Yet those numbers might even be too kind to fossil fuels. They presume that oil and gas will stay at their presently low price for several decades into the future, something without historical precedent. Even if you take away climate change, solar and wind makes more business sense than the status quo.
And just as with automation and work, the ground zero for where the Second and Third Disruptions will converge will once more be in transport, with the autonomous electric vehicle solving as many problems as the automobile did when it replaced the horse. A few short decades from now, the seemingly terminal problems of today will appear as absurd as the London manure crisis of 1894 does to us.
Racing to the Future
In the summer of 2017 the British government announced it would ban the sale of all petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040. While well-intentioned, that lofty ambition failed to account for a crucial point – with current trends there will be none left to buy.
The reason why is that the cost of energy storage technologies, specifically lithium-ion batteries, are falling at an even-faster rate than solar cells. In 2009 Deutsche Bank reported the cost of lithium-ion batteries as \$650 per kilowatt hour, predicting that figure would halve by 2020. Just like the IEA’s solar energy forecasts in 2014, however, those predictions were way of, with the price of the technology falling 70 per cent over the following eighteen months. As a result, Tesla now expects to produce batteries for \$100 per kilowatt hour by the early 2020s, although privately shareholders are told it could happen in 2019, while GM expects the same by
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