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.