Chapter Four - 2024

Summary

The climate crisis signals a change in the technological order, a moment when our fundamental way of relating to the natural environment is rethought and, as a result, new political and economic arrangements become both possible and necessary. This chapter looks at previous energy revolutions and finds that they resulted in increasingly artificial systems granting their creators new and extensive forms of geopolitical power. The clean energy transition promises to enact a similar revolution as it unleashes new sources of energy, sharing many of the elements of information economics. The metaverse, artificial energy and zero marginal cost energy increasingly form a single complex. What we call ‘clean energy’ may turn out to be unlimited or unconstrained energy, at least if compared to the fossil fuel economy, since, on the one hand, it no longer relies on finite energy stocks and, on the other, it does not have the same destructive impact on the planet. Countries that recognise zero marginal cost energy as an opportunity to be seized rather than as a problem to be curtailed will be the ones designing and creating the world of tomorrow – the world everyone else will be forced to inhabit. The race to design and build the new global energy system will decide who runs it.