A significant portion of growth is substitution. As oil/gas gets more expensive, alts will most likely go more mainstream and come down in price as economy of s

A significant portion of growth is substitution. As oil/gas gets more expensive, alts will most likely go more mainstream and come down in price as economy of scale kicks in. I'm handwaving a bit - there are process issues, but as scale goes up so does the money for improving processes. We already see this with solar panels in Hawaii. But the principal reason people don't use more solar is that oil and gas are much cheaper now. Nat. gas in particular is quite cheap. And tracking gasoline prices ( as a proxy for oil costs ) from the early '80s to now, those prices generally did not keep pace with inflation. I think that we're short on jobs mainly because of poor instrumentation in our monetary policy. Scott Sumner and the other Market Monetarists have built on Milton Friedman's work and believe that the wrong metric is used to steer monetary policy. It might be uncharitable, but the Right seems to prefer a shortage of jobs in the service of the exceptionalism myth and because there's a fairly panicked fear of inflation. The Left seems to prefer the signalling to be gained from fiscal support. Sumner purports to explain the stagflation people use the memory of to drive the fear in terms of... monetary policy. So the politics of Market Monetarism seem bleak. But there are examples of countries other than the US using a more MM approach and not having the same suffering. I am USAian but I think it's foolish to think the US is immune to processes that work in other nations.