The time has come to abolish the combustion of coal, oil and gas for energy generation worldwide, along with the nuclear power threat. This is the historical challenge of today. It is unlike any other that receded it in the emergence of human civilization. It is unprecedented because it involves a collective choice to be made across a wide array of technological, social and economic conditions to go beyond the slow and messy process of blind evolution. A global renewable energy base is the very foundation of sustainable life on this planet. Only with it, massive afforestation efforts and lifestyle changes to higher quality and dramatically lowered material consumption become the essential elements of hope. A worldwide move to sustainable economic practice beyond green lip service may just still carry this promise: to rebuild the inherited system of wasteful abundance for the few into a basis for sustaining human life in a steady-state economy for all.
100 per cent renewable means an entirely renewable power base for the global economy, across the lifecycle of energy flows, embodied, operational, transport or stationary. In this world steeped in expensive and toxic hydrocarbon fuels and products it does not seem easy for anyone but isolated indigenous tribes to live up to this ideal. Nevertheless, the aim to rely on the abundant and largely free sources of the sun is clear, and it is necessary. A wave of innovations rises in infrastructure systems, personal transport or community development, successfully procuring non-polluting local electricity and thermal resources. Manufacturers begin to develop renewable production processes, and increasingly, producers of closed-cycle materials are keen on eliminating fossil carbon combustion content. This book is a snapshot of a dynamic picture, a world well on the path to sustaining human civilization on a renewable planet.
Is 100 per cent too ambitious? Climate change and fossil fuel production risks are now so massive that an anthropogenic carbon emissions balance has to be aimed at that is significantly below zero: current atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations will have to be lowered by at least 25 per cent through carbon sequestration in forests and soils to eventually return to preindustrial levels that is, if a choice is to be made to actively and purposefully compensate for human damage. Others may prefer to pray instead for helpful disasters : such as, say, the collapse of the Gulf Stream to slow Greenland glacial melting.
How to get there? The path is different for each person, community, company or country. For some, internal renewable resources can be maximized more easily, for others, regional and national programmes will have to be the more powerful agenda carriers. Weak local government will require strong action by state and national institutions. Developing countries in the grip of international lending leveraged policies will also benefit from a reform of these policies, to advance 100 per cent renewable targets not merely as desirable aspects of sustainable development, but the very condition on which to found sustainable aims such as, for example, the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs).
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