Faster, Please! · Economics & Policy
TIER 4 Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:50:14 +0000
Famous futurist Herman Kahn bet that cheap, inexhaustible energy would unlock human abundance. The tools have arrived. The politics still have not ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- # ⚡ Tracking a 200-year energy wager ### Famous futurist Herman Kahn bet that cheap, inexhaustible energy would unlock human abundance. The tools have arrived. The politics still have not Dec 15 --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- | | ---|---|--- _🎄 The holiday are fast approaching, which is especially good news for**Faster, Please** free subscribers like yourself. _ _Between now and New Year 's,**you can get a 50% discount on a paid subscription**!_ _Just hit the Big Blue Button below for more info. My guess is that 2026 is going to be an amazing year on the pro-progress front, and I can 't want to cover and analyze it for you folks! I appreciate your support!_ Get 50% off for 1 year * * * **My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:** Sure, I know that there's lots of time left. But Herman Kahn's¹ 200-year wager has been in a slump for its first 50 years. Rough start. "Two hundred years ago, almost everywhere human beings were comparatively few, poor and at the mercy of the forces of nature," the sunny futurist wrote in his 1976 book, _The Next 200 years: A Scenario for America and the World_. "Two hundred years from now we expect almost everywhere they will be numerous, rich, and in control of those forces." Some progress, sure, but likely _not near as much_ as he anticipated would have occurred nearly a half century on. Critical to Kahn's Up Wing vision would be an anticipated shift from scarce fossil fuels to effectively inexhaustible energy. Engineers have largely done their part. From safe nuclear reactors to cheap solar panels to improving deep geothermal drills, the toolkit for clean energy abundance is deep and expanding. Next up: fusion and space-based solar. The failure lies elsewhere. Here's your trouble: Politics has not kept pace with physics. Consider **nuclear** , long the affection of abundance-minded futurists. It's back in vogue with electricity demand surging, firm, low-carbon power scarce, and multiplying AI data centers prizing reliability over old-school environmental scowling. Yet, to be honest, the revival is halting. Global nuclear capacity actually shrank this year as shutdowns outpaced additions. BloombergNEF expects a rebound in 2026, but Goldman Sachs' longer-term outlook is tellingly modest: Despite some pledges out there to triple nuclear power by 2050, the bank only sees capacity rising from about 380 gigawatts today to roughly 575 gigawatts by 2040. That would nudge nuclear's share of global electricity up only slightly. The direction is right; the leisurely tempo is all wrong. **Fusion** , long mocked as perpetually "30 years away," now looks like a geopolitical and commercial contest. Game on. American start-ups are signing long-dated power agreements with tech firms. China is building vast experimental facilities at speed. The 2030s may bring first-of-a-kind commercial reactors. Fusion will not ease this decade's emerging power crunch, but markets are beginning to sense an energy future that looks way different from the past. The supposed compromise technology has disappointed: **Small modular reactors** promised factory efficiency and easier financing. Instead, inflation has pushed up costs and learning curves have flattened. Washington's latest $800 million nuclear award bypassed the sector's startup pioneer in favor of designs backed by established vendors. The result is a renewed appetite for big AP1000 plants, even as fourth-generation designs such as TerraPower's Natrium enter the queue. **Solar** , by contrast, tells a story of rapid market penetration. Panels are established manufactured goods, those obey learning curves. Global capacity is doubling roughly every three years. Costs have collapsed, and scale has followed. Solar already supplies about 6 percent of global electricity. Bottlenecks include grids, land, and storage -- not technology. Even so, the trajectory seem clear. By the mid-2030s solar is likely to be the world's largest source of electricity. **Geothermal** , as my frequent readers know, is edging into the energy big leagues by redeploying oil-and-gas drilling tech to tap Earth's heat. (Fracking, the innovation gift that keeps on giving.) Fervo is building a 100-megawatt project in Utah.² XGS has shown closed-loop systems can deliver heat with predictability and minimal water use. Costs are sliding as drilling speeds up and subsurface mapping improves. McKinsey reckons mature projects could reach $45-65 per megawatt-hour in the 2030s and scale to roughly 40 gigawatts by mid-decade, rising toward 100 gigawatts by 2050 -- enough to make geothermal a central source of clean, firm power rather than a minor energy footnote. Even **space-based solar** ³, once a sci-fi curiosity, is creeping into contention as launch costs fall and efficiency improves.⁴ The physics is increasingly credible. The industrial challenge is daunting but seemingly intelligible. Which brings Kahn's two-century bet back into view. Thankfully, the world largely knows how to make clean power cheaply and at scale. But it can't decide where, how fast, and by whom it should be built. Until permits, politics, and power align,⁵ energy abundance will remain a future humanity has already engineered -- but not yet allowed itself to obtain. Get 50% off for 1 year 1 Herman Kahn, gregarious and rotund, is presented as the model "conservative futurist" in my 2023 book. President Ronald Reagan eulogized him in 1983 as "a futurist who welcomed the future." 2 Illustrating the sector's commercial acceleration, The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Fervo Energy raised $462 million to scale its enhanced geothermal systems. 3 Emerging from stealth with $20 million led by Lowercarbon Capital, Overview Energy plans to beam laser energy to Earth's existing solar farms, transforming them into 24/7 assets, as Heatmap reports. By "geographically untethering" power to serve peak demand across time zones, they target $60-$100/MWh by the mid-2030s. The ultimate goal is massive: scaling operations to supply 10 percent to 20 percent of global electricity by 2050. Overview asserts the physics is solved. The remaining hurdle is the industrial challenge of mass-manufacturing the orbital fleet. 4 Kahn: "Developments in space may eventually add to mankind's options, but they are not critical to the resolution of the central economic and energy problems discussed here." 5 Just look at what's happening in Washington, Permitting reform is once again stuck. House Republicans have advanced the SPEED Act to streamline NEPA reviews, yet they faces resistance from both directions: conservatives who oppose anything that might entrench wind and solar, and Senate climate hawks who insist reforms must explicitly unlock transmission and clean-energy buildout. That split has stalled momentum in both chambers. Good grief. * * * **On sale everywhere** _**The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised**_ | | ---|---|--- #### Invite your friends and earn rewards If you enjoy Faster, Please!, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. 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