Photo by Tasos Mansour on Unsplash

The Democratizing Effects of Electrifying Everything

Electricity is agnostic as to the inputs. Fossil fuels promote monopolies.

ScottCDunn
5 min readJun 23, 2022

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The subtext of the battle over Ukraine, the Middle East, and even fracking in America, is the monopolies they promote. When we use fossil fuels, we promote monopolies. Coal, gas, and oil are all centralized extraction industries. They are all sanctioned by the government. All monopolies require government intervention to exist. They are the antithesis of the free market.

In America, the government sells leases and charges taxes on the rents extracted from the land in the form of money made from the sale of fossil fuels. I’ve seen their tax forms and the tax codes. From the ground to our homes or power plants, fossil fuels are a vertical monopoly that everyone pays for.

Electricity doesn’t care where it gets electrons from. Electricity is everywhere. Electricity is the flow of electrons from one place to another. When electrons move, they perform work. Electricity mediates all of our senses, everything we use in our homes, and can power just about anything we use at work, to get work done.

Fossil fuels run power plants. Coal is still a huge source of power for electricity production. But renewables are encroaching. In some places, renewable power is cheaper…

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