Eco Tech: Investing in Regenerative Futures 103247419X, 9781032474199

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Eco Tech

The book is a seminal contribution from a leading futurist who, over the past three decades, has explored each of the most disruptive forces shaping our world today, including emerging technologies, entrepreneurship, venture investments, and industrial manufacturing. Eco Tech brings all this thinking together, fusing insight from thought leaders with the author’s own considerable experience, to explore scenarios for 2050 and discuss eco-effectiveness as an established practice for governments, corporations, startups, and individuals. Trond Arne Undheim begins by providing a brief history of sustainability and provides simple definitions for key terms including eco-efficiency, life cycle analysis, industrial ecology, cleantech, net zero, climate change, biodiversity, and carbon capture, which will enable the reader to engage confidently in eco­ discussions. Undheim also explores the ambitions of regeneration and offers a new conceptual framework to facilitate future discussion around sustainable innovation. He applies this framework to green, ambitious startups and exam­ ines the way these ventures will lead the way towards an eco-effective society, drawing on stories from exciting founders who are already changing the world. Finally, the book takes a deep dive into emerging eco-innovations, including batteries, bioplastics, distributed energy, space tech, and futuristic megaprojects. The book contains clear directions on how to progress through adversity and avoid returning to the status quo. The book will be an essential guide for executives, sustainability profes­ sionals, and energy tech investors who are deeply concerned with the future and are prepared to both significantly invest in it and make behavioral chan­ ges to foster regenerative development. It will also be a great resource for students and scholars of sustainable investing and innovation. Trond Arne Undheim is a futurist, scholar, podcaster, and venture partner, and an expert on the evolution of technology and society. He is a research scholar in Global Systemic Risk, Innovation, and Policy at the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (SERI) at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University. He is also a venture partner at Antler, and a co­ founder of technology foresight consulting firm Yegii. Formerly with Tulip Interfaces, Hitachi Ventures, MIT, WPP, Oracle, and the EU, he is the co-author

(with Natan Linder) of Augmented Lean (2022), and is the author of Health Tech (2021), Future Tech (2021), Pandemic Aftermath (2020), Disruption Games (2020), and Leadership From Below (2008). He hosts the Futurized podcast and is a Forbes columnist in manufacturing. Trond’s work has featured in a variety of business, industrial, and mainstream media, including The Boston Globe, NPR’s Cognoscenti, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, IndustryWeek, and MIT News. He holds a Ph.D. on the future of work and artificial intelligence and is based between Wellesley, MA, and Palo Alto, CA.

“A powerful statement from a systems thinker who, navigating future challenges, finds investment potential in the equilibrium between our ecology, economy and communities.” Alan Moore, author, craftsman, innovator, Founder, Design School for Beautiful Business “The eco-tech revolution, which now needs to be driven forward at a scale and a speed that few even begin to comprehend, is absolutely necessary to the survival of humankind into the next century. But it is absolutely not sufficient. With his deep knowledge and decades of first-hand experience, Trond Arne Undheim helps his readers navigate their way through this fascinating and increasingly controversial territory.” Jonathon Espie Porritt, 2nd Baronet, CBE, environmentalist, Co-Founder of Forum for the Future “This important book strikes a necessary balance between economics and regeneration on the path towards a flourishing future.” John R. Ehrenfeld, author of The Right Way To Flourish, and former Director of the MIT Program on Technology, Business, and Environment “This remarkable book looks beyond policies and technology to the wider range of changes in individual conduct, and in the organization of society that may be needed to meet the existential challenge of climate change and of the destruction of nature and imagines a range of outcomes.” James G. Wilson, Lord Moran, Chairman and Managing Partner, Source2 “Investing in an ecologically sustainable future can be immensely rewarding for the investor and for the planet. In a complex and rapidly evolving sector, Eco Tech contributes to investor understanding of this vitally important topic.” Bruce Usher, Professor, Columbia Business School, author of Investing in the Era of Climate Change

Eco Tech Investing in Regenerative Futures

Trond Arne Undheim

Designed cover image: © Getty images First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Trond Arne Undheim The right of Trond Arne Undheim to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-47394-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-47419-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-38604-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049 Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of figures List of interviews Acknowledgements Introduction

ix

x

xii

1

PART 1

The future

9

1 Scenarios 2050

11

2 A regenerative investment framework

25

PART 2

The past

39

3 Insufficient non-financial commitments

41

4 The state of play in eco-investments

51

5 From deep ecology via industrial ecology to the regeneration

fallacy

68

6 Failures of dominant actors

85

PART 3

Scaling challenges 7 Re-centralizing the self as an environmental agent

93

95

8 Energy is not the issue

109

9 Which game changers really matter?

125

viii

Contents

10 Is gigascale the ideal?

139

11 Eco-flavors: Corporate social responsibility, eco-efficiency, and

carbon accounting

148

12 Carbon capture illusions

158

PART 4

Solutions

169

13 Eco-effective commandments

171

14 Good future directions

183

15 Conclusion: The eco-efficient past, our eco-effective present, and

regenerative futures

191

Index

199

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 7.1 7.2 13.1 13.2 14.1

Flavors of Eco-manufacturing Economic Transitions The Socio-behavioral Investment Framework Ideologies of Regeneration Human Existence in the Industrial Era Human Existence in the Post-nature Era The Seven Commandments The Ten Obstacles and Fixes Seven Directions

27

28

33

34

101

102

172

175

186

Interviews

0.1 Industrial Biomanufacturing. Interview with Moji Karimi.

Futurized podcast 0.2 What You Can Do to Change the Planet. Interview with Justin

Gillis. Futurized podcast 2.1 Climate Imaginations. Interview with Vandana Singh. Futurized

podcast 2.2 Communicating Climate. Interview with Cindy Forde. Futurized

podcast 3.1 The Changing Environmental Movement. Interview with

Graham Hill. Futurized podcast 3.2 Hope in Hell for the Earth. Interview with Jonathon Porritt.

Futurized podcast 4.1 Energy System Transformation. Interview with Carolina Torres,

Executive Director, Cognite. Futurized podcast 4.2 The Future of Cleantech. Interview with Neal Dikeman,

Partner, Energy Transition Ventures. Futurized podcast 4.3 Investing in the Era of Climate Change. Interview with Bruce

Usher. Futurized podcast 5.1 Regenerative Business. Interview with Alan Moore. Futurized

podcast 5.2 The Real World Beyond Sustainability. Interview with John

Ehrenfeld. Futurized podcast 5.3 The Road to Regenerative Capitalism. Interview with John B.

Fullerton. Futurized podcast 5.4 Doughnut Economics Regeneration. Interview with Erinch

Sahan, Business & Enterprise Lead, Doughnut Economics

Action Lab (DEAL). Futurized podcast 5.5 Green Swans. Interview with John Elkington. Futurized podcast 7.1 Sustainable Norway. Interview with Kristian Bye. Futurized

podcast 8.1 The Hydrogen Economy Value Chain in Aviation. Interview

with Paul Eremenko, CEO and co-founder, Universal

Hydrogen, Futurized podcast

2

5

30

31

43

44

52

55

59

69

71

79

80

81

96

113

List of interviews 8.2 The Emergence of Fusion Energy. Andrew Holland, CEO of

Fusion Industry Association, Futurized podcast 9.1 Investing in Sci-Tech Futures. Interview with Shahin Farshchi,

Partner, Lux Capital. Futurized podcast 9.2 The Future of Vertical Farming. Interview with Eddy Badrina,

CEO of Eden Green. Futurized podcast 12.1 Carbon Removal Challenges. Interview with Claude Letorneau,

CEO, Svante. Futurized podcast 12.2 Industrial Carbon Removal. Interview with David Phillips,

Head of UK and Investor Relations at Aker Carbon Capture.

Futurized podcast 13.1 The Future of Cultured Meat. Interview with David Brandes,

CEO of Peace of Meat. Futurized podcast 14.1 Hope in Hell for the Earth. Interview with Jonathon Porritt.

Futurized podcast 15.1 Climate Storylines. Interview with Ted Shepherd, Professor,

University of Reading, UK. Futurized podcast 15.2 How Climate Visions Get Constructed. Interview with Mike

Hulme. Futurized podcast

xi

119

128

130

160

161

173

183

191

192

Acknowledgements

To my family in Norway who brought me up in an environment conducive to what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku (“forest bathing”) and Norwegians just call friluftsliv (“outdoor life”), which gave me an innate appreciation for the value of our ecosystem. Without fully experiencing that value it is doubtful that investors will have the incentive or determination to protect, enhance, or regenerate nature. For that reason, part of the book is about how to regain or foster that experience in our everyday reality. To my former colleagues at Natur & Ungdom, the Norwegian youth environmental organization, who taught me how to be an activist. I have contained my rebellious nature long enough. Now that I’m older, I’m at least able to express my thoughts in ways that attempt to bridge activism and intellect, because there should be no contradiction between them. To my investment colleagues in corporate venturing, particularly the crowd around Global Corporate Venturing (GCV), Hitachi Ventures, and Antler. Through working with you in various capacities, I’ve learned the investment trade and have been able to connect some dots between corporate and venture capital and ecosystem tech entrepreneurship. Some of that connective tissue made it into the book. How successful it was, is up to the readers to judge. To all guests of the Futurized podcast, who contributed so much wisdom on ecological issues, entrepreneurship, technology, and all things disruption, future, and risk. Particular thanks to those Futurized guests who are quoted or referenced in the book, notably, Moji Karimi, Justin Gillis, Vandana Singh, Cindy Forde, Graham Hill, Jonathon Porritt, Carolina Torres, Neal Dikeman, Bruce Usher, John Ehrenfeld, Alan Moore, John Elkington, Kris­ tian Bye, Paul Eremenko, Andrew Holland, John B. Fullerton, Shahin Farshchi, Eddy Badrina, Claude Letorneau, David Phillips, and Mike Hulme. To Kyle McCord with Atmosphere Press, who did a great job as a devel­ opmental editor consultant at the latter stage of the book-writing process. Thanks to my editor at Routledge, Taylor & Francis, Annabelle Harris for believing that this book had merit, and thanks to editorial assistant Jyotsna Gurung, who made the editorial process smooth. Thanks to Maire Harris who expertly copyedited my manuscript and to Cathy Hurren, my production editor.

Acknowledgements

xiii

To my colleagues at Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (SERI) for giving this book project a twist towards existential risk. I began this project on my own but was able to finalize it in the stimulating environment at Stanford, influenced by a flurry of ongoing work at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) as well as at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Lastly, but not least, to my kids, Naya, Jax, and Zadie, who will grow up in an ecological environment so different from mine. By the time their genera­ tion comes into their prime, humanity will, by all accounts, be entering an “emergency mindset”, particularly as regards the natural environment. Yet, I would like to believe that you could still build a regenerative future. Today’s investors should do their part to make their job a bit easier.

Introduction

When Moji Karimi, CEO and co-founder of Houston-based biomanu­ facturing startup Cemvita Factory wakes up in the morning, he is not wasting any time getting to work. He certainly doesn’t doubt whether his efforts are appreciated or necessary. Moji holds multiple degrees in drilling and petroleum engineering, respectively, but is obsessed with cleaning up and utilizing the carbon spills instead of extracting them, using a process that mimics photosynthesis. Over the course of only a few years, the business he is in has become a lynchpin effort in creating tomorrow’s regenerative production cycles. For Moji, the starting point is what is traditionally called “heavy industry” such as mining and oil and gas. Biomanufacturing overall is slated to become an $85 billion market in 2031 (ReportLinker, 2021) and that’s likely just scratching the surface, given that the application areas are still largely unexplored, and some market sizing studies only count more traditional biotech within its scope. What Cemvita Factory does is to create economical carbon-negative solutions through industrial-strength synthetic biology. What is that you ask? The approach taken by Cemvita is to deploy custom-engineered microorganisms that catalyze the conversion of CO2 at ambient pressure and temperature. In essence, they are building a bioreactor. If Moji succeeds, the damaging carbon released by industrial production would be used as feeder stock for a process that turns it into bio ethylene, essentially as healthy as a banana, and that approach used to create biofuels for transportation or bioplastics for packaging. If their effort can scale, it would be a game changer towards reversing cli­ mate change. The question is how long it would take to get there, and what scale they can realistically achieve by the deadline of the carbon neutrality target, 2050, the so-called “net zero” date the EU has set for itself, for example (EP News, 2019). Trying to build a bioreactor that doesn’t use too much energy means massive technical challenges. Can they make these beneficial microbes at scale?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-1

2

Introduction

Interview 0.1 Industrial Biomanufacturing. Interview with Moji Karimi. Futurized podcast.

The process is in motion, Karimi says: We are converting CO2 to bioethylene using the gene for the ethylene form­ ing enzyme from bananas. We engineered it into our microbial system that now uses CO2 and water as feedstock. We’ve done this at lab scale and are scaling up the process a thousand times and right after that we are ready for a pre commercial unit. […] In a controlled environment, microbes could deliver economic value, and synthetic biology enables you to do so. (Undheim, 2022) Moji targets using CO2 as feedstock to produce intermediate chemicals and polymers, with gigaton-scale CO2 utilization potential by 2050. That’s 30 years away. But he hopes to already reach a meaningful scale three to five years from now, meaning they will go beyond the research stage. Overall, this market is called the “carbon utilization” market, to distinguish it from the carbon capture business models that only entail trapping the carbon and burying it in the sand. Industrializing microbes is both fascinating and scary. Can biology truly be put under human control to fix our energy challenges, reduce emissions, and put us on the path to regenerative economic growth? Time will show, but startups such as Cemvita are making headway. There is no question of the need for industrial biomanufacturing as a novel approach. Surprisingly, what seems to be the biggest challenge isn’t the deep science itself, but the opera­ tional challenges in scaling the technology properly so that the promising-use cases can materialize in sync with market expectations. The question is whether we are doing enough towards the environment. Is the path towards sustainability sufficient? Do we have to abolish capitalism in the process or is there a third way between capitalism and post growth? What is the time we have available? What are realistic solutions and what frameworks would help us get there?

Introduction

3

Disagreement: How alarmist should we be? Since the 1970s at least, there has been an elite discussion about the limits to growth, meaning a growing awareness that the developed nations’ consump­ tion and industrial practices were unsustainable for the world’s ecosystem balance. Environmentalism as a social movement began in earnest after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, fostering regulations against pesticides (Carson, 2002). But that was a simple fight compared to what we, as citizens, business, and civil society are up against now: changing our entire economic model and social landscape. Since that time, there has been a series of intergovernmental meetings attempting to address the problem, to no avail. Throughout the last 50 years, there have been attempts to innovate our way out of the problem. Startups have emerged with various types of technologies and solutions that, it was claimed, could make a significant contribution to climate change. Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, a wave of startup innova­ tion, the cleantech wave, washed over the investment landscape. Everywhere you went, investors were putting money into “tough tech” with uncertain business models, dubious technologies with long R&D time horizons, and without proper cyber-physical system integration to benefit from the network effects that had lifted other markets such as the software sector. Described this way, few investors should have put their money on it. However, at the time, it was nevertheless regarded as the next big thing, a way to get outsized returns. It was the latest investment fad. For years, there was intense disagreement on whether there was cause for alarm over the earth’s climate. Most scientists claimed climate change was a reality, and the climate scientists started mounting evidence. Some scientists were against this focus, pointing to natural variations, complexities, and big unknowns. Many industrialists claimed the consequences of attempting dec­ arbonization would be worse, even detrimental to growth and employment. Governments have attempted to strike a balance which, to most, has meant meager changes to the industrial system. A couple of years ago, something changed. The consensus shifted, partly based on extreme weather events gaining momentum (WMO, 2021), partly based on near incontrovertible evidence that the earth’s climate has warmed considerably over the past five decades (IPCC, 2014), which coincides with the latest industrial revolution, and broadly has increased over the entire industrial era. As of about 2020, there was near universal agreement across political camps, even in the US, China, India, and the UK, that climate change needed to be tackled. I call this the institutionalization of climate emergency, mean­ ing governments named the challenge and started to put in place a rudimen­ tary infrastructure, standards, and started placing bets to try to stem the heating of the earth’s atmosphere, most notably broadly agreeing to try to achieve what’s called net zero, meaning no further deterioration of the earth’s

4

Introduction

carbon balance, by 2050 (IEA, 2021). The climate concern finally became normative but that does not immediately translate into actions. Change takes time. The picture is somewhat more complicated. There are holdouts among governments, industrialists, and citizens around the world. For example, Danish author Bjørn Lomborg published the book The Skeptical Envir­ onmentalist (2007), which lodged complaints against the consensus, challen­ ging us all to get the facts straight about climate change (Lomborg, 2001). US Republicans typically also assign the topic of climate change low priority (Tyson, 2021). There is innovation, but existing efforts scarcely amount to a credible path to net zero. Overall, the world is still stuck in apathy. This has been called by many names: cold-start problem, lacking individual incentives, collective action problem, you name the number of ways that exist to say that agree­ ment on the problem does not mean agreement (or knowledge) about how to get there. Or, how to begin working on it. During my time at MIT Sloan in the mid-2000s, I spent some time ana­ lyzing cleantech failure and began to study its main cases with the idea of trying to figure out what went wrong and how to avoid it next time. At that time, I couldn’t quite figure out the answer, but time has provided some of them. Then came a decade of disillusionment where most of these startups failed to live up to the expectations. As a result, investments plummeted. In the US, the solar tech player Solyndra became emblematic of cleantech’s failures. Having collected a $535 million loan guarantee based on Bush-era legislation, it still failed in a market where the price of silicon dropped. However, the main reason was that the company could not achieve full-scale operations rapidly enough. Can we conclude that federal loan guarantees are always a mistake? That’s a stretch. The Solyndra flop was an exception, not the rule. Helped by an enormous amount of progress in the integration of cyberphysical systems, a new investment boom cycle started around 2018 with a more diversified set of startups and approaches, and a more mature market, in which a new generation of cleantech investors jumped on the bandwagon. Funding has soared more than 3,750% since 2013 (Temple, 2020). We are currently amid this new wave. How early in this investment cycle are we right now? I’m not a neutral observer. I have been personally engaged in this endeavor, through my pre­ vious role as a venture partner at Hitachi Ventures, a corporate investment arm of Hitachi, the Japanese multinational conglomerate and Fortune 50 company. I am also currently a venture partner at Antler, the global venture firm. It is not at all clear that the companies that emerged until 2023 have what it takes to become great, trailblazing companies that change the ball game for environmental tech and industrial progress. Are we even in the first inning of figuring out how to measure the impact of human industrial activity, travel,

Introduction

5

and consumption? Even if we could agree on a standardized way to measure pollution or carbon reduction, what would that change? Are we overcorrecting for decarbonization instead of focusing on the wider challenges connected with industrial change stemming from exponential technologies and business models? Another key issue is biodiversity, which among other benefits reduces the chances of extinction of wild animals. In fact, inter­ dependent species extinction might become an accelerating phenomenon soon with unknown consequences. I see no consequential startup or pro­ ject comprehensively changing the playing field in terms of safeguarding biodiversity. The key question I ask throughout this book is: what happens now? Is investment the right strategy? What about citizen behavior change, as advo­ cated by Harvey and Gillis (2022) in their book The Big Fix (Harvey and Gillis, 2022)? More importantly, what will the transition look like?

Interview 0.2 What You Can Do to Change the Planet. Interview with Justin Gillis. Futurized podcast.

We need all actors, government, private sector, philanthropy, and citizens to invest and act. Not separately, as in we have a bunch of devoted envir­ onmentalists who reduce their carbon footprint and demonstrate good beha­ vior and then we have a set of industrialists who preach decarbonization but who live their professional and personal lives as if that statement had no consequences. What’s needed is for investors to realize that it isn’t necessarily betting on the right frontier technology solution that ultimately will make the world transition to net zero. Rather, what will make the difference is switching the world’s population over to an eco-efficient behavior logic through a combi­ nation of policy incentives and fruitful engineering and science-based inno­ vations. What would this mean? Where are we now on this quest and how do we make progress? Let us bring it back to Moji Karimi, an entrepreneur hard at work on bioengineering. What Moji needs is patient growth capital, which is almost a

6

Introduction

contradiction in terms. He also needs a highly impressive talent pool, which means that he depends on his field being judged both cool, important, and well paid by top PhDs in a multitude of fields. Then, he needs policy and regulation to be aligned and to provide disincentives to heavy industry con­ tinuing to pollute, but not so many regulations that they go out of business, which would produce further delays. As for behaviors, Moji is betting on citizen sustainability efforts to, ultimately, believe in biomanufacturing as a new keystone industry they will support, and in the continued support for synthetic biology as an approach that is ethically sound, if it is subject to certain controls. In addition to that, of course, like all startups, Moji’s needs a confluence of drive and product/market fit as well as market momentum to reach hypergrowth. The startups that will come to define humanity’s response to climate change will not merely need to be “unicorn startups” worth in excess of a billion dollars. No, they need to be consequential companies in industrial value chains, and ultimately need to be 100-billion-dollar companies. Let’s not be starry eyed; there are not a lot of those.

The structure of the book Making progress requires structure. The book is structured in clear sections. Part 1 (The future) presents four scenario vignettes for 2050 (Chapter 1) to set the stage for imagining the future. That’s the first step in positive change. Scenarios are not predictions. They depict plausible futures. Not all are desirable. Not all are dystopian either. These are not full-fledged scenarios with full timelines, rather, they are “a day in the life of” some key people I imagine could exist and would experience the world this way if various con­ ditions are met. A key perspective in the book is that we are all investors, so that section also presents a regenerative investment framework (Chapter 2), which is the key to unlocking a process of change that will take decades to achieve and may never be entirely completed. Regeneration is a new civiliza­ tional principle that requires intermediate steps. Part 2 (The past) describes the insufficient non-financial commitments (Chapter 3), looks at the state of play in eco-investments (Chapter 4), and retraces the steps from deep ecology via industrial ecology to the regeneration fallacy (Chapter 5). The fallacy is not to look towards regenerative practices, and start planning for this, but to claim that we have a clear idea what they are yet. The failures of dominant actors (Chapter 6) also belong to this line of argument. Part 3 (Scaling challenges) starts on a more hopeful note, re-centralizing the self as an environmental agent (Chapter 7), pointing out that energy is not the issue (Chapter 8), and asking which game changers really matter (Chapter 9), and wonders, despite the gargantuan challenges humanity faces, whether conducting gigascale projects and building eponymous infrastructure is the right approach (Chapter 10). This section also handles the various eco-flavors: CSR, eco-efficiency, and carbon accounting, that have cropped up over the

Introduction

7

past few decades (Chapter 11) and describes some efforts as carbon illusions (Chapter 12). Part 4 (Solutions) introduces a few eco-effective commandments (Chapter 13) and considers good future directions (Chapter 14), and the book con­ cludes with some reflections on the arduous, but also fulfilling path from an eco-efficient past, through an eco-effective present, and towards a regenerative future (Chapter 15). Climate emergency might suddenly have become normative, but what hap­ pens now is still contingent on a mix of science, engineering, social factors, and a good bit of luck. Exactly how this might work is for us all to discover, and for you to explore throughout this book. A key tenet in this book is that everyone can do something, and that many—whether expert or novice—can do far more than they think. This is the decade to act. These are the 25 years to establish a human legacy, starting with our survival but also regenerating nature, so that future generations also can flourish. But before action comes reflection.

References Carson, R. (2002) Silent Spring. Anniversary edition. Mariner Books. EP News (2019) What is carbon neutrality and how can it be achieved by 2050? Eur­ opean Parliament. Available at: www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/ 20190926STO62270/what-is-carbon-neutrality-and-how-can-it-be-achieved-by-2050 (Accessed: 14 December 2022). Harvey, H. and Gillis, J. (2022) The Big Fix: Seven Practical Steps to Save Our Planet. Simon & Schuster. IEA (2021) Net zero by 2050. Available at: www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 (Accessed: 14 December 2022). IPCC (2014) Fifth Assessment Report. Available at: www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/a r5/ (Accessed: 14 December 2022). Lomborg, B. (2001) The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. 1st edn. Cambridge University Press. ReportLinker (2021) The global next-generation biomanufacturing market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 14.85% during the forecast period 2021–2031 and is expected to reach a value of $85,201.2 million in 2031, Yahoo. Available at: www.yahoo.com/ now/global-next-generation-biomanufacturing-market-093200345.html (Accessed: 14 December 2022). Temple, J. (2020) How VCs can avoid another bloodbath as the clean-tech boom 2.0 begins, MIT Technology Review, 30 November. Available at: www.technologyre view.com/2020/11/30/1012660/venture-capital-clean-tech-boom-biden/ (Accessed: 14 December 2022). Tyson, A. (2021) On climate change, Republicans are open to some policy approaches, even as they assign the issue low priority, Pew Research Center. Available at: www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/23/on-climate-change-republicans-are-open-to­ some-policy-approaches-even-as-they-assign-the-issue-low-priority/ (Accessed: 14 December 2022).

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Introduction

Undheim, T.A. (2022) Industrial biomanufacturing with Moji Karimi. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/industrial-biomanufacturing/ (Accessed: 14 December 2022). WMO (2021) Weather-related disasters increase over past 50 years, causing more damage but fewer deaths, World Meteorological Organization. Available at: https://public.wmo. int/en/media/press-release/weather-related-disasters-increase-over-past-50-years-ca using-more-damage-fewer (Accessed: 14 December 2022).

Part 1

The future

1

Scenarios 2050

Setbacks “What on Earth?” said Iniko, the affable Nigerian Conference of the Parties (COP) 55 representative who had just attempted to order a beer at Summit Bar, the 1,507 square feet bar on the 21st floor of the Radisson Blu hotel. “Did you just say $200?” He wasn’t worried about the environment at that moment, although there was plenty to worry about, but he was making a comment on beer prices. Having just come in from Abuja, he was taking in Oslo’s most breathtaking view from the stylish Summit Bar, re-designed and refurbished by Snøhetta, the renowned architects. Snøhetta, the highest mountain in the Dovrefjell mountain range in Norway, literally means “the mountain with a hood of snow”, although snow had departed the Norwegian mountains long ago. It was early November, but Oslo had Mediterranean temperatures and a warm breeze. By 2020, a pint of beer had passed the price of a barrel of oil, but every­ body had expected oil to spike higher. By 2050, in Oslo, the most expensive city on earth, both beer and oil stood at $200, a striking price considering the efforts made to turn the energy markets around. “No worries, Iniko”, said Anastasia, his Russian counterpart. “Doesn’t Iniko mean ‘time of trouble,’ if so, you have been waiting for this moment. Catch the moment. Nigeria is finally making a mark.” As she brushed her blonde, flowing hair back, she adjusted her Dolce & Gabbana floral-printed blouse and opened a button up top. She took a sip from the glass and remarked on the freshness of the pine needle aromas. “We had large forests in sub-Saharan Africa, too, as late as a decade ago”, said Iniko, “but now there are only pockets left”. The broad-shouldered, six­ feet-eight tall man was no forester. On the other hand, he could recall the Akure-Ofosu Forest Reserve from his childhood memories. He imagined he could see its remains from his urban rooftop weekend existence in Lagos. Not that he had looked. In his youth, he was a social activist and some of his friends were environmentalists. Now that widespread prosperity had been generated in Nigeria, Iniko preferred to join politics, not fight against it. Nature was different now. They were the post-nature generation. DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-3

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The future

“This beer is often confused with others made on creeping juniper, but this must be made with Norway pine, whatever’s left of it”, she said. “But why do you worry about beer? We have bigger problems. The conversion to a dec­ arbonized economy is proceeding too fast, don’t you think?” The 21st-floor bar’s floor-to-ceiling panoramic windows provided the per­ fect views to ponder how to derail tomorrow’s meeting on resetting climate targets from net zero to net 30. After all, who had thought the world could even get to 50 percent reduced emissions. Both Nigeria and Russia needed more time. Time to soak in a few decades more of oil revenue to fill the cof­ fers of the oil tycoons and drizzle enough tax breaks on the wealthy and middle-class population that they keep quiet. “Guys, keep your voice down”, said Ola, the starry-eyed Norwegian industry association CEO who kept Iniko and Anastasia company. “We cannot let the press get wind that we are together. Everyone thinks Norway is on board with the Net Zero target, and my Prime Minister will lead the negotiations tomorrow. I’ve been instructed to keep a low profile. Nobody has to know about our new oil and gas infra­ structure investments in your two countries. I have to go anyway; enjoy the Presidential suite we got for you.” He swung his backpack on his shoulders, fiddled for his bicycle lock key, and was on his way to pick up kids from the evening’s activities. As he swung onto his bike, he felt the warm air from the afternoon breeze, and for a moment, he felt like he was in the Mediterranean, on summer break, and thought of ice cream. The evening was still young, and the two decided to take Ola up on his offer for them to continue their discussions in the suite on the 26th floor. Lighting in the ceiling at Summit Bar is kept to a minimum to maximize the view of the Oslo Fjord. Sea-level rise was still minimal. It had been a great few years for Anastasia, Iniko knew. As head of Rus­ sia’s foreign delegation to the last ten climate meetings, the beautiful and shrewd woman had successfully avoided too much discussion on the methane emissions from Siberian melted permafrost. She shepherded the new North­ ern shipping route through the Arctic in alliance with the Canadians. Sur­ prisingly, there were no objections from Norway. Well, the 1 percent Arctic toll both ends of the supply chain had agreed to pay was probably smoothing things over. Somehow the United States accepted it, too. It helped that those ships carried semiconductors from Asia to feed the hungry US electronics market. Anastasia had a curious past. She grew up in Ukraine, and just about caught the last of the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers there back in the 2020s. But then her fortune changed. Her Russian family in St. Petersburg took her in and gave her an education at the best schools. She attended CIS St Petersburg followed by Lomonosov Moscow State University and obtained a diplomacy degree from Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Her semester at Oxford gave her a global network. The world was at her feet. At some point, she got into large mammals. She campaigned for a while to protect the Amur tiger and the Far Eastern leopard, to no avail; Eurasian

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biodiversity collapsed rapidly in the 2040s as these apex predators dwindled. It turned out they were part of the few, fragile factors regulating that ecosys­ tem. She did manage to protect the wetlands in time, though, so a great win, after Russia’s main cities had their water supplies threatened throughout the 2030s. Cleaning up sulfur, oil, heavy metals, and aluminum from two million lakes and 210,000 rivers dirtied by Soviet-era ignorance was a challenge. A chemical solution using synthetic biology from researchers at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University helped. Cleaning crews hired from Syria implemented it at scale. After that, she joined The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (Minprirody). Now her life was all about compromises. It fit her well. Part Ukrainian, part Russian, contradictions were already part of her outlook. An environmentalist now part of a fight to maintain fossil fuels. Iniko had a slow morning, with a French coffee and baguette at the hotel, followed by an hour and a half cab ride to the Oslofjord Convention Center where COP55 was held. After all, the job was done, all he needed to do was a few sessions with African colleagues to support a climate justice initiative. The case for Africa was resounding now. Everyone wanted to invest. Adap­ tation. Mitigation. Full-on fossil fuel infrastructure. It didn’t matter. This was turning into Africa’s half-century. Africa’s total population reached nearly 2.5 billion by 2050, and Nigeria was leading the pack. With 400 million people they were becoming true players. Nothing wrong with that. The mass migra­ tions northwards over the past few decades were becoming a thing of the past. After all, losing 10 percent of the population wasn’t too much of a blow, although those who left were the healthiest. They had to endure crossing the great Saharan desert to get to the Mediterranean Ocean and set off for Europe. Chances of arriving dead or alive are 50–50. In 2015, 100,000 Afri­ cans made it to Europe alive. In the 2040s, the annual rate hovered around 50 million. Well, Europe has plenty of space, thought Iniko. Not that the Europeans saw it that way. Many migration boats were sunk right outside their harbors. By covert operations submarines, presumably. Likewise, the natural disasters that had plagued sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade, with massive floods of the Niger Delta caused a standstill of oil production for months. The collapse of the coastal cities and the degeneration of slum areas was clearly cause for concern still. The old Olusosun landfill had crept into Lagos proper, contaminating the groundwater and causing Lassa disease among the poor who still had no water filtration. Mountains of plastic waste washed up on the shores. Most other continents had a coastline defense system against plastic debris by now. But with fresh money from the World Bank, IMF, the EU, and the major investment by Norway, he felt comfortable about slowing down new partnerships. Nigeria was the chooser now, not the beggar. Reaching 100 percent electricity by 2060 was in sight, due to the energy mix of fossil, hydropower, and solar. Food stress was of course concerning, and having to ship in most food from other countries was not ideal, given the

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The future

amount of low-yield agrarian land that stood idle. Nothing worse than Northern Europe during the first two industrial revolutions, Iniko convinced himself. Just like that. But there was one thing that Iniko couldn’t stand. The plastics were every­ where. Microplastics in the lungs of infants. Born with cancer. It was the one area he might mobilize the powerful Nigerian diaspora to fight. Even the criminal networks had turned against plastics. In theory. But they were all using it. Bioplastics had been a trap. Plastics could never be fully recycled, but more importantly, they could not be collected. The world was doomed to pile up ever larger chunks of plastic in landfills and in the ocean. Good to know nobody ate fish anymore. What makes me sleep at night, thought Iniko, is knowing that lithium pol­ lution is as bad as fossil fuel pollution. Turns out all this electrification was far worse for the environment than previously advertised. Lithium extraction uses a form of chemical mining process that harms soil and causes air con­ tamination and wastewater lagoons that infiltrate groundwater. In a way, it was the next oil. Prices had quadrupled every five years for two decades now. Far more harmful than fracking, it was the Achilles heel of the environmental movement, he thought. His father had personally ensured that Tesla went nowhere with its plans to mine lithium in Nigeria (Lawal, 2022). Good to know. He was one of the good guys.

Synthetic existence At 5 p.m. Central European Time on August 2, 2050, the alarm bells went off at SynBio Logos in Sophia Antipolis, France. Home of the world’s most advanced synthetic biology scale-up laboratory, it was among five regional labs charged with developing countermeasures against climate change. Only this time, the alarm wasn’t of an urgent kind, it was hyper-urgent. For 20 years, there had been a tacit agreement internationally that only 10 percent of the world’s crops should be genetically modified, just in case something went wrong and it had to be contained. Gene modification was closely tracked. The alarm now went off as the metric had hit 50 percent. Not that there was a choice: none of the regular crops grown throughout previous millennia could be grown south of Scandinavia, Canada, or Northern Russia. As always, all this alarm did was to remind the scientists to send out an invite for this year’s meeting of agricultural syn-biologists. A young Italian scientist, Floriana, at the ripe young age of 24 was in charge of the invites. All she had to do was push the button. Everything was prepared. Agendas were online. Topics were predetermined. Formulas were known. Consequences were known. Floriana means flourishing, and she was mindful of the name her parents had chosen. She strongly believed in walking as restorative and had expanded the notion of a “forest bath” (in Japanese: shinrin-yoku) to an even more efficacious floral bath, which she had introduced on a citywide level across Europe by a curious new approach.

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From a young age, Floriana had been fascinated by modified nature, more specifically artificial intelligence-created flowers, which by now had billions of varieties not found in nature. She only did the crop stuff to have access to the lab. As one of the world’s leading scientists, they let her have her own flower lab on the side, where she developed both industrial and artisan varieties. Some of them did double duty as crops and flowers. The synbio version of Dahlia was a modified potato crop, edible but originally including indigestible elements found in other members of the sunflower family which caused gas and sometimes cramping. In doing so, she built on the pioneering work of an earlier plant biologist, Professor Joanne Chory, who had been the lead scien­ tist emeritus at Ginkgo Bioworks in the 2030s, after she left the Salk Institute. Chory’s approach was to encourage plants to grow roots using the natural waxy substance called suberin (Dreyfuss, 2019). Ginkgo was the MIT company that led the way into the synthetic biology revolution with its massive foundries and other platform essentials for the biorevolution. By the 2030s it played the same role in the economy as did General Electric in launching electricity to the mass market. Independent of the plant work, other synbio inventions, however, had managed to be embroiled in some scandals. Notably, it was the cause of depopulation of Australia. Luckily, the world decided to test a gene-modified mosquito on Tasmania and not on the mainland. When it failed miserably and the mosquitoes got more numerous (by 1000 folds) instead of less, the experiment was aborted, but not before the entire island ecosystem was destabilized by the enormous grasshoppers that resulted from eating the mosquitoes. It was commonly known that grasshoppers feed on barks, mosses, seeds, fungi, animal waste, decomposing meat, spider silk, and even insects like spiders, flies, and mosquitoes, but that altering one feed could make them swarm and devour an entire continent’s worth of plants was a bit beyond the imagined scenarios. Not only had Floriana removed any unfortunate side effects and chosen a plant not an insect as a carrying vehicle, she had also enlarged the size of both the tubers and the flowers, each edible. Her bright red-colored Floriana Sunrise edible dinnerplate Dahlia had won a First at the Chelsea Flower Show. Even more important, of course, she had created a variety that barely needed water, the downside of all other Dahlias. It reproduced even more easily than other Dahlia tubers, or traditional potatoes, and could be grown in vast quantities, stretching along highways or railroad tracks, or even indoors. As Floriana prepared her introduction at the meeting, she thought about another “pair” of scientists, Haber and Bosch. I wonder what my Dahlia will lead to, she thought. Will we feed billions of people like they did? The paral­ lels were there but were not exactly the same. In 1915, a devastating poison gas attack on the Belgians, in Flanders, was carried out by German troops as part of World War I. Fritz Haber, the inventor of chlorine gas, personally oversaw its effect. In 1918, Haber controversially won the Nobel Prize in

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Chemistry for the synthesis of ammonia. Ammonia (NH3) is made from one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms, is used in nitric acid production, as a fertilizer, and as a cleaning solution. Ironically, Haber’s lab worked on the hydrocyanide-based insecticides Zyklon A and Zyklon B which, much later, were used by the Nazi regime to kill Jews. Carl Bosch, another German che­ mist and engineer, turned Fritz Haber’s laboratory experiments into an industrial-scale process (Ritchie, 2022). As of 2022, half of the global population were dependent on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and the Haber-Bosch process was likely to have enabled the lives of at least 3 billion to 3.5 billion people by that point. The challenge is that high-yield agriculture also means nitrogen runoff which causes algae blooms, loss of aquatic life, and biodiversity loss. Excess nitrogen is also damaging to healthy soils (Scientific American, 2009). Towards 2050, another 50 percent increase in fertilizer use was needed to feed the rising population. This was unfortunately a cause of increased climate change. But what was the alternative? Not feeding billions of people? The COP55 climate adaptation meeting in Oslo was widely regarded as unimportant, even before it began. By now, everyone realized that Net Zero was an impossible goal, and since the ice caps on both poles had already melted, sea water rise by 1 meter was already underway. Carbon dioxide from all kinds of greenhouse gasses would have been unstoppable, except there was, quite possibly, a synthetic biology fix. This was a far cry from the highly anticipated industrial solution that most of the oil industry and the world governments had been waiting for. Carbon capture, sequestration, storage, and utilization (CCSSU) remained a pipe dream, both at source and through direct air capture. The challenge was not the technology as such, but the price to scale it. Nobody wanted to pay for it. And the infrastructure required to put it in place was, with one word: ugly. The last-ditch effort by Chinese sci­ entists to filter carbon through water failed so miserably it nearly polluted the Pacific Ocean forever. They had been working in open seas without contain­ ment and accidentally released a powerful chemical that started to acidify water and kill all aquatic life in the surroundings. Instead of the bulky CCSSU approach, synthetic biology attempts to reconstruct basic biological and physical properties to generate novel forms of living matter (Fernau et al., 2021). The synthetic biology fix was, Floriana thought, somehow related to her Dahlia. She needed input from the global team, and quite possibly another decade of development in the lab before scale up. But it would seem that flowers could capture carbon much more efficiently through a process she had developed. The reason is that soaking up the carbon into the tubers would avoid the problem of the green part of the plant decomposing rapidly and releasing the carbon into the atmosphere again. Floriana was working on a modified Floriana Dahlia Carbonata whose individual tubers could hold 500 pounds of carbon dioxide. At more than ten times what an entire tree can do, with seven to ten tubers per Dahlia, this was a scalable solution. The only trouble was that the flower

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would turn gray and you could no longer eat the Dahlia. Given the con­ centrations, the tubers themselves would also need to be stored underground, much like atomic waste. A small price to pay, according to the EU Frame­ work Program whose support she was counting on. Floriana did not look forward to the milestone and feared it would be the end of her citywide Dahlia flower shows.

Destruction “Hold on tightly”, said Hanne to her son, Johan, who was rappelling down a winding tree on the side of the Vassfjellet mountain, near the city of Trond­ heim, Norway. This was no ordinary tree, it was the last tree confirmed to be alive on the European continent. They had climbed up and down that tree, with its spectacular location, protected by slate rock on three sides, and coming up a waterfall, for the first time a decade ago. This was when there were trees everywhere. The last decade things have gone downhill. The sul­ phuric level in the atmosphere had nearly killed all life. Only trees fed from naturally cleansed mountain water were still okay, although the forceful winds had downed most trees above ten feet tall. “Mom, I cannot see you”, said Johan, “but I’m okay. I know my way down.” Johan was 14 and was an experienced climber. To Hanne, teaching her son to rappel down a mountain and climb a tree was the best gift she could give him. Soon there would only be indoor locations left to spend time in. Johan would soon be a grown teenager, but what about his kids and the kids in the next generation? Hanne shuddered, thinking about how different life would be without nature. The COP55 climate adaptation meeting in Oslo was starting the same day. Hanne had considered going down there; after all, she was a climate scientist and also a psychologist, but decided against it. There was too much work to do in Trondheim with all the students who were collapsing mentally around the realization that nothing more could be done for mother nature. COP55 would most likely call it quits. Urban air quality in 2050 was the top cause of environmentally related deaths worldwide (OECD, 2012), with particulate matter and ozone both killing 5 percent of the population annually and causing misery and early death for another 25 percent of those with the weakest lungs. Initially, fore­ casters had predicted these deaths in China, India, and in the emerging economies in Africa. However, the tipping point occurred in 2042, as the overall sulfur level spread across the globe. Finding elevated levels of microplastics in people’s lungs is now a natural occurrence and it led to a particu­ larly nasty form of lung cancer in about 10 percent of newborns. The treatment was effective, but expensive, and led to 60 percent recovery for those with medical insurance or in socialized healthcare systems. However, living with reduced lung capacity was a reality for most. World leaders were widely expected to declare that nature was no longer safe and people who spent time outside could no longer be protected. In fact,

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The future

they would be considered polluted and could no longer be brought inside the new city-based oasis facilities that had sprung up in every city larger than 100,000 people. Any smaller than that, and the tax base could not support the construction of a $10 billion facility that would house the working population in a whole city. Life along the coastlines was tougher than in the 2020s, even for experi­ enced outdoors people such as Norwegians. Sea level rise was only 1 meter in Scandinavia, but that was about to change. The coastlines of most other countries had changed dramatically. Even the Dutch had to give up their territory, despite their excellent national system of dikes, when the Flemish dikes burst in neighboring Belgium and water overflowed the northern 5 per­ cent of the European territory. With more people crammed into the center of the European continent, confrontations between workers and non-workers were frequent. After all, if you did not work, who would give up their place in the oasis? It didn’t feel fair, but it was realistic. You contribute, you breathe. As Hanne herself rappelled down the gorge, at times stepping on tree branches, at times holding on to the rock, she reminded herself how lucky she and her family were. Living in the north of Norway was, so far, a blessing. The Gulf Stream had indeed stopped pouring temperate waters along the Norwegian coast recently, but the cooling effect was only a few degrees and was offset by the warming climate. The end result was a much more windy but mild climate. Not like the South of Europe which was uninhabitable and had turned into a desert, taking on Saharan desert characteristics. The world on average had seen a 5-degree temperature rise, far more than even the most pessimistic IPCC climate panel projections back in the early 2020s. The biggest problem everywhere was how to obtain drinking water. Small quantities were easy, because distilled water was obtainable at the cost of fine wine. The problem was that distilled water had very few nutrients. Obtaining daily drinking water with minerals in it was another affair. You almost had to lie and steal to get it. But Hanne knew that teenagers needed minerals to grow. The extensive set of vitamins she poured into her son wasn’t the same as eating it through food the natural way. But without nutritional supple­ ments, population growth would have been stunted long ago. As is, a 5 per­ cent annual decline was worrisome, but perhaps solvable with better technology a few decades on. Any spare tax revenue went into R&D and the best of the best were all pouring into the national labs that the biggest nations had set up after the university system collapsed. Hanne worked in one of them. She thought about her friends who had been working in the field of synthetic biology when the realization occurred that synthetics were about to destroy the planet, not fix it. The process was going to get ratified at the COP55 meeting: no more synthetic biology experi­ mentation until the paradigm shift had occurred. Without a breakthrough, the world could not risk releasing any more bio adapted organisms into what remained of nature without destroying photosynthesis. What had earlier been called “junk DNA”, as it turns out, was responsible for regulating gene

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expression. That meant that 98 percent of the genome wasn’t fully under­ stood. It was that part that went wrong. Synthesized organisms started to malfunction, one after the other. The natural feedstocks they were built on also started to dwindle, because bioen­ gineering factory production remained poorly regulated until the late 2030s. The politicians simply didn’t understand the challenge until it was too late. DNA sequencing of a human genome became commonplace in the late 2020s at less than $100 (down from thousands of dollars a decade earlier). Follow­ ing the Carlson Curve (Carlson, 2016), every decade, the price dropped sig­ nificantly, and by 2050, anybody could sequence as much DNA as they wanted. The result was that personalized gene experimentation became possible for the middle class in the Western world and among the upper classes in Africa. That was good for medicine and for the life expectancy of the wealthy. As a wealthy person born in 2050 one can expect to live to 120 or more—if the world still stands at that point. The true bottleneck, however, was the capacity of synthetic genetic circuits, the components built to modify cellular functions when applying synthetic biology and analogous to electric circuits. Only two years ago, when these circuits became true engines for pharma­ ceutical production and biological machines started rivaling other approaches in terms of energy storage, fuel production, and as base material for any advanced product in the industrial chain, did the problem proliferate. Nature simply shut down around them. It was as if the stresses of it all simply became too much. A little like a body collapsing under stress. As Hanne packed away the climbing equipment for the day, she looked at her son. Johan was happy. He was healthy. He was in good spirits. But his world, everyone’s world, was collapsing. What to do? Even a psychologist did not have any answers anymore. All she could do was take him climbing in the last tree on the Earth. She promised herself to do that until the tree stood no more.

Ecomax Earth Akari had been depressed for weeks. Her father had given up everything to try to make it work. His marriage. His family. Not her, of course. But her brother and sister. As non-scientists, they were both estranged. They did not understand her father’s obsession. His health. He has terminal cancer now. From smoking. It was his vice. He was only 90 but could not expect to live until 130 the way most healthy Japanese adults did these days. He worked too hard. Fifteen hours straight. Seven days a week. For what? Akari didn’t know. She was in Death Valley on the third year straight, only accompanied by her lab colleagues, an engineer, and a manufacturing crew. In fact, her father had been there every spring for 20 years. But there was never a good harvest. Critics said he was testing his modified crops in too harsh conditions. Too experimental. Too expensive.

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The future

Most experiments try to modify wheat or rice, not start from a different plant altogether. He was building on the corn to cactus project. By 2039 the project expected to hand a working C4 rice plant to commercial breeders (Kleiner, 2022). Except they didn’t actually want to turn corn into cactus, the way her father approached it. Her father started from orchids. Orchids? Of all things to combine with wheat and rice, why did he choose orchids? Akari wanted to hide in a big hole. Except, she was already in the biggest hole on planet Earth. Oh well. Around her was all desert. Well, there was a bright spot over the past few days. The wildflowers had arrived. But not the ones she had been waiting for, apparently. “Can you believe it?” said Ichika, and took another ten photos in rapid order. Well, photos, they were more like streaming video, in 10D quality meaning it could be shown on a wide screen in a movie theater. Ichika and her friend Akari were on vacation in Death Valley in Eastern California to see the flowers. Miraculously, last year, as the great Temporizer technology was rolled out across California, air temperatures had dropped back to 1850 levels or a little below. What happened that spring was that flowers started to show up in the Death Valley desert. Not just the regular 20 species of wildflowers, but thou­ sands of species, including a dainty display of orchids and many others. The Superbloom, last seen in 2016 (Dallas, 2016), and then before that in 2005, was 100 times bigger than before. The El Niño weather patterns created far more rainfall than before, and most deserts around the world had spectacular flower blooms several times a year now. Biodiversity was on the rise. Admittedly, it would take millions of years under natural, Darwinian evo­ lution to reconstitute all 70 percent of the biodiversity that was lost over the past hundred years. Luckily, with the decarbonized Net Zero Earth goal being achieved by 2049, the path was cleared. The dispersed synthetic biology labs all around the world being charged with local biodiversity reconstitution and acceleration also helped. However, it all came at a cost. At first, there was no plan to pay for such an effort. Then, an expert group came up with a plan: a global fund of unprecedented size and mandate. What got it off the ground was the 30-year buildup of the “ecological class” described by French thinker Bruno Latour (Sciences Po, 2022; Schultz and Latour, 2023), one of the emerging geo-social classes defined by “territorial position, by their position in the reproduction processes of the soil” and allowing descriptions of “who is occupying or exploiting the territory of others, or how some people’s livelihoods disallows the durable existence of other people’s conditions of reproduction”, in which “exploitation happens when social groups live off other people’s soil” (Schultz, 2020). In other words, this concept allowed for a powerful reformulation of socialist and Marxist ideas of the reproduction of inequality. This tied in 100 percent not only with the climate justice movement or the global South’s fight with the West for climate loss and damages, but it made sense to the everyday

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citizen who looked outside his or her window and saw nature, their nature, their physical community, and property, fundamentally altered within their generation alone. The ecological class is a social movement of sorts that not only took over the Green parties in most countries but created a rationale for a completely different type of capitalism. One that was first centered around regenerative practices and degrowth. They were not against growth, just pro-ecology first. At first, of course, it was pretty pathetic, and was only a derivation of various environmental movements. It had the contradictions of housing activists and academics under the same tent. Then, it took on the characteristics of a political movement. Leaders arose. Not activists destroying artwork. True leaders with a vision. Organizing talent. Media savvy. Populist narratives. Suggesting collective actions that were easy to take and didn’t hurt people’s wallet too much. Things like shar­ ing with neighbors. Traveling only when necessary. Buying local. Getting rid of those ridiculous ESG reports and replacing them with true climate man­ dates. Realizing that regulating themselves was better than destroying the Earth they lived on. Regulating the amount of leverage industrialists could use in financial transactions. In short, the ideology took off when the ideas translated into actions and then became big, populist parties that stood in elections. The magic was in the internationally coordinated campaigns. The idea exchange. The shared vision that developed after a decade of infighting. It was possible, at last. They became the majority. A power to reckon with. A power that wanted change but not destruction. The Global Fund for Earth funded by all the organizations found respon­ sible for fossil fuels over the industrial era had grown to $10 trillion by now and was fueling all kinds of mitigation and adaptation efforts all around the globe. Even the Pacific islands previously threatened by sea level rise had found their solutions, it seemed. There was even a plan to reconstitute the Arctic ice shelf lost during the 2030s and to expand the Antarctic ice shelf considerably to lock in more ice and reduce the water levels again. The Eco­ logical Class put an end to the dangerous plans for solar geoengineering put forth by the Indian government. Who knows what ills that would have led to. Perhaps another ice age? Perhaps the destruction of all plant life? Akari opened her purse and pulled out some Belgian chocolate. Well, it wasn’t so much Belgian as of Madagascan origin, a unique terroir, due to its tropical island climate situated 250 miles off the East Africa coast. Mada­ gascar cocoa beans are of three types, Trinitario, Criollo, and Forastero, share the flavor characteristics of strong acidity, yet aromatic and citrusy fruity notes, and forest flavors considered among the best worldwide, and only account for less than 1 percent of world cocoa production. Harvested twice a year, at the beginning of the rainy and the dry season, from the north of the island, sheltered from the seasonal cyclones that blow off the Indian Ocean, most of it is processed in Belgium (Myers, 2019). The real miracle was to eat chocolate at all. Climate-smart cocoa production was saved by a hair.

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The future

Suddenly, Akari got a voice in her ear, and a projection of her father Isamu appeared in front of her inner eye using EyeBelieve, the new communication technology approved by governments worldwide last year. “Are you ready to document this moment?” he said. “I’m not sure if this is such a great idea”, mumbled Akari, but relented. “Give me a sec”, she said, because she sud­ denly discovered she needed to straighten a fold in her pink tank top to pre­ pare to face the world’s attention. She was being beamed into the main conference room of COP55 where they were watching as the US and China together turned on the climate modification scheme, or CMS, the effects of which she was about to experience in person. Death Valley had been the location of a crop enhancement project over the past decade and now the time had come to turn it on. “Dr. Akari-san”, said Isamu, “I have the Pre­ sidents and leaders of 200 countries here and we are about to turn on the CMS. Please tell us what you see.” Akari directed her EyeBelieve towards the widest view of the Valley that expanded before her. The wildflower display was stunning, but it was the late afternoon, and getting dark already. But that was not in itself what everyone was waiting for. All of a sudden, the sun went down completely, and instead of being covered in complete darkness, the entire valley was illuminated in hundreds of thousands of distinct floral and fauna colors. The synthetically modified natural environment which had been encoded with translucent fungus. Transferring metabolic pathways for therapeutics into far more tenable plants is complex (Barnum, Endelman, and Shih, 2021). Akari, Isamu, and the entire team at the Nobel Prize-winning Plant Lab in Tokyo had been experimenting with teaching C3 plants to ax the wasteful photorespiration process and take on C4 plant traits. Orchids, for example, use the Crassula­ cean Acid Metabolism (CAM) way to achieve photosynthesis. C4 plants include corn, sorghum, sugarcane, millet, switchgrass, pineapple, daisies, and cabbage, but are not as useful as crops as C3 plants which include mainstay crops such as wheat and rice. However, a genus like Atriplex, Euphorbia, and Flaveria has both C3 and C4 species. Theoretically, it should be possible because all C4 key enzymes are also present in C3 plants. Only about 3 per­ cent or 7,600 species of plants use the C4 pathway, about 85 percent of which are flowering plants; the experts call them angiosperms (Wang et al., 2012). It had been complex, but here it was. Fortified wheat that was mixed with orchids and marked with translucent DNA from a Siberian fungal plant. It was counterintuitive because fungus usually can cause disease. It was tested, and this was the large-scale deployment all across Death Valley. If this worked, it would be brought worldwide. The plant could serve simultaneously as a crop, as floral gardens, as street lighting, and as a medical herb. It could do all this in temperatures as high as 60 degrees Celsius and as low as 22 degrees, and at almost any humidity level. In fact, extreme drought or extreme flooding would both improve its yield, because it was coded to respond accordingly. It was nothing short of a

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miracle. Perhaps the long days at the Plant Lab were worth it. Perhaps they could save the world, if not themselves, she thought to herself as she lit a cigarette.

Conclusion At this time, I see four ecological scenarios for the world over the next 50 years: Setbacks, Synthetic Existence, Destruction, or Ecomax Earth. Set­ backs are never good but might be realistic on the path. Synthetic Existence almost seems like a given because nature is going away at such an alarming and accelerating pace. Destruction would be devastating but is not outside the realm of possibility—we would ignore it at our peril. Taking steps to prevent it is the only way to truly lower the chance of it ever transpiring. Ecomax Earth seems like a paradise but even humanity and nature’s best­ case scenario has a mix of challenges, notably the path to get there which entails a lot of sacrifices in terms of growth, delayed gratification, risks, and somehow finding a global, collaborative spirit. Which will it be? That’s largely up to us. The next chapter presents a regenerative investment framework suitable for planning the next evolution of our society.

References Barnum, C.R., Endelman, B.J. and Shih, P.M. (2021) Utilizing plant synthetic biology to improve human health and wellness, Frontiers in Plant Science, 12, p. 691462. Carlson, R. (2016) On DNA and transistors. Synthesis. 19 March. Available at: www. synthesis.cc/synthesis/category/Carlson+Curves (Accessed 8 November 2022). Dallas, D. (2016) A rare ecological event: “Super bloom” in Death Valley, High Country News. Available at: www.hcn.org/articles/superbloom-photos-flowers (Accessed 9 November 2022). Dreyfuss, E. (2019) The plan to grab the world’s carbon with supercharged plants, Wired, 26 April. Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/the-plan-to-grab-the­ worlds-carbon-with-supercharged-plants/ (Accessed 7 November 2022). Kleiner, K. (2022) How to make corn more like cactus, Knowable Magazine [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1146/knowable-111022–111021. Lawal, T. (2022) Tesla wants to mine lithium in Nigeria: What are the hidden costs? The Africa Report. Available at: www.theafricareport.com/240607/tesla-wants-to-m ine-lithium-in-nigeria-what-are-the-hidden-costs/ (Accessed 19 November 2022). Myers, A. (2019) “Fine, fresh and fair”: The secrets behind Chocolat Madagascar, Confectionery News. William Reed Ltd. Available at: www.confectionerynews.com/ Article/2019/04/23/Fine-fresh-and-fair-the-secrets-behind-Chocolat-Madagascar (Acces­ sed 12 November 2022). OECD (2012) OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050: The Consequences of Inaction. OECD Publishing. Ritchie, H. (2022) How many people does synthetic fertilizer feed?, Our World in Data. Available at: https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fertilizer-feed (Accessed 7 November 2022).

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Schultz, N. (2020) Geo-social classes, in Krogh, M. (ed) Connectedness: An Incomplete Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene [Preprint]. Available at: www.sociology.ku.dk/staff/p hdfellows/?pure=en%2Fpublications%2Fgeosocial-classes(cf94f356-54dd-4931-b075­ 9c116d91e08c).html (Accessed 19 November 2022). Schultz, N. and Latour, B. (2023) On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo. 1st edn. Translated by J. Rose. Polity. Sciences Po (2022) (Re)defining class: In conversation with Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz. Available at: www.sciencespo.fr/en/news/redefining-class-in-conversation­ with-bruno-latour-and-nikolaj-schultz (Accessed 18 November 2022). Scientific American (2009) How fertilizers harm earth more than help your lawn, 20 July. Available at: www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-fertilizers-harm-earth/ (Accessed 7 November 2022). Wang, C., Guo, L., Li, Y. and Wang, Z. (2012) Systematic comparison of C3 and C4 plants based on metabolic network analysis, BMC Systems Biology, 6 Suppl 2, p. S9.

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A regenerative investment framework

Towards a regenerative investment framework As we have established, eco-efficiency is accepted in industry as an approach that enables economic value generation to continue unabated even though sustainability impacts are also measured (and coming into increased focus). The question is: can this approach be sufficient, when we know that it was the outcome of a 1987 report and a 1992 UN meeting that failed to produce the results that would have turned the world onto a net zero track 30 years ago? The answer almost gives itself: it does not suffice. But what else can we bring to the table? The 1987 concern was how to avoid two parallel worlds: that of sustainability and that of growth. Are we now again at a crossroads? There is no need to decouple growth from sustainability, but there is a need to capture the primacy of saving our ecosystems for future generations and clearly something drastic needs to be done. Where it seems the 1987 and 1992 discourse went off the rails was in trying to please or appease business when, in fact, stronger medicine might have been accepted. The lack of ambition ensured a compromise was found, and activity started, but it may have short circuited the possibility of admitting a real discontinuity. Things should not have continued in the same direction. Either way, because we are 30+ years delayed in switching gears, not only has the urgency increased, so has the risk profile of the undertakings we need to put in motion. That’s where risk capital from venture capitalists comes in, and that’s where corporate venturing also has had significantly more exposure over the past few years. But risk capital is still a small (but growing) fraction of the multi-trillion-dollar private equity landscape, in itself a tiny fraction of the overall equity landscape. That does not suffice this time around. The challenge is too great. We also know that government capital tends to have a hard time putting capital to good use in the phase beyond R&D, although exceptions exist. Mazzucato makes the observation that every technology that makes the iPhone so “smart” was government funded: the Internet, GPS, its touch-screen display, and the voice-activated Siri (Mazzucato, 2015). Sovereign wealth funds have started investing, but that typically happens at a much later stage and in larger companies, and often not domestically unless DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-4

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The future

as a rainy-day fund or to finance budget overrides (Affuso, Istiak, and Shar­ land, 2022), although there is a growing debate on whether they should engage more in venture capital fund-of-funds space or in the ESG investment space (Hoffmann, Armangue i Jubert, and Parrado, 2020). Sustainability has been conceived differently throughout the post-war era. What started as a growing awareness of corporate social responsibility morphed into eco-efficiency as a response to the UN’s work on sustainable development in the late 80s, evolved into environment, social and governance (ESG) fac­ tors as a response to the Paris meeting in 2015, and over the past few years, has surfaced as an ambition to carry out business not just to create economic value but with the explicit objective to not only sustain but to regenerate and support all systems—social, financial, and ecological (Baldridge, 2021). What an irony. The problem with the concept of sustainability was not that it was too ambitious or too hard to define but that it was too modest! As you can see from Figure 2.1, an emerging framework for sustainable growth, moving beyond eco-efficiency does entail a shift in emphasis away from growth at all costs, and away from a balance. Rather, sustainability becomes the prime concern and if it passes that test, growth-based business models can be considered. Beyond that, sustainable growth has such an urgency that the risk profile of the projects undertaken temporarily must increase, too. However, the risk that projects won’t be accepted by the involved stakeholders (who ultimately are individual taxpayers), must correspondingly decrease, as you cannot have high risk elsewhere in the system. Moreover, the system needs to be deeply digitized and interoperable so that it can be flexible enough to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances as well as to the workforce. The question about this framework is not its parameters, which are almost given. The real issue is how to govern and adjudicate whether it is being followed. One would almost have to imagine a reporting structure at every part of a company’s journey, far beyond carbon accounting, narrowly defined. Figure 2.1 compares eco-efficiency with eco-effectiveness. Evidently, they are both steeped in the industrial paradigm. However, only the latter approach begins to address the real challenges within the industrial reality. This begs the question: where, if at all, is eco-effectiveness practiced today? Comparing the magnitude of difference between the two perspectives is not hard. It’s the difference between driving the corporate car fleet less to achieve better numbers in the corporate emissions report and shifting the fleet to electric vehicles and making better use of public transit or rail. It’s the dif­ ference between only allowing cars with odd numbers into the city center and planting massive public gardens to offset emissions in a natural way. It’s the difference between prohibiting industrial waste above a certain tonnage and creating a market for recycling within a waste facility. It’s the difference between a business model that only incentivizes employees to innovate and an open innovation approach that brings in ideas from outside the organization, too. It’s the difference between recycling bottles and making 100 percent plant‐based plastic beverage bottles. It’s the difference between only dumping

A regenerative investment framework

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Figure 2.1 Flavors of Eco-manufacturing

industrial waste on Fridays to reduce the impact and using compostable vegetable dyes to eliminate the impact (Avlonas and Nassos, 2013). Back in 2002, which is 20 years ago from the date of this writing, McDonough and Braungart proposed a five-step system that leads to eco-effectiveness: break free of undesirable substances, follow personal preferences, create a passive– positive list, activate the positive list, and reinvent products. Several of these steps are highly questionable today. In fact, these steps could now read: be aware of all ecological consequences known in the literature of all substances used, try to avoid bad substances, ensure your product passes all ecological standards, and safeguards, and always only innovate if the product is demonstrably more eco­ friendly than existing products and approaches. For these reasons and others, the term for this effort in the EU is the circular economy, a construct from resource economics that dates back at least to the late 1980s (Pearce, 1989), not cradle-to­ cradle. Circular economy refers to “an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design” (Alcalde-Calonge, Sáez-Martínez, and Ruiz-Palomino, 2022). A myriad of “R activities” are now part of that concept, such as “refuse, rethink, reduce, reuse, repair, refurbish, remanufacture, repur­ pose, recycle, and recover” yet without consensus on how to measure progress (Potting, Hekkert, and Worrell, 2017; Alcalde-Calonge, Sáez-Martínez, and Ruiz-Palomino, 2022). However you define circularity, progress has been slow (EC, 2022). The energy cost of circulating everything in loops is impossible to meet in a regenerative manner.

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The global challenge is to create technology and foster manufacturing sys­ tems that work more like, and are synergistic with, natural ecosystems. There are many concepts aiming to foster such a process. Industrial ecology (Grae­ del and Allenby, 2003), biomimicry (Benyus, 2002), blue economy (Pauli, 2010), cradle to cradle (Braungart, McDonough, and Bollinger, 2007), per­ formance economy (Stahel, 2010), regenerative design (Lyle, 1994), or natural capitalism (Hawken, Lovins, and Lovins, 1999). Each “have the aim of [developing] an economy centered on increasing the productivity of natural resources […] and the regeneration of damaged natural capital” (Gupta and Salonitis, 2021). While the knowledge base is evolving, best practices are not yet consolidated. Additionally, eco-efficiency cannot guarantee sustainability because of limited supply of nonrenewable materials and efficiency gains will soon be negated by gains in population and consumption (Huesemann, 2004). As illustrated in Figure 2.2, the economic transitions over the past 30 years have had to do with a gradual evolution of the growth paradigm. We have slowly transitioned from extractive growth towards eco-efficient growth and we are now just beginning to see eco-effective growth which will take this decade to mature. In 2030 and beyond, we should slowly begin to transition towards regenerative growth, although the process will be piecemeal and will not take place across the board. The main profit driver used to be corporate profits, plain and simple, but sustainability concerns as well as other con­ straints brought more efficiency, and eventually better ways of doing things. Very few actors today put ecology before profits, but that’s what eventually must occur if we are to see a regenerative economy. The model organizations in this regard are social enterprises and social entrepreneurs. They are not disinterested in growth, quite the opposite because they want to grow their impact. On the other hand, they won’t let

Figure 2.2 Economic Transitions

A regenerative investment framework

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growth overshadow their purpose. One way to envision the regenerative era is to consider that eventually all businesses will be social impact businesses. This will take some time to emerge. There will be ample resistance from actors whose interests are far removed from such concerns. Each era has seen a growing stakeholder impact, and in regenerative growth, nature would pre­ sumably be represented by proxies such as environmental organizations, ecology standards, and enforced by sensors directly coupled to governance structures that would get alerts when certain thresholds are reached. In the growth paradigm, the main habitat was a factory. In the efficiency paradigm, the habitat was the office. In the effectiveness paradigm the habitat was a lab or purpose built physical infrastructure or supply chain. In the regen­ erative paradigm, the habitat will be a hybrid location, a mix of homes, offices, labs, and nature, not necessarily with a clear distinction between them. The reason is that with increasing connectivity, we are less and less dependent on, or tethered to, physical infrastructure. This process has been drawn out and will not be complete by the early 2030s. It will also be a much more social process than many digital emissaries predicted. The technologies that built the growth era were industrial machines, the efficiency era was built on digitalization, the effec­ tiveness era was built on no-code software applications such as office productiv­ ity suites, design tools, and industrial frontline operations platforms. The regenerative era will be built on exponential technologies such as AI, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, quantum computing, hydrogen fuel cells, and fusion energy, each of which will take decades to mature and integrate with each other and with existing technologies, infrastructures, and industrial organizations. Absent from any context, regenerative growth sounds great. But there is always context. We are situated, human beings. We find ourselves in positions where we are asked to contribute to the organization we have in front of us. That’s where the need to translate comes in. How does regenerative growth translate to my situation, to my employer’s situation? Perhaps you feel you have a similar problem? A challenge I have experienced was to explain what regen­ erative investment looks like from a Japanese industrial conglomerate such as Hitachi, active in dozens of industries, with legacy capabilities it wants to deploy. Disruption factors, including digitalization, regulatory scrutiny, new business models, infrastructure investments, and new generations such as Millennials entering the workforce, create increased and starkly different communication needs. Digital technologies, such as apps, games, videos, AI, and Edge technolo­ gies, provide unprecedented ways to gather intelligence or interact with products and customers. But the most important thing is to engage and co-create, not simply to inform. Energy consumers are not simply economic actors. They have a perceived influence on energy suppliers and on the overall energy landscape. Their indivi­ dualistic worldviews and cultural attitudes (to change, the economy, the environ­ ment, politics) mean market imperfections cannot simply be fixed by better information. Sustainability and energy efficiency as a symbolic act. “I turn off the lights for an hour to save energy” (and feel better about myself in society), said one

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The future

woman in a Norwegian study, although the authors found that although public engagement with climate change issues may facilitate energy efficiency policy, to succeed with more radical changes in energy consumption, wider climate policy measures seem to be needed (Aune, Godbolt, and Sorensen, 2016). In the utility industry, negative attention (“ugly transmission lines”, “blackout”, “unsafe”) cancels goodwill unless there is a strong emotional connection. Consider shifting the communication focus towards hitting emo­ tional and cultural strings in finely grained psychographic target groups (and listening too) rather than appealing to what is cognitive, rational, or efficient. Metaphors are widely used in scientific and educational discourse to commu­ nicate ideas about abstract phenomena (Wernecke et al., 2018). The metaphors used in the eco-discussion matter because they indicate how we conceptualize the challenge and might also indicate which approach we would be prepared to support as a possible solution (Frischherz, 2010), Larson, 2014). But metaphors “are not merely shorthand for the facts” but figures that “simplify a complex reality by situating facts in a web of cultural meaning” (Larson, 2014). It is time for the eco-discussion to move to the expansive, experiential territory where we start to imagine and reinvent things instead of deluding ourselves into thinking we can limit the human spirit, could somehow police our way there, fight our way out of the problem, or even resign ourselves to the “realities” of climate change (whatever they might turn out to be). However, note that there is a clear distinction in metaphorical terrain between techno-optimism (at the core of which is the scientific faith in ecomodernism) and expansive thinking, even though the two are interconnected. The techno-optimists, here referring to the followers of techno-optimist thinking, not the actual sci-tech innovators them­ selves, are too often deluding themselves, assuming no change is needed because some new technology always will take care of the problem. That’s not how pro­ blems are fixed. This shift in perspective has clear implications for the type of investment thesis that is possible, fruitful, and might lead to the greatest returns over the next 7–10 years, which is a venture investor’s timeline.

Interview 2.1 Climate Imaginations. Interview with Vandana Singh. Futurized podcast.

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Climate educator Vandana Singh is adamant that one needs to envision both positive futures and the reality of climate injustice to motivate largescale change. The pivotal role of climate education in climate mitigation cannot be achieved without acknowledging the pain the students feel as they are exposed to knowledge. To make it real, and bearable, she avidly uses visual tools, narrative approaches, creativity, and a transdisciplinary mindset. “Speculative imagination can really help us free ourselves from the grasp, the hold of the dominant paradigm”, says Singh. “I teach from the perspective of the most marginalized people, such as from villages in north Alaska or in India”, she tells me. I tell real stories from people I have met who are battling climate change, sometimes successfully. Village women in India fighting off loggers on the last 200 hectare forest told me the animals had come back and the groundwater levels had returned so they were able to get a crop again, they had water and food security. (Undheim, 2023a) She asks her students to envision a picture of the earth as a circle with six subsystems around it. It’s even bigger than that, she says. Paraphrasing an expression by poet Margareth E. Atwood, “it’s not climate change, it’s everything change” (Atwood, 2015).

Interview 2.2 Communicating Climate. Interview with Cindy Forde. Futurized podcast.

Cindy Forde, founder of Planetari, the global education platform that equips children to be innovators, and author of the children’s book Bright New World believes everything starts with imagination. What we need to do is harness the power of imagination, foster creativity, show the work and ideas of role models. She evokes the fact that indigenous people think several gen­ erations ahead. The Seventh Generation Principle is based on an ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy that the decisions we make today

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The future

should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. This creates a bond of community and stability, fostering specific values. In Bright New World, she envisions a brighter future for the Earth, created by our children. “What we choose to do over the next 10 years” matters, because “we have great powers for transformation”. She writes to kids: “use your voice, eat for a happy planet, be a carbon light food, wallop waste, say enough to stuff, be informed, include girls, go wild, believe you can make a difference, care, share, dare”. Forde says the book sets out a “blueprint, a roadmap to safety”. The way she positions this to children is as a “positive journey”, although children should not think of it as a “burden”. In reality, she says, “I’m trying to put tools into children’s parents’ hands” because we need to “shift our dominant cultural narratives from one that has supported extraction to extinction, if you like, to one that supports collaboration and regeneration”. “When I think about tomorrow’s investors”, she says, I’m thinking about my own children. Clearly, I have to be part of the change, but I know for a fact that if we cannot see change emerge in the next generation, we are doomed to repeat the failures of past generations. (Forde, 2022; Undheim, 2023b)

Fostering a regenerative future Figure 2.3 outlines the scientific, political, behavioral, and monetary aspects of such a framework. This framework is a boundary object between where we currently are and the fully emerged regenerative future. As ecologism becomes institutionalized the tensions in each of the three subdomains identified come to the fore. The assumption is often that the monetary side is the last one that will come into place. This is actually not the case. The debates about what constitutes value, what true efficiency is, and what elements are constitutive and tradeable parts of the great chain of events that constitute our living system are easier to resolve than the political ones. The scientific ones are the easiest. Uneven, but directionally understandable progress in deep tech every now and then pushes us into new kinds of ethical decisions. The material basis of our existence will continue to evolve, and we are in a particularly fruitful phase of discovery in this decade. The energy limits on our ambitions are also clear at any given time. The behavioral questions are also relatively easy to resolve. Questions of democracy are complex, non-linear, and will keep facing controversy, but within an understandable framework. The role of the strategy of supplying people with subtle nudges that allows us to make progress with­ out alienating those we are encouraging to make changes is becoming more fully understood. It is not without conflict. Some will always feel it takes too long to work. The notion of habitus as a structuring principle of diversity within a clear set of social groups, is also becoming accepted and widely understood. The political arena is where things get complicated. The political

A regenerative investment framework

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Figure 2.3 The Socio-behavioral Investment Framework

values are always more complex to figure out than the monetary ones. The notion of the human world consisting of a set of commons that we need to own and manage as finite resources is hard to conceptualize, understand, and accept. Decentralized action limits the efficiency of debating it. Will we ever agree on the notion of quality of life? It is unclear what it means. Even if we generally know what it means, how can we affect the quality of life of the entire set of humans on earth? And, if not, what does it matter? If fairness cannot be achieved, how can we determine what quality is? I have already presented the idea of human existence in the post-nature era as one where a tilt has occurred. A tilt that simply shifts the priority from capitalist consumerism to ecologism, but not one that erases either. For that to occur, the ecologist class would have to come up with an alternative growth model, not just “post growth” arguments. We will know we have gotten there once there’s evi­ dence of system feedback that generates more value than is put in. We already know such systems from human relationships. The value of having a child far outstrips the activities that led to this event. But such value generation has never been proven to happen outside of that particular domain. And, what we are engaging in is biomimicry, we are acting out the role that humans have in the ecosystem, not adding a new element that was not foreseen. There is an implicit assumption among those using the term regenerative that they have a monopoly on the idea that only one way (theirs) would lead to generating value or regenerating it based on replacing what was earlier lost. This is not a rule of nature. In Figure 2.4, I attempt to describe how the various ideologies of regeneration can co-exist and what they might co-create. Regenerative futures are not necessarily created through a unified vision. They could also emerge through conflict, negotiation, and synthesis between

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The future

Figure 2.4 Ideologies of Regeneration

competing eco-political visions. If we take three simple cuts across ecologism (the pragmatic side), growth (the camp who are social-democrat or centrist), and degrowth (the moderates within that camp), it is not inconceivable that they could meet somewhere in the middle. What results would not be eco-efficiency in the old-style compromise that attempted to encompass the impossibly abstract notion of sustainable development, or sustainability for short. Rather, it would have to be an eco-effectiveness that was focused on the impacts and outcomes of the process, whether the inputs are efficient or not. Eco-effectiveness is a good notch more ambitious than eco-efficiency. It is also more logical. Directionally, it is the same thing, but the effect volume is substantially different. Efficiency is mostly a measure of the degree of waste reduction in the input: it refers to the simplest aspect of lean management. That is true whether the waste reduced is time, money, effort, or emissions, biodiversity, or indeed any other resource. Effectiveness is purely focused on the (successful) outcome. The short way to describe the difference between them is to say that efficiency is doing things the right way, while effectiveness is doing the right things. Had sustainability started with efficiency 30 years ago, we would have been in a radically different place today. These ideological debates would have been avoided. That’s why the eco-efficiency compromise is so frustrating. By focusing purely on effort, it has become an impediment to making true progress. To clarify, growth theory implies that through increasing the size of the pie, all problems eventually dissipate. What if that is partially true and growth is a

A regenerative investment framework

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necessary ingredient in a regenerative future? What would it take for degrowth visionaries to accept a certain amount of growth? To put it another way: what is an acceptable speed and burden of growth? Is there an equity equilibrium that could be reached? What if degrowth in extractive industries is a precondition for a regenerative future? What would it take for the growth camp to accept that certain industries, such as mining, could never be regen­ erative? What would it take for the ecologist camp to provide the middleground arguments as to why a balance must be reached? As a point of departure, there is a kernel of truth in each of the three perspectives and movements. The key, then, is to establish what the safe, agreed middle ground is, not to fight along the borders. Note that seeking common ground is not the same as making compromises.

