Technologies Already in Development Will Render the Fossil Fuel Debate Irrelevant Within a Decade

Technologies already in development, Randall Carlson argues, are capable of transmuting the pollutants produced by fossil fuel consumption - rendering the central premise of the climate debate around carbon emissions functionally obsolete. Whether political factors allow those technologies to be implemented is a separate question, but the technical capacity is approaching, and Randall believes it will be in practical use within five to ten years.

The deeper point he is making is about the frame through which civilisation approaches its challenges. The zero sum game - the assumption that we are all competing for an ever-diminishing pool of finite resources - is one way to see the situation. But it is not the only way, and it may not be the accurate one. The alternative is expansive thinking: recognising that the constraints we assume to be fixed are often the product of a failure of imagination rather than a genuine ceiling on what is possible.

The Gothic cathedrals are his reference point. After 1130, across a 150-year period of sustained creative ambition, medieval Europe built some of the most complex, beautiful, and technically demanding structures in human history - driven by a culture that had decided the project was worth doing and found the means to do it. What they accomplished looked impossible before they began. Randall's argument is that the same capacity for civilisational ambition is available to us now, if we are willing to think at the same scale.