Fragile fossil chokeholds: Current events accelerating the renewable energy transition across the world

Going by the headlines, recent events in the Middle East are accelerating the ongoing energy transition to renewable energy such as water, wind and sunshine.

Energy transition also known as energy system transformation describes the major structural changes occurring in energy supply and consumption in an energy system. 

2025 had already been recognized as a turning point year in this transition for many economies and economic blocs. Demand trends had flipped from fossil fuels to renewables for electricity. At the same time, electricity is increasingly becoming the motive power for vehicles. 

Now, early March 2026, before any of these reports are renewed for this year, there are already signs of an accelerated willingness to emancipate from dependence on oil. Today, an Ecuadorian engineer penned the pointed column which outlines the current scenario. A Korean professor warns us its time to redesign energy security. 

As the conflict involving Iran intensifies, one of the most sensitive warning lights in the global energy market has begun flashing. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s seaborne crude oil shipments pass, can trigger immediate disruption in global energy supply whenever a crisis occurs. It is also a crucial gateway for the energy that flows into the Korean economy. Lee Jae-seung

A senior tutor at an Australian university goes a step further to point out the fragility of the current system and the vulnerability of path dependence on this fragility. They articulate the implications for the energy transition:

The situation in the Strait of Hormuz also raises broader questions about the relationship between energy security and climate policy. Discussions about the energy transition often focus primarily on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, reducing reliance on fossil fuels may also reduce exposure to geopolitical disruptions in global oil markets.

Renewable energy systems differ from fossil fuels in an important respect: they are less dependent on internationally traded fuels transported through strategic chokepoints. Solar, wind, and other renewable sources can be produced domestically in many countries, potentially reducing reliance on volatile global supply chains.

For countries like Australia, this raises an important policy question. Expanding renewable energy capacity and electrification may not only contribute to climate mitigation but also strengthen energy security by reducing dependence on imported petroleum products.

Seen in this light, the global energy transition is not simply an environmental imperative. It may also represent a strategic response to the economic and geopolitical risks embedded in fossil fuel systems. Hoda Asgarian

This then sums up the rationale for acceleration of the energy transition to renewable sources and for electrification. Last week, Bangladesh had already arrived at the same conclusion: Experts urge faster renewable transition as Hormuz crisis threatens energy security. India was already ahead of them by three days; experts seem to be everywhere speaking up on the benefits of independence. Europe is not far behind Asian economies feeling the pain of a chokehold. 

“This is a moment to bring investments to ramp up plans to scale up electrification of the power and transport sector faster as the ultimate solution to energy security.”

Everyone is literally singing the same song as everyone else - path dependence is now unviable, undesirable, and unfeasible. We will come back to this moment in time in 5 years. 

Temporal overlay: when past knowledge and new understanding overlap at the moment of observation

 Just a few days before the formal submission of the thesis, as I was writing to a friend I was struck by a disconcerting sensation of temporal overlay. There aren't words to reference the experience so I'm making them up to describe the sensation. At one and the same time, I experienced the sensation of perceiving two snapshots in time overlaying each other: one from the past and one which would represent the future. These words feel clumsy as I struggle describe so let me use an example from that moment in time. 

On one level there's nothing new in what I have contributed in my thesis, from the practical perspective of the actions taken. On another, it is my perceptions of those actions which has completely been transformed. This really is what I learnt: how to push at my perception and my understanding to expand and deepen it as a means to rise above it all completely and see it anew. The narrative I use to describe my work changed, not the work itself. Hence the temporal dissonance when I sat there reading a paragraph describing the practical actions taken in the field. 

The temporal snapshot from the previous 20 years conveyed a familiar and well-known activity. Yet at the same time it was overlaid by the sensation of being able to see it in a wholly novel way. It is not that the old version of understanding has been completely replaced by the current version of understanding thus replacing and erasing from view the temporal snapshot from the past. Instead it felt as though my vision itself had changed (and, not my focal length either). Instead where I saw things in monochrome I was now seeing colour. 

I'll be honest, I don't think I had any idea of what I was getting into even as I knew I didn't have an idea of what lay ahead of me when I began the PhD back in 2019 (yes, its been a very long time and it wasn't meant to be so: the pandemic probably tacked on an extra couple of years for sure). 