Conclusion We are at a crossroads. There’s a rupture in society’s fabric. Not unlike the first industrial revolution. Except, this time the change is not contained within the contradictory and simultaneous urban flourishing and decay witnessed by social scientists 150 years ago. This time, the very existence of our civilization is under threat—but also in (some kind of) renewal. Making sense of these contradictory, awfully powerful, and tumultuous forces will require detailed scrutiny. Without fully understanding what it means, we cannot chart a map towards the future. The initial scenario vignettes sketched in Chapter 1 represent a contribution to begin that process. And the framework sket­ ched in this chapter begins to interpret the underlying logic at play. It seems that there are several parallel trajectories that are equally possible. To some extent, they depend on political choices. Seldom has society been so beholden to policymakers. At the same time, seldom has the political fabric been more brittle. The full impact of being in an Anthropocene era where humans are causing geological-level changes within the lifetime of a single cohort (Millennials who are born between 1981 and 1996), are only slowly becoming apparent. Ideologically, this is in some sense a battle between three main fundamental standpoints. There is a powerful ecomodernist thrust that has complete faith in technological innovation, economic growth, and the notion of constant progress. In that camp, problem definitions might still be sharp but ultimately, everything is solvable because humans are infinitely resourceful when facing a common threat or challenge, at least in connection with huge economic and social rewards. To ecomodernists, there’s still ample time but what matters is to make the potential gains more apparent. There is also an activist camp of environmentalists who are now being shaped by an ecologist ideology of degrowth. To that camp, less is more, the threat is existential, and time is short. There is also a middle ground, a group of pragmatists who see both sides of the story. To them, the tools available to us as politicians, consumers, corporations, are sufficient. We just have to use them more efficiently.

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In previous decades, these three positions were less clear-cut. The envir­ onmentalists hadn’t yet coalesced around an ecologist vision and were internally divided. There are, to be sure, subgroups within ecologism that choose to express themselves with different degrees of fervor. But the ideology has coalesced into a definable core set of beliefs. There is a powerful argument that rather than being simply a tiny group of “Greens” as a political fringe, this might soon evolve to represent a majority position. That may still not mean that they can rule politically, but it means they are less marginalized than before. Arguably, their class consciousness is rising rapidly, although there have been few international polls that can verify that yet. The next chapter considers whether the commitments made by govern­ ments, corporations, and citizens, are insufficient to change our society to address the ecological challenges that are ahead.

References Affuso, E., Istiak, K.M. and Sharland, A. (2022) Sovereign wealth funds and eco­ nomic growth, Journal of Asset Management, 23 (3), p. 201. Alcalde-Calonge, A., Sáez-Martínez, F.J. and Ruiz-Palomino, P. (2022) Evolution of research on circular economy and related trends and topics. A thirteen-year review, Ecological Informatics, 70, p. 101716. Atwood, M.E. (2015) It’s not climate change—It’s everything change. Available at: https://medium.com/matter/it-s-not-climate-change-it-s-everything-change-8fd9aa 671804 (Accessed 31 December 2022). Aune, M., Godbolt, Å.L. and Sørensen, K.H. (2016). Mismatch or misunderstanding? Calculation and qualculation among economists and consumers in their framings of the electricity market. Acta Sociologica, 59 (4), pp. 347–361. Available at: https:// doi.org/10.1177/0001699316657397 Avlonas, N. and Nassos, G.P. (2013) Eco‐effective Versus Eco‐efficient. Wiley (Prac­ tical Sustainability Strategies), pp. 55–64. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/ 9781118787472.ch5. Baldridge, M. (2021) The evolution of ESG, Medium. Available at: https://melissaba ldridge.medium.com/the-evolution-of-esg-four-versions-of-environmental-social-gov ernance-performance-in-business-aadae9fb0243 (Accessed 11 December 2022). Benyus, J.M. (2002). Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Harper Perennial. Braungart, M., McDonough, W. and Bollinger, A. (2007) Cradle-to-cradle design: Creating healthy emissions – A strategy for eco-effective product and system design, J Clean Prod, 15 (13), pp. 1337–1348. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2006.08.003 EC (2022) Circular economy action plan, Environment. Available at: https://environment. ec.europa.eu/strategy/circular-economy-action-plan_en (Accessed 22 December 2022). Forde, C. (2022) Bright New World: How to Make a Happy Planet. Welbeck Editions. Frischherz, B. (2010) Metaphors of sustainability: A study of metaphors in the public discourse on sustainability. [Working Paper]. Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS), Cardiff University. Graedel, T.E., Allenby, B.R. (2003) Industrial Ecology. Prentice Hall. Gupta, K. and Salonitis, K. (eds) (2021) Sustainable Manufacturing. Elsevier (Hand­ books in Advanced Manufacturing).

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Hawken, P., Lovins, A. and Lovins, H. (1999) Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. Little Brown and Company. Hoffmann, B., Armangue i Jubert, T. and Parrado, E. (2020) The Business Case for ESG Investing for Pension and Sovereign Wealth Funds. Inter-American Develop­ ment Bank. Available at: https://publications.iadb.org/en/the-business-case-for­ esg-investing-for-pension-and-sovereign-wealth-funds (Accessed 22 December 2022). Huesemann, M.H. (2004) The failure of eco-efficiency to guarantee sustainability: Future challenges for industrial ecology, Environmental Progress, 23 (4), pp. 264–270. Larson, B. (2014) Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability: Redefining Our Rela­ tionship with Nature. Yale University Press. Lyle, J.T. (1994) Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development. Wiley. Mazzucato, M. (2015) The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Revised edition. PublicAffairs. Pauli, G. (2010) The Blue Economy –10 Years, 100 Innovations, 100 Million Jobs. Paradigm Publications. Pearce, D.W.W. (1989) Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment. Johns Hopkins University Press. Potting, J., Hekkert, M.P. and Worrell, E. (2017) Circular Economy: Measuring Inno­ vation in the Product Chain. PBL Publishers. Available at: https://dspace.library.uu. nl/handle/1874/358310 (Accessed 11 December 2022). Stahel, W.R. (2010) The Performance Economy. Palgrave Macmillan. Undheim, T.A. (2023a) Climate imaginations: Interview with Vandana Singh. Futur­ ized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/climate-imaginations/ (Accessed 6 April 2023). Undheim, T.A. (2023b) Communicating climate: Interview with Cindy Forde. Futur­ ized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/communicating-climate/ (Accessed 6 April 2023). Wernecke, U., Schwanewedel, J. and Harms, U. (2018) Metaphors describing energy transfer through ecosystems: Helpful or misleading? Sci Ed, 102, pp. 178–194. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21316

Part 2

The past

3

Insufficient non-financial commitments

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid sur­ roundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity?”, wrote Rachel Carlson in her 1962 book Silent Spring (Carson, 2002). Already at a press conference on August 29, 1962, President Kennedy was asked about the growing concern among scientists of the possibility of “dangerous, long-range side effects from the wide-spread use of DDT and other pesticides” and whether he had “con­ sidered asking the Department of Agriculture or Public Health Service to take a closer look at this”. “Yes, and I know that they already are. I think particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book, but they are examining the matter” (JFK Library, 2007). The first wave of that battle was won by citizen activists in the sense that the toxic pesticide DDT got banned in the US for agricultural uses. The next decades, as more complex human-made negative environmental dynamics (most notably global warming and loss of biodiversity) began playing out, progress has not been so clear cut. Why? There has not been a spokesperson as lucid as Carlson, until Swedish youth activist Greta Thunberg appeared on the scene in 2018 (Thunberg, 2023). Perhaps more importantly, the issues are more complex than banning a single substance. What we now need to do, arguably, is to change our way of life. To offer some context, I was destined to become a bit of an envir­ onmentalist from the moment I was born. When The Limits to Growth (1972) report came out with its devastating claims about the consequences of popu­ lation growth combined with the earth’s finite resources, and a few months after the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm, Sweden, I was being conceived in rural Norway, not too far away. Sweden had first suggested such an event. Canada also supported it. Britain, the US, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and France were against. China played a small role except objecting to population as a cause of envir­ onmental degradation. The Soviet Union, led by Leonid Brezhnev, as well as another East-bloc nation, Czechoslovakia, boycotted the event because East and West Germany were not UN members yet and were not allowed to attend. DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-6

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Already that year, the event prep package contained an 800‐page digest condensed from 12,000 pages of environmental reports and recommenda­ tions submitted by some 70 member nations (Hill, 1972). The outcome was 109 recommendations and five resolutions, calling for a ban on nuclear weapon tests, an international databank on environmental data, redirecting development actions, modifying international organizations, and creating an environmental fund (Chasek, 2020). Non-governmental organizations were, for the first time, granted access to UN deliberations (Chasek, 2020). Even amid cold war tensions, global environmental coop­ eration was a fact. On the downside, the bureaucratization of climate change policy had begun.

Norway: A personal history of environmentalism That same year, in 1972, the Norwegian state oil company, Statoil was cre­ ated. With that, Norway suddenly was a different world. I was born in the summer of 1973, just as the environment hit the debates, and right before the oil price shock that autumn, which sank most developed economies. I played outside and splashed in clean water puddles throughout the 1970s, witnessing Norway’s rise to riches, expanding its petroleum extraction industry offshore in the North Sea. That eventually took care of the skyrocketing interest rates and allowed Norway to run countercyclical financial policy with high eco­ nomic growth and low unemployment (Grytten, 2008). As the 1980s came along, and the former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland headed up the eponymous Brundtland Commission (1987), I proudly watched the powerful sustainability concept arise. By the late 80s, I stood on the barricades demonstrating how much waste every household produced in a year. I can reveal, it was very little compared to what most households produce today, so did that mean we failed? I think so. Later, I eagerly took part in the local enthusiasm around the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21 (1992) which meant developing local sustainability action plans. I celebrated the Kyoto Protocol (1997), eagerly awaited the Paris Accords (2015) and the Sustainable Development Goals (2015), impatiently hoped for results at Glasgow COP26 (2021), but by Sharm el-Sheikh COP27 (2022), having lived through the warmest summer on record, I still had all but given up hope that loss and damages would be awarded to islands in the Pacific. Equally important, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, 2022’s COP15, unfortunately saw little progress either on increased funding for con­ servation in developing nations, or towards a pledge to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and seas. This despite the fact that as a result of human activity, a million animal and plant species (out of 8 million) are threatened with extinction, a third of all land is severely degraded, soil fertility and water purity are compromised, and oceans are threatened by pollution and climate change (IPBES, 2019).

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Movements within current structures Looking at it this way, through my own personal life trajectory, I realize that what has been achieved in terms of nature restoring action in my lifetime is, in real terms, next to nothing. The verdict on these 50 years of human history of sustainability is that the discussion, the process, the concept, all of it has been a catastrophic failure. But I don’t blame any individuals. There were heroic efforts mixed in. I don’t even blame any particular government—many had their reasons for slowing down. I don’t blame the United Nations, those who work there have to work within its framework. This is a collective failure of imagination as much as of commitment to change. And, it is as much a failure of the envir­ onmental movement as it is a failure of industry or government.

Interview 3.1 The Changing Environmental Movement. Interview with Graham Hill. Futurized podcast.

Graham Hill, the founder of Treehugger.com, an early sustainability infor­ mation website admits: The environmental movement hasn’t done a great job on communicating. […] talking about polar bears and that stuff, we wasted a lot of time being really sciencey. […] Extreme activists are actually really valuable for the rest of us because they are coming from a good place, they might be entirely right, and we might be overly conservative. […] Facts don’t matter, what matters is what your tribe says. So if you’re trying to figure out how to behave you look around you, you look to your tribe. That’s how you make your decision. […] I view our role at Carbonauts as trying to find these change ambassadors and help them build momentum, help them learn what they need to know, help support them, help them build momentum and get that momentum going to reach a quarter of whatever population such that things flip. (Undheim, 2023)

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Will the current structure get the job done? Hope in Hell author Jonathon Porritt, co-founder of Forum of the Future claims that even as the sciences say everything is getting worse everywhere, yet there is still time, perhaps a decade, where key actions can get done if we all come together. However, he says, we need a “New Deal”, not just a continued path.

Interview 3.2 Hope in Hell for the Earth. Interview with Jonathon Porritt. Futurized podcast.

The Limits to Growth (1972) by Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and Dennis L. Meadows helped launch modern environmental computer model­ ing. It offered a pessimistic view of the natural resources available for the world’s population. The authors used a systems dynamics model developed by Jay Forrester at MIT that presumed exponential growth. The what-if scenar­ ios generated, revealed that the world’s “carrying capacity” was limited. The planet showed signs of wear. The “global system of nature” in which we all live is not boundless. The negative “feedback loops” such as pollution, non­ renewable resources, and finite resources such as agricultural land “cannot support present rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100” (Meadows et al., 1974). The study also took into account the need for social necessities including peace, social stability, education, employment, and technological progress. The Club of Rome, as they called themselves, suggested a range of outcomes, none of them pleasant. Which part of this analysis holds today? The population thesis didn’t pan out, but only for a specific reason: the invention and subsequent indus­ trialization of fertilizers. Despite this life support, the carrying capacity limits will probably only be pushed slightly, to be reached around 2075, not 2100. But are there true limits to growth, given technological progress? The answer to that question is not only important for venture investors, or for the insti­ tutional investors, and eventually the public markets that follow in the wake of pathbreaking startups, but in this case, they matter to humanity. Big cor­ porations certainly innovate, too. But if new startups are unlikely to hold more than 10 percent of the answer to eco-efficient markets, for example, we

Insufficient non-financial commitments

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are clearly on the wrong path and will need to rethink the overall approach of trusting bottom-up engineering and applied science innovation. Perhaps some more managed instruments are in order, such as massive government efforts of the Manhattan-project variety, perhaps with the addition of private phi­ lanthropy into that mix. Or, alternatively, might it be that more limited scope, but highly innovative efforts, say from universities such as Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Imperial College, and a few others, might make equally huge impact if well-conceived? Stanford’s newly established Doerr School in Climate and Sustainability, the first new school in 74 years, is a notable effort in this regard, as is its Sustainability Accelerator (Stanford News, 2020). But what would it take for a single university to have a tangible impact on a global challenge? And, arguably, with such a late start, will the results show up in time? Michael Schumacher (1974) in his book Small is Beautiful (Schumacher, 2010) presented the Gandhian ideology of: “There is enough on the earth for your need but not for your greed”. The subtitle is “Economics as if people mattered”. True enough, the notion of a person in economics is reductionist. The economic man (Latin: homo economicus) is not a person as much as an ideal type, a maximizing person, a rational actor with perfect access to market information. Such are not the conditions today. Reality is much more complex. Other things matter to people. And, those things are increasingly possible to measure if you try. It’s quite surprising that this model still yields usable economic data. Yet, the answer may not be to attack greed. The financial incentives must be there for change to occur. But regulating those incentives so they match long-term survival of humanity, and furthermore the safeguarding of biodiversity, might channel that greed in the right direction. It is preferable to work with the grain.

The problem of conventions The Brundtland Commission (1987), which was established by the United Nations in 1983 was charged with reexamining environment and development to address the fact that in the years after World War II, government and industry alike primarily focused on the goal of economic growth. The Brundtland Report, also called Our Common Future (WCED, 1987), intro­ duced the concept of sustainable development and described how it could be achieved. A seminal contribution with respect to resource conservation at the global level, it argued there were three fundamental components to sustain­ able development: environmental protection, economic growth, and social equity. The report recognized that human resource development in the form of poverty reduction, gender equity, and wealth redistribution was crucial to formulating strategies for environmental conservation and argued for a need to balance economy and ecology. Ultimately, the lasting impact of this report is found in the statement on sustainable development defined as: “development that meets the needs of the

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present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. However, in the years to follow it proved difficult to agree on how this cleverly formulated concept would be implemented. Due to my Norwegian heritage, I was personally enthused by the Brundt­ land effort and my (tenuous) connection to it. Brundtland was Norway’s Prime Minister over three terms (1981, 1986–89, and 1990–96). In fact, in the late 1980s, I was actively engaged in Natur og Ungdom (Young Friends of the Earth Norway), the only environmentalist youth organization in Norway. I particularly recall a cold Saturday spent in my village square demonstrating how much trash one Norwegian household consumed in one year. In 1992, that amount was (so I thought) a staggering 237 kilograms (SSB, 2021). The level reached its highest in 2014 but has had a downward trend. Today, that amount is 449 (SSB, 2021). Today, the average US person produces 1,788.5 pounds or 811.24 kilograms (Krosofsky, 2021). Perplexing and disappointing, perhaps? I recall writing on ozone layer depletion, biodiversity, and more. I went to elementary school in the 1980s. During those years, most of my school essays were on the theme of climate change. I don’t regret a word I wrote. I just wish that words in school essays had even more power than they do. What if we gathered all such school essays together and did a text analy­ sis? What would they say? It would be compelling evidence on the state of mind of today’s youth. This is becoming technically possible, but would pol­ icymakers want this information? It might shift priorities. Young people’s democracy would not look like today. The Rio Declaration and Agenda 21 (1992), informally known as the Earth Summit, formulated 27 principles intended to guide countries in future sus­ tainable development and was signed by 175 countries. Most notably, these include the precautionary principle (Principle 15), and the polluter pays principle (Principle 16). Agenda 21 was a connected statement of intent (not a binding treaty) whereby every local government should draw up its own ver­ sion of this type of document, and many did attempt to do so, particularly in Europe. This was, arguably, the pinnacle of glocalization. Notably, in Sweden, all local governments at some point had their Agenda 21. In the US, there were legal obstacles as well as protests from the Tea Party movement and others. The universal agreement around the world is that few of the environ­ mental goals in this declaration have been reached. The Kyoto Protocol (1997) was an international treaty, entering into force in 2005 and lasting until 2012, that commits state parties to reduce green­ house gas emissions, based on the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and that human-made CO₂-emissions are driving it. A total of 192 parties signed. Afghanistan signed and ratified it in 2013. Sudan signed and ratified it in 2004. The US Congress did not ratify, so it never took effect. Canada withdrew as of 2012. China, India, and other developing countries were exempt from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol because they were not the main contributors to the greenhouse gas emissions during the indus­ trialization period that is believed to be causing today’s climate change.

Insufficient non-financial commitments

47

By most experts’ consensus, the Kyoto Protocol failed, some say because it exempted developing countries from reductions requirements, others because it lacked an effective emissions trading scheme. Most of all, it suffered from a collective action problem, meaning that the short-term net profit from abate­ ment (nationally) did not make sense for most countries (Napoli, 2012). The 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development failed to implement any significant measures although there were new targets in the areas of sanitation, fisheries and biodiversity (Park, Conca, and Finger, 2008). Crucially, the US and the EU were defensive (La Vina, Hoff, and DeRose, 2002). The problematic relationship between sustainability and globalization was now clear to many, but there was no willingness to deal with it. The Copenhagen Accord (2009) collapsed and did not get adopted universally which meant there was no successor treaty to Kyoto, although it was exten­ ded until 2020 through the Doha Agreement (2012). The Paris Agreement (2015), also referred to as the Paris Accords, is a legally binding international treaty on climate change. Its goal is to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. A total of 196 countries are in this agreement, including the five countries that produce the most carbon dioxide (CO₂), China, the US, India, Russia, and Japan, and the largest country not to ratify the agreement is Iran, representing a mere 2 percent of the world’s emissions (EDGAR, 2022). The US briefly withdrew during the Trump administration (2020–2021). At this stage, governments generally agree on the science behind climate change but diverge on who is most responsible and how to set emis­ sions-reduction goals. European legislation regarding greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., European Union Emission Trading System, the Renewable Energy Directive, and the Fuel Quality Directive) have tended to be stronger than other intergovern­ mental approaches. The European carbon market (ETS) enshrines the “pol­ luter pays” principle. Launched in 2005 to fight global warming, ETS is a major pillar of EU energy policy and covers some 11,000 factories, power stations, and other installations (de Tannenberg, 2019). This makes it the biggest carbon trading scheme in the world, which, by most estimates, is still far too small to make a significant global impact on emissions reduction. The scheme got a major revamp in late 2022, phasing out free allowances, and including shipping, a major emitter (2.5 percent of global emissions according to the EU (2022), excluded thus far (EP, 2022). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a collection of 17 inter­ linked global goals designed to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all”. The SDGs were set up in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and are (obviously) intended to be achieved by the year 2030. Goal 1 on Poverty, Goal 2 on Hunger, 6 on Water, Goal 7 on Access to energy, Goal 9 on Industry innovation, Goal 10 on Inequality, Goal 11 on Sustainable cities, Goal 12 on Responsible consumption and production, Goal 13 on Climate

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The past

action, and Goal 14 on Life below water are the most relevant to regenera­ tion. Many of these goals overlap, and a myopic climate focus might hamper general progress. The trouble is that too many goals means too little focus. Only an organization such as the UN would pick that many goals. Even tracking it is a headache. The 17 goals are defined in a list of 169 SDG targets, and it was agreed to track them by 232 unique indicators. Generally, some of the goals seem reachable by 2030, others not (particularly the poverty rate and world hunger). Ending hunger would, by most experts, take an unimaginable effort within this time frame. Some individual targets are also especially challen­ ging: access to safe sanitation, upper secondary school completion, and underweight children (Moyer and Hedden, 2020). The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly referred to as Glasgow COP26 (2021), ended with a compromise deal on climate that included a pledge on leaders from 120 countries to reduce deforestation, a methane gas reduction pledge by 100 countries, and a green transport sales declaration by 100 countries to end the sales of internal combustion engines by 2035 in leading markets, and by 2045 worldwide (UN News, 2021). The Glasgow Climate Pact (2021) essentially kicked the can down the road to COP27 to be held in Egypt in 2022. Perhaps most surprisingly, the US and China, around the conference, announced a bilateral ambition to boost cli­ mate cooperation. If those two countries got their act together, a lot would fall into place. Paradoxically, given their size, appeasement between these two powers would lead to better climate, even if their rationale had little to do with the topic (Klare, 2022). COP stands for “Conference of the Parties”, the apex decision-making body of the United Nations Climate Change Framework Convention (UNFCCC). There have been 26 such summits (Down to Earth, 2022) thus far in history, notably aforementioned Kyoto (COP03, 1997) and Paris (COP21, 2015).

Conclusion On the path from Silent Spring to today, what has been achieved? Where do we stand? In truth, we stand at a watershed moment for humanity. Since the first climate change conference, carbon emissions have increased by 60 per­ cent (Naím, 2021). How worried should we be about this increase? To me, the question isn’t how worried I am but what the impact of that worry should be in terms of my actions, and how I could try to influence others to act. But first, to answer the question posed: do sustainability commitments from gov­ ernments, corporations, or citizens lead to results? The answer so far is a resounding: no. The reason is simple. Neither gov­ ernments and businesses nor individuals have any behavioral model within which it makes sense to change their ways. So far, we are stuck in industrial capitalism. As long as the notion of industry-led economic growth dominates we cannot make progress on sustainability. Well, we can make incremental

Insufficient non-financial commitments

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changes which is what the whole sustainability compromise was all about. The trouble is that it would take too much time to achieve those results and the Earth’s climate cannot wait that long. What to do then? We need a new societal model. And capitalism needs to fit within it, but extractive, industrial capitalism cannot be dominant. That’s what we will turn to next. The next chapter considers the state of play in eco-investments and looks to the future.

References Carson, R. (2002) Silent Spring. Anniversary edition. Mariner Books. Chasek, P. (2020) Stockholm and the birth of environmental diplomacy, International Institute for Sustainable Development. Available at: www.iisd.org/articles/deep-dive/ stockholm-and-birth-environmental-diplomacy (Accessed 24 November 2022). de Tannenberg, V.L. (2019) EU carbon market is having a hard time being effective, EURACTIV. Available at: www.euractiv.com/section/emissions-trading-scheme/ news/the-european-carbon-market-is-having-a-hard-time-being-effective/ (Accessed 13 December 2022). Down to Earth (2022) COP list. Available at: www.downtoearth.org.in/climate-change/ coplist (Accessed 13 December 2022). EDGAR (2022) EDGAR - The Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research. Available at: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ (Accessed 13 December 2022). EP (2022) Climate change: Deal on a more ambitious Emissions Trading System (ETS). Available at: www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20221212IPR64527/clima te-change-deal-on-a-more-ambitious-emissions-trading-system-ets (Accessed 19 Jan­ uary 2023). Grytten, O.H. (2008) The economic history of Norway, EH. Available at: https://eh. net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-norway/ (Accessed 19 November 2022). Hill, G. (1972) U.N. panel on Stockholm Conference boycotted, The New York Times, 7 March. Available at: www.nytimes.com/1972/03/07/archives/un-panel-on-stockholm­ conference-boycotted.html (Accessed 24 November 2022). IPBES (2019) Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Available at: https://ipbes.net/global-assessment (Accessed 13 December 2022). JFK Library (2007). Rachel Carson Centennial. Available at: www.jfklibrary.org/ events-and-awards/forums/past-forums/transcripts/rachel-carson-centennial (Acces­ sed 19 November 2022). Klare, M.T. (2022) What if the US and China really cooperated on climate change? Available at: www.nationofchange.org/2022/11/30/what-if-the-us-and-china-really­ cooperated-on-climate-change/ (Accessed 13 December 2022). Krosofsky, A. (2021) If you’re not sure how much trash you produce each month, prepare to be shocked, Green Matters. Available at: www.greenmatters.com/p/ how-much-garbage-does-average-person-produce (Accessed 13 December 2022). La Vina, A.G.M., Hoff, G. and DeRose, A.M. (2002) The successes and failures of Johannesburg: A story of many summits, World Resources Institute [Preprint]. Available at: http://pdf.wri.org/wssd_joburg_english.pdf. Meadows, D.H., Randers, J. and Meadows, D.L. (1974) The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. 1st edn. Universe Books.

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Moyer, J.D. and Hedden, S. (2020) Are we on the right path to achieve the sustainable development goals?, World Development, 127, p. 104749. Naím, M. (2021) An uninhabitable Earth? El Pais. Available at: https://english.elpais. com/opinion/the-global-observer/2021-12-07/an-uninhabitable-earth.html (Accessed 13 December 2022). Napoli, C. (2012) Project MUSE – Understanding Kyoto’s failure, SAIS Review of International Affairs, 32 (2). Available at: https://muse-jhu-edu.stanford.idm.oclc. org/article/493430 (Accessed 13 December 2022). Park, J., Conca, K. and Finger, M. (eds) (2008) The Crisis of Global Environmental Governance: Towards a New Political Economy of Sustainability (Environmental Politics). 1st edn. Routledge. Schumacher, E.F. (2010) Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Harper Perennial Modern Thought). Reprint edition. Harper Perennial. SSB (2021) Waste from households. Statistics Norway. Available at: www.ssb.no/en/na tur-og-miljo/avfall/statistikk/avfall-fra-hushalda (Accessed 6 April 2023). Thunberg, G. (2023) The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions. Penguin Press. UN News (2021) COP26 defined by “reinvigorated multilateralism”. UN News. 14 December. Available at: https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/12/1107952 Undheim, T.A. (2023) The changing environmental movement. Interview with Graham Hill. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/the-changing-environmenta l-movement/ (Accessed 6 April 2023). WCED (1987) Our Common Future. 1st edn. Oxford University Press.

4

The state of play in eco-investments

Stakes are high. In 2020, there were a record number of climate disasters, each resulting in over $1 billion in damages. By 2050, it is estimated that damages from the global climate crisis could surpass $77 trillion (SVB, 2022a). To put the Earth on the path towards a regenerative future, we would need to rapidly get to a bilateral investment track of $100 billion a year. We currently invest $34 billion (Donor Tracker, 2022). Ultimately, to turn things around would likely require ten times as much for a period of time, a whop­ ping $1 trillion a year. This would represent a 30-times increase in investment. The difference would have to be made up both by China and the US and by a massive general uplift. Given humanity’s propensity to always find another avenue of growth, we are likely to pursue those first, geographically, or geologically. The challenge is that it might take another 50–100 years before truly stunted economic growth happens. We cannot wait for that as a signal. Globalization was a result of Western countries looking for growth in foreign markets combined with a desire to squeeze out more by collaborating more closely. When growth stagnated in Japan due to stagflation in the 1990s, Japanese corpora­ tions looked to grow in foreign markets. When China faced the prospect of eventually running out of steam in its domestic market, it started to look to South American markets. As the world economy once again contracts, we will be looking to the African continent for growth. The same goes for minerals. Once we extract what’s on the Earth’s surface, we will be mining deeper down, and into the Deep Sea, until we have extracted all resources the Earth has to offer. The global mining industry is in rapid growth and expected to soon be worth $2 trillion (Newswire, 2022), and responsible for 4 to 7 percent (and growing) of emissions and for causing water issues (Henderson and Maksimainen, 2020). Only when there’s little left will we start fully consider­ ing a regenerative economy. That might, worst case, take another hundred years to play out. The reason is that extraction technologies will keep getting more efficient, but also that the preferred minerals will change over time (Turner, 2017). Today, industrial sectors—notably steel, cement, oil, and natural gas— account for nearly 40 percent of global energy consumption and more than DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-7

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The past

30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (Feingold, 2022). Decarboniz­ ing and digitizing heavy asset industries is a key challenge of our time, and it won’t be easy. Luckily, there are ways to go about it, and software is key to the transition because it allows the industry to track its progress. We can only hope the analytics is used to speed up the process rather than do the minimum—our ecosystem depends on it. Perhaps we can do more than hoping, though, as we can each put pressure on our employers and governments and local city councils, make investment choices, and practice sustainability. I predict we will come to our senses in the next 25 years.

Interview 4.1 Energy System Transformation. Interview with Carolina Torres, Execu­ tive Director, Cognite. Futurized podcast

Empty government financing pledges Country pledges are notoriously easy to make, but hard to fulfill. They depend on timelines that outstrip elections. Political will rarely lasts long on the international arena. The global loss and damage fund agreed at the COP27 conference in the fall of 2022 still has no predetermined amount pledged to it. That’s good and bad. We need pledges. But we need more than pledges. The 2009 Copenhagen climate summit pledged $100 billion to cli­ mate which never fully materialized (Timperley, 2021; Brown, 2022). We need to reform and recapitalize international institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank to deal with a new charter. Gordon Brown, the WHO ambassador for global health financing, wants a burden-sharing formula for climate financing similar to what the world did for smallpox (Brown, 2022). The cost of financing the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) post-Covid is dramatically escalating, “with the price of fighting floods, firestorms and droughts—and the debt burden of low-income coun­ tries—[…] it is $4tn annually” (Brown, 2022). Cascading risks, for example the out-of-left field challenge of COVID-19, complicate such efforts because they derail attention on agreed goals to chase immediate crises. Even climate

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risks are about to cause a myriad of their own adaptation challenges that will themselves derail further climate mitigation (Kemp et al., 2022). The more is going on, the easier it will be to take the eye off the ball. In fact, as docu­ mented by the Stern report, about $2 trillion will be needed each year by 2030 to help developing countries cut their greenhouse gas emissions (Harvey, 2022). “This could be paid for, if necessary, by raising global taxes like the airline levies pioneered by France and the UK” (Brown, 2022). But will gov­ ernments be able to put this on the private sector? Annual global energy investment is currently around US$1.9 trillion and renewables dominate investment in new power generation (WEI, 2021). In 2020, the US spent $1 trillion on energy, or 4.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) (CSS, 2021). However, the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Investment report said clean energy investment globally is set to exceed $1.4 trillion in 2022 (WEI, 2022). There is some good news, how­ ever, because due to technology improvements and cost reductions, “a dollar spent on wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment today results in four times more electricity than a dollar spent on the same technologies ten years ago” (WEI, 2021). ExxonMobil Energy Outlook (2021) projections for 2050 include global emissions peak around 2030 and (with energy sector and gov­ ernment climate efforts) declining 13 percent to 2050, energy demand growing 15 percent, transportation energy demand growing more than 20 percent and, claims oil and gas will still play an important role in coming decades (ExxonMobil, 2022). Getting to Net-Zero will require adding 1700 gigawatts of clean power to the grid which will require some $4.2 trillion in infra­ structure investments over the next 30 years (Net Zero Tracker, 2022). According to REN21’s annual Renewables Global Futures Report (2021), the world’s only crowd-sourced report on renewable energy, despite heigh­ tened attention, significant obstacles to its further increase of share in the energy balance remain (REN21 Secretariat, 2021). In fact, the world is burn­ ing more fossil fuel than ever: “Renewable energy meets just over 11% of global final energy demand—only a slight increase from around 9% a decade ago”. Philanthropy funding plays a limited role Climate change, arguably the biggest existential challenge to mankind, is receiving less than 2 percent of philanthropic funding (Inside Philanthropy, 2017). Billionaire pledges to give $1 billion over a lifetime do not help much because they will take too long to ramp up. Most billionaires pledge far more than they actually give. They also earmark their dollars to their pet causes, not to areas strategically agreed by humanity. Moreover, mega donations are no longer sufficient, we need to get to giga-donations of $10 billion or more. More importantly, these donations need to be better coordinated, and they must be invested in useful types of innovation, mitigation, and adaptation that truly builds a regenerative economy. In the US, especially, there’s also the

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issue of Republican mega donor climate deniers. Climate misinformation donations from the Heartland Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and others, amounted to $54 million between 2014 and 2020, according to The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a national watchdog (Kotch, 2022).

