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Enough doom-mongering about climate change

Telegraph

a day ago

Telegraph

Enough doom-mongering about climate change

As a student, Johannes Ackva wore a hair shirt so itchy and uncomfortable that even Greta Thunberg might have approved. The young, idealistic German limited his use of water, stuck to a strict vegetarian diet, refused to drive and flew as little as possible. But, two decades on, Ackva, who works as a climate researcher, has changed his views considerably. He remains concerned about the environment and he still doesn't drive or eat meat. But there is cause, he believes, for optimism. Two things have changed since his hair-shirt days, he says. One is that the data looks a little less bleak than it used to. Instead of predicting that global temperatures are likely to increase by between 1.5°C (the best case) and 4.5°C (the worst), as it did for many years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now says the increase will be between 2.5°C and 4°C. That 0.5°C reduction in the worst-case scenario makes a substantial difference – and itself represents a significant reduction from the 8°C rise that had, in the Noughties, been predicted by scientists such as James Lovelock for the world's temperate region. 'You have to be more optimistic than you would have been 10 years ago,' Ackva says, 'and even five years ago.' And the second thing that has changed, according to Ackva, is the rate of technological progress: 'We can see from what we've been doing with solar, or with electric cars, that we know how to fundamentally solve this problem.' The most rapid energy transition in history The price of solar energy has fallen almost at the speed of light; solar panel costs have fallen 90 per cent in the past decade alone. Renewables are helping to push coal and natural gas out of power grids. In 2009, 74 per cent of British electricity came from fossil fuels; in 2023, it was only a third. Over the same period, the share of British electricity coming from renewable sources (solar, wind etc.) has gone from two per cent to 40 per cent. In short, we are living through the most rapid energy transition in history. It is incomplete because renewables are dependent on the sun shining and the wind blowing, and because we do not have adequate battery technology to store vast amounts of electrical energy for months at a time. And, of course, it is expensive because of all the infrastructure that needs building, be it car-charging facilities, wind farms, or the apparatus that connects both of these things and more to our power grids. However, the recent progress in the energy transition is demonstrative of a truth that many environmental activists – groups like Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and the new Youth Demand – would prefer to ignore. Because, while they advocate for 'degrowth', whereby we shrink our economy and consume less in order to constrain our emissions, the innovation of recent years suggests the opposite is true: that it is investment and economic growth that will improve lives worldwide and solve the crisis. I spoke to Ackva during my research for a book about people who have dedicated their careers to saving the world from catastrophe, The Anti-Catastrophe League. He works at a non-profit organisation called Founders Pledge, where his research guides the philanthropy of entrepreneurs who want to use their wealth to address the climate crisis. And degrowth organisations are not the kind that he recommends his philanthropists support. Instead, he recommends that they fund innovation: inventions, and government action, that take the battle beyond wind farms and electric cars. 'We need to make sure that we also do it for cement, that we do it for [the manufacture of] steel, that we do it for long-range transport,' he says. 'But this is not rocket science. This is, in principle, doable.' It has been doable for longer than we might care to admit. After the Second World War, governments on either side of the Iron Curtain built nuclear power stations by the dozen. But nuclear power stations are gargantuan structures, complete with puffing chimneys atop blue-glowing reactors, and they are expensive to build. They also produce radioactive waste. This effluent is relatively unproblematic in itself, but conceptually unattractive to the public. Even more unattractive is the concept of nuclear meltdown. Chernobyl's death toll, including deaths from the explosion and acute radiation sickness within the first few months, is estimated to have been 30 to 60 people. These figures are lower than one might imagine but the victims of the Chernobyl disaster stick much more indelibly in the mind than do the abstract millions who die of fossil fuel-related air pollution each year. Despite the Chernobyl