San Francisco, microcosm of the world. Solarcentury, microcosm of hope.
I write these thoughts with skyscrapers reaching into clouds around me, in a city that is doomed. A geological fault that rips through the entire outer shell of the planet passes in a straight line right through San Francisco. This geological phenomenon, the San Andreas Fault, has been undisturbed by earthquakes for a century. That sounds good, but is in fact awful. Faults like this, which are common around the Pacific Ocean, normally release their stress via many tiny earthquakes. Not this one. It is locked. But only temporarily. Over geological time it builds stress steadily until a periodic big release. The last release came in 1906, generating one of the most destructive earthquakes ever seen. The bits of the city not destroyed by the earthquake were polished off by the fires that followed it. The periods between the releases of stress on the fault tend to be around a hundred years.
The good citizens of San Francisco know about the imminence and inevitability of the next great San Francisco earthquake. They go about their lives in their pleasant city, in various forms of denial, in the same way that humans have liked to live on the lush slopes of tropical volcanoes from time immemorial. They kind of know about the threat. (Hotels like the one I am in offer coaching in earthquake survival on the TVs in their guest rooms). But they choose to forget.
San Francisco, it seems to me, is a microcosm of the world. Most of us choose to forget threats that do not present a clear and present and danger, even if their eventual probability is 100%. The two great oversights of our times, global warming and peak oil, fall in this category. Both can destroy our economies and ways of life. Both of the them we choose, collectively, to do little or nothing about. Few people outside neoconservative America deny any longer that global warming is a ruinous threat, though many deny or are unaware of the peak oil problem. These two topics I intend to cover, as their respective and related dramas unfold, in my blog on the Guardian newspaper's "Comment is Free" website http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jeremy_leggett/. In my Solarcentury blog, I want to talk about the solutions.
Yes, there are solutions, in the sense that we can hope to avoid the worst excesses of global warming and oil depletion. Solar energy is part of a family of low and zero carbon technologies that can tackle the problems. Solarcentury, dedicated as it is to making a big difference via the marketing of solar solutions, was set up as a microcosm for hope about the future, in particular in facing up to global warming. The core values of our company are positivity, courage and desire to lead by example. Our view is that if many other companies were set up, or changed, to follow our business principles, the world could be turned into a saner place with a survivable future. I believe that, for this idea, the time has come.
What makes me think this? Here are two things at the top of the list.
Such is the demand for solar energy in the modern world, and such is the skill and dedication of my Solarcentury team in meeting part of that demand, that Solarcentury has evolved into one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the UK. Seven years ago, when we began our commercial adventure, this was difficult to imagine, to say the least.
Such is the desire to begin investing in renewable energy companies, that I can address groups of investors who control trillions of dollars of capital - as I have risked doing above the San Andreas Fault - and find them excited and interested in the story. This was difficult to imagine even one year ago.
So hope lives. The solar revolution cometh. I will be writing about it in this blog, as it unfolds.