Venture capital is growing but insufficient Even during the past cleantech wave, the World Bank estimated that by 2023, total innovation investment in the climate and cleantech sectors would reach $6.4 trillion (Ehst and Rawlins, 2014). However, cleantech firms face high upfront capital requirements and are heavily reliant on government policy. Those dollars were not just invested in nimble startups, they were embedded in larger infrastructure projects. The World Bank spent resources promoting “competitiveness, employment, sustainability, inclusive growth, and develop­ ment” within these sectors and regions. That’s not the same as having billions of dollars in venture capital. That’s why such numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt. Climate tech investments soared in 2021 in anticipation of the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, with the Bay Area in California, London, Berlin, New York, and Boston home to the biggest concentration of both venture investors and startups, a constellation which still tends to go together (Shead, 2021; PWC, 2022). Depending on how you define it, broadly some 6,000 unique investors now cater to the space, having funded more than 3,000 startups over the past decade. There are at least 100 venture capital firms with a meaningful eco­ efficiency portfolio (The Freeing Energy Project, 2019; Hess, 2019; Climate, 2020; Joffe and Hind, 2021; Zou, 2022). Historically, such funds started as cleantech funds in the early 2000s. One of the earliest European funds was Emerald Technology Ventures (2000), a multi-corporate fund. These funds have tended to invest across a wide variety of sectors: agriculture, recycling, building technologies, waste management, and energy. The technologies involved tend to entail hard tech or hardware and typically involve infrastructure, with most use cases in regulated indus­ tries. These complexities, and the scattershot approach, needless to say, com­ plicates early returns. Throughout the 2000s a broader category of energy tech funds started to emerge, such as Chrysalix (2001), Braemar Energy Ventures (2002), San Francisco-based DBL Partners (2004) and London-based ETF Partners (2006). They tended to use the term energy tech, a narrower category which used to mean regulated industries dealing with energy production or dis­ tribution, but which includes both fossil and renewable fuel sources as well as its conversion into electricity. Today, however, the label “energy tech” largely means having a clean energy focus, but the funds cannot use the cleantech label because it has such

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a negative connotation (and the term is copyrighted). Between 2008 and 2015, only a few highly dedicated funds emerged. During the period from 2006–2011, investors deployed $25 billion primarily into thin-film solar, bio­ fuels, and energy storage companies (Gaddy, Sivaram, and O’Sullivan, 2016). The 2011 bankruptcy of US solar energy startup Solyndra in many ways marked the end of the first cleantech wave much in the same way as Webvan’s 2001 bankruptcy marked the end of the dotcom era. The next venture capital cycle for energy started around 2015 and dozens of funds rapidly emerged, most notably Activate (2017), Breakthrough Energy Ventures (2016), Cantos (2016), Clean Energy Ventures (2017), and The Engine (2016). Most of these climate tech, impact, and carbon focused funds have an explicit impact metric they track against, for example typically some way of measuring carbon reduction or at least the implication that this is their target. The most recent wave of funds started in 2020–21 and most notably includes Energy Transition Ventures (2020) as well as Chris Sacca’s Lower Carbon Capital (2021). During the same period a bunch of the classical gen­ eralist VC firms (e.g., GV, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, USV, and others) got into the game, as did accelerators (Antler, SOSV, Techstars, Y Combinator). A separate sub-specialty, deep tech VCs (e.g., The Engine, Pangea, Bolt, SOSV), also emerged strongly, and cater to energy, IT, and manufacturing startups that are commercializing complex technologies that may involve hardware or material technology advances. Venture investing in energy, even renewable energy, seems to have entered an interesting inflection point where subsidies gradually might not need to play such a huge role any more due to the price points coming down. That is because several renewable energy technologies have matured to a point where they can start to compete head-to-head with fossil fuels-based approaches. That being said, market dynamics are slow to turn around and there is still arbitrage to be had between newer and older technologies and approaches, especially in emerging markets.

Interview 4.2 The Future of Cleantech. Interview with Neal Dikeman, Partner, Energy Transition Ventures. Futurized podcast.

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Lastly, private equity is starting to pick up deals, which pushes valuations and deal rounds. Today, these funds broadly fall into the following categories: Cleantech 1.0 (a tiny group of holdouts), Energy Tech (Chrysalix, Clean Energy Ventures, Energy Transition Ventures, ETF Partners), Strategics (cor­ porate venturing), and private equity (Activate Capital). Sustainability funds such as Hartford Climate Opportunity Funds are also making themselves present, and so are sovereign wealth funds: Managing more than $9 trillion of capital globally, sovereign wealth funds from China, Singapore, the Middle East, and Norway are ratchet­ ing up their interest in the cleantech sector to tap into the global shift towards energy efficiency and lower carbon emissions. (Saigol, 2020) Investment trends to watch What has changed over the past decade? The public perception of climate risk has changed, including the influx of governmental and corporate net zero emissions commitments which follow a consumer push and awareness of cli­ mate change as a reality. There have been formidable technology and R&D breakthroughs in computa­ tion speed, robotics, automation, as well as in standards-compliant interoperability and open-source software. The emerging open platforms cannot be under­ estimated and will be a game changer for the energy space across industries. There has been a globalization of venture capital (China, Europe, India, Israel) which is gradually shifting investments towards where the original talent is located before it migrates towards capital (Haemmig, 2003). There has been a deep digitalization across industries and even foundational industries are being impacted by cloudbased business models, and machine learning approaches. The maturity of the data analytics field means each sector must upgrade its knowledge of both its own resources and those around them on a regular basis. A significant wave of user centric design woos consumers and enterprise users alike. The incoming workforce’s generational digital skills eases indus­ trial tech adoption and enables faster integration of startup innovations into larger companies. Finally, there has been significant government deregulation and additionally ongoing and planned incentives (particularly in European and Californian energy sectors). Increasingly, there is the prospect of US energy reform due to perceived market opportunity in energy innovation combined with the downside risk of not acting (stagnation and climate change). Breakout startups are themselves reshaping the energy field. A few examples include EnerNoc (2001), demand/ response energy software, acquired by ENEL (2017) for $250 million, Tesla (2003), electric vehicle, digital manufacturing platform, $20 billion total funding, as well as Nest labs (2010), home automation, acquired by Google (2014), esti­ mated $1 billion revenue.

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Impactful eco-efficiency venture firms The most important venture capital players in the emerging eco-efficiency landscape are these 20 firms (listed alphabetically): Activate Capital Partners (2017), Amazon Climate Pledge Fund (2020), Arctern Ventures (2012), Blackhorn (2016), Blue Bear Capital (2016), Bolt (2013), Breakthrough Energy Ventures (2016), Braemar Energy Ventures (2012), Cantos (2016), Congruent VC (2017), DBL Partners (2004), Energize VC (2017), Energy Impact Partners (2014), Fifty Years (2015), Lower Carbon Capital (2021), Lux Capital (2000), Powerhouse Ventures (2011), Prelude Ventures (2012), Prime Impact Fund (2018), Starlight (2017), and Wireframe VC (2016). The reason they are so important is that they have startup portfolios that will shape the future of eco-efficiency in the years to come. Futurists, policymakers, or corporate innovators could do worse than spend a bit of time every year going through these startup companies’ latest developments (or even investing in them). But angel or venture capital won’t change the world alone, for that you need the amounts and unique characteristics of private capital, starting with corporate venture capital (CVC). Brief history of eco-efficiency focus in corporate venturing The Global Corporate Venturing’s Energy Council brings together the main energy producers, utilities, infrastructure and tech providers, and consumers including Amazon, BP, Chevron, General Motors, Hitachi Ventures (2019), National Grid, Shell, Total Carbon Neutrality Ventures (2008), and Schnei­ der Electric. The advisory board members are working with more than 100,000 startups (Mawson, 2021). Other corporate funds active in this field include Tencent, Next 47 (Sie­ mens), ENI, Wind, Oxy, Volta, Evergy Ventures, Equinor, and ABB Tech Ventures as well as industrial funds (TDK Ventures, BASF, CAT), and con­ sumer funds (Salesforce). Singaporean government-owned fund Temasek and French public investment bank BPI France (2012) are also very active. The last few years has also seen the rise of the mega climate funds: Unilever: Climate & Nature Fund: $1 billion, Amazon: Climate Tech Pledge Fund: $2 billion, Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund: $1 billion, Total Carbon Neu­ trality Ventures: $2 billion, and Shell Ventures: $1.4 billion (amounts as of 2021). The catalyzing role of corporate venture capital According to a survey by PitchBook Data Inc., investment through corporate venturing over the last decade has exceeded US$1.78 trillion (Mawson, Gab­ riel, and Funaki, 2021). Yet, overall, too little private investment is yet involved in the transition towards a regenerative future. Billion-dollar invest­ ments pledged by the likes of Morgan Stanley (PEI, 2022) will undoubtedly

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do some good, but is a drop in the bucket. Corporate venture capital can play a role, and has invested significant amounts of money in climate startups over the past decade to the tune of $23.2 billion (Jenkins, 2021), but the total CVC budgets are insignificant compared to corporate balance sheets. Even though corporations had invested $31.2 billion in 186 CVCs by 2018, a tripling from 2012, these are rounding errors on corporate budgets (Schlipf, 2020). By 2020, there were over 4,000 CVCs linked to over 2,000 deals (Sauvage, Zeisberger, and Varadan, 2022). An increasing percentage of CVC firms (36%) are lead­ ing deals and nearly all take board observer seats (SVB, 2022b) which indi­ cates that they are becoming more strategic about their investments. However, with the economic downturn, CVC funds tend to get closed down. That’s another cause for worry. Without a long-term strategy for corporate involve­ ment in climate change venture investments, it will not serve the overall regenerative agenda. CVC regenerative investments alone would have to be in the vicinity of $100 billion in order to address the challenges we face. Instead of a tripling of investment, I’m afraid we are looking at a decimation of the sector in the coming years. I hope I am wrong about that. The only thing that could save the sector is, in fact, if climate change pledges continue to get channeled into CVC budgets. One of the reasons why corporations engage in CVC is to foster open innova­ tion and exploring sustainability is one such specific objective (Döll et al., 2022). Another reason is to build legitimacy, explore a specific green opportunity, or to copy an activity undertaken by a competitor (Hegeman and Sørheim, 2021). CVC investments in green startups are associated with increased green patent applica­ tions of the parent firm correlating with green innovation output which means there’s a “double impact” for founders seeking their financing (Bendig et al., 2022). However, utility-based CVC funds fail more often than others, which could be attributed to a conservative organizational culture and an observable mismatch between the CVC unit and their parent firm (Teppo and Wustenhagen, 2009). An increasing number of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) also invest in cleantech startups but are less aware of the risks involved and the role they play in commercializing cleantech (Hegeman and Sørheim, 2021). Bruce Usher, Professor of Practice at Columbia Business School and author of Investing in the Era of Climate Change puts it this way: “We’ve got about 30 years to decarbonize. We literally have to rebuild the global economy and I emphasize building because we’re talking about physical products”. Many dif­ ferent types of investment strategies are needed, he writes, such as risk mitiga­ tion, divestment, ESG investing, thematic impact investing, and impact first investing (Usher, 2022). An example of the latter is extremely high-risk capital from the likes of Bill Gates who is making “20-year or longer investments, you could say bets because they really are kind of bets in businesses that may never have a path, and he’s put a billion dollars or more in, because he can.” The issue is that “we’re on the right path with some of these [renewable] technologies but it’s not fast enough. It’s really a time issue and that’s where investors come in. We need more capital more quickly” (Undheim, 2023).

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Interview 4.3 Investing in the Era of Climate Change. Interview with Bruce Usher. Futurized podcast.

Corporate sustainability governance at Hitachi Hitachi arguably is among the leading multinational companies not only making significant climate commitments, but working actively to carry through on them, and enabling its surrounding business ecosystem to do the same. This is not easy, will not happen overnight, and will require much more far-reaching changes to its business than we have seen so far, but it is a start. Country-wide energy tran­ sition will depend on large company efforts. Hitachi, Ltd., founded 1910, has 350,864 employees, and is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Given the size of Hitachi which plays a role in some specific 14 industries, there is perhaps no surprise that it is engaged in decarbonization. In October 2020, Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga pledged to put his country on the path to net zero by 2050, and by December of that year, the coun­ try’s trade ministry named 14 industries where significant investments would be required to decarbonize. Later that year, Japan announced a $19 billion investment to support hydrogen commercialization. Short-term action, and governance frameworks to accomplish this are still outstanding (ECIU, 2021). Manufacturing accounts for 54 percent of the world’s energy consumption and is responsible for 22 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions globally (Betti, 2021). Since 2018, the World Economic Forum has been recognizing and announcing the most advanced factories that are world leaders in the adoption and integration of cutting-edge technologies. The World Economic Forum recognized Hitachi Omika Works, a brownfield factory originally built in 1969, in Japan as a lighthouse factory in January 2020 for having “reduced lead time of core products by 50% without impacting quality”, and adopting digitally enabled processes (Betti, 2021). Hitachi Omika Works provides information control systems for important social infrastructure systems, such as railway, electricity, water supply and sewerage showcasing Hitachi Van­ tara’s Lumada data ops solutions which combine operational technology (OT) with information technology (IT) and products (Yoshida, 2020). These

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solutions are named as leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for industrial IoT platforms (Gartner, 2021). Hitachi, Ltd.’s Executive Sustainability Committee comprises Executive Chairman and CEO Toshiaki Higashihara and other members of the Senior Executive Committee, along with the CEOs of every business unit (Hitachi, 2022). The committee meets twice a year to discuss and reach decisions on important policies and measures related to sustainability, share progress and results, and find ways to connect these to further improvements and new initiatives. The Hitachi Sustainability Report (2022) contains a set of ESG governance tools that track many aspects of the company’s activities (IT, mobility, automotive systems, energy, industry, life, construction machinery, and metals). Hitachi Ventures GmbH was established in 2019 to serve as the strategic CVC arm of Hitachi, with offices in Munich and Boston. Hitachi Ventures looks for the best solutions to address the world’s technical, social, and environmental challenges, believing that “fostering disruptive innovations and collaborating with innovative startups help to contribute to the greater good” and “investing in leading startups we establish unique value-add partnerships with Hitachi businesses and customers”. Hitachi Ventures scouts for startups in industries of strategic relevance for Hitachi, such as healthcare, environ­ ment, and future social businesses. “Hitachi is always actively collaborating with startups, with evaluation and decision-making on investment happening in parallel. Therefore, the number of collaboration projects is often much higher than the number of invest­ ments. Nevertheless, we need to learn from this if we are to understand megatrends and identify disruption from adjacent markets before investing funds and resources. That is why strategic venturing is a significant value-add to corporates”, says Stefan Gabriel, MD and CEO Hitachi Ventures (Mawson, Gabriel, and Funaki, 2021). Two examples within the eco tech portfolio of startups so far are Ascend Elements (2015) and Provectus Algae (2018). Ascend, based on technology out of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), is committed to changing the dynamics for processing end-of-life lithium-ion batteries, ensuring fewer bat­ teries go to landfills and a cleaner manufacturing process. Australian bioma­ nufacturing company Provectus Algae (2018) specializes in the optimization of algae to produce high-value compounds for use in a wide array of indus­ tries and applications, including a high-performance blood red colorant for the alternative protein market. The manufacturing platform is carbon-nega­ tive by leveraging its 20,000-liter pilot facility of closed system automated bioreactors that use photosynthetic algae as a growth platform for high-value compounds with a series of LED lights. The platform is modular, scalable, and cloud-enabled, and can be managed from anywhere in the world and is an end-to-end supply chain solution complementary to other fermentation, bacteria, or yeast systems. Provectus is already building a 10-times size facility for further scaling (Crawford, 2021).

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Hitachi’s ambition is to become a climate change innovator and “reduce carbon for Governments, cities and our customers”. Chief Environmental Officer Alistair Dormer says: There was a pressure from across the business, and in society, for climate change action […] There is huge [need] to invest, not just in electric cars, but in electric trains, in battery trains, in hydrogen. These are huge opportunities that should be [an] engine of growth for Hitachi businesses. (Seaton-Potter, 2021) Hitachi Carbon Neutrality 2030 (2021) is an initiative aimed at net zero CO2 emissions. The company invested 50 billion yen in energy-saving measures over the ten-year period from fiscal year 2011 to 2020. By introducing new equipment and optimizing operating conditions, Hitachi achieved a 17 per­ cent reduction in CO2 emissions from 5.28 million tons in 2010 to 4.37 mil­ lion tons in 2019. In 2020, three sites achieved carbon neutrality: Hitachi High-Tech Kyushu Corporation, Hitachi High-Tech Fine Systems Corpora­ tion, and Hitachi High-Tech Science Corporation (Hitachi Social Innovation, 2021). Hitachi is introducing its internal carbon pricing system and is expanding its decarbonization business. The key environmental target is: “Achieve 50% reductions in CO2 emissions by fiscal 2030, and 80% reduc­ tions by fiscal 2050 across the value chain compared to fiscal 2010”. Claudio Facchin, CEO of Hitachi Energy, a $10 billion business unit, says: “There is a need for us to support decarbonization across all of the sectors and the industries and certainly the energy space, which is a large contributor of CO2 emissions” and “If we just continue with the speed that we’ve been on this journey, we will be nowhere near the goal of carbon neutrality by 2050 or 2060.” But “it takes anything between five and 10 years to […] deploy the technology” due to regulatory delays such as long permitting and execution processes (Davies, 2021).

The impact of eco-investments What has the impact of this worldwide increase in risky eco-investments been? PWC (2021) has identified 78 climate tech unicorns, broadly defined, although another source lists only 31 climate tech unicorns around the world who have collectively raised over $22 billion of total funding in the last decade and are now collectively valued at $70 billion+ (Holoniq, 2022). Current climate tech unicorns include companies like Aurora Solar (2013) which develops cloud software for the solar industry where Energize Ventures was a key investor, recycling startup Redwood Materials (2017) which had early backing from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Uplight (2019), Denver-based technology partner for energy providers transitioning to the clean energy ecosystem, backed by energy automation company Schneider Electric.

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Example of eco-impact: Batteries—obstacle or solution? The biggest obstacle to the energy revolution remains batteries as well as the even bigger question of large-scale energy storage. Almost all alternative energy sources depend on batteries in some shape or form because without independence from the electricity grid, they are tethered down (not mobile or useful for air, ground-, underground, or space transportation), cannot operate in a distributed fashion (the last mile problem), or indeed don’t help the grid much in terms of daytime energy spikes. One estimate from Elon Musk is that the world’s battery production would need to increase 1,600-fold to meet the demand for net zero (Brown, 2020). Battery startups often fail because of R&D hurdles, failing to close the gap between spinning out and hitting industry benchmarks, hitting the “valley of death” of capital dearth right before reaching industrial scale, or because of commoditized energy prices in adjacent markets (Choi, 2017). Outliers exist, but no battery startups have reached global scale, with possibly one or two exceptions. Also, even if automakers are all making announcements about timelines to go all-electric, the supply chain issues would create a battery shortage and a global recycling and waste problem (Lambert, 2021) The biggest battery scale-up, by far, is Northvolt (2016), the Swedish lithium-ion gigafactory battery maker where European tech giants Siemens and ABB Technology Ventures, Danish wind energy provider Vestas, Swedish energy giant Vattenfall, and Swedish truck maker Scania were early investors (Deign, 2018). Electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian (2009) has also reached significant scale, although likely just the tip of the iceberg of the coming EV boom that includes Lucid Motors, Tesla, and a host of Asian competitors (Foelber, 2021). Considering the coming backlash against extractive lithium mining in Chile (Sengupta and Zegers, 2021) and other places, battery scale­ up for electric vehicles is fraught with environmental challenges, too. Given that, we should strongly consider non-lithium batteries or other alternatives entirely, such as sodium-ion, solid state, and lithium-sulfur (Scoltock, 2022).

Conclusion Early-stage eco-investments need to ramp up by orders of magnitude. Eco­ efficient investments are on the rise, but 30 years too late. Moreover, even if investments get there, the policy coordination to ensure the money is going to the right things needs to dramatically improve. Furthermore, the innovation system is not capable of absorbing that amount of investment either. There would not be enough startups to pick up all the early-stage venture capital. The only thing there would be enough of is construction firms wanting to build. That seems to be something human organizations can muster. Despite massive amounts of venture capital, a drastic uptick of corporate venturing efforts going into the space, as well as increased government investment in R&D, piloting, and some early efforts at pre-commercial public

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procurement stimulus, the exponential progress needed in most fields identi­ fied here (mobile batteries, stationary grid-scale storage, CCUS, hydrogen fuel cells, fusion energy) just seems far-fetched in terms of reaching net zero by 2050. However, it might be on track for that goal by 2075 or, at least, by 2100, but that will be a very different world already, with drastically deterio­ rated biodiversity, temperature rises of 2–5 degrees, and other calamities not yet modeled out. Having said that, it is reasonable to expect that the uptick of investment, if it holds for another decade, will lead to unforeseen platform innovations that prove to be game changers. We just cannot count on it, and we cannot even, as futurists, (at least not this futurist) really comprehend where such innova­ tions would appear and what they might entail. Right now, most startups in the game are very early entrants in a game that will change drastically once there is an ISO-standard or perhaps more likely ten standards that govern its market dynamics. In fact, in the next 3–5 years, increased efforts should go into standardization. Only once we have a set of standards can the commercial attempts, as well as regulatory efforts to sti­ mulate or punish firms and individuals, truly have the intended effect. The next chapter traces ecological paradigms from deep ecology via industrial ecology to the regenerative fallacy (it’s not yet here).

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CSS (2021) U.S. energy system factsheet, Center for Sustainable Systems. Available at: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/us-energy-system-factsheet (Acces­ sed 4 December 2022). Davies, A. (2021) Roads to resilience in the global energy transition: A conversation with Claudio Facchin, CEO, Hitachi Energy, Forbes Magazine, 13 October. Available at: www.forbes.com/sites/hitachienergy/2021/10/13/roads-to-resilience-in-the-global-ener gy-transition-a-conversation-with-claudio-facchin-ceo-hitachi-energy/ (Accessed 11 December 2022). Deign, J. (2018) Siemens backs Northvolt as gigafactory fever takes hold, Greentech Media. Available at: www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/siemens-backs-north volt-as-gigafactory-fever-takes-off (Accessed 31 December 2022). Döll, L.M., Ulloa, M.I.C., Zammar, A., do Prado, G.F. and Piekarski, C.M. (2022) Corporate venture capital and sustainability, Journal of Open Innovation: Technol­ ogy, Market, and Complexity, 8 (3), p. 132. Donor Tracker (2022) Climate, Donor Tracker. Available at: https://donortracker.org/ sector/climate (Accessed 5 December 2022). ECIU (2021) Taking stock: A global assessment of net zero targets, Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. Available at: https://eciu.net/analysis/reports/2021/taking-stock-a ssessment-net-zero-targets (Accessed 11 December 2022). Ehst, M. and Rawlins, J. (2014) The $6.4 trillion climate and clean technology oppor­ tunity, World Bank Blogs. World Bank Group, 19 September. Available at: https:// blogs.worldbank.org/psd/64-trillion-climate-and-clean-technology-opportunity (Acces­ sed 5 December 2022). ExxonMobil (2022) Outlook for energy, ExxonMobil. Available at: https://corporate. exxonmobil.com/Energy-and-innovation/outlook-for-energy (Accessed 31 December 2022). Feingold, S. (2022) Norway’s $1.2 trillion wealth fund sets net-zero target, World Economic Forum. Available at: www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/norways-massi ve-sovereign-wealth-fund-sets-net-zero-goal/ (Accessed 5 December 2022). Foelber, D. (2021) Lucid, Rivian, and Tesla are just the tip of the EV stock iceberg, Yahoo Finance. Available at: https://finance.yahoo.com/m/5b501540-f3e8-3d54-8624-a 9bf7e1d349b/lucid-rivian-and-tesla-are.html (Accessed 31 December 2022). Gaddy, B., Sivaram, V. and O’Sullivan, F. (2016) Venture capital and cleantech: The wrong model for clean energy innovation. An MIT Energy Initiative Working Paper. July 2016. Available at: https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ MITEI-WP-2016-06.pdf (Accessed 12 April 2023). Gartner (2021) Gartner magic quadrant for industrial IoT platforms, Gartner. Avail­ able at: www.gartner.com/en/documents/4006918 (Accessed 31 December 2022). Haemmig, M. (2003) The globalization of venture capital, in S. Jugel (ed.) Private Equity Investments: Praxis des Beteiligungsmanagements. Gabler Verlag, pp. 67–88. Harvey, F. (2022) Developing countries “will need $2tn a year in climate funding by 2030”, The Guardian, 8 November. Available at: www.theguardian.com/environm ent/2022/nov/08/developing-countries-climate-crisis-funding-2030-report-nichola s-stern (Accessed 5 December 2022). Hegeman, P.D. and Sørheim, R. (2021) Why do they do it? Corporate venture capital investments in cleantech startups, Journal of Cleaner Production, 294, p. 126315. Henderson, K. and Maksimainen, J. (2020) Here’s how the mining industry can respond to climate change, McKinsey. Available at: www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/

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sustainability/our-insights/sustainability-blog/here-is-how-the-mining-industry-ca n-respond-to-climate-change (Accessed 5 December 2022). Hess, J.M. (2019) Smart green VCs you should know, ECOSUMMIT—Smart Green Business Network and Conference. Available at: https://ecosummit.net/articles/sma rt-green-vcs-you-should-know (Accessed 31 December 2022). Hitachi (2022) Hitachi sustainability report 2022. Available at: www.hitachi.com/susta inability/download/pdf/en_sustainability2022.pdf (Accessed 2022). Holoniq (2022) Global climate tech unicorns. Available at: www.holoniq.com/clima tetech-unicorns (Accessed 31 December 2022). Inside Philanthropy (2017) Grants for climate change, Inside Philanthropy. Available at: www.insidephilanthropy.com/fundraising-for-climate-change (Accessed 5 December 2022). Jenkins, L.M. (2021) The hottest investment in 2021? Climate tech, Protocol. Available at: https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/climate-tech-corporate-venture-capital (Acces­ sed 5 December 2022). Joffe, B. and Hind, M. (2021) What SOSV’s Climate Tech 100 tells founders about investors in the space, TechCrunch, 10 June. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/ 2021/06/10/what-sosvs-climate-tech-100-tells-founders-about-investors-in-the-space/ (Accessed 31 December 2022). Kemp, L., Xu, C., Depledge, J. et al. (2022) Climate endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119 (34), p. e2108146119. Kotch, A. (2022). The dirty dozen: The biggest nonprofit funders of climate denial. Available at: www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/03/21/the-dirty-dozen-the-biggest-nonp rofit-funders-of-climate-denial/ (Accessed 6 April 2023). Lambert, F. (2021) Tesla cofounder JB Straubel sends warning to automakers going all-electric: “Do the supply chain math”. Available at: https://electrek.co/2021/10/13/ tesla-co-founderjb-straubel-sends-warning-to-automakers-going-all-electric-do-supp ly-chain-math/ (Accessed 31 December 2022). Mawson, J. (2021) Shifting the clock forward from year zero. Available at: https:// globalventuring.com/corporate/shifting-the-clock-forward-from-year-zero-2/ (Acces­ sed 31 December 2022). Mawson, J., Gabriel, S. and Funaki, K. (2021) Growing seeds of innovation through strategic corporate venturing, Hitachi Review, 1. Available at: https://www.hitachi. com/rev/column/oih/vol01/index.html. Net Zero Tracker (2022) The net-zero industry tracker, World Economic Forum. Available at: www.weforum.org/reports/the-net-zero-industry-tracker/ (Accessed 5 December 2022). Newswire (2022) The global mining market is boosted to grow to $2 trillion by the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war, PR Newswire. Available at: www.prnewswire.com/news­ releases/the-global-mining-market-is-boosted-to-grow-to-2-trillion-by-the-ongoing­ russia-ukraine-war-301530238.html (Accessed 5 December 2022). PEI (2022) New Morgan Stanley strategy aims to seeks to invest $1bn in emissions reduction companies, Private Equity Insights. Available at: https://pe-insights.com/ news/2022/11/21/new-morgan-stanley-strategy-aims-to-seeks-to-invest-1bn-in-em issions-reduction-companies/ (Accessed 5 December 2022). PWC (2021) State of climate tech 2021. Available at: www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/ sustainability/publications/state-of-climate-tech.html# (Accessed 13 April 2023).

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PWC (2022) ESG reporting and preparation of a sustainability report, PWC. Avail­ able at: www.pwc.com/sk/en/environmental-social-and-corporate-governance-esg/ esg-reporting.html (Accessed 11 December 2022). REN21 Secretariat (2021) 2022 renewables global futures report. Available at: www. ren21.net/2022-renewables-global-futures-report/(Accessed 31 December 2022). Saigol, L. (2020) Sovereign wealth funds are betting on clean tech. Why that’s impor­ tant. Available at: www.barrons.com/amp/articles/sovereign-wealth-funds-are-bettin g-on-clean-tech-why-thats-important-51608724991 (Accessed 31 December 2022). Sauvage, N., Zeisberger, C. and Varadan, M. (2022) Is corporate venture capital right for your startup?, Harvard Business Review, 28 July. Available at: https://hbr.org/ 2022/07/is-corporate-venture-capital-right-for-your-startup (Accessed 5 December 2022). Schlipf, J. (2020) Betting your innovation budget: Why risk it on CVC? Rain­ making. Available at: https://rainmaking.io/article/betting-your-innovation-budget­ why-risk-it-on-cvc/ (Accessed 5 December 2022). Scoltock, J. (2022) The big battery challenge: 3 potential alternatives to lithium-ion. Available at: www.imeche.org/news/news-article/the-big-battery-challenge-3-potentia l-alternatives-to-lithium-ion (Accessed 1 January 2023). Seaton-Potter, E. (2021) People of Hitachi: Alistair Dormer. People of Hitachi Podcast. Available at: www.hitachi.eu/en/about/podcasts/alistair-dormer. Sengupta, S. and Zegers, M. (2021) Chile writes a new constitution, confronting cli­ mate change head on, The New York Times, 28 December. Available at: www.nytim es.com/2021/12/28/climate/chile-constitution-climate-change.html (Accessed 31 December 2022). Shead, S. (2021) Climate tech start-ups have raised a record $32 billion globally so far in 2021. Available at: www.cnbc.com/2021/10/26/dealroom-climate-tech-start-ups-ha ve-raised-32-billion-this-year.html (Accessed 31 December 2022). SVB (2022a) The future of climate tech. Available at: www.svb.com/trends-insights/rep orts/future-of-climate-tech (Accessed 31 December 2022). SVB (2022b) The state of CVC report 2022. Available at: www.svb.com/trends-in sights/reports/state-of-cvc (Accessed 5 December 2022). Teppo, T. and Wustenhagen, R. (2009) Why corporate venture capital funds fail— evidence from the European energy industry, World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development, 5 (4), pp. 353–375. The Freeing Energy Project (2019) The definitive list of cleantech and climate tech investors. Freeing Energy. Available at: https://www.freeingenergy.com/list-of-clea ntech-investors/ (Accessed 31 December 2022). Timperley, J. (2021) The broken $100-billion promise of climate finance—and how to fix it, Nature Publishing Group UK. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586–41021– 02846–02843. Turner, J. (2017) Mined into extinction: Is the world running out of critical minerals? Mining Technology. Available at: www.mining-technology.com/features/featuremine d-into-extinction-is-the-world-running-out-of-critical-minerals-5776166/ (Accessed 5 December 2022). Undheim, T.A. (2023) Investing in the era of climate change: Interview with Bruce Usher. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/investing-in-the-era-of-climate-cha nge/ (Accessed 6 April 2023). Usher, B. (2022) Investing in the era of climate change. Columbia Business School Publishing.

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WEI (2021) Executive summary—World Energy Investment 2021—Analysis, IEA. Available at: www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2021/executive-summary (Accessed 5 December 2022). WEI (2022) World energy investment 2022, IEA. Available at: www.iea.org/reports/ world-energy-investment-2022 (Accessed 4 December 2022). Yoshida, H. (2020). Omika Works contributes to 4th industrial revolution and power­ ing good. Hitachi. Blogs. 6 July. Available at: https://community.hitachivantara.com/ blogs/hubert-yoshida/2020/07/06/omika-works-contributes-to-4th-industrial-revolu tion-and-powering-good (Accessed 12 April 2023). Zou, K. (2022) Running list of climate VCs, Climate Tech VC. Available at: www.ctvc. co/climate-tech-vc/ (Accessed 31 December 2022).

5

From deep ecology via industrial ecology to the regeneration fallacy

Regenerative business practices go well beyond sustainability. According to designer Alan Moore, author of the purpose-driven innovation project DoBuild (Moore, 2021), it is possible to lead with generosity, have a transparent supply chain, design products and services that are “joyful”, and create a company culture where individuals “flourish”. He thinks that beauty gives us the oxygen needed and how we need to reclaim it. In his moral realism, he echoes British female writer–philosopher Iris Murdoch who wrote that “morality is not an esoteric achievement but a natural function of any normal man” (Murdoch, 1999, 2001). All it takes is giving ourselves, as architects, designers, creators, or innovators, the permission to think about that myster­ ious, awesome concept, and reality of beauty. Moore: “The extractive approach of doing things is that somehow or other we must harm something to create something better, a win or lose. I think this is a very poor bar to be setting ourselves” (Undheim, 2021). The true bar, he maintains, is, “whether you can make a work of quality”. Moore cites the founders of Climeworks who feel that you cannot build a regenerative business with the timeframe of a decade, you need to look at it in a very different time frame. Moore: “How do we create something that we are handing down to our children and our children’s children? Let’s say we want to be around for an eternity. Then, we have to fundamentally rethink what growth means”. To this end, he currently offers himself up as a “walking partner”, where you “come together as equals”, because “there is a reconnection of the heart, the hand, and the mind as you walk”. It is in finding their weakness, that true future leaders are born. “What we need is people that are prepared to show up with all their vulnerability because they’re the ones that stand on the strongest ground” (Undheim, 2021). These observations are profound because walking is the essence of discipleship which is a key part of the influential concept of servant leadership. As is well known, Christ washed his disciples’ feet. Even President Theodore Roosevelt allegedly said, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care”. What does regenerative leadership look like? For one, environmen­ tally specific servant (ESS) leadership positively impacts employees’ low-carbon behavior (Xia et al., 2022). But fostering regenerative behavior in yourself, your peers, or your employees, or among fellow citizens, goes deeper than that. DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-8

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Interview 5.1 Regenerative Business. Interview with Alan Moore. Futurized podcast.

Ecology, coined by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, describes the economies of living forms (Haeckel 1866; Levitt and Hossfeld, 2019), although most ecologists don’t study humans, the way most economists don’t study nature. His terminology was picked up by the deep ecology movement who describe the relationship between person and planet as very close (Devall, 1980). Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, who I had the great pleasure of engaging in conversation about these things, first coined the term “deep ecology movement” in 1973, grounded in the teachings of Spinoza, Gandhi, and Buddha (Naess, 1973). In his view, speaking of “pollution” is a “shallow view”. The “deep view” instead considers diversity, decentralization, symbiosis, and classlessness. Steeped in mysticism, he advocates meditating within nature and “thinking like a mountain”, doing away with dualisms of modern philosophy such as mind/body or spirit/matter, or even the distinction between reason and sensibility. Practical consequences follow, although Naess was never an advocate for violence (Schwarz, 2009). Naess had a childlike fascination with all things: a piece of chocolate, a natural wonder, even a friendly boxing match. After a speaking engagement, I once punched him so hard he fell into a clothing rack, fearing I had hurt him. But he bounced back and didn’t seem to mind. To him, an ideal world population, from a resource perspective, is 100 million. He greatly feared the 10 billion projected popula­ tion at the end of the century. Deep ecology views the world as a set of systems. Lovelock’s 1979 book Gaia (Lovelock, 2016) takes the idea of systems further, applying it to the whole planet. There, the planet is a self-regulating superorganism and has an implicit value for humanity. Earth systems science is still in its infancy, but it already seems quite clear that Lovelock’s intuition won’t be too far off the mark. That being said, such thoughts are still controversial, not because they don’t make intuitive sense, but because they threaten most established notions about how humans are the dominating species. Ecologism was first used by Andrew Dobson in 1990 to describe what he saw as the emergence of an ideology distinct from environmentalism that

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emphasizes respect for natural limits and calls for change (Baxter, 2000; Dobson, 2007). Ecologism is an ideology and environmentalism is an activist attitude that could be a response or could be founded in other ideas entirely. Either way, let’s assume that both ecologism and environmentalism might at some point become dominant voices. The result might be a social movement, but it might be more. Once a social movement gains general legitimacy, it becomes part of the institutional fabric of society. Applying a sociological lens, that fabric fun­ damentally consists of social classes. If so, we might see the emergence as an “ecological class”, perhaps along the ways foreseen by Bruno Latour (Schultz and Latour, 2023), perhaps in other ways. But although practical environmentalism is indeed going mainstream, it is largely ineffective. The reason is not that the movement is radical enough but that it is unclear and builds on a fallacy: the idea that regeneration is or will become a shared political goal anytime soon.

