Earning Optimism in 2026

What comes after what's next? That's a more important question than how we'll fare in the next five to ten years. Clues are emerging

Today I’m going to describe some hard, apocalyptic truths about our short-term future. Basically, using fossil fuels for geopolitical extortion is resulting in catastrophe. But then I’m going to make three unapocalyptic claims: first, that fossil fuel coercion is becoming structurally self-defeating; second, that future material scarcities that can be used to coerce weaker nations are shallower and shorter-lived than their predecessors; and third, that the limiting constraint on industrial civilization is ultimately ecological rather than technological or political. Finally, I’ll show how this is cause for a (cautious) optimism about our mid- to long-term future.

A Bracing Shot of Bad

Let’s start with what’s going to go wrong. I’ll race through this, because your doomscrolling will already have filled you in on most of the details:

• Trump’s tariffs are causing financial and industrial flight from the world’s biggest economy, the possible collapse of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and a consequent debt crisis for America.

• Russia and the U.S. have weaponized global supply chains. The (illegal) attack on Venezuela and the cutting-off of its oil shipments to Cuba are America’s version of the blackmail Russia attempted against the EU with oil and gas. Expect more of this sort of blatant interference with other countries using oil for leverage.

• A collapsing US economy is the perfect breeding ground for full-blown fascism. The US midterm elections may be stolen, will certainly be contested, and the United States is actively funding far-right movements in Europe. Orwell’s vision of three ideologically identical superpowers, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, using mutual fear and hatred to control their citizens, is only one constitutional crisis away.

• This crap couldn’t come at a worse time, ecologically speaking. If things continue as they are, we are on track to see the worst of the IPCC’s climate scenarios come true. That will mean complete collapse of the global agricultural system, and an extinction event for much of the world’s flora and fauna. In a century the planet will look like the game Fallout, minus the radiation. The collapse will occur slowly enough that due to he ‘boiling the frog’ effect, people will blame whoever’s available at the time rather than the real causes of their misery.

The First Claim

The most important geopolitical lever at present is energy. For the past century, energy has come from fossil fuels. Two of the three Orwellian empires are trying to carve up the world into competing spheres by controlling access to those fuels; the third, China, has a near-monopoly on the production of solar panels, the emerging alternative. There’s a clear pattern to recent geopolitical events:

1. After Russia’s (Eurasia’s) invasion of Ukraine, it attempted to blackmail Europe by throttling its oil and gas supplies.

2. There’s America’s (Oceania’s) recent attack on Venezuela, which is also about controlling oil. The US has cut off Cuba’s fuel supply, in an apparent attempt to starve its people into submission.

3. China (Eastasia) is playing with different pieces, but the game is the same. It controls most of the global market in solar panels, and wants Taiwan back not just out for historical reasons, but because to control Taiwan is to control the world’s supply of computer chips.

Now, accepting all of this… According to BloombergNEF, global investment in the transition to renewable energy hit a record $2.3 trillion in 2025, up 8% from the previous year, with all four investment indicators—deployment, supply chain, equity finance, and debt issuance—moving upward simultaneously despite significant trade disruptions and geopolitical tension. Trump is trying to reopen coal plants, and here in Canada, Alberta’s government is going all-in on oil production, lobbying and coercing the Feds to help it build new pipelines for what it perceives to be a stable international market. But these initiatives are not working.

US clean energy investment actually hit a record $378 billion in 2025, a 3.5% year-on-year increase, despite the administration’s sweeping anti-renewable policies. Now, it’s true that this was mostly driven by transport rather than generation, because coal-fired electricity output in the U.S. did increase 13% from a year earlier. But coal is more expensive than renewables; supporting it financially merely digs the US government deeper into a fiscal hole. Solar and wind are now expanding fast enough to meet all new electricity demand—a milestone reached in the first three quarters of 2025—and for the first time across a sustained period, renewables generated more electricity than coal globally.

These facts weaken the argument that renewables can’t scale fast enough to outpace the growth in demand. We’ve reached an inflection point, where the next year or two may show that argument to be false. Which brings us to my first claim: that the cost of renewable energy is rapidly falling below the threshold where coercion-induced scarcity can be sustained long enough to achieve these actors’ political goals. In simpler words:

Petro-hegemonic coercion is becoming strategically self-defeating at an accelerating rate.

The Russia vs. EU case is a great case study. Russian gas imports dropped from 45% of EU imports to 12% by 2025 , and crucially, on January 26, 2026, EU countries formally adopted a regulation permanently banning Russian natural gas imports. Europe was coerced and responded by localizing energy production.

Admittedly, they were able to do this because the coercive event (the Ukraine crisis) happened after renewables had already crossed a cost-competitiveness threshold, and because the EU had the institutional capacity and capital to execute a rapid transition.

