Sustainability

Redesigning Technologies For Risk Avoidance With The World Economic Forum

On June 4, 2010, in Development Issues, Economy 2.0, Events, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, Social and Ethical, Sustainability, geoengineering, by Tim

I spent last weekend in a rather hot Doha (Qatar), surrounded by Emirs, Queens, Princes and Prime Ministers at the World Economic Forums Global Redesign Initiative meeting. It’s an organization I have been involved with for the past six years, through both the Technology Pioneers program and the Global Redesign Initiative.

As the world changes at an ever increasing pace, with new challenges from the financial, technology and natural worlds coming thick and fast, there have been questions over whether international institutions, from the United Nationals to the International Monetary Fund are able to cope.

“Today’s institutions are organized to solve yesterday’s problems” – Mark Malloch Brown, World Economic Forum Global Redesign Meeting, Doha, May 2010

A large part of the change, from the time when most institutions were set up in the aftermath of the second word war has been the explosive growth in communication. When the UN was founded television was only available to a very few people, whereas in 2010 almost five billion people have access to the Internet. The proliferation of Internet enabled devices from iPhones to sensors and the expanding use of social networking such as Twitter and Facebook would have been unimaginable even thirty years ago when the Internet was still an emerging technology.

But technology can present a hazard as well as a risk. While presenting many opportunities that benefit the planet such as raising awareness of global issues and encouraging international cooperation, the Internet can also be used for identity theft and spreading pornography, or even challenging the legitimacy and authority of governments.

With all emerging technologies to date, from the Internet to genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the understanding of the implications by governments and international institutions has lagged way behind the deployment of the technology.

The same is true for the emerging technologies of the 21^st Century. Nanotechnologies, synthetic biology and geoengineering have undoubted potential for good, especially in proactively addressing the issues which will inevitably arise in a world where nine billion people face increasing competition for resources, from food and water to power and natural resources. But equally inevitable is the potential for misuse, from home brew bioterrorism to environmental pollution, and in the case of geoengineering the potential for global disaster even though technologies may have been deployed with the best of intentions.

These emerging technologies, and their inter-linkages with civil society have the potential to shape and reshape our world even more profoundly than the Internet, and the ease of access to information and computing power means that in the 21^st century world changing breakthroughs are as likely to come from the mind of student as from a large multinational corporation.

The reactive nature of institutions is inherent in their nature, and we are proposing the creation of a mechanism to support faster, more fact based decision-making, and to provide the knowledge which would enable a proactive approach to be taken to both the risks and the opportunities arising from 21^st Century emerging technologies.

The full proposal for the Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence is contained in the WEFs Global Redesign Initiative report, and you can also download a copy here.

I’m happy to say that the idea is receiving increasingly strong support from both Governments and companies who are increasingly realizing that in today’s world, taking a passive and reactive approach to global issues will be always more expensive than developing risk avoidance technologies in advance.

You can see (and hear) more about the WEF Global Redesign Initiative below

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Tagged with: emerging technologies • geoengineering • Nanotech • risk management • Sustainability • World Economic Forum

How Did We End Up Here?

On May 29, 2010, in Nanotech, Products, Sustainability, by Tim

As I head towards Doha where through the World Economic Forum I will be continuing the battle to encourage governments and policy makers to be proactive about technology rather than reactive, Andrew Maynard’s excellent posting on the kerfuffle over using ‘nano’ dispersants to clear up oil is more grist to the mill.

I often despair when policy on environment and health issues seems to be made without any recourse to science, whether on MMR vaccines, GMO’s or the Louisiana clean up. For a background on the alleged dangerous nanotech you can take a look at Andrews blog. But the big issue here is a ridiculous system which often results in us to be unable to make use of technology.

Making wise choices on the dispersants used in the Gulf of Mexico is vitally important, and bad choices could have lasting consequences. And it is right and proper that questions should be asked over the use of one product over another. But if the spill is to be dealt with effectively, these choices must be science-informed – otherwise no-ones interests are served in the long run.

The real question I’ll be looking at in Doha is much longer are we going to have to wade through obfuscation from all sides while the planet dies?