Industrial ecology as precursor Industrial ecology (IE), first described in a seminal 1989 article called “Stra­ tegies for manufacturing” (Frosch and Gallopoulos, 1989), is the study of material and energy flows through industrial systems. The two authors, both researchers at General Motors, claimed that “waste from one industrial pro­ cess can serve as the raw materials for another, thereby reducing the impact of industry on the environment” (Frosch and Gallopoulos, 1989). Their point was that “today’s industrial operations do not form an ideal industrial eco­ system”, pointing to the life cycles of plastics, iron, and the platinum-group metals, but that the potential was there. Their realism was much more honest than others: “the difficulties in implementing an industrial ecosystem are daunting, especially given the complexities involved in harmonizing the desires of global industrial development with the needs of environmental safety” (Frosch and Gallopoulos, 1989). These perspectives eventually evolved into a more formalized life cycle analysis (LCA), pioneered by German chemical company BASF and others (Saling et al., 2002; Curran, 2013; Bisinella, Christensen and Astrup, 2021). When I interviewed John Ehrenfeld, one of the field’s founding fathers, he explained how his perspective shifted towards an even more radical approach: I was part of a seminar where we had to walk up and say what we were deeply concerned about and to free our inner self. Others spoke about how they were promised that there will be peace in the world. I walked to the front of the room, turned to the group and said: “I am worried about the possibility that human and other life will perish on the planet, for­ ever.” That’s where it began. I now knew how that was happening and how we could get there. In a moment my plans changed. I reconsidered what I had been doing. […] The proximate causes of all forms of envir­ onmental degradation have to do with human consumption. We need to change the western idea of what it is to be human, a self-interested,

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particularly needy human being. That need has become defined by eco­ nomics and sociology. It’s okay if we’re going to change that. We need to say it’s over with. […] The interesting thing about existential ideas is that there’s another human being there. A caring human being. The inau­ thentic human is a product of our culture. (Undheim, 2022) However, for Ehrenfeld, it is not enough to critique the system, you have to become part of it. To change a system, you have to act within it. This is Jevin’s paradox. Ehrenfeld: Jevin points out that efficiency leads to more consumption because you become more efficient at it. Almost all environmental bads are unin­ tended consequences of doing what we normally do. They just happen. We just happen to have been using fossil fuels for a long time. Industrial ecology and the whole idea of the connectedness of our global metabo­ lism helped develop these ideas. […] But if you think you’re going to stop this emerging system’s consequences, you haven’t thought about it deeply enough. Reducing unsustainability will not create sustainability. Sustainability is a systemic notion. It’s about health, it’s about the whole system working together. You need to get to the very root cause. When a com­ pany becomes more efficient, they’re not dealing with that. They’re deal­ ing with a little tiny piece of it. This is not a diatribe against being more efficient. This is simply a critical thing, a concern that it’s insufficient to solve the very same problems they are thinking they are solving. […] It’s hopeful that if we shift from our Utilitarian view of the world as some­ thing that’s there for us to use, to a world in which we are thrown, and part of, and care for, we will maintain it in a way that brings it flourish­ ing, and brings us flourishing. It’s a hopeful notion. (Undheim, 2022)

Interview 5.2 The Real World Beyond Sustainability. Interview with John Ehrenfeld. Futurized podcast.

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The cradle-to-cradle concept, which challenges industrial production as well as environmentalists alike by setting a higher, circular economy standard for how we use materials and nutrients (McDonough and Braungart, 2002) can be considered an extension to the industrial ecology concept. Focusing on how growth can be maintained as long as the product design is sound, is crucial. But is even a circular economy still caught in the industrial extractive logic? Is it just another version of eco-efficiency? The simplest criticism is that it will limit product variation and innovation. Another challenge is that the authors developed a proprietary certification system that limits its diffusion. Also, it seems to ignore the phase where a product is used, which is the source of many emissions and problems. McDonough himself is an architect and a designer but is not equally great at putting things into production (Sacks, 2008; Toxopeus, de Koeijer and Meij, 2015). Ecological economics is a transdisciplinary field that evolved throughout the 1970s but was only founded as an academic society by Herman Daly in 1990, addressing the interdependence and coevolution of human economies and natural ecosystems in space and time and bringing along concepts such as “steady-state economies”, “carrying capacity”, “ecological footprints”, and “environmental justice” and a view of “progress” that attempts to integrate nature with market-based mechanisms (Daly, 1991; Daly and Farley, 2010; Nelson and Coffey, 2019). Importantly, in this view, human and social sys­ tems are subsystems of an overall ecological system, although there are also attempts to translate the value of factors like clean air and water as well as species diversity, into traditional economic terms. Sustainability standards in the present A bright spot in the 2021 COP meeting in Glasgow was the announcement by the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation of the Interna­ tional Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). This new entity will create a “global common language” for climate disclosure by consolidating and stan­ dardizing ESG reporting and integrating it with financial disclosure (IFRS, 2021). The ISSB will benefit from the consolidation of global bodies (CDSB, IIRC, and SASB)—as well as the support of IOSCO, TCFD, and WEF—that share the aim of enterprise value-focused sustainability disclosures. ISSB standards are already in force in the UK, Japan, and New Zealand (Mohin, 2021). As sustainability (1987) became industrially relevant, conceived as eco-effi­ ciency (1992) something was lost. Perhaps more than what was gained by sustainability in the first place. The WBCD’s definition of eco-efficiency is not as much a contribution to “changing course” as the originators claim as it is to, more modestly, achieving “successful steps towards sustainability”, and “create more while using fewer resources” as long as there are “environmental improvements that yield economic benefits” (Schmidheiny, 1992). All in all, the eco-efficiency perspective brings ample focus on making industry

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modestly “cleaner”, but not on making the environment “clean”. That’s just not good enough now, given the lack of progress on making things cleaner. We now need to go clean. Despite the environmental movement’s push throughout the last 30 years, both consumers and governments have lacked a consistent, yet realistic behavioral framework. To be clear, the simplest formulation of eco-efficiency as “a little better” is not the answer to the ills facing society. Rather the opposite. I find it to be a symptom. The term, for one, lacks a past and a future. It only addresses the delta (difference) from the present without defin­ ing an ideal state. Neither sustainability nor eco-efficiency establish a past state of perfection or symbiosis. They don’t even refer back to the pre-indus­ trial era, the way IPCC’s net zero vision does. They are too quickly implicitly assumed to represent the shared, common-sense view, taking into account the reality of business and industry. The eco-efficiency approach does not go far enough. Perhaps it never did, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it now hampers progress. Flourishing: An attempt to clarify the vision What might such an idealized state of nature refer back to? Since this is a goal of the environmental movement, it might help to be clear. Both philosophers Locke and Hobbes suggest humans had natural rights even before governments came into the picture, which inherently creates conflict. In contrast, in litera­ ture, pastoral refers to any representation of the countryside or life in the countryside that emphasizes its beautiful and pleasurable aspects. This tradition goes all the way back to the Idylls of Theocritus (3rd century BCE), which inspired Virgil’s set of poems, the Eclogues (c. 42–37 BCE), and found its way into the Christian Bible (Little, 2020). In the Romantic period, pastoral became a broader category of nature writing that emphasized the intensity and immense power of people and places, and the delight some can find in nature. Perhaps the ideal is to revert back to the tranquil, slow, pastoral lifestyle of shepherds herding livestock in the open land at the whim of changing seasons, availability of water, and land for pasture? This is a key sticking point because to many, this idealized rural existence is not the paradise we are looking for. The notion of flourishing (Greek: εὐδαιμονία or eudaimonia) literally translates to good spirit but is often referred to as happiness or welfare. This concept of the highest human good in the Greek Aristotelian tradition was the aim of practical philosophy, ethics, and politics. The Greek believed that it allowed human beings to consider and experience being human and is linked to virtue (Greek: ἀρετή or arete). In modern times, it is linked to positive psychology, which also links to the theme of resilience, which literally means bouncing back (Ryff, 2014). The Templeton Foundation, investing $60 mil­ lion in research that promotes human flourishing, tentatively have formed a vision that encompasses “mental and physical health, happiness, life satisfac­ tion, meaning, purpose, character and close social relationships” (Nature,

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2020) and that attempts to harness the science of human flourishing to “accelerate sustainable development” through advancing the UN’s SDG goals, strengthening institutions, curtailing consumption, and fighting COVID-19, misinformation, and climate change (Templeton World, 2021). Flourishing in nature is regarded as beneficial to body and mind across the world, from Chinese healers to Henry David Thoreau (Capaldi et al., 2015). The Japanese practice of taking forest baths (shinrin-yoku) emerged in the 1980s but is now making it to the West, too, as a form of ecotherapy espoused by contemporary wellness practitioners. It can be extended into the home through the use of essential oil aromatherapy, taking cypress baths, cultivating bonsai, or through flower therapy (Miyazaki, 2018). Connecting with nature for its deep stimuli of all five senses, and for its therapeutic effects on the immune system, cardiovascular system, respiratory system, depression and anxiety, mental relaxation, and increased sense of gratitude, or stressrecovery, forest bathing is practiced widely (Hansen et al., 2017). Admittedly, nature intervention research typically does not yet meet “the gold standard of broad sampling, random assignment, strong control groups, and longitudinal data collection” (Capaldi et al., 2015). As a native Norwegian, I grew up practicing daily forest therapy as a matter of course, far before I learned the term. Forests, marshes, beaches—many of us have been lucky enough to experience them from childhood. Those who don’t might struggle with evok­ ing bucolic images even if walking in the forest. But these therapeutic prac­ tices can clearly be learned, if you know to seek them out. Nature-deficit disorder (Louv, 2008) has become existential, but before that fact is widely recognized, the regenerative mindset will remain cast as the minority view. For me, I now experience the same type of suffering in the form of eco­ anxiety. I feel it when I am in damaged natural surroundings destroyed by industrialization. I even feel a profound sadness oncoming, at times, when writing this book. Perhaps it can only be healed by a relational paradigm which is focused on being, not on having or becoming, and which encapsu­ lates growth within an ecological frame, an intangible boundary that limits our transgression of planetary boundaries. A more formal paradigm launched to describe this attitude is the HDLB-model (Having-Doing-Loving-Being) by Nordic researchers (Hirvilammi and Helne, 2014; Helne, 2021). Having refers not to material things but to a fair standard of living. Doing refers not to climbing the capitalist ladder but to purposeful and responsible activities. Loving refers not to greed or want but to compassionate relationships. Being refers not to being physically alive but to being alert in the present. Perhaps it is possible to practice this paradigm even if you are in the minority. This soulful practice may or may not tip the world’s systemic logic in the ecologi­ cal direction, but at least it is the meaningful choice for me. According to Ehrenfeld, reducing unsustainability “still does not create whatever it is we agree should be sustained”. To that I’d say that we still don’t fully understand or agree about what needs to be sustained. I’m a naturalist and I want to protect nature. The acronym, these days, is nature plus or

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nature positive. The term is emergent and has far too many nuanced con­ notations to be politically or behaviorally useful. But the ambition is clear. We need more nature than industrialist society has provided for. Even if it comes at a cost. But not at any expense.

Where ecomodernism fails Ecomodernism, the idea that technology will solve all environmental pro­ blems is flawed because it makes assumptions about growth that don’t follow even from historical data. Ecomodernists promote more efficient agricultural techniques, nuclear power, and urbanization (Ballotpedia, 2022). A 2015 paper entitled “An ecomodernist manifesto”, published by a group of 18 scholars and researchers from Harvard University, the Breakthrough Insti­ tute, Columbia University, the University of Colorado, and other think tanks and universities, argued that improved human well-being can be achieved through technology, modernization, and investment. The ecomodernists are a much smaller group, if we isolate it to those that have any available tools to take part in shaping that ideology. We should perhaps keep mainstream supporters somewhat distinct, because unless they are acting on their beliefs, they might sway between positions. Some days they sympathize with ecologism. Other days they lean towards ecomodernism. The consumerist urbanite of the last few decades largely falls within this category. There are signs that this group is splitting up into a tra­ ditionalist and a postmodernist faction. The traditionalists still have faith in macroeconomic stability. The postmodernists are a minority, a wealthier group that can afford to live with the contradiction of tacit acceptance and an activist core. Urban, upper middle-class families are the core of the postmodern movement. The pragmatists consist of a wide variety of people who started out radical but have softened or who have completed their postmodernist journey, found it ultimately unfulfilling, and seek a more demon­ strably fair resource distribution. The observation to make is that all this time, ecologists think they need to change economics but what needs to happen is very likely to instead start listening to sociology, with all its flaws, which is a more realistic science for our times, and leave economists where they are, although more and more isolated they will be. As a consequence, urbanization seems to be a symptom of something, not a cure, just like it was in the first industrial revolutions that sociologists Durkheim, Weber, and Marx documented. On the other hand, the outcomes of those revolutions were an entirely new consciousness, reality, and structure, all at the same time. The urbanist communities that emerged had enormous potential for creativity and innovation in them, but also, as Schumpeter pointed out, the logic of the dynamism of capitalism was due to its capacity for creative destruction. More importantly for our discussion, these changes escalate social inequities which makes true democratic action

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complicated and, in the process, turns governance forms based on consensus into a brittle veneer on top of diverging objective interests. As a result, we are not only in need of an action framework for a regen­ erative future, but for a political project that can unify, simplify, and con­ cretify what needs to happen. This is what we turn to next. Chapter 12 is all about commandments, that old-time governance strategy, except that although these commandments might be synergistic with various divine designs, they could pass for secular, commonsense responses to a near impossible situation of cascading changes that threaten to block independent action. What is post growth and what follows? In the seminal book Post Growth, sustainability thinker and playwright Tim Jackson claims, “limits are the gateways to the limitless” (Jackson, 2021). As fascinating as that sounds, it’s not clear. However, standardization is key to innovation. My favorite example is jazz improvisation. It is only through an innate knowledge of the roles of jazz standards that a certain level of impro­ visation can occur at predetermined levels, points, and injunctions in the music. Without controlling the variability, improvisation becomes cacophony. Sometimes improvisation leads to truly new nuggets of music. Those nuggets then need a certain amount of re-elaboration to become new musical pieces. If not, they remain ephemeral, musical nuggets. Essentially, their newness needs to be tempered, structured, and understood in more traditional cate­ gories. For Jackson, the good life is about virtue, and virtue is not about excess. It is about balance, where “our most adaptive strategy”, arguably, is one that “holds a place for competition without sacrificing the value of cooperation” (Jackson, 2021). Jackson’s poetic book is a follow-up to his more scholarly work Prosperity without Growth (Jackson, 2016). In the earlier work, he spearheads the notion that GDP growth is not necessary in order to achieve higher well-being in richer nations but can be achieved by government intervention (Jackson, 2016). By that same token, he defends growth in developing nations. The argument would be that in order to stabilize our system(s), we would need to enter a period of post growth where we reassess, use less resources, regenerate what we can, and prepare for a future. Part of that preparation, obviously, would be running A/B tests on how to live in a period of de-growth. Only Japan has that experience, and it’s not pleasant. Ecomodernists such as my former MIT colleague Andrew McAfee, in a Wired article, thinks degrowth is the “worst idea on the planet” because a degrowth recession “would have all the economic contractions’ job losses, business closures, mortgage defaults, and other hardships and uncertainties” (McAfee, 2020). His growth path, he says, “will be supported by a great deal of the world’s people, who will eagerly sign up to climb our new green path to prosperity” (McAfee, 2020). Maybe so.

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Where I agree with both Jackson and McAfee is that good regulation can address a lot of the seemingly impossible and insurmountable challenges we are currently facing. I’m not a degrowth fanatic. Post growth isn’t as attrac­ tive a future as Jackson posits. But I also don’t agree with McAfee that all is hunky-dory in ecomodernism. Modernism is failing but postmodernism is not the answer. To make matters worse, I am also not completely convinced by the pragmatist position that we need a bit of everything and don’t need to change all that much. The reason is that what we are doing now is not working. Taking a middle ground might imply that the status quo is okay. I strongly disagree with that position also. We need to figure out something else. Is there something else that would constitute a truly regenerative future? If I am to start to unpack the world that surely awaits us post all the widely advertised solutions that are surely dead ends (sustainability, eco-efficiency, continued industrialism, ecomodernism, degrowth, post growth), it starts with understanding what questions economics does and does not give answers to. Economics is not the answer to meaning in your life. But that does not mean that it isn’t important. Sustainability could possibly be understood as an economic paradigm within eco-efficiency, but that doesn’t come close to being a regenerative paradigm. Ecomodernism has a lot to answer for, too, in its enviable but ultimately pointless techno optimism which contains a grow­ ing host of enormous, mostly unmitigated risks (from AI, biotech, nanotech, and quantum tech). All things considered, the regenerative paradigm is also unclear about its economic fundamentals. Beyond behavioral economics Behavioral economics has already had its heyday (Thaler and Sunstein, 2021). The useful yet overly simplistic notion of nudges as a “choice architecture” of gentle interventions, is flippant. The downside is that it reintroduces a func­ tionalist argument that omits the motivational thrust that is at the core of value-based living. On the bright side, it avoids the tautologies of most eco­ efficiency, industrial ecology, ESG measurement, or even newer carbon accounting approaches. These are tautologies because they are process judg­ ments that lack predictive power, given that they lack an agreed starting point, and even lack a desired end point. In contrast, we need a management framework general enough to guide early-stage investors, industrialists, consumers, and policymakers alike yet specific enough to avoid the pitfalls of earlier conceptual shortcuts that, arguably, either have tended to be overly complex, measured the wrong thing, or amounted to greenwashing. For that, we need to get inspired by the writers Bauwens, Mazzucato, and Bourdieu. Commons scholar Michel Bauwens is committed to expanding the peer-to-peer principle because of its potential to create a fairer society that lives within our resource boundaries. Social econ­ omist Mariana Mazzucato’s notion of value and the need to protect public goods is a powerful argument on the side of building stable institutions that

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can simultaneously innovate. This is sorely needed if we are to turn the tide on ecological destruction. Sociologist of inequality, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” (e.g., “active” habits) as the main logic that underpins behavior, is a perhaps sur­ prisingly clarifying insight. Bourdieu’s theory of action builds on his concept of “habitus” as both “structured structure” (an institutionalized action pat­ tern) and “structuring structure” (a habit in the process of being formed), and illustrates how action speaks larger than words. Also, it implies that the action you take (as an individual or organization) stems from who you are (or want to become), as opposed to who you want to be perceived to be. To be clear: an investor must “live” their investment thesis or will be revealed to be insincere. As a result, any investment without the right actions (pre or post) might be counterproductive to the causes involved. A regenerative investor, to my mind, is an individual who is a longevityminded steward of the combined flourishing of humanity and biosphere and shows this commitment by actions they take in their own life. To me, a number of attributes follow from that statement. This investor is informed of nature’s historical role in the evolution of humanity and innovation. He or she is fully aware of nature’s awesome power and potential resources, includ­ ing through direct experience with outdoor peak experiences (regular, exten­ ded nature hikes, daily gardening, awareness of the positive impact of natureuse by others in other geolocales) that bring them into flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). This investor is aware of risks presented by human intervention, yet embraces nature's innate ability to resist damage, recover, and persevere. He or she is capable of financing activities that demonstrably re-energize humanity’s relationship with ecology to achieve a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship where biodiversity and humans both thrive, and with­ out resorting to static ideals of how things once were. Lastly, this investor is ambitiously striving to measure the impact of one’s activity and efforts but without “locking into” frameworks that necessarily are tentative or pre­ liminary. Ecology is a moving target depending on how much we know about how humanity is affected but also because ecology itself is both subject to chaos and to order, the relationship between which is still poorly understood (Thompson, 2022). That being said, this investor firmly believes in the cau­ tionary principle (Kriebel et al., 2001).

A regeneration fallacy? Regeneration is tossed around a lot these days: regenerative capitalism (Elk­ ington, 2020; Hawken et al., 1999; Hawken, 2021; Fiekowsky and Douglis, 2022; Fullerton, 2015), regenerative geography (Huijbens, 2021), or climate restoration (Fiekowsky and Douglis, 2022). Yet, it’s a bit of a placeholder for something we don’t yet understand. All we know is that it may become important someday. It is one among several optimistic scenarios that describe possible futures.

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In 2015, ex-J.P. Morgan banking executive John B. Fullerton’s essay “Regenerative capitalism” recognized that capitalism is about to (yet again) “embark on what follows the beginning”. Paraphrasing economist Sir Nicholas Stern, climate change represents the largest market failure in history (Stern, 2007). At core, Fullerton embraces biomimicry as a model in business: “The universal patterns and principles the cosmos uses to build stable, heal­ thy, and sustainable systems throughout the real world can and must be used as a model for economic-system design” (Fullerton, 2015). In Fullerton’s model of regenerative capitalism, humanity is seen as part of an inter­ connected web of life, viewed holistically as “harmonization of multiple kinds of wealth or capital, including social, cultural, living, and experiential capi­ tal” where we adapt to the changing environment through “empowered par­ ticipation”, which “honors community and place”, nurturing resilient communities and regions, realizing that abundance flourishes synergistically at the edges of systems “where the bonds holding the dominant pattern in place are the weakest”, seeking balance (efficiency/resilience, collaboration/compe­ tition, diversity/coherence, small/medium/large organizations and needs) because it is essential to systemic health. It is when Fullerton writes about the need to foster “widespread” social and economic vitality that his paradigm begins to have legs. Spreading the benefits of capitalism was never the strong suit of market capitalism.

Interview 5.3 The Road to Regenerative Capitalism. Interview with John B. Fullerton. Futurized podcast.

Another name that seems to stick is doughnut economics, after Raworth’s eponymous book, attempting to redesign an economic logic around regen­ erative, distributive, and modular principles with “a social foundation” and an “ecological ceiling” to avoid overshooting planetary boundaries (Raworth, 2018). The idea here, as Erinch Sahan told me, is to “put nature on the Board of directors”, a steward ownership approach taken by organizations as diverse as Patagonia, Manos del Uruguay, Bosch, Sharetribe, and Mondragon (Undheim, 2023).

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Interview 5.4 Doughnut Economics Regeneration. Interview with Erinch Sahan, Business & Enterprise Lead, Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL). Futurized podcast.

In Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism (2020), John Elkington, dubbed the “Godfather of Sustainability”, explores expo­ nential breakthroughs that (might) expand corporate horizons from responsi­ bility, through resilience, and onto regeneration (Elkington, 2020). Elkington, who coined the term “triple bottom line” describing a sustainability frame­ work that examines a company’s social, environmental, and economic impact in 1994, and the even more business-friendly term “people, planet, and profit”, is a pioneer of social enterprise, including a co-founder of a few of the first B-corporations in the UK. A major influencer in corporate social responsibility, he argues we must “upend capitalism” with “green swans” which are “systemic solutions to global challenges” that “lead, via evolution and adaptation, to a better place”, creating “economic, social, and environ­ mental wealth” (Elkington, 2020). To him, the alternative is to see “our sur­ prisingly fragile economies, societies, and natural environment” unravel post two degrees of warming. Better then, he writes, to believe in the power of unreasonable people (Elkington, Hartigan, and Schwab, 2008). These are the people the 1997 Apple ad celebrated as “the crazy ones, misfits, rebels, trou­ blemakers, round pegs in square holes”. The point though, as Elkington writes, is that “the ultimate test is whether whatever form of wealth creation we do evolve by the 2030s is capable of actively restoring and regenerating our natural environment and, in parallel, our economies and societies” (Elk­ ington, 2020). One or the other is not enough. Elkington’s “swanspotter guide” is great as general guidance, espousing characteristics like exponential, resilient, future-oriented, renewable, and plant-based, but his examples are a bit lacking. The reality is that legacy industries that don’t evolve, the tobacco, auto, oil, steel, and mining industries being the prime examples, tend to die a sudden death as sinners, too. It is actually in their own interest to adapt, otherwise they will have a Minsky moment. The trouble is that our world is facing a high number of interrelated “wicked problems” for which there is no clear problem statement, solution template, or explanation.

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Interview 5.5 Green Swans. Interview with John Elkington. Futurized podcast.

As Baldridge (2021) writes: “Regeneration flips the script from net withdrawals or harm to the biosphere to positive net contribution”. Regenerative agriculture, which ties into my point about behavioral aspects you can practice in your life, with your significant others, friends, and in your own garden, “restores soil health and quality, minimizes use of pesticides and fertilizers, helps soils better retain water and nutrients, restores biodiversity, and even sequesters carbon (‘carbon farm­ ing’)”. Perhaps only when practicing regeneration can one properly invest in it (whether it is an agtech or a hydrogen startup) from a place of deep, personal experience, and hard-won insight from success (beautiful flowers or a bountiful harvest) and failure (losing the dance with the insects that munch on your vegetable leaves). With regeneration as your impact investing objective, the decarbonization strategy might shift from carbon capture to biodiversity (Montemayor, 2020).

Conclusion Industrial ecology was not the solution to sustainability in business. Flourishing is far too vague a concept to spearhead corporate change. Behavioral economics contributed the notion of nudges, but because of its individualistic, psychological focus, is way too simplistic to begin to describe, much less help modify, the complexities of human economic behavior. The challenge of transitioning from an industrial to a regenerative economy is indeed a behavioral challenge but one that needs to be tackled by changing the basic symbols and memes that motivate social groups. Regeneration might not exactly be a fallacy, but its tenets need a better description before it can gain momentum. The next chapter traces the failures of dominant actors from politics to the environmental movement to startups.

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com/pulse/evolution-esg-four-versions-environmental-social-melissa-baldridge/ Acces­ sed 13 April 2023. Ballotpedia (2022) Ecomodernism, Ballotpedia. Available at: https://ballotpedia.org/ Ecomodernism (Accessed 22 December 2022). Baxter, B. (2000) Ecologism: An Introduction. Georgetown University Press. Bisinella, V., Christensen, T.H. and Astrup, T.F. (2021) Future scenarios and life cycle assessment: Systematic review and recommendations, International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 26 (11), pp. 2143–2170. Capaldi, C.A., Passmor, H., Nisbet, E.K. et al. (2015) Flourishing in nature: A review of the benefits of connecting with nature and its application as a wellbeing inter­ vention, International Journal of Wellbeing, 5 (4). Available at: https://doi.org/10. 5502/ijw.v5i4.449. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row. Curran, M.A. (2013) Life cycle assessment: A review of the methodology and its application to sustainability, Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, 2 (3), pp. 273–277. Daly, H.E. (1991) Steady-State Economics. 2nd edn. Island Press. Daly, H.E. and Farley, J. (2010) Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications. 2nd edn. Island Press. Devall, B. (1980) The Deep Ecology Movement, Natural Resources Journal, 20 (2), pp. 299–322. Dobson, A. (2007) Green Political Thought. 4th edn. Routledge. Elkington, J. (2020) Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism. Fast Company Press. Elkington, J., Hartigan, P. and Schwab, K. (2008) The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World. 7th edn. Har­ vard Business Review Press. Fiekowsky, P. and Douglis, C. (2022). Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race. Rivertowns Books. Frosch, R.A. and Gallopoulos, N.E. (1989) Strategies for manufacturing, Scientific American, 261 (3), pp. 144–153. Fullerton, J. (2015) Regenerative capitalism. Capital Institute. Available at: https://cap italinstitute.org/regenerative-capitalism/ Haeckel, E. (1866) Generelle Morphologie. Bd. I. Allgemeine Anatomie der Organis­ men. Bd. II Generelle Morphologie. Allgemeine Entwickelungsgeschichte der Orga­ nismen (Eng.: General Morphology of Organism). Georg Reimer. Hansen, M.M., Jones, R., and Tocchini, K. (2017) Shinrin-Yoku (forest bathing) and nature therapy: A state-of-the-art review, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14 (8), p. 851. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14080851 Hawken, P. (2021) Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Penguin Books. Hawken, P., Lovins, A., Lovins, H. (1999). Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. Little Brown and Company. Helne, T. (2021) Well-being for a better world: The contribution of a radically rela­ tional and nature-inclusive conception of well-being to the sustainability transfor­ mation, Sustainability: Science Practice and Policy, 17 (1), pp. 220–230. Hirvilammi, T. and Helne, T. (2014) Changing paradigms: A sketch for sustainable wellbeing and ecosocial policy, Sustainability: Science Practice and Policy, 6 (4), pp. 2160–2175.

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Huijbens, E.H. (2021) Developing Earthly Attachments in the Anthropocene. Routledge. IFRS (2021) IFRS Foundation announces International Sustainability Standards Board, consolidation with CDSB and VRF, and publication of prototype disclosure requirements. Available at: www.ifrs.org/news-and-events/news/2021/11/ifrs-founda tion-announces-issb-consolidation-with-cdsb-vrf-publication-of-prototypes/ (Acces­ sed 11 December 2022). Jackson, T. (2016) Prosperity without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow. 2nd edn. Routledge. Jackson, T. (2021) Post Growth: Life after Capitalism. 1st edn. Polity. Kriebel, D., Tickner, J., Epstein, P. et al. (2001). The precautionary principle in envir­ onmental science, Environmental Health Perspectives, 109 (9), pp. 871–876. https:// doi.org/10.1289/ehp.01109871 Levit, G.S. and Hossfeld, U. (2019) Ernst Haeckel in the history of biology, Current Biology, 29 (24), pp. R1276–R1284. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019. 10.064 (Accessed 13 April 2023). Little, K. (2020) ‘Pastoral’, in Lynch, D.S. (ed.) Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Lit­ erature. Oxford University Press. Available at: https://oxfordre.com/literature/page/ eicletter/letter-from-the-editor/ Louv, R. (2008) Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Updated and expanded edition. Algonquin Books. Lovelock, J. (2016) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford Landmark Science). Illustrated edition. Oxford University Press. McAfee, A. (2020) Why degrowth is the worst idea on the planet, Wired, 6 October. Available at: www.wired.com/story/opinion-why-degrowth-is-the-worst-idea-on-the-pla net/ (Accessed 7 December 2022). McDonough, W. and Braungart, M. (2002) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. 1st edn. North Point Press. Miyazaki, Y. (2018) Shinrin Yoku: The Japanese Art of Forest Bathing. Illustrated edition. Timber Press. Mohin, T. (2021) What the COP26 agreement really means for the climate, Fast Company. Available at: www.fastcompany.com/90701071/what-the-cop26-agreem ent-really-means-for-the-climate (Accessed 11 December 2022). Montemayor, L.O. (2020) Regeneration: The new impact investing imperative! Medium. Available at: https://lauraom.medium.com/regeneration-the-new-impact-in vesting-imperative-bc0f1ef11a67 (Accessed 11 December 2022). Moore, A. (2021) Do Build: How to Make and Lead a Business the World Needs (Do Books, 28). The Do Book Co. Murdoch, I. (1999) Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Penguin Books. Murdoch, I. (2001) The Sovereignty of Good. 2nd edn. Routledge. Naess, A. (1973) The shallow and the deep, long‐range ecology movement. A sum­ mary, Inquiry: A Journal of Medical Care Organization, Provision and Financing, 16 (1–4), pp. 95–100. Nature (2020) A new quest to uncover what helps humans flourish, Nature. Available at: www.nature.com/articles/d42473-020-00317-3 (Accessed 6 December 2022). Nelson, A. and Coffey, B. (2019) What is “ecological economics” and why do we need to talk about it?, The Conversation, 4 November. Available at: http://theconversa tion.com/what-is-ecological-economics-and-why-do-we-need-to-talk-about-it-123915 (Accessed 25 January 2023).

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Raworth, K. (2018) Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Illustrated edition. Chelsea Green Publishing. Ryff, C.D. (2014) Psychological well-being revisited: Advances in the science and practice of eudaimonia, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 83 (1), pp. 10–28. Sacks, D. (2008) Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough, Fast Company. Available at: www.fastcompany.com/1042475/green-guru-gone-wrong-william-mcdo nough (Accessed 11 December 2022). Saling, P. et al. (2002) Eco-efficiency analysis by BASF: The method, International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 7 (4), pp. 203–218. Schmidheiny, S. (1992) Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Develop­ ment and the Environment. 1st edn. The MIT Press. Schultz, N. and Latour, B. (2023) On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo. 1st edn. Translated by J. Rose. Polity. Schwarz, W. (2009) Arne Næss, The Guardian, 15 January. Available at: www.theguardia n.com/environment/2009/jan/15/obituary-arne-naess (Accessed 7 December 2022). Stern, N. (2007) The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. 1st edn. Cam­ bridge University Press. Templeton World (2021) Harnessing the science of human flourishing to accelerate sustainable development, Templeton World Charity. Available at: www.templeton worldcharity.org/humanflourishing/harnessing-science-human-flourishing-accelera te-sustainable-development (Accessed 6 December 2022). Thaler, R.H. and Sunstein, C.R. (2021) Nudge: The Final Edition. Revised edition. Penguin Books. Thompson, J. (2022) Hidden chaos found to lurk in ecosystems. Quanta Magazine, 27 July. Available at: www.quantamagazine.org/hidden-chaos-found-to-lurk-in-ecosys tems-20220727/ Accessed 13 April 2023. Toxopeus, M.E., de Koeijer, B.L.A. and Meij, A.G.G.H. (2015) Cradle to Cradle: Effective vision vs. efficient practice? Procedia CIRP, 29, pp. 384–389. Undheim, T.A. (2021) Regenerative business with Alan Moore. Futurized podcast. Avail­ able at: www.futurized.org/regenerative-business/ (Accessed 20 December 2022). Undheim, T.A. (2022) The real world beyond sustainability with John Ehrenfeld. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/the-real-world-beyond-sustaina bility/ (Accessed 6 December 2022). Undheim, T.A. (2023) Doughnut economics regeneration. Interview with Erinch Sahan. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/doughnut-economics-re generation/ (Accessed 6 April 2023). Xia, Y., Liu, Y., Han, C., Gao, Y. and Lan, Y. (2022) How does environmentally spe­ cific servant leadership fuel employees’ low-carbon behavior? The role of environ­ mental self-accountability and power distance orientation, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19 (5), p. 3025. Available at: https://doi. org/10.3390/ijerph19053025.

6

Failures of dominant actors

I personally know a bit about failure. I wrote about it in my book, Disruption Games (Undheim, 2020). The book was about the failures of MIT startups. Expected to succeed against all odds. I also wrote about my own failures. Failure to see potential. My own failed startup. The failure to cut my losses in time. The loss of spousal trust. The deterioration of friendships mixed in with the business. On the other hand, the truth is, that when handled right, failure can become catalytic. That happens if we deeply acknowledge the sting of failure. See the causes. And, use failure as a motivator. A way to do things better next time. To live more intensely in the moment. To capture wonder, we must find urgency within ourselves. That’s what’s needed now. That’s why I dwell on these climate policy failures. And why you do well in doing the same. Where were you when these things were going down? Where are you now? Where do you want to go? And, where do you want the world to be? We are all climate investors. But some of us don’t know it yet. So far, we have not invested well. That can change. Over the past 50 years, cleantech policy, regulation, and startups mostly failed, fueling 50 years of capitalist resource extraction excess. Will cleantech in the next 50 years improve? Despite constant international attention, not only has climate change policy failed, but energy innovation has failed. That is to say that it has been non-existent. First, there was innocence, because if you are benefiting from it, what’s not to like about the oil and gas boom? Then, in the 1980s, as evidence mounted, there was denial. All the benefactors in oil-producing countries said, let’s keep this going for a while. In the late 80s, there was this convenient concept, sustainability. This was followed by a brief pause to reflect. Business as usual ensued. There have been proposals to build new markets, the Kyoto protocol. A handful of countries did, hurrah! Out of the legally binding 2016 Paris Agreement, there have been 194 national pledges, such as net zero. But those were empty promises. It is increasingly becoming clear that we will never get to net zero. Not in this century, anyway, and certainly not before 2050. And not without some technological (and expensive) innovation investment miracle (Dyke, Watson, and Knorr, 2021). There has been corpo­ rate self-regulation, resulting in ESG reporting in their annual reports. There DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-9

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is now a (hitherto unfunded) loss and damage fund, so Pacific islands can get pennies back on the dollar when relocating towns inland because of sea level rise. I’m not celebrating, and you shouldn’t either. Oil rich nations, their corporate handlers, and by consequence, citizens, all have turned the world into negative spirals of increasingly severe climate emergencies. There are over 100 countries with proven oil reserves. Half the world. That makes 4 billion people complicit. The other 4 billion are victims. It’s as simple as that. Although there is some spillover of people who are both victims and complicit. Either way, fueling 50 years of excess emissions through burning hydrocarbons has been costly for the world but clearly lucrative for some. Global warming is caused by excess release of carbon into the atmosphere. A whole host of other undesirable processes are becoming unstoppable and irreversible. But while we worry about carbon dioxide, bio­ diversity is dramatically reducing year over year. Plastic waste is accumulating in our oceans and in our kids’ lungs. What a grand and utter shame. The only reversal in sight starts with behavioral changes within each of us. What makes sense is to start with ourselves, with forces completely within our own control. Then, we can move to our family, our spouse, kids, siblings, or parents. Beyond that is our household, all the people who spend significant time in and around our house and property. After that, we can worry about our community, our workplace, and only then, the national level, and poten­ tially do something internationally. This will take time. Policy change can be highly effective. But systemic change can start with the most miniscule of adjustments. It starts with planting native plants in your garden. But it cannot stop there. The largest negative impact is not companies or nations polluting. Our greatest human loss is individuals living their lives as if none of this was happening. They make humanity slightly less human every day that passes. I have been that person. You have been that person. Perhaps you still are. We cannot afford that. We need everyone on board.

