Since good news is hard to come by these days, I thought I’d share some. We are entering a new era where there will be less respiratory illness and climate change, fewer political conflicts and wasted resources and more prosperity for the people of the world.

This is happening because we are becoming better at imitating plants. Plants utilize solar energy to grow and release oxygen, but humans have only been able to use it to dry clothes or warm our backs. That’s too bad, because enough solar energy strikes the Earth every hour to power human civilization for a year.1

To get our energy, we’ve had to dig up and burn the organic remains from eons past — in essence, stored solar energy. Those who control these ‟fossil fuels” have enjoyed wealth and power, and conflicts over this control have incited uprisings and even wars.

But we are leaving that world behind. Just like plants, we can now use sunlight directly, turning it into electricity for transportation, irrigation, air conditioning and other essential services. This makes that endless amount of energy available to everybody. Solar and wind, combined with cheap batteries and digital technologies to manage energy demand and supply, will allow all humans access to an electrified world.2

We are accelerating away from the dirty and damaging world of fossil fuels because of powerful physical, economic and emotional forces.

Trillions up in smoke. We’ve never really wanted fossil fuels. What we want are the services we can get when we burn them under controlled conditions.3 The physical reality — a major inconvenient truth — is that, when we burn fuels, we waste around two-thirds of the energy they contain (mainly as heat). So, to get the energy we use, we have to dig up, transport, refine and deliver fuels containing three times the amount of energy we actually need. This means we pay about $5 trillion annually to generate waste heat. Think about how much money we could save if we could get the energy we need more efficiently.

Enter cheap solar, wind and batteries. These technologies are much more efficient than fossil fuels in the sectors of electricity generation, road transport and low-temperature industrial processes. Humans ship 17 billion tons of fossil fuels around the world each year to support our current inefficient energy system, but we can get a similar amount of end-use energy from the sun and wind using only 300 tons of infrastructure annually.4

Solar panels take off like cell phones. Not only can we now get the energy we need with vastly less waste, but that energy keeps getting cheaper and cheaper due to the modular nature of solar, wind and batteries. Like cell phones or transistors, as production scales up, each unit produced gets less expensive. For each doubling of deployment, costs decline 20%, which only encourages more deployment. Innovation drives costs down even more. Just in 2024, the cost of batteries dropped by 40%, and the decline continued in 2025.

Similar astonishing reductions in costs have occurred for electric motors, power controllers and embedded computer chips, expanding the cost-effective uses for electricity. This remarkable shift means that ‟everything that moves, heats, lights up, computes, or converts energy is being rebuilt to perform better, faster, cheaper, quieter, and as a freebie, cleaner around electric technology.”

Plummeting costs now allow electric technologies to out-compete fossil fuels in economic markets (the health and climate benefits realized by not burning fossil fuels are significant bonuses). The Dolphin EV retails in China for less than $10,000. In India, solar with battery storage at the utility scale is cheaper than fossil fuels.5 While solar gets cheaper, fossil-fuel costs are being pushed higher as we must exploit ever more remote supplies (think of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or deep-ocean drilling). And there are only marginal opportunities for further innovation to reduce fossil-fuel costs — the most consequential improvements happened in the 19th and 20th centuries.

So physics and economics are driving our energy system towards solar power. Trump foolishly tries to prop-up fossil fuels and kneecap renewable energy (especially offshore wind), but the transition cannot be stopped. California is using almost 50% less natural gas to generate electricity when compared to just two years ago,6 and even China’s use of fossil fuels to generate electricity declined in 2025.

The same thing will happen, albeit more slowly, to gasoline consumption as EVs come to dominate transportation. The sales of gasoline-powered cars peaked last decade, and have declined by more than 20% since then. EV sales have grown almost 30-fold in that time, and now represent 25% of new cars, and more than half of new cars in China (the world’s largest car market). More electric cars are sold in the EU than non-hybrid gasoline cars. A whopping 95% of new cars sold in Norway are EVs.

Our leap to an electrified world is more pronounced in emerging economies, which are changing so fast that governments can’t keep up with events on the ground. It appears that installed solar capacity is actually almost eight times larger than official statistics in countries such as Nigeria, Columbia and Pakistan. (This phenomenon was identified in Pakistan when analysts tallied solar-panel installations using Google Earth and compared it to official statistics. It turned out that, in 2024, working totally on their own, solar installed by Pakistanis increased the electrical generating capacity of their national grid by 30%.) Electrification of end uses, from EVs to irrigation pumps, is advancing much more rapidly around the world than in the United States.

Some voices caution to curb our enthusiasm about the transition. Electricity ‟can’t do it all,” and there is no doubt humans will be burning some fossil fuels for many decades. But while certain important sectors, including aviation, shipping and high-temperature industrial processes (like cement manufacturing) remain highly reliant on fossil fuels, this will not slow the electrification of everything else. In 2000, it was projected that 25% of our final energy demand could be satisfied by electricity, but innovations in electric transport, heat pumps and related technologies have already pushed that number to 75%.

Power shift to the people. But perhaps most importantly, the transition away from fossil fuels will make people more self-reliant, prosperous and less vulnerable to markets, wars and shortages. Imported fossil fuels represent more than half of the primary energy in over 50 countries, draining national treasuries and creating dependencies that give fossil-fuel exporters enormous political leverage (the current focus on the Strait of Hormuz is a great example). But almost every country has renewable resources that are 10 times their current energy use. So it is possible to escape the tyranny of fossil fuels. Solar, wind and batteries can reduce fossil-fuel imports by 70% and save importing nations $1.3 trillion each year while making them safer and more independent.

The war with Iran, and the subsequent economic shockwaves reverberating around the world, is further propelling the transition from fossil fuels. Imports ​of solar panels by countries in Africa and Southeast Asia essentially doubled from February to March of this year. EV registrations in South Korea in March were twice as high as a year ago, while in New Zealand registrations nearly doubled in just two weeks.

Today’s electrical revolution is being compared to the transformational impacts brought about by the advent of refrigeration. Entire new economic relationships and industries — and boosts to human prosperity — are possible. The spread of renewable energy is Science Magazine’s ‟Breakthrough of the Year” for 2025.

The fossil-fuel industry will be forced into retraction as capital investment shifts to renewables (what if they held a lease for offshore oil drilling and nobody was interested? That just happened in Alaska). This reality is why the industry is fighting so hard against solar and EVs, but it is a losing battle, and the current supply squeeze is further sealing its fate. Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency described the fossil-fuel industry as a broken vase: ‟The damage is done – it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together.” Inevitably, Donald Trump’s ridiculous proclamations against renewable energy will end up on the trash heap of history where they belong.

Dave Roberts notes: ‟You can imagine a world where all or most countries are energy self-sufficient. That is a fundamentally new state for humanity to be in. We’ve never experienced anything like that… A whole new chapter of our time on this earth. We’re entering it and we have no idea how that is going to play out.”

The industrial revolution brought many benefits, but it entrenched humans in a polluting, hierarchical system of energy. We are now evolving quickly into a new era. As we learn to emulate one of the extraordinary abilities of plants, we have a chance to stabilize the climate, democratize energy production and use, and refashion a healthier world. It’s about time, and it’s very good news.

Endnotes