disaster, and despite smaller events at Fukushima and Three Mile Island, nuclear power is much safer than fossil fuels. The use of nuclear energy results in 99.8 per cent fewer deaths than does the use of coal; 99.7 per cent fewer than oil and 97.6 per cent fewer than gas. We can predict with some confidence that fossil fuels will be thoroughly outmoded over the course of the 21st century. It is important that governments continue to underwrite what Ackva calls 'big bets'. Fusion technology, for instance, stands a much better chance of working if, through being given public funding, it is given the gift of time. Once a technology outperforms fossil fuels, though, it will need no subsidy. We will need no carbon taxes, nor carbon credits. Thanks to far-sighted government support, the market has greedily adopted solar power and electric vehicles. Further greedy adoptions are inevitable. Bettering the miracle of fossil fuels is a lofty goal, but one that humanity is likely to meet. That still leaves a serious problem unsolved. That problem is the warming (1.17°C / 2.11°F) that has already occurred – and the warming that we are due from the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Many people are trying to prevent the temperature from rising in the future; very few are trying to reverse the heating that has already occurred. But a small minority is attempting to do just that: the environmental dark wizards. Speaking with Andrew Song, he rejects the pieties of climate change. 'A lot of people were indoctrinated,' he tells me, 'including myself. I was an American boy scout, thinking: 'I just need to recycle and recycle and plant some trees, and I'm good.'' But these soothing instructions, Song came to realise, were 'all a f—ing lie!'. Telling me the story, he bursts into laughter. And he is right: recycling, in some respects, is overrated. It will not solve the climate crisis. Song has helped start several businesses in San Francisco. While enrolled in Y-Combinator, the prestigious accelerator for start-ups, Song met Luke Iseman. This was in 2016; after some false starts, Iseman said: 'Andrew, I've just learnt about stratospheric aerosol injection.' Stratospheric aerosol injection is the method by which we might be able to reduce the heat of the planet. It is achieved by launching sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. Here sulphur dioxide reacts with other gases to form sulphate aerosols, which are fine particles. These fine particles reflect the Sun's light back into space. And the more light is reflected back into space, the less it warms the Earth. But there are downsides. The term 'uncontrolled termination' describes the scenario in which humanity starts a massive project of stratospheric aerosol injection, then abruptly stops. It is thought that this would result in ' termination shock ', whereby the temperature would swiftly rebound. Such a rebound would result in much more disruption of weather and ecology than would a more gradual rise in temperatures. And termination shock is far from the only reason to be wary of stratospheric aerosol injection. It could deplete the ozone layer. It could cause acid rain. It could have various other unintended effects. And it would not address air pollution, acidification of the oceans, and other nasty effects of the burning of fossil fuels. Instead, stratospheric aerosol injection might encourage us to stick with our bad habits. In April 2022, Iseman launched his first balloons, releasing them from his home in Baja California, Mexico. By the following February, Time magazine was calling him 'an innovator, renegade, or charlatan, depending on who you ask, but certainly the biggest climate tech trouble-maker in recent memory.' He and Song incorporated Make Sunsets, their new company, that October. Having been ticked off by the government of Mexico, they currently operate a patch of hilly Californian scrubland owned by Iseman. Journalists tagging along with Iseman and Song have witnessed a homebrew operation that resembles some of the more chaotic scenes from the TV series Breaking Bad: two rascals taking an RV to the wilderness in order to cook up something that most observers would probably call deeply irresponsible. Song, a talented marketer, tends to liken stratospheric aerosol injection to sunscreen. As he pointed out to me, humanity already puts 60 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the troposphere each year. Song and Iseman propose simply to put a much smaller amount of the chemical compound a little higher up. In Song's view, we have been misapplying our sunscreen. We have been 'just spraying the sunscreen lotion on our face, but with our mouths open. And since some of that is being swallowed, we're getting sick off it.' As for the ozone layer, Iseman and Song refer to evidence that its depletion will be comparatively small. Song does accept there is a risk of acid rain, but he argues that the risks of inaction are even greater. His view is that we should be less precious about geoengineering. 