Thoughts on Thriving #3: Panic. Cleantech. Hope.

This is Thoughts on Thriving, and I'm Wayne Visser. And what I'd like to reflect on today, coming from page three of the chapter on hope in my book Thriving, is to think about panic. When I reflect on nearly drowning off the coast of South Africa, I realize that probably what would have killed us was not the waves, was not the current, the rip tide, but was the fact that we started to panic. And I think this is really relevant for the global challenges that we face, especially if we look back at the last year, with the Russian war in Ukraine, the scramble for fossil fuels.

We tend to get into panic mode. And that is a sure way to make irrational decisions, to take the wrong kinds of action. Now, I know that Greta Thunberg, who I'm a great fan of, says that we must panic because our house is on fire. Where I agree is that we must take urgent, bold, decisive action. But that's not the same as panicking. Panicking is an emotional state in which we normally scramble and take rather rash decisions. Sometimes in a crisis, we will throw lots of money at a problem, we will come up with very inefficient and even inappropriate solutions.

That's when we panic. But when we decide that we're facing a crisis, that it's urgent, and we need bold action, then we can still move quickly. And we can move decisively, and we can take action - and we must take action. For sure, if I had done nothing, when I was being swept out to sea by the rip tide, I probably would have drowned. So action was required. And it needed to be timely, it needed to be decisive. But the sense of panic that I felt led me to thoughts of giving up, of losing hope, of perhaps heading in the wrong direction. In fact, I was fighting directly against the current instead of moving and swimming diagonally towards the shore.

So this brings me also to what I've been reflecting on over the past week or so. And it's actually good news that's come out about 2022. In particular, I want to focus on low carbon technologies. The panic response to the Russian war in Ukraine, the subsequent energy crisis, combined with a cost of living crisis, and the climate crisis, was to panic. And to have a feeling that we're going back to fossil fuels. There's this mad scramble for coal and oil and gas, and we're opening new fields for exploration and in some cases, we're opening new coal fired plants.

And that leads to a false impression, because in fact, since the war in Ukraine started, around 20 European countries increased their targets for renewables. Not only that, but when we look back at 2022, if we first focus on Europe, renewables accounted for 22% of the energy mix - that's solar and wind primarily, and it represents a growth from the previous year. That is actually more than gas, wich accounted for roughly 20%. And even if we look at coal, which had a little increase, that's sitting at about 14.5% , down from 30% in the year 2000.

So we shouldn't be panicking. And this is borne out by the global figures as well. If we look at investment in low carbon technologies, we hit $1.1 trillion in 2022, for the first time equaling the investments that are going into fossil fuels. And if you look at different components of that, renewables, of course, continue to grow at a rapid rate. But the EV trend, the electric vehicle and charging network investment, jumped an incredible 54% from the previous year.

Be in no doubt, we are in the midst of a revolution. And we're moving rapidly in the right direction. Despite all of the resistance, all of the denial, all of the negative lobbying from the fossil fuel industry, this revolution is happening. It's happening at speed and at scale. There will be winners and losers. And I wonder, which will be those winners and which will be the losers. You can make your choice on which side of history you want to be on: you can be part of the acceleration.

And like with my story of nearly drowning, the critical thing, when we don't panic, is that we don't lose hope. We look at the facts. We stand back and we get perspective. We look at the trends. We understand how change happens, that it's nonlinear, that we're in an incredible acceleration curve right now.

And remember that just in the same way that new technologies like renewables and EVs can exponentially grow, so too the incumbent old technologies can exponentially crash. In fact, there is some evidence that the decline of incumbent industries and old technologies is even more rapid than the typical growth of innovative new technologies. Basically, the dinosaurs go off a cliff.

And so be warned, if you're still in coal, oil and gas, the fossil fuel industry, if you're still betting on the old technologies, this is the time to make rapid shifts. And we see, if I reflect on Toyota, that some are already possibly too late. They've bet on the wrong technology. In this case, Toyota hung on to hybrids as its main strategy for far too long, and is now belatedly trying to catch up in the full electric market.

So it is a positive message for 2023. Despite all of the pain and the suffering that we're experiencing, despite the energy crisis and the cost of living crisis, we have reasons to be hopeful. We have reasons to believe that we're in the midst of a fantastic positive revolution towards thriving.