Power Shift

I really liked this letter from the editor, Jurriaan Kamp, in the September 2008 issue of Ode Magazine, about the future of energy. Very inspiring compared to most of the other global warming/energy crisis literature I read. :)

This month’s cover story on the future of energy relates closely to the mission of Ode. We’re always looking for the seeds from which positive change sprouts. Finding these seeds isn’t the most challenging part of our mission; there’s no shortage of inspiring human ingenuity. The real challenge is seeing them to fruition, since creativity is so often met with skepticism and a lack of courage—or, more accurately, a lack of intelligent optimism.

In 1997, with Ode in its third year in the Netherlands, we published a cover story on the future of energy. It was a 21-page report about how technological breakthroughs could lead to a clean, renewable energy economy. The power of the sun is what I remember most from that story. In 1996, global energy use was 352,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules, or 352 exajoules, while the energy available to the Earth from the sun each year came with even more zeros attached: an astonishing 2,500,000 exajoules. The only challenge is to harvest its potential.

A decade ago, our story was undeniably futuristic. But this time around, the possibilities we were exploring then are becoming realities. Out beyond the naysayers wringing their hands over the end of oil, a promising future is rapidly unfolding. Positive change is outdistancing the skeptics.

It’s happened before. In Paris during the 1880s, even the most clear-sighted visionaries had a bleak picture of the horizon. If our city continues to grow at this rate, they argued, carriages won’t be able to ride along the avenues, but will be bogged down in mounds of horseshit. That was the experts’ conclusion. Then the automobile was introduced.

Today’s media are full of such dire prophecies. We read about peak oil and the disasters waiting to happen when the last drop of fuel hits the pump. Meanwhile, highly respected minds routinely underestimate the most powerful source of change: human creativity. They forget that the reason we don’t ride in carriages, or use typewriters, isn’t because we ran out of hay and paper, but that people invented better ways to do things.

Do you remember when you bought your first cellphone? I bought mine in 1997, the year of our other energy cover story. And when did you get your first Internet connection? In the past decade, industries like these have transformed society. It’s hard to imagine ourselves without such things now. Society has been decentralized. People work from home or from wherever they are. Nobody saw that coming. All the great technological revolutions happen much more quickly than anyone can predict. Forecasts for the spread of mobile phones and information technology were overtaken by reality. The same will happen in the renewable energy economy now upon us.

In fact, the impact of the energy revolution will be even bigger. Energy power still equals political power. But renewable energy means decentralized energy. We’re headed for a double power shift that will transform not only the relationship between man and nature, but between man and man in the rich North and the poor South. And the reliance on oil will be a thing of the past.

As an inspiring T-shirt says: “40 years of oil left. 5,500,000,000 years of sunshine left.” Don’t worry.