If it’s true\u2014 if<\/em> it’s true\u2014 it could change everything.<\/p>\n Carbon pollution: ended. Climate Change: mitigated at least, the worst scenarios averted (with hope for renewed stability once the current bolus of thermal inertia works its way through the system). Clean energy in abundance. A world where the boots of the powerful might even ease up off the necks of the rest of our necks, a world where resources are so plentiful there’s no real need<\/em> to kick us in the teeth just to maintain the swimming pool in your rooftop penthouse. (Granted, a lot of one-percenters might well go on kicking us in the teeth just for fun. Still.) The Utopia Express, leaving on Platform #4 in 2025.<\/p>\n Yes, there were questions<\/a>. There were skeptics. The comments on this Aviation Week piece<\/a> run the gamut from measured skepticism about deuterium-tritium reactions through to Youtube links that purport to show a working fusion reactor someone cobbled together ten years ago out of two coat hangers and an alarm clock. (Hell, a lot of the comments right here<\/a> on the ‘crawl show way more skeptical erudition than I could ever pretend to.) But Lockheed Martin<\/em>. We’re talking technological breakthroughs here:\u00a0 if not them, who?<\/p>\n I moped, at first. All my carefully-researched environmental apocalypsi, obsolete. All my grim odes to the coming dark age, suddenly quaint and simpleminded. My own increasing certainty that I’ll probably end up freezing to death with a broken and gangrenous leg, huddled in the burnt-out shell of some Scarborough duplex while my step-pones, fighting over the last tin of Irish Stew, swing nail-studded 2x4s at each other\u2014 maybe a wee bit too pessimistic after all. Thanks to Lockheed Martin I was less relevant than ever.<\/p>\n But then a change started to come over me. “This could… this could fix<\/em> things,” I half-whispered to the BUG, as if speaking too loudly might somehow jinx the coming Utopia. “Things might actually get better<\/em>. In just ten years<\/em>.” A little later, down in the shower, I said it again, less hesitantly: “If we can just hang in there for another decade, we might be able to fix it all. They’re even talking about powering spaceships<\/em> with this thing.”<\/p>\n Of course it seemed to good to be true. But what if it wasn’t? What if life could actually be awesome<\/em>? Maybe I’d live to see warp drive and mini-skirted female astronauts with beehive hairdos after all.<\/p>\n And then I read this<\/a>.<\/p>\n Okay, so Alternet isn’t what you’d call a peer-reviewed journal. But they’re not talking about their own opinions here; they’re gloating about the opinions of a major European financial institution. Apparently, Deutsch Bank expects that solar will own the energy industry in a mere fifteen years. And they’re not the only ones: <\/a>this study<\/a> out of Cambridge also sees solar kicking Petro’s ass in the not-too-distant future. A new generation of batteries will crush<\/em> the storage issue. Forget cutting back on dirty energy for some airy-fairy reason like “saving the planet”; we’ll leave all that shit in the ground because it’s just not worth the cost of digging it out, given the cleaner, cheaper alternatives. The numbers seem compelling even to the oil barons themselves, if the industry’s <\/a>rearguard campaign against solar<\/a> is anything to go on.<\/p>\n We’re not quite there yet, of course. Coal’s still the cheaper option, and these new <\/a>Flow Batteries<\/a> aren’t quite up to the task at their current state of development, but within just fifteen years<\/em>\u2014<\/p>\n
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