Fuel cells that provide clean electricity for buildings and new-generation vehicles are nearing the market. Making hay while the sun shines. With the right mix of public and private initiatives, clean energy could ramp up rapidly. Shell Oil planners see renewables potentially becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels by 2020 and producing more than half the planet's energy by 2050. I just hope it happens in time to avoid melting the polar ice cap, or some other disastrous thing.
Time is of the essence.
Presidential science advisor John Holdren notes that if power plants on the drawing boards now are constructed, they will still be in operation in 2050. The 1990s were the warmest decade in at least 1,000 years, and 1998 was the hottest of those years. Now 1999 is going down in the books as the second-warmest year on land, and this past winter in the U.S. had the highest average temperature of any winter since the government began keeping records. The growing body of evidence for climate change recently spurred the heads of the top climate monitoring organizations in the United States and Britain to break with any past scientific reticence and clearly connect global warming with human activities. While climate scientists have been moving toward that conclusion for some time, a similar finding by the World Economic Forum came as a shock.