With time, a swinging pendulum shapes energy and climate change
Editor’s note: This story was originally published on Cipher News.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about time. Many people — myself included! — bemoan that we don’t have enough of it.
But in the context of Cipher and the topics we cover, we have a different perspective: things take too long.
The time horizon of addressing climate change and transitioning our massive energy system to cleaner resources is spectacularly mismatched for humanity and its societal pendulum swings.
As evidence, let me throw out some timelines:
To be counted as offsets to carbon emissions, forests may need to be monitored up to 50 years.
It can take 30 years to commercialize a new climate technology.
Renewable-energy developers are waiting up to nine years to connect to the grid.
It took 27 seconds for the power systems of Spain and Portugal to fail in April’s massive blackout incident.
Readers spend an average of 26 seconds reading a news article online.
We have utility experts analyzing crises in seconds, climate scientists warning of increasingly extreme weather over decades — all while political parties in power are shifting every few years. Meanwhile, most of you have stopped reading by now!
Indeed, these shockingly disparate time frames illustrate the fundamental challenge of addressing climate change and transitioning our energy system to cleaner resources.
“It’s almost generational in nature,” said Bill Gates, founder of Breakthrough Energy, whose venture team makes intentionally long-term bets on new climate technologies. “You have to invest today in either innovation or deployment to avoid a problem . . . more than 20 or 30 years later.”
Read more from Cipher’s exclusive interview with Bill Gates here.
Plus, innovation itself takes a long time. “You have to build giant systems that cannot possibly be conceived of and planned and constructed in four years,” said Jason Grumet, CEO of the American Clean Power Association.
That leads some observers to say, simply, that we won’t, especially given that the slow nature of solutions is up against humanity’s increasingly short attention span.
As Peter Atwater, a behavioral economist and a professor at William & Mary and University of Delaware, told me: “you have a long-term problem and an impatient crowd.”
So we find ourselves here: President Donald Trump is rolling back most climate and clean energy incentives in the United States, while geopolitical unrest is grabbing headlines — and government dollars — away from climate and clean energy.
To many climate activists, cleantech entrepreneurs and others invested in the clean energy transition — whether morally or financially — this moment in history is a particularly dispiriting one.
It’s also a difficult one for Cipher and our team of journalists.
After nearly four years of publishing, this is my last Harder Line column for Cipher News. We are ceasing publication as of today, July 16, 2025.
Read reflections from the rest of the Cipher team on the past four years and what could be ahead for the energy transition. Learn how to keep up with our team after Cipher stops publishing here.
In hindsight, it’s hard not to wonder if these past four years were an interval of a pendulum. Was the momentum we had to tackle climate change inevitably going to swing back? It is the immutable nature of a pendulum — discovered by Galileo, powered by gravity and defined by the laws of physics — that after a set and predictable amount of time, it will swing back.
The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg put this axiom in the context of our nation’s political framework: “A great man once said that the true symbol of the United States is not the bald eagle. It is the pendulum. And when the pendulum swings too far in one direction it will go back.”
Perhaps, then, we were never on track to meet net-zero climate goals and were always going to face a political backlash to progressive causes, including climate change.
“There’s a general recognition that the energy transition is a lot more complex than had been portrayed,” said Daniel Yergin, an energy expert famous for writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the history of oil (among other books).
Yergin co-wrote an oft-cited Foreign Affairs article published in late February that explored this idea. He told me he and his co-author began writing their article in August 2024, suggesting the pendulum was swinging before November 6, and that Trump’s election was more a result of this shift than a cause of it.
But unlike a real pendulum, which swings from a fixed spot, the anchor point of American politics is always shifting. When it comes to addressing climate change, that might be a good thing.
Everyone I interviewed for this article agreed: The transition toward cleaner energy is (still) happening and will not go fully into reverse, even if more localized trends stall or backtrack temporarily.
That’s due largely to a host of factors over the last 30 years — government policies, economic trends and more — that have made clean energy, in many instances, more affordable than fossil fuels. That simple economic reality is a force now larger than politics.
“We’re not going back, but we’re not going straight forward,” said Yergin, who hosts what is arguably the world’s foremost annual energy conference, CERAWeek by S&P Global, which is largely (still) dominated by oil and gas companies.
In other words, the energy transition will not be linear — or predictable like a pendulum; for one thing, different countries will go different routes at different paces.
The challenge ahead, then, isn’t just about developing technologies, policies and financial incentives — though that’s part of it, to be sure — but is also about asking fellow humans to consider the role of their own psyches.
I asked Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy, about the time disconnect between a decadal problem like climate change and humans’ shrinking attention spans, especially as artificial intelligence makes so many things faster and easier.
“It underscores the paramount importance of bringing in areas of study about how we humans interact with information and make decisions,” Hayhoe said.
Of course, as time goes on, scientists like Hayhoe point out that our weather is almost certain to get more extreme: hotter, wetter and less predictable. I wondered, could that push the political pendulum back toward more aggressive climate action in the years to come?
“Humanity tends to normalize chronic risks,” said Kevin Book, an independent energy analyst who leads the research firm ClearView Energy Partners. “That’s mostly good — if we didn’t, we might not ever get out of bed — but this could also raise the bar for public outcry.”
At least unless (or more likely until) the risk becomes impossible to ignore. Book posits that society may begin to seriously consider geoengineering: using human-made technology to alter the planet’s temperature by reducing the amount of heat it absorbs from the sun.
“As political challenges mount for leaders in a warming world, they could look to a different solution set — geoengineering responses rather than (or in addition to) systemic transformation,” Book continued. “We may be headed to a very different sort of debate.”
I bounced this idea off Atwater, the dispassionate behavioral scientist whose expertise lies far from the technical aspects of climate solutions and more in societal thinking.
“We’re not going to deal with the problem,” Atwater said plainly, seeming to imply that more radical solutions like geoengineering might be in the cards: “We’re going to deal with the consequences of not dealing with the problem.”
Just give it some time.
Editor’s note: Amy Harder serves on the Washington State chapter board of The Nature Conservancy in a volunteer capacity. Bill Gates is founder of Breakthrough Energy, which supports Cipher.