Two weeks ago several of my SMCo colleagues and I spent two days at Building Energy 12, the annual conference of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA). My involvement in NESEA goes back 30 years. For me this annual meeting is truly a tribal gathering.
This year’s conference was particularly thrilling. The highlight for me was experiencing the emerging youth contingent which has brought great new vitality into the organization the past few years. It makes me feel like we have greater capacity than ever before. I feel this at NESEA, and at South Mountain too. I like us. I like who we are now. While we are more empowered as individuals than ever before, we are people who know, with conviction, that all of us are smarter than any of us.
A few personal highlights:
- Being a part of Robert Leaver’s “Keynote Experience” to open the conference, in which three of us gave short talks about how we are changing our practices to confront the challenges of the coming decades;
- Leading a session called “Finding Your Place in the New Economy” which was a conversation with two beacons of the Next Economy, Terry Mollner (chair of StakeHolders Capital, Inc. and a founder of Calvert Social Investment Funds, Inc) and Marjorie Kelly, former publisher of Business Ethics Magazine, author of The Divine Right of Capital and the very exciting forthcoming book Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution, due out in June from Berrett-Koehler).
- Presenting, on behalf of NESEA, the annual “Professional Leadership Award” (which is awarded each year to an individual who has made significant contributions to our field of work) to my friend and SMCo colleague Marc Rosenbaum. Nobody could be more deserving.
As usual, Marc made several well-received presentations, and this year my colleague Rob Meyers, who manages our energy department, was the Renewable Energy track co-chair.
The central part of Building Energy, for me, has become the Whole Systems in Action track. For the past five years a group of us have been grappling, in this arena, with the discipline of systems thinking and how it relates to the essential issues of our times. Rather than trying to summarize the many insights I gained from the conference, I want to offer two TED Talks and a follow-up essay which provide, together, a compelling statement that echoes my own sense of our current dilemmas.
The first talk is by Paul Gilding, author of The Great Disruption. The second is by Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X-Prize Foundation. The essay, which I have edited somewhat, is Paul’s discussion of the contrasting points of view embodied in the two talks.
The second reason the techno-optimist’s view is wrong is that the science says we simply don’t have a long time.
Here you go – I think you’ll find the 50 minute investment to watch these two talks and read the essay to be well worth the time and effort!
WILL THE TECHNO-OPTIMISTS SAVE THE WORLD? By Paul Gilding
I’m writing this on my way home from speaking at the annual TED gathering in Long Beach California, where 1,500 people gathered to listen to what the organizers call “Ideas Worth Spreading”. TED has always been an influential gathering, but then they put some of the talks online and, with over 500 million views, their global reach as a spreader of ideas has become quite a phenomenon.
There is nothing quite like this event, with its eclectic mix of investors, entrepreneurs, activists, think tanks, corporate execs and philanthropists. There are owners and CEOs of companies like LinkedIn and Amazon alongside enthusiastic founders of young start-ups hoping to emulate their success. There are people with big picture ideas about where the world’s going, alongside social entrepreneurs taking today’s practical ideas into the field in the developing world. The latter included many examples of beautiful hope and simplicity, like the guy leaving a good corporate job to help run a social start-up called Wonderbags, which uses insulated bags to dramatically reduce the dangers and expense of cooking fuel in poor villages in Africa.
The optimism is infectious and so the opening session sparked quite a controversy. I gave my worldview with a talk titled “The Earth is Full”, arguing a major economic crisis was now being triggered by humanity passing the limits of the earth’s capacity to provide cheap resources, especially soil, climate and water. While I argued humanity was good in a crisis and we’d get through it, my argument left the techno-optimists a little shell-shocked, as they are more used to being uplifted with stories of optimism and endless opportunity.
They were soon reassured again by Peter Diamandis, the CEO of the X-Prize foundation, who argued that while we tend to focus on our problems, technology was an all-powerful force and could deal with any challenge we faced. He also put the case, popular with this crowd, that it was the market rather than government that would be the main driver of solutions. He and I then discussed these issues on stage with the head “TEDster” and event curator, Chris Anderson.
