Having spent almost half my life in serving High Tech, High Reliability and High Performance industries with special material solutions for thermos management applications I had to meet specifications of single digit parts per million failure rates – having developed to a launching rate of a new product release in one of my globally 6 factories and 3 licensees every other week at the end of my carrier meant operating excellence across the whole team. When nowadays consultants cause quite a stir on mentoring management changes in organizations under all kinds of consulting-product names like e.g. “agile” makes me smirk. We had developed all these ways of life almost 20 years ago from the need of becoming a self-learning organization. We simply could never have sold a new product under such maximum failure rate guarantees prior to having had manufactured one single piece before, without having learned the abilities to tangibly rate and manage risks.
Hand on your heart: What do you know about Climate Change – “not enough”? Whom do you entrust the whole issue to – “nobody”? Do you believe you can contribute something reasonably effective against it – “not really”? What are the key issues driving Climate Change – “don’t know”? What an analogy to 737max pilots’ situation! As on the plane, here neither is any comprehensive manual exploring the specifics of potential incidents. There are almost 8bln people living on this planet. About ⅓ at a standard of living, the other ⅔ still want to reach! The war in Syria initiated migration streams that like by venturi effect entrained other economically desperate Central Asians to start marching northwestward. Does anybody really think that current National Determined Contributions of European countries are fit for preventing millions of Africans leaving their homes for a better life, if Climate Change puts further tensions on their clean water supply and arable land letting future perspectives vanish? The PV-panels on our roofs feeding electricity to a grid at subsidized tariffs (paid by the public) while some other energy infrastructure goes into idling mode is a waste of resources. In Germany it’s amusing to read CO₂ abatement statistics not offsetting idling coal power plants’ emissions against New Renewable electricity credits. Or northern Europe’s Carbon Neutrality achievements by burning biomass that is often imported from tropical plantations needing to compensate the exported soil replenishment resource by fossil phytochemicals. Not to speak about heavy oil fuel used by transportation ships from e.g. Borneo’s embarkation harbor built under EU subsidies to Europe’s main biomass terminal. By the way, biomass is much too valuable to be burned being the least efficient use of (its) Carbon (content). It has 1.7 times the Hydrogen : Carbon ratio of crude oil and if fresh, 40% water content. Hence using it as a refinery feedstock is 2.5 times more Carbon- and 5 times more Water –Efficient than refining crude oil! In Power and Mobility Hydrogen Economy would further half the need of primary energy. So developed countries could way outperform currently intended NDCs by going Carbon Circular and so cut total lifecycle cost for citizens in half of today’s Linear Carbon Economy!
Climate Emergency is more or less at the brink of Seneca Cliff (named after Roman stoic philosopher and teacher of Nero, Lucius Annaeus Seneca) in Africa, maybe some parts of India, Southeast Asia and Southwest Pacific islands. While 40 to 10 years ago the industrialized world whelmed China with outsourced jobs on outdated equipment & infrastructure to eradicate poverty under quantitatively growing markets, a similar success in Africa could only be achieved through qualitative growth. Instead sale of wasteful infrastructure duplicates as should already have been impaired in their countries of origin, cost savings and local closed loop economy stabilization from Carbon Circular economy should be brought there. It provides energy security at no extra cost to status quo without having to plunge money into often foreign oil wells. New employment and regional purchasing power will build from what was the oil bill so far. Such elimination of Linear Carbon Economy wastefulness can eradicate poverty in all non-oil & gas countries of Africa! And yes, there it would make a lot of sense to install PV-panels and all sizes of Wind turbines to bring resource efficient electricity to people first time enabling higher levels of education and healthier cooking, etc. Where farms don’t use all the phytochemicals yet the composting of agricultural residues would eventually give healthier soils improving resilient harvest yields stopping land erosion. Where conditions precedent impede cultivating land to support more evaporation-cooling surface from vegetation, maybe humidity collector panels could be put up, distressing groundwater consumption for the time needed to rebuild healthy soil water retention capacities.
Maybe it’ll need a collapse of our Financial System to get over nowadays’ ridiculously held out barrier of existing Linear Carbon asset impairment fears against changing to Carbon Circularity. Europe currently invests in wind parks and electrolysis infrastructures at 4 times the cost of regenerative Hydrogen from its waste that is only ineffectively incinerated today for comparable waste reduction Capital Expenditure Cost. Not to speak of air-pollution produced by all combustion processes that could be replaced by cleaner multiple chemical use of carbonaceous resources. Would you prefer the crash scenario to clear the field for letting the most Carbon efficient solutions being also most energy-, resource- & capital- efficient rebuild a new economy in Carbon Circularity? Or could you imagine preparing for future by an emergency-management agenda against ruin brought upon us at any moment? Ugo Bardi, author of the Seneca Effect says: “What is the future if not a fan of possibilities that we ourselves may decide to turn into reality?”