The price curve
In 2010, a solar panel cost $2.15 per watt. By 2023: $0.27. Eighty-seven percent decline in thirteen years. The IEA, which had underestimated solar in every forecast for a decade, finally stopped lowballing. Solar was adding more generation capacity per year than all other sources combined. Did we lobby for this? Did we regulate it into existence? The cost curve did the work.
Climate policy spent thirty years trying to make dirty energy expensive. It failed everywhere it was tried at scale — Yellow Vest protests in France, political backlash in Australia. What succeeded was making clean energy cheap. Not through mandates. Through manufacturing scale and the compounding logic of a technology that gets 20 percent cheaper every time cumulative production doubles. Is decarbonization still a sacrifice, or is it the better investment?
The decoupling data is not hypothetical. The UK grew GDP by 30 percent while cutting territorial emissions 40 percent. Sweden grew faster than the EU average with the lowest per-capita emissions. The degrowth camp says this is impossible. It already happened, measured by real statistical agencies.
The cornucopians share our growth optimism but think the problem is imaginary. We think the problem is real and the solution is engineering. Someone who grew up in the oil industry and watched their community built on extraction knows what transition costs look like. We do not pretend those costs are zero. We argue they are smaller than not transitioning, measured in degrees Celsius.
The decouplers are our closest allies. They want redesign. We want deployment of what we already have while their technologies mature. Why wait for spider silk from engineered yeast when solar panels are on the shelf?
Where we concede ground: Territorial emissions are not the full picture. The UK offshored its carbon. Consumption-based accounting tells a less flattering story.
What would change our mind: No major economy achieving absolute material decoupling — footprint declining while GDP grows — by 2035 despite a decade of policy.
Read the full synthesis: Can the economy grow forever on a finite planet?