Well, not yet, but one can hope for a rapid transition .
Check out this piece at Motherboard:
?In just 15 years, the world as we know it will have transformed forever. The ?age of oil, gas, coal and nuclear will be over. A new age of clean power and smarter cars will fundamentally, totally, and permanently disrupt the existing fossil fuel-dependent industrial infrastructure in a way that even the most starry-eyed proponents of ‘green energy’ could never have imagined.
These are not the airy-fairy hopes of a tree-hugging hippy living off the land in an eco-commune. It’s the startling verdict of ?Tony Seba, a lecturer in business entrepreneurship, disruption and clean energy at Stanford University and a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur….
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call me overly optimistic but I think it will be sooner. The advances that are being made in battery technology are coming so rapidly you read about them on an almost daily basis (like http://seeo.com/news-2014december9-funding-samsung). Just this week MIT scientists showed how, using ordinary commercial solar panels they were able to get 40% efficiency. That’s enough to make them very competitive. Add to that Elon Musk’s Solar City that will start to branch out and offer enough storage onsite so the average homeowner can mostly go off grid – one the new plant is operating. Add in the new business model of homeowners not having to buy the solar panels but instead another company installs them then charges them for the power generated. Then you have wind and other renewables coming on strong with rapid advances.
I liken these estimates more to those that come out in the IPCC reports of how fast things are changes, and less to those of futurists – they are always underestimated. Things are happening at a much faster pace than expected.
Will it be enough to save mankind from a 3/4/5/6 C increase, maybe. I doubt there’s anything that can be done now to prevent a 2C increase.
I hope so
There’s been good progress in solar power too – by Aussie scientists I’m proud to say :
http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2014/12/08/4144142.htm
@ Doug Alder : ” I doubt there’s anything that can be done now to prevent a 2C increase. “
I really hope and actually expect you are wrong about that because there are a lot of intelligent and good people working on the problem(s) and the alternative is truly horrific. Even 1 and a half degrees is going to have extremely nasty implications for our planet – I expect we’ll need to find some way(s) of actively lowering Co2 and other GHG levels.
I certainly don’t have all the answers though.
@Astrostevo sometimes reality simply is horrific. There is a huge time lag between when the CO2 goes into the atmosphere and when we can measure the result in warming – something on the order of 20 years or so. By the time any substantial action is taken at the national levels there will be many more hundreds of billions of tons poured into the atmosphere.
The biggest problem in ending the reign of oil is in transportation, not electricity generation. How do you replace hundreds of millions of vehicles, and who is going to pay for it?
My generation spent the post-war years glorifying the car, the suburbs, and highways, not mass transportation. As a result, North American cities are designed all wrong and retrofitting them for mass transport is going to be horrendously expensive – trillions not billions. Who is going to pay for it?
Solar, wind, tidal power generation along with enhanced geothermal generation will ultimately see the end of most coal production, so that is a good thing
I have great respect for the ability of science and engineering to come up with great technologies to move us towards those goals but I’m old enough to be very skeptical about any implementation that requires governments to get involved. One need only look at the talks in Kyoto, Copenhagen etc to see how governments, and the corporations that really govern them, actively try to block climate progress.
I want to believe some “miracle” will occur that sees the world through this mess but I’m cynical enough to fear we are at heart just giant apes that will let the hindbrain take over and doom us.