'We've injected two trillion tons of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere since the 1870s,' he says. 'So are we suddenly drawing a line of where we can deploy these aerosols? Literally, as we speak, we're emitting CO2, geoengineering the Earth, even just by breathing.' Global buy-in required Another difficulty, though, is that stratospheric geoengineering will require global buy-in. Or will it? Perhaps it is naive to imagine that solar geoengineering will occur after diplomatic efforts rather than before. As the climate expert Ben James writes: 'I find it impossible to imagine a UN mechanism approving something so universally contentious. Rather, someone will probably just do it.' Stratospheric aerosol injection, like nuclear fission, is a technology to which we already have access. And there are several more under development and notable for their promise. An American startup, Terraform Industries, demonstrated last year that it could produce synthetic natural gas from sunlight, water, and airborne carbon dioxide. In other words, the prototype can conjure some of the world's best-performing fuel from almost nothing. It is also possible that we will be able to take not only energy from the air, but pollution. Via carbon capture, we can remove fossil fuel-generated pollutants from the atmosphere, though we have not yet worked out how to do this in an energy-efficient manner. However, the technology I consider the most underrated involves not the air above us, but the ground below us. Today, geothermal power, which harnesses the heat of the Earth's core, constitutes a sliver of global energy production: an estimated 0.35 per cent. The figure seems even more meagre when one considers that an infinitesimal fraction of the Earth's geothermal heat, a tenth of one percent of that heat, goes the calculation, would power humanity's current outgoings for 20 million years. As it stands, we use geothermal power only where that heat happens to be closer to the surface than usual. Volcanic areas are useful in this regard. The hot springs of Bath are a less dramatic example. Elsewhere, geothermal power is harder to exploit. The idea is that you pump water down one well, bring it up via an adjacent well, and use that hot water to power turbines or heat buildings. We can drill deep enough, several kilometres down, to reach rock the temperature of a boiling kettle, or even a heated oven, but it's expensive, and can cause mild tremors. Moreover, to pay back that up-front cost, geothermal systems need to produce heat for years – which, given how hard it is to know what's going on several kilometres down, presents yet further difficulty. For that reason, this promising technology has been far less attractive an investment than drilling for fossil fuels, and has therefore remained underdeveloped. Necessity is forcing us into action. So is new technology. Commissioned by a think tank, I spent much of last year examining the performance of FORGE, the US government's geothermal field laboratory, in Utah. The lab shares its results and allows companies to visit and test their gear. Its drilling speed had increased fivefold between 2017 and 2022 and costs had fallen by as much as 50 per cent from 2022 onward. As all of FORGE's research was public, the entire geothermal industry could benefit from it. FORGE is working on 'enhanced geothermal', which employs techniques imported from the fracking industry. Likewise, the oil and gas industry has pioneered 'directional drilling', which is now allowing geothermal projects to drill not just vertically, but laterally, thus making it possible to create underground structures resembling radiators. Even more thrillingly for fanboys of geothermal power, Quaise, another company, is trying to go even deeper, which would enable it to access heat that can give water the energy density of natural gas. Quaise's method is to vapourise rock using a millimetre wave, which is something akin to a transparent laser. The company was founded by Carlos Araque, a disenchanted oil and gas engineer, advised by Paul Woskov, a fusion scientist. They must solve a litany of technical problems. But if they are successful, they could unlock a power source that would leave fossil fuels outmoded and make fusion an irrelevance. Due to advanced geothermal being in the category of those 'big bets', that would be a vindication of Ackva's approach. We failed to make the most of nuclear power; we might shy away from stratospheric aerosol injections; but to start to turn the situation around, we might need only one of those big bets to pay off.

