A recent article pointed to the stark contrast between China’s pushing ahead rapidly with low-carbon energy to alleviate climate change and the United States’ dominant political party and US President Donald Trump declaring climate change a hoax.

How can there be such a contrast? The truth is that while the US president’s posture on climate change represents an extreme, few people in the US really believe that such a transformation of the energy system is possible. This is true, I think, even of the advocates for that transformation. I am one of those advocates, and even I haven’t fully believed in its possibility. I was more likely to believe that the truth lay closer to a declaration by Mark Mills, a former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, that a transition away from society’s dependence on hydrocarbons “is not feasible in any meaningful time frame”.

Why was I so skeptical that this transformation could take place? Those realists who doubt that it can occur within a reasonable time frame point to several facts. First, energy transitions in the past have taken a century, not decades. And they have never been complete. Coal replaced wood, but dependence on wood lingered on for many people. Oil replaced coal, but coal continued to be used in massive amounts. Natural gas pushed some coal and oil aside, but those fuels still sell in massive quantities. And nuclear energy surged for two or three decades but never pushed coal aside.

They also point out that while solar and wind power are surging throughout the globe — it is often said that nearly all new power generation in recent years has been wind and solar — the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has continued to rise at about the same pace as it has for almost 70 years.

Also contributing to my own skepticism was the poor arguments the enthusiasts for wind and solar made for the economic viability of these renewables. They claimed that it had been proved that wind and solar were the cheapest forms of energy. But as evidence for that claim, they cited levelized cost-of-energy comparisons performed by a financial firm, Lazard Freres. Comparisons on that basis of wind and solar with coal, gas, and nuclear are, however, apples-to-oranges comparisons because they don’t consider the whole system cost.

Such biased and incomplete arguments for wind and solar on the part of too many of its advocates, often made with an attitude of complete certainty, as if these were undeniable scientific facts, provoked skepticism.

But I have changed my mind. This change of mind was cemented by a book I just read, Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change — in 50 Questions and Answers, by Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and senior researcher at the University of Oxford and deputy editor at Our World in Data. Ritchie does not express the exaggerated aspirations that overenthusiastic renewables advocates proclaim; she is more realistic about the energy transition. She advises the enthusiastic advocates to “stop obsessing over arbitrary targets (such as, for example, ‘net zero by 2050’) and focus on how you can help to reduce our carbon emissions as quickly as possible”. She says, “A completely fossil-free world is not going to happen overnight. Not even in the next 20 years. We should be upfront about that. It is a transition, not an on-off switch.”

The truth is that while the US president’s posture on climate change represents an extreme, few people in the US really believe that such a transformation of the energy system is possible

But then she shows in 50 concise chapters how the transition can take place, perhaps even soon, and it is all credible. Technologies for some of them are not ready yet, and many are still too expensive. But it makes Mills’ statement “not feasible in any meaningful time frame” seem far too pessimistic.

As for China’s coal plants, she points out that “China has been using its coal plants less and less. In the early 2000s, plants were running around 70 percent of the time, but this has since dropped to around 50 percent and will keep falling”. China is using its coal plants in the same way that the US is using gas, to deal with the intermittency of renewables — that is, to generate electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Solving this problem in the long run will require better and lower-cost batteries, and long-distance transmission lines, on both of which China is a leader. And it will likely require large quantities of nuclear energy too, the construction of which China again leads.

We find it hard to believe that a transition away from the energy systems we have all been used to for many decades will really happen. The habit of extrapolation is in human nature. What we have been doing is, we feel intuitively, likely to be what we will be doing, no matter the hype around artificial intelligence, or the energy transition, or climate change itself. It may be advisable to pay some attention to this intuition when it comes to AI, but not when it comes to climate change and the energy transition.

Ritchie makes a seemingly unremarkable but highly pertinent observation toward the end of the book that wraps it up well: “We accept that changes have happened in the past but are skeptical that tomorrow, next year or the next decade will be much different. When it comes to climate technologies, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Things are changing quickly.”

The author is a mathematician and economist with expertise in the finance, energy and sustainable-development fields. He is an adjunct associate professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.