When
fighting climate change, the focus often is on the small changes instead of
supporting industries that would make a big impact. In this article I suggest
three industries which I believe could make a decisive impact on climate change
and which need to be supported.
Making
rational decisions is one of the most complex tasks humans face. We tend to
base decisions on emotions, which comes more naturally. Emotions evoke
compassion, and it is this compassion that has driven the success of the human
species. We get others to co-operate and help, because we have arguments that
arise similar emotions in others, who sympathize and would give time and effort
for same causes.
This led
everybody to demonstrate, sometimes violently, against nuclear power in the
1980’s, especially in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. It was right to voice
anger at the neglect and incompetence of the Russian nuclear operators and politicians;
it was wrong to advocate shutting down all Nuclear reactors. It slowed down the
development of safer, more advanced Nuclear power stations and lead to the
exponential increase in coal power stations, suffocating the rest of the world.
Now countries, that did not benefit from the abundance of cheap dirty coal-generated
electricity have to bear the effects of global warming caused by the steep rise
in CO2 those powerplants spew out.
The same emotional
decision making caused an uproar against the use of fracking to extract gas
from bedrocks. Horror stories of contaminated groundwater and earthquakes circulated
on social media, and therefore many politicians were slow to support any
fracking. Yet, the USA has probably peaked in CO2 emissions in 2006, even with
Donald Trump, and his love for coal, at the helm. The drop was due not because
of the electric car, nor the solar power stations, but fracking. The widespread
use of gas, which often can be used instead of coal to fire power stations, was
the main driver in the reduction of emissions in America.
The list
goes on and on. Plastic straws are a swearword these days, and plastic shopping
bag are frowned upon. Yet McDonalds in the UK instructed its outlets to discard
the paper straws with the general waste because they are so hard to recycle. Multi-use
shopping bags need to be used 140 times to negate the negative environmental
impact of producing them. Even though I do think that it is right to look at
alternatives to plastic, especially single use plastic, I do think we are
forgetting about industries that can make a real change.
So what are
the three industries I am backing? Wood especially CLT, Hydrogen propulsion and
urban farming. I think each of them would could cause a substantial change to
our environment and to our way of life. Here are some of the reasons why I
chose those three industries, starting with wood.
Humans have
used wood for millennia to build everything from ships, to carriages and
houses. It has great properties. It was easy to work with, it floats, it was
strong and had great insulation properties. But it had a big downside. It
burns. Many great cities were partially wiped out because the fire spread
easily. Think of London in 1666, San Francisco in 1851 or more recently how the
Notre-Dame de Paris burned relentlessly. But in the 1990’s a technology called
Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) was developed, which enhanced the properties of
wood dramatically. The fire resistance of the wood is now far superior to
concrete and steel structures in catastrophic fire events. CLT panels are also
extremely strong, with a very favorable weight to strength ratio. Researchers
have also established that it has excellent seismic resilience, with no
residual deformation. CLT wood is now being used to build an 84-meter-tall
building in Vienna, called the HoHo. Construction is much quicker than
conventional concrete and steel construction, and alterations will be a lot
simpler. The foundations didn’t need to
be as massive as normal because the weight of the building is a fraction of
what a similar concrete and steel structure would have been.
But the
biggest benefit of using wood in construction is the CO2 footprint. While trees
grow, they absorb a lot of Carbon Dioxide and emit Oxygen. When a tree is fully
grown the absorption of CO2 is dramatically less. Given the shedding of leaves
or Pinecones, a mature tree is more or less carbon neutral. Therefore,
sustainable forest planting and harvesting is a certain way to absorb some of
the Carbon in the Atmosphere.
The second
industry is the automobile propulsion industry. Elon Musk made one genius decision
– to make eclectic cars less extravagant and more normal. They look like conventional
elegant well-designed cars and their performance matches the looks. Before then,
electric cars looked very much like something from the future, full of
compromises. The electric car has a few critical flaws though, where a solution
seems to be years if not decades away. The first problem is that cars take a
long time to charge. Part of the problem is that lithium-ion batteries tend to
get hot when they are charged too quickly. Since lithium is one of the more
volatile elements, the batteries tend to catch fire if they are getting to hot.
That’s why Samsung had to re-design their phones after a few caught alight.
The second
problem is that some of the materials used to make the batteries are from some
of the most volatile places on earth. Cobalt for example is mainly sourced in
the Democratic Republic of Congo. They
are more known for their extremely violent never-ending armed conflicts. Those
are not the best conditions to build a mine which is supposed to supply a
steady stream of material. The commodities used in the batteries were in such demand
recently, that the miners struggled to mine enough of the commodity. That it drove
prices ever higher. With the global electric car production was not even 2% of
total global car production it is hard to see where the supply of raw materials
should come from if electric vehicles dominate global car production.
A solution
that is just as environmentally friendly, but in my opinion more scalable are hydrogen
powered cars using fuel cells. Hydrogen, probably the most widely available
element is liquified and using a fuel cell technology is converted to
electricity which then powers the electric motors of the cars. The only thing
leaving the exhausts is essentially water vapor. Hydrogen is a very effective
storage of power, but also faces some technical issues. There is a lot of energy
loss in through the various stages of the supply chain. These challenges should
be easier to resolve, than trying to build another 20 mines in a war-torn
country with no infrastructure.
The technology
has got very distinct advantages. To start of with, you can drive up to a
filling station and fill up in the same time as you would using the conventional
fossil fuels. The power generated is
also substantial. Toyota said that all their buses made for the next Tokyo Olympics
will be powered by fuel cells. Other commercial vehicles like trucks and
possibly planes could be powered by fuel cells because they will be able to
generate enough power and the time re-fuel is not different from what they are
used currently (which is important for industries where the assets constantly
need to be productive). Hydrogen could also be produced almost everywhere.
Filling stations could produce it themselves or be supplied through the same
supply chain they currently use. It is probably easier to develop new more effective
processes to liquify Hydrogen than it is to make Lithium less unstable.
The third
new industry is urban farming, which incorporates everything from a basic DIY
hydroculture set-up to vertical farming. (Sophisticated vertical farming start
by breeding insects, which are fed to fish, who’s excrement is used as the
enricher for the water for the plants.) It is all based on the principles of
hydroculture, which essentially means that plants grow without the need of soil,
but the water is enhanced with the minerals which the plants would normally
extract from the ground. This also means that plants can be grown closer to
where their produce is demanded; one could imagine a grocery shop producing
their own veggies on site in the future. That would reduce the need for a sophisticated
just-in-time transport system for fresh plant produce.
There are
many more advantages for our environment. Hydroculture uses 80% less water than
conventional farming. Since the plants are grown in a controlled environment,
there is no need for pesticides, saving the ground from being drenched in
poison and saving the insects from dying out. The freed-up farmland can then be
used to restore nature, possibly by planting native trees.
There are
obviously many more industries that impact positively on our environment, but
these three, if embraced, will surely have a big impact on our environment. Best
of all is that they already exist, mostly in their infancy, but with a bit more
backing could get traction. They don’t life on futuristic hopes and dreams but on
realistic technologies and practicalities.