If there was any place where one could most quickly get information related to Doctor Ultron without going straight over to stare him down, it had to be The Charity Ball. So Peter began visiting The Charity Ball more often, seeing whether he could learn anything from the homeless through his own connections—or, more precisely, Aunt May's.
"Looks like there are quite a few fewer people, Aunt May. Have things been pretty good lately?"
"Yeah. Stark Industries has come back from the brink, and Roxxon hasn't gone bankrupt either. New power plants are opening everywhere, so there are indeed fewer homeless people... but it's probably only temporary. I heard a lot of old coal-fired plants have shut down. In a few months, there'll probably be another batch of homeless people."
Tony Stark had successfully used the same move, "mutual destruction," to pull Stark Industries back from the edge of bankruptcy and bring it back to life, while also lowering electricity prices around the world. That had effectively ended this power war once and for all. If anyone still wanted to question Stark's product design, fine—then don't use it. Let the whole world use it and see whether every engineer on Earth was wrong.
But unexpectedly, neither Stark Industries nor Roxxon Energy had suffered much in their struggle. Instead, coal-fired power plants had gone bankrupt in droves. After all, the Arc Reactor was fundamentally an energy source, while oil, as industrial gold, was more essentially a raw material for chemical products. Even if it was not used to generate power, there were still plenty of places that needed petroleum products.
As for coal-burning power plants, they truly had no answer. Faced with the overwhelming technological advantage of the Arc Reactor, there was nothing they could do except resent Stark for not