It’s a verifiable fact that most of us who have advocated for a transition to renewable energy sources over the past years are deeply dismayed by the, not first, but second election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency. We are guaranteed decisions, policies, and regulations that will again throw us into the dark and dangerous age of fossil-fuel dominance and likely stall the energy transition four more years and even beyond.
Due to this political reality, it is difficult to find hope for changing the trajectory of global warming, and all that it entails, today. I myself find the prospects grim based on the current situation. Yet there are at least three elements of hope that I will cling to.
The first is the inability to predict the future. This is known to be true because the predictions of well-known world futurists have consistently been shown over the years to be no better than random guesses. The same has been demonstrated in the business crucible of Wall Street where random selection has been shown to be as good a stock trader as the so-called experts. What might seem impossible today could be the key to making the energy transition happen, and at a rate far greater than experts would predict. We call them game-changers, and many of them are on the lips of those knowledgable in the energy field. A breakthrough in battery technology could revolutionize the way we handle energy, make EVs less expensive than conventional vehicles, and enable solar and wind farms to become nearly baseload, meaning they can supply nearly continuous, constant power to the grid. A breakthrough in solar panels efficiency could make solar’s already competitive pricing become even more attractive to individuals and businesses. In reviewing technology over the past couple hundred years, it is more reasonable to think that something disruptive will happen than not. Who predicted the telegraph, the airplane, the desktop computer, the cell phone? I don’t need to have hope that some disruptive technology will hasten the energy transition — I know it will.
The second ray of hope is simply in the likelihood that a connected world society will act in its own interest. A good idea often germinates slowly, but then there can be a rapid spread like wildfire as the idea coalesces across boundaries that were thought firm. I often think of the phenomenon in England when the ability to peck open the paper caps of milk bottles spread quickly amongst blue-tit birds to enable the whole population after a few had perfected the technique. Or how trees communicate amongst themselves the timing of leaves to wither and fall in a coordinated autumn display. Or how the snowball rolling downhill gathers more and more volume in a non-linear fashion. At some point the innate advantages and benefits of electrification of everything will become overpowering, and the recalcitrance of governments and corporations to the energy transition will simply break apart and evaporate. Some may be perturbed that such late movement may seem not to be driven by morals but by self-interest, but the result is what we will applaud and relish. With few exceptions today, the collective minds of nations are not fully controlled; with information readily available on the web, or even person-to-person, most world citizens have access to the information that should sway them to support, and engage with, the energy transition. This may happen through a rapid process of group-think coalescence.
The third ray of hope lies in the aphorism of Margaret Meade: “"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has.” It is well-known among computer scientists that tiny perturbations in the input to a modeling program can cause radically different results, as shown by Thomas Lorenz decades ago. This is the origin of the famous “butterfly” hypothesis which says that a butterfly flapping its wings in Siberia may cause a hurricane weeks later in the Atlantic Ocean. The idea is preposterous of course for the real world, but what if millions or billions of butterflies act in concert across the globe? Such is the power of the numerous ardent advocates for the energy transition in nearly every nation. Is it too much of a fantasy to think that someday the steady beating of so many wings will produce a coordinated movement which draws even more into its vortex, leading to rapid, general adoption of electrification and renewable energy?