“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”
— Lao Tzu
We have a supposed planetary goal of keeping global warming below 1.5°C. According to the best scientists, if we fail in this, we’ll unleash far more severe climate change impacts than we’ve seen to date – meaning worse droughts, heatwaves and rainfall; and more forced migration with its resulting human and political devastation.
But there’s no chance we’ll keep warming below 1.5°C. To get there, global emissions would need to peak by 2025 and fall 43% by 2030 – never mind the additional, increasing reductions beyond 2030!
If we don’t change our approach, we won’t keep global warming below 2°C. And without painting a picture of Dante’s Inferno, the danger here is that various tipping points get set off and we enter an irreversible spiral where temperature increases accelerate out of our control.
We need another way.
To date, in seeking to tackle climate change we’ve largely relied on consumers, politicians & big corporations to do the right thing. But it doesn’t matter how many UN Intergovernmental reports are issued or how many forest fires or flash floods we see, many of us in the First World do not seem prepared to make the necessary life changes beyond changing to LCD lightbulbs and maybe buying a hybrid electric car.
Big sacrifices that could make a difference if everyone got on board and which would genuinely pain us, can easily be rationalized away by each consumer in the knowledge that others aren’t doing it and a solo run would have negligible effect in the grand scheme of things.
Stop eating meat? Give up air travel? Have we evolved so much over the last ten thousand years just to return to the caves!?
As for politicians, they generally follow the people and are disincentivized to sort problems with a horizon of more than four-years.
All those annual COP gatherings – the last one was the 27th – have come up with agreements and emissions targets that are non-binding with no sanctions or penalties for breaking promises! The developed nations don’t need coal and yet they haven’t even been able to agree in principle that we should stop using it!
Sure, certain cities, states and countries are beginning to bring in tougher regulations and fines, but it’s not enough – carbon emissions and global temperatures are still rising.
Big corporations can make all the right noises, and they’re making some moves in the right direction, but unless there’s an inescapable global network of laws and sanctions to make them do the right thing, they’ll never do it on their own. In reality, they’re the biggest lobbyists against real change and their billions of dollars often help ensure that politicians don’t do the right thing.
ESG reporting & investing is getting better, but even ignoring pervasive greenwashing issues, it’s a slow, complex, piecemeal approach that doesn’t reflect the emergency we’re in and isn’t yet as powerful as the lobbying acting against it.
The Other Way?
OK, we’ve seen that:
- Relying on individual consumers’ or the collective’s goodwill won’t solve climate change; and
- People will only do the right thing when it’s clearly in their interest to do so.
Therefore, the challenge we face is to come up with products & services that help ameliorate climate change and that people will buy & use for other self-interested reasons – such as saving them time, money or effort.
When the average person turns on the shower or kettle, they’re far more concerned with the immediate availability of that power and its cost than they are with where it comes from. That’s why, if we want people to use power generated from wind, then it needs to be (a) available, and (b) cheaper than power from coal or gas or oil – even when the wind isn’t blowing. The same goes for solar (when the sun isn’t shining).
Battery technology is key here; as are improvements to the power grid and continuing improvements in wind and solar technology.
And we need thousands of other innovations to become commercially available. Some of these will help reduce emissions by a small amount – having a large cumulative effect – while others, such as nuclear fusion, are “moon-shots” that could make an enormous difference on their own.
So how do we make this happen? And who will bring these innovations to fruition and to market?
Water, Water Everywhere
According to UNESCO, 2 billion people (26% of Earth’s population) do not have safe drinking water and 3.6 billion (46%) lack access to safely managed sanitation.
Desolenator, based in The Netherlands and Dubai, has come up with an efficient, inexpensive solar-powered solution to desalinating water. No chemicals are involved in the process and no emissions result. Desolenator’s solution can be deployed at large scale for major cities. At small scale, their product is about the size of a fridge – basically a solar panel atop the water-in/water-out box. This can easily be deployed in remote villages or even on relatively small boats.
Pump Up the Volume
Up to 30% of world power goes on heating and cooling buildings. The most efficient way to do this is with heat pumps. But heat pumps employ refrigerant gases which can be thousands of times more toxic to the environment than CO2. Exergyn, the Irish company I co-founded, is developing a solid-state heat pump that has no refrigerants and zero emissions. Already it’s proved the principle of its technology with a series of prototypes. Once the product is made available commercially, it could help make a significant impact in reducing global carbon emissions.
Going Nuclear
Nuclear (fission) power could be a much bigger factor in getting us to Net Zero if only:
- Its operation could be much safer
- Its fuel couldn’t possibly be used for weapons generation; and
- The waste produced could be reused in some way.
Lightbridge Corp is developing a fuel for nuclear power that potentially:
- Operates at temperatures of 300°C rather than the usual 1000°C – which should hugely reduce physical operating pressures and, thus, the risk of accidents
- Cannot possibly be used or repurposed for weapons
- Can be reprocessed after operational use for reuse.
Also, their fuel should help make nuclear power cheaper by making power generation more efficient. It should be usable in existing reactors and purpose-built ones, whether they be large reactors or small modular reactors (SMRs).
Who Said There’s No French Word for Entrepreneur!?
Entrepreneurs.
That’s the answer to the question of who will come up with the innovations we need and bring them to market.
It’s entrepreneurs who will work to discover new inventions, take the risks, manage to do it with the minimum amount of money, find ways to overcome bureaucratic obstacles, and thereby “bend history in the right direction”.
10,000 new innovative companies like Desolenator, Exergyn and Lightbridge Corp. should enable us to keep global warming below 2°C and, hopefully, eventually start removing emissions from the atmosphere and bringing the temperature down.
Governments’ main job should be to remove as many obstacles as possible to innovation and adoption, and to spur it on in the right places. They need to support and encourage entrepreneurs – including funding education to ensure that young people have the necessary skills to innovate and bring products to market.
These actions are in the interests of Governments and their people as they lead to increased employment, income and well-being – so no need for goodwill! Other actions also in our interests include:
- Fossil fuel industries are subsidized many times more than the “green” economy. We need this position reversed so entrepreneurs are helped, not hampered.
- We need voters and governments to realise that the lost jobs in carbon fuels will be more than offset by new jobs in the “green” economy. Already in the US more people are employed in solar than in the oil, gas and coal industries combined!
- We need to put a real price on carbon and apply it globally. After cutting subsidies to fossil fuels, this is the most critical thing that nations and lawmakers could do (and I’ll deal with it in another blog), but it needs agreement between lots of competing interests. Hence why I’m focusing here on entrepreneurs – they can cut through the nonsense and bypass the slow journey to consensus.
There’s a fire raging and we need to realise that convening bureaucratic committees on an annual basis to discuss the fire is not the way we’ll put it out.
Those committees have a place. As do laws, regulations, penalties and fines. But they should all support the necessary innovation and creativity that will create the products & services that will enable us to douse the fire while continuing to live full 21st century lives.
When the old lightbulbs were banned, we weren’t forced to go back to candles. It was only after LCDs had been invented and were commercially available that the ban could happen. That’s the law working in tandem with innovation & entrepreneurs in a way that’s in our long-term self-interest.
In short, we should recognize the need for entrepreneurs to help us get out of this mess, and support them all the way.
Note: Lightbridge Corp is a public company and I’m making no comment on whether the stock price may rise or fall as these things are determined by many factors not related to technical developments.
All references to nuclear power when discussing Lightbridge relate to nuclear fission.
