Lachlan Carey

I have a new essay on place-based economic development policies as "broadly-shared abundance policy" at Site Selection magazine: siteselection.com/incentives-s... Key pt: econ dev policies can boost abundance IF targeted at distressed areas/non-employed, & if local housing policies accommodate.

Secure, Competitive, Global - RMI A playbook for US energy policy and financing to secure supply chains, boost competitiveness, and power global growth with abundant energy.

For those interested, much more in our recent report, including, most importantly, what the US can do about it in the context of upcoming DFC and EXIM reauthorizations

@akshatrathi.bsky.social - for your awareness. Doesn't change the substance of the piece, but obviously not as dramatic a takeaway.

Seeing this chart a bunch. As tempting as it is, it pretty dramatically undervalues US oil & gas exports (I think it just looks at crude oil & LNG exports). Here's what I get with UN Comtrade data:

What the Pentagon’s Rare Earths Deal Gets Right and Wrong Hello and welcome to the newsletter, a grab bag of daily content from the Odd Lots universe. Sometimes it's us, Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, bringing you our thoughts on the most recent developme...

New piece from @arnabdatta.bsky.social and @petereharrell.bsky.social goes through the good and bad in the Trump MP Materials deal.

They note it improves on past industrial policy (e.g. Tesla) while not addressing some current challenges.
www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

"The material basis of the global production, consumption and information systems are being remade. One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to think that will imply a radical transformation in global politics."
@katemac.bsky.social & I on the new globalization:
phenomenalworld.org/analysis/bri...

Solar components as well? I thought it was just wind in the text.

"Even in 2024, the EU was spending more money on Russian oil and gas (€22 billion) than on financial aid to Ukraine (€19 billion)"
👀

Trumpian policy as cultural policy - Marginal REVOLUTION The Trump administration has issued a blizzard of Executive Orders, and set many other potential changes in the works.  They might rename Dulles Airport (can you guess to what?).  A bill has been intr...

Worth a read. Terrifying that it might be true.
marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo...

Polycrisis 2025 | Kate Mackenzie & Tim Sahay Diplomacy, finance, and extraction in the year ahead

Not saying this is comforting, but here’s our look at what other world powers might & could do, while the US is a source of chaos and volatility. www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/pol...
www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/pol...

The most surreal and maddening feature of the campaign was that everyone agreed that high prices were the main issue but the guy explicitly, consistently running on a platform of raising everyone’s prices won voters most concerned about high prices.

We hammered this time and time again and yet.

I will never stop saying this: Biden should have given this as the reason for halting permits for new LNG export terminals. Everyone knew it would raise domestic prices, even with the ports already in the works.

Bidenomics: Farewell to an Idea?  | Brent Cebul As the Democratic Party reckons with another loss to Donald Trump, no issue looms larger than its continued hemorrhaging of working-class voters. It’s not

www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

In the @nybooks.com I offer historical perspectives on the political failure of Bidenomics: a massive program built thru business and nonprofit welfarism. Market-making, as I call it, has its place, but it must be embedded within more direct social benefits.

Any electoral arguments always felt to me like post-hoc justifications of a political strategy that offered corporate largess in exchange for policy stability, and a geopolitical strategy that countered China through green investments

Great piece. Personally, I think the political arguments for Bidenomics are misguided. The success of this approach will be determined by a) whether much of it survives Trump politically, b) meaningfully re-industrializes strategic industries and c) cuts carbon. Nowhere in there is "win elections."

Climate advocates might feel hopeless with Pres-elect Trump returning to the WH.

They shouldn’t.

I wrote about how to make progress for NYT

1. Focus on innovation and industrial strategy
2. Be pragmatic about fossil fuels
3. Expand the interests that gain from decarbonization

Map showing six regions with highest load growth: ERCOT (Texas), PJM (Northern Virginia), Georgia Power, MISO, Pacific Northwest and SPP

US power demand now projected to grow by 128 GW by 2029!

Last year, Grid Strategies broke the news that utilities and system operators had doubled their forecasts for electric demand growth from 2022 – a sudden jump driven by data centers and industrial load, among other factors.🧵 1/4
🔌💡

Hey @bsky.app , all these great posts and no bookmark button to save them for later?

Norway's road transport energy use is now highlighting a really important effect: primary energy consumption falling even while people travel more.

Why? Because electrification is energy efficiency.

Chart by @robbieandrew.bsky.social

Chart of the Day.
Fun fact - New York City has a bigger GDP than the state of New York.

A more than doubling during the Biden Administration 🔌💡

SAF, carbon management, and the EV supply chain have been the big winners since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) Growth in cumulative investment since 2018, indexed to Q2-2022. (2022-Q2=100)

datawrapper.dwcdn.net/seUKi/1/

Chart of the Day:
New Clean Investment Monitor data is out, so time to update the IRA growth chart. SAF and carbon management are now so far off the chart it's starting to look silly. EV supply chain manufacturing, solar, and hydrogen continue to grow rapidly, as do EV sales and storage deployment.

Chart of the Day:
The number of federal government employees has increased by 6% since 1970, while federal government spending has increased by over 3,000%.

Energy Technology Perspectives 2024 – Analysis - IEA Energy Technology Perspectives 2024 - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency.

www.iea.org/reports/ener...

Well this jumped out at me:
"the value of China’s clean technology exports is set to exceed USD 340 billion in 2035, based on today’s policy settings. This is roughly equivalent to the projected oil export revenue of both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates combined in 2024."
-IEA ETP, 2024

EU to demand technology transfers from Chinese companies New requirements will apply to batteries but could be expanded to other green sectors

EU plans to flip the script on China with new tech transfer requirements for Chinese companies seeking EU subsidies. 1/

www.ft.com/content/f4fd...

No, it's not correlated with either county or state when controlling for demographic factors, economic factors, or abortion salience.
Doesn't necessarily discredit deliverism - might just not have been long enough for effects in local labor markets to outweigh inflation, for example.

There’s a real risk of over interpreting what happened in a way that sends D’s backwards on so many fronts not least of which is climate/clean energy

Recycling of Critical Minerals – Analysis - IEA Recycling of Critical Minerals - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency.

www.iea.org/reports/recy...