Back in Junior High I was a bit of an Alex Keaton (Michael J. Fox) from Family Ties. I wrote a report on how to invest in stock and why Tyco Labs was the place to invest. They had this great technology called a photovoltaic cell. Solar Energy was an idea whose time had finally arrived.

We had just been held hostage by OPEC and people had to wait in lines to buy gas, at was then, record prices of over a dollar a gallon.

Jimmy Carter had put solar panels on the White House to set an example of how we could start on our way to energy independence.

Then Ronald Reagan got elected. There was no way that in his America we were going to conserve. We drive big cars, heat and cool our houses to whatever extreme we want. We are a big and powerful nation and can afford to waste as much as we want. And for the next 30 plus years that’s exactly what we did. Only communists suffer shortages.

Bush gave tax breaks to people who bought Hummers. And lots of people did. You still see a few of them around today. But they don’t make them anymore. They went by the wayside when many American Automakers went bankrupt.

American Automakers also gave up a lot of marketshare to Japanese automakers in the 80’s. Because like most commodities that don’t have competition the price of gas just kept going up. And that drove people to buy the smaller, better built more fuel efficient imports.

But for those who study history we can often find examples of history repeating itself.

So lets go back just a few years. After a major recession the US elected one of those un-American leaders. The kind that doesn’t believe in American Supremacy and actually promoted the notion that once again Americans should conserve energy, invest in alternative energy and have a lofty goal of getting 1 million electric cars on the road in just a few years.

But the first order of business was bailing out American Automakers. Something Reagan did with Chrysler back in the 1980’s now had to be done again 30 years later. Because we forgot that gas can get pretty expensive and building lots of big cars that get crappy gas milage hurts the economy when gas hit’s $3 a gallon. And when the only cars on your lot don’t sell anymore bankruptcy is a given.

Well, the economy recovered because we have cheap gas once again. Or at least we perceive it as cheap because once you hit $3 a gallon $2 looks really cheap. Almost as cheap as $1 where gas hit at the height of the recession. I’ll bet if gas hits $3 now people will still perceive it as being pretty cheap.

So now after 8 years of that commie socialist we have once again elected a President who acknowledges the Supremacy of the United States of America.

His first order of business is to incentivize 19th century technology. Make coal great again. His second order of business was to make sure we can burn lots of fossil fuel. Keep it cheap so people can burn lots of it. There can’t be an iceberg hiding below the surface using that strategy. No,literally. All the icebergs are melting. Deny that this strategy has environmental consequences at all costs. Science is suspect. What do scientists know anyway.

And worst of all spreading the myth that restrictions on environmental pollution makes us uncompetitive in the world.

Trump is Reagan revisited. And I don’t mean that in a positive way.

This time the world is no longer looking for Americans to lead the way. We are way behind the power curve on implementing alternative energy.

Unlike the United States or China most of Europe and the UK does not have vast areas of unpopulated land mass. Most of France, Italy, Germany and the U.K.  have lots of people in very small areas. Their pollution problems are like ours of California prior to Nixon and The EPA or those pesky California Emission Standards.

Other countries are actually investing in technology to get off of fossil fuels. German automakers that were first pushed by Tesla and further pushed by their own greed and cheating emission rules with their diesel cars are now going all out on developing Electric Vehicles. Add that to their growing supply of solar power and other countries are leading the way into the 21st Century. Not the U.S.A.

What are American Automakers doing? Building as many SUV’s and Pickup Trucks they can churn out. And that is pretty much a sign that although many Americans feel that the economy still sucks that it really doesn’t. Poor people don’t buy $70k Automobiles, or do they? Well poor people don’t, but having a $1k a month payment and another $150 or more a month going to Mobil or BP can sure as heck make you feel like your broke. Especially if you have 2 of these in your driveway. Let gas hit $3 or $4 a gallon again and it won’t take long before another recession hits.

Another fallacy is that regulations make products cost more. Well let’s go back to the 1980’s. Factories used to just dispose of certain waste from production, much of it in small particles like the sawdust from mills.

Well there was this company called Torrit Donaldson. You might know who they are. They make filters for your car among other things.

They would also design collection systems that collect sawdust among other things. Now instead of these particulates being dumped in the air and garbage they make particle board and other products from them.

Both the mill and the filter maker, make money. Long term results are better. That’s how jobs and new technologies get created. Not by doubling down on burning toxins. Too bad Wall Street doesn’t care beyond the next quarter

So is their a silver lining in this Trump cloud?

Well just like the 1980’s businesses will continue to look for ways to make more money and people will continue to ask for innovation.

Tesla proved that you can make a compelling Electric Car. Germany and the U.K. have proven that solar and wind are competitive with nuclear and coal when you factor in the external costs that we in the U.S. don’t account for.

The only real question is will politics get in the way of the U.S.A. becoming a leader or will be relegated to the position of follower?

Will American Car Makers once again, for the third time misjudge where the market is headed. Maybe that’s why Tesla has a higher market cap than Ford or G.M.

One that it really doesn’t deserve as Tesla makes less cars in a year than the other automakers make in a week.

If only there was a military reason to develop alternative energy. When the Russians were beating us in space we moved heaven and earth to get their first.

And much of the technology that got us into space is driving most of the technology we have today. It’s not like we hadn’t given the Germans the lead in technology before. It took a World War to give us the drive to outsmart them as well.

I doubt beating ISIS will require a new modern energy that was easy to deploy almost anywhere.

Actually now that I think about it. What if we dropped a few solar panels connected to a battery that could power a radio or two and maybe some type of modern convenience that we could broadcast the truth to every village or town where the electricity infrastructure has been bombed out?