Futurist and author Ramez Naam is an optimist, even when it comes to the problem of climate change.

His personal history is all about progress. Naam’s father, a physician, grew up impoverished in Egypt; three of his siblings died as infants. He emigrated to the US and spent a decade working in rural Illinois, where doctors were in short supply, to obtain permanent residency status and raise his children as Americans. Naam, 42, grew up to become a computer scientist and executive at Microsoft, an inventor, and an award-winning author of science fiction books. “When people ask me, what was the most important thing to shape my life, that was it,” Naam says.



As a student of world history, Naam has seen how humanity has flourished in the last century. People live longer and suffer less than before. Doom-and-gloom predictions have not just been proven wrong, but spectacularly wrong. Take food: some forecast that the world would starve by the 1970s. While population has doubled since then, the food supply has grown by two-and-half times, and today there are more obese people than malnourished people in the world.



“This is the best of times,” Naam writes in his 2013 nonfiction book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. “We live in a period of health, wealth and freedom never seen before.”



Natural resources – notably the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases – may be limited, Naam argues, but ideas and innovation are not.

Lately, Naam has been sharing his can-do optimism, along with specific solutions, on his blog, at conferences (most recently Sustainable Brands) and as a teacher at Singularity University, a think tank designed to inspire and equip business leaders to tackle humanity’s big problems.

None is bigger than climate change, Raam told me when we met recently. This is because of its peculiar economic, political and scientific dimensions. The costs of fixing climate change are short term and local; the benefits are long term and global. Equity issues, meaning who should pay for higher energy or adaptation costs, are thorny. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide, which is being emitted at an unprecedented rate, persists in the atmosphere for decades, so time to solve the problem is running short.

Bringing billions of people out of poverty, feeding a growing planet and stewarding water resources while reducing greenhouse gas emissions “may well be the largest challenge that humanity has ever faced”, Naam says. “The problems are vast. They’re very substantial. They will not solve themselves on their own. But if we make a concerted effort, they are not insurmountable.”

What’s to be done? When Naam talks about innovation, he’s not talking simply about new technology. Innovative business models and policy are vital. “Technology innovation is often facilitated or bootstrapped by policy innovation, and it’s driven along by business-model innovation,” he says.

All require strong business leadership from big companies and startups alike, he says. Naam argues that capitalism isn’t the enemy of climate, as Naomi Klein has written; to the contrary, well-regulated markets will drive climate solutions.

Consider solar power, one of the technologies, along with wind, battery storage and, possibly, nuclear, that he’s counting on to transform the world’s energy system. “Over the last 35 years or so,” he says, “the price of solar modules has dropped by a staggering 150 times.” This is promising news, especially, to the more than one billion people without electricity, most in Africa and South Asia. They “almost all live in the sunny parts of the world, a lucky coincidence for us and for them”, he says. With help from the World Bank, India is now building what will likely be the world’s largest solar plant. “This is a disruptive technology,” Naam says.

To rapidly drive the uptake of solar, though, business-model innovation is needed. The US firm Solar City, for example, came up with what in retrospect is a simple idea: finance the upfront capital costs of solar for homeowners and businesses so they can pay-as-they-go and realize immediate savings. “That was a triple bottom line win,” Naam says. “It was good for the customers, it was the good for the planet. And Solar City created a $6bn market cap out of thin air.”

Many big companies, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, are already major buyers of clean energy, which drives prices down. “Every company and person that deploys clean energy makes it cheaper for everybody else,” Naam says. Now business leaders must take the next step, and become forceful advocates for smart clean energy policy, as Apple’s Tim Cook did last fall.

Policy is the toughest nut to crack, Naam says. Solar would not be thriving without government subsidies in the US and, even more so, in Germany. To drive clean-energy innovation faster and further, Naam, like a growing number of business leaders and economists across the political spectrum, advocates a carbon tax.



He’s got a simple, four-point plan for a carbon tax. First, pass the tax, give businesses and consumers five years to prepare for it, and start it at just $10 per ton of CO2. Second, raise the price by $10 a year until the US meets its emission targets. Third, put a tax on imports from countries that don’t tax carbon. Fourth, give all the money back to taxpayers, probably by reducing payroll of income taxes.

States and cities are already adopting innovative climate policies. Washington will follow, Naam predicts, as the cost of climate solutions continue to fall, and the costs of inaction become clear. “We’ll make progress when those two lines cross,” he says.