Cutting Carbon Emissions

Some time ago, I had a call from my son Brian, who had come across a huge new wind farm as he was driving on one of the interstate highways in west Texas. He described the rows of wind turbines receding toward the horizon. Interspersed among them were oil wells. The wind turbines were turning and the oil wells were pumping. My son was fascinated by the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the past and the future. I said, “If you return 30 years from now, the wind turbines will still be turning, but it is unlikely that the oil wells will be pumping.” What he was looking at in a nutshell was the energy transition, the shift from the age of fossil fuels to renewables.