Sure, dystopia may be just around the corner. We may, in fact, be doomed – as climate change begins to accelerate mass species extinctions and threatens critical water and food supplies - but I wouldn't bet against the human race.

We are in the midst of an economic transformation unparalleled in the world's history. It's happening so quickly, and at such scale, that it's almost beyond recognition to most people.

It's enmeshed in deep, polarizing, conspiratorial political fights, further obscuring its rise. Dozens of the wealthiest corporations in the history of the world – and government leaders at their beck and call — are bitterly opposed to this transformation, and are determined to deny it.



And yet it exists nevertheless.

Great economic transformations occur in every generation — some through speculation (the Great Depression), some through greed (the sub-prime housing market collapse) and some, as now, through necessity.

This new transformation will be seen most clearly in two sectors – transportation and utilities. By 2030, the transformation will be nearly complete.

Within just a decade or so, electric vehicles will have begun to replace the internal combustion engine as the primary form of transportation in the United States and elsewhere. At the same time, solar photovoltaics distributed across many places locally will have disrupted the utility sector providing our electricity and power.

The reason is simple. Driven by the necessity to find non-carbon sources of energy before we reach planetary tipping points created by industrial CO2 that remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, renewable energy is in the midst of a revolution that is transforming the way the world produces and uses electricity.

The age of fossil fuels is actually coming to an end.

Solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower are providing vast new energy resources, replacing carbon-intensive fossil fuels, and eliminating the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said repeatedly that, in order to avert the worst impacts of climate change, the world will need to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius below pre-industrial times. We're approaching 1 C in 2015.

We now know, with a high degree of certainty, that we can achieve this target by reducing emissions in every country and by rapidly scaling up the deployment of clean energy to completely replace the burning of fossil fuels by 2030.

Though this timeframe may seem fast, clean energy is the latest in a long history of disruptive innovations — like television, the cell phone and the personal computer — that grow exponentially, shift consumption paradigms, and create a new technological reality in a relatively short period of time.



It's happening now, almost everywhere.

Today, the renewable power available in readily accessible locations from the three most common sources — sunlight, wind and water — is more than 55 times the power needed worldwide by 2030, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Solar power is at the epicenter of the clean energy revolution. The cost of manufacturing solar panels has been steadily falling for years, while the growth rate of utility-scale solar installations has skyrocketed. In 2014, more than a third of all new electric capacity in the U.S. came from solar, which itself represented 41 percent growth over the year before. Solar energy is right now at an inflection point of technological proliferation and low cost.

One of the fastest growing areas is photovoltaic (PV) installation for residential, non-residential and utilities. The cost for rooftop solar panels has been dropping so fast that they are now common equipment for homes in many parts of the country. The IEA predicts that by 2050, PV solar alone will provide around 16 percent of total global electricity production, a significant increase from its 2010 prediction of 11 percent.

It is only a matter of time before electric vehicles surpass internal combustion engine vehicles. The electric car giant Tesla is leading the automobile transition, with plans to open a massive new factory in Nevada by 2020 that will manufacture a new generation of high-efficiency lithium-ion batteries that will power an affordable midsize sedan.

The so-called "gigafactory" will drive down the cost of its battery packs 30 percent by 2017 and 50 percent by 2020. With the gigafactory's 35GWh of battery storage, Tesla plans to ramp electric vehicle production up to 500,000 cars by 2020. For perspective, Tesla says it produced 35,000 cars in 2014, with 40,000 Tesla cars already on the road today.

Morgan Stanley predicts there will be 3.9 million Tesla cars on the road by 2028, which will be able to store 237 gigawatts of capacity. That's 22 percent of U.S. electric generating capacity and more than 10 times the amount of grid storage capacity today.

Perhaps more importantly, the new generation of high-efficiency, low-cost batteries will help wind and solar energy industries with their current problem of intermittency, or the reality that we need energy when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining. Better energy storage will help grow utility-scale renewable energy, along with the overall growth and diversification of the industry as a whole.

All of this envisions a radically different energy and economic world on an accelerated timetable. And change is scary. But it also may be inevitable, and it's already happening whether government leaders choose to recognize and acknowledge it.

So don't place your bets on a dystopian future just yet. There's still time, and the human species has proven its ability to adapt and change before. It can do so now, even in the face of an existential threat.