A KISS FOR LUCK AND WE'RE ON OUR WAY:

In a huge hangar in Quonset Point, Rhode Island, welders are aiming blazing torches at sheets of aluminum. The hulls of three new ships, each about 27 meters long, are taking shape. The first will hit the water sometime in the spring, ferrying workers to service wind turbines off the New England coast.

The US barely has an offshore wind sector for these vessels to service. But as the Biden administration accelerates a plan to decarbonize its power generation sector, turbines will sprout along its coastline, creating demand for services in shipyards and manufacturing hubs from Brownsville, Texas, to Albany, New York.

Senesco Marine, the shipbuilder in Rhode Island, has almost doubled its workforce in recent months as new orders for hybrid ferries and larger crew transfer vessels have come in. "Everybody tells me recession in America is inevitable," says Ted Williams, a former US Navy officer who is now the company's chief executive. "But it's not happening in shipbuilding."

Nor is it happening in any clean energy sector in America. Across the country, a new revolution is underway in sectors from solar to nuclear, carbon capture to green hydrogen--and its goals are profound: to rejuvenate the country's rustbelt, decarbonize the world's biggest economy, and wrest control of the 21st-century's energy supply chains from China, the world's cleantech superpower.

The world is only just beginning to contend with what it means.

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