When i thought of it my hopes were mostly deposited on the automotive industry. Some big players (PSA, for one) will have full hybrid ranges in their line-ups, in the next 2 years. A fully electric land transport system (maybe excluding still long range hauling) could be around the corner in the next.. say, ten years, maybe? There certainly is a sense of urgency building up.
That is only 20% or so on total energy needs, transportation, and of course, that energy must still be produced. But what impact could it have if the common people on their everyday life stopped being direct polluters? Could it mean a sort of entitlement to demand other actors to follow the same high standard?
This is the optimist in me, of course. The realist sees mostly chaos in the foreseeable future.
But it hasn't really sunk in yet that this almost entirely a political problem. It's a failure of democracy and open government. Most Western governments have had genuine popular representation replaced by a cynical and compliant corporate statism, and this is the result.
A few years from now it's going to start becoming obvious that distributed regional generation is the only option that can work reliably, and that in spite of contiunuing security spasms, the centralisers will be becoming irrelevant. Regionalisation and the demise of central government may do more to make change possible than any technology.
Unfortunately not all regions will make it, and the ones which don't won't be good places to be.