The causes of eco-failures Let’s turn your attention to the causal process that fueled these failures. My theory is that the operating principle of society’s governance, namely democ­ racy, in all its forms, has been fundamentally flawed for hundreds of years. How? By not properly representing its constituents. Let’s start with radical longtermism, an ideology that supports protecting the rights of non-born human beings thousands of years, if not millions of years into the future (MacAskill, 2022). That’s fraught with difficult issues to consider. Starting with the fact that it attempts to mask enormous uncertainty. Wouldn’t we all want to know what ills might face us multiple generations from now? Instead, for starters, let’s consider that we are not giving currently living human beings an equal vote. Kids between the ages of 15 and 17 who typically cannot vote, yet are actively taking part in consumer society. That means they are causing climate change but not usually able to help politically. A whopping 33.2

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percent of the world’s population are under 20 years old (Ang, 2021). And, who is representing nature? Biodiversity, for example? There should be national representatives, entire agencies, local action groups, you name it. Take who represents mammals, as an example. Scientists have identified 6,495 mammal species on Earth, roughly one fifth of which are known to be threatened or extinct (Burgin et al., 2018). Restricting democracy to people does not seem like a way to enter the next 50 years of history. If we do that, it might end up being the last century. For humans. Nature will likely survive on a geological scale. But none of the humans you know today will benefit from it. That’s the reality. The bigger challenge is how to organize democratic participation, by proxy, for other species than human beings. I’m not saying whales themselves should have the vote. Yet. Until we find a way to properly communicate with them. The fundamental principle of the modern animal rights movement is that many non-human animals have basic interests that deserve recognition, con­ sideration, and protection (Singer, 2009). The movement for cetacean rights may not exactly be gaining momentum, but it exists (Cetacean Rights, 2022). Cetaceans is an infraorder of aquatic mammals consisting of three orders: whales, dolphins, and porpoises that have specialized brain cells called spindle neurons associated with advanced abilities such as recognizing, remembering, reasoning, communicating, perceiving, adapting to change, problem solving and understanding (WDC, 2018). Cetaceans have the ability to use tools, understand human gestures, and the ability to form long-term social bonds, including with human beings (Mann, 2017). They can also suffer. These ani­ mals use sound to sense what is around them (e.g., echolocation, to hunt for prey and find their peers). Consider this: if the entire species of non-human mammals had a vote in the UN Security Council, how fast do you think biodiversity legislation would be proposed? What would they feel about noise pollution? Meat industry legislation? Animal cruelty laws? Right now, they are only represented (poorly) by proxy. Through whoever chooses to defend their rights. If it suits their national interest at the time. Delving into disruption Previously, in my book Future Tech (2021), I have written about the impor­ tance of understanding the five forces of societal disruption (Undheim, 2021). I emphasized the importance of learning to spot technology, policy realities, business interests, social dynamics, and environmental context in an intuitive way. Learn to cut away all the jargon. Explain complexity in everyday lan­ guage. The disruption caused within democratic states stems not from lack of knowledge in these domains, but from the absence of unifying principles between micro-collectives. I don’t understand teenagers. I don’t understand rust-belt Americans. I have no inkling what it’s like to live at the poverty level in New Jersey. Having lived my adult life in Europe and the US, I don’t even

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understand the country I grew up in anymore (Norway). But, I know this much. Technology is never to blame for anything. It is a mirror of society. But when we don’t understand each other how can we rule together? Democracy presupposes community. Community presupposes a base level of agreed terms. Shared meaning. Presumes we want to treat all others the way we want to be treated ourselves. But when we are not the same as the others, the logic does not work so well. I don’t think democracy can survive other­ ness. To the task then, either to understand otherness and reduce its sting. Or, to build a different governance model that doesn’t rely so much on shared reality. Take your pick. Fruitful bonds as an ecological tool French sociologist, Michel Maffesoli has described the postmodern era as a Time of the Tribes (Maffesoli, 1996). A world of declining individualism. The rise of affinity groups. A situation where tribal instincts again have caused us to resort to smaller communities. We form new group affiliations that make sense to our increasingly effervescent, ephemeral preoccupations with the present. We are aware of what we feel at any given time. This as opposed to the more lasting basis of community which could be found in historical experiences through time. Family history. Ancestral traditions. Storytelling. Common cultural practices including traditions, languages, and games. Livelihoods were more similar before. But even now, we attempt to share the task of working together. We did a lot of it during COVID-19. Isolated from each other but joined up online. The accumulation of physical spaces with its physical boundaries, its vil­ lages, cities, and countries, was a creation of modernity. But, the necessity of sharing resources persists. The value of the city as an infrastructure is getting even stronger. But as urbanity expands and the megapolis becomes com­ monplace, is there a society left? The longing for sharing is still there. It might even be more pronounced. But we share in disjointed communion. We prac­ tice our togetherness in more and more esoteric places away from the com­ mons. That won’t work.

Consumption Nothing about consumer consumption currently, or at any point over these 50 years, truly considers the environmental impact. The rise of the eco-friendly consumer has been slow, and studies tend to show embracing purpose-driven brands is different from purchase patterns, but it is at least perceptible as a possibility in the near future (White, Hardisty, and Habib, 2019; Asad, 2021; Emmert, 2021). In defense of consumers, perhaps we would need to see it in front of us as an environmental tax before we act. Polluter pays principles applied to con­ sumers would be things like fees on plastic bags or any plastic products, road tax, or carbon tax on air travel, as well as the obvious one, gasoline, heating

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oil and natural gas taxes (Hirs, 2020). Some argue the downside of consumer carbon tax might be that it has some administration costs (although digitali­ zation of ecommerce makes that simple to administer). A more credible objection is that carbon tax is regressive, since by making fossil fuels more expensive, it imposes a harsher burden on those with low incomes. They will, one argues, pay a higher percentage of their income for necessities like gasoline, electricity, and food (Amadeo, 2022). True, but that’s why governments need to have compensation schemes for the poor that alle­ viate these costs, if not entirely, at least by a proportion. Even without environmental taxes on consumers, further behavioral shifts are possible, even foreseeable, as the eco-cataclysm intensifies. Proof of this line of argument is the ongoing pandemic. People’s mask-wearing habits change with the uptick in the variants and the local cases in one’s community and with different vaccination levels (Bartsch et al., 2022). The trick is to institute some of these behaviors sooner. And, find ways not to regress once results start to trickle in, and thereby lose the earlier advantage gained. The World Bank reports that only 40 countries and 20 municipalities use either carbon taxes or carbon emissions trading in some form, covering a mere 13 percent of annual global greenhouse gas emissions (Amadeo, 2022). Al Gore first proposed the US carbon tax in 1992 but failed to pass it. Clin­ ton tried but ultimately failed to impose a “BTU” tax on all forms of energy. There have been “carbon dividend” plans proposed, as well. The obvious problem is that unless all the world’s countries introduce carbon tax at the same time, other countries pay an abatement cost penalty. The tradeoff between carbon tax and economic growth is a tough one, where countries always choose the latter, and consumers tend to, as well. There is also the question of relative carbon usage, given that consumers in the US use far more energy than consumers in Brazil, Iraq, India, or let’s not even talk about Tanzania, or other places in Africa (Bryce, 2019). However, these are significant implementation challenges, but not non-starters. The market failure of not having consumer (and industry) taxes on carbonpositive or eco-inefficient behaviors is a joint responsibility. Governments should agree to it. Intergovernmental collaboration should ensure it. Local carbon taxes make a lot of sense because those could be very targeted. Cor­ porate carbon tax should be pushed past lobbyists in the self-interest of those same corporations. Citizens should pay personal carbon tax. Employees should pay their carbon tax and part of it should be passed on to their employers. Consumers should face carbon taxes on all goods and services purchased. Not having a universal carbon tax starting in 1990 is a tragedy of the commons that we must fix immediately.

Limits: How energy limits us downstream and upstream Energy may not be everything. But it does provide limits to what human civilization can accomplish. Encyclopedic technology history scholar Vaclav

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Smil points out that energy’s role in society reflects “desires” rather than “needs”. He says, “higher energy use does not guarantee anything except greater environmental burdens” (Smil, 2017). Balancing close to energy determinism himself, “dominant fuels and prime movers” being “among the most important factors in shaping a society”, and “one of its many forms must be transformed to get anything done”, he says he rejects that argument, “like any other reductionist explanation” as “misleading”. For example, he feels artistic production does not depend on energy. Yet, he thinks “the probability of adopting rationality, moderation, and restraint in resource consumption in general and energy use in particular, and even more so the likelihood of preserving such a course, is impossible to quantify” (Smil, 2017). Also, “life’s cardinal characteristics have been expansion and increasing complexity” and would need to be “reversed” in order to “shift to moderated energy uses”, implying a “revolutionary delinking of social status from mate­ rial consumption”, which would “eliminate the quest for social and economic mobility.” So what, we give up? Well, he notes two “contradictory expectations” regarding the energy basis of modern society, namely that of “chronic con­ servatism regarding the power of technical innovation” or “exaggerated claims made on behalf of new energy sources” and instead recommends to “capture them, convert them, and store them on scales orders of magnitude higher than we have done so far”, which would take “several generations” (Smil, 2017). However, he has no encouragement for “technology optimists” and their “fairy tales” of a “future of unlimited energy” from “super efficient PV cells”, “nuclear fusion”, or “terraformed” planets either and recommends a “commitment to change” (Smil, 2017).

Conclusion Fixing past failures can be significantly less painful than critics claim. But it will never be painless. Neither should it be expected to be. We would be changing society’s basic running model. Being against this shift is, morally speaking, an illegitimate position to have as a global citizen. However, rea­ listically, we should tilt it instead. It is easier to do. More people would get on board. Politically, it might make more sense. Viewed from almost any per­ spective, the tilt makes more sense. Now try to convince the environmentalist that this is the case. This will be difficult. Which is why part of my analysis on the path to regeneration involves realizing that at crucial points in the journey over the past 50 years, the environmental movement may have hurt their cause as much as they have helped it. I have, myself, been part of the pro­ blem. The moralistic stances are rarely helpful in discussions, although hard to avoid. But particularly look at the missed opportunity right after the US EPA was founded by President Nixon in 1970—when the democrats should have seized the moment. The missed opportunity of the Brundtland Com­ mission in 1987—when sustainability was poorly defined and let both

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government and business off the hook. Lastly, consider the ridiculous defa­ cing of artworks that has been going on in 2022 (Thompson, 2022). None of this helps us much. And it brings the notion that environmentalists are, for the most part, unreasonable. Not unreasonable in a good way. Just unrea­ sonable. Cleantech will improve over the course of the next 50 years, not because of our successes but because we take on board the lessons of our failures. The next chapter tackles the crux of the transition to a regenerative world: modifying human group behavior.

References Amadeo, K. (2022) Carbon tax, its purpose, and how it works. The Balance. March 13. Available at: www.thebalancemoney.com/carbon-tax-definition-how-it-works-4158043 (Accessed 13 April 2023). Ang, C. (2021) Visualizing the world’s population by age group. Available at: www. visualcapitalist.com/the-worlds-population-2020-by-age/ (Accessed 24 November 2022). Asad, H. (2021) Customers with sustainable mindset: A new era of sustainability, Environment + Energy Leader. Available at: www.environmentalleader.com/2021/06/ sustainably-minded-customers-the-new-era-of-sustainability/ (Accessed 24 Novem­ ber 2022). Bartsch, S.M., O’Shea, K.J., Chin, K.L. et al. (2022) Maintaining face mask use before and after achieving different COVID-19 vaccination coverage levels: A modelling study, The Lancet: Public Health, 7 (4), pp. e356–e365. Burgin, C.J., Colella, J.P., Khan, P.L., Upham, N.S. (2018) How many species of mammals are there? Journal of Mammalogy, 99 (1), pp. 1–14. Cetacean Rights (2022) Declaration of rights for cetaceans: Whales and dolphins. Available at: www.cetaceanrights.org/ (Accessed 24 November 2022). Dyke, J., Watson, R. and Knorr, W. (2021) Climate scientists: Concept of net zero is a dangerous trap, The Conversation, 22 April. Available at: http://theconversation. com/climate-scientists-concept-of-net-zero-is-a-dangerous-trap-157368 (Accessed 24 November 2022). Emmert, A. (2021) The rise of the eco-friendly consumer, Strategy+Business. Available at: www.strategy-business.com/article/The-rise-of-the-eco-friendly-consumer (Acces­ sed 24 November 2022). Hirs, E. (2020) What will an American carbon tax cost you? Forbes Magazine, 21 July. Available at: www.forbes.com/sites/edhirs/2020/07/21/what-will-an-america n-carbon-tax-cost-you/ (Accessed 13 December 2022). MacAskill, W. (2022) What We Owe the Future. Basic Books. Maffesoli, M. (1996) The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society). 1st edition. SAGE Publications Ltd. Mann, J. (ed.) (2017) Deep Thinkers: Inside the Minds of Whales, Dolphins, and Por­ poises. Illustrated edition. University of Chicago Press. Singer, P. (2009) Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement. Updated edition. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Smil, V. (2017) Energy and Civilization: A History. The MIT Press.

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Thompson, E.L. (2022) All the times people have shot, puked upon, and meat-cleav­ ered famous paintings to make a point. Available at: https://slate.com/news-and-p olitics/2022/10/climate-paintings-protests-history-art-destruction.html (Accessed 24 November 2022). Undheim, T. (2020) Disruption Games: How to Thrive on Serial Failure. Atmosphere Press. Undheim, T.A. (2021) Future Tech: How to Capture Value from Disruptive Industry Trends. Kogan Page Publishers. WDC (2018) How intelligent are whales and dolphins? Whale & Dolphin Conservation USA. Available at: https://us.whales.org/whales-dolphins/how-intelligent-are-wha les-and-dolphins/ (Accessed 13 December 2022). White, K., Hardisty, D.J. and Habib, R. (2019) The elusive green consumer, Harvard Business Review, 1 July. Available at: https://hbr.org/2019/07/the-elusive-green-consum er (Accessed 24 November 2022).

Part 3

Scaling challenges

7

Re-centralizing the self as an environmental agent

Both structurally, and individually, the price we pay to be stuck in industrial capit­ alism is high. People who seek to accumulate material possessions face a “greater risk of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem”, and problems with relationships and intimacy, regardless of age, income, or culture (Kasser, 2003). The cost of indus­ trialization since 1850 will amount to several trillions of dollars in annual damages by 2100. The Office of Management and Budget, which administers the US federal budget, estimates floods, drought, wildfires, and hurricanes made worse by climate change could cost the US federal budget about $2 trillion each year—a 7.1 percent loss in annual revenue—by the end of the century (Vahlsing, 2022). But unfortu­ nately, although they will pay some way or another, these damages cannot all be fixed by the world’s largest emitters. One reason is that they don’t have the money. Even if they enacted emergency budgets, all the available dollars, rupees, yuans, riyals, or euros, wouldn’t begin to pay for the loss and damage caused by climate change and loss of biodiversity. At least that’s what politicians would want us to believe. In truth, it’s just a question of when to take the costs. To be clear, the costs of inaction are high even in monetary terms. But they are not impossibly high. There are also smart ways to go about it. Spending wisely is a good start. Behavioral change grows out of our identity. Altering behavior on a civili­ zational scale is going to take more than the nudges governments have intro­ duced so far. But punishments alone won’t work either.

The curious case of Norway The COP27 agreement on a “Loss and Damage” fund for vulnerable countries was a breakthrough (UNCC, 2022). Putting money to that pledge is another matter. The accumulated damages are something only these countries’ sum of sovereign wealth funds (often built on fossil fuel revenues) could begin to address. To illustrate this point, take a look at the small Scandinavian country of Norway. A tiny part of this picture, perhaps, but one I know well. Norway discovered oil in 1967, but the adventure really began with the Ekofisk field in 1969. Norway’s state-owned oil production company was formed in 1972, centered in Stavanger, a few miles from where my family name is from. In 1990, the Norwegian government created the Oil Fund (“Oljefondet”). Today, it is DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-11

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known as the Government Pension Fund Global (GPF-G), for those who want to look it up. The purpose of the GPF-G is to invest parts of the large surplus from the petroleum industry. Just to give you an idea, a few years ago the government decided that the fund would expand its investments to real estate. The bewildered fund managers on Wall Street quickly discovered that there was not enough trad­ able real estate on the world’s stock exchanges to make that happen easily. Instead, they started buying city blocks in the world’s megacities. For me, it is near home to think of what one could do to reinvest Norway’s $1.1 trillion fund. And, it’s relevant, because I have a vote in the matter. I’ve recently begun to take in the reality that, from most perspectives, this is technically blood money from nature. Why? Because it was earned from extracting hydrocarbons that we had no business extracting at this rate. The consequences became clear after about 20 years into the business. At least, that’s when Shell knew (Franta, 2021). The fact that my prided industrial inheritance is blood money is hard to swallow. That money is supposed to pay for our pensions. Admittedly, Norway’s small population of 5.4 million people isn’t a heavy load. However, they are my compatriots, friends, and family. I would assume most Norwegians assume that money is theirs and does not belong to nature. Yet, that’s not the most logical view. Kristian Bye, Director of Innovation Norway in San Francisco and Palo Alto, said: The story of Norway is complicated. There’s its industrial background. Sus­ tainability has come over a period of time. It’s obviously an oil producing country. […] Yet, so dependent on natural resources. […] and looking to keep and maintain the beauty of nature brought Norway to exploring opportunities. Hydropower became the main source of electricity, very often done locally, giving every town their own energy supply. Norway followed this approach when it discovered oil. We made sure to have political control over how those resources were leveraged. Activism led to strong subsidies for electrification. Now, 54% of all new cars in Norway are electric compared to 3% in California. (Undheim, 2021)

Interview 7.1 Sustainable Norway. Interview with Kristian Bye. Futurized podcast.

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In 2022, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund announced it aims to have every company in its vast portfolio reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (Feingold, 2022). It holds a stake in more than 9,000 companies in 70 coun­ tries. Does that make everything better? No, but it is a start. If we divided the Norwegian oil fund evenly among all the country’s citizens today, my friends and I could contribute some $200,000 to various efforts. But would I spend it all on helping the inhabitants of islands in the Pacific affected by sea level rise? I don’t think so, and I’m a bit of a climate fanatic. Let’s explore this reasoning further. How far should I go? What is fair? What is realistic? The debate on climate change and on what we need to do to avoid human extinction doesn’t get real until we answer these questions for ourselves, not just for “others”. There are no others in this debate. This is all about us, the human race. I’m sure that if you dig a bit, you have a similar story. You have some role in industrialization, either by nationality, family ties, or through your career. None of us are neutral. We are all active participants in destroying the planet that we are bringing children into. That’s a fact. What are you doing about it? Not all emitting countries have such funds. Look at Nigeria, who found oil in 1956 and have squandered all its exploits. Nigeria’s sovereign wealth fund was only established in 2011, and now has around $3.5 billion in assets under management (Reuters, 2021). That amounts to $17 per citizen, which you could buy a tank of gas for or, if wiser, a piece of clothing or two. What are they going to do once net zero or some version goes into effect and the value of its hydrocarbons get written down to zero? For now, they are fine, and have some trillions of dollars’ worth of it still sitting in their soil and continental shelf. What will its 400 million citizens say in 2050? We want our $200,000 a piece back? For one, the math doesn’t work for them. Even if each Nigerian wanted to take out $2000 from a hypothetical oil fund to pay for groceries or rent, that amounts to $900 billion, almost a Norwegian oil fund. Now imagine that some UN agreement forced them to pay that out to a third party. I think a rebellion would ensue. To be clear, nation states like China, the US, India, EU, Russia, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Germany, and all others who took part in industrialization, should clearly pay for the impact of their emis­ sions. The largest corporate emitters, including China’s coal industry, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, Coal India, Mexican Pemex, Russia’s coal industry, Shell, China National Petroleum Corporation, BP, Chevron, PDVSA in Venezuela, and a host of others, should get a separate bill. Exactly what the amount of money the bill should say, is another matter. How do you price such damages? This will be food for lobbyists and lawyers for decades. There were more than 600 fossil fuel lobbyists at COP27, outnumbering most national delegations (Garric, 2022). Imagine that number and double it for next year given the loss and damage fund. But it is too easy to blame corporations without involving ourselves. I’m reminded that when I worked at MIT, I helped bring millions of petrodollars into the MIT Energy Initiative. In retrospect, not a

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moment of pride for me, even though some valuable energy transition work on energy efficiency and energy storage has been funded, too. The sixth extinction, a mass extinction of biodiversity over a short period of geological time, has begun (Kolbert, 2014). Distinct species—bacteria, fungi, plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates—are dying out at fast pace. This is unquestionable. There is also a chance that we humans will pay the ultimate price. Arguably, the climate end game has begun for humanity as well (Kemp et al., 2022). Human extinction within this cen­ tury is not yet a policy topic high on the agenda. Next century it might be, if we continue using fossil energy at the current pace. The psychological con­ sequences alone will be huge. But let’s stay in this century for now. Let’s even stay in this decade. We have enough problems in the here and now. Having said that, I predict an “emergency mindset” will set in sometime between 2040 and 2050. This will unleash unprecedented, large-scale interventions to stem climate change, biodiversity loss, protect water quality, and safeguard life in the oceans.

The critique of growth Over the past decade, there has been a vociferous debate about alternatives to the industrial revolution’s growth model. Regrettably, the debate has not moved much beyond the arguments of 1962’s Silent Spring or from 1972’s Limits to Growth (Shellenberger and Nordhaus, 2007). Environmentalists still speak about limiting things. Limit consumption. Limit growth. Limit corpo­ rate power. Limit government spending. Limit air travel. The sustainability folks, a corporate movement firmly situated within the industrialist paradigm, speak of CSR, ESG targets, and metrics. Responsibility. Measurement. Sus­ tainability. A slightly new angle is the talk of the need to develop a “regen­ erative” economy. Circularity. Repair. Repentance. At least, there we are talking about restoring nature, not just using less of it, or damaging it less. But the language is moralistic. Can there be prosperity without growth? Yes, says Tim Jackson, who wrote a 2009 book on that topic (Jackson, 2016). His most recent book, Post Growth: Life after Capitalism, presents the thesis that it’s not only possible, but we better imagine a world beyond capitalism. To him, this is “a place where relationship and meaning take precedence over profits and power” (Jackson, 2021). To be clear, I don’t think Jackson’s book speaks the right language. We do need an alternative, yet powerful vocabulary evocative of a different kind of progress. It needs to provide renewal. But it also needs to stand the chance of becoming representative of the mainstream. We cannot afford to have another few decades of fringe environmentalism, green movements, and near voterless Green parties. That time is over. Gloves off. What then? Violence? At least severe disruption. Causing material damage. Some think so. Extinction Rebellion was founded in 2018 on that basis. Formally, non-violence. Practi­ cally speaking, their actions are in the gloves-off territory. Except, for 2023,

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the UK XR folks vowed to stop upsetting people and start conversations instead. Wise move, but will it last? Reasonable people find reason to become unreasonable these days. Revo­ lution is justified, they think. Even older people are taking up actions they would not have dreamed of a decade ago. Violent protest. Destroying art­ works. Blocking city traffic for weeks. Who knows what else is in store for us as this struggle heats up. I’m not saying this will be easy. And perhaps there is a larger class struggle here. If so, the process will be violent. But it might lead to true renewal. But only if there are true revolutionaries leading the struggle. People with a true vision. Leaders who feel the pain around them. Capable of absorbing it. Channeling it. Voicing it. Gathering votes. Storming parlia­ ments. We have seen it, haven’t we? The January 6 United States Capitol Attack, for example. What they were concerned about was making America great again (MAGA), and the Trumpist agenda (Shenoy and Quraishi, 2022). What this really means is that they were grieving. They were grieving the loss of the place they had in society in the industrial era. A time when small towns around America experienced great growth around industrial activity. Coal mines. Manufacturing. Factories. I observed some of this when I was living in London a decade ago. The 2011 England riots. People came in to smash my office building. At the time, I was working for a multinational corporation and had a fancy office in the City of London’s financial district. Again, perhaps a shameful thing to do, but I decided to move my family out of London and out of the UK. I saw the writing on the wall. The attempt to pull the UK out of Europe. Out of the global reality that industrialization is nearly over. What was com­ pleted with Brexit in 2020. This didn’t feel like my struggle. Perhaps it was. What I do realize is that without a job, you feel like you are a bit lost. That’s something to remember, whenever we stand on the sidelines, judging people who smash windows or walk into Congress looking for trouble. Either way, I’m not sure we all like what we have seen so far. All revolutions are messy. It is not often clear what they are about until much later. They were mourning loss. Loss of greatness. A similar process of loss is likely what the demise of the petroleum era will lead to. The struggle is one between those who are defending their territory and those who are exploiting it. The political struggle between industrialists and ecologists is not yet fully defined. The class consciousness of “the ecological class” (Latour, 2018) is still embryonic, some say non existing. But if the ecological movement is to gain ideological consistency and autonomy it must offer “a political narrative that recognises, embraces and effectively represents its project in terms of social conflict” (Latour, 2018). Latour’s stunning claim is that the ecological class is, potentially, of the majority. Partly because of the sense of crisis, partly because of the dissatisfaction with traditional parties, this is now an opportunity to be grasped. The concern for nature has become omnipresent. But rather than being a unifying force, nature divides, it is inherently con­ flictual. But because the destruction of nature is both geographically and socially distinct (it is “geo-social”), it has the pattern of previous class

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struggles based on unfair material conditions. Except, at the moment, there is the attempt by the elite to “pretend” like we are all on the same side, that everyone agrees that everything needs to “radically change”. Even though no fundamental change happens. All of this is interesting, but there’s little proof that Latour and Schultz are right. It’s merely a wish. We are indeed in the same boat. I truly believe that fossil fuel executives also believe that. They just hope they can delay the inevitable a bit longer. And, the difference from ear­ lier class struggles is that there was a true proletariat and a true bourgeoisie, two clearly defined groups of workers and owners. Today, it’s not so clear cut. State-owned oil companies, for example, are a combination of people and power. This is why the climate justice movement is so invisible as a force. The sheer numbers of those who have legitimate claims are high (Arcaya and Gribkoff, 2022). The number of illegitimate claims is also high (Chait, 2022). There are myriad ways social movements can take, geographically, ideologi­ cally, and methodically, but the struggle has clearly only just begun (Derman, 2020). If you look at Extinction Rebellion (XR) alone, it is a new element grown out of Northern Europe. The same cannot be said of Friends of the Earth International, Indigenous Environmental Network, and Climate Justice Action, each with their own history and tribal characteristics. It doesn’t seem likely that they will all be fighting exactly the same battle in unison. To be clear, these are early days of trying to grasp ecology as a political force. It is also not easy to see how it fits in with the loss of industrial jobs and meaning. Or whether the two forces will coalesce.

The loss of industrial identity As long as the notion of industry-led economic growth dominates we cannot make progress on sustainability. But what is the alternative? In Figure 7.1, I have illustrated what I think is a fair description of how humanity experi­ enced three key -isms in the period from 1850 to 2020. We were in a sort of balance between capitalism, consumerism, and ecologism. It is not true that capitalism dominated. At least, we didn’t realize it did. We were living with­ out regard for “limits”, that’s true. But this existence was not purely based on the idea of economic growth as the only concern. Some economists may have mistakenly seen it that way. But Adam Smith knew better. John Stewart Mill knew better. Most central bankers knew better. Sure, there was inequality. The consequences of that are dire (Piketty, 2022). But there was also the casual rela­ tionship between humans and nature. The average person could go for a walk in a park every day if they wanted to. Enjoy forests, mountains, or lakes on their weekends. And when they did, they were observing nature. Fish. Birds. Animals. Insects. What was unique about the industrial era was not its technologies, its manufacturing dynamics, its factories, workforce, or the products that ensued. What was unique about it was the way in which humans were living in an artificially constructed reality where we thought we were in balance. Sure,

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there was exploitation of labor. There was excess. There was conspicuous consumption. But at the same time there was progress. Or so we thought. It has taken many of us a long time to realize that progress is not what we are experiencing right now. Humanity is in decline because the environment we depend on is failing under us. That’s not something only those who love nature will regret. Everyone will regret it. And, we did it to ourselves. For a long time after we had discovered what we were doing. That’s the tricky part. It felt so good. Perhaps destruction always does. So far, so good, we have been in a period that lasted for more than 150 years that was characterized by the illusion of progress. For some, there have been enormous bounties. Huge pension funds. Individual wealth. Industrial prowess. Nations such as Saudi Arabia, Norway, and Nigeria have risen from nothing. China and India have become world powers. What now? The post-nature era is something completely different. Yet, most people don’t seek to replace capitalism. It’s not yet clear enough what should be put in its place. If there is something, it will surely take centuries to put it in place. It’s been 30 years since people started talking about postmodernism, whether emphati­ cally, or claiming it empirically. Yet, I’m not sure we will ever be postmodern. To that, Latour, for one, would say, we have never been modern either (Latour, 1993). We are happily tribal, attempting to assemble society out of a mix of materials, with both human, and nonhuman elements and arguments.

Figure 7.1 Human Existence in the Industrial Era

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Modern or not, over the past few decades, we have been experiencing a sense of loss. Which is a modern characteristic, at least. For some, it is the loss of nature as we know it. For others, it is the loss of the respect that came with industrialism. With such loss, inevitably comes shame. And shame leads to overcompensation. Defensiveness. Denial. The psychology of it all is a bit hidden. Like all serious conflictions it is not completely playing out in the open. But let me get to what’s increasingly clear about the post-nature era. It simply represents a tilt. The balance is tilted between capitalism and ecolo­ gism, but consumerism is still present. This begs a bit of an explanation. I’m not saying everybody has realized that ecology should be their primary con­ cern. They don’t need to. What is happening is more a subtle shift of emphasis. It is becoming clear that the priority for our human existence is to continue existing. Not in the sense that we are all becoming radical long­ termists, the social movement that has grown up around a mix of the desire for longevity, with the ideology of transhumanism at its center (Bostrom, 2016; Ord, 2021; MacAskill, 2022). No, I mean in the more pedestrian sense that most humans themselves will want to continue living the way they thought they were supposed to live. Only that they are starting to realize that this will take a bit of effort. Slight changes. Reversed priorities. A bit of initial pain. But for this transition to gain momentum, it is not necessary to turn everything around. As illustrated in Figure 7.2, a tilt is what seems more

Figure 7.2 Human Existence in the Post-nature Era

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likely to happen than abrupt change for the foreseeable future (until we enter an “emergency mindset”, perhaps around 2050 or so). To be clear, as long as it is a tilt, it will not bring nature back. For that, we will need a combination of very powerful emerging technologies and an enormous amount of self-restraint. We would also need a bit of luck. What exactly does a tilt mean? It means one is a top priority but not that the others don’t count. It means that everything is seen from the perspective of how it affects ecology. What it doesn’t mean is that capitalism is dead or dying. Growth does not become degrowth. Consumption will continue. What it might mean is that the hunt for new energy sources will intensify. In this picture, human energy needs will continue to grow. The response will include flexible grids, energy storage, renewables, and a host of other energy-relevant tweaks. Exponential technologies will need to come online. Over the next few decades, this increasingly means renewables, but it also means fusion energy. In fact, it is questionable whether this growth scenario can work without it. Luckily, there’s been a fusion break­ through with net energy gain (Ryan and Ravisetti, 2022). Give it a decade or two, and fusion might enter the grid.

Eco-dynamics Whether the concern is how to invest in the environment, energy, and sus­ tainable technologies, innovation, and startups, or whether it is how to live a life in synergy with the earth’s ecosystem, success in these endeavors boil down to what I’m going to call “behavioral eco-dynamics”. Fancy word, perhaps, but “acting on behalf of nature” sounded too corny. It is also not exactly what is happening. Because we are representing ourselves. We are connected to nature. We are nature. The reason “post nature” is a process of grief is that we have lost something that was part of us. Some of us despe­ rately want it back. Others are resigned to the fact that it is lost. Then there’s a group of people who haven’t yet reflected on it. My prediction is that they will, eventually, get there, too. What I’m describing is the situation that is emerging where most people have made up their minds. I don’t think it will take a lot of time. The way things are going with visible signs of environmental decay it will not be another decade before the process is complete. For that reason, we need to prepare ourselves now. A new type of governance is needed. A new set of yardsticks. It will also affect liberal democracy. For one, a whole new set of actors will need to be represented: oceans, forests, species. Bruno Latour described the general process of actor–network mobilization years ago. He managed to describe the implications for Gaia and ecology just before he passed away (Latour, 2017). It is now playing out. For sustainability principles to truly seep in and enable the world to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2040, safeguard whatever is left of biodiversity, and keep a symbiotic relationship between humans and nature, eco-behavior needs to become commonplace, measurable, and always informed by science

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and technology. That much is reasonably clear. I don’t think it will happen. The concept is not strong enough. Sustainability is the emperor’s new clothes. It is a trap. There cannot be one action plan. Instead, there will be many. Scientist, policymaker, or activist, mastering behavioral psychology is the key to pro­ gress. Recall that the Rio Agreement (1992) called for local community action plans. Right now, I think the demand for individual action plans is more urgent. There is also the need for family action plans. There’s the need for reinventing ourselves as political beings. Aristotle called us political animals (in Greek: zoon politikon) for a reason. It is not random that zoon, which is a New Latin formulation, or more accurately zôion in ancient Greek literally means animal, brute, or beast. The notion refers to our animalistic nature. It is what defines us as living beings. That’s how we prove we are alive. Without considering the actions that matter to us, the exercise becomes too theoretical to matter. Behavior starts with the proximal, physical settings where we find ourselves. In my book, we need to regain awareness of how ecological balance can and must start with each of us. We have to start with what we can do. This is concrete. Those of us who have a plot of land (or even any outdoor space) should be exploring and creating biodiverse gardens with local plants. Why? To regain the connection with the soil, the terroir that defines us as human beings as part of nature. Winemakers were frontrunners here, but now, even vegetable and fruit growers are using the notion of terroir to develop pride in their work. What we grow and how we grow it, defines who we are. The quality of the soil depends on what has happened to it over time. Terroir cannot be faked. But it can be destroyed in an instant. Yet, terroir is always balanced by the movement that is also inherent in any human culture (West, 2022). Action-at-a-distance matters, too. People are increasingly discovering they can be remote activists. Contribute money as diaspora. Support a local candidate in any election worldwide through online donations. Even join their campaign. Arguably, this is no time to sit at the sidelines, to be removed from the act (in Latin: ab actu remotus). Instead, many find that this is a time for the bellatrix, the warrior activist. Roy Finley, the “gangster gardener” who was jailed for planting gardens in food deserts along the parkway has a Masterclass on “Planting a Revolution” (Finley, 2022). Finley started a movement, where “we envision a world where people know nutrition and where it comes from”. He is teaching communities how to transform food deserts into food sanctuaries. His work is studied at universities for teaching individuals how to regenerate their lands into creative business models, a much-needed skill in the global South and in tough urban neighborhoods alike. According to The Ron Finley Project, there are currently 23.5 million people living in food deserts in the US alone. Cities with high African American and Latin American populations, including Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, and New York City, regularly top the list of those hit hardest by food scarcity. Lack of healthy food leads to obesity and a host of

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health problems. But back to the importance of planting something yourself. The progress in indoor plant life through hydroponic gardening means the same could be achieved in any space by using the appropriate (and inexpen­ sive) LED grow lights. Going forward, even investors who are successful at startup investments in the environmental tech space are unsuccessful overall, unless they have an equally conscious and elaborate plan for the carbon structure of their own private life. The reason is that practicing what you preach will enable you to deeper understand the challenges with most business models you are con­ fronted with, which ultimately, depend on behavioral buy-in. As we saw in Chapter 2 on Commitments, based on the past 50 years, there simply can be no confidence either in the intergovernmental structure, in governments, or in corporations when it comes to assuring our sustainable future. This does not mean that they will not play a role, far from it, without that I would stop voting, or stop working for startups or multinationals. However, what it means is that you cannot take it for granted, which is a shame. Conversely, the individualistic perspective is also not self-evident. Yet, it is an earth-shattering new perspective. Applied to contemporary environmental investing, it is equally transformational as software-as-a-service (SaaS) was in enabling the cloud business model for the IT industry. Individual activism will also directly benefit both governments and corporations, whether they are well-meaning, strategic, or still stumbling towards greater sustainability. In fact, it will help wherever the various institutional layers are on their path towards decarbonization. Corporations consist of individual employees as much as governments consist of citizens. The communities they form matter. The smaller group activity they take part in, too. Your behavior shapes these larger organizations in ways we are only starting to understand. Emerging behavioral psychology and cognitive sociology perspectives, taken together, have earth-shattering insights for the cli­ mate movement. Beyond that, it is a game changer for industrial progress. Earlier eco-efficiency frameworks are somewhat incomplete, but there is something that many overzealous climate advocates miss. The original eco­ efficiency thinking was first described in 1978 (McIntyre and Thornton, 1978). It is ancient, by now. But it wasn’t until 1992 that the term was for­ mally coined and widely publicized by an entity called World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). The publication was called Changing Course (Schmidheiny, 1992). It must be said that the course was arguably not changed that much. It is questionable if it even tilted slightly. And then, it tilted back. Later, in a corporate setting, similar points were made by economists at the German multinational BASF and became the basis for the ISO 14040 standard for LCA, or life cycle analysis (1997–2000, 2006). A standard is a real thing. LCA attempts to follow a product’s impact from cradle to grave. It does become a bit technical. It is hard to be accurate. And the process is expensive. But it is a heroic effort. The landscape is evol­ ving and there are many more standards and guidelines (Pallas, 2021).

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Given the lack of progress, it is easy to make the mistake of ignoring the larger community forms such as governments and corporations. In contrast, a beha­ viorally and cognitively informed perspective does the opposite. Yes, the logic by which these larger institutions have worked until now is drastically, perhaps fatally flawed. However, viewed from the short-term futuristic perspective, say in the next 30–50 years, which is a reasonably near-term time frame that matters to each of us, what they do they still matter. If we then pick the next 50–100 years, which is a time frame that matters to our children, the situation becomes more tenuous. We would have to move beyond existing governance forms if we are to survive and thrive. Were we to apply the time frame of the next 500 years, the argument would be blatantly obvious. Either way, the future that is currently available to us needs different institutions. Or if not, those institutions we have need to be radically reformed. On that matter, there is little else to say. Except that there are major uncertainties. We could be facing ecological challenges we have only just begun to worry about. We might even be facing new ones. Or, we could be preoccupied with other existential risks that take our eye off the ball. We cannot predict everything. At the moment, in fact, we are making very little progress on social or ecological prediction. But we will. Once AI reaches a more mature state, and can make use of massively upgraded quantum computers, which is bound to happen by 2100 or so, we will indeed have some prediction tools that may make a difference. We might be capable of simulating our own world, or key parts of it anyway. On the contrary, the disruptive forces that matter within the time frames of each of the small scenario vignettes I sketched in Chapter 1, which only took us to 2050, are not that hard to point to. In fact, you need no futurist to consider these aspects. Although running a model on how they would change and evolve over time is spectacularly challenging. However, simply forecasting gradual increases already produces astonishing and worrying results.

