Tres Escenarios Energético Que Veremos en los Próximos 20 Años, Or (Roughly) Three Energy Scenarios We’ll See in the Next 20 Years

At left: “The need to replace fossil fuels.”

I’m sure I’ve mentioned that I’m trying to learn Spanish, an endeavor that has been much more difficult than I expected it to be, perhaps because I took it on fairly late in life.  The real challenge people like me face is conversation–and not so much speaking, but listening.  Where we can normally express what we want to communicate, we have the devil’s own time understanding what other people are saying, mainly because we can’t tell where one word stops and the next one starts, and the fluid manner in which Spanish is usually spoken (unlike, say, the precision of German) makes this particularly tough.

Reading in Spanish, of course, doesn’t present that difficulty, which is why, as long as I have my dictionary (spanishdict.com) open, I can read fairly well.

Here are excerpts from the article here, whose title is above.  The  three main scenarios are:

Los combustibles fósiles disminuyen, pero aún dominan. Fossil fuels diminish but still rule.

La captura de carbono espera en las alas. Carbon capture waits in the wings (whatever that means in this context).

La energía solar y eólica prosperan, pero los desafíos de almacenamiento persisten. Solar and wind energy thrive, but the challenges of storage persist.

My comments:

If the future looks like an extension of the past, this is obviously correct, but how much insight does such a prediction require?  Isn’t anything going to happen in the next 20 years that will shake this up?  And if not, what’s the value of the article itself?

More importantly, it’s time for all of us to stop promoting pessimistic crap like this.  If all this turns out to be correct, that means simply that living things on this planet face an unprecedented level of suffering.

Given that this isn’t what we want at all, how about this?  Construyamos un mundo mejor, or Let’s build a better world.