TrendMacro conversation with Mark P. Mills on energy in the age of Trump and DeepSeek
Energy demand growth is soaring even without AI. There’s no alternative but oil, gas and coal.
Update to Strategic View
The global information economy already cycles unimaginable volumes of bytes in data centers any one of which, at the efficiency levels of a generation ago, would have consumed all the electricity in the country. And it’s growing by orders of magnitude, even without making extravagant assumptions about incremental demand from AI. Politicized forecasts for peak energy demand have led to a decade of underinvestment in energy generation and transmission infrastructure, and malinvestment in forms of generation that are unreliable, unscalable and uneconomic. The only solution in any feasible timeframe is to ramp up production of oil, gas and coal. Nuclear is on the horizon, but still distant. Trump’s deregulatory agenda points to enabling a fossil fuel growth surge, and Trump’s election signifies a tipping point in the public’s psychology about it. The US leads the world in financial and human capital focused on this, as well as a capacious mineral endowments. China will be a formidable competitor, but the world will benefit from the competition of rivals to unleash the energy that will enable an age of growth.