Cleantech in Melbourne: No Worries!

On May 12, 2010, in Economy 2.0, Energy Efficiency, Events, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, by Tim

According to JP Morgan, flying to 21186 miles to Melbourne and back for a clean tech conference generated 5.63 tonnes of carbon dioxide, but unlike most conferences on this subject the hot air emissions were negligible.

The Sir Mark Oliphant Cleantech: Mainstream and at the Edge conference was refreshing for the positive outlook on cleantech rather than the self flagellation that usually goes along with this kind of event. While there were a few graphs showing frightening population statistics, with dire predictions of resource and energy use, they were mostly used to illustrate how a combination of human ingenuity and technology could be used to solve problems. None of the speakers even suggested smashing the corrupt capitalist system as happens so often at green events.

Megatrends

From my perspective, as hopefully a purveyor or at least enabler of technology based sustainability, the advantage of this kind of event is to see what the real drivers are, the market for the technology, and then try to find the science and engineering to solve the problem. This probably explains my rapt attention to talks like Stefan Hajkowicz’s excellent overview of Megatrends (the full report is available here), which looked at the “trends, patterns of economic, social or environmental activity that will change the way people live and the science and technology products they demand.”

I wasn’t too happy about the use of data from a rather flawed WEF risk report which identified nanotechnology as a risk on a par with an asset price collapse, a slowing Chinese economy, oil and gas price spikes, extreme climate change related weather, pandemic, biodiversity loss and terrorism. We seem to keep finding echoes of the grey goo fears of ten years ago in these kind of documents, something for the science communication experts to ponder.

Also fascinating was Ellen Sandell’s talk on her work with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, a mobilisation of 50,000 young people who just couldn’t wait for Copenhagen, Davos or Canberra to reach an agreement, or for the Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace to stop politicking and decided to get things moving themselves.

So given that we know what to expect, and we have no lack of youthful enthusiasm to push us along, there’s no real excuse not to act.  We should be demanding of our politicians that we develop new technologies not new taxes, and that we use our scientific knowledge of the natural world to make it a better place.

The news gets even better, as many of the speakers mentioned, in that you can make the world a better place and make money.

No worries!

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Talking Cleantech In Melbourne

On May 5, 2010, in Energy Efficiency, Events, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, geoengineering, by Tim

The Sir Mark Olifant Cleantech conference has been a lot of fun so far, from Eric Isaac’s opening overview of the the issues (and solutions) to Stefan Hajkowicz’s analysis of megatrends that will shape our future technology development.

I’m still struck by how much cleantech seems to be focused in a few rather obvious areas, something which effectively prices a lot of technologies out of the market, and the excessive valuations thus generated tend to make it almost impossible to get a return for most investors. Sometimes meeting the problem head on isn’t the best strategy, and it is better to wait until a problem has been cracked and then capitalise on the myriad opportunities that spin out – as with mobile phones you don’t have to invent the device to make money from it.

My focus is more on how nanotechnology, by its nature is more akin to what nature does. As Eric Isaacs mentioned this morning, we are almost at the stage where we can create materials by design, or in his his words ‘we can almost taste it’ – something that opens up a whole new world of sustainable everything.

A preview of my presentation is available here – with the caveat that it works better if you hear me tell the story behind it!

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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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Copenhagen – Where’s The Science?

On December 7, 2009, in Nanotech, by Tim
Secretary-General Addresses Climate Change Sum...

Image by United Nations Photo via Flickr

The next couple of weeks will be dominated by the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, and probably some nasty brutish debate with science caught somewhere in the middle. While the negotiators fumble towards a compromise that keeps all the vested interests happy while appearing to be taking tough action, I’ll be busy pushing the idea that we should actually do something about it.

Unfortunately the political response to climate change so far has been simply to set targets and impose taxes. While every politician knows that the only way to reduce energy consumption would be to double prices, as the recent oil price spike showed, that would be political suicide, so the response has been ‘green taxes’, adding a few pence here, a pound on air passenger duty there, that no one will notice too much.

However, merely taxing and punishing people doesn’t provide a solution and the only way to make a difference is to make sure that we are applying the fruits of four thousand years of science and technology more effectively than we do at present. That means governments supporting science with the fruits of the eco taxes, rather than simply shovelling them into the black holes of the banking system, and NGO’s stopping their knee-jerk anti science reactions and working with the scientific community to find acceptable sustainable solutions.

The most important thing to emerge from Copenhagen will not be a new round of targets, but a real commitment to ensure that the technologies we need to tackle climate change (and this involves nanotech, industrial biotech, geoengineering, synthetic biology and a whole range of other technologies that are currently unpalatable to the huge swathers of the ‘stop climate change’ lobby) can be effectively developed and deployed, and pronto!

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Geoengineering Gets NGOs Madder Than A Nest Of Angry Wasps

On August 31, 2009, in Publications, Sustainability, geoengineering, by Tim

I tweeted yesterday that I wondered how NGO’s would try to pop the geoengineering genie back in the bottle, now that it is being actively discussed by the Royal Society. It hasn’t taken the ETC group long to develop a strategy that involves dismissing geoengineering as pure fantasy – just like banning all technology would lead to a perfect world then? But, boy are they angry?

The Royal Society will play an important role in this performance by offering a prestigious platform and global microphone to some modern-day tricksters. The emperor in the children’s fable, encouraged by dishonest tailors, pretends he can see the invisible threads of his fancy new clothes just as the political establishment, aided by scientists, will pretend that technology will save us from the climate crisis. In order to get us all to have faith in this fallacy, they need first to engineer momentum and then get us to believe in fairy tales.

From the vehemence of this piece, accusing the Royal Society of promoting ‘geopiracy’ the ETC group appears to be severely rattled, but as usual they don’t advance any practical solution, and that’s my real beef with this rather misleading piece, that it entirely negative and pretty much the same kind of scaremongering that we would take the Daily Mail to task for.

Given that climate change is an urgent issue, shouldn’t we be doing everything that we can to evaluate ways to mitigate it? Not according to the ETC group who suggest that releasing huge amounts of hot air into the atmosphere is the only solution. Their response is to call for

an international framework to evaluate new technologies, so that governments, in consultation with civil society and the scientific community, can make reasoned and equitable decisions regarding their possible development and/or deployment. The possibility of “dual-use” geoengineering to be unilaterally deployed and its possible commercial applications call for an urgent global resolution. The current governance gap over geoengineering needs to be closed, which will happen only through serious international discussion under the auspices of the United Nations

I wonder how history will judge some of the environmental movement. Will they be seen as the people who saved us from ourselves, or will they be the Luddites who blocked every attempt to find a solution and made a bad situation even worse?

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