Multinational corporations, mega-billionaires, and wealthy governments have begun to throw more money at the “climate crisis”, apparently following the herd. This approach is fundamentally flawed: It seeks to solve an engineering problem using financial and political tools. Technologists like me are delighted with the attention but are not empowered to implement solutions. While the physical evidence shows that this course has consumed resources for the last 30 years and is not even close to achieving its objectives, the influential class is doubling down like a loser at the blackjack table.
Our strategies to address the “climate crisis” are indeed misdirected, but why?
The last time 1 , I noted that the annual cost of the renewables transition, as projected by the geniuses (used in both the literal and sarcastic sense) of the UNFCCC COP27 crowd, was more than all the money in the world . So it shouldn’t be surprising that such a proposal, however well-meaning, is dead on arrival. Yes, we can address the climate crisis by aggressively transitioning to renewables, damned the global economy, but there’s no rational expectation that we will .
Back in May 2 , I summarized lessons learned during the first year of writing this series. Let me repeat one of them here:
Acknowledging the problem is just the first milestone on the road to a solution. But, among those who recognize the problem, most have underestimated the scale and urgency of the problem at hand.
Governments and billionaires think (correctly) that innovation is vital, but instead of acting in concert, they throw money competitively at novel ideas selected for their cleverness rather than effectiveness. If history is any guide, cleverness won’t scale quickly enough. Cleverness ≠ innovation .
On the other hand, well-intentioned individuals conduct ineffectual rituals . It’s the modern equivalent of a Native American “rain dance”, an activity-based more on religion than Science. Moreover, the adherents tend toward a counterproductive self-righteous attitude that renounces individualism and stifles disagreement. It’s a turnoff.
Recognition of the problem is becoming universal. But IPCC continues to generate more and more detailed reports of the problem . Yet, despite mountains of evidence, thoroughly analyzed and processed, this esteemed panel of thousands of well-intentioned and credentialed experts has failed to influence world leaders to implement the hard choices needed for an actual solution. Instead, it’s simply driving dollars and “pledges” toward feel-good rituals on a larger scale.
There’s an unmet need to change our approach, in a word, “innovation”, and basic economics bins solutions to unmet needs into two general piles, “vitamins” (providing long-term benefits) and “aspirins” (solving an urgent, immediate pain). Vitamins are generally less valuable businesses than aspirins. So, where does climate innovation fall? Is it an aspirin or a vitamin?
By underestimating the scale and urgency of the problem, the affluents of the world have surely binned climate innovation as a vitamin. Thus, the climate crisis (along with its religious doppelganger, environmentalism) has become the target of philanthropy, “impact funds”, and taxpayer dollars to support a public good. In other words, “addressing climate change” is an expense that makes the donor feel good about spending their money. Of course, it could make the world a better place…eventually. Thus, money continues to be thrown at clever but half-baked (and increasingly uncooked) ideas. Essentially, we’re megadosing on vitamins when we need aspirins to relieve an invisible but acute pain today.
I’ve spent a career at the leading (some say, bleeding) edge of technology. My dopamine rush comes from realizing a clever solution to a persistent problem. I get a visceral kick from listening to new ideas and spreading them to other nerds. And behaviorally, at least, my peers seem to have a similar addiction. There is always another dopamine hit in the latest issue of Science or Nature , another shiny object to examine, debate, and fantasize about. And, inevitably, a sense of satisfaction is associated with being first, the first to discover, the first to realize, and the first to tell others. Conversely, there’s a feeling of exclusion from being the last to know. I get it—I’ve lived it and been forced to confront my addiction to cleverness and its destructive potential. Cleverness is not innovation . As much as we might like the two to coincide—innovation requires more than a good idea; it insists upon adoption.
This behavioral pattern lies at the heart of why climate innovation is off track—Adoption is an afterthought, like in “Field of Dreams”, whispering, ‘Build it, and he will come.” Advanced societies expect novelty, and technologists like myself are at the forefront of feeding this dependency. Unfortunately, when the going gets rough, options make it far too easy to change course in favor of a promising (but undeveloped) new approach. It feels like “innovation,” but it’s not. And adding more money and political support to the promise of innovation has the destructive consequence of providing leaders with even more promising but unrankable options.
How should we, as notional climate technologists, modify our approach? Sadly for some, but happily for most, I’m not the one in charge! Nevertheless, I am more than willing to propose a bold solution:
First, there needs to be an open and urgent discussion among leading technologists about creating a concise, shared objective. I’m not suggesting another National Academies panel making recommendations to Congress, but something more like a Constitutional Convention. Here’s a suggestion:
To control Earth’s climates, we must gain control over the composition of Earth’s atmosphere. By another name, this is ‘geoengineering’, but it cannot be avoided, however scary or environmentally disruptive it might seem. Any solution must be implemented as soon as possible, then adjusted and monitored regularly, rather than debated or refined until it’s too late.
Second, the objective needs to be refined to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based), an acronym familiar to project managers. I’d suggest something straightforward but still challenging and uncertain, like:
Over the next decade, technologies that bend the Keeling curve downward will be deployed. Such technologies will be evaluated quantitatively according to their contribution to the objective and should be capable of leveraging economies of scale.
It will be essential to avoid making the objective subjective, in other words, open to interpretation. This means eliminating political meddling by design. In addition, it will be essential to avoid pluralizing the objective—if needed, multiple objectives can be stated but then must be explicitly prioritized so that there is a primary objective (a must-have) with secondary objectives (nice-to-haves).
I’ve often joked that, at the inception of the Apollo program, if Earth had two moons instead of just one, Congress would still be debating which one we should go to. Having a clear and agreed-upon objective (singular), publicly stated, focuses efforts on proposed solutions. Politicians must get out of the way of progress.
Finally, the program should have a defined end date but with an effectively infinite budget (cost should not be a limitation). Existing financial support (both public and private) is more than adequate but can be organized around programmatic goals to avoid duplication if their delegates can agree on an objective. Clearly stated technical objectives have worked in the past for the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, so the approach should work here. The distinction is that those efforts addressed a clear and present danger presented by a well-defined enemy. It will be up to politicians to convince their constituents that we’re facing an unseen and undetected enemy that requires a dedicated effort without the luxury of an imminent threat, like Pearl Harbor or 9-11. It won’t be easy, but it will involve politicians stepping back from meddlesome (and self-serving) behavior.
Scientists and engineers should lead the program, but it must explicitly sunset to prevent a persistent drag on the global economy—approaches that cannot be sustained without program funding should be terminated. We should avoid creating another IPCC, but that panel’s current members could be productively redirected toward solutions.
Implementing such a global program is damned hard in an environment where participants compete. The diffuse funding structures in place today enable technologists to be rewarded for partial, stand-alone solutions to a much larger problem. So, we technologists should unite to cooperate rather than compete, forgo our dopamine-fueled addiction to novelty, and insist that global leaders provide the resources and space needed to execute. To quote Benjamin Franklin on the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
I’m not confident it will ever happen, but I’m optimistic it can.