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech' will build us all a better world

The Guardian

a day ago

The Guardian

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech' will build us all a better world

There's a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. That's because we have been persuaded to believe that innovative technology is whatever bombastic billionaires claim it is, whether that's commercial spacecraft or the endless iterations of generative AI tools. As the Canadian technologist and engineer Ursula Franklin once said, fantasies of technology would have it that innovation is always 'investment-driven, shiny, lab-born, experimental, exciting'. But more often than not, in the real world, it is 'needs-driven, scrappy, on location, iterative, practical, mundane'. The real pioneering technologies of today are genuinely useful systems I like to call 'frugal tech', and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don't impose top-down 'solutions' that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. It turns out that genuinely innovative technology really can set people free. Last month at Berlin's once hippy, now increasingly corporatised Re:publica conference, for example, I met researchers from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), who are using technologies such as software-defined radios and spectrum sensing to allow people in low-resource environments to stay connected despite limited bandwidth, power, hardware and communication infrastructure. These technologies are the basis of the local community networks that supply coverage to the 2.5 billion people globally who lack internet access. In the Niger Delta, which suffers from toxic levels of air pollution from its oil industry, APC is setting up connections and deploying low-cost sensors that monitor the environment. These play a crucial role in how locals can advise children when to stay inside and which areas to avoid playing in. This infrastructure is managed for and by the municipality, serves a pressing need and can be installed and built by the people who deploy it. Unlike, say, ChatGPT or a Blue Origin space rocket. The fact is, while generative AI is lauded as the technology of the minute, iterations such as Dall-E 3, Google Gemini and GPT are irrelevant to those who don't have enough internet bandwidth to use them. The new digital divide is the gap between the top end of the global population – who have access to these power-intensive technologies – and those at the bottom, whose internet access, or lack of, remains static. That's why some of today's most brilliant minds are working out how to manage the trade-off between internet range and bandwidth, and whether there are obstacles in the way such as mountains and foliage. The fact is that good innovation also often involves lobbying for good. So while big tech poured hundreds of millions into watering down the EU AI Act, good tech lobbies for better internet provisions for all. Policy and innovation go hand in hand, meaning that the consequences of good technology far exceed the technology itself, extending to governance and social welfare. At Re:publica's 'maker space', I fiddled around with DIY solar-powered sensors that can be built using a Raspberry Pi computer and off-the-shelf components such as humidity sensors. I lost my partner, an engineer by training, to a microscope designed by the OpenFlexure project that was made from 3D printed materials. Microscopes are crucial for diagnosing infections but can cost millions of pounds, making them entirely inaccessible for many people across the globe. This one is lightweight, costs next to nothing and is open source, meaning that anyone can reproduce the design by 3D printing parts and cobbling them together with shop-bought motors and circuit boards. A bit like a cheap Ikea wardrobe, except that all the bits you need to assemble it can be bought inexpensively from a local electronics shop. Manufacturers from Ghana and Wales to Chile and Australia are all using OpenFlexure's designs to give people everywhere access to low-source microscopy. We might think generative AI has invaded all corners of our lives, but this couldn't be further from the truth. What is actually prolific and relevant to the majority are low-cost technologies that solve day-to-day business and social problems. While most of what we consider to be 'hi-tech' is closed off behind proprietary algorithms, the open-source technologies above all require community involvement. This can be immensely empowering, and can improve public trust: it's hard (and unwise) to give yourself over to a technology that won't tell you how it works, particularly when its predefined settings allow only for meagre approaches to 'user privacy'. As I ask my students, if you could develop an AI at your own home, and programme it to reflect your values and prioritise your safety, wouldn't you trust it more? Well, the idea isn't so outlandish – it only feels impossible because big tech firms want us to think it is. What is most outstanding about frugal innovation is not just that its technologies are impressive, but that it might actually prompt systemic change by showing people that tech can be developed locally, and not just imported from Silicon Valley. When farmer Chris Conder dug her own fibreoptic cables on her property in Lancashire, she set out 'to prove that ordinary people could do it … it wasn't rocket science'. By demonstrating that fast internet could be connected with fibre-optic cable, a digger and the desire to just get on and do it, she spawned an organisation called B4RN, which promotes community fibre partnerships. Tech bros may want you to believe there is no point in making something new unless it is difficult, inaccessible and exclusionary. But technological innovation is about collaboration as much as it is about competition. For many people across the world, a product's value isn't in a sky-high valuation, or in it being impossible to take apart (as with impenetrable iPhones). Often, the smartest technologies are those that distil a problem down to its bread and butter components in order to disseminate a solution to the masses. So, while innovative individuals and communities around the world quietly get on with improving their lives and those around them, it's high time the rest of us stopped being passive recipients of technology, and started asking ourselves what kind of world we want to live in and how to create it. Must the setting for innovation be £1bn-plus buildings like Google's new London offices in King's Cross, located in nations that can afford to stomach eye-watering training costs and compute power requirements? Or might we instead be able to steer innovation from within our very communities – or households? Eleanor Drage is a senior research fellow at the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and co-author of the The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism

The Guardian

2 days ago

The Guardian

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech' will build us all a better world

