Centerfield

And the Saudi's will be back to living in tents and riding camels. Oh, the horror!

Well, maybe not. All that desert could be good for solar power, too. But the energy monopoly would be broken forever, which might well break the Kingdom. And think what that would do to the financing of the spread of Wahabism across the world. Talk about ripple effects.

...well, except the adoption rates always slow as you approach saturation. It's easy to double when that means 1000->2000. You won't see every coal generator on earth vanish by 20 years.

But what really is hopeful is that it seems likely to be cost-effective for non-specialized applications pretty soon.

Well, once they've got solar power generation to the point of being really cost-effective, the last big hurdle will be getting power storage that both has the capacity to move a vehicle 250-350 miles and can be recharged in under 5 minutes (i.e. the time it takes to fill the tank with gas). Which it sounds like is getting closer than I had realized. After that, it "just" becomes a matter of rolling out the recharging stations around the country.

Yeah, who knows what the pace will actually be.

The thing that I find so encouraging is that people are responding to changes and finding alternative ways. They're really happening, and they're happening increasingly quickly. Right before our eyes. The movement in the last 5 years has been pretty visible, what with popularity of hybrids, increased incorporation of ethanol along with investigation of other methods of ethanol production, and growth in solar and wind power as the became viable due to a combination of improved technology and increased costs for fossil fuels.