Disentangling Science from Actionable Knowledge

 

Mercier, O. R. (2007). Indigenous knowledge and science. A new representation of the interface between indigenous and Eurocentric ways of knowing. He Pukenga Körero: A Journal of Mäori Studies, 8(2)

Maori physicist Dr. Ocean Ripeka Mercier's conceptual reframing of the interface where a plurality of knowledge systems must come together to collaborate, co-create, and co-design - as seen in the figure above - disentangles Science from the rest of Knowledge, thereby liberating all the other knowledges we make from being held up to the standards of the "physics paradigm of science" (Mercier 2007). 

Importantly, this framing liberates design knowledge (Manzini 2009) - that which is made by user researchers, UX specialists, participatory and codesign initiatives (among others) - from being held up to the same metrics of quality as that imposed by the positivist paradigm of the hard (natural) sciences such as physics. Mercier (2007) further distinguishes between Western/European knowledge systems and the rest of the world's own knowledge systems. She acknowledges that "indigenous" is a monolithic label for the technicoloured pluriverse of knowledges, each indigenous to its own locality and peoples but it does help simplify visualizing this conceptual model of hers as an epistemic tool.

Why would we need to liberate the fruits of UX research (for example) from being judged by the same metrics as a doctoral thesis in physics or mathematics? Until I saw Mercier's conceptual reframing of the interface where knowledge is co-created and realized the implications of the quadrants, I would not have been able to write the question above. However, once written down it makes it obvious that its not a question that needed to be asked. Why should the knowledge you make to help you codesign a healthcare app for elderly rural residents be held up to the rigid criteria of pure science? Far better answers than I could write are easily available from Helga Nowotny, who conceived the notion of 'socially-robust knowledge' - far more resonant with service design knowledge-making for practical and useful outcomes for society.

Yet, if I had not asked it, the question would never have been formulated at all. And, that's the favour Dr Mercier has done for us, putting a spotlight on what knowledge is being made and for what purpose.

Book Review: The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh (reprint)

 This was originally written and published elsewhere on 17th August 2022.

Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse is a lucid, well-written synopsis that rapidly introduces the reader to the legacy of the colonial and imperial narratives that destroyed Indigenous ways of living with the natural environment and the living planet, for profit, trade, and glory. I was moved last night to bookmark various passages from Ghosh’s book that illustrate my review. Other reviewers, such as Andrea Wulf in the Financial Times, have been similarly moved,

“The planet will never come alive for you”, Ghosh urges, “unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings, seen and unseen, that inhabit a living Earth.”

As Ghosh rightly notes, it is only ‘today’ – in the 2020s – that Western science and belief system is willing to consider the agency and needs of non-human life, and, to grudgingly look for ways to incorporate “IKS” – Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems in transdisciplinary climate sciences. Clearly, Gaia is revolting against the past 400 years of having been demoted to a dead, inert ‘natural resource’ that must be exploited to the fullest as a symbol of one culture’s beliefs of man’s place on earth. In my classes from the creative sustainability program at Aalto University I’d been introduced to the legacy of the West’s Enlightenment et al., on the strictly enforced suppression of beliefs rendered backward and primitive if they did not consider man (and christian european white man at that) as the only power to shape the planet. Ghosh not only synthesizes this legacy into a brief synopsis that captures well the argument but links it to terraforming efforts that technobillionaires crave for themselves today. As another reviewer, this time on Resilience.org, writes:

Terraforming — from conservation projects to colonizing Mars — is dependent upon denaturing nature, but it is also dependent upon dehumanizing most humans. As long as there is a “we” who decides, there are Others who are rendered voiceless. Or dead.

Ghosh traces biopolitical warfare to the works of 16th century Francis Bacon, who argued for ridding the planet of primitives and savages as the spiritual purpose of European Christians. Considered one of the father’s of the “scientific revolution”, is it any wonder that the story of rational science is deeply intertwined with beliefs of which living beings are worthy of life and which are to be exploited as beasts of burden? This is a story is worth reading, and reflecting on, for every university educated person pondering the future of our shared planetary home today. This is where decolonization of our thinking and belief systems begins – by tracing the emplaced and profitable narrative for Elizabethan swashbuckling and piracy to the dehumanisation and devitalization of all other life on the planet, all in the name of god and the scientific method. Decolonization of the mind is not just for the Others but begins at home with the roots of western science. As Ghosh says in an interview,

