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!

Tagged with: • • • • •
 
1 Comments
Leave A Response

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.

Tagged with: • • • •
 
1 Comments
Leave A Response

Geoengineering – Engineering an All Purpose Political Smokescreen?

On March 8, 2010, in Nanotech, Sustainability, geoengineering, by Tim

There’s nothing like the mention of Geoengineering to get environmental groups even madder than putting a wasps nest down their trousers and beating them with a cricket bat, and for good reason. The idea that we could do something about climate change that didn’t involve re-engineering the political system would mean that we don’t have to live in caves, grow beards and ride bicycles. More annoyingly, some kind of techno fix would deprive some groups of a platform for the various other anti capitalist/globalisation/consumer agendas that have somehow got mixed up with sustainability.

Our old friends the ETC group, who spent the last ten years objecting to nanotechnology on rather questionable grounds, have reactivated their global network to write an open letter to “the upcoming privately organized meeting on geoengineering in Asilomar, California” which aims to look at a voluntary code “for the least harmful and lowest risk conduct of research and testing of proposed climate intervention and geoengineering technologies.”

What really gives the game away is their objection, or rather their outrage on behalf of a number of Philippines farmers groups, to the “almost exclusively white male scientists from industrialized countries” who will be at the conference.

Come on guys, why don’t you just come out and say that you are outraged by the lack of ethnic diversity in science, peeved about people making money out of it and hopping mad about not being seen as being important enough to be invited? What’s geoengineering, synthetic biology, nanotechnology or biotech got to do with it? Apparently absolutely nothing.

Tagged with: • • • •
 
2 Comments
Leave A Response

What is Synthetic Biology and Where Will It Take Us?

On November 26, 2009, in Economy 2.0, by Tim

A twelve minute primer on synthetic and industrial biology and how just how much you can do in your garage or kitchen –  from Rob Carlson taking tea with the Economist and discussing how we need emerging technologies to manage the risk of natural pathogens such as H1N1 or SARS 2.0.

Tagged with:
 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Why We Won’t Grow Biofuels in 2029

On April 20, 2009, in Health & Safety, Renewable Energy, Sustainability, by Tim

Biofuels Watch has a little article entitled “Biofuels 20 Years From Now” which caught my eye not so much for its conclusion that we should grow non food crops such as the oily succulent Jatropha instead of maize, but for the woolliness, or at least the linearity of the thinking surrounding biofuels.

There are two things happening here, and neither of them are particularly productive. Firstly there is the underlying assumption that anything bio, i.e natural, must be better than something synthetic like, erm, oil (which is the product of something that did grow once!) which seemed plausible enough to convince politicians around the world to set targets for biofuel use. Of course it has finally dawned that oil can be pumped out of the ground in inhospitable areas if the world whereas the growing of biofuel plants requires the grubbing up of land that would otherwise be used for food production.

What worries me more is the sort of inflexible thinking that this article, and many others addressing future energy needs and sustainability embody. Switching from something edible to something inedible as a feedstock for ethanol production doesn’t solve the problem any more than living in a tree will mitigate climate change.  Growing stuff in fields is something we have been doing for ten thousand years, and it s such an easy trick that even ants can do it, so we need to think about doing something new, something that makes some use of three or four thousand years of civilization, philosophy and science rather than banging our heads repeatedly against the (cave) wall.

If we want to get smart about this, we need to take something that we already have lots of, and find a waste by product that we can utilise, trees for example. Now before anybody jumps up and down pointing out that you can’t make ethanol directory from wood, and all the maple trees in Canada wouldn’t make much difference, we do know that. That’s where the technology comes in.

As often happens with these technologies, you have to get from A to B (or in this case trees to ethanol) via a few other places, and most of those places involve biotechnology and synthetic biology to transform a waste material (and plenty of stuff is thrown away during paper making for example) into a more useful material. Often a second or third step is needed to get to B, but doing this using microbes is much more energy efficient and cleaner than processing biofuels in a refinery.

