Hope Is a Future Powered By the Wind and the Sun

For the second year in a row, fossil related emissions have not increased. This has never happened before with the global economy still growing.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

2016-04-24-1461531502-7707821-PugetSoundEnergy1.jpg

"I don't want to give up hope...I don't want to live that way", said fashion model Cameron Russell to her mother Robin Chase, on the inspiring Huffington Post series 'Talk to Me', where children interview their parents. The subject was the conflicted feelings associated with bringing a child into a world under the existential threat of climate change. Greenland's glacier melt has started two months early this year, and we have set new temperature records in each of the last 11 months, with March 2016 being the largest anomaly ever recorded...just beating out February. The notion that we are going to leave the world a better place for our children seems farfetched indeed.

Like Robin, I didn't really have to confront this issue beforehand, as my 'climate epiphany' came in the spring of 1988 when my first child, my daughter Layla, was about two months old. I had just sat all day listening to someone I had hired to unpack this 'climate change' thing for me, distilling the latest science and the projections for what was likely coming. I remember downloading what I had learned to my wife and a friend in the car on the way home, and I didn't get very far into it before all of us were in tears - except for the burbling infant in the car seat, blissfully unaware of what a mess we all have made about the world she is now in the process of inheriting. None of us in that beat up old Toyota will ever forget that day, or that conversation - in my daughter's case because she's sick of us telling the story.

But last week in New York, more than 170 nations signed the Paris Agreement, for the first time acknowledging what needs to be done - 25 years late, but not too late...we believe. There are many positive signals: Elon Musk's record breaking launch of the Tesla 3; decadal low fossil fuel prices have had no appreciable effect on the growth of wind and solar; coal companies going broke; the Financial Stability Board's pronouncements on the climate related risks to the global financial system; the growing divestment from fossil fuels by institutional investors; and of course, the rapidly growing installation levels and record low prices of both wind and solar power.

For the second year in a row, fossil related emissions have not increased. This has never happened before with the global economy still growing. The International Energy Agency attributes it mostly to increased efficiency and the rapid uptake of renewables, mostly wind power. GWEC's Global Wind Report, released last week, highlights that wind delivered more new electricity generation than any other technology in 2015, along with the rest of the story of the uptake of wind power around the world. Surely that's a sign of hope? A sign, yes, but now that we've slowed or stopped the growth in emissions we need to turn it around and get them coming down, and quickly.

There is an energy revolution underway, led by wind and solar, and technology advances and cratering prices for both technologies have shown to all but the most die-hard sceptics that we have the technology to solve the climate problem. There are two question: one - whether we can muster the political will to implement the Paris Agreement across the depth and breadth of the global economy; and two - whether or not we can do it in time. We don't have much time.

One of the implications of the Paris Agreement which is just beginning to dawn on policy makers and the power sector is that to have any chance of meeting the 2°C target, we need a fully decarbonized power sector by 2050, if not before; and if we're talking about 1.5°C it needs to be much sooner. So anyone investing in a coal-fired plant today has a high risk of having invested in a stranded asset. The financial community and most of the business community has gotten this message. They may not like it, but the writing is now clearly on the wall for all to see. We're in a race against time, but we have the tools, and if we fail, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

So Cameron, Layla, and the rest of you 20-somethings out there: Yes, we've made a mess, and yes we've dithered for decades while we knew what we had to do. But please don't stop hoping. Your planet, and your species, needs you to hope.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot