Author: Captain Obvious

I guess it was no surprise to see this post in the Greenbiz online newsletter as we start a new year:  Shopify: 3 lessons from investing $55 million in 27 carbon removal startups | GreenBiz

Why is there so much interest in carbon removal from the air?  Is it because it seems so big as a business potential?  Or is it that we can do it almost anywhere on the planet … so labor costs won’t matter?  Or is it because we have now given up on controlling the sources since that is so difficult to do?

Or, perhaps, is it because it is easier to ask people to pay for the forgiveness of their sins than to expect them to stop sinning?

The Catholic church called them indulgences and prospered in unseemly ways, but if you get past that extreme, you can clearly see the same root problem with why it is so attractive to have someone take the garbage we create and just make it disappear.  Or at least they can make it appear that they have.

Haven’t we learned anything from our efforts to recycle?  The news media has covered this of course and the results are anything but encouraging.  Why is that we think we can now recycle carbon dioxide?  Isn’t that problem even harder than our efforts to recycle cardboard and plastic?  We have landfill problems already and have for decades.

For example, here is another article in Greenbiz.  It will be very telling to see how Pepsi responds to this lawsuit:
Why it matters that New York state is suing PepsiCo over single-use plastic | GreenBiz

As we start a new year, wouldn’t it be better to remind everyone that the cumulative effects of our sinful extractive and unsafe energy demands on this planet require us to each look a bit more honestly at our personal wasteful tendencies?  Wouldn’t it help if each of us considered each day and in every way whether we really need to use or consume this or that and/or throw it away?

We are not walking gently on this planet, and the idea that we can pay for someone to take away our sins speaks volumes about our true attitudes toward consumption and our willingness to make a difference.

Perhaps you do know that the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, more commonly referred to as COP28, just ended this week. The meeting was marred by some realistic talk from the fossil fuel industry about the likelihood that it was going to fade into the background anytime soon.

The graphic I have here was taken by me as I was just checking on my boat harbored in Mystic Connecticut. It always amazes me that you can see its position within about 20 feet in near real time due to its automatic positioning system (called AIS). Most vessels larger than 30 feet have one installed. And because of this tracking system, the Coast Guard rarely does Search & Rescue anymore. With AIS, they know where you are and perform rescue.

I took this screen shot as I was zooming out to check a course a friend was going to take and was once again astounded by the number of large boats crossing just about everywhere and/or fishing international waters. It is equally astounding to do this with commercial air traffic. And, I am flabbergasted by the number of trucks on the road.

The scale of worldwide commerce is just staggering. The idea that you are going to simply eradicate all these fossil-fueled vehicles in the near-term is ludicrous.  Here is a live shot of commercial planes in the air.

Yet the politicians proclaim solar, wind, hydrogen, ammonia, and whatnot will save the planet.

What will save the planet is a sober assessment of this question: Why are all these vehicles doing what they are doing and what should we consider changing for the future.

You don’t hear that question at all do you? Why don’t you? That is the more important question.

I fully understand why we are all now concerned about the future of our civilization and the planet.  That is refreshing, even if it is insincere in my opinion.  But, the more important and immediate question is when does business do more harm than good by being in business?  How do we solve international business existential problems: businesses that are profitable but not in the best interest of the planet?

It is pretty easy to criticize extractive businesses like mining that are unsustainable and are simply raping the planet.  Many of these put local poor people, especially children, in harms way as their desperate plight exposes them to unsafe and hazardous conditions.  You have heard me talk about EVs being the blood diamonds of this decade for this reason.

But there seems to be a more subtle and insidious practice of cultivating land for cash crops, and in doing so, opens up a whole new raft of corruption and abuse, no less environmental impacts.  Little did I know that avocados are creating the same situation in Mexico that the world decries with the destruction of the Amazon due to raising beef.  Take a closer look at the damage in Mexico here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/us/mexico-avocado-deforestation.html?searchResultPosition=2

We see countless rallies about carbon dioxide emissions, but the simple fact that China rapes the oceans to feed their masses and drives food stocks into extinction is well known but I never hear about it in our news press coverage of our relationship to China.  Why is AI, Taiwan, and industrial espionage take the spotlight, while the exploitation of the world’s food supply goes unnoticed?