There's a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. That's because we have been persuaded to believe that innovative technology is whatever bombastic billionaires claim it is, whether that's commercial spacecraft or the endless iterations of generative AI tools. As the Canadian technologist and engineer Ursula Franklin once said, fantasies of technology would have it that innovation is always 'investment-driven, shiny, lab-born, experimental, exciting'. But more often than not, in the real world, it is 'needs-driven, scrappy, on location, iterative, practical, mundane'. The real pioneering technologies of today are genuinely useful systems I like to call 'frugal tech', and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don't impose top-down 'solutions' that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. It turns out that genuinely innovative technology really can set people free. Last month at Berlin's once hippy, now increasingly corporatised Re:publica conference, for example, I met researchers from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), who are using technologies such as software-defined radios and spectrum sensing to allow people in low-resource environments to stay connected despite limited bandwidth, power, hardware and communication infrastructure. These technologies are the basis of the local community networks that supply coverage to the 2.5 billion people globally who lack internet access. In the Niger Delta, which suffers from toxic levels of air pollution from its oil industry, APC is setting up connections and deploying low-cost sensors that monitor the environment. These play a crucial role in how locals can advise children when to stay inside and which areas to avoid playing in. This infrastructure is managed for and by the municipality, serves a pressing need and can be installed and built by the people who deploy it. Unlike, say, ChatGPT or a Blue Origin space rocket. The fact is, while generative AI is lauded as the technology of the minute, iterations such as Dall-E 3, Google Gemini and GPT are irrelevant to those who don't have enough internet bandwidth to use them. The new digital divide is the gap between the top end of the global population – who have access to these power-intensive technologies – and those at the bottom, whose internet access, or lack of, remains static. That's why some of today's most brilliant minds are working out how to manage the trade-off between internet range and bandwidth, and whether there are obstacles in the way such as mountains and foliage. The fact is that good innovation also often involves lobbying for good. So while big tech poured hundreds of millions into watering down the EU AI Act, good tech lobbies for better internet provisions for all. Policy and innovation go hand in hand, meaning that the consequences of good technology far exceed the technology itself, extending to governance and social welfare. At Re:publica's 'maker space', I fiddled around with DIY solar-powered sensors that can be built using a Raspberry Pi computer and off-the-shelf components such as humidity sensors. I lost my partner, an engineer by training, to a microscope designed by the OpenFlexure project that was made from 3D printed materials. Microscopes are crucial for diagnosing infections but can cost millions of pounds, making them entirely inaccessible for many people across the globe. This one is lightweight, costs next to nothing and is open source, meaning that anyone can reproduce the design by 3D printing parts and cobbling them together with shop-bought motors and circuit boards. A bit like a cheap Ikea wardrobe, except that all the bits you need to assemble it can be bought inexpensively from a local electronics shop. Manufacturers from Ghana and Wales to Chile and Australia are all using OpenFlexure's designs to give people everywhere access to low-source microscopy. We might think generative AI has invaded all corners of our lives, but this couldn't be further from the truth. What is actually prolific and relevant to the majority are low-cost technologies that solve day-to-day business and social problems. While most of what we consider to be 'hi-tech' is closed off behind proprietary algorithms, the open-source technologies above all require community involvement. This can be immensely empowering, and can improve public trust: it's hard (and unwise) to give yourself over to a technology that won't tell you how it works, particularly when its predefined settings allow only for meagre approaches to 'user privacy'. As I ask my students, if you could develop an AI at your own home, and programme it to reflect your values and prioritise your safety, wouldn't you trust it more? Well, the idea isn't so outlandish – it only feels impossible because big tech firms want us to think it is. What is most outstanding about frugal innovation is not just that its technologies are impressive, but that it might actually prompt systemic change by showing people that tech can be developed locally, and not just imported from Silicon Valley. When farmer Chris Conder dug her own fibreoptic cables on her property in Lancashire, she set out 'to prove that ordinary people could do it … it wasn't rocket science'. By demonstrating that fast internet could be connected with fibre-optic cable, a digger and the desire to just get on and do it, she spawned an organisation called B4RN, which promotes community fibre partnerships. Tech bros may want you to believe there is no point in making something new unless it is difficult, inaccessible and exclusionary. But technological innovation is about collaboration as much as it is about competition. For many people across the world, a product's value isn't in a sky-high valuation, or in it being impossible to take apart (as with impenetrable iPhones). Often, the smartest technologies are those that distil a problem down to its bread and butter components in order to disseminate a solution to the masses. So, while innovative individuals and communities around the world quietly get on with improving their lives and those around them, it's high time the rest of us stopped being passive recipients of technology, and started asking ourselves what kind of world we want to live in and how to create it. Must the setting for innovation be £1bn-plus buildings like Google's new London offices in King's Cross, located in nations that can afford to stomach eye-watering training costs and compute power requirements? Or might we instead be able to steer innovation from within our very communities – or households? Eleanor Drage is a senior research fellow at the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and co-author of the The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism

Librarians breathe easy as tool spots toxic book pigment

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Enough doom-mongering about climate change

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech' will build us all a better world

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech' will build us all a better world

Librarians breathe easy as tool spots toxic book pigment

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Try Our AI Features

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Enough doom-mongering about climate change

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech' will build us all a better world

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech' will build us all a better world

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