Cheap clean energy has broken the old trade-off between raising living standards and cutting environmental harm.

What these subjects mean

climate change Warming and what would actually move it: emissions, carbon, and the difference between a gesture and a lever.

batteries Storage as the thing that decides how much intermittent generation is worth building.

sustainability Whether human wellbeing and environmental impact still have to trade off against each other.

Mental modelTrade-offs

On the topicDo we shrink our way out of the climate problem, or grow our way out?under our view: Cheap energy is what made prosperity and lower impact stop being opposites

What they actually said

Holders over time

Do you hold this korrent?Do you also believe this?

In tension with

Breaking the trade-off between prosperity and the environment is an opportunity rather than something that will happen on its own.

These are the two halves of Ritchie’s own argument and they pull against each other on purpose: the deadlock has started to break, and there is no law that says it will keep breaking. She holds both, and the second is the sentence she says she always adds.
In tension with

The climate policy everyone has quietly assumed is that poorer countries stay poor, and that is the wrong answer.

Handmer and Ritchie both hold that cheap clean energy has broken the old trade-off, and they disagree about what follows. Handmer treats the outcome as an inevitability that the default climate discourse is too pessimistic to see; Ritchie insists in the same breath that it is an opportunity and not an inevitability. Agreement about the fact and disagreement about the modality is the more interesting half.

Shared subject first, then similar wording. They may agree or disagree.