Earth, wind and liars amid moneyed politics

PETER Thiel, Facebook investor and Donald Trump supporter, is by all accounts a terrible person. He did, however, come up with one classic line about the disappointments of modern technology: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." OK, now it's 280, but who's counting?

The point of his quip was that while we've found ever more clever ways of pushing around bits of information, we are still living in a material world - and our command of that material world has advanced much less than most people expected a few decades ago. Where are the technologies transforming the way we deal with physical reality?

Well, there is one area of physical technology, renewable energy, in which we really are seeing that kind of progress - progress that can both change the world and save it. Unfortunately,…