Want To Be A Techno-Optimist? Here Are Some Basic Guidelines

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Optimism for the future is an interesting stance to take right now, especially the strains of techno-optimism within more technically aligned communities such as cleantech and tech-centric news sites. Corey Doctorow has written about techno-optimism with a reasonable pairing of pessimism and optimism:

‘‘In order to be an activist, you have to be both: pessimistic enough to believe that things will get worse if left unchecked, optimistic enough to believe that if you take action, the worst can be prevented. Techno-optimism is an ideology that embodies the pessimism and the optimism above: the concern that technology could be used to make the world worse, the hope that it can be steered to make the world better.”

We live in a world increasingly impacted by global warming, where our leadership is as much under the sway of short-term corporate interests as our long-term personal interests. We live in a post-truth world where social media has been suborned by foreign powers and power-seekers to carve us into bubbles and feed us disinformation to trigger our votes and activism. We live in a world where the most powerful nation not only has abdicated from efforts on one of the most significant issues of this century, but whose leader mocks those efforts along with many other things.

Yet optimism prevails among most technically oriented people. We share headlines of promising research and new power generation gizmos, we share Tesla’s successes and we share stories of wind and solar’s amazing strides. We critique negative and poorly structured research such as the recent nonsense paper linked in headlines to MIT for an appeal to false authority asserting that wind farms will cause as much global warming as they save. [Word to the wise: it was published in Joule, a journal which didn’t exist a year ago and which doesn’t have an impact factor, by at least one author who has form making other statements about wind power that almost no one accepts and another who really loves geoengineering through insolation reflection as an answer to global warming. This paper has such poor provenance and grasp of physics that MIT should be embarrassed to be linked to it.]

There are tremendous reasons for optimism to leaven the challenges we will have with a world which will not stay within 2 degrees of warming. Electric cars, trucks and buses are taking off. Wind and solar energy are the cheapest forms of new energy and deployable in every country in the world. HVDC is now practical at much higher capacities and lower losses than traditional generation. 5G everywhere is a proven technology and starting to scale, bringing knowledge to every corner of the globe. New smart grid technologies are making our legacy physical infrastructure perform much more efficiently and effectively. GDP rise has decoupled from carbon growth for good. Our electric future is bright and amazingly efficient.

But that doesn’t mean we should be so optimistic about a utopian technical future that our brains fall out of our heads today.

To that end, what follows are suggested guidelines for techno-optimism. They are imperfect, but are the start of riverbanks to suggest the flow of thinking and to be able to articulate what solutions are worth being optimistic about. As with all good lists, it has exactly 7 items, not 12:

  • Accept reality
  • Respect scientific research
  • Respect engineering
  • Respect human nature
  • Respect scale
  • Embrace change
  • Be pragmatic

Accept reality

With change comes both opportunity and setback, and the benefits and pain are distributed unevenly. We are in the midst of a tumultuous period. Global warming is real, the attendant impacts of climate change are being felt in hurricanes and droughts, wildfires and rising waters. The promise of artificial intelligence is starting to be realized, with large numbers of jobs now requiring at minimum substantial change as computers take more and more direct control from humans. Social media has been weaponized, and traditional media has in many cases been corrupted by PR efforts for both good and ill, more so than in the past.

The physical world changes much more slowly than the virtual world, but both are transforming at an unprecedented and uneven pace. Keeping up is hard, never mind looking ahead with any certainty. It’s possible we are in a Kurzweil singularity of exponential and unpredictable change, but the limitations of our human senses prevent us from seeing it. Be humble about knowledge and perspectives on the future.

Respect scientific research

We understand the reality of the physical world through science. The people who toil, usually for long hours, little money, and little reward compared to other careers they might have had, deserve our respect. The papers they strive to publish should be reviewed carefully and thoughtfully. They should be considered in context of other scientific papers and in context of the hierarchy of evidence, with opinion at the bottom and systematic reviews such as the IPCC process at the top.

Respect does not mean blind reverence, but properly skeptical attention. When headlines about research papers appear, they should be treated with care and not immediately shared, even if they fit our biases of optimism or pessimism about a certain area. The underlying source should be assessed. Find it and at least read the abstract or executive summary. Is the paper in a peer-reviewed journal with a respectable impact factor or from a trusted institution? Does the paper support the often hyperbolic headlines, or is it much more cautious? Have the researchers or analysts asserted support for the press coverage of their research or are they cautioning that it is inaccurate? What quality of study from a data and methodology perspective was performed as best as can be assessed?

And understand that advances demonstrated in labs are a long and tortuous road from commercial and wide-scale deployment. What has been shown to work at a small scale may never be commercially viable.

Respect engineering

While scientists demonstrate possibility and enhance our understanding of nature, engineers build things which have impact. Engineers automatically start thinking about logistics, materials and capacity, not the art of what might be possible, but what is actually possible today.

