there was a lot It is a bane as to whether the world will come together enough to prevent catastrophic warming. There is certainly something to be said for that — we have gone astray at every opportunity over the last few decades.
Well, here again the canned food is in front of us and the end of the road is rapidly approaching.
Luckily, I tend to be an optimist. I think we’re still in a world of pain. Perhaps we’ll have to rely on some exotic technology like fusion power or direct air capture to bounce back from the brink. When down, humanity tends to survive.
Using computing and software as a guide, capital is expected to grow nearly fivefold over the next 30 years.
As such, I think many of the pessimistic scenarios for investing in climate technology tend to be overly bearish. Consider the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast. This forecast has habitually underestimated the growth of solar power for years. Since then, the agency has added better models to its toolkit, but it still makes predictions that have proven overly pessimistic.
In practice, renewable energy and other climate-related technologies are likely to follow a similar adoption curve to other industries. Given how broad and deep the impacts and benefits of climate technology are likely to be, we might even follow an accelerated version.
To see how climate change technology is surpassing current predictions, take a trip back to 1970, when the computing revolution began.
exponential trend
The overall trend of investment in the computing and telecommunications sector over the last 50 years has been exponential. However, that simple analysis shows significant growth that happened early on. It also fails to keep up with important technological advances that have spurred wider adoption.