Crossing the Rubicon Into a New Age of Clean Energy

According to the Writer’s Almanac, it’s the anniversary of the date on which Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River from Gaul back into the Roman Republic, starting a civil war; this whole event and the context in which it occurred is (as always) described nicely in their article on the subject. 

The importance of this event in history is so great that we carry the metaphor “crossing the Rubicon,” meaning passing a point of no-return, in our language more than 2000 years later.

I often wonder if there will be such an event in the migration away from fossil fuels, for example, a binding international agreement on carbon emissions, a date past which all coal-fired power plants will be decommissioned, and a massive multi-national effort to develop and implement clean energy solutions.   Though I’m hopeful, I rather doubt that such a thing will take place; the most likely scenario is one in which, a couple of decades hence, market economics themselves usher in enormous amounts of solar, wind and the rest, along with smart grid, energy storage, etc., as the costs come down and make fossil fuel exploration obsolete.

The question, though, unanswerable as it may be, is: How much damage will we have done in the meanwhile?