“While we bicker about pipelines to tidewater and the effects of a tiny, incremental price on carbon, the cost of solar and wind continue to plummet—driven by the inevitable declining cost curves associated with all technologies as they scale, from cell phones to drones,” Rand and Andrade write. “Batteries are doing the same.”

“The threat these technologies pose to the status quo is based on (largely Western) innovations brought to industrial scale by an aggressive Chinese state,” they add, and “neither the pace of innovation nor scale of production show any signs of slowing. Indeed, the opposite is true. Fast-forward a decade or two: Cleantech will take down incumbent energy industries that make the same old assumptions about demand for their product.”