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Tagged with: oil spill

Science – Our Insurance Policy Agains Global Catastrophes?

On May 27, 2010, in Economy 2.0, Nanotech, Sustainability, by Tim

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but shouldn’t governments have a little more foresight when it comes to predictable disasters?

With operations underway to cap the leaking Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, economists are already totting up the bill. So far we have somewhere around $3.5 billion of insured losses, $15 billion losses at BP (although the damage to the share price may be only temporary unless BP gets hit with additional fines under the US Clean Water act), $700 million a year for the local economy and probably a lot more won’t see the bill for until much later. Putting all of this together we are looking at a bill of up to $20 billion dollars.

The real tragedy of this disaster is not the size of the bill, the economic or ecological damage, but the fact that it could, and should have been manageable. After all, we can be reasonably sure that given the amount of oil being produced and transported around the world every day a major spillage is inevitable, and history shows us that major oils spill occur every twenty years with smaller ones happening on a far more regular basis.

While it is as difficult to prevent these type of accidents occurring as it is to prevent new strains of infection diseases emerging, i.e. impossible we are forewarned but oddly not forearmed, even though the economic cost of preparedness far outweighs the cost of disaster mitigation. Politicians seem to ‘get it’ as far as climate change is concerned, and are taking action now to avoid much bigger clean up bills in the future, but why don’t we do this in other areas?

As I prepare for another round of discussions about risk management and mitigation with the World Economic Forum in Doha this weekend, I have to wonder whether we are making the best use of our five thousand years of accumulated scientific and technological knowledge. While it is possible to hedge against corporate losses through insurance – in fact without insurance companies wouldn’t be able to take any risks at all – there is still no way we can insure the rest of the population against the outcomes of major disasters.

Or perhaps there is, and that is why we do science. If we were to instigate a global program tomorrow to tackle a major potential disaster, what would it cost? With assets of some $35 billion the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is tackling global health, poverty and education, and making some great strides forward as a result of its focussed initiatives. But this is a huge project tackling a wide range of issues across a very broad front, mitigating an oil spill or a global pandemic should be much cheaper.

I have looked at a number rapid screening technologies for pandemic control recently, costing between two and twenty million dollars to get to market. That’s small change compared with the estimated $70-166 billion dollar cost to the United States of an influenza pandemic.

Similarly the cost of developing technologies to mitigate oils spills is negligible in comparison to doing nothing, and much of this cost can be offset by piggy backing on existing academic research, and could be well funded by diverting only a tiny proportion of oil profits.

So when it comes to global catastophes, it can be argued that science is our only real and tangible insurance policy.

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Tagged with: deepwater horizon

New White Paper – Sustainable Technologies for the Next Decade

On May 13, 2010, in Economy 2.0, Energy Efficiency, Nanotech, Sustainability, by Tim

Prophets, priests, scientists and environmentalists have been gleefully predicting the end of the world for several millennia but it wont happen. One of the reasons that the human species has been so successful has been our ability to adapt to changing environments, enabling us, like viruses, to colonise almost every part of the planet, and make use of every available resource.

But there is a problem – we have made use of every available resource, and while some, like silicon make up 25.7% of the Earth’s crust by weight and are to all intents and purposes inexhaustible, many others such as indium are not. The problem is compounded by many of the scarcer elements being a small cog in a large wheel, so while materials such as aluminium, steel and many plastics can and are recycled, recovering the small amounts of indium from broken touch screens is neither feasible or cost effective.

So what can we do with increasingly scarce resources? The problems with elements, as opposed to compounds, is that as fundamental building blocks we cannot create more material, and nor is there an abundant source of material containing the elements in question. If we need hydrogen or oxygen they can be simply made from water, but there are few abundant compounds containing rare earths. As a result we need to find a new solution, and quickly.

