Hey PP. Thanks for this. Useful set of questions. 

Thought I'd take a wander through, drop a few charts and blablah and such.

1. My primary concern has long been global warming. And the key techs to winning that war have always been solar and electric vehicles. Sure, wind could help along the way, efficiency too, and other useful things - like heat pumps. But anyone could tell that what would eventually turn the PUBLIC mind was always gonna be solar, and electric cars. 

Now, the cost of solar and such was always trending lower, but sooner or later almost every tech hits a wall and progress from there gets sludgy - and that posed a risk to solar. What if it stopped just short, and would mean we had to pay TWICE as much as with fossil fuels? Not good. 

But today... with solar... it's ALREADY entered a low enough cost zone that it already makes sense in big chunks of the world. Maybe not in all our hoods, but for hundreds of millions of people. And THAT'S a big enough market to move it along. Plus, the major barriers to cutting solar's price in half again have to do with the efficiency of installation and approvals, not manufacture. So THAT's another push downward. And finally, the next round of tech improvements are already in hand, and just need to be installed in plants. e.g. The world's largest solar firms already have these in hand. No magic future inventions required. 

Which means, yes, we now have the tools to make the transition beyond global warming.

The little 2 minute blog item below has four of the greatest charts in history on it. People should go look.

http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/striking-chart-showing-solar-...

For example, here. Look at the collapse - in orange - of solar prices. And the rise - in blue - of solar sales. BOOM.

And the one below is my fave. See that lightning bolt coming down? That's how fast the cost of solar has fallen. 

Now ask yourself. Do you see any reason why the cost decline of that solar lightning bolt will suddenly stop, completely? Slow down, sure. It has to. But stop? No way. 

Solar wins.

The reason I say the electric car is ALSO important is a simple one. We use oil, liquid fossil fuels, for our cars. Which means all the solar and wind in the world can't help us, since they produce electricity, right?

But once you have an electric car, you can now switch out your oil use, and plug-in your solar-generated electricity. The techies like to call this the "electrification" of our energy systems - so that you get not just power, as we do today... but also transport and heating, from electricity. 

So..... for instance.... you could have a solar panel, which would produce power for your lights, PLUS energy for your car, PLUS you can power your heat pump, to heat/cool your home.

Anyway. That's why I feel like the tools are now in our hands. [And yes, the cost of batteries and of storage is also coming rapidly down a slope.]

1B. Does this mean global warming is SOLVED, though? Errrm, no. This transition could maybe be done in 20-30 years, but we could also screw it up, and take 40-50-60. 

And the problem with that is, all that carbon we drop into the air will be up there for a long time. Plus, each bit we add pushes us over top of a few more natural thresholds. Which means we could accidentally, stupidly, push past a couple of big natural walls, and trigger runaway effects, and thus ruin the planet.

Shit can, in fact, happen.

So I'm kindof still keen on hurrying things along, eh?

That said, and while I'm against geo-engineering to try and stop global warming NOW, and very much suspect we'll do some smaller scale adjustments at some point in the future. You know, act like an artificial volcano and drop some reflective particles in the atmosphere. 30 years from now, I could see that being done. [Though I'm not a fan, obviously.]

Anyway, my point is that I really don't think life on Earth is doomed. At least not by activity in this front.

2. The Middle East, on the oil side, is f*cked. Seriously. And a lot of people, big investors, inside industry advisors, know it. They know they need to take their coin, now... and invest it on generating renewable power for themselves, and maybe to create some future export sales opportunities. A lot of people are out there are saying the big oil price crash has as much to do with future expectations as it does with fracking, and I tend to agree. Maybe some countries [the Saudis?] have just decided they want to own the next 10-20 years worth of revenue streams, in order to invest their winnings NOW, knowing that the long-term revenue picture for oil looks disastrous. 

Al Gore, by the way, has a new roadshow, which is built up almost entirely around the kind of statements I've made above. He's becoming blindingly positive, it seems. I'd say that, Al being Al, he's late, but better Al-late that Bush-never.

Russia? You much be joking. Their only chance is to sell Siberia off piecemeal to China. Oh wait. That's already underway? Well then.  Guess we better have some military distractions along the way.

3. Not convinced the self-driving thing is gonna be that big. It's running smack up against one of the last outposts of male self-determination [Imma drive my car], as well as one of the last tools in the hands of working class culture. Also, what happens when we start seeing accidents from self-driving cars? The first kiddie killed? This transition ain't gonna be smooth. 

