Chris Turner thinks that North Americans have boarded the wrong train on the wrong track. For starters, the fossil-fuelled machine can’t keep civilization on the move much longer because of rising costs. Moreover, a good number of nations and cities dependent on oil imports are now jumping platforms, Turner says. The world’s oil slaves in Europe, India and China are not only laying a new energy track, but inventing a different future. And they are doing just fine.
Turner, a Calgary guy, military brat and resident of Alberta’s full-blown one-party petro-state, calls his vision “the leap.” He says it’s neither far-fetched nor utopian. He also admits that it is not a slam dunk. His engrossing investigation of the globe’s green industrial revolution is also an astonishing piece of good reporting. It contains the sort of stories that rarely appear in our media any more as Canada increasingly salutes bitumen exports as a sort of totalitarian energy future. Turner, however, doesn’t have much time for the 20th-century bitumen establishment. Instead, he focuses on what is being fixed, renewed or retooled.
The journalist, former sustainability columnist for The Globe and Mail, writes like a charm. He begins with a few declarations obvious to a growing number of citizens. He argues that the world’s fossil-fuel supply has peaked and the burning of dirty and expensive hydrocarbons is undermining the economy. Because of rising energy prices, the globe’s financial system has already fallen apart. Last but not least, he believes that fossil fuels have acidified the oceans and darkened the skies. We can now choose the volatility of extreme oil (and its rising environmental sacrifices) or the promised stability of a green transition: Civilization can change – or decline.
Thus begins one of the most arresting arguments for building a green economy yet in print. Not only is The Leap free of chest-thumping ideology (Turner is a practical Calgarian, after all), it is chock full of interesting success stories as well as lots of green failures. Feed-in tariffs, the policy of offering long-term contracts to renewable-energy producers, is a revolutionary concept for building renewable-energy capacity that didn’t work well in Britain and Spain because those countries bastardized the winning German formula. Turner also makes it plain that the green revolution is being led by the same sort of characters who promoted the petroleum energy party 100 years ago: profit-seeking enterprises, municipal politicians and technology innovators.
But switching energy and business tracks takes both vision and luck. Turner notes that the Erie Canal, a project that transformed the U.S. Midwest and energized the city of Chicago, began “first and foremost as a cognitive leap.” It was an idea that the status quo couldn’t see any benefits from, yet it transformed the landscape because humans generally learn by doing, not by fearing things.
Turner identifies inertia as the greatest obstacle to green-leaping, or any kind of energy transition. “We are much more deeply invested in where we are than in where we might be able to go,” he notes. No one fought abolition harder than 18th-century slaveholders, who could no more imagine a world run by hydrocarbon slaves than Big Oil can imagine a world powered, in part, by green ones.
According to Turner, the future won’t be about disruptive technologies but rather disruptive techniques. It’s about tweaking existing ways of doing things “that leads to new ways of solving problems and organizing systems.” (It’s almost as simple as putting wheels on baggage, an innovation that took 5,000 years.) India’s Solar Electric Light Company, for example, lends money to poor people to put solar panels on their homes. The market-driven enterprise has installed 100,000 solar panels in rural villages without damaging the climate or the economy. In fact, it’s lightened rural life altogether.
