Crisis energética y dependencia de carbono: lecciones de la era carter

As the price of west Texas crude approached $14 a barrel, President Jimmy Carter donned a cardigan for a candid fireside chat about his strategy to face the permanent energy shortage he saw in the nation's future.

Aggressive development of domestic coal, the nation's 'black hope'

Fast-forward to the present, and Donald Trump's America finds itself in a not-too-dissimilar quagmire, with gasoline prices higher than in 1977 after inflation, threatening to push inflation to its highest in three years.

Despite the US economy being much less reliant on energy than in the 1970s, fear of stagflation, the unholy mix of recession and high inflation, is in the air again. And Trump is doubling down on Carter's old strategy: to push pedal to the metal to develop US fossil fuels.

The energy crisis sparked by the US's and Israel's war against Iran makes a strong case for redoubling efforts to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

Solar and wind power are mostly homemade, not vulnerable to bottlenecks like the strait of Hormuz, where Tehran is throttling the flow of energy the world economy needs.

The rationale is even more powerful in Europe and Asia, which are more dependent on energy imports. As Keir Starmer, the British prime minister put it: