Monday Morning Links

• Shell’s faster-moving scenarios envision annual solar installations exceeding a terawatt globally by the early 2030s — roughly the equivalent of adding today’s entire US power system every year. At that scale, accelerating, market-driven electrification becomes difficult to stop regardless of politics. Physics reinforces the trend, according to Shell: “Electricity is increasingly the most efficient way of delivering energy services, and electrification continues to expand across transport, buildings and industry.” Electric motors waste far less energy than internal-combustion engines. Electrifying industrial processes avoids many of the energy losses inherent in combustion. As Shell calculates, electricity’s share of final energy — the energy actually used by homes, vehicles, and factories — rose by two percentage points per decade for most of the past century, but is now climbing at more than twice that pace. [Faster, Please!]
• Herman Kahn, gregarious and rotund, is presented as the model “conservative futurist” in my 2023 book. President Ronald Reagan eulogized him in 1983 as “a futurist who welcomed the future.” [Faster, Please!] 
• Consider two statements by the Japanese prime minister and the US President over the past few months. Each leader called time on the prioritization of finance over operating competence. When Mr. Trump exhorted defense contractors to cap executive pay and put production before buybacks and dividends, he was asking them to act more like the Japanese conglomerates who are already doing these things (and who are often better at making and maintaining US weapons systems than their US counterparts). Consider RTX compared to Japan’s three “heavies,” all of which supply key components to RTX (and have had to share in multi-billion dollar cost to repair RTX’s mistakes in its civilian engine business). Between 2010 and 2024, RTX spent $40bln on buybacks against $26bln on capex and $39bln in depreciation while paying its CEOs (including Greg Hayes, who trained as an accountant) over $300mm in compensation. The three heavies spent $180mm (total) on buybacks and $40bln on capex while spending far less than the $5mm/year CEO salary cap proposed by Mr. Trump (all numbers from Capital IQ). It is no wonder that Mr. Hayes’ successor (a lawyer) needs Japan’s help in dealing with its multi-year Patriot missile backlog…help Japan’s heavies (all led by experienced engineers) can fortunately provide, while introducing a slew of new products from nuclear power plants to energy efficient turbines to advanced frigates and submarines in the bargain. [Japan Optimist]
• Most notably, if men and women have very different views or experiences of travel, this could influence how easily men and women pair up. If women see travel as an important form of identity-formation, a high-status activity, and a valuable form of leisure, but men disagree, then women and men might find themselves at odds over what activities they enjoy together, or that they have fundamentally divergent experiences of the world. Men who are unwilling to travel might even inadvertently broadcast to women that they have low social status. As it turns out, voluminous survey data suggest women really do value international travel more than men, and that women make up a disproportionate share of those traveling internationally for leisure. For whatever reason, international leisure travel is a disproportionately feminine activity, and one that women tend to see as part of their identity formation and growth. [Institute for Family Studies]
• Buzzi generated 40% of its revenue and 52% of its EBITDA in the United States in 2024. The company has doubled its U.S. revenue organically over the past 10 years, and its American assets generate margins consistently above other U.S. players. Yet Buzzi’s U.S. peers trade at 12x 2025E EBITDA. In Europe, Heidelberg and Holcim trade at 9x-11x 2025E EBITDA. By contrast, Buzzi trades at just 6.8x 2025E EBITDA, and that excludes €1.2 billion of value from its high-margin Mexican business and other minority-owned assets. If Buzzi was valued in line with its comps, the stock would be worth twice as much. [Kerrisdale Capital]
• The Natural Gas Pipelines business segment’s financial performance was a record for the fourth quarter. Growth in the fourth quarter of 2025 relative to the fourth quarter of 2024 was due primarily to higher contributions from our Texas Intrastate system, KinderHawk and Outrigger Energy assets,” said KMI President Tom Martin. “Natural gas transport volumes were up 9% compared to the fourth quarter of 2024 primarily due to LNG deliveries on Tennessee Gas Pipeline. Natural gas gathering volumes were up 19% from the fourth quarter of 2024 across all assets, with our KinderHawk system making the largest contribution. [Kinder Morgan]