Disruptions and pain

What is a transition? It is shifting from one state to another and it entails change. So configurations and structures will have to change in order for that shift of state to occur – or those reconfigurations and structural-shifts are simply the transition itself. Over the past decades, there are some transitions that we kind of take for granted are necessary and we just allow them to happen even though they wreck a lot of havoc but most people may think nothing much of them. Then there are the transitions we haven’t fully agreed with in part because we think there are ways to stay in the same state, or that we are simply so vested in the current state that the new state feels ‘inhabitable’ to us.

Now I invite all of us to rethink those instances where we are resisting change because of that. Because of the thought that the new state is ‘inhabitable’ or is it?

Now the Energy Transition is going to be a major such shift in the world over the next decade or so. And the pace will accelerate – well, it must – in order to achieve the carbon-reduction targets that we have committed to at the Paris Climate Agreement. The world will have to radically change the way we produce food, consume products, move people and goods around. That will entail pain because activities which are geographically-bound previously may open up to more competition, communities and local economies created by the old ways of doing things may be destroyed.

We are going to find ourselves aligning with the resistance on some fronts at least; because we might think the new world on the other side of the energy transition is inhospitable for our habits, our lifestyles, at least for quite some time. But we have to think, whether our prevailing system, habits and practises themselves can eventually make earth, our one and only home planet, more inhabitable instead of the alternative on the ill-fated trajectory we are on.