Energy transition and new ideas

Prepared for the Santa Marta, Colombia conference on the transition away from fossil fuels (TAFF), 24-29 April 2026, exploring underlying assumptions that need to be interrogated as part of the process.

Quick video introducing it here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:745272359013276467…

The following is based on a submission the author made to Brazil’s COP30 Task Force on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels.

Key points:

• Redefining prosperity. So long as success is measured by material accumulation and GDP growth, the transition will be structurally disadvantaged. Principles like moderation and sufficiency should receive greater attention in economic and political life.

• Strengthening collective action. The challenge is fundamentally relational: building consensus, sharing burdens equitably, and sustaining coordinated effort across diverse national circumstances — rather than collapsing complexity into binary arguments.

• Organising around learning. No nation has the blueprint for this. A framework built on iterative learning — replacing blame with understanding, embracing setbacks as exploration, and orienting action toward the common good — offers the most practical path forward.

The transition away from fossil fuels — just, orderly, and equitable — will be among the most consequential undertakings humanity has ever attempted. It will require an agreed-upon strategy equal to the challenge. Especially as recent geopolitical volatility is a reminder of how bound together the fate of nations has become, in no small part through their shared reliance on fossil fuels.

Much of the conversation in international spaces centers on the practical dimensions of the problem: the finance gaps, the technological requirements, the legal frameworks, the political obstacles. These are real and must be addressed. But the Bonn preparatory sessions for COP29, the difficult final hours in Belém, and the ongoing consultations for a TAFF roadmap all point to something that technical and financial analyses alone cannot explain. We know a great deal about what needs to be done. We are struggling to take the first steps to do it. This points to something deeper.

The most fundamental barrier may not be physical, technological, or even financial. It may be conceptual. Specifically: how do we define success? What are the qualities by which a nation, a corporation, a community, or a person is judged to have made progress? So long as growth and profit — as achieved through existing systems — remain the central organizing principles of our collective life, transitions away from a status quo will be difficult. Alternatives, however promising, will face a profound structural and conceptual disadvantage because of the legitimate material benefits that fossil fuels have brought about.

This is not an argument against prosperity. In fact, non-fossil fuel sources of energy are increasingly more profitable. It is an observation that the dominant conception of prosperity — one that equates it almost entirely with material accumulation, with GDP growth, with the capacity to consume — is the very framework that makes this transition so hard. Principles like moderation, sufficiency, and contentment find little place in growth-driven paradigms. And yet it is these qualities that a sustainable energy future will need to incorporate, not as moral slogans, but as organizing realities of human life.

A related barrier is what might be called path dependency — the deep grooves worn into our systems by decades of fossil fuel production, distribution, and consumption. These grooves have a technical dimension, of course. But the deeper challenge is fundamentally one of collective action. The paths in which we find ourselves are a product of human beings making choices in the context of other human beings making choices. In this sense, the relational challenges before us are at least as significant as the technical ones. Overcoming them will require a meaningful strengthening of collaborative capacities: the ability to build consensus across diverse stakeholders, to articulate a shared vision of the future, to equitably distribute both benefits and burdens, and to sustain coordinated action through setbacks and reversals.

It is also worth noting that the fossil fuel conversation is too often framed as an all-or-nothing proposition, a false dichotomy. The reality of circumstances around the world is neither universal nor simple. There are places where leaving fossil fuels behind in the near-term would, today, provoke economic and other disruptions beyond any reasonable request. On the other hand, there are places where attachment to fossil fuels is more a product of convenience than necessity. Collapsing this complexity into a binary tends to promote argumentation, foreclosing avenues for meaningful action. A just transition will have to honor the genuine diversity of national circumstances while still moving, together, in a coherent direction.

What might a framework for that kind of movement look like? The answer, I would suggest, lies in an approach built around learning — not as a rhetorical commitment, but as an operative principle. Transitioning a global civilization from one energy base to another, in ways that are just and sustainable, is a feat without historical precedent. No nation or segment of the global population can claim full knowledge of how it will ultimately be accomplished. It is a goal that humanity as a whole will have to learn its way toward, together.

Adopting learning as a primary objective — rather than a welcomed byproduct — would require significant changes in how we approach and evaluate our efforts. Quick and simplistic designations of "success" and "failure" would need to give way to far deeper reflection. Concerns for blame and credit would need to be replaced by a shared search for understanding. Setbacks would need to be embraced as natural features of a process of exploration. And planning, action, and the assessment of action would need to be iterative, systematic, and motivated primarily by concern for the common good.

Such an orientation is not merely a matter of procedure. It points to something more substantive: a widespread ethos of service to a cause beyond one's own immediate interests. Communities that have successfully reorganized their collective lives around more sustainable patterns — and they do exist, in diverse forms around the world — tend to share this quality. The cause to which people commit can take many forms, but it is expansive: it extends outward, to communities beyond one's own, and forward in time, to generations not yet born. This orientation is what allows growing numbers of individuals, and eventually entire communities, to commit their energies to endeavors that transcend political cycles, funding cycles, and even the human lifecycle itself.

The transition away from fossil fuels is, in its deepest nature, a civilizational project. Treating it as such — with the seriousness, the humility, the collaborative spirit, and the long-term vision that such a project demands — may be the most practical thing we can do.

SOURCE: https://www.bic.org/perspectives/energy-transition-needs-money-and-tech…