…in my view, it was really this violence that Europeans unleashed upon other peoples that ultimately became a violence unleashed upon the Earth. It was when they began to treat people as resources that the idea came to them that everything was a resource meant for the mastery of a very few. Because let’s not forget, the colonialists, the conquistadores, and so on, they were a tiny minority even within their own countries. They were elites really often. And they also unleashed the same kind of violence against farmers and the peasantry in their countries. Most of all, they unleashed it against women. This entire witchcraft craze in Europe is completely coterminous with this period of settler colonialism. And in effect, the violence that they unleashed upon really poor peasant women in Europe was modeled upon the violence that they had unleashed upon Native Americans.

One can see the lingering legacy of this narrative in the ideological/political battles raging across the digital zeitgeist today, as those who wish to continue with their right to exploit and profit battle with those who are waking up to the fact that the primitive brutal ones are themselves. As Ghosh says

“This is entirely an ideology of conquest and an ideology of supremacy, really. What else can you call it? But the philosophers who start articulating these ideologies are almost always connected with colonial states and with the colonial project”.
[…]
We have to find ways to restore life to the beings of the Earth who have been silenced over the last two hundred years. In this whole period that we call modernity, all these beings have been silenced. There’s a huge movement now called TEK, traditional ecological knowledge, which is again being appropriated and treated as a kind of resource, trying to use, as it were, traditional wisdom for “managing the earth,” as they call it. But this is exactly it. They don’t realize that this kind of wisdom exists in the context of stories, in the context of storytelling, in the context of songs. And all of that is what we’ve lost and what we have to try and bring back. [source]

The era of rendering things that you want to exploit and profit from as inert economic resources without soul, spirit or meaning – whether the human being who looks and thinks differently from you or whether the whales in the sea or the nutmeg in its tree – is obsolete. In the end, Ghosh’s parable is about rediscovering our ways back to making meaning of the world in which we live, together with all other life. And, this meaning will not emerge without deep resonance and wisdom, of our role and place in the complex systems that support life. Man’s footprint on earth must resize and reposition itself in its authentic humble and respectful place in this life support system.

An epistemological error

Let me return to yesterday's post to pick up the thread from Laininen (2019) which somehow got derailed into a discussion of proving one's humanity on the increasingly artificial interwebz. The irony of constantly having to prove one is not a robot is not lost however.

There is an epistemological error in Western thought, said Erkko Laininen (2019), as he tried to paint the landscape of education and curricula from the perspective of shaping more sustainable futures for our planet. 

"Do we have a blindspot?" he asks. Well, perhaps "we" do - and this "we" in quotation marks is a discussion for another day. For now, consider what I wrote yesterday on those of us conditioned by the academy yet not of the culture of origin where the academy's paradigms and worldviews are firmly rooted. Chilisa (2019) - one of my favourite citations these days - points out that the academy itself is indigenous to its own society and culture. I'll stop here before I derail myself again because I want to point out the epistemological error that Laininen (2019) found. In short, its the Cartesian divide. The root of the world's problems. Again that is a post for another day. Here I will simply quote Laininen (2019). (Yes, that's his name Laininen 2019 rather than like Anthem).

The epistemological error, according to Laininen (2019) has:

...its roots in the modern, dualistic worldview that replaced the perception of man being an integral part of nature. Separateness as an operative way of knowing and thinking reflects itself all around in the Western culture. We see our relations as win-lose games instead of win-win possibilities. We focus on parts of the system instead of their relations. We separate social and economic systems from nature, and base our decisions on reasoning with a false assumption of separateness of emotions and values. We believe in objective truth instead of accepting the existence of several, subjective explanations for reality.

According to Sterling (2003), the tension between the parts and the whole—the dominant mechanistic and the alternative organistic worldview—lies in the heart of this epistemological battle. (Laininen 2019:170)

Its the replacement of the holistic worldview by the Cartesian divide that is the knowledge system's epistemological error, IMO, not the consequences as Laininen (2019) describes in further detail, and then shapes the remainder of his narrative. The consequences are of course substantial and have been found to be at the root of much unsustainable thought and action (Laininen 2019). However, if we do not pinpoint the fact that "something" got replaced we won't be able to unearth what it was that got replaced nor to be able to resurrect it. 

