Last week, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times posted an essay by Princeton professor Robert Socolow entitled "Wedges Reaffirmed." In it, Socolow declared, "humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical and industrial know-how to solve the climate and carbon problem for the next half century."
First, I couldn't agree with that assertion in the article more. In fact, it is only 20-year-old technologies like solar, wind, and efficiency that can attract the $100B of financing to scale to become a significant part of electricity generation. And, late last month, the Carbon War Room launched a new consortium that will unlock billions of dollars of investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies for US commercial real estate -- using existing technologies.
Another main point by Socolow's article is also true -- we do not want to hear bad news. Or even believe it. He points out that the world has scoffed at a prediction like Galileo suggesting that the earth was not at the center of the universe. The list goes on.
It is why I can empathize on a human level with politicians and business people that want to dismiss the carbon problem as hogwash. I understand their fears.
But, that does not mean, like any business, we do not address our fears -- in this case, the carbon threat, head on. After all, any business would go through a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. In doing so, it would head off threats.
While the threat of carbon to our planet has been dismissed on one side -- and is Armageddon on the other -- it seems prudent that we assume the probability for Armageddon is greater than zero and that we address it.
As Andrew Grove, Intel CEO and founder said, "Only the Paranoid Survive."
So, for survival of the planet, we need to be paranoid, but also pragmatic.
And as the article points out, pragmatic is not managing a 50-year carbon objective (although we might state one). We can't manage 50 years.
Pragmatic is what he refers to in the article as "iterative risk management" -- which basically creates rolling objectives every decade. So, we can deal with rolling ten-year increments. In doing so, iterations account for new technologies plus new data. So, emissions targets would be continually renegotiated and updated.
Iterative risk management also takes into account what can be deployed quickly and what can be deployed slowly. For example, as Socolow's writing noted fast deployment of solar PV, and wind should be done. After all, in founding SunEdison, I created a business model for solar to be rapidly deployed with no harm to the environment. I disagree with his suggestion in the article that technologies like renewable fuels need to be feathered in. Quick deployment of renewable fuels simply can't offset the entire global fuel demand even if we move as fast as possible -- so technology lock-in is really not a problem here.
But, as we iterate, we can still innovate. Deploying renewable fuels and nuclear as fast as we can shows entrepreneurs and the capital that supports them that a deployment pathway exists. For example, the iterative implementation of solar spurs R&D because those researchers see a pathway to deployment of the next generation of technology.
In the meantime, to manage the business risk of climate change let's deploy the technologies we have -- quickly and prudently. It seems to be a bet worth hedging.