I can’t remember when I first became aware of Peter Leyden. It might have been that article in Wired all the way back in 1997. But here’s a video he made last November that is as he puts it “far from the gloom and doom of what the media are saying.” (That’s a relief.)
Here’s a guest post he wrote in August on Substack, “America’s Fourth Reinvention.” He begins:
America is entering its fourth great reinvention. Each time in the past, the pattern has been the same: a wave of transformative technologies arrives and the old order cracks apart in conflict. After a bruising struggle, new rules, institutions and operating models take hold, reshaping the deep structures of the economy and society.
The Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Depression were all moments when Americans tore down an exhausted model and replaced it with one fit for a new age. We are there again today. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are acting as a demolition crew in Washington, smashing institutions that no longer fit.
The problem is, they are not builders.
In San Francisco, technologists and systems thinkers are sketching the outlines of the next American operating system, built around artificial intelligence, clean energy and biotechnology.
A wave of general‑purpose technologies sparked each of America’s three past reinventions, and each lit a political firestorm before settling into decades‑long booms. Steam engines and mechanized mills in the early Republic multiplied human muscle with coal power and sent the economy surging. Railroads, Bessemer steel and the telegraph shrank the continent, creating a national market overnight. After World War II, the internal‑combustion engine, petrochemicals and nuclear science underwrote suburbia, the interstate highway system and a rules‑based world order.
Every time, the economic consequences of new technology collided with entrenched systems. Patriots faced loyalists. The Union fought the Confederacy. Roosevelt’s New Deal internationalists battled America First isolationists. These were not gentle transitions. It took a Civil War and 750,000 dead to uproot an economy built on slavery and clear space for free‑labor manufacturing.
I have a friend named Carolyn, who is a “fixer,” who goes into failing companies and turns them around. Years ago I was complaining to her about New York publishing’s inability to adapt to new ways of doing business, that they were still operating under an archaic business model that predates World War II. She told me, “The biggest complaint I hear in my business is, We’ve always done it this way.”
Going back even further, I went to work for BP during the development of the first Prudhoe Bay oil field. At that time BP published an in-house magazine called the BP Shield and the very first issue I saw had a cover article about a solar-powered car. This was in 1976, fifty years ago, before any of us had ever heard the phrase “climate change.” BP understood then that they were in the energy business.
Today, fossil fuel companies seem to think they are solely in the fossil fuel extraction business, which isn’t working out well for them. If they hired Carolyn to fix them (a good idea, by the way), she would hear them saying that because “they’ve always done things this way” they can and should continue to do it into infinity. No reason to change at all, nope, nosiree.
The last two oil lease sales in Alaska generated no bids from any of the fossil fuel extraction companies. Yesterday the price per barrel of oil was $61.75. Punching a hole can cost a fossil fuel company $1M just for the lease.
In the meantime solar power is 41 percent cheaper and wind power is 53 percent cheaper than power produced from fossil fuels. We have all noticed. As Fix the News puts it, “Trendlines versus headlines.” I’ve got solar panels on my roof and so does Storyknife. At a latitude where daylight drops to six hours a day in December, solar takes longer to pay for itself but it’s still cost effective, as demonstrated by solar panels multiplying on rooftops all over the lower Kenai Peninsula. Wind turbines are beginning to sprout, too, with three in my neighborhood alone. Never mind how much cleaner renewable energy resources are, they are cheaper than fossil fuel energy and getting more so every year. Maybe leaving enough money left over so we can, you know, eat.
Meanwhile, China has built a $20,000 EV. Switzerland has successfully tested a solar-powered airplane. Peter Leyden is right. The future isn’t coming, it’s here.
I also take great comfort in knowing that this has all happened before. Although I’ll give the last word to another friend, Barbara, who says, “Living through it is still horrible.”
Dana sez–Many of the links above came through a newsletter from Fix the News which drops into my inbox a couple of times a month and without fail includes hotlinks to legitimate sources for every story.
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