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A second solution is to accelerate the capital flow, ensuring that lots of cheap capital is made available for renewable energy production. Most renewable energy is pretty much free once you’ve built the plant to capture it — nobody pays to make the sun shine or the wind blow. What does it cost to build the plant? It depends on how cheaply you can borrow money. A government-backed Green Bond4 — just like the Victory Bonds of World War II — is one way to engage all citizens in this project, not just venture capitalists like me and the bankers on Wall Street.
When the world’s banking system failed in 2008, governments around the world mobilized trillions of dollars almost overnight. The same scale of investment is required just to help us start to kick the fossil fuel habit. To ignite our imagination, I ask in each chapter the trillion-dollar question: What would you get if you invested $1 trillion? How many barrels of oil could you replace? What sort of infrastructure could be built?
This level of investment is not fantasy. The International Energy Agency predicts that the world needs to invest more than $45 trillion in energy systems over the next 30 years, to both meet expected growth and reduce carbon emissions by half. The question is, how do we want to invest it? Do we continue to invest in melting tar for our energy, or do we harness the sun? Do we continue to rely on a 17th-century technology — coal — or do
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we greet the 21st century with a brand new start?
The third solution is to simply walk away from the existing energy base. We need to abandon our coal plants. It’s totally irrational from a free¬market perspective, but necessary if we are to make this transition in time to save the planet. We could do that by drilling enhanced geothermal boreholes next to the coal plants, and replacing the boilers with heat-exchangers. It can be done.
When the microchip was invented, it changed the world. We are on the cusp of a similar economic and energy revolution. That revolution, though, will not come by itself. We need to stand up and make it happen. It will not come unless we want it badly enough, unless we work hard enough, unless we really commit ourselves to it.
To paraphrase the world’s most famous hockey hero, the great Wayne Gretzky: “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where the puck is.” By mid-century, our civilization must have broken the fossil fuel habit. Kick the Fossil Fuel Habit is a celebration of where we’re going and a clarion call to start heading in that direction now.
