Why is lowering energy costs not a top focus area?
Decreasing energy costs has the least political opposition and lowers the cost of living
Democrats and Conservatives can get behind lowering cost of living without replacing jobs
(i.e. deflation of costs by replacing human jobs with automation/AI may not have as much bipartisan support)
It’s relatively well-researched and executable to increase (1) solar energy and (2) nuclear energy
These are coordination, markets, or political/regulatory problems, not research problems; therefore, it is a known known with very few known unknowns (and likely little unknown unknowns) - just scale up what is working
Lowering energy costs might have bipartisan support but the approaches to achieve them don’t.
Energy prices is a well-treaded political issue that comes out at most elections. Everyone wants cheaper electricity but conservatives lean anti-wind and anti-solar and liberals lean anti-nuclear and anti-fossil fuel so there’s a bit of an impasse.
Saying “lower energy costs has bipartisan support” is like saying “improving education outcomes” or “fixing healthcare” has bipartisan support. The disagreements and intractability are in the details.
Do you have a more specific idea for how you would use $1M to lower energy costs in way that would have bipartisan support?
That’s a good point.
I’m not familiar with why Conservatives are anti-wind and anti-solar. What are these arguments?
Here’s Grok: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_4a7c7d26-dd4f-4e4e-aaf3-3605d888de44
Producing more electrons is a known engineering problem; while education and healthcare are human problems, so I don’t know if these are directly comparable.
There are a lot of interesting global development and technology-related angles that could justify energy-related work. Reliable, affordable energy can spur economic growth and increase the quality of life for people in developing economies. I’m linking a very surface-level McKinsey report on the historic link between energy demand and GDP for basic context, but I’m happy to have a longer chat.
Existing cause areas like South Asian Air Quality could benefit from low-hanging fruit in scalable alternatives to the country’s current reliance on coal. For example, India is already a major importer of LPG (which it subsidizes for home kitchen use) and, more recently, LNG. IEA expects India’s gas imports to more than double by 2030 to support its predicted economic growth. This is in addition to the existing ~46% of domestically produced energy coming from renewable sources.
Diverting philanthropic resources to US energy policy doesn’t make much sense to me on the surface, but I’m open to being proven wrong if you have more information behind the argument.
Edit: My non-tech energy work is a ~neutral earning-to-give situation. The work is interesting, reliable, and I enjoy it. I wouldn’t argue that it is has a similar impact to direct work.
I mean generally energy is a universal factor in cost of living.
Lowering costs of living while not getting rid of jobs has the most universal appeal with least political opposition anywhere—that’s my general point.
Each country and each marginal dollar can lower the cost of living for each constituency’s allocatable marginal dollar.