And even if it is, I think there are 100 other forces more likely to shape our cityscapes. Like... working online.

4. Africa will change, but maybe we'll see its shape first in India. Go check out SunEdison sometime, and their movement into rural India. Aiming to give every rural Indian family electricity, for lighting, for cell phones, for..... Same in Brazil and likely same in Africa. 

Cellphone access, the ability to work/study at night, cleaner water, and as you say, maybe access to some electrically-driven transport. Pretty big forces. And NONE require centralized, capital-intensive, government action or construction. Solar + Batteries will give it to you.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sunedison-appoints-cathy-zoi-ceo-20300046...

Hell, I used to work on pedestrian-controlled electric vehicles, back in the 90's, and those things can HAUL loads.... Incredibly flexible, they're basically the motive power of an ox, only handleable through fingertip control. Wanna move crops, water, people? Easy. Chargeable through a solar panel. Cheap as dirt, don't need a road.

5. I've never felt, funny enough, that low cost energy will automatically free anyone or anything.

In fact, I know it won't. 

My dear old Manitoba sells its power to its citizens at 5 cents/kwh, and industry at 2 cents/kwh. That's basically as "free" as anyone's gonna see within the next 30 years. This won't be a driving force for change, as far as I can see, for average citizens. 

Now, for regions which are in extreme JAMS because of energy constraints, like a Ukraine etc., it absolutely offers a way to ease those constraints. So 20-30 years from now, we'll see less of that nonsense.

Will cheap-energy-accessing citizens go on to challenge the 1% more freely? I'm not sure the one leads to the other (sadly.) Mostly because the 1% will maintains strangleholds over food, military/police and many other things.

If the 99% are gonna change this, then..... the 99% are gonna change this. But it'll be through organized action by people, perhaps greased by the Internet, but not driven, magically, by cheap energy. IMHO.

6. Here's a longer article, from Tomgram, worth a read. Also worth noting that these links I'm tossing in are just from the last 2-3 DAYS. i.e. This stuff is now coming in a torrent. 

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175982/

Future? Nano stuff is cool. And one of its first major areas of gain is in the.... manufacture of better batteries. 

Space travel? I wish. I'm getting old, and hanging around fighting these backwoods-inbred-moronic political battles - that almost no one under 30 can even grasp - is beyond tiring.

It's just plain boring. 

We need a political movement that does 3 simple things:

1) Grasps that we now have a technologically-prepared path that will lead us beyond almost all the day-to-day battles we've been fighting these past centuries, and that WE NEED TO GET ON WITH IT; and,

2) That we're not going to waste another moment, not another breath, on the ancient-social-religious-nationalistic idiocies that shrinking minorities cling to. [Yup. They're clinging. Said it, meant it.] i.e. We're not spending another day arguing with these morons about the Insatiable Gays and the Wimmins and the Coloured Folk - that stuff is for the dustbin of history.

3) The 1% cannot get us to this future. They can only get THEM there. Worse, it's very apparent that their present trajectory is to get themselves to lifespans of >100, and to inhabited worlds elsewhere, ASAP. In the meantime, tropical islands and gated compounds are mere waiting areas. We, the 99%, can, in fact, get us there. Can get us ALL there. So that's what we're going to do. We're all gonna move forward, and we're all gonna have a damned fine future, and we're all gonna move into it, together.

Amen bro.

An interesting Technocratic view of a vision of a clean green future depending on the same rapacious dirty and polluting Industrial Civilization that created our present crisis. The claim of ' near-free electricity' brings back the memory of promises from the Nuke Industry of  ' clean electricity too cheap to meter.'

The main roadblock to this pipe-dream is that our economy and lifestyle are based on never ending growth and the early data has shown that the rapid expansion of solar/wind production has only added another, somewhat cleaner, source to feed this growing demand. US electric power demand will increase by 29% by 2040 and solar/wind may fill much of that increased demand but the base demand will still be supplied from fossil fuels and Nukes.

Solar/wind power may appear clean viewed from the downstream angle but its manufacture is an industrial process requiring huge amounts of carbon and other pollutant producing inputs. Massive new mining operations, processing, transportation and . the manufacturing plants will be required to achieve this goal and all of this has to be added to the carbon emissions already in the atmosphere.

Some Japanese industrialists have a plan to ring the Moon with solar panels manufactured by robots with lunar resources to broadcast power back to Earth but this plan will probably be too late to stop the catastrophe we face.