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Agreed. This is not a problem that is tractable on an individual level. Sure, if everyone became a vegetarian and cycled to work and only partook of goods and s

by nkoren 10y ago

Agreed. This is not a problem that is tractable on an individual level. Sure, if everyone became a vegetarian and cycled to work and only partook of goods and services that were part of a circular economy, then the world would be a place. But that's not going to happen, because in many places, food choices (and food culture) is terrible; cities are designed in cycling/pedestrian-hostile ways; the circular economy just can't supply all the goods and services you need to keep your family in good shape. So that's not gonna work. I mean, do it if it makes you feel good -- personally I don't own a car, am a vegetarian, etc. -- but don't kid yourself that that's how the world gets saved. It isn't. The problems need to be fixed on an institutional/structural level. Here's how I'm personally doing that: - Worked on a new urban transport technology (http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/ http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/) that is significantly more attractive than the car in many respects, is all-electric, requires 70% less net energy, and uses 95% less land. - Although I failed at getting the above technology implemented at urban scales, I discovered a more fundamental problem that needed to be cracked: cities have difficulty innovating (and integrating) because all the various planning/engineering/policymaking disciplines are heavily siloed. So I started a software company (https://www.podaris.com/ https://www.podaris.com/) that has now created a collaboration platform for transport planners, urban planners, architects, policymakers etc. If it helps us to create better cities, it may actually help to save the world. If I could clone myself and work on other things, they would be: - Bio-engineered vat-grown meat and yeast-derived dairy. I have no intrinsic problem with small-scale, local, traditional meat production, but the mainstream industry, based on feedlots and Brazilian Soya, needs to die. - Sea farming: seaweed and oysters. Sustainable, and also highly freaking yummy. - Vertical / urban farming tech. (Still not 100% sold on this, but where it makes sense, it should be done!) - Create software tools for tracking, comprehending, and shaping designs and resource flows in the circular economy. - Get involved in public policy: reform campaign-finance laws that allow entrenched industries to capture and distort the regulatory landscape; implement a carbon tax; abolish farm subsidies. - Electric aviation. Somewhere in the next 10 years this will be crossing into the realm of viability. Would be exciting to get in on the ground floor. - Electric storage systems. A decarbonised electrical systm needs better way of buffering electricity, whether that's in batteries, potential energy, air pressure, or whatever. Much innovation needed here. - Electric shipping. Hey, why isn't this a thing already? - Sustainable building materials. Concrete is one of my favourite materials, but it has one hell of a carbon footprint. Figure out better ways to make concrete, or innovate with other materials entirely. (I suspect that bamboo still has a hell of a lot of untapped potential, and could even be a viable carbon sink.) - Better automation in the production and installation of solar and wind. The more that robots do the work, the faster it can get done. (Elon Musk is very much on this track, with his whole "factories that make factories" thing). You should be extremely pessimistic every time you hear people extol how many jobs will be created by the Green Economy: the flipside of the jobs-creation scenario is that it'll take a very long time and an unsustainable fuckload of money. Want it to be done quickly and economically sustainably? It'll have to be done with robots. Go build 'em. - Do research on / campaign for a Universal Basic Income. Wait, what does this have to do with ocean acidification? Simple: 1. We're not getting out of this mess without software/robots eating the world. The decarbonisation process is going to destroy millions of jobs in old, polluting industry -- and won't replace them with an equivalent number of new jobs. Heck, even my urban planning collaboration software is going to eventually displace a lot of middlemen. So the entire wage-labor economy, with one's salary being the cornerstone of the social contract, is going the way of the Dodo. 2. When people are economically insecure, they have a difficult giving a damn about any of the above. They just want their coal-mining jobs (or whatever) back. And thus we end up with the politics of our age. 3. This problem is worse in emerging economies, BTW. 4. So until more people can achieve economic security, all of the above will be a very uphill battle. But the world has more than enough money to solve this problem, so let's bloody well solve it so we can get on to the harder problems. There's your list, for a start. It'll be tough work, but somebody's gotta do it. Might as well be you.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Thanks for the detailed response. That's exactly the kind of things I was looking for. Of course none of those points are something a single individual can tackle, but what I'm thinking about is to: - identify broad areas in which changes / development could meaningfully help with the problem (like you started doing with this list) - rank them on impact potential - subdivide them into smaller areas - use that as a reference for what to work on, and encourage people to work on that - track progress in these areas (this alone is a good list item; I haven't really seen anything yet that does a good job of tracking how solutions for big problems are progressing) EDIT: Regarding Podaris, how is the project turning out in the real world? Do urban planners use it?
- nkoren 10y ago
  In reverse order: Thanks for asking about Podaris! Yes, there are a handful of planners using it. We soft-launched a little over a year ago, and since then have been working with a small group of planners from my personal network. They've done some good things with it, and it's gratifying to seen them now spending several hours every day in the software, so we're clearly addressing some kind of need. However up until now it hasn't been ready to be pushed out to the wider industry, so we don't really have a compelling traction story to tell. That push will start later this month, however -- so hopefully that will happen soon! It's a slow-moving industry, so I'm not expecting Snapchat-like growth curves, but am still quite optimistic. Re: making a list -- there are some serious attempts to do that, for example McKinsey's work on carbon abatement cost curves: https://everythingischanging.wordpress.com/tag/abatement-cost-curve/ https://everythingischanging.wordpress.com/tag/abatement-cos... However, such an endeavour can be problematic in that it's much easier to capture incremental innovation as opposed to disruptive innovation, and component innovation rather than systems innovation. If you look at the cost curve they came up with in 2009, for example, you'll see that "hybrid vehicles" are on the list but "all-electric vehicles" aren't. This is because all-electric vehicles were thought to be a pipe dream, unrealistic without some kind of radical change in the cost and capabilities of batteries. That change is actually happening, however. Considered in isolation, radically cheaper and better batteries have no environmental impact per se, but their knock-on effects are fantastically impactful. This is how disruptive innovation generally works -- modest low-level innovation which enables the development of radically new capabilities. Capacitive touchscreens enable smartphones; elevators enable skyscrapers, etc. Those low-level innovations are really important, but hard to value in isolation. Systems innovation is another area that's hard to compartmentalise. You can see "better insulation in houses" on that McKinsey list, but you don't see "build dense multifamily housing in city centres where people can walk to work and shopping", even though the latter is comprehensively more impactful, more than just about any item on their list. There are ways to value the latter, but it requires evaluating a complex scenario that includes not just housing efficiency, but also transportation, public policy, etc. This can only ever be indicative: it will never be as deterministic as saying that "replacing X insulation with Y insulation will save Z amount of energy". Doesn't mean that it's not worth doing, however! So what I'm saying is: be careful in subdividing things: it's possible to lose track of a lot of value in the process. But better ways of monitoring and evaluation would of course be a good thing! What you really need is a way of doing M&E for complex systems innovations... ...oh, wait, I started another company (https://www.futurescaper.com/ https://www.futurescaper.com/) which does that, among other things. Forgot to put that on the list, since it was a bit meta, but yes, could be valuable. Hasn't changed the world yet, but we're working on it!