Conclusion The best way to become environmental agents is to re-centralize the self. Even if we don’t have time to lose, the loss of industrial identity will be costly, timeconsuming, and will require time to process and transition. Modifying beha­ vior and seeking experiences that deepen our ecological appreciation is a more reasonable approach than a rupture, at least until the general public and the elites each adopt an emergency mindset. We need the economic elite to be part of the solution. The way to do that is a combination of carrot and stick. But we cannot forget the carrots. Even so, behavior is not the ultimate layer, which is experience. The reason we need to eco-behave is to ensure that the eco-experience can be rescued for ourselves and future generations. The next chapter addresses the fact that energy is not the game-changing issue some people think it is, if we want to be on the path towards a regen­ erative society.

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References Arcaya, M. and Gribkoff, E. (2022) Climate justice, MIT Climate Portal. Available at: https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/climate-justice (Accessed 13 December 2022). Bostrom, N. (2016) Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Reprint edition. Oxford University Press. Chait, J. (2022) The climate-justice movement is bad for climate and justice. Available at: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/the-climate-justice-movement-is-bad-for­ climate-and-justice.html (Accessed 13 December 2022). Derman, B.B. (2020) Struggles for Climate Justice: Uneven Geographies and the Poli­ tics of Connection. Springer International Publishing AG. Feingold, S. (2022) Norway’s $1.2 trillion wealth fund sets net-zero target, World Economic Forum. Available at: www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/norways-massi ve-sovereign-wealth-fund-sets-net-zero-goal/ (Accessed 5 December 2022). Finley, R. (2022) Planting a revolution, MasterClass. Available at: www.masterclass. com/classes/ron-finley-teaches-gardening/chapters/planting-a-revolution (Accessed 20 November 2022). Franta, B. (2021) What Big Oil knew about climate change in 1959, Greenbiz. Available at: www.greenbiz.com/article/what-big-oil-knew-about-climate-change-1959 (Accessed 20 November 2022). Garric, A. (2022) COP27 hosts record number of fossil fuel lobbyists, Le Monde, 11 November. Available at: www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2022/11/11/cop27­ hosts-a-record-number-of-fossil-fuel-lobbyists_6003884_114.html (Accessed 20 Novem­ ber 2022). Jackson, T. (2016) Prosperity without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow. 2nd edn. Routledge. Jackson, T. (2021) Post Growth: Life after Capitalism. 1st edn. Polity. Kasser, T. (2003) The High Price of Materialism. 9th edn. Bradford Books. Kemp, L., Chu, C., Depledge, J. et al. (2022) Climate endgame: Exploring cata­ strophic climate change scenarios, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119 (34), p. e2108146119. Kolbert, E. (2014) The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. 1st edn. Henry Holt and Co. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by C. Porter. Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. 1st edn. Translated by C. Porter. Polity. Latour, B. (2018) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. 1st edn. Polity. MacAskill, W. (2022) What We Owe the Future. Basic Books. McIntyre, R.J. and Thornton, J.R. (1978) On the environmental efficiency of economic systems, Soviet Studies, 30 (2), pp. 173–192. Ord, T. (2021) Precipice. Hachette Books. Pallas, G. (2021) Life cycle-based standards and guidelines, PRé Sustainability. Avail­ able at: https://pre-sustainability.com/articles/lca-standards-and-guidelines/ (Acces­ sed 20 November 2022). Piketty, T. (2022) A Brief History of Equality. Translated by S. Rendall. Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press. Reuters (2021) Nigeria sovereign wealth fund’s assets rise to $3.5 bln, minister says, Reuters, 1 September. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/nigeria­

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sovereign-wealth-funds-assets-rise-35-bln-minister-says-2021-09-01/ (Accessed 13 December 2022). Ryan, J. and Ravisetti, M. (2022) Fusion energy breakthrough: Major milestone achieved in US Experiment. Available at: www.cnet.com/science/fusion-energy-brea kthrough-major-milestone-achieved-in-us-experiment/ (Accessed 13 December 2022). Schmidheiny, S. (1992) Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Develop­ ment and the Environment. 1st edn. The MIT Press. Shellenberger, M. and Nordhaus, T. (2007) Break Through: From the Death of Envir­ onmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. 1st edn. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Shenoy, R. and Quraishi, H. (2022) New Harvard study concludes U.S. Capitol rioters were primarily motivated by Trump, WBUR. Available at: www.wbur.org/news/ 2022/07/27/harvard-shorenstein-research-january-6-insurrection-president (Accessed 20 November 2022). UNCC (2022) COP27 reaches breakthrough agreement on new ‘loss and damage’ fund for vulnerable countries. Available at: https://unfccc.int/news/cop27-reaches-breakthrough-a greement-on-new-loss-and-damage-fund-for-vulnerable-countries (Accessed 20 Novem­ ber 2022). Undheim, T.A. (2021) Sustainable Norway with Kristian Bye. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/sustainable-norway/ (Accessed 13 December 2022). Vahlsing, C. (2022) Quantifying risks to the federal budget from climate change, The White House. Available at: www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2022/04/04/qua ntifying-risks-to-the-federal-budget-from-climate-change/ (Accessed 13 December 2022). West, H.G. (2022) Terroir products: A movable heritage feast? Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies, 103 (1), pp. 1–27.

8

Energy is not the issue

Energy is an important limiter of human action. Following the thread of energy shows us all the ways energy weaves in and out of everything we do, everything we value, and everything we hope for the future. It ties together the accumulating problems of envir­ onmental quality, geopolitics, human welfare and dignity, justice, the law, personal comfort, the humanities, and the form and function of cities. (Pasqualetti, 2021) Humans both need and loathe limits. Limits don’t just “limit us” but they become a frame of reference. Energy is such a frame. But it is neither more nor less than that. Assuming that technology necessarily leads to specific outcomes has a name: technology determinism. It is false (Feenberg, 2017). The type and quantity of energy a human civilization can generate doesn’t fully determine human progress. In electronics, a limiter creates dynamic range compression. Similarly, what an energy regime does, at maximum, is to restrict our range of options. Energy might not be the big problem or solution we are looking for. It is simply an efficiency, but we are looking for better, more efficient ways to live, not just efficiency. In his book Growth (2019), Vaclav Smil writes that: “The history of energy use is a sequence of transitions to sources that are cheaper, cleaner, and more flexible” (Smil, 2019). He says: “the great hope for a quick and sweeping transition to renewable energy is wishful thinking”, because “Behind every morsel of bread, fruits, or meat is a large amount of trans­ formed fossil fuels.” Moreover, Our increasingly electrified, electronic, and data-driven society places steadily rising demand on reliable baseload power—that is, on electricity available 24/7/365. Servers never sleep, nor does air conditioning during hot nights, and in Asia’s megacities, subways and electric trains take only brief naps between midnight and 5 A.M. (Smil, 2019) DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-12

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Leaving aside that machines don’t need naps but that their machinery will wear down without maintenance, Smil is right about the importance that energy avoids intermittency and that transportation avoids disruption. What all of this also means is that the hunt for new sources of energy generation is on. However, new sources of energy generation or fuel don’t come easy. There are many can­ didates in the quest for “fuel switching” away from oil and coal: natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy resources (Pasqualetti, 2021).

Hydrogen If you want to be technical, hydrogen is an energy carrier, not an energy source. But hydrogen is at the center of the energy discussion because it can deliver or store a tremendous amount of energy. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Three times as abundant as helium. Hydrogen constitutes roughly 75 percent of all normal matter. Because it’s so abundant, under certain condi­ tions, hydrogen is an excellent “secondary” source of energy. Hydrogen can already be used in fuel cells to generate electricity, or power and heat. More capacity is coming. For some it is the ideal way to handle energy. But before we can talk about clean hydrogen, the way most of the world currently uses hydrogen needs to change. Drastically. This is best explained through the commonly used metaphor that divides hydrogen purity into colors black, brown, blue, gray, and blue, and more recently, pink, turquoise, yellow, and white, depending on how it is produced. The fossil fuel industry has slowed down the shift from gray hydro­ gen to anything else, but now seem willing to consider blue hydrogen as long as governments will subsidize the transition. Meanwhile, the policy framework is better put to use by stimulating the move to green hydrogen directly. How quickly can we get away from gray hydrogen? The prevailing way to generate hydrogen is via the combustion of fossil fuels. Gray hydrogen, produced by steam from natural gas, currently represents most of the market. It is the most economically viable way to produce hydrogen (Ajanovic, Sayer, and Haas, 2022). However, there are many emerging methods and approaches in the market today, of various color and maturity, using renewables, biomass, biofuel, or waste as feedstock to drive down costs, and it is in many ways unclear who will be the commercial winners (Brasington, 2021). Regardless, green hydrogen is clearly where the money is at in terms of eco-effi­ ciency although its current high price of production is a major barrier. Because of that, industrial applications tend to focus on blue hydrogen. The reason is clear: it builds on the current industrial paradigm. Is blue hydrogen scalable in the future? To be clear, hydrogen has no color. It is an odorless gas. That being said, the color system is quite useful. “Black”, “gray”, or “brown” refer to the production

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of hydrogen from coal, natural gas and lignite respectively. Blue hydrogen is the term for hydrogen derived from methane gas split into hydrogen and carbon dioxide (CO₂) and where the CO₂ is captured and stored. This is where the fossil fuel industry got the world into trouble by bringing together natural gas and heated water in the form of steam. It is currently not possible to produce clean blue hydrogen on a commercial scale. It is doubtful when it will become possible, if at all. Trying to do so is risky, expensive, and arguably prolongs the fossil fuel industry era. Is it still necessary? That’s up for debate. That’s where carbon capture and storage (CCS), an idea first suggested in 1977, came into play. In its simpler form, used to separate marketable gasses from the rest, CCS has been used since the 1920s, mostly to extract methane. In Texas (USA), CO2 was piped to a nearby oil field and injected to boost oil recovery. This process is known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). EOR is all upside. The biggest activity occurs in the Permian Basin, in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. Grey and blue hydrogen might be worse than burning coal in terms of its carbon footprint (Kindy, 2021). There is also a behavioral aspect to carbon capture. Changing behaviors to reduce emissions has been a staple of the environmental movement since its inception. But do these new macroscale sci­ tech approaches make such attempts unnecessary? I would argue a resound­ ing no. I would also say the emphasis is shifting towards collective responsi­ bilities across all the groups we frequent or belong to. Consumer activism is coupled with workplace activism, with voter activism, and intermeshes with traditional social movements as well. The backlash against social media and its coming retreat into the metaverse, the physical representation of the Internet, might also play a part in a reevaluation of eco-efficiency. Is green hydrogen a pie in the sky? Green hydrogen is hydrogen that is generated entirely by renewable energy. As such, it will play a role in reducing emissions of all kinds. Scope 1, 2, and 3 is a way of categorizing the different kinds of carbon emissions a company cre­ ates in its own operations, and in its wider value chain. Scope 1 and 2 emis­ sions are owned or controlled by a company. Scope 1 includes all direct emissions, including fuel combustion on site such as gas boilers, fleet vehicles, and air-conditioning leaks. Scope 2 are indirect emissions from electricity purchased and used by the organization. Scope 3 emissions are a consequence of the activities of the company but occur from sources not owned or con­ trolled by it. The terms first appeared in the GreenHouse Gas Protocol (GHG) of 2001, a corporate reporting standard created as a joint initiative of the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Devel­ opment (WBCSD). The WBCSD is a CEO-led organization of some 200 international companies created in 1995. The GHG Protocol is the account­ ing platform for virtually every corporate GHG reporting program, including

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programs in Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, North Amer­ ica, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom. Green hydrogen, once established, will hopefully be a diverse value chain that extends to many sectors and will create many jobs in the process. It is widely expected that green hydrogen will enable companies, institutions, and countries to meet net zero contribution targets. The trouble is how to get there (Kurmayer, 2022). Right now, the main issue is a lack of demand. There are also technical challenges. Hydrogen requires extremely high pressure and is expensive and inefficient for use in vehicles. Right now, there is a lack of legal certainty, next to no infrastructure, and limited availability. The fossil industry has tried to slow it down, too. All of these are normal in the early stages of a new energy carrier, but each could prove detrimental to scaling it. Many of the world’s largest carriers have already committed to net-zero emissions by 2050 including Air France, American Airlines, British Airways, Delta Air Lines, Lufthansa, Southwest, and others (Patterson, 2021). The hydrogen economy value chain in aviation is one key challenge taken up by the startup Universal Hydrogen, founded in 2020. Universal Hydrogen is a fuel logistics company aiming to make hydrogen-powered commercial flight a near-term reality. Their approach is to focus on storage and containment, aircraft retrofits, and building a global distribution infrastructure. Analogous to the Nespresso pod model, UH’s hydrogen capsules are first targeting the $2.4 billion regional aviation market expanding to the $105 billion urban air mobility market (UAM) by 2028 and the $322 billion single-aisle aviation market by 2032, according to founder Paul Eremenko. The company is also considering expanding to other verticals such as trucking, maritime, and rail in the future. In their model, they are envisioning a conversion kit for air­ planes to fly on hydrogen. Eremenko said: There’s no amount of aerodynamic refinement or engine refinement or new materials and structures are going to get you there. The only thing that can get you there is a fundamentally different energy modality, which translates to a different fuel. Additionally, sustainable aviation fuel is a drop-in replacement. But there are scaling challenges. SAF is expensive. Currently, if the SAF is made from waste oils, the price is double or more the price of fossil fuels. Making it by higher-order biofuel quadruples the price. An even bigger problem is that, at scale, SAF is, arguably, not sustainable because of the amount of biomaterial it takes to produce and cannot yet be produced at scale (Reichmann, 2021). Synthetic biofuel (“power to liquid”) is a future option but is also expensive. At the same time, in just the last few years, green hydrogen production has been on an exponentially increasing volume trajectory, while hydrogen clearly is on an exponentially decreasing cost trajectory. But as Eremenko said: “The missing piece in the hydrogen value chain is how do you get hydrogen from the point of production to the

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airplane [which is] a pure infrastructure question and a transportation logis­ tics issue.” Eremenko has a solution: “Rather than trying to replicate the jet fuel infrastructure for hydrogen, why don’t we just turn hydrogen into freight and use the existing cargo handling stream that goes into every airport in the world?” (Undheim, 2022b). The basic idea behind Universal Hydrogen’s concept is to put hydrogen in modular capsules compatible with existing intermodal shipping containers. The capsule becomes the primary fuel tank for the flight. This modularity play is expandable to many other energy, sus­ tainability, or industrial scaling challenges.

Interview 8.1 The Hydrogen Economy Value Chain in Aviation. Interview with Paul Eremenko, CEO and co-founder, Universal Hydrogen. Futurized podcast.

The hydrogen economy is coming, it is not even a question of when, it is exactly how we will make it work in the coming decades that is the interesting part. Eremenko says: “There will not be enough production in 2025; the opportunity, however, is more like 2035” (Undheim, 2022b). The innovation is not so much in pure R&D as it is in coordinating the introduction of a new fuel source paradigm which would mean building hydrogen-driven planes, but also tweaking airport infrastructure to cater f hydrogen as a fuel source. The key will be to achieve modularity, to increase the efficiency with which cargo and fuel flows through the supply chain. These long-term shifts are not easy to see for politicians and asset owners, but will entail their buy-in. Can hydrogen fuel cells fix transportation? Fuel cells are among the most energy-efficient devices for extracting power from fuels. They can theoretically be used in a wide range of applications. Green hydrogen could help decarbonize heavy industries such as steel pro­ duction and play a role in storage of renewable energy, making it transpor­ table in the process. The use cases include transportation, material handling, and backup power (for stationary, portable, and emergency use). In transport, it can be used to fuel cell vehicles, including forklifts, automobiles, buses,

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trains, boats, ferries, motorcycles, and submarines. That being said, early use cases are mostly demonstration projects. A promising use case is hydrogen ferries, which has been tested in Norway (Brook-Jones, 2021). Active investors in the green hydrogen space include energy companies (e.g., Equinor), PE firms (Vedra’s Hycap fund), and others. The EU has been parti­ cularly active in stimulating hydrogen R&D and innovation. The investment firm Hycap, which aspires to lead the UK energy transition by investing across the emerging hydrogen ecosystem, in the emerging green hydrogen economy, claims that by 2030 the annual investment in hydrogen is expected to be circa $40 billion. Production of low-carbon hydrogen is anticipated to grow to over 200 million tons per annum by 2030 according to IEA’s Net Zero by 2050 roadmap for the global energy sector (IEA, 2021). Governments worldwide have committed over $70 billion in public funding to date, with more than $300 bil­ lion expected by the end of the decade (Hydrogen Council, 2022). THE HYDROGEN CAR

Hydrogen may eventually replace batteries in cars, although technology and infrastructure investments over time are needed (Rassenfoss, 2021). Battery technology will be a strong contender for some time. In principle, green hydrogen is more eco-efficient, relies less on mining rare metals, has longer range, is relatively quick to fuel up (although not as fast as filling gas), pro­ duces less waste, and is more energy efficient. In practice, however, building up a hydrogen infrastructure will take time, requires high-pressure on-board hydrogen storage and depends on a transport and fueling station infrastructure. As a result, it will more likely be a solution for truck fleets than for cars. The real question is when, and the answer could be ten years or triple that. Toyota’s experience is illustrative. “Toyota began its fuel cell development around the same time as its original Prius nearly 25 years ago, and the Mirai shares tech­ nology from the company’s hybrid program” (Toyota, 2020). All in, Toyota has sold 40 million cars and trucks made at its 14 manufacturing plants to drivers in 140 countries. Very few of them are hydrogen cars. Toyota’s hydrogen car, the rear-wheel drive 2022 Mirai (未来, Japanese for “future”), built on a Lexus platform, debuted in Japan in 2014. The latest Mirai sports a more upscale look and sells for $49,500 in the US market. The fuel is subsidized and this clearly is not the market prize for such an experi­ mental vehicle, which received subsidies from the Japanese government (Wong 2020). As of 2018, there were 3000 Mirai’s on the road in the US, all in California where there are 31 fueling stations. Most sales were lease agreements in Cali­ fornia, where the Mirai costs approximately $389 per month, with $2,499 due at signing. Interestingly, Toyota includes up to $15,000 of hydrogen fuel with Mirai purchase or lease (Vaca, 2021), as well as providing 21 days of com­ plimentary rental cars for trips that may venture outside the areas where hydrogen fuel is readily available. Toyota expects to expand sales to

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northeastern states, such as Connecticut and Massachusetts (Kurczewski, 2020). For somebody who lives in Massachusetts, the nearest fueling station is in Quebec, Canada, which is 400 miles and a good six-hour drive away, so the car is not a terribly practical solution yet. If, on the other hand, you live in California, you have 53 fueling stations to choose from. Toyota Mirai’s business model rollout is highly educational because it illustrates the point that I’m trying to make throughout this book about how eco-efficient behavior can change everything. Consider the Norwegian test market’s importance for Tesla where government subsidies over several years made it the biggest Tesla market in the world. A similar thing is happening in California for Toyota Mirai, and undoubtedly in select European locations. If you have the capital to be patient, market creation does not take many willing consumers in the beginning. The early adopters were in the dozens, then in the hundreds, then in the thousands. Almost any new technology works that way. The way to foster a growing movement of people who proudly display eco­ efficient behavior is to provide sufficient incentive but enough of a sense of exclusivity to allow status to play a part, as well. You are seeing the same for electric trucks from Rivian, solar cars from the Dutch scale-up Lightyear, as well as for Swedish automotive brand Polestar with its electric performance car. In 2001, I studied a pilot project of electric buses in Rome, Italy. As I track the situation now, 20 years later, it has been a slower rollout. The market leader for electric buses, BYD has sold more than 700 buses that are in operation across Europe alone (Crider, 2021). Is that a lot or not? To the untrained eye the buses look fairly similar to what they did 20 years ago. Why has it taken so long? The use case was abundantly clear 20 years ago: historic European cities are congested and polluted. Small electric buses can make a difference. If you look closer, the pioneering project in Rome may have made a bigger difference than I originally realized. The 700 buses may only be the tip of the iceberg. In fact, the Italian government (centralized in Rome), pushes for the transition to electric and gas fueled buses, respectively in urban centers and suburban areas, with a 3.7 billion euros allocation over the period 2019–2033, and electric buses are already running in Rome, Milano, Turin, Novara, and Bergamo (Sustainable Bus, 2019). WHY SUSTAINABLE AIR FUEL (SAF) ALONE CANNOT SOLVE OUR POLLUTION PROBLEM

As we have seen, US-based Universal Hydrogen (2020) is placing a bet on making hydrogen aviation, distribution, and propulsion a “near-term reality”. Investors such as Tencent, Airbus Ventures, Mark Benioff’s Time Ventures, Toyota Ventures, and JetBlue Ventures are believers. In a similar vein, another US-based startup, ZeroAvia (2017) aims to enable zero-emission air travel at scale, starting with 500-mile short-haul trips, at half of today’s cost. Investors include Alaska Air, Shell Ventures, and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund.

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Green hydrogen startups with urgency. The three most interesting green hydrogen startups from the perspective of fostering an eco-efficient future sooner rather than later, and having already achieved initial market momen­ tum, include Syzygy Plasmonics, Inc. and Everfuel. The Danish company Everfuel is, for example, already well positioned both with fueling station plans in Denmark and Norway, two highly attractive test markets for futur­ istic mobility. It owns and operates green hydrogen infrastructure and part­ ners with vehicle OEMs to connect the entire hydrogen value chain and seamlessly provide hydrogen fuel to enterprise customers under long-term contracts (Everfuel, 2022). Hydrogen solutions providers don’t yet grow on trees, to put it mildly, so companies who want to get engaged are not spoiled for partners. A notable exception is Green Hydrogen Solutions, which is a tiny UK-based company today, but the vision it presents may be a big business opportunity ahead. The pitch is to “combine big data and AI with innovative technologies and mobility to develop lower-than-average cost projects that produce green hydrogen at competitive prices in close proximity to areas of demand”. They claim to “harvest least-cost green electrons”, in order to use “electrolyzer technologies and suppliers” and thereby to “link production with markets”, using “blockchain-based contracting”. The problem, of course, is that there is no market yet. Syzygy Plasmonics (2017) is a Series B-stage technology company based on an “antenna-reactor” photocatalyst invented at and licensed from Rice Uni­ versity, headquartered in Houston, Texas, developing a new type of photo­ catalytic chemical reactor (using metallic, plasmonic nanoparticles) to revolutionize the industrial gas, chemical, and energy industries. The Antenna-Reactor is the combination of a larger light-harvesting plas­ monic nanoparticle (the “Antenna”), and smaller traditional catalyst nano­ particles (the “Reactor”), where the proprietary reactor design is what makes it work better than any others, being the most stable, active, and efficient to date (Green Car Congress, 2021; MIT Startup Exchange, 2021). Photocatalysts are materials that change the rate of a chemical reaction on exposure to light. Plasmonics is the study of plasmons in metallic structures, namely the collective oscillations of their free electrons in response to incident waves (Pang et al., 2014). It involves exploiting the waves of electrons— known as surface plasmons—that are triggered when light (photons) strikes a metal surface, which could transform photonics and enable a multitude of plasmonic devices (Johnson, 2018). In physics, a plasmon is a quantum of plasma oscillation. Just as light (an optical oscillation) consists of photons, the plasma oscillation consists of plasmons, and their behavior is known as surface plasmon resonance (SPR). Plasmonic nanoparticles, including gold, silver, and platinum particles, are discrete metallic particles that have unique optical properties due to their size and shape. Plasmons are currently tentatively deployed in technologies that squeeze electromagnetic waves into minuscule structures that may yield a new

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generation of superfast computer chips (e.g., nano/quantum based), ultrasensitive molecular detectors, graphene sensors, biosensors, nanosensors, nanolasers, as well as photovoltaic catalysts (Atwater, 2007). Plasmonics is found to be useful in creating various types of photonic metamaterials, such as artificially engineered optical materials containing nanostructures which give them truly remarkable optical properties that will become industrially relevant sometime soon. There has been tremendous progress in metamaterials and plasmonics over the past decade (Yao and Liu, 2014). Syzygy’s photocatalytic technology replaces heat with light to trigger more than a trillion chemical reactions per second—a transformation in industrial processing that aims to reduce 1GT of CO₂ emissions by 2040 as well as to cut the cost of zero-emission hydrogen in half, when compared to other alternatives such as electrolysis (BusinessWire, 2021). Specifically, the goal is to produce ultra-low-cost hydrogen gas from various feedstocks on-site at customer locations, using modular and scalable reactors. Their LED lights are powered by renewable energy and operate at over 1,000 °F lower tem­ perature than conventional chemical reactor technology that helps in reducing maintenance costs and is able to start or stop production near instanta­ neously. In turn, this technology will also enable fuel cell vehicles. ARPA-E (2022) writes that Syzygy’s technology can be “incorporated into existing infrastructures like hydrogen refueling stations for fuel cell vehicles”. Both Trevor Best, CEO and co-founder of Syzygy Plasmonics and Suman Khatiwada, CTO and co-founder, have their commercial background from the American company Baker Hughes, one of the world’s largest oil field services companies. Khatiwada received his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Rice University where he worked with co-founders and professors Naomi Halas and Peter Nordlander. Hydrogen risks? The nascent hydrogen sector faces a number of risks and challenges, notably the fact that investment in hydrogen deployment must take place before vital infrastructure can be created and before the business models that make these enormous investments pay off can start to kick in. In fact, the challenge is a particular instance of the typical valley of death that faced the cleantech 1.0 generation firms. What would the difference be this time? For hydrogen, there is not so much a digital advantage as in many other cleantech fields, given that the entire platform of photonics is an entirely new phenomenon that almost must be built from scratch. The timelines are enor­ mously uncertain. However, as with all emerging technology infrastructure development, its key component can be scaled up gradually through large pilot deployments. The key to success will, among other things, be to create the right partnerships (Hydrogen Council, 2022). There are perhaps only two main technologies—batteries and hydrogen— that can provide the required storage for renewables. The two are both

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competitors and complementary approaches because hydrogen storage is cur­ rently capable of 10 times higher energy density compared to current generation rechargeable batteries (Hydrogen Council, 2022). Promising energy storage use cases for hydrogen includes autonomous taxis and shuttles, digitally enabled freight chains, VTOL taxis, and data centers. The Center for Behavior & the Environment, a program by Rare, the leading behavior change organization in the conservation world, has adopted Thaler and Sunstein’s (2009) behavioral economics approach. Their Seven Pathways to Achieve Climate Impact include: Purchase Electric Vehicle, Reduce Air Travel, Eat a Plant-rich Diet, Offset Carbon, Reduce Food Waste, Tend Carbon-sequestering Soil, and Purchase Green Energy and can be practiced by individuals and argued for in all the collectives you are a member of (Heller and Green, 2019). However, more importantly, conscious behaviors tend to produce spillover effects on other areas because of the active habits they form. Those habits are often capable of transforming us as individuals or affecting the significant others around us, even down to our friends and acquaintances. The real effect of socio-behavioral interventions, either from the individuals concerned, from professional practitioners, or from law enforcement authorities are much more powerful than nudges yet don’t need to have characteristics of strict laws, regulations, or standards. There can be great power in speaking up for social norms, rule-breaking, or defending the commons, simply from a commu­ nity-building perspective.

Is fusion on the grid a panacea? Fusion is promising as a technology, but it doesn’t solve any civilizational challenges, it only escalates them and potentially creates new problems on a different scale. Harnessing nuclear fusion, the energy of the sun, has been a sci-tech dream since the 1970s. As conventional nuclear reactors are reaching the end of their 30-year cycle, there is increased enthusiasm around fusion to take up the baton. Private equity is flowing in. There are at least 42 fusion energy companies worldwide, with many located in the US. MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (2017) raised $1.8 billion in funding in 2021 to build SPARC, the world’s first commercially relevant net energy fusion machine. SPARC is expected to achieve commercially relevant net energy from fusion in 2025 and the ARC fusion power plant is expected to be com­ pleted in 2030 (NEI, 2021). A fusion accelerator is a device that “imparts kinetic energy to subatomic particles by increasing their speed through electromagnetic interactions” (Federal Register, 2007). “Bringing Fusion to the Grid”, a 2021 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), confirmed a possible role for fusion in the transition to a low-carbon emission electrical generation infrastructure (NASEM, 2022). The Fusion Energy Association, a Washington, DC, industry association formed in 2018, already

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has 29 members, about 20 of whom are US companies. All are fusion com­ panies at the research and development stages. None of them have generated surplus energy yet. What is the commercialization pathway? The claim from fusion startups is that fusion eliminates energy insecurity because winning the fight against climate change requires 1GW a day, which is, they believe, only feasible with fusion energy on the grid. Holland says: Fusion is the ultimate energy source. […] but trying to make a major breakthrough for humanity essentially on the cheap and that ain’t going to work. […] We’re above $5 billion total invested in the industry now. […] We have a bold decadal vision to get fusion on the grid within a decade. […] but we need to line up the whole government funded fusion program towards that plan. There are common needed elements, such as fuel supply. […] we are talking about a whole new industry […] The nice thing about fusion is you can plug and play into the existing grid. […] We have companies who are very focused on rocket propulsion fusion as the way. This opens up the entire solar system to exploration. It means that instead of Mars being a year and a half trip it turns it into a weeks or months trip. It means that you can access the moon in shuttles back and forth. It means that satellites in orbit [don’t have to be] stationary in orbit but can move around. […]Fusion is inevitable, it will be the future energy source in the long term. […] Whether we get there in our lifetimes is dependent on us. Right now our companies cannot find enough plasma physicists. There’s now a Fusion Energy Caucus in the US Congress. (Undheim, 2022a)

Interview 8.2 The Emergence of Fusion Energy. Andrew Holland, CEO of Fusion Industry Association. Futurized podcast.

When will fusion come onto the grid? What will the impact be? It seems probable that it will, eventually, solve the energy crisis, perhaps indefinitely, or at least for centuries, it might propel us to Mars and beyond. But way before that, it will allow us to stem climate change, which is no small feat. We just

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got to get it off the ground. It might not be around within a decade, as many hope, but it shouldn’t be 30 years away anymore. There’s also a critique of the path towards fusion energy which finds that claims are exaggerated, particularly how quickly various efforts might get to generating more energy than their devices consume (e.g., reach net energy), expense, or public acceptance criteria (Krivit, 2016, 2022; Hirsch, 2017; Car­ dozo, 2019; Müller et al., 2019; Hirsch and Bezdek, 2021; Nicholas et al., 2021; Reinders, 2021; Jassby, 2022). Instead, these authors point out, the technical challenges are formidable and perhaps not possible to overcome for several decades, if ever. In 2022, the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore lab announced it had achieved net energy gain in an inertial fusion reaction (Wilson, 2022). Regardless, industrializing fusion is years ahead, and fusion energy faces a significant social acceptance risk as a new technology that might be confused with nuclear fusion (Hoedl, 2022). The net energy breakthrough is also not equally applicable to all current fusion approaches, such as the magnetic fusion approach (Genkina, 2022). The costs are also stellar. The UK, for example, has preliminary plans for a $22 billion reactor which might produce fusion energy in the mid-2040s, but with “no guarantee it will work” (Royce and Jefford, 2022). Apart from energy density considerations, fusion infrastructure tends to have an overall smaller footprint than conventional nuclear reactors, or com­ pared to wind or solar energy installations and infrastructure and can rela­ tively easily integrate into the existing grid. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building their SPARC reactor by 2025 to achieve commercially relevant net energy from fusion and aims to provide fusion power on the grid (~400MW) in the early 2030s. Small private fusion concepts are different both in scale and kind from the giant ITER reactor. This results in lower tritium inven­ tories, radiological hazards, and low-level waste production. Canadian company General Fusion (2002) is working on magnetized target fusion based on a compressed gas driver system with high-pressure pneumatic pistons, with a rotating internal chamber which is made up of smaller pistons filled with liquid metal which is spun until it forms a cavity. The pistons are synchronized to bring the metal inwards. Using timing and pressure varia­ tions this changes its shape from a cylinder into a sphere. At the same time, hydrogen plasma is injected, compressed, and heated to more than 100 mil­ lion degrees Celsius, and fusion occurs as hydrogen atoms fuse and release energy in the form of heat. The heat is transferred into the liquid metal. The heat is then extracted from metal and used to create steam. The steam will drive a turbine producing electricity. The result is clean energy that would be both low-cost and abundant. The practical improvements made include not needing lasers or giant magnets, and no need to manufacture other ingre­ dients to produce the fusion process. Its demonstration plant will be built in the UK. Multiple units will be required to energize large cities or heavy industry The company plans to be operational by 2030, using the “most practical path to fusion energy”.

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The UK already has issued a Green Paper, “Towards Fusion Energy”, and has carried out a consultation (GOV.UK, 2021). It finds the hazards com­ parable to those of a large chemical plant and confirms there’s no meltdown risk. This is the start of a regulatory framework for fusion and aims to put it on the grid by 2040. The US is behind, but the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (2019) makes it committed to creating one by 2027. The NRC Commission has already affirmed jurisdiction over fusion even though it historically only has regulated fission reactors. The hazards from tritium, neutrons, and operational radiation need to be managed, as well as activated components and dust, in addition to non-radiological hazards that would result from operating any industrial facility.

Conclusion Despite the ecomodernist idea that energy innovation solves all problems, it does not. The core issue of human civilization is to find a way to live within planetary boundaries. New energy technologies tend to prolong our reliance on growth as an escape hatch. We need to look elsewhere for the solution to a regenerative future. The next chapter considers which game changing innovations and technologies truly matter.

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Crider, J. (2021) BYD receives one of largest electric bus orders in Italy—50 electric buses, Cleantechnica. Available at: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/05/26/byd-receive s-one-of-largest-electric-bus-orders-in-italy-50-electric-buses/ (Accessed 14 Decem­ ber 2022). Everfuel (2022) Everfuel. Available at: www.everfuel.com/ (Accessed 23 December 2022). Federal Register (2007) Federal Register Rules and Regulations, Federal Register, 72 (189), p. 55922. Feenberg, A. (2017) Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason. Harvard University Press. Genkina, D. (2022) Fusion “breakthrough” won’t lead to practical fusion energy just one more step on the long road to commercialization, Available at: https://spectrum.ieee. org/national-ignition-facility-impractical#toggle-gdpr (Accessed 31 December 2022). GOV.UK (2021) Towards fusion energy: Proposals for a regulatory framework. Available at: www.gov.uk/government/consultations/towards-fusion-energy-proposals-for-a-regula tory-framework (Accessed 4 December 2022). Green Car Congress (2021). Syzygy Plasmonics raises $23M Series B to electrify chemical manufacturing; photocatalytic reactor for hydrogen production, Green Car Congress, 10 April 2021. Available at: www.greencarcongress.com/2021/04/20210410-syzygy.html Heller, K. and Green, K. (2019) Changing behaviors to reduce U.S. emissions. Available at: https://rare.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Changing-behaviors-to-reduce-U.S.-em issions-digital.pdf. Hirsch, R.L. (2017) Necessary and sufficient conditions for practical fusion power, Physics Today, 70 (10), pp. 11–13. Hirsch, R.L. and Bezdek, R.H. (2021) Public acceptance of ITER-Tokamak fusion power, European Journal of Energy Research, 1 (4), pp. 8–12. Hoedl, S.A. (2022) Achieving a social license for fusion energy, Physics of Plasmas, 29 (9), p. 092506. Hydrogen Council (2022) Intelligence. Available at: https://hydrogencouncil.com/en/ intelligence/ (Accessed 14 December 2022). IEA (2021) Net zero by 2050. Available at: www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 (Accessed 14 December 2022). Jassby, D. (2022) The quest for fusion energy, Inference, 7 (1). Available at: https:// inference-review.com/assets/pdf/articles/the-quest-for-fusion-energy.pdf (Accessed 31 December 2022). Johnson, D. (2018) Plasmonics takes a step closer to real-world applications, IEEE. Available at: https://spectrum.ieee.org/plasmonics-takes-a-step-closer-to-realworld­ applications (Accessed 14 December 2022). Kindy, D. (2021) “Blue” hydrogen may not be a very “green” energy source after all. Available at: www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/blue-hydrogen-20-worse-burning­ coal-study-states-180978451/ (Accessed 14 December 2022). Krivit, S.B. (2016) Hacking the Atom: Explorations in Nuclear Research. Edited by M. J. Ravnitzky, C. Goldstein, and M. Nieuwenhoven. Pacific Oak Press. Krivit, S.B. (2022) MIT’s road to nuclear fusion is paved with good intentions, New Energy Times. Available at: https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/08/08/mits-roa d-to-nuclear-fusion-is-paved-with-good-intentions/ (Accessed 31 December 2022). Kurczewski, N. (2020) 2021 Toyota Mirai: A tech look at this fuel cell vehicle, KBB. Available at: www.kbb.com/car-news/2021-toyota-mirai-tech-look/ (Accessed 14 December 2022).

