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> The hard work Carter asked for — building the physical capacity to never need the buffer — was quietly abandoned.

But since then, US natural gas production doubled [1], and solar power is growing exponentially [2]. Leaving that out of the history seems excessively gloomy.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9050us2a.htm [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183447/us-energy-generat...

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If you look at US share of energy consumption by source you can see that solar is 2.83% of energy used in the US. Natural gas is 34.2% .

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states

That's a really interesting/informative link you have.

Some highlights are:

- Energy use per capita has been declining since 2000

- Overall energy use has been basically flat since 2000

- Essentially, coal is being replaced by gas, almost 1:1. Lump both together and their relative share of the market is pretty stable.

- Solar went from 0.3 to 2.8% in the last 10 years, wind from 0.3% to 4.2% in the last 20 years. 7% wind/solar isn't world-leading but getting from basically 0 to 7% in 20 years is significant movement.

The person named in the byline (can we still call them "author" when Claude wrote the text?) may have included "be pessimistic" in their prompt.

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