The future may disagree with us

Oman has spent decades learning to keep buildings cool beneath a punishing sun. In the Netherlands, buildings designed to hold warmth are increasingly confronting summer heat they were never built to release. At the Dutch Embassy’s Energy Majlis this week, I offered that reversal to the room: why should we assume knowledge must travel in only one direction?
The roles we give countries begin as descriptions and harden into expectations. In the familiar script, Oman supplies; Europe invents. Each assumption influences whose research gets funded, whose engineers are heard, whose patents get filed and which partnerships are even imagined. Such a role can survive in a contract long after the world that produced it has changed. So I asked a second question: what would it take for us to be good ancestors?
We were debating energy choices whose consequences would outlive their justifications. An early bet on a new technology can falter before markets exist for it. Projects once dismissed as uneconomic can become desirable when prices change. We heard both experiences. A spreadsheet can record the loss on an abandoned investment, but it has no line for the factory never built, the engineers never trained, the suppliers never formed, or the industrial knowledge that never took root. These absences, too, shape what a country becomes.
Oman’s electricity system offers an almost literal map of this problem. Some of our richest renewable resources lie far from the country’s main centres of demand. A power line drawn between them is also a decision about where factories stand and where livelihoods grow. A project can appear sound on its own balance sheet even as connecting it burdens the wider grid. Infrastructure that reads as extravagant now could prove indispensable to an industry that does not yet exist. Years later, those who live inside that geography may judge it more clearly than the people who drew it.
A proposal from the room concerned future energy subsidies: why not invest part of what governments expect to pay in coming years into infrastructure that could reduce those payments? The economics would need rigorous testing. Assets have financing and maintenance demands of their own, and good intentions cannot rescue a poor investment. Yet annual budgets make recurring expenditure seem familiar, and upfront commitments forbidding by comparison. What looks prudent across one fiscal year may be costly across a generation. Any bargain struck with the future must also be fair to the people financing it today.
Geopolitics runs on the same assumptions. The energy transition could move production toward renewable-rich countries without moving the power to set terms. A nation might export green fuels across oceans, dependent on equipment designed elsewhere and standards it had no hand in writing. Our work with the Netherlands has room for greater ambition. Imagine Omani experience with desert heat becoming the basis for shared research into cooling European buildings. The direction of exchange changes, and so does the meaning of partnership.
We are ourselves the descendants of decisions no one asked us to approve. Ports and institutions enlarged our horizons; pollution and dependencies constrained them. We carry both the consequences nobody foresaw and our forefathers and mothers chose to postpone. The freedom to question what came before us arrived with everything else, and it was neither automatic nor evenly shared.
Every generation closes off possibilities it cannot reopen, so the least we owe the next one is the means to confront our errors. Those who follow us will inherit our decisions. Some will need to challenge them.