So, what was replaced? And, why? Is it possible to find it again? Can it be brought into the light?

Let me do some digging on this to be sure because this was one of the sparks that I had to tamp down while focusing on completing my thesis, and so I was unable to pursue it after quoting Laininen (2019) on the epistemological error. 

A relationship with snow?

 

My relationship with snow has naturally evolved over the years that I've lived in Finland. I still recall my first view out the window, in April 2009, during Easter weekend, when I saw snow still on the ground in the park across the road from my apartment building. Oh look at that, there's still snow on the ground in April, I remember thinking. 

Having the experience of Chicago winters under my belt, living just a block or so from the lake, meant I was not a newbie to either the lake effect or below freezing temperatures.

What I learnt in Finland, however, was not that it was "warmer" than Chicago, but the embrace of snow as a part of life for a much longer span of time. Snow, here, has many different words to describe it although lumi is the most common word. Unlike English, snow has a different word if its a verb than when it is a noun, among other little differences. 

Someone asked me how I felt about the crunch of crisp ice crystals under my feet. To be honest, I can't recall experiencing quite that kind of snow so much. Instead, once it snows, such as the year I took the photograph above in the nature walk behind my old apartment, its the experience of walking through it, sometimes ankle deep (if not deeper), plowing through it would be a better word I think, that I most recall. 

After moving into the city center a couple of years ago, I've forgotten this experience. The snow not only doesn't collect in quite teh same way - I'm guessing its warmer overall with the hot water pipes running under the streets - but its cleaned up more often and its dirtier and slushier. Not as pristine as in the central city park. 

I guess I miss this kind of walk more than I thought I would, given that I grew up on the equator (tropical Malaysia and then later, Singapore). I've learnt a lot about snow over the years: its warmer after a snowfall; its brighter and the night can sometimes seem to shine when there's snow on the ground; snow is better than rain; and snow, a lot of snow, is intriguingly a perception of silence and safety. I didn't expect to realize I now have a relationship with snow, but it seems that I do.

Paradigms, worldviews, lifeworlds, and the Cartesian divide

 

Laininen, E. (2019). Transforming our worldview towards a sustainable future. 

In my previous post, I mention a discovery I want to explore further: that of realizing that changing my writing style by learning how to write research manuscripts for academic publication was not simply a change of writing voice but a transformation that had to first occur in my way of thinking. Indigenous scholar Rauna Kuokkanen (2007) would say I was undergoing the first hand experience of socialization by the academy, specifically that institution of higher education - the university. Kuokkanen, in particular, has written poignantly about this process albeit from her perspective as a feminist Saami scholar (2000, 2017, 2022).

Now of course I speak in retrospect - hindsight is always guaranteed to be 20:20 regardless of our own trifocals. At the time I was practicing my academese - circa March 2021 - I certainly wasn't thinking about changing my writing style as a form of paradigm change nor acculturation. But then again, unlike the vast majority of the scholarship I have reviewed over the past four years in particular I did not spent the bulk of my career inside the epistemological infrastructure of the academy. Thus I was not as suffocated by its normative pressures.

I had the blog. And it is the blog to which I return as to decompress - ironically, given that I've spent most of the past 6 months in fulltime writing; yet perhaps, not ironically, given that I had to curb every spark of thought and narrowly focus only on the structured presentation of a set of research questions. This is my liberation from that imposed structure and need to cut off every creative idea or train of thought. Sometimes excising entire pages, paragraphs, or simply sentences from my manuscript. I think this is why I came seeking out a place where I could think and write once more as I used to do, informally, once upon a time when Perspective first began. 

An interesting thing I discovered which I'd never understood from the outside was how we go silent in public, not daring to write, when we're in the midst of manuscripts for journals and construction of the thesis. I was terrified I'd say something as my fingers ran away with me so I just stopped. Now I want to come back and its a whole new world out here full of artificially generated content attempting to masquerade as a human. 

So how do we prove we are human? 

How do you find your voice?

At least three times in the past 21 years, since I first began the blog Perspective, I have deliberately sat down with a disciplined attempt to write in order to find a voice. 

