The Technologies We Can't Seem to 'Disrupt' Are the Ones Killing the Planet

Right now, a few decades-old technologies are not-so-slowly but surely consigning the planet to burn—and to melt—and gas-powered cars and coal-fired power plants lead the pack. As the chief contributors to planetary warming, there may never have been technologies in such dire need of 'disruption', to deploy the buzzword of our times, ever before.

Yet a new energy report from BP shows that our reliance on the ancient energy tech—'modern' coal power was developed in the 1880s, and the combustion engine rose to prominence in the decades that followed—is only continuing to rise, at the precise moment we need to phase it out. Coal consumption grew to its largest market share since 1970 last year. Oil remains the world's leading fuel.

As such, we don't just need to build newer and improved energy technologies—which we have, in the way of solar, wind, geothermal, etc—we desperately need to subject the old ones to Schumpeter-style creative destruction. The latest critical analysis of climate science says our best bet for avoiding catastrophic global warming is to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels—altogether—by 2050. In other words, we can't just settle for creating new cleantech; we really, really need it to displace the old. Asap. We need to disrupt.

Yes, disrupt. Sure, the execrable term has been elevated to bold new heights of banality in recent years, and it's been embraced as the ultimate business virtue by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and aspirants. These are supposed to be the days of disruption, they claim, where the stodgy industries and government bureaus from the pre-digital age are supposed to fall like dominos to sleeker, cleaner, more efficient innovations. Hotels, publishing, taxis, etc—they're all being Disrupted.

Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist whose thinking is probably most responsible for the current popular usage of 'disruption', originally described the process as "creative destruction." He calls it the "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one."

That's the 'disruptive' process, which typically has all kinds of terrible ripple effects, job loss and chronic insecurity among them. But it's precisely what we need to see happen with the energy economy.

Yet somehow, amongst this mighty flurry of innovation, and all the trumpeting of world-transforming technologies, we have failed to disrupt the only industry that is actively turning the planet into a Venusian hellhole. It's cool that we can rent out our spare bedroom to strangers for some extra money, and that we can stream videos online now, but I wonder how thrillingly disruptive those acts will seem when Florida is underwater. Human civilization would persist, I imagine, if the hotel industry were to remain undisrupted. The same might not be true with the fossil fuels industry.

See, right now, here's what the worldwide energy usage trend lines look like, as per last year's BP report:

Not nearly good enough. Renewables are inching upward, but so is everything else—especially coal.

Coal, the biggest contributor to global warming worldwide, remains totally, entirely undisrupted. It's not even dented. Remember, unless we draw down fossil fuel emissions to next to nothing by 2050, we're looking at far more than 2˚C global temperature rise, and severe economic dislocation worldwide.

What we really need, of course, is to see some actual creative destruction in the global energy regime. We need that trend line to look more like this, to use one of the Silicon Valley's favorite disruption stories; mobile's decimation of the landline regime.

Okay, it's apples to oranges—energy infrastructure is exponentially more difficult and expensive to replace and upgrade, and obviously the time scales are vastly different—but some of the parallels here are useful. Imagine land lines are coal, and mobile phones are the clean energy mix.

That's the trend line we need to see with global fossil fuel consumption viz a viz renewables—the former starkly declining while the latter scales up. And, as with mobile phones, one of the most promising modes of renewable energy is so-called distributed power: rooftop and community solar, home wind turbines, and, on the horizon, maybe, modular nuclear power.

Those are a lot more expensive than a new phone, sure, but the driving philosophy is similar; it emphasizes trading participation in a massive, hardwired infrastructure with a personalized, more nimble product. That's partly why companies like SolarCity, which leases home solar systems, are booming right now: they offer freedom and flexibility, as well as eventual cost savings. With the right incentives, the above picture is possible with energy, too.

To Silicon Valley's credit, it isn't as if it hasn't tried to invest deeply in cleantech. It has. There are some profound success stories: Tesla Motors of course, comes to mind, SolarCity is blazing guns, and smaller outfits like Solar Mosaic are growing fast. But they're often no match for the fast returns promised by apps and software, and fickle market signals over the last few years have seemed to dampen some investors' enthusiasm.

Anyway, this goes far beyond the Valley. The creative destruction needs to unfurl across China, India, Russia, and Europe, too—coal plants are still springing up across the world, and we can't seem to stop burning carbon. Since fossil fuels are so cheap to dig up and burn—unless you count the massive health and environmental costs, which nobody likes to do—no market is going to allow them to be disrupted on its own. It won't be as easy as finding a better technology, as we've already seen.

To achieve a significant enough disruption to halt catastrophic climate change, we're going to need a cocktail of new tech, strong policies, a global agreement, and, probably, a stampede of civil disobedience. It remains a little ironic—the technology we're least eager to disrupt is the one of the oldest, dirtiest, and most dangerous to the well being of human civilization. If we can't muster the skill, wits, and wherewithal to usher in a disruption of the shittiest technologies on the planet, maybe we deserve the planetary variety that will soon be headed our way.