Download Sustainable Technologies For The Next Decade (1.5Mb)

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Canadian Organic Associations Ban Nanotechnology (Maybe)

On May 4, 2010, in Health & Safety, Nanotech, Sustainability, by Tim

Canada has become the latest country following the UK and Australia to ban nanotechnology in organic food. Dag Falck, organic program manager at Nature’s Path Foods explains:

“Genetic engineering is a definable science: splicing genes into crops. With nanotechnology there are at least 1000 different applications, all unregulated with unknown risks.”

As the Canadian organic folks don’t seem to have got around to actually defining what nanotechnology is yet, one suspects that they are rather jumping the gun. It is rather confusing though as FoE, to their credit admit.

Homogenizing milk and grain milling create nanosized particles—milk molecules and wheat flour dust—but would not be considered products of nanotechnology….Nano Green Sciences, Inc. sells a nano-pesticide that they claim is “organic.” Other natural pesticides, such as pyrethrin and copper, could contain nanoparticles and nanosilver could be used to clean vegetables of bacteria.

I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on organic food regulation, but I was rather under the impression that ‘organic’ simply meant free from anything ‘artificial,’ as we discussed when the UK Soil Association also banned all things nano. It would seem that the natural/man made division would catch all engineered nanomaterials anyway, so explicitly banning them is as much a waste of time as banning cloned sheep from being in organic pigeons or grasshoppers from dancing on the moon.

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Tagged with: food safety • organic

We Have The Technologies To Deal With Oil Spills, Why Don’t We Use Them?

On May 4, 2010, in Nanotech, Sustainability, by Tim

Twenty Four hours ago my colleague Dexter Johnson asked my opinion about what nanotechnology could do to help clean up the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and I reluctantly said “not much.”

But this doesn’t have to be the answer, we probably have access to most of the technologies that we would need to make a big dent in the environmental mess that is unfolding, but why haven’t they been used?

The answer, as Andrew Maynard and I found out through our work with the World Economic Forum, is that most governments are reactive rather than proactive. The emphasis is on regulating risk rather than developing technologies that would help us deal more effectively with risk, and this disaster illustrates how, when something goes wrong, governments want to be able to pluck fully formed technologies from a tree. Unfortunately the branches are bare.

So what should we be doing to help us deal with inevitable disasters? Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but with a bill estimated at $15 billion for this incident alone, shouldn’t we be spending a few hundred million on making sure that we have the right technologies?

Between nanotechnology, industrial biotech and perhaps even synthetic biology, and not forgetting traditional chemistry I’d bet that we already have 90% of the technology we need. Light, strong, resistant materials for plugging leaks and corralling slicks, enzymes to transform oil into something more manageable, and dispersants to break up the slicks.

It is a certainty that somewhere in the world we will have another oil spill. What is less certain that by then we will have developed the technologies to stop an accident becoming a catastrophe.

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Tagged with: clean-tech • Nanotech • oil spill • Sustainability • synthetic biology

Technology Diffusion as the Ultimate Democratic Process

On April 27, 2010, in Development Issues, Economy 2.0, Sustainability, by Tim

The Guardian follows up on the Nature article last week which indicated that most applications of GM crops have been successful.

It’s sad to see the the first reaction of many of the anti GM side of the debate is to attempt to portray the writer of he Guardian article as biased or beholden to big GM business in some way. If that’s not sufficient then another commenter raises the oft cited ‘ethical’ objections along the lines of

- Agro-chemical companies work for profit
- That profit has to come out of someone’s pocket
- That someone is first and foremost the farmer, and always has been.

I’m often shocked by the naivety of the anti technology arguments, especially that if someone makes a profit it then the technology must automatically be bad. Profits means that people are employed and taxes get paid which pays for all the wonderful services we take for granted. If there wasn’t any money in it, then we wouldn’t have most modern crops, drugs, electricity. computes, mobile phones…

Unless the farmer has a lower IQ than the seeds he is planting, it will be simple economics which determine whether he uses GM or non GM seed. Feed your familay and sell your surplus.

That’s all there is to technology diffusion, whether GM, nanotech or anything else. It is the ultimate form of democracy, because it is us, the people, who eventually get to choose whether a technology is used or not, not politicians, companies or single issue campaign groups.

