“It's too late to be a pessimist“

Martin, speaking to you today remotely, I see you’re wrapped up warm in your home office? The current energy crisis is causing people to feel the impact of the climate emergency first hand.

Yes, it's becoming real now. What we are experiencing is a completely new manifestation of the problem. In Zoom conferences, we are now outdoing each other with our bobble hats. We always knew that the necessary changes would be very deep, that it would be a structural break, the transition to a completely new systemic logic. And we expected the transition period to be rough.

What we didn’t know, though, was in what guise the change would come. And we didn't know how fundamentally our lifestyles would be shaken up. The energy crisis, supply chain disruptions and supply inflation are all giving us a taste of that now.

You say we are technologically capable of solving the climate problem, even without massive wealth loss, but time is running out. Basically, though, you’re optimistic?

We have some friends in this transformation: the regenerative power of the planet, the creativity of open societies. In the short term, though, technology is our best friend. It is a necessary factor for a rapid transformation, but we need more than that.

In some areas, we can see how powerful technology can be as a driver of change. Take the global energy transition. In 2015, the year of the Paris Climate Agreement, none of the required technologies – renewables, storage, electromobility, green hydrogen, green ammonia, green ethanol, digital grid control – were commercially viable. Today, about one quarter are market-ready and commercially competitive. We expect that, by 2030, that proportion may even rise to three quarters.

The complete interview is found under: https://lnkd.in/eizRfnu4