Energy is the master variable. Civilisation, climate, biology — all of it is downstream of how much energy we have, where it comes from, and what we do with it.
The grid is everywhere — and almost no one understands it. Gretchen Bakke · The Grid
Solar will dominate the world's electricity by the end of this decade. Chris Goodall · The Switch
Climate change is too big a problem to be left to ideology. Goldstein & Qvist · The New Fire
Across the climate writing, the systems analysis, and the policy mix, the same observation keeps surfacing: we are mid-transition. The fossil-fuel era is ending — not because activists won the argument, but because the physics of cost finally bent. The remaining question is how fast and how cleanly.
Wallace-Wells's The Uninhabitable Earth is the most-cited contemporary book on the climate stakes. Its central move: drop the language of 2100 and write about what the next thirty years already make likely. The slow-violence framing of climate is the single biggest barrier to acting at the scale required.
We have a remarkable amount of agency over how much hotter it will get. David Wallace-Wells · The Uninhabitable Earth
Bakke's The Grid documents the strange physical infrastructure that is the American electrical system — built piecemeal across a century, ageing, brittle, and now expected to absorb intermittent renewable inputs at scale. Her thesis: the engineering challenge of decarbonisation is not generation, it's the grid.
We have built our entire lives on a power system whose maintenance no one wants to pay for. Gretchen Bakke · The Grid
Goodall's The Switch made a then-controversial forecast: solar's exponential cost decline would make it the cheapest source of electricity globally inside a decade. Almost a decade later, that forecast is the consensus. The economic case has flipped. The remaining barriers are political and infrastructural.
Each doubling of installed capacity has lowered solar costs by about twenty per cent. Chris Goodall · The Switch
The pattern is consistent. Steam to coal. Coal to oil. Oil to electricity. Each transition took roughly fifty years. The current one is on schedule — except the timeline we have is shorter than fifty years.
Climate change is too big to be solved by one technology. Goldstein & Qvist · The New Fire