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Tagged with: GMOs

Eyjafjallajokull – Bad for Travel but Great for Science

On April 19, 2010, in Europe, Sustainability, geoengineering, by Tim

The ash cloud heads south east....

While the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland is bad news for some people, it is actually quite interesting from an emerging technologies point of view, and bordering on fascinating if, like me, you somehow managed to shoehorn a big chunk of geology and geomorphology into you education (It’s a frightening thought, but I could have ended up as a geographer!) as well as spending time working at the European Space Agency.

One of the more frequently proposed geoengineering solutions to climate change is to eject large amounts of aerosols into the upper atmosphere which then cut down the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo and the twenty million tons of sulphur dioxide it blasted into the stratosphere was thought to have caused a global cooling of half a degree centigrade, more than offsetting human induced climate change.

One of the key arguments against geoengineering is that we don’t know what the effects would be – and it is also a good idea to know how much the earth is warming by and what is causing it before you start to try to reverse it – but in this case we are learning fast, and collecting huge amounts of data from dozens of earth observation satellites, many of which were launched in response to concerns about climate change and designed specifically to measure it. So this particular eruption may be the one which helps us make that (hopefully) rational and evidence backed decision to use geoengineering should if ever become necessary.

While Eyjafjallajokull is estimated to be spewing ten thousand times less sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere than Pinatubo, the highly sophisticated earth observation satellites launched since Pinatubo’s 1991 eruption means that we are far better placed to study the effects of the eruption, both on the planet as a whole, and as a result of the particular composition of material ejected.

Ash sweeps across Europe, as seen from Envisat

This animation from the European Space Agency shows both the spread of the cloud, and its concentrations of sulphur dioxide, and ESA already has a project named Globvolcano which will “define, implement and validate information services to support volcanological observatories in their daily work by integration of Earth Observation data, with emphasis on observation and early warning.”

The other interesting bit of science we can do this week is investigate the effect of aircraft vapour trails. The water vapour emitted by jet engines has a similar effect to high altitude cud, reducing the amount if radiation reaching the earth during the day and acting as an insulating layer during the night. Work carried outwhen all aircraft were grounded in the US after the September 11th attacks concluded that “Sept. 11-14, 2001, had the biggest diurnal temperature range of any three-day period in the past 30 years.” As with all science, taking a single data point doesn’t prove anything, so having another crack at it might help us understand the effect of aircraft on the climate.

All in all, it’s pretty exciting stuff, and armed with half a dozen earth observation satellites like Envisat bristling with spectrometers there is the opportunity to do some great science.

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Tagged with: climate change • Eyjafjallajokull • geoengineering

A Concerted Effort To Save British Science

On March 9, 2010, in Nanotech, Sustainability, credit crunched, by Tim

The past week has seen some strong and effective lobbying from the scientific community, naturally worried about some rather dim politician seeing the science budget as being available to plunder, with the next government having to deal with any consequences. It’s therefore good to see various former science ministers, and the Royal Society making high profile interventions and spelling out the link between science and prosperity.

I’m not convinced that the science budget can be ring fenced. Despite what politicians are saying now, the huge black hole in the UK budget needs to be plugged, and for most people science is a very remote and irrelevant thing when compared to rubbish collection or heath care.

But a crisis can also be an opportunity, and as spelled out in last week’s ‘Vision for UK Research‘ report there is also a need to start thinking about science in a different way. In fact we really need to look at the whole process of scientific innovation from primary education to technology funding. Long term, sustained and focussed funding is required, but getting the message across to the non science community is very difficult.

Perhaps the most frightening chart in the Royal Society report is this one. If we don’t have any qualified maths and science teachers then where are the researchers of the future to come from?

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How Did We End Up Here?

Science – Our Insurance Policy Agains Global Catastrophes?

New White Paper – Sustainable Technologies for the Next Decade

Canadian Organic Associations Ban Nanotechnology (Maybe)

We Have The Technologies To Deal With Oil Spills, Why Don’t We Use Them?

Technology Diffusion as the Ultimate Democratic Process

Eyjafjallajokull – Bad for Travel but Great for Science

A Concerted Effort To Save British Science

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