Dick Cheney with some Saudis, 1990. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Paul Krugman’s Substack post this morning is about Dick Cheney’s “drill baby drill” energy report from 2001. Krugman quotes from the report:
By 2020, non-hydropower renewable energy is expected to account for 2.8 percent of total electricity generation.
As of March 2025, 50.8 percent of American electricity came from renewable sources.
Even though George Bush and Dick Cheney were boy scouts compared with Donald Trump and JD Vance, we must never forget that they were wrong about everything, and that the ways in which they were wrong did enormous harm in the world while making the super-rich richer and setting the stage for the 2008 financial crisis. In 2016, the Brookings Institution wrote: “Looking back, one could argue that this ‘oil escalation’ strategy failed on all counts, exacerbating instability in the Middle East and setting the U.S. and the world back a decade and a half in the fight against climate change.”
It was a huge relief when at last we saw the helicopters carrying Bush and Cheney out of Washington for the last time. I’d have thought that with Bush/Cheney we had hit rock bottom. Now we know that the global oligarchy was just getting started. And this time they don’t intend to give up their power because of a mere election.