alt Hacker NewsThings are changing.
In 2023 China had more net new solar capacity than the US has in total, and it will only climb from there. In order to do this, they're flexing muscles in R&D and mass production that the US has actually started to flex, and now will face extreme headwinds and decreased capital investment.
Regarding agriculture: America's agricultural powerhouse, California's Central Valley, is rapidly depleting its water supplies. The midwest is depleting its topsoil at double the rate that USDA considers sustainable.
None of this is irreversible or irrecoverable, but it very clearly requires some countervailing push on market forces. Market forces do not naturally operate on these types of time scales and repeatedly externalize costs to neighbors or future generations.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35582-x
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/57-billion-tons-of...
It sounds like those countervailing pushes are ongoing? The Nature article mentions how California passed regulatory reforms in 2014 to address the Central Valley water problem. The Smithsonian article describes how no-till practices to avoid topsoil depletion have been implemented by a majority of farmers in four major crops.