by nkoren 10y ago

TeMPOraL 10y ago

Thanks for the detailed response. That's exactly the kind of things I was looking for. Of course none of those points are something a single individual can tackle, but what I'm thinking about is to: - identify broad areas in which changes / development could meaningfully help with the problem (like you started doing with this list) - rank them on impact potential - subdivide them into smaller areas - use that as a reference for what to work on, and encourage people to work on that - track progress in these areas (this alone is a good list item; I haven't really seen anything yet that does a good job of tracking how solutions for big problems are progressing) EDIT: Regarding Podaris, how is the project turning out in the real world? Do urban planners use it?

nkoren 10y ago
In reverse order: Thanks for asking about Podaris! Yes, there are a handful of planners using it. We soft-launched a little over a year ago, and since then have been working with a small group of planners from my personal network. They've done some good things with it, and it's gratifying to seen them now spending several hours every day in the software, so we're clearly addressing some kind of need. However up until now it hasn't been ready to be pushed out to the wider industry, so we don't really have a compelling traction story to tell. That push will start later this month, however -- so hopefully that will happen soon! It's a slow-moving industry, so I'm not expecting Snapchat-like growth curves, but am still quite optimistic. Re: making a list -- there are some serious attempts to do that, for example McKinsey's work on carbon abatement cost curves: https://everythingischanging.wordpress.com/tag/abatement-cost-curve/ https://everythingischanging.wordpress.com/tag/abatement-cos... However, such an endeavour can be problematic in that it's much easier to capture incremental innovation as opposed to disruptive innovation, and component innovation rather than systems innovation. If you look at the cost curve they came up with in 2009, for example, you'll see that "hybrid vehicles" are on the list but "all-electric vehicles" aren't. This is because all-electric vehicles were thought to be a pipe dream, unrealistic without some kind of radical change in the cost and capabilities of batteries. That change is actually happening, however. Considered in isolation, radically cheaper and better batteries have no environmental impact per se, but their knock-on effects are fantastically impactful. This is how disruptive innovation generally works -- modest low-level innovation which enables the development of radically new capabilities. Capacitive touchscreens enable smartphones; elevators enable skyscrapers, etc. Those low-level innovations are really important, but hard to value in isolation. Systems innovation is another area that's hard to compartmentalise. You can see "better insulation in houses" on that McKinsey list, but you don't see "build dense multifamily housing in city centres where people can walk to work and shopping", even though the latter is comprehensively more impactful, more than just about any item on their list. There are ways to value the latter, but it requires evaluating a complex scenario that includes not just housing efficiency, but also transportation, public policy, etc. This can only ever be indicative: it will never be as deterministic as saying that "replacing X insulation with Y insulation will save Z amount of energy". Doesn't mean that it's not worth doing, however! So what I'm saying is: be careful in subdividing things: it's possible to lose track of a lot of value in the process. But better ways of monitoring and evaluation would of course be a good thing! What you really need is a way of doing M&E for complex systems innovations... ...oh, wait, I started another company (https://www.futurescaper.com/ https://www.futurescaper.com/) which does that, among other things. Forgot to put that on the list, since it was a bit meta, but yes, could be valuable. Hasn't changed the world yet, but we're working on it!