How the 2008 Crisis Quietly Rewired America’s Energy Economy
The 2008 financial crisis did more than trigger a recession: it marked a structural break in the United States’ energy trajectory. In the years that followed, the country began to decouple carbon emissions from GDP growth, driven by shale gas, efficiency gains, industrial shifts and the rise of digital infrastructure. That transformation now sits at the center of the cloud and semiconductor economy, where power demand is rising even as the carbon intensity of growth has fallen.
