charging a monthly fee to drivers who want to access more than *half* the charge in their batteries:

pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edi…

Residential solar inverter companies like Solaredge require an internet connection and shut themselves off after a protracted period of no-contact with the company's servers:

pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unp…

35/

As with the solar revolution, the solar *enshittification* revolution is just getting started. There are so many ways that a "smart" device can be remotely downgraded. There's a "smart" sous-vide wand that got a mandatory software update that deleted its most popular features and turned them into monthly subscription "upgrades":

reddit.com/r/sousvide/comments…

36/

There's no (legal) reason that Samsung or LG couldn't do the same thing to the new induction top you spent thousands of dollars to buy and install (or built a custom kitchen around).

If I was a Big Oil company, I'd be investing heavily in the control systems for EVs, solar inverters, induction tops, heat pumps, smart thermostats, and anything else that depends on an internet-connected computer to operate.

37/

I'd flood every sales channel, offering zero-money-down installations with teaser zero rate loans and I'd do exclusivity deals with landlords and property developers. I'd get states and city councils to pass "safety" laws requiring grid coordination using a proprietary protocol and/or authentication token.

38/

I'd ship products that were compatible with open protocols, and later push mandatory updates to them that flip them to using proprietary controllers, like Chamberlain did with virtually every garage door opener in America:

pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lea…

I'd also be pushing the narrative that all this cleantech stuff is *already* enshittified - by *China*.

39/

I'd be out there shrieking about the possibility of China shutting off everyone's heat pumps in the dead of winter, or bricking every solar inverter if America doesn't back away from supporting Taiwanese independence.

It wouldn't even be (entirely) wrong. There are a hell of a lot of creepy things that a nation-state can do if they export critical, internet-connected infrastructure to the whole planet.

40/

Just ask any farmer who owns a John Deere tractor - every one of which is killswitched, meaning Donald Trump could order Deere to shut down a nation's entire agricultural sector:

pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/abo…

The Tiktok ban provides a template for how this could be rolled out: gin up a moral panic about sinister foreign control over a key aspect of daily American life, then force a sale to one of Trump's billionaire cronies:

fair.org/home/as-ellison-buys-…

41/

As Ellison Buys Out TikTok, US Moves Toward One-Party Media

The Ellison duo taking over both CBS and CNN, as well as controlling a major social media network like TikTok, would be dangerous for democracy.

^FAIR

Trump could easily flip the whole cleantech sector to a consortium of US oil companies fronted by, say, Rex Tillerson. If you can't beat 'em, expropriate 'em.

I raise all this not to alarm people who are as excited by McKibben's news as I am, but rather, to game out the likely response of our sworn enemies so that we can get ready to fight them. These rent-seeking chokepoint obsessives have one move: corner a market and *squeeze*.

42/

They've been ratfucking renewables for decades because it competed with their existing racket.

But they aren't emotionally committed to setting fire to old dead things - they're just nature's most compulsive toll-booth operators, and they're sure as shit going to be looking for ways to stick toll-booths in our renewables future. Big Tech has shown them how to do it. So this is just another reason to defeat enshittification, which we *must* do anyway.

43/

Image:
Bastique (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…

CC BY 4.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

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File:Solar Panels on Church Roof full.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

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