So much has been written about the urgency of the looming climate disaster that I’ll skip straight to the solutions. I am a climate alarmist, just as Churchill was a Nazi alarmist in the 1930s. But I am not a climate doomer. I am of one mind with Paul Hawken, author of Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, who believes that we can do this if we put our minds to it. The alternative is too dire to contemplate.
Every nation needs to achieve its transition to 100% renewable energy by 2040, acting with the same urgency that governments displayed during World War II. A team led by the Stanford University futurist Tony Seba has calculated that most of the world could transition to 100% wind, solar and storage by 2030 (1). Mark Jacobson’s Solutions Project team has calculated that the entire world could be powered by 100% renewable energy, using 44% solar, 50% wind, and 5% hydropower (2). Wind and solar, which are by far the cheapest sources of electricity, could alone meet global energy demand a hundred times over by 2050 (3). As one small example of what is possible, Denmark is planning an offshore wind-power island that will produce more electricity than is consumed by the entire country.
The volume of minerals needed, such as copper, will be huge, but the mining needed, compared to mining for fossil fuels, will decline dramatically (4). Instead of assuming that every family needs to own an electric car, we must plan systems of transportation that remove the need for car ownership, depending instead on safe separated bike trails, public transit, railways, and carsharing, as well as electric vehicles.