Clean Energy Is Coming. Faster! Faster!
To combat climate change, cleaner energy needs to replace fossil fuels. To do that, we must consider two overlapping factors:
- How to retrain workers from the fossil fuel industry to work in new cleantech sectors or redirect their skills to other sectors.
- To what degree fossil fuel technologies can be replaced with clean technologies or repurposed to function with clean energy in every sector from electricity to manufacturing.
Communities, states and countries dependent on fossil fuels are unlikely to fully embrace clean energy replacements until or unless they can ensure companies and state-owned enterprises won’t face a massive set of financially stranded fossil fuel assets and also gain confidence their workers will still have jobs.
This is especially true for developing countries in Southeast Asia and Africa that are still growing their economies.
Discussions around these topics will reach a fever pitch in November, when the United Nations hosts its annual climate conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a fossil-fuel powerhouse in the Middle East. UAE, along with other nations in the region, are investing heavily in renewable energy while maintaining oil and gas production.