A recent Friends of the Earth report, The Big Six on the Run, suggests that the rise in renewable generation is disrupting the old order (where the old order really is a different generation). The facts are clear: renewable generation is on the rise. However the conclusion as to why this is the case and where this may lead is not so clear.

There are various perspectives as to what perspective to take.

Conspiracy theorists and policy strategists would both agree that the outcome of events are the result of guiding, conscious hands. Chaos and chance do not enter into it. Outcomes lead naturally from events as a consequence of predetermined rules, agreements or secret handshakes.

The real world suggests that conspiracy and strategy are seldom ahead of the game but lag at least a step behind the often surprising and continually unexpected events that reality conjures up.

Take the Fukashima Daiichi nuclear disaster, $140 crude oil, $70 crude oil and Putin, plenty of Putin. Add in a potential great global bake off in the form of dangerous climate change and you've got everything you need to counter anyone's suggestion that we know what is going to happen (or indeed what is going on).

The rise in renewable generation is a testament to patience, technology and opportunism. The 1970s pioneers of renewable generation, forged in the heat of that decade's oil crisis never went away. They patiently stuck with it and rode the technology wave that has swept us all up and made every one of us a networked, super-computer carrying, consumer. Investment dollars seek out opportunities like lungs seek air: no extra encouragement needed there. Release these elements into a space looking for cost and carbon savings and generational stability solutions and it is inevitable that renewables will rise to the tops as the solution of choice.

The green movement would take credit for seeing all this coming. I would suggest that they should take credit for being prepared. But in some respects they should take no more credit than those living in fall-out shelters, surrounded by tins of beans and boxes of shotgun cartridges, who pop their heads out of their bunkers, find that the world really has ended and smugly think to themselves that they were right.

What sets the green movement apart from the bunker dwellers and off-grid cabin clans is their engagement with a real and particular problem. We can argue as to how important some of their agenda items are but anyone who faces up to the reality of climate change, rather than seeks to suggest that either there is no problem or that the problem is too big, should be supported. 

Governments, by the chaotic nature of events, have been driven to embrace low carbon, energy efficient solutions to solve a host of anticipated and unanticipated problems. We should not question how we have got here, all we should do is encourage and support. This is no trailer for this summer's disaster movie. Leave your bunkers. Abandon your cabins. Go make some changes.

This is the real deal.