Plunging Oil Prices and Renewable Energy

Alejandro Manrique is a colleague from Argentina, who, last year, demonstrated his great generosity: he donated a ton of time to translate a great deal of our content here into Spanish.  He wrote me just now to wish me a Happy New Year, and to explain the rather dire situation in Argentinian economics.  He closed by asking: The oil price is plummeting and it seems that a new era of cheap oil is coming. Do you think that renewables will be affected worldwide by this situation?

I responded that, as to what’s going to happen, I don’t know.  As Bill McKibben summarizes here, this is all going to sort itself out in the next few decades one way or the other.

The two opposing forces, environmentalism and Big Energy, are both gaining strength.  The environmentalists have decency, common sense and growing “grass roots” support on their side. Ironically, they have the entire U.S. military apparatus on their side as well; apparently, it’s not in our interests to deal with the enormous amount of planetary disruption and chaos that’s headed our way at about 1000 miles per hour.  On the other hand, Big Oil has more money than God, and all the PR and congressmen it can possibly buy.

So, I suppose either we’ll have a civilization here, or we won’t.  I know that sounds like a fortune-teller explaining that you’re about to meet a mysterious person, or some such.  But seriously, I don’t know.