Insurmountable Opportunities

Back in my office days, we used to look at crises as they arose – there was always at least the “Friday afternoon flap” and often things much worse – and call them “insurmountable opportunities.”  It’s based on the old saying, which may or may not be accurate, that the Chinese character for crisis is a combination of the characters for danger and opportunity.  That’s somewhat akin to Rahm Emmanuel’s famous comment that no crisis should be wasted.

There’s nothing particularly new in the UN report on climate change, due to come out on Monday and whose executive summary was released Friday, except two things.  A number of drafts have been floating around for a while, and it reports the same dismal things as heard previously, only, in some cases, as in sea level rises, sounding worse.  The first new thing was a level of certainty of 95 percent for climate change being caused by human activity.  That’s polite scientific language for “really sure.”  It’s the level of certainty about your condition a surgeon would like, but sometimes doesn't have, before cutting you open.  It’s far beyond the “preponderance of evidence” a civil jury would need to find you guilty of contributory negligence; fossil fuel corporations should remember that.  In other words, we have ourselves to blame.  It’s hard to understand why people who would accept surgery on less evidence still refuse to accept man-made climate change.  They’re valuing their wallet over their internal organs.  That would be a really good study for the social psychologists.

The second new thing was the certainty that climate change will continue for centuries with temperatures rising above 2 degrees Celsius despite what we do.  That means prevention is definitely too late and amelioration and adaptation are now definitely the goals.  That, strangely enough, could be a big part of the solution to our economic problems.  Countering and making use of the effects of climate change could be, and eventually will be, a major new economic sector. Industries and jobs will be created, if not here than certainly elsewhere.  We should make sure they’re here.   I've mentioned the major infrastructure issues to be dealt with many times.  Rising seas and more severe storms mean major new construction.  Green technology is very slowly, and with lots of resistance, coming on board.  That change is occurring much too slowly; a noted historian of energy technology predicted recently that natural gas will be the dominant fuel for the next 50 to 60 years, with wind and solar only becoming dominant after that.  We need lots bigger pushes in those technology areas.  But things are beginning also to get interesting in the adaptation area.

Adaptation is already thriving in other countries.  Remember how rising temperatures are sure to produce more droughts with the need for desalinization of sea water, and of course, much less snow.  An Israeli company is making good money converting sludge from desalinization into artificial snow for resorts.  Other adaptation startups are popping up all over.  There should be a boom in the pipeline industry.  New materials are needed for insulation.  As climate changes some areas will fade and others boom.  Innovative building construction and land development should really grow.   Urban agriculture is a wave of the future. They've used green houses in Crete for many years to grow vegetables protected against the sun.   What is lacking here is not opportunity, but the imagination to use the many opportunities that exist. 

A problem we have to deal with these days is all the entrenched technology, which owners want to hang on to rather than facing the risk of exploiting the new.  When Marconi invented the telegraph, he first tried selling it to France, but it was rejected there because of the competing existing businesses.  He took it to America, where it became an instant success because there was nothing to compete with it.  We increasingly act like France did rather than America, to our loss.  What we need are policies which encourage, possibly though temporary subsidies and tax breaks, the innovations needed to ameliorate and adapt to climate change.  The innovators should not be in it alone.  We all have an interest in their success.  Climate change is a crisis that should not be wasted.