DESERTEC COMMENTARY: Look on the Bright Side: Climate Change Could Be the Best Crisis We Ever Had

The challenge of climate change could end up making the world a richer, freer, less warlike place. In fact, it's shaping up as 'the mother of all opportunities.' Those who 'get' this new value frontier will eventually build the 'Googles,' 'Toyotas' and 'BHPs' of the 21st Century - to the great benefit of society.

Why? There's plenty of energy out there other than coal and oil. Consider just one: "Clean Energy From Deserts."

A concentrating solar power array 1,300 kilometers on a side (that is, covering roughly 2% of Earth's desert areas) could satisfy ALL mankind's primary energy needs. That's ALL the energy consumed by Earth's six billion people -- including electricity, petrol, firewood and anything and everything else. That's alot of energy.

Other solutions could include tidal or wave energy, geothermal or wind built on sufficient scale.

Of course, no one's going to build a single huge global solar array, or a single huge windfarm, or a single huge tidal energy system or a single huge wave capture machine to power planet Earth. But a globally networked system of renewable technologies would create a diversified, robust, reliable whole immensely greater than the sum of the parts.

An internationally networked system of renewable energies using high capacity direct current cables would do for energy what the Internet did for telecommunications -- shrink marginal user costs to the vanishing point. Predawn geothermal energy generated from central Australia could power daytime air conditioners in California. Outback sunshine could power Japan's bullet trains. All that need be done is lay power cables similar to MurrayLink, Basslink and DirectLink across international boundaries -- just like we did with seafloor fiber optics. Skeptics once scoffed at those, too.

Imagine the knock on economic benefits of a revamped, interconnected global energy system revolving around internationally-transportable renewable energy. Here's just three: reduced energy market volatility, more effective monetary policy and, potentially best of all, poverty reduction.

Start with energy market volatility. In renewable energy markets, the power source (wind, sun, tides, geothermal) is free. Cartels can't distort or dominate trading. Energy price volatility becomes a thing of the past. Prices are flat.

Three trillion dollars is now spent annually on energy market risk management. That's a huge amount to waste on a zero sum game. By shifting to renewables and eliminating Middle Eastern and Russian oil and gas supply risk, wildcat exploration risk, 'peak oil' handwringing and the need to fund the upkeep and security of explosive and dangerous fossil fuel and nuclear infrastructure -- up to $3 trillion annually could be spent on better solutions like safe, proven, non-explosive renewables.

Consider the macro economic benefits. Energy costs are among the most volatile components of inflation. If energy prices stop being volatile, inflation will be easier to forecast. If inflation is easier to forecast, monetary policy will work better. If monetary policy works better, economies can operate at 'higher speed limits,' generating more wealth. If economies generate more wealth, everybody gets ahead. If everybody gets ahead, there's less political discontent that feeds political extremism. With less political extremism, politicians lose the opportunity to impose heavy-handed security, erode civil liberties and engage in xenophobic electioneering by creating phantasmagoric enemies. Ultimately, the War on Terror is a proxy war on the world's religiously-mobilised, globally-marginalised poor, who themselves are being manipulated by own xenophobic demagogues creating phantasmagoric enemies (ie us).

Write this on your forehead: battling climate change is not a technological issue. The technology is there. It gets better by the day. Battling climate change is an economic reform issue. It can be solved by opening markets, cutting crony subsidies and allowing capitalism to work. Climate change induced economic reforms offer huge gains for everyone. Even workers in 'vulnerable' coal and deforestation industries would win. Over the short-term, they could be paid 'not' to work. Over time, they'll reinvent themselves as greenies, becoming additional active stakeholders in positive change.

More efficient economies, less military expenditure, lower taxes, less xenophobia and reinvigorated civil society. Fixing climate change holds big opportunities across the board. And it can all be paid for with the trillions of dollars currently trapped in unnecessary, obsolete markets like betting on oil prices.

Once we catch on, climate change is going to end up a VERY 'good news' story. It's going to prompt needed economic reforms by giving them the boost they need. The bad news is that we wasted 30 years before waking up to this. If these reforms had occurred during the 1970s oil crises like they should have, we'd all be richer now. There wouldn't be a need for an "Oil War on Terror."

But let's get back to the good news. Awareness has come a long way in the short time since Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." The next step is to surf the climate change wave to a brighter future.