Climate

Multiple exponential trends are coalescing to unlock rapid global decarbonisation. The fundamental technologies driving this have been exhibiting Wright’s Law for decades: the falling cost of solar and wind, the falling cost of energy storage (both batteries and hydrogen), the falling cost of engineering biology for mass production. These are each compound trends, themselves made up of sub-trends exhibiting exponential learning rates, and the long term resource requirements of the products built to run on these tailwinds are lower than anything imaginable under a petrochemical paradigm.

Nevertheless, adoption of new technologies with much greater long term potential is bottlenecked by vicious cycles perpetuated by conservative incumbents blinded by the innovator’s dilemma. The world is slow to awake to exponentials, and slower to awake to their convergence. There is no panacea technology that will fix everything, no “silver bullet”—rather, the transition will be from a mix of hydrocarbons to a mix of renewables and low-carbon fuels, supported by remediation of historic emissions. All must progress in parallel, as an ecosystem.

Moreover, despite the obvious long term optimality of renewable strategies in industry, decarbonisation will be only one part of a global effort to avert each and every fraction of a degree of heating beyond pre-industrial levels, but we acknowledge now that a broader suite of emergency technologies must be developed in parallel if we want to avoid irreversible damage. These include approaches that, for example, combine carbon dioxide removal with managing solar radiation, radical approaches to sink excess heat, ecosystem-scale engineering and beyond.