Get that right and there is no need to take up any additional land, or to plant any additional crops, and you can play this trick with a number of other materials. While some of the technologies I have been looking at (which is why I have to be deliberately sketchy above) are a few years away from commercial use, I’m pretty sure that biofuels in 20 years time will be produced in a far more sensible and efficient way than currently envisaged.

Predictably, Friends of the Earth are dead against this approach, rather short sightedly equating any new technology with unacceptable risk. It’s all very well to carp from the sidelines, but given the urgency of finding solutions to global problems such as water and energy, spending twenty years rejecting any technology based solution doesn’t seem particularly enlightened – even toddlers tantrums blow over quicker!

Tagged with: • •
 
1 Comments
Leave A Response

Time For A New Green Agenda?

On April 19, 2009, in Economy 2.0, Energy Efficiency, Health & Safety, Nanotech, Sustainability, by Tim

Yesterday’s meeting started me thinking about why, despite some NGO finding another potential climate related catastrophe almost every day, there is a feeling of frustration and a lack of progress. It looks to be the fault of the Green movement itself.

If we take a look at the history of the environmental movement, most if it sprang from the anti establishment movement of the early seventies, when people were fighting against corporate greed and government inaction. This was inexorably linked with left of centre politics, and into this rainbow coalition were drawn all of the other popular movements demanding an end to war, liberation for Palestine, legalisation of LSD and a whole variety of other causes. As a result, it is hard to get any rational discussion of environmental issues without running into some rather naive anti capitalist rhetoric, and this probabl;y goes some way to explaining the Green movements confrontational stance. In a nutshell, they are a bunch of old hippies, still fighting the battles of 1975 in 2009 because a) that is all they know how to do and b) there is a natural human instinct to try to preserve the status quo even if you started off fighting to overturn it.

If we look at the green leaders we see people such as Lord Jonathon Porrit and George Monbiot, sitting pontificating about how people should live their lives from a position of unimaginable privilege when viewed from most of the developing world. I have been in plenty of meetings with this strata of the green movement where people have had the arrogance to try to deny developing nations the very technology which would allow them to start improving standards of living. “We’d rather let them starve than risk using GMOs” seems to be the rather depressing view, which completely missed the point that while we in the west are rich enough to waffle on about downshifting, and slacking for the several billion other people living in grinding poverty would result in an early death.

Let’s face it, cycling to work or trading tomatoes for lettuces with your neighbour might make you feel better, but  isn’t going to save the world, so what is?

Well it has to start with economic growth. Population will continue to rise anyway, and contrasting the living standards in London and Lagos illustrates why money is important. So demanding that x% of GDP be spent on mitigating climate changes isn’t really going to work because that money is being raised through green taxes which just takes more money out of the economy and leaves less of a margin to do good works with. But stimulating economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean pollution, as I mentioned yesterday the environment in the UK is actually getting cleaner and greener while at the same time we have got considerably richer.

It seems that the established Green movement knows only how to use the stick – taxes and scare stories – and not the carrot to change peoples behaviour. Nudge by Richard Thaler would be a good place to start looking for ideas. In addition this obsession with technology being bad is really holding back progress. technology isn’t all bad, as you’ll find out if you ever need to go into hospital.

The other thing that we can do to make a real difference is to encourage the development of, and if safe, the deployment of the whole range of new and emerging technologies that can address climate change. Should we be bothered that an entrepreneur or a company that comes up with a way to make a major difference to carbon dioxide emissions gets rich on the back of it? Of course not, we should applaud it and hope that it it will encourage others to try. There are a huge range of technologies, from nanotechnologies in thin film solar cells, through to engineering carbon capturing microbes using synthetic biology to solar shaded and geoengineering that we need to develop.

Groups such as Friends of the Earth and ETC have fought tooth and claw, and in the dirtiest possible way to encourage the wholesale rejection of technologies. It’s these old hippies with their 1975 mindsets that need to be rejected, not technology. Let’s forget the politics and see some action. If their approach is not appropriate for the 21st century then wither replace them or start a movement that is.

Tagged with: • • • •
 
6 Comments
Leave A Response

Go To Top »