Let’s upgrade our intellectual rigor here. Do you sincerely believe that “PV + battery are sufficient for virtually anywhere in the world” even when it comes to viral disease, dictatorships and warfare, chemical pollution, deforestation, social epidemics (eg, drugs, social media), housing crises, food deserts, famine, etc?

You might be only considering the energy transition, but it is not as if the original author was strictly speaking of that topic, or as if that is all that matters for humanity on earth.

“I don’t see any other significant levers,” you say? Read from history: how about the great liberalizing effect of the Christian marriage and family policy that broke down filial kin networks and paved the way for markets, universities, and democracies by way of fostering impersonal trust? How about the smallpox vaccine? How about the incredible rise in population and economic activity upon the introduction of potatoes to Europe? How about the invention of ammonium-based fertilizers? This one will rankle some feathers: how about the incredible geopolitical twist and – yes – reduction in atmospheric carbon introduced by the development of fracking (enabling the transition away from coal)? How about the civil rights movement in the United States? The invention of nuclear weapons? Metallurgy? Chemistry? The shipping container? Large language models? Look around and you will see fulcrums everywhere.

Literally look around you, wherever you sit right now, and just consider the vast number of twists and turns that led to the current circumstance. Then imagine someone 500 years ago in Beijing saying something as foolish as, “we just need more movable-type printing, yeah, that will protect us from the Northern invaders, that will completely solve deforestation, that will protect us from famine… Hey you farmer over there, stop farming! We have movable-type printing! We’re good, we just need more of it!”

The simplistic model is very appealing; it is easy to wrap your mind around it, it is easy to communicate via viral essay, it is easy to develop optimism upon it. But it is not a working model. It is just too simple and incomplete. The various fulcrums I pulled out of my imagination above all worked because the world was complex. The people who invented and developed those fulcrums were effective because they embraced a complex model. They made the intellectually rigorous choice to reject naive simplicity when others tried to thrust it upon them.