The end result is energy-independence for Europe. Russia’s coercion backfired. In Systems terms, what was once a stabilizing mechanism for fossil fuel power (scarcity creates dependency creates leverage) is now a destabilizing one (scarcity creates transition incentive creates accelerated independence).

Cuba’s situation is different in several ways:

• The EU could mobilize €300 billion. Cuba, under a blockade, has severely constrained access to the financing that clean energy deployment requires. Solar panels and grid infrastructure require upfront capital, and coercion and capital starvation often arrive together.

• A transition can outpace the political damage from the coercion. In Cuba’s case, the economic catastrophe is immediate; the renewable buildout, even under favorable conditions, takes years. The question is whether the Cuban state will survive the intervening period in a form capable of executing the transition.

• Importing solar components, inverters, and grid equipment is itself subject to trade restrictions. This suggests that renewables themselves may be subject to the same coercive architecture as fossil fuels, at least in the short run.

In the short- to medium-term, therefore, petro-hegemonic coercion accelerates the transition in states that have the institutional and financial capacity to respond. It may prolong suffering in states that don’t. So right now, Europe’s example suggests that the decay of coercive power is real, but is a self-defeating strategy in proportion to the target’s resilience and access to alternatives.

You might object that there’ll always be some scarcity that can be used as leverage to bully other nations. You might be right; let’s look at that possibility.

China’s dominance of the market in solar panels, and Taiwan’s control of microchips suggest that what matters is who captures the new dependencies that replace the previous ones. Critical mineral supply chains, battery manufacturing, semiconductor access for grid management: these are the emerging chokepoints, and China currently holds disproportionate positions in most of them. The post-fossil-fuel order may not be more multipolar and democratic than the petro-order; it might just reorder coercive leverage around new scarcities.

This seems to be why Trump wants Canada and Greenland: because we have the newly-important ‘critical minerals.’

But for how long are these minerals (lithium, rare-earth elements, cobalt) going to remain ‘critical?’

The Second Claim: An Accelerating Cycle

Take lithium. In 2025, nearly all battery-powered electric vehicles used lithium-ion batteries. Lithium is not intrinsically rare or difficult to work with, but convenient reserves of it are limited to a few locations. These same vehicles use rare-earth elements in their motors.

CATL’s Naxtra battery, unveiled in April 2025 as the world’s first mass-produced sodium-ion battery, achieves 175Wh/kg energy density—rivaling mainstream lithium iron phosphate—with a 500km range and 10,000+ cycle lifespan. Sodium batteries can hold their charge reliably at -40C, so they’re perfect for northern climates. By 2030, China is expected to account for over 90% of global sodium-ion production, but only because they’ve had a head-start in producing it. There are no scarce elements involved in building sodium-based batteries.

As I’m writing this, Donut Lab is claiming to have broken the back of the battery problem entirely. Their revolutionary new cell is currently undergoing independent testing; the results are mixed, but the fact that experts haven’t dismissed their claims out of hand is telling.

What all this suggests is that the current chokepoint is real, but the next generation of technologies are inherently more democratizable. Sodium is the sixth most abundant element on Earth, found in ordinary salt, and the manufacturing process is adaptable from existing lithium-ion lines. So the transition from lithium dependency to sodium is not just a commodity substitution. It’s a step-change in geographical independence. A country like Indonesia, or Nigeria, or Bolivia, doesn’t need specialized mines to acquire sodium—salt is everywhere.

Meanwhile, companies like Valeo are commercializing rare-earth free electric motors. And let’s not forget perovskite solar cells, which promise to be cheaper, more powerful, and use more abundant elements in their manufacturing than current PV materials. Perovskites still use lead and have shorter lifespans than silicon cells, but this is changing. They, too, promise to remove the scarcity problem from that segment of the electrified economy, and not in decades, but in a few years.

What’s ultimately important is not the fact that sodium-ion batteries and perovskite solar will genuinely democratize the means of production of energy, it’s that this turn of the wheel has taken much less time than the last one. Fossil fuels dominated for a hundred years. It took a quarter-century for us to go from renewables being a tiny niche market, to where we are now. It’s a matter of only a few years before the current generation of renewables technologies is replaced by even cheaper, more easily obtainable versions. The acceleration is clear.

The Third Claim: Ecology Beats Economics

Up to this point, I’ve been tracing the decay of dependencies in the energy and technology stack. But there is a more fundamental constraint that governs the entire global system: the ecological carrying capacity of the biosphere.

There is a maximum rate of physical transformation of any given landscape that is compatible with the continued functioning of that landscape as a life-support system. Beyond that threshold, industrial activity does not create wealth—it destroys it. Think of it this way: if all of Canada’s territory was factories, power plants, and the kind of open-pit surface destruction typical of the Alberta tar sands, what would be left? This ecological limit is not political or negotiable. It is thermodynamic and ecological. We could call it a saturation threshold for (traditional) industrialization.