While a scientist might find an interesting isotope of silicon to enhance solar panel efficiency, an engineer will look at material sources, cost and manufacturing difficulty. Things which look good in labs may work as prototypes, but may never be manufacturable in sufficient scale to actually deliver value. An engineer will look at prior art and attempts in the same space to see if something has been tried multiple times to no avail. 99% of engineers will look at hydrogen, see that it’s destined to be a fossil fuel with no distribution network and move on to something which makes sense.

When confronted with a possibility, for example air-borne wind energy, solar roads, or hydrogen fuel-cell cars, think like an engineer or find an engineering assessment on the domain.

Respect human nature

Which one aligns with human nature, the sexy, very quick sedan or the electric rickshaw with the worst attributes of cars and motorcycles?

We humans are wonderful things, capable of amazing art, thought, and sentiment as individuals. And en masse we behave in moderately predictable ways. When people are given a free market to buy anything that they want, they will buy things which are more convenient, more comfortable, sexier and cheaper, all else being equal. They will use climate control year round, they will eat tasty meat, and they will drive to the corner store five minutes away to get milk. They will drive around a parking lot for five minutes looking for a closer spot to the door rather than walk for three minutes. They will delude themselves into believing commute times that are only true at 3 AM on Wednesday mornings when buying homes that align with their internal vision of ‘home’.

If you want human beings to adopt something which is good for them in large numbers, it has to be more convenient, more comfortable, sexier or cheaper, and probably at least 3 of the above.

Hair shirts, short-range crappy electric cars — three-wheels or four — and giving up on creature comforts aren’t winning strategies. Any ‘solution’ which requires humans to behave against their nature in large numbers isn’t viable.

Respect scale

Global problems are big. Stupidly big. Enormously big. Any solutions to global warming worth talking about at length — as opposed to quietly just doing something about our own carbon footprint — should at least have the potential to be a 1% to 5% wedge.

Carbon capture sequestration has proven to be what was obvious from some simple math years ago, too small, too slow, and too expensive. Whether it’s magnesite, capturing CO2 from vehicle exhausts, or at-source coal-generation carbon capture, it can’t achieve scale. Tiny wind turbines won’t cut it either.

And part of scale is time. Internal combustion cars won’t go away in years, but decades. Fossil-fuel electrical generation will continue to decline, but we will still be burning fossil fuel somewhere for electricity in 2100.

Embrace change

When data changes and our biases and preferences are no longer supported by evidence, it’s time for us to change, not the data. As our lives are going to be disrupted by technology, look for the opportunity zones for our next career or gig. Our politics are proving to be whipsawed already in part by climate change, as the recent round of European elections showed after the Syrian refugees flooded into Europe. The world’s predictable boundaries are being redrawn and the lessons we thought were learned for life are now cast into doubt.

In some cases, this means accepting that battles we thought were long won such as abortion rights and near-universal vaccination have to be refought and arming for them. In other cases, it means accepting that many who aren’t techno-optimists are actively fearful of change and bringing them along the journey slowly with us.

In other cases, it means abandoning favored technologies which have not stood the test of time for mass deployment in sufficient scale to be a major factor, whether this is hydrogen or nuclear or carbon capture.

Be pragmatic

While wind turbines, solar panels, and HVDC transmission lines are no longer sexy new technology, just highly dependable modern technology, they are the backbone of the grid’s transformation. And while cars, trucks and buses are just that, they are by far the dominant forms of moving people around, and making them clean and green is much more pragmatic and useful than trying to get everyone moving through depressurized tubes above or underground, or trying to get them to buy electric tricycles. Accept that if nuclear fusion ever generates electricity in sufficient quantities to be useful, it will have nowhere to do it except in space.

If we ever arrive at a techno-utopia while still having bodies, it will have been done piece-by-piece, unevenly and incrementally. It will be continuous evolution and experimentation that leads to it, not revolution. The physical has actual rules, unlike the virtual, and while in some far distant future we might be able to sidestep some of them, we have these limitations for the foreseeable future.

It’s the foreseeable future our children will live in. It’s this world that all but the tiniest fraction will be born, live and die upon. When thinking and writing about technical solutions, pragmatism is a useful constraint.


We have the solutions to solve the problems facing us. It doesn’t take new tech, it takes deploying the tech we have and innovating around it, much more than inventing new gizmos. That’s the techno-optimist utopia that makes sense for the coming decades, not a laboratory experiment or insolation geoengineering pipedream. We don’t have to fix every problem, just the pressing ones without creating too many new ones.

As Voltaire said, “the best is the enemy of the good.”

In the spirit of incremental improvement, suggest ways that these guidelines could be improved in the comments. If good guidelines had been suggested previously but missed, please point them out.


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Michael Barnard

is a climate futurist, strategist and author. He spends his time projecting scenarios for decarbonization 40-80 years into the future. He assists multi-billion dollar investment funds and firms, executives, Boards and startups to pick wisely today. He is founder and Chief Strategist of TFIE Strategy Inc and a member of the Advisory Board of electric aviation startup FLIMAX. He hosts the Redefining Energy - Tech podcast (https://shorturl.at/tuEF5) , a part of the award-winning Redefining Energy team.

Michael Barnard has 702 posts and counting. See all posts by Michael Barnard