“Beating the Oil Companies Is the World’s Biggest Problem”

A reader notes:  I live in New Zealand where 75% of our electricity is from hydro, geothermal, and wind. We could easily replace every bit of coal with more geothermal and be 100% renewable with political will. Shell in NZ wants to develop methane hydrates on the sea floor and make us a major GAS exporter to Asia!! Beating the oil companies is the world’s biggest problem.

I hear you, pal.  We have the technology to make this happen any time we want, and the economics are becoming more compelling every day.  Yet the politics, i.e., the confluence of big money and law-making, continue to scare the hell out of me.

The good news is that this can’t last forever.  Soon it will be untenable for Shell—or any other element of the fossil fuel empire—to continue to wreck the world for money.  There are numerous reasons for this that I present in my most recent book (Bullish on Renewable Energy), most of which revolve around the forces of pure market economics, i.e., how inexpensive all these clean energy solutions are becoming, and how they dovetail so nicely with one another.

The combination of electric transportation and wind energy is a good example.  We have huge amounts of off-peak wind in the middle of the night.  Guess what?  We have electric vehicles that need to be charged at that precise same time.

In closing, let me point out that you play a key role in ushering this along; the more people telling stories like yours the faster all this will become clear to the world around you.  Keep up the good work.