The debate continued in the corridors all week, sparked by more presentations on technology, such as a very interesting liquid metal battery from MIT that is suitable for grid level electricity storage and a stark wake up call from climate scientist James Hansen. Hansen is a rock star amongst climate scientists, having been arguing the case for action since the 1980’s.
As the week moved on, some concluded that the crisis vs. techno-optimism division was quite artificial. This view was that of course we faced some serious issues that needed attention, but technology would achieve remarkable things and avoid a serious crisis. Besides, what could be wrong with a little optimism? It cheers you up, gets you motivated and helps get investors on board!
Others, including myself, became more convinced that techno-optimism, rather than being harmless, was potentially quite dangerous.
There are two key issues to making this the case. Ecosystem lags – the delay between actions like emitting CO2 pollution and response e.g. the climate changing – and the inherent risks in a highly integrated global economy (the low margin for error when a globally impactful crisis hits).
We learnt the latter in 2007/8, which many now believe was triggered by record oil prices sucking money out of the US economy, causing sub-prime mortgages to default and almost bringing down the global financial system. This is a good example of systemic risk vs. theoretical markets. In theory higher oil prices just reduce demand and encourage alternatives but in reality change happens fast and markets can’t respond, leading to complicated impacts. As we saw, our now tightly wound and integrated global economy can thus be easily shaken to the core by a relatively normal event such as high oil prices.
The other issue challenging the techno-optimist view is lags – when fixing the cause of some problems doesn’t slow the impacts or bring benefits for a long time.
This applies to climate change, as discussed above, where the impact goes on for decades, but also to degrading soil quality or over extracting water from aquifers as is becoming a critical issue in China. When the negative impacts of such lagging impacts are substantial and economic, as is the case with climate and food related issues, it makes solving them even more difficult. This is because as the impacts take hold and a response is pursued, the negative economic consequences continue to build causing economic weakness just when the most resources are needed to fix the causes.
Put these together and we face a serious problem. People use the huge opportunity of technology to reassure themselves we won’t face a crisis. They believe any serious limits in the system will be avoided because technology will intervene and we’ll adapt. There are two reasons I think this is wrong and may actually be dangerous.
First, while technology has great potential to address the issues we face, without strong price signals and other government support, large-scale technology change takes a very long time. We see this today where, though there are many programs supporting clean technology around the world, it is taking a long time – many decades – for this technology to have scale impact.
The second reason the techno-optimist’s view is wrong is that the science says we simply don’t have a long time.
But can’t technology drive rapid change? Everyone at TED holds up their smart phones as a wonderful example of such fast, transformational change. This is a good and correct example, but it needs to be put in perspective. This is what I call a “toy technology” – something that makes our lives more convenient and more fun. These technologies are adding real value to our lives and driving change, but they are not transforming the foundations of our current economy. They also don’t threaten a powerful industry that then fights against their success. The oil industry alone is a $3 trillion per year economic powerhouse. Add coal, cars and fossil fuelled power stations and it’s going to take more than a Steve Jobs design genius to get that amount of capital to move aside. Thus the question becomes time, something we’re out of.
I am a big believer in the power of technology and markets. I can see how they can combine to make our lives safer, cleaner and more secure. But given the scale of our challenges, particularly around climate and food, it would be naïve to think they are capable of delivering the change needed until government takes strong action to kick-start a true scale transformation. The danger in techno-optimism is that it becomes a form of denial. That things aren’t that serious and therefore politically difficult change that will confront powerful vested economic interests can be avoided. Such a view is reassuring, it feels good and it fits nicely with our genetic tendency to optimism.
Unfortunately it’s also wrong.
I agree, mostly. We can’t expect innovation to solve all our problems, much as we wish it could. Economic inequality combined with widespread denial about environmental conditions is a tough combination. Along with doing everything we can to encourage appropriate technological solutions (those that don’t just bring a new set of un-intended consequences) we must change politics, change corporate behavior, change the architecture of our economy, and change ourselves! Severe challenges, short time frame.
But despite all this, it is always inspiring to meet with my colleagues at NESEA and share the work that we are all doing to try to turn the headwinds we face into tailwinds to propel us forward.
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