The limiting constraint on industrial civilization is not, ultimately, energy or materials or chips or robots. It is the biological and physical integrity of the systems within which all of that activity is embedded.

This idea reframes what “development” means. The current model—maximize industrial throughput, then worry about ecological consequences—becomes not just environmentally problematic but strategically limited. A country that converts 80% of its landscape to industrial production has not become more powerful than one that converts 40%. It has become more brittle, more dependent on imports of ecological services it has destroyed domestically, and more vulnerable to systemic shocks.

There’s actually a body of work that quantifies this. The concept of “safe operating space” from the planetary boundaries framework, and more granularly, national-level biocapacity accounting from the Global Footprint Network, quantify the ecological saturation threshold per country. The data is striking: most high-income countries are already operating well beyond their domestic biocapacity, which means they’re effectively exporting their ecological overshoot to other territories.

A country like Indonesia, which has extraordinary biodiversity and biocapacity, has a strategic interest in not maximizing industrial conversion of its landscape—not just for ecological reasons but because that biocapacity is itself a form of national wealth and resilience that industrialization destroys permanently. The orangutan habitat is not separable from the carbon sink is not separable from the watershed stability is not separable from the food security. These are the same asset.

A Unique and Historic Opportunity

The unresolved question here is, is there a political economy that can actually operationalize this trend? Every political system we currently have rewards leaders who maximize short-term growth, not ones who manage toward sustainability.

Developing a true post-growth earthly civilization is the best approach—and the least politically tractable. It’s the only option that actually addresses the root rather than the symptom. But it requires something that no large-scale human society has ever voluntarily achieved: the decoupling of social meaning, status, and security from material accumulation. Every attempt so far has either been imposed by external constraint—collapse, war, ecological catastrophe—or has remained small-scale and fragile.

Within the framework of late capitalism, I see two possible ways forward. They both allow competition and unlimited growth to continue, but change where that growth happens.

The first is the “dematerialization” of growth. The most valuable companies in the world produce nothing physical, or produce physical goods as a byproduct of primarily informational value. A dollar of GDP in 1970 required vastly more material throughput than a dollar of GDP today in high-income economies. If that trend continues and deepens—if competitive status-seeking, creative expression, social hierarchy, and economic accumulation increasingly play out in virtual spaces—then the pressure on the biophysical world does genuinely reduce, not because people want less, but because the arena of wanting shifts.

The second option is to move industrial competition off-planet. This requires no transformation of the competitive drive, no acceptance of limits, no renegotiation of what constitutes a good life. It just needs a frontier. The problem is the timeline. The biosphere doesn’t wait for launch windows, and the scale of off-world economic activity required to meaningfully relieve pressure on Earth is not a 50-year project under any realistic assessment.

Still: regulating the biophysical space becomes easier as it becomes less economically central. The reason fossil fuel regulation has been so politically difficult is that fossil fuels were load-bearing for the entire economy. If the economy’s center of gravity shifts to virtual or space-based competition, the regulated biophysical remainder becomes more like a park than a factory—easier to protect precisely because fewer powerful interests depend on exploiting it.

Does This Trend Only Apply to Energy?

I don’t think so. The long-range trajectory for technological development in general, that I see, is increasing autonomy for production and reuse in circular economies. Lithium is a good example because lithium batteries can be recycled, recovering over 90% of their original components. More importantly, other potential scarcities such as food and fresh water have similar solutions that are evolving rapidly. The development of Solein is a “weak signal” of the trajectory for food independence. Fresh water can now be harvested from thin air and desalination is getting cheaper and easier. Industrial 3d printers are evolving rapidly. General-purpose robots can theoretically remove the scarcity of having a small workforce (and include capacities such as repairing and building one another). AI does the same for expertise. So, while the overall trend is barely visible at this point, the various signals are proceeding in fits and starts in a definite direction. That direction is away from Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia being able to control smaller states by choking their supply of life’s essentials. Taken together, it all suggests an eventual decoupling of human civilization from ecosystem services—making services we’ve been sucking up available again to the global biosphere.

This potential future is not Utopian. The transition period is genuinely dangerous—the semiconductor chokepoint, the capital access problem for lower-income states, and the political economy of growth all create real risks of conflict and suffering in the near term. We stand at a pre-apocalyptic moment in history, where things could still swing either way.

The reason we might still earn optimism is that these three development paths are not mutually exclusive; they could all happen at once. So we get dematerialization plus space development plus a slow but sure change of focus away from destructive growth cycles and toward circularity. The first two can fund the third.

What do you think? Is this analysis at all reasonable? Can we picture a future where we don’t necessarily change human nature or shift our political ambitions, but place them on playing fields that no longer negatively impact the earthly biosphere?

To me, it doesn’t seem like we’re building a “bright green” or ecotopian civilization. The path will be messy, gradual, full of setbacks, dead-ends and failed experiments.

But it does sound like a future in which we, and our planet, are still alive.

—K