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“You have to remember the seriousness of the climate challenge we faced in the 2020s to fully appreciate what we all did in the end.”
Thus begins the fictional account of journalist-from-the-future Stuart Rand, reflecting in the year 2100 on the revolutionary changes humans made in the 2020s in order to save themselves from the climate crisis.
This account is part of a six-part series from writer and entrepreneur Peter Leyden called The Transformation, which tells the story of how the United States solved its toughest challenges between 2020 to 2050 through retrospective interviews with Rand. In the series — which, like Future Human, imagines a better future and the ways it can be achieved — Rand also reflects on positive changes in tech, politics, and the structure of society, all of which we could start to implement, in real life, today.
Leyden imagines the 2020s marked by a commitment to scaling up renewable energy, led by solar power in California; a massive shift toward electric vehicles, fueled by the development of cheaper battery packs; the rise of autonomous vehicles, which reduced traffic congestion; and, perhaps most importantly, the cooperation of government and private business to meet climate goals.
Read about how we turned the corner on climate here: