APRIL 27, 2026 – I remember the monthly departmental lunch meeting at my old law firm when our fearless leader reached the agenda item expressed simply as, “E-mail.” The newly hired techno-geeks had just rolled out the “new system,” and with many senior lawyers kicking and screaming, the venerable old firm was stumbling into the modern age.
“This new thing called email,” said the department chair, “is the up and coming method of communicating. Everyone will be expected to use it. It’s the wave of the future.” His tone bore the hint of a carnival charlatan peering into a crystal ball. I watched my colleagues roll their eyes. By nature, training and experience, we were a skeptical and conservative lot. “The tech department will be leading training sessions, and I encourage everyone here to sign up,” said our leader, seated at the head of the large conference room table as if positioned alone on the cutting edge of the firm’s nascent technology. His words were met with more skepticism—manifested this time by people checking their watches and turning to the second page of the agenda.
That meeting of the Cave People preceded by a month or two a half-day continuing legal education seminar I attended on “Legal Uses of the Internet,” led by a lawyer-turned-techno-geek. The highlight of the class was the lawyer’s spectacular failure to connect with the “internet,” despite numerous attempts to dial up using his AOL account. By the end of the “not yet ready for prime time” presentation, I figured that full use of the “internet” was still years away from the broad use of “email,” which itself seemed to be advancing at a senior partner’s crawl.
“May the record reflect,” I say, tongue in cheek, that since those days, the world has progressed technologically by exponentially quantum leaps.
Which brings me to the whole business of “change,” as a constant feature of the human condition. Change is like gravity: it’s constant and we couldn’t live without it, yet it can be a huge problem to the point of putting people’s lives at risk or subjecting them to extraordinary burdens—thus inducing great fear in the hearts and minds of humankind looking down from high places.
Over the weekend I listened to several hours of a day-long webinar symposium billed as “Energy Equity” and sponsored by the University of St. Thomas School of Law. The presenters had been recruited from various energy industry groups, along with lawyers practicing in that area. They were a formidable group in expertise, experience, and insights about state, regional, national and global energy policy. The foremost takeaway from their presentations, including myriad graphs and charts, was as obvious as a 2 x 4 hitting one’s forehead: along with air and water, energy is essential to our existence and survival. As I grappled with the extensions of this axiomatic statement, I naturally thought about how society is addressing energy—and how we are just as intensely ignoring it as the central issue of our time, yet perhaps of every phase in history and pre-history.
As reflected by the title of the symposium, the focus of the confab was addressing equity in energy policy, particularly in the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Frankly, I hadn’t thought much about existing inequities in the system. The best example would be the disparity in generation costs between rural and urban consumers. Another would be the environmental costs associated with “green” energy sources. Yet another, would be the loss of revenues to Indigenous nations from oil and gas deposits on tribal lands, as they seek to transition to green forms of energy. And more broadly. how are underrepresented elements of society to be granted meaningful input in utility regulatory decisions? But then there was the kicker: what about energy policy (or lack thereof) in one country that has an adverse effect on its neighbors or on the other side of the globe?
What each of the speakers stressed was the need for cooperation among all stakeholders in shaping and implementing energy policy; for sharing information and working in concert on solutions to complex problems. All the talk underscored the swift-moving currents of change as society struggles to address climate change and increased demands for energy.
The bottom lines were threefold:
FIRST, if the combination of energy efficiency and power generation doesn’t keep pace with our demands, the social, political and economic issues that confront us today will be compounded to the breaking point tomorrow, and “tomorrow” will arrive at our doorstep all too soon. Moreover, if we don’t face the whole range of environmental issues associated with increased generation, storage and transmission, we’ll be digging one giant social/political/economic hole (climate change; pollution of air, water and soil) to fill another (shortfalls in energy).
SECOND, to get ahead of the accelerating curve will require or impose—take your pick, depending on policy preferences—major changes in the way society operates.
THIRD, to optimize necessary change—to render it productive and equitable—will require cooperation on a level that’s largely alien to how most Americans are accustomed to thinking.
On the bright side, how we approach and manage necessary changes in energy policy can serve as a model for how we wrestle with other “Top 5” issues facing humanity, from addressing climate change to clean air and water to sustainable food production and distribution to affordable, accessible quality health care to education as the means for adaptation to constant change as well as a means for enlightenment and edification to inter- and intra-national disarmament and dispute resolution.
I have an hour to go with the “Energy Equity” symposium, but I’m heartened that such people as its participants have dedicated their professional lives to this central business of humanity. If change in communications and the transfer of information forced us out of the “cave days,” so can change in energy policy make for a brighter future.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
