Here, electric mobility entrepreneur and clean technology advocate, Aidan McClean, gives a taster of what to expect in his new book, Electric Revolution: Myths & Truths about Electric Vehicles and Climate Disaster now available in paperback.
We are at a crucial stage in human civilization’s development. We may not survive the planet overheating due to climate change because of carbon emissions from our 200 years of fossil fuel burning frenzy. I have learned that we are in this situation in part because of lies and cover-ups from the hydrocarbon industry, internal combustion automakers, and vested fossil fuel interests. However, there is good news and a lot of hope.
Over the past five years of writing my book, I have zero doubt that we are living in the middle of a rapidly accelerating electric revolution. The momentum is now unstoppable and we’re past the tipping point. The age of internal combustion and ultimately the age of oil is at the beginning of its end. Almost every major automaker has now declared its intention to become electric.
If you have any doubts or believe that electric is not for you then think again. This is the equivalent of saying you would never buy a mobile phone 20 years ago. The story of the rise of Tesla and its fundamental change to the way we think about electric cars and mobility will go down in history as one of the great driving forces behind our third great industrial revolution.
The technology of the past century is no longer viable in this century. In the first 20 years of this century, we have massively increased our population, our consumption and climate pollution, however, we’ve also advanced technologies that would have seemed science fiction in the 1990s. From the Paris Agreement to individual action and a new corporate consciousness around climate change, momentum to a bright clean future is accelerating. Despite all the negative things I’ve learned, I am filled with hope about the potential of human ingenuity and ideas combined with passion and the necessity to solve our future.
The future is bright. On a clean, fresh, bright sunny day sometime later this century, your grandchildren will walk down a city street and as they walk, near-silent, clean, autonomous transport vehicles will drive past them. The glass on buildings will be converting sunlight into energy, micro static wind generation will be installed on rooftops, every store, office building and restaurant will be near energy self-sustainable and not relying on legacy power plants.
The stories from their grandparents about how streets were filled with poisonous air from inefficient fossil fuel burning machines and how the lights were powered by burning coal and oil, threatening the survival of life on our planet, will seem like the darkest of the dark ages to them. This will be the story of our second chance and how the electric vehicle rebirth was the catalyst that began our great green transition.
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