Hey Tiger! Sometimes you gotta be up to be down. Sometimes you gotta flip the narrative. How can you do more by doing less? Less scrolling negative social feeds, more nourishing the mind. Less procrastination, more creative inspiration. Take a quick prowl through our curated jungle of positive news bites. They say a Tiger can’t change its stripes, but it can read between the lines.
Can you feel the energy? When Davos leaders start talking tipping points, it’s a tip that something’s shifting. A confluence of factors is accelerating the energy transition right now. From Russia’s disruption of EU supply, to skyrocketing energy prices, to Australia’s new PM spruiking plans for ‘a renewable energy power house’, to investor focus and exponential tech innovation. Remember when step-change used to be linear? Well, now it’s a dance between disparate tipping points. Let’s hit play!
Positive Tipping Point / | ˈpɒzɪtɪv |tɪp pɔɪnt |
effect
A Positive Tipping Point (PTP) occurs when the original system conditions have fundamentally been transformed so as to achieve a desired vision of the world.
Long Read: what are positive tipping points and how can they coalesce the global community? In the social universe, tipping points always emerge within a given social context or system of reference. They are usually triggered by an alternative vision of the future, followed by the building of transformative conditions and an eventual unfolding event, although we cannot predict when or even whether they will happen.
Watch: A young Malcolm Gladwell talks tipping points as a social phenomenon. If you have not read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Tipping Point, please do. 2022 is likely to be a tipping point for every one of us because our world has all of Gladwell’s characteristics, from connecting events to maven events, massive context change, and stickiness factors everywhere. The tipping point for clean energy represents the moment of critical mass, the threshold, and the boiling point. It is the point when everyday things reach epidemic proportions.
Read: What the war in Ukraine means for energy, climate and food. Russia’s invasion has caused a short-term spike in prices but could prompt a long-term shift towards sustainability. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has roiled the markets and geopolitics of energy, driving oil and gas prices to their highest levels in nearly a decade and forcing many countries to reconsider their energy supplies. But will Russia inadvertently prompt a long-term shift towards sustainability?
Watch: Triggering positive tipping points in power generation. In the UK, power generation from coal has dropped to almost nothing within the last five years. A carbon tax, an EU emissions scheme and increased generation from renewables combined to create a Positive Tipping Point: coal power became unprofitable.
Listen: Australia’s renewable superpower opportunity. Former Prime Minister From policy to technology, resources to resilience, Malcolm Turnball shares his experience and observations on the moves Australia needs to make to become a global energy superpower.
Watch: Aussie entrepreneur has been tipping hydrogen for decades, and the bet is paying off. I was fortunate to interview hydrogen innovator and CEO of Hyzon Motors, Craig Knight. Craig is an entrepreneur dedicated to taking hydrogen technologies out of the lab and into real-world applications. As CEO of Hyzon Motors, Craig believes the future energy system is a distributed system, enabled by self-generated hydrogen - a technology he describes as the great energy leveller.
Read: corporates pledge green without the washing. More than 50 corporations have joined a global “buyers’ club” that pledges to purchase aluminum, steel and other commodities made from processes that emit little to no carbon, a move that will be announced on Wednesday by leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Read: Rewiring the regulations to circuit break financial flow. Carbon markets have at last become one of the most widespread tools in the fight against climate change. By the end of 2021 more than 21% of the world’s emissions were covered by some form of carbon pricing, up from 15% in 2020. Ever more businesses have to pay regulators for the right to release a tonne of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Investors are getting interested too: trading on these markets grew by 164% last year, to €760bn ($897bn). That stacks up as positive news so far as tipping points go!
Scan: Nasa is keeping an eye on the earth, you can too. NASA’s Global Climate Change website hosts an extensive collection of global warming resources for media, educators, weathercasters and public speakers. Browse by topic and by media type, including videos, social media shareables, infographics, quizzes and interactives. It’s always refreshing to remember we are spinning on a globe with an atmosphere the proportions of a detergent bubble, and it's the only one we know of in the known universe.
Watch: if the answer is digging up the earth in order to save the earth… we’re asking the wrong question. Around Australia, new mining operations are being brought back to life. These miners aren’t digging for coal or gold, they’re hunting for other lucrative commodities – known as critical minerals. These minerals are a critical part of the clean energy transition, powering solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and battery storage. To power renewables, we will be pulling these minerals from the earth at unthinkable rates. Digging up the earth to save it is a linear answer to a problem created by our linear economy. A systemic solution requires us to think between the lines.
Quiz: What’s your energy level? Test your knowledge of energy and its role in our climate system with NASA Climate Change experts.
Take it Easy Tiger, and thank you to everyone who’s joined our now 18,000+ strong community of Easy Tiger and Love Mondays readers. We appreciate your readership. If you’d like to help us spread the word, we would love you to share Easy Tiger with a friend.