Tomorrow I’ll get back to being curmudgeonly. Today let’s celebrate a couple of things that have drifted from the extraordinary into the mundane, which speaks to the marvel that is our age and our great nation.
You’d be hard pressed to find a more fascinating straight line. The figure below is one of the most amazing graphs in all of climate policy.1 It shows the decarbonization of the U.S. economy from 1992 to 20252 — with decarbonization is defined as the ratio of carbon dioxide emissions (from fossil fuels) to GDP (in 2025$).
Sources: OMB and EI. Note that 2024 and 2025 U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from FF are based on projections from the 10 June 2025 EIA STEO.
The wild swings of energy policies from Democratic to Republican administrations beg the question of whether the United States is capable of sustaining any coherent energy policy, whether in service of climate mitigation or energy dominance. And yet, despite all of that political and policy volatility, the US over recent decades has both managed to sustain a significant and consistent rate of decarbonization while establishing its energy economy as the envy of much of the world.
What makes the U.S. decarbonization rate remarkable is that it is (a) not an explicit focus as a policy metric, (b) few people pay attention to it (you’ll see decarbonization discussed more here at THB than most anywhere), and, (c) U.S. politics and energy policy has indeed been subject to “wild swings” over the past 30+ years. And yet, with all that, the linear decline.
He goes on to say, “Based on the historical data, I’d hypothesize that economic growth and decarbonization are actually inter-related, and mutually reinforcing.”
Notice how long running and uninterrupted the trend has been along while being somewhat indifferent to policy and greatly indifferent to political office holders. Despite their best efforts at being bad actors, political leaders and the government are held in check from doing the bad things that sound good by markets which do the good things that sound bad.1
As I write this piece, I’m about to board an airplane. I’m in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but in just over 13 hours I’ll be in Zurich, Switzerland. In the 19th century, not even the wealthiest imaginable person would have been able to travel this quickly. Indeed, the entire wealth of the world could not have bought a 13-hour trip of just over 7,000 miles, say, in 1910, because it simply didn’t exist. . . .
It’s very likely that the flight crew will be Swiss, since the airline I’m flying is based in Switzerland. Not long ago, most people in the world were unlikely to ever meet people foreign to their own countries. . . .
. . . And after I board the plane, I’ll put on headphones that will cancel all surrounding noise as we lift off so I can relax and maybe take a nap. Can you imagine explaining this kind of comfort to the millions of people who, just one century ago, were boarding ships from Europe to America for months-long journeys during which it was very likely that some people would die???
When I’m in the plane, I’ll continue to write this piece on a laptop, the mere concept of which was nonexistent barely fifty years ago. . . .
If I get bored on the flight as a write this piece, I’ll probably turn my attention to one of the two books I brought along for the journey. But a person like Aristotle, for example, could not dream of such an object. . . .
Once I leave the plane, I’ll immediately text my girlfriend that I’ve arrived safely, something that was inconceivable a few decades ago. . . .
Freedom makes all of these things possible. Planes, pills, headphones, laptops, books, cellphones: Whenever we make it possible for human ingenuity to flourish, we come up with new inventions that raise our standard of living over and over. . . .
The benefits of free market capitalism and the international division of labor, which we usually take for granted, are incredible, and their extent is probably impossible to fully realize. . . .
