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04/02/2026
As battery electric vehicles (BEV) in Norway inched their way to a market share of 0.25% in 2010, their future success was far from assured. But by 2024, BEV’s share had shot up to 84%. Norway had experienced a positive tipping point in BEV sales several years previously, notes Professor Tim Lenton, founder of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter.
That track record, he indicates in his new book, Positive Tipping Points, could be repeated in many industries.
The Norwegian EV transition, Lenton suggests, could provide a model worldwide, and was a unique event not visible in any other European market. Boosted by a range of government measures prompted by public campaigning, sales went through exponential growth, doubling twice in five years. Exponential change is a typical characteristic of processes that experience tipping points, Lenton tells Transform following the publication of the book.
“Early on, you get exponential kick-up of self-accelerating change, and that’s also true with the negative tipping points for the climate.” In the same decade of EV market expansion, petrol and diesel internal combustion engine (ICE) car sales plummeted. “EVs being the same price to buy as an ICE vehicle was the tipping point,” he explains.
In Norway, it is difficult to imagine a return to this 20th-century form of transport ‒ as quaint a scene, perhaps, as horses trotting through London streets. Sales of BEVs have experienced a change that may be irreversible.
In that respect, the outcome may be comparable and counterbalance change in ocean coral reefs, forest carbon sinks and Arctic ice that is taking place now. Proving tipping points in these ecosystems may take decades. Lenton likens these tipping points to a chair tilting back and forth on its hind legs, and then tipping irreversibly backwards. And in human and industrial systems, it may be possible to stimulate the arrival of those tipping points.
As with a chair, and some natural processes, an industry or technology that goes through a tipping point experiences a reinforcing feedback loop that becomes strong enough for the change to propel itself. In the Arctic sea, melting ice exposes dark waters that absorb most of the sunlight that the ice was previously reflecting, and this accelerates warming even further. Industries may experience similar shifts.
For instance, some investors stopped financing coal-fired plants that became loss-making when, in 2013, UK government policy pushed up carbon prices. This, suggests Lenton, caused further investors to withdraw in a reinforcing feedback loop, prompting successive utilities to lose money, shutting one coal-based power station after another until the last closure in 2024.
Damping feedback can also occur. This is when the shifting process is nudged back towards its previous position. Lenton gives a controversial example of the use of nuclear energy, which slowed down in the late 20th century. In the nuclear industry, he suggests, the chair tipped back towards its previous state, rather than accelerating past a tipping point, because of anxiety in the public domain.
“Nuclear power became more expensive as it got more deployed because we became more concerned about waste and accidents,” he says. “Arguably, that is damping feedback, where costs go up and there is less inclination to deploy more of it.” We are currently seeing damping feedback to renewables because of anti-climate policies by nationalist parties.
Scientists have not quite mastered the detection of tipping points while they are happening. However, clues emerge over time. Among them is the response to system perturbations that nudge a process such as warming, or a technology, in an opposite direction. The system becomes more sluggish, and its ability to stabilise slows down.
That is the experience of ICE vehicle sales, says Lenton, drawing attention to patterns in pioneering economies. China’s EV market share, for example, leapt from 5% in 2020 to 22% in 2022, passing a positive tipping point. “ICE sales recovery from little shocks has become much slower before the market is really starting to turn away from petrol or diesel, as in China. It’s a principle that holds at least for that technology,” he says.
He uses the Covid pandemic to illustrate his point. “It created a shock, followed by a marked decrease in petrol and diesel car sales but not denting EV sales. That’s a strong clue that petrol and diesel car sales weren’t very resilient. Their markets never really recovered and the tipping of EVs has continued to unfold,” he says.
Positive Tipping Points contains no forecasts, but it is a treasury of evidence, setting out a track record for positive environmental change over the past quarter of a century.1 That, in turn, could strengthen belief in future transformation. Alongside BEVs, changes Lenton considers to be success stories include the social movement sparked by Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg; the rise of solar PV; an international small group and tree-planting programme known as TIST; and the fall in coal power in some countries, which he dubs the “quiet revolution”.
Experiences like these help build a precedent for the development of green hydrogen (produced using renewables) by industry, although the infrastructure finance is more complex than for solar or wind. There is currently, observes Lenton, exponential growth in green hydrogen projects – one of the signs that a tipping point could be approaching. This might be defined when the price of green hydrogen can consistently compete with grey hydrogen (produced using natural gas, or methane). However, he points out that heroic efforts are required to switch to green hydrogen. Whereas solar at its fastest increased by 50% annually worldwide, hydrogen production has to double each year to hit targets.
There is also cause for hope in the food supply chain, says Lenton. Among the positive signs is the increasing investment in alternative proteins. This has been growing exponentially, with a doubling time of four years. The sector is expanding at twice the rate of the meat industry.
It is not all good news, though. Among the industries that may not experience a tipping point is the high-carbon-emitting cement sector, says Lenton. This is because an alternative is not readily available, and the energy penalty of carbon capture is so high. That means change in that industry would need to come about quite differently. “Luckily, it’s in a minority of activities where you need more of the brute force approach of having to change the rules and pay up if you want to eliminate those emissions.”
While tipping points and compound growth play their part, they are not the norm. Much change is incremental or evolutionary. The book casts market and social innovation in a new light, highlighting the power of human activity to trigger positive tipping points.
“I published the book to be honest about risks to the climate but also to show people there is a credible path out of trouble, and that our actions make more of a difference than we think they do,” he says.
Elisabeth Jeffries is a freelance ESG writer and editor
