I’ve been thinking about, and later worrying about, climate change almost my whole life. As a kid reporter for the newspaper (back when there was a kid reporter page in the newspaper/back when there was a newspaper) I worked on a story on the greenhouse effect in the late 80s. The focus then was on CFCs and the ozone hole, which problem was essentially solved, but the bigger challenge remained: human activity is messing with the atmosphere and the consequences would be enormous.
Climate change led me into paying attention to politics (hello Green Party) and into academia (hello small group action) and for the many years I blogged regularly, I returned to the subject over and over.
And I’ve never seen a moment as exciting as this.
Back in 2006 I declared “now we have won”, that the great argument over whether climate change is real has been decided and now the question was what action would be taken. I’m pretty happy with calling that moment as the tipping point. The question of action though has been vexed. But solutions got stuck: human society is so heavily built on fossil fuels that trying to move away from them seemed to inevitably result in some path of greater hardship. People don’t vote for hardship. As things got observably worse on a scarily swift timeline, it was easy to get despondent. It seemed like we needed a miracle!
And, not a moment too late, we got one.
Solar is the answer. The right incentives were put in place after that 2006 tipping point to allow investment into the technology, and improvements came, and more improvements, and suddenly it was getting better faster than anyone predicted or expected, on one of those s-curve paths beloved of tech evangelists.
All the climate nerds I follow have been excited about solar for the last few years, and it keeps getting better. The numbers are staggering. Solar is the answer. The economics are absolutely clear: fossil fuels are old tech. Solar is VASTLY better, cheaper, more reliable, more environmentally friendly.
The basis of the science-fiction future is already here. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to let it slowly outcompete fossil fuels. That industry is enormously powerful and is doggedly fighting any attempt to dislodge it, and the pollution it creates is locking in worse and worse climate change. The challenge now is to break the political hold fossil fuels maintain over the world so solar can take its place in time to keep us all safe.
Like William Gibson said, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Changing that will be a good fight.
(By the way: nuclear is not the answer. Almost every climate nerd I follow made peace with nuclear power years ago, but solar still beats it on every metric.)