Yes, of course there are lots of issues that need more consideration, but destroying the food stock of the planet seems to me to certainly deserve being in the list.  You do remember when China had a one child policy because they themselves realized that policy was not working.

This situation in Mexico is a litmus test for whether we can work together to solve these problems.  The article in the NY Times brings it into the light of day, but can we bring this to a logical conclusion?

Hopefully, we will learn more and act rather than just turn a blind eye to one more area of neglect.

Yep, we now have a new word to describe the damage companies and governments have on the environment. The European Union just passed a law that criminalizes some of the most serious forms of environmental damage. Although the text of the law does not use the word “ecocide,” its preamble says that it intends to criminalize “cases comparable to ecocide.” The law is part of a growing global movement to formally ban polluting companies from harming our planet.

Now, before you go into a tizzy celebrating what could have been a major shift in environmental thinking, let’s consider the reality of any “cide” label. Let’s start with genocide. Has the world stopped any form of this abuse just because it declares it illegal? Do I need to rattle off all the recent cases of countries who are killing people en masse just because they deem them undesirable?

And let’s think about how the Chinese are destroying the fish populations all around the globe in their attempt to feed a nation. Tell me that you believe this new law will matter?

I do expect this term will gain traction because it is a good description of our situations, but unfortunately, I also believe it is simply one more label we can use to shorten our conversations. It is a great soundbite.

We need dialogue and sobering considerations about where we all are going on this journey. Perhaps that is the true key to it all: realizing we are all in this together whether we like it or not. We really do have only one planet earth, and we are extracting the elements of sustainable life here at a rate that is already unsustainable and will be even more difficult as the population of the planet increases.

Labels do little to promote this kind of thinking. They just seem to polarize us further.

This dates me, but one of my favorite TV shows growing up was the Lone Ranger.  After resolving an episode’s plot, he would leave behind his trademark silver bullet.

Wikipedia defines the silver bullet in folklore as one of the few weapons that are effective against a werewolf or witch. The term “silver bullet” is also a metaphor for a simple, seemingly magical, solution to a difficult problem: for example, penicillin circa 1930 was a “silver bullet” allowing doctors to treat and successfully cure many bacterial infections.

My reason for this blog is to highlight that all too many of the ideas being talked about today to achieve a sustainable energy future are metaphorically silver bullets.  They won’t work.  Most of them will fail because they don’t work in the first place, are not economical, and/or will not scale to address the problem at hand.  They may be nice hobby-like activities such as composting, or work when labor and/or raw materials are low cost, but they are not candidates for serious consideration at the scale required to make a difference.

It amuses me to see the trade press pick up on these ideas and proclaim them excitedly when the engineering under the hood is missing or frankly refutes the claimed benefits.  The media is so uninformed about energy technology that they proclaim benefits and impacts without checking them.

Worse yet, once one media outlet proclaims something, they all seem to pounce on the idea as if it were the answer to the world’s problems.  Headlines suggest this or that will be the death of the internal combustion engine or produce essentially unlimited energy with no adverse side effects.

Do you remember the phrase “trust but verify.” It is a Russian proverb. It was used often in the text of nuclear disarmament during the Cold War era by Ronald Reagan meaning the United States can trust the Soviet Union, but they need to do more than trust to make sure they won’t betray the United States.

Betrayal.  Yep, that’s what the media are really doing these days: they are betraying us.

All this stands in stark contrast to the time when I was a young professional and all ideas were peer reviewed.  Experiments done by one researcher had to be replicable by others.  Conferences on topics were more about verification and rigor than fundraising pitch decks.

So, when you read the headlines about how all our energy problems are solved with green hydrogen, fuel cells, EVs, photovoltaics, and wind, think critically about the source and realities of that happening.