The very first time was naturally when I first began blogging and the very first prototype of Perspective was called Prescience, it was private and hidden, and I can't recall the software but it wasn't one of the big blog hosts then populating the interwebz. I tried that for most of March 2005, before finally launching Perspective on typepad in April 2005. Back then what I had was a voice (now that I know the concept of having one) but no focus, according to one of my readers. Although, within a year or so, once I found a focus I simultaneously found an audience. At one point I was voted among the Top 40 bloggers on design. I think it was by 2007 or 2008.

The second time is less clearly identifiable so I'll pick June 2011 as the illustrative time period when I was authoring on someone else's blog as a guest and kept being guided into a more generic, more "professional", and less personal voice - that was probably the first time I have a clear memory of understanding a writing voice. That was also the beginning of the end - for years - when I felt I was moving further and further away from the blogger who began Perspective. 

This voice would keep sputtering like an engine with a blockage in the fuel pipe. It ended in writer's block interspersed with sporadic outbursts. It was never an easy voice to write in nor did it ever motivate me to blog the way my first voice, my design blogger, and Perspective voice did. That is, there was no personality. Today, I guess we would say those kinds of professional blog voices are what AI churns out by the mile in minutes.

So, now we come to the third time, in March 2021. Not only was I emerging from at least 5 years of a writer's block but I was well into my second year of doctoral studies with not a single research publication in sight. I had some rough first drafts but struggled in the middle income gap between having to unlearn 20 years of professional final report writing for clients and simultaneously having to learn the discourse of different research journals as well as find myself an academic voice. 

What I needed, I felt, was to sit down and learn how to write in academese - the language of the research articles accepted for publication by peer-reviewed journals. 

What I discovered was that it was not simply a writing style, it was an entirely different way of thinking.

I think discovering this fact contributed directly to the thesis I have now recently written and submitted for examination. Not it terms of helping to write the manuscript itself but in terms of the research presented in the manuscript. I will come back to disentangle bits of this as a means to decompress over time, not right now.

Now, I want to find a voice for Perspective once more. 

Someone just asked me the question which titles this post. How I answer it will probably reflect my strategy. I'll pick up from here in another post. This one feels as though its reached its end. On the other hand, this approach itself might be the strategy. Start writing in bite size pieces. Stop when you find yourself forcing out a sentence. Pick it up again the same day if you feel moved to write. Treat it like a playground. Nobody is coming to peer review this piece of writing. 

What I really want to do now

 

On Submitting the Doctoral Thesis for Preliminary Examination this Week

This week - because took me a day or two going back and forth with small fixes and then asking for extra time - this week, let's say on the 14th of January 2026 to make it easier for you, I submitted my compilation doctoral thesis for preliminary examination to the Engineering School's Doctoral Programme Committee. Its been a very long journey, longer than I expected it to be although by a hair's breadth I haven't overshot my own deadline. There are some blogposts from the past which I wanted to link to but I discover I don't really want to write the kind of sentence which would suitably situate word phrases as hyperlinks. Instead, read this one this one and this one if you want, and then I'll continue on below. 

What I really want to do - and I think that's why I've resurrected this old place rather than write on something more current in all my domains - is go all the way back to 2005 when I first began blogging and find my voice. Its not starting over if you're 20 years older. But its not the years in the professional voice wilderness nor is it the months and months of writing practice to learn academese well enough to represent my thoughts. I don't know where it is, or what it is, but I do know its human. I heard somewhere that old skool blogs are coming back in fashion, as humans we search for real places and real people rather than the automated generated streams that pass for content everywhere all at once. 

And so, this first post might sound disjointed, and its certainly not flowing as easily as writing my thesis did, but its a deliberate attempt to tear away the default easy sentence structures taht are meaningless. I learnt that from reading George Orwell. He wrote something. He wrote a lot of things, but I'm working hard not fall back on my own cliches. 

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear. Orwell 1946

 It will be a hot mess for a while but I suspect its also an amuse bouche to clear my brain and fingers from the rhythms of academese and find a human voice again. On the other hand, I return to blogging 100% certain that not only is my writer's block completely dismantled but I've found the music of my keyboard again. What I now want to do is see if I can learn to play entirely different genres of music as I type. So come back after a while and see if I have settled in and found a space and a place to play in or follow along as I try to make room for the human in our online worlds again.