The path to the future is renewables, but not in Donald Trump’s America
China is leading the world to make the transition but Washington is stalling under a president whose energy motto is ‘drill, baby, drill’
Does the United States suffer from a “resource curse”? Surely, that’s an absurd question. It’s the kind of problem that affects only low-income and underdeveloped countries run by dictators and authoritarian rulers.
Before the 2007-08 global financial crisis triggered by the collapse of the US subprime real estate market and its financial derivatives, most American policymakers also thought such crises only happened in developing economies. Well, guess what?
In a recent podcast with historian Heather Cox Richardson, Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman argued that the US did suffer from a resource curse. “[What] we have in the US is an actual resource curse,” he said. “We would not be rejecting renewable energy. We would not be rejecting electro-tech probably if we didn’t have all of this oil and gas.”
The US has the world’s largest combined oil and gas reserves.
Krugman continued: “Our politics are kind of polluted by the power of our own fossil fuel industry, And that’s actually probably ending up being an economic disadvantage … we are not that different from countries that actually have mineral resources that end up to be negatives, not positives for them.”