Inflation Reduction Act passed
President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law on August 16, 2022. Despite the name, the law was primarily an energy-transition spending bill — over $370 billion in tax credits, loan guarantees, and direct funding for solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles, hydrogen, and domestic battery-mineral processing. It was the largest single industrial-policy commitment in U.S. history outside of wartime. The bill's structure — uncapped tax credits with strong domestic-content requirements — was deliberately designed to rebuild U.S. battery and solar manufacturing as a strategic alternative to Chinese supply. Within two years, over $200 billion of private capital had been announced for U.S. clean-energy manufacturing, mostly clustered in Republican-led southern states. The energy transition had become explicitly a strategic-industrial competition.
The IRA's domestic-content requirements created a meaningful split with European allies, who had no equivalent program and saw their own clean-energy manufacturers tempted across the Atlantic by U.S. subsidies. The 'European response' (the EU's Green Deal Industrial Plan, the Net-Zero Industry Act) is still being assembled and is widely considered to be smaller in scale and slower in execution than the U.S. effort.
05 · The Transition
Three energy revolutions are running simultaneously. American shale fracking has made the U.S. the world's largest oil and gas producer for the first time since 1973. Solar and battery costs have collapsed by 80 to 90 percent in fifteen years, with China dominating both production and the rare-earth supply chain. And weaponized energy — Russia's gas cuts to Europe, Western sanctions on Russian oil, the price-cap mechanism, the Nord Stream sabotage — has demonstrated that the petrodollar system can be unwound, in pieces, in months. The wealth ranking of the next era is being decided right now, and not all of the candidates know they're competing.
Read the full era →- 2008 — 2014U.S. shale oil revolution
- Nov 27, 2014Saudi price war against shale
- 2010 — 2024Solar electricity becomes the cheapest power
- 2017 — presentCobalt and lithium become geopolitical
- Apr 20, 2020Oil futures go negative
- Sep 26, 2022Nord Stream pipelines sabotaged
- Dec 5, 2022First fusion ignition at NIF