energy policy

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"You know, there are 13 ways of doing anything. 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it.”. Dennis Hightower, who at the time was head of Disney International.

He asked me why I wasn’t doing something, and I responded by explaining the pros and cons of two different ways of doing it. Thoughtfully, he replied “You know, there are 13 ways of doing anything. 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it.”

The best Founders avoid over-analyzing. At a startup, you don’t have time — and the result will most likely be marginal. Pick a way and do it. Be consistently decisive.

I underestimated tariffs. Here is what I've learnt. I used to quietly feel smug watching others underestimate the power of tariffs in the hands of the United States, especially in discussions about the balance of power between China and the U.S., only to realise I had been underestimating them myself.

1. The mere threat of tariffs can coerce behavior.

2. Applying even low, broad tariffs breaks the illusion that any country is immune and increases bargaining power.

3. Markets have learned to distinguish between a threat, a temporary tariff, and a permanent one. This helps explain why the U.S. economy has absorbed much of the tariff-related volatility.

4. The U.S. could lose leverage if enough of the world joined a unified trade bloc and bargained collectively. But this remains unlikely. Most countries are competing to boost exports and create jobs, which puts them in competition with each other rather than cooperation.

5. By targeting BRICS members, the U.S. is using tariffs to weaken emerging trade blocs. Any bloc without strong internal governance, such as the EU has, is unlikely to survive a direct challenge from the U.S.

6. Tariffs have become tools of industrial policy. The U.S. is now using them to incentivise domestic manufacturing, rebuild supply chains, and advance strategic industries like semiconductors and clean energy.

7. Tariffs also provide domestic political leverage. They offer a way to pressure companies to reshore operations and send a strong message to voters about protecting American jobs and industry.

All of this shows that when you are the world's buyer of last resort, and exporters are competing for access to your market and there is no other country with a big enough consumer market to absorb supply, you hold a very strong bargaining position.

It’s worth noting that the world wasn’t always configured this way. It’s only under today’s conditions where global trade is tightly integrated and access to the U.S. market is essential for many economies that tariffs carry this kind of power.  This is part of the reason I was unable to make this insight earlier.

So what do you think? Is the US position as strong as it seems? What can individual nations and trade blocs do to defend themselves from the US?

When it comes "the global warming debate," there are often third ways that are ignored. Often the framing is global warming and climate deniers or something like that.

but it seems like there are obviously multiple perspectives here, and these two black and white boxes keep us from really seeing potential solutions.

Bjorn Lomborg for example believes in man-made climate change, but also doesn’t like the alarmism. Although he cherry picks data like he accuses others of, he also I think rightfully points out lots of flaws in the arguments that help us identify solutions. Much of the hurricane damage increase over time is because we’re building bigger and more expensive houses in hurricane alleys; for this problem, we can stop building there; everybody stopping flying altogether until 2100 delays increases the increase by a few weeks, so stopping flying isn’t the solution. Often the solutions are smaller, more local, less sexy: want less polar bears to die? Increase regulation on poaching. (Polar bear populations are up over the past decade because of this, apparently). I would love to identify and popularize these solutions, so they are spoken in the same breath as global warming rather than it being all gloom and doom and end of the world.

There are real tricky questions about what we’re trying to preserve and for whom, as well. If all we care about are humans and climate migration, then building infrastructure in places like Haiti and even evolving to coal power would be more helpful.

Finally they learned to cut off people's mics. Hot take: If the media wasn’t so Green and did this in 2016, I think Hillary would have won.