The denial-industrial complex, CoastCon, and a new story
Hey folks! First off, a word from our sponsor! I have a new Hacksilver story, “The Witch and the Wyrm,” up at Reactor for your delectation!
In other news, Scott Lynch and I will be guests at CoastCon in beautiful Biloxi, Mississippi, from March 7-9! That’s this weekend!
I hope to see some of you there!
And so, on to the meat of this newsletter.
One of the things I rarely see discussed when we talk about climate change and futurism is the fact that in this year of 2025, burning fossil fuel for energy is essentially a dying technology. There are absolutely panicked forces that have invested heavily in fossil fuel infrastructure that are doing everything in their power to stretch that death out for as long as they possibly can, but the writing is on the wall.
Emerging economies have the advantage of not having fossil fuel infrastructures that need to be torn down and replaced. The current American regime is doing everything in its power to catastrophically de-position the United States in the world economy. China is expected to reach peak oil demand in two years, and with the now seemingly inevitable international collapse of American soft power, China is also poised to step into that void with cleaner energy technologies.
Meanwhile, Putin and Trump are apparently too stuck in the 20th century (which, I note, was now a quarter of a century ago) and too ossified in their thinking to take proactive steps toward a future that is already happening. Instead, they are doubling down on propping up a failing fossil-fuel industrial complex (and devastating the economic opportunities provided by greener energy) with a nostalgic decadence reminiscent of subsidizing a buggy whip factory in 1923.
(Fossil based feedstocks remain valuable for industrial uses, of course: that’s not what I’m talking about here.)
I think I’ll start calling it the denial-industrial complex.