Have We Already Won the Renewables Revolution?

[kristopher]

38. It sounds like you're describing the inertia of the existing fossil system.

I'd define the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 as the moment when the collective leaders of "we as a species" made a conscious choice to move away from fossil fuels. The scientific contingent's consensus was that the most viable alternative was to be found in renewable resources* - beginning a period of intense focus on bringing the costs of the required technologies to a point where they would be economically preferable to the existing system of fossil and nuclear.

But my timeline goes back even further to the efforts initiated by Carter in response to the oil embargoes of the 70s. That decade laid the foundation for a strong public sense of unease about our dependence on petroleum specifically and monopolistically controllable energy resources generally. Even though the associated initial research efforts produced little of substance, the core research on renewables that would be gathered for Rio was initiated.

Kyoto and now Paris have continued to affirm the commitment to change which began in Rio.

Over the course of that time has the change been visible? Yes and no.

The research into lowering costs continued; first it focused mostly on ways to improve technologies for harvesting the identified energy resources. But then it began to spread to the area of improving manufacturing techniques. We are now in the third mass production stage where marginal costs are driven down by the cycle of increased demand leading to more investment in manufacturing. At this point, looking at the market globally and including the billions of people in severe energy poverty, the drivers for that cycle of increasing demand-investment-cost reduction-increasing demand quite literally cannot be broken by any foreseeable economic force the existing energy system owners can bring to bear.



*'Renewable Energy: Sources for Fuels and Electricity' published in 1993 by Island Press