The opening of Brian Merchant’s Vice Motherboard article which argues that the industries most in need of creative destruction have thus far largely been impervious to it:

“Right now, a few decades-old technologies are not-so-slowly but surely consigning the planet to burn—and to melt—and gas-powered cars and coal-fired power plants lead the pack. As the chief contributors to planetary warming, there may never have been technologies in such dire need of ‘disruption’, to deploy the buzzword of our times, ever before.

Yet a new energy report from BP shows that our reliance on the ancient energy tech—’modern’ coal power was developed in the 1880s, and the combustion engine rose to prominence in the decades that followed—is only continuing to rise, at the precise moment we need to phase it out. Coal consumption grew to its largest market share since 1970 last year. Oil remains the world’s leading fuel.

As such, we don’t just need to build newer and improved energy technologies—which we have, in the way of solar, wind, geothermal, etc—we desperately need to subject the old ones to Schumpeter-style creative destruction. The latest critical analysis of climate science says our best bet for avoiding catastrophic global warming is to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels—altogether—by 2050. In other words, we can’t just settle for creating new cleantech; we really, really need it to displace the old. Asap. We need to disrupt.

Yes, disrupt.”