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Kurmayer, N.J. (2022) Steelmakers frustrated with slow start of EU green hydrogen pro­ duction, EURACTIV. Available at: www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/steelmaker s-frustrated-with-slow-uptake-of-green-hydrogen/ (Accessed 27 November 2022). MIT Startup Exchange (2021) Syzygy Plasmonics, Inc. Available at: https://startup exchange.mit.edu/node/20343 Müller, I.M., Reich, M., Warmer, F., Zohm, H., Hamacher, T. and Günter, S. (2019) Analysis of technical and economic parameters of fusion power plants in future power systems, Fusion Engineering and Design, 146, pp. 1820–1823. NASEM (2022) Bringing Fusion to the U.S. Grid. National Academies Press. NEI (2021) Commonwealth Fusion Systems raises funds to commercialise fusion. Available at: www.neimagazine.com/news/newscommonwealth-fusion-systems-raises­ funds-to-commercialise-fusion-9309117 (Accessed 14 December 2022). Nicholas, T.E.G., Davis, T.P., Federici, F. et al. (2021) Re-examining the role of nuclear fusion in a renewables-based energy mix, Energy Policy, 149, p. 112043. Pang, L., Freeman, L.M., Chen, H.M., Gu, Q., Fainman, Y. (2014) Plasmonics in Imaging, Biodetection, and Nanolasers, in N.V. Richardson, S. Holloway (eds) Handbook of Surface Science. Volume 4. North-Holland, pp. 399–428. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-59526-3.00014-8 Pasqualetti, M.J. (2021) The Thread of Energy. Oxford University Press. Patterson, T. (2021) How green is hydrogen fuel? Flying Magazine. Available at: www. flyingmag.com/how-green-is-hydrogen-fuel/ (Accessed 3 December 2022). Rassenfoss, S. (2021) Baker Hughes investment in hydrogen highlights need to scale up faster. Journal of Petroleum Technology, 6 April. Available at: https://jpt.spe.org/ba ker-hughes-investment-in-hydrogen-highlights-need-to-scale-it-up-faster (Accessed 13 April 2023). Reichmann, K. (2021) Sustainable aviation fuels aren’t sustainable, not yet at least, Avionics International. Available at: www.aviationtoday.com/2021/08/05/sustaina ble-aviation-fuels-arent-sustainable-not-yet-least/ (Accessed 3 December 2022). Reinders, L.J. (2021) The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion. 1st edn. Springer. Royce, R. and Jefford, W. (2022) “No guarantee” £20bn fusion power plant will work, BBC, 6 October. Available at: www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire­ 63163966 (Accessed 31 December 2022). Smil, V. (2019) Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. 1st edn. The MIT Press. Sustainable Bus (2019) 3.7 billion for electric and gas fuelled buses in Italy. Available at: www.sustainable-bus.com/electric-bus/3-7-billion-allocation-for-electric-gas-fuel led-buses-italy/ (Accessed 14 December 2022). Thaler, R.H. and Sunstein, C.R. (2009). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin Books. Toyota (2020) Toyota introduces second-generation Mirai fuel cell electric vehicle as design and technology flagship sedan. Toyota Newsroom, 16 December. Available at: https://pressroom.toyota.com/toyota-introduces-second-generation-mirai-fuel­ cell-electric-vehicle-as-design-and-technology-flagship-sedan/ (Accessed 13 April 2023). Undheim, T.A. (2022a) The emergence of fusion energy with Andrew Holland. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/the-emergence-of-fusion-energy/ (Accessed 6 April 2023). Undheim, T.A. (2022b) The hydrogen economy value chain in aviation with Paul Eremenko. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/the-hydrogen-econom y-value-chain-in-aviation/ (Accessed 6 April 2023).

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Vaca, S. (2021) Zero emissions in style: 2022 Toyota Mirai pricing announced. Avail­ able at: https://pressroom.toyota.com/zero-emissions-in-style-2022-toyota-mirai-p ricing-announced/ (Accessed 14 December 2022). Wilson, T. (2022) Fusion energy breakthrough by US scientists boosts clean power hopes, Financial Times, 11 December. Available at: www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fa b-66ef-4e33-adec-cfc345589dc7 (Accessed 31 December 2022). Wong, B. (2020). First drive review: 2021 Toyota Mirai goes faster and farther, but is that enough? Green Car Reports, 16 December. Available at: www.greencarreports. com/news/1130665_first-drive-review-2021-toyota-mirai-goes-faster-and-farther-but­ is-that-enough (Accessed 13 April 2023). Yao, K. and Liu, Y. (2014) Plasmonic metamaterials, Nanotechnology Reviews, 3 (2), pp. 177–210.

9

Which game changers really matter?

The size of the systemic challenges we face to return to a human existence and growth mode within planetary boundaries is such that we would need not one but dozens of game-changing technologies or infrastructure initiatives to stem the tide. This chapter includes deep dives into a small set of ecosystem game changers, including R&D soon spinning out of universities, startup stories from founders already contributing to changing the world for the better, and investment considerations from the venture capital community.

The complex evolution of bioplastics Plastics have been used for more than 150 years. Only recently have we rea­ lized that the $600 billion global plastic market has been devastating for the environment. Less than 10 percent of plastic has been recycled (Cho, 2017). Petrochemical plastics take centuries to degrade, although plastic bags degrade much faster than plastic bottles, styrofoam, and fishing line (Chariot Energy, 2021). As it degrades, it releases methane gas. It is abundantly clear that the world drastically needs true bioplastics, but none of the new products currently available can fully replace oil-derived products. Bioplastics cur­ rently only represent 1 percent of the market (CBS News, 2022). In fact, as Daniel Yergin (2021) writes: the degree to which the world depends on oil and gas is often not understood. It’s not just a matter of shifting from gasoline-powered cars to electric ones, which themselves, by the way, are about 20 percent plastic. It’s about shifting away from all the other ways we use plastics and other oil and gas derivatives. Plastics are used in wind towers and solar panels, and oil is necessary to lubricate wind turbines. The casing of your cellphone is plastic, and the frames of your glasses likely are too, as well as many of the tools in a hospital operating room. The air frames of the Boeing 787, Airbus A350, and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet are all made out of high-strength, petroleum-derived carbon fiber. DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-13

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Adding insult to injury, bioplastics consist of a whole family of materials and applications “made in whole or in part of renewable resources” although in practice it may only have to be made from 20 percent or more of renewable materials to get the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Certified Bio­ based Product label (USDA, 2022). Furthermore, the biodegradability does not depend on the resource basis of a material but is rather linked to its che­ mical structure. As plastics degrade, they shed microplastics, which is truly damaging to living things. Most plastic products marketed as biodegradable today according to the European standard for compostable products (EN 13432) cannot be recycled in home recycling streams in the backyard but require high-temperature industrial-scale composters (Ocean Mimic, 2021). Very few cities have the infrastructure to deal with advanced recycling so bioplastics often end up in landfills. Even worse, bioplastics will break down very slowly in the ocean, which is the bigger problem (Ocean Mimic, 2021). Experiments with microbial bioplastics, specifically nanocomposites, show promise in medical applications but would need to be adapted to work for packaging (Ojha and Das, 2021). Current challenges include high production cost, poor thermal and mechanical properties, and unstable quality (Tan et al., 2021). Even though consumers say they want bioplastics, unless the quality of bioplastics improves, it will be difficult to transition the market quickly. We cannot let consumers off the hook with our throw-away mentality either (Di Bartolo, Infurna, and Dintcheva, 2021). The true solution to the problem may not be bioplastics but a circular economy. The recycling stream needs to be fully functional. Both producers and consumers should be penalized if they don’t participate in product take-back, recycling, and reuse (Robbins, 2020). Why is the plastics issue not recognized as a grand challenge receiving billions of research dollars? Where are the solutions? Where is our own willingness to change our behavior? I happen to live between a town (Wellesley) where I can go to a town recycling facility several times a week with little pain and another city (Palo Alto) where recycling is mandated and not doing so carries punishments. That makes my conscience easier, but I should not need this much help to do the right thing. In reality, we all do. It’s easy to scream for the government to act, or for tech R&D to fill the gap, but so much could be done at the local level or indeed by ourselves. What will mobility mean in the coming decades? What are we to think of robotic travel? Can travel, again, become a legitimate practice without bad conscience for accruing carbon footprint? Will humans, plagued by infectious disease and the equally powerful (and separate) desire to transcend the body’s limitations, retreat into virtual worlds (such as a metaverse)? How can inves­ tors separate chaff from wheat in this overheated space? The race towards autonomy With the overheating of innovation in the autonomous mobility space, between robots and the more friendly co-bots, self-driving cars, and space

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travel, where will this technology race end? The space contains thousands of startups, but the three that speak the most to me about eco-efficiency and have approached industrial scale include: Einride, Motional, and Sonos. Highly established and capitalized startups include Silicon Valleybased Aurora (2017), and soon-to-be Texas-based Tesla (2003), Michiganbased Rivian (2009), Cruise (2013), Sono Motors (2016), and Embark Trucks (2016). In December of 2022, Tesla delivered its first electric Semi trucks promising 500 miles of range (Valdes-Dapena, 2022). Tesla claims they can pull up to 82,000 pounds, on par or better than a diesel truck. Volvo and Daimler also have e-truck programs. Given the current range issues, these are likely to be used on shorter routes, not cross-country (Lu, 2022). How quickly will fleets be upgraded? Time will tell, but e-truck semis are expensive. Can the market bear it? Both producers and con­ sumers (EV purchase tax credit) could get up to $40,000 credit under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. With a shortage of 80,000 truck drivers in 2021, according to the Amer­ ican Trucking Associations, autonomy is, eventually, a necessity. Heavy-duty trucks account for a quarter of all greenhouse gasses from transport, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But it will take a while before robots take the wheel. Getting to “Level 4” autonomous vehicles is just hard to do. My assessment is that it is beyond a decade away, if it is possible at all on open roads. Depending on what you think that is either far away or right around the corner, of course. Therefore, the best bets are semi­ autonomous solutions or separate freight lanes that rapidly start to look like rail transport. The startup Locomation thinks fleets of trucks with fewer drivers is feasible (Saporito, 2022). Perhaps. Einride has started operating electric trucks made by other vendors such as Scania, adding their own software, and preparing for autonomy eventually. There are many models being explored. Solar dreams Solar-driven electric vehicles would be fantastic to see adopted at scale. Currently, a number of constraints are stopping its rise. Solar panel effi­ ciency rate is increasing, but slowly. The EV market has a bunch of alter­ native fuel sources and hybrids available—what will the ultimate car model mix be? Competition would be fierce once technology is available. Until then, other barriers or perceived ones, such as a lack of sunlight in covered garages are also showstoppers. Battery tech constraints are a problem across mobility applications, at least for longer distances. Market projections vary wildly, from under $1 billion to nearly $50 billion by 2030. Why is that? Projecting future markets is not science, it is akin to intuition. The global solar vehicle market size stood at $228.1 million in 2019 (Fortune Business Insights, 2020).

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Interview 9.1 Investing in Sci-Tech Futures. Interview with Shahin Farshchi, Partner, Lux Capital. Futurized podcast.

Will autonomy play a role in eco-efficiency? The early idea was for auton­ omy to reduce travel time, increase passenger safety, and improve accessibility. At the core, the idea is that with autonomy in place, car connectivity will ensure there will be less vehicles on the road, so the roads will be less con­ gested, and will produce less carbon emissions and less air pollution (Nar­ ayani and Krishna Kumar, 2021). The vision is to convert parking lots to green spaces, change all land to mixed use development with plenty of organic materials, bicycle lanes, prior­ ity for pedestrians in inner cities and compact and dense urban settlements without the feeling of congestion or a lack of space because the flow itself is better. Can all these things be realized with autonomous mobility? Time will show. Perhaps autonomy is not the holy grail, but rather a convenience fea­ ture with different applications depending on use case.

Regeneration at scale What are the biggest ongoing projects that will contribute to humanity’s shift towards a regenerative economy? Candidates include colonizing Mars, mas­ sive progress on the UN’s SDGs, transitioning to majority or exclusively renewable energy, launching strong efforts to protect biodiversity, driving cost down and scaling vertical farming without drastic water use increases, and finding a workable model for regenerative finance. Waste is a waste Over 2 billion metric tons of waste is produced annually (World Bank, 2022). The global waste management market is already at almost a trillion dollars, although there are many ways to measure its size. The waste from both industrial and residential sources keeps increasing. Waste management is a big business but could be much bigger. Have we fully exhausted the

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opportunity to develop precision recycling facilities? Future opportunities include using advanced sensors to measure waste, identify the useful compo­ nents of waste, collect data from the waste and in various processes to make use of the waste. Crunchbase lists over 350 waste management startups which, on average, were founded in 2015 (Crunchbase, 2022). I wonder why that number is not 1000, or why not 10,000? With more ideas, more regulatory support for waste management, and more punitive regulations against indus­ trial and consumer waste, this is not unreasonable. It starts with delaying the process of a product turning into waste and ends with making use of each component of what historically has been looked upon as waste. Biological processes can enhance the process of turning waste into biomass or extract high-value biomaterials. Robots can sift through waste to identify metals and other highly valuable materials. Chemicals can break down plastics. Combinations of AI and smart sensors can recognize stuff both before it gets thrown into waste and after. Reusable, or productreturn packaging reduces the amount of waste going to waste management facilities. Composting schemes at city level creates beneficial feedback loops. However, right now there is a near complete lack of visibility on the quality of materials being thrown away, entering the waste stream, even about those materials that are fished out and traded on the market. Various new technol­ ogies, startups, and business models need to be developed to fix that. It cannot be that hard compared to all the other big challenges humanity has taken on before. The progress on the UN’s SDG 12 (responsible consumption and production) has been sluggish to put it mildly (UNDESA, 2022). The worst situation is found around food waste as well as electronic waste, both enormously damaging to the environment. But do you finish your plate after every meal you eat at home or in a restaurant? Do you recycle your food waste? Do you think carefully before upgrading your electronics, whether it be your laptop, cell phone, or TV, or the dozens of other devices that you use around the house? Do you ensure you recycle all your electronic waste prop­ erly? Progress has to start with ourselves. I know I’m guilty of buying a new cell phone every few years even though the last one worked. I also have far too many electronic gadgets laying around, used or unused. I am no saint. I need to do better. It feels therapeutic to admit it. Now what? As one step, I need to repent by investing in waste management startups. There are also waste management companies listed on most stock exchanges (Klean Indus­ tries, 2021). Vertical farming subsidy fairness Vertical farming is an innovative way of growing crops that are stacked in vertical layers and grown indoors in a controlled environment with increased productivity and yields (Harris and Kountouris, 2020). It is part of the evo­ lution towards much needed precision agriculture and decentralized food production which will reduce the reliance on resource-costly supply chains.

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Despite sounding fantastic it is quite expensive to build, implement, operate, and maintain. Right now, it only works in premium markets but this situation will evolve.

Interview 9.2 The Future of Vertical Farming. Interview with Eddy Badrina, CEO of Eden Green. Futurized podcast.

“When you have a rise in population and they’re trending towards urban areas you run into a density problem, but the density in terms of population growth as well as density in terms of food sources in geographic relation to those population centers … [with the farms] … further and further away from those population centers, so you get this huge supply-chain length” said Eddy Badrina, CEO of Eden Green to Futurized podcast (Undheim, 2021). But why are they so efficient? Badrina explains: “We control all the growing fac­ tors around each individual plant: water flow, water temperature, nutrient mix, air temperature, amount of light, as well as spectrum of light”. The game-changing nature of vertical farming would only show up under four conditions. One would be if the price comes down drastically. This could happen by reducing material cost, improving technology for monitoring, and decreased sensor and energy costs through energy efficiency. Without being powered by low-cost renewables, vertical farming is not really very feasible in the long term. More experimentation could also reveal particularly suited crops, perhaps even medicinal plants, staple food crops, and other high-cost crops. Down the line there could be opportunities to improve yields of staple crops such as rice, soybean, wheat, or corn in some way as well, but research is needed (Siregar et al., 2022). Any insights garnered from vertical farming could be used to monitor crop growth, forecast crop nutrition, evaluate plant health, and control pests and diseases in other agricultural use cases, too (Siregar et al., 2022). In fact, we are still learning about how micronutrients such as boron, chlorine, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, and zinc, which are required in very small amounts by the plants, activate plant devel­ opment and lead to profitable crop production (Kumar et al., 2022). Vertical farming can operate with the precision of a lab and is ideal for this kind of research and experimentation. The second condition would be if

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outdoor climatic conditions such as temperature or pollution become too challenging to grow anything. Both are feasible in the long term, but it will take a while. The third is that as new net-zero urban city concepts emerge, vertical farming will necessarily be part of the solution for skyscrapers. It might also be a solution for degraded land with poor soil quality. Fourth, to the degree that certain crops (greens especially) become wildly successful grown vertically, those can be removed from field production to free up land. Once costs come down, vertical farming could feed poorer regions and food deserts. If we assume a growing population, as well as less and less agri­ cultural land, vertical farming may become a necessity purely out of lack of land. Eventually, it will play a role in ensuring global food security. An extreme use case is producing food in space. However, the energy use of ver­ tical farming and the fact that it requires purpose-built factories built with resource-intensive materials is worrying at this time. They currently use much more energy than greenhouses, for example (Nauss, 2018). The overall foodtech space is innovative. With 119 FoodTech unicorns over the past few years, the space is bustling with energy. However, a lot of the attention is on food delivery, hardly a revolutionary use case. Other themes are food waste, alternative protein, insects, and smart fertilizer (Dealroom, 2022). Clearly, true innovators in vertical farming would be good investment cases in the years to come, but perhaps not in the short to medium term. Having said that, Berlin-headquartered Infarm, a fast-growing urban farming company, became Europe’s first unicorn startup in vertical farming in 2021 (Heater, 2021). Perhaps not coincidentally, it was led by the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Qatar being a country in a climate change squeeze, lacking in freshwater resources (World Bank, 2020). The story of vertical farming is the same as the story of renewables. With the same level of subsidies as regular farming, vertical farming would have taken over long ago. Even without subsidies, it is bound to make headway, but it will take too long. Current agricultural subsidies for vertical farming in most countries is a pittance compared to what traditional agriculture has access to. This is a missed opportunity. Agricultural lobbying is well estab­ lished and is, no doubt, trying to slow the transition. The Common Agri­ cultural Policy (CAP) budget, the EU’s huge farming subsidy program, has paid out more than €50 billion ($58 billion) every year since 2005 (Shankar, Win, and Hekman, 2021). Imagine if just 1 percent of that started immedi­ ately going to vertical farming to start shifting towards innovative agriculture? A billion euros is not much but it helps if it is going to startups only. What about 5 percent or 10 percent to subsidize existing farms adding a vertical farming component to their business? Regenerative finance (ReFi) If you say crypto, most people think of a currency, a digital coin, but they certainly think of finance without adding a specific use case. The way crypto

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space is growing, this is changing rapidly. The blockchain-enabled business model is also relevant to reshape the economic landscape surrounding cli­ mate-change investments. Three examples are KlimaDAO, Efforce, and Genesis. KlimaDAO is a decentralized organizer of climate action founded in New York in 2021. It began as an app focused on helping consumers understand and offset their carbon emissions. You may now be thinking that it is simply another carbon calculator. However, its carbon-backed, algorithmic cur­ rency—the KLIMA token—is broader. Their vision is bridging the world of decentralized finance (DeFi) and the voluntary carbon markets. KlimaDao has “rallied its community to absorb nearly 18M tons of carbon credits, equivalent to taking 3.8 million cars off the road for a year” (Kane, 2022). Current carbon markets are opaque, inefficient, and depend on inter­ mediaries. Admittedly, the crypto space is full of confusion, inflated expecta­ tions, speculators, and frauds. There’s also volatility. This is not a good thing for carbon markets, which institutionally depend on planning ahead. Mark Cuban briefly got involved with KlimaDAO and then dumped the coin for profit (Camilleri, 2022). Efforce, a crypto-enabled energy efficiency platform co-founded by Steve Wozniak in 2018, is attempting to build a new, regenerative market. So far, they are selling NFTs, in this case a type of digital token and artwork for energy assets such as a power plant. An NFT, or a non-fungible token is a unique digital identifier recorded in a blockchain and used to certify authen­ ticity and ownership. That works as long as that blockchain is an operating entity. What it does for the energy efficiency market is allow companies to obtain funding to start energy efficiency projects through trading on their future energy savings (Efforce, 2022). Savings are redistributed to contributors through a smart contract that enables them to sell their token on secondary markets. The interesting thing about Efforce, and crypto platforms, is that it enables individuals to act on, invest in, and own assets they could not own before. This all stems from the tokenized system. There are currently 5,000 people with access to the platform, and 500 of them are actively backing energy retrofits (Pratty, 2022). Genesis is a capital markets pilot initiative launched by Goldman Sachs and a few other financial institutions which aims to “use blockchain and digital tokenisation to help investors who purchase climate-related bonds track the associated carbon credits in real time”, particularly to support green bond contracts (Tett, 2022). The supposed benefits would be easier coordina­ tion and less opportunity for greenwashing. The starting point in regenerative practice is that places have a unique bio­ cultural identity and potential. Using place-based tokenomics, ReFi aims to restore our economies into localized living entities (Skinner, 2022). Its eco­ nomic model recognizes and rewards people for their contributions to society. The need for global collaboration and local coordination and participation in climate change projects is definitely there. The World Economic Forum’s new

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initiative, the Crypto Sustainability Coalition, is another example of actors in this space (Cheikosman, 2022). The building blocks of ReFi include blockchain, infrastructure tools that support these blockchains, and carbon suppli­ ers (for example, Toucan Coin, Flow Carbon, Regen Network, and KlimaDao) who bring carbon on-chain (Neelakanti, 2022). Crypto has gained a reputation as having a large carbon footprint. Market leaders Bitcoin and Ethereum each consume as much energy as a mediumsized country, but there are exceptions such as Algorand, Solana, Cardano, XRP, and Nano, who each use more efficient computing models (Daly, 2022). There is a clear clash between climate activists and crypto enthusiasts, so that dynamic will be interesting to watch Given that we are in the midst of a new crypto winter, the short-term investment case for ReFi and crypto in sustainability is tenuous, at best. Long term, it is bound to be excellent. We would first have to see which players survive the regulatory crackdown and general skepticism that will rule in the coming years. Bio-geoengineering Engineering our way out of climate change has relatively recently become more than a sci-fi idea. There are now serious efforts underway that seek to modify plants or other living things to, in turn, modify the earth’s climate. For a while, the world’s governments focused these efforts on planting trees. Still, the US plans on planting a billion trees over the next ten years (Hall, 2022). But climate change is making it harder for trees to grow and to absorb carbon dioxide. It cannot be the only solution. This was until they discovered the number of trees that would need to be planted for that to work. There are about 3 trillion trees on Earth, which is only half as many as 12,000 years ago (Holl, 2021). There are currently almost 8 billion people on Earth. If every single person planted a tree each year for the next 20 years, that would mean roughly 160 billion new trees. However, that doesn’t seem like a socio-behavioral strategy that would work. How would you get the message out? I can think of a whole lot more productive things to do with land than simply planting trees. Mixed use, in the form of smart cities incorporating vast urban ecological oases that people can actively visit and breathe in will likely be much more productive and regenerative in the long run than simply planting vast areas. Overall, planting public places across the world as well as encouraging individual landowners to keep an organic garden is a bigger bang for the buck for biodiversity both of fauna and soil fauna (Brown, 2018; Tresch et al., 2019; Powers, 2021; Monbiot, 2022), mental well-being (Samus et al., 2022), and for cooling effect (Knight et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2022). Other bioengineering approaches range from synthetic biology to more mechanical approaches that literally capture the carbon gas and store it in some location (below surface, in space). Modifying plants to store more CO₂

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in their roots or engineering bacteria to use CO₂ as their carbon source instead of sugars are other approaches. The fixes are not limited to carbon but extend to other gasses such as nitrogen or methane. What are the best ideas for futuristic regenerative gigaprojects? Many candidates could be suggested, but many of them are highly risky, speculative in format and design, and enormously expensive. They are not necessarily fundable outside of an emer­ ging “emergency mindset”: � � � �

Regenerative megacities Terraforming the Gobi, Arabian, Saharan, Arctic, and Antarctican deserts Mars colony Generation spaceships

My sense is that megacities need to drastically change for the better and if we find the formula for creating regenerative megacities that can be built within some recognized business model, that would truly be a game changer. The three others seem far-fetched and perhaps not even that positive for the world. Terraforming, the process of deliberately modifying the ecology of the planet (or a planet) to make it more similar to the environment of Earth, is a fascinating concept. A bigger idea here is to terraform deserts such as the Sahara by bending the Niger river back to split into two, one of which used to go into the Sahara. Apart from the fact that the Nigerians would want to have a say in this event, there are other challenges. There is a major catch with most of these ideas, namely that perturbations of the carbon cycle on a global scale will be profound and irreversible in their consequences (DeLisi et al., 2020). What would a Mars colony get us? The energy (solar and geothermal) and material resources (particularly iron and carbon dioxide) on Mars are believed to be formidable (Badescu, 2014). Yet, conquering Mars the old-school industrial way would be a great waste. I hope the full colonization of Mars can wait until we have matured regen­ erative technologies such as energy storage, solar PV, fusion, and smart building materials. Destroying the ecosystem on Mars before we have built it out would be a missed opportunity for a second chance on building a regen­ erative civilization. Admittedly, since the Viking 1 landed on Mars in 1975, progress has been glacial. Many challenges remain. How to transport resour­ ces to Mars, how to build on its planetary resources to avoid transporting much, and how to adapt terrestrial energy technologies to work on Mars. The planet’s weather patterns are complex. Dust storms would damage current solar panels. Wind turbines would have to be much more solidly built and are of little use without grid-scale energy storage. Nuclear technology is currently the most realistic “baseload” technology in space (Badescu, 2014).

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However, no credible theory of human settlement on Mars currently exists that bypasses the artificial creation of a sustainable ecosystem on a lifeless planet (“ecopoiesis”). For that to happen we would, at minimum, have to figure out a way to locally produce fresh water. There’s also the obvious challenge that neither Mars (nor the Moon) contains soil, only regolith— loose, unconsolidated rock and dust that sits atop a layer of bedrock. To grow anything, we would have to remove the toxic salt contaminants in the regolith or deploy vertical, space-efficient hydroponic or aeroponic agriculture. How­ ever, maintaining a stable oxygen concentration is tricky. Agricultural inno­ vations from Mars might then be reused on Earth (Sia, 2020). Having said that, experiments using Lunar “soil” have managed to grow simple plants, although the plants were stressed and quickly displayed stunted roots (Walia, 2022).

Conclusion Neither electrification of mobility, nor autonomy are true game changers for a regenerative economy. At least, they are not the game changer everybody seems to think they are. The reason is that the real problem with mobility is not autonomy, not electrification. Rather, the problem is positioning of people and goods in an optimal distance from each other. In other words, it is a supply-chain question. With already emerging technology, we will be increasingly mobile on land, on oceans, in the air, and even online through augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (AR/VR/MR). Will that help us build a regenerative economy? Per­ haps. But mobility is only part of the solution. We need a better under­ standing of where to put things and where to situate ourselves in the grid that is the contemporary world. The paradox is that the world is filled with overambitious industrial or spec­ ulative urbanism megaprojects that go counter to a regenerative future and, at the same time, we have a lack of ambitious megaprojects that could propel us towards a regenerative economy. This combined challenge is likely the result of a too-small elite of urban developers, billionaires, and autocratic rulers having near monopoly power on launching visions of this type. Had we instead made use of the immense creativity of the best of human talent, the results would have been vastly different. Is it wishful thinking to hope that we can, one day, enable the right talent to work on such concepts and also realize them? I don’t think so and I think that the time to do so is within the next 50 years. Whilst some ideas are purely money pits where enormous investments need to be made with little potential commercial return, in most people’s mind, to make progress at scale, business models need to be found. Many startups have seen this and are trying to exploit this window of opportunity. In the upcom­ ing chapter, I turn to the thorny issue of gigaprojects. The next chapter asks whether and under what circumstances going for gigascale is an appropriate approach.

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References Badescu, V. (ed.) (2014) Mars: Prospective Energy and Material Resources. Springer. Brown, G. (2018) Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture. 1st edn. Chelsea Green Publishing. Camilleri, M. (2022) How billionaire Mark Cuban got revenge on DeFi with KlimaDAO. Available at: https://protos.com/cuban-klimadao-mark-revenge-klima-polygon­ bct-toucan-protocol/ (Accessed 27 November 2022). CBS News (2022) Companies invest billions in fully biodegradable bioplastics made from natural materials. Available at: www.cbsnews.com/news/bioplastics-pha-pla­ companies-invest-billions/ (Accessed 1 December 2022). Chariot Energy (2021) How long does it take for plastic to decompose?, Chariot Energy, 10 February. Available at: https://chariotenergy.com/blog/how-long-until-pla stic-decomposes/ (Accessed 1 December 2022). Cheikosman, E. (2022) Web3 tech can be used to fight climate change. Here’s how, World Economic Forum. Available at: www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/regenera tive-finance-web3-climate-change/ (Accessed 27 November 2022). Cho, R. (2017) The truth about bioplastics, Columbia University. Available at: https:// news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/11/11/how-close-are-we-to-climate-tipping-points/ (Accessed 9 November 2022). Crunchbase (2022) Waste management startups. Available at: www.crunchbase.com/ hub/waste-management-startups (Accessed 1 December 2022). Daly, L. (2022) 5 Eco-friendly cryptos you should know about, The Motley Fool. Available at: www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/financials/cryp tocurrency-stocks/eco-friendly-cryptocurrency/ (Accessed 27 November 2022). Dealroom (2022) Foodtech startups and venture capital—Q1 2022. Available at: http s://dealroom.co/uploaded/2022/04/Dealroom-foodtech-report-Q1-2022.pdf ?x72253. DeLisi, C., Patrinos, A., MacCracken, M. et al. (2020) The role of synthetic biology in atmospheric greenhouse gas reduction: Prospects and Challenges, BioDesign Research. Available at: https://doi.org/10.34133/2020/1016207. Di Bartolo, A., Infurna, G. and Dintcheva, N.T. (2021) A review of bioplastics and their adoption in the circular economy, Polymers, 13 (8). Available at: https://doi. org/10.3390/polym13081229. Efforce (2022) EFFORCE launches public sale of Steve Wozniak-inspired Genesis NFTs to implement two energy efficiency projects, Utility Dive. Available at: www. utilitydive.com/press-release/20220920-efforce-launches-public-sale-of-steve-wozniak­ inspired-genesis-nfts-to-impl/ (Accessed 27 November 2022). Fortune Business Insights (2020) Solar vehicle market size, share & growth. Available at: www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/solar-vehicle-market-104333 (Accessed 2 Decem­ ber 2022). Hall, S. (2022) The US is planting a billion trees to fight climate change, World Eco­ nomic Forum. Available at: www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/08/climate-change-tree-p lanting-restoration/ (Accessed 27 November 2022). Harris, Z.M. and Kountouris, Y. (2020) Vertical farming as a game changer for BECCS technology deployment, Sustainability, 12 (19), p. 8193. Heater, B. (2021) Vertical farming startup Infarm raises $200M for international expansion, TechCrunch, 16 December. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/ 16/vertical-farming-startup-infarm-raises-200m-for-international-expansion/ (Acces­ sed 27 November 2022).

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Holl, K.D. (2021) How would planting 8 billion trees every year for 20 years affect Earth’s climate? World Economic Forum Blog, 25 August. Available at: www.weforum. org/agenda/2021/08/planting-trees-combat-climate-change (Accessed 13 April 2023). Kane, P. (2022) Green cryptocurrency – one that doesn’t burn the planet by whirring computers – is here. What do we do with ReFi (regenerative finance)? The Alter­ native. Available at: www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2022/10/31/green-cryp tocurrrency-regenerative-finance (Accessed 27 November 2022). Klean Industries (2021) The world’s top 15 biggest waste management companies. Available at: https://kleanindustries.com/resources/environmental-industry-market-a nalysis-research/biggest-waste-management-companies-worldwide/ (Accessed 1 December 2022). Knight, T., Price, S., Bowler, D. et al. (2016) How effective is “greening” of urban areas in reducing human exposure to ground-level ozone concentrations, UV exposure and the “urban heat island effect”? A protocol to update a systematic review, Environmental Evidence, 5 (3). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13750-016-0054-y Kumar, A., Kumar Dubey, S., Sendhil, R. et al. (2022) Smart and sustainable food production technologies, in S. Sehgal, B. Singh, and V. Sharma (eds) Smart and Sustainable Food Technologies. Springer Nature Singapore, pp. 3–24. Liu, Z., Zhan, W., Bechtel, B. et al. (2022) Surface warming in global cities is sub­ stantially more rapid than in rural background areas, Communications Earth & Environment, 3 (1), pp. 1–9. Lu, M. (2022) Every electric semi truck in one graphic. Available at: https://elements. visualcapitalist.com/every-electric-semi-truck-in-one-graphic/ (Accessed 2 December 2022). Monbiot, G. (2022) Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet. Pen­ guin Books. Narayani, A.R. and Krishna Kumar, K. (2021) A vision for sustainable mobility through autonomous vehicles in city planning, IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 1130 (1), p. 012037. Nauss, T. (2018) Is vertical farming really sustainable? EIT Food, EIT. Available at: www. eitfood.eu/blog/is-vertical-farming-really-sustainable (Accessed 27 November 2022). Neelakanti, N. (2022) Regenerative finance 101: A guide to crypto’s ReFi movement, CoinCentral. Available at: https://coincentral.com/regenerative-finance-101/ (Acces­ sed 27 November 2022). Ocean Mimic (2021) Bioplastics – eco friendly or scam?Jan 26. Available at: https:// ocean-mimic.com/bioplastics/ (Accessed 1 December 2022). Ojha, N. and Das, N. (2021) Microbial Production of Bioplastics: Current Trends and Future Perspectives, in M. Kuddus and Roohi (eds) Bioplastics for Sustainable Development. Springer Singapore, pp. 1–60. Powers, M. (2021) Regenerative Soil: The Science and Solutions. 2nd edn. Permaculturepowers123. Pratty, F. (2022) Inside Steve Wozniak’s new crypto climate tech startup, Sifted. Available at: https://sifted.eu/articles/steve-wozniak-efforce-climate-startup/ (Acces­ sed 27 November 2022). Robbins, J. (2020) Why bioplastics will not solve the world’s plastics problem, Yale E360. Available at: https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-bioplastics-will-not-solve-the­ worlds-plastics-problem (Accessed 1 December 2022). Samus, A., Freeman, C., Dickinson, K.J.M. and van Heezik, Y. (2022) Relationships between nature connectedness, biodiversity of private gardens, and mental well­

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being during the Covid-19 lockdown, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 69, p. 127519. Saporito, B. (2022) The 18-wheel battery-powered autonomous delivery route to glor­ ious profits that also saves the planet–with robots! Inc. Available at: www.inc. com/magazine/202211/bill-saporito/trucking-ev-ai-self-driving-supply-chain.html (Accessed 3 December 2022). Shankar, P., Win, T.L. and Hekman, L. (2021) Lobbies undermine EU’s green farming plan, Deutsche Welle. Available at: www.dw.com/en/exposed-how-big-farm-lobbie s-undermine-eus-green-agriculture-plan/a-59546910 (Accessed 1 December 2022). Sia, J.S. (2020) ISRU Part IV: How to grow food on Mars. Available at: www.marsso ciety.ca/2020/09/28/isru-part-iv-how-to-grow-food-on-mars/ (Accessed 4 December 2022). Siregar, R.R.A. et al. (2022) Vertical farming perspectives in support of precision agriculture using artificial intelligence: A review, Computers, 11 (9), p. 135. Skinner, C. (2022) What is regenerative finance (ReFi) (Part One), Chris Skinner’s blog. Available at: https://thefinanser.com/2022/10/what-is-regenerative-finance-r efi-part-one (Accessed 27 November 2022). Tan, D., Wang, Y., Tong, Y. and Chen, G.Q. (2021) Grand challenges for industrializing polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), Trends in Biotechnology, 39 (9), pp. 953–963. Tett, G. (2022) Blockchain may have a green future regardless of crypto, Financial Times, 24 November. Available at: www.ft.com/content/6d049669-1fac-40d8-bd24-955de5d29730 (Accessed 27 November 2022). Tresch, S., Frey, D., Bayon, R.L. et al. (2019) Direct and indirect effects of urban gardening on aboveground and belowground diversity influencing soil multifunctionality, Scientific Reports, 9 (1), p. 9769. UNDESA (2022) Goal 12. Available at: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal12 (Accessed 1 December 2022). Undheim, T.A. (2021) The future of vertical farming with Eddy Badrina. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/the-future-of-vertical-farming/ (Accessed 27 November 2022). USDA (2022) BioPreferred. Available at: www.biopreferred.gov/BioPreferred/faces/pa ges/BiobasedProducts.xhtml (Accessed 1 December 2022). Valdes-Dapena, P. (2022) Tesla delivers its first electric Semi trucks promising 500 miles of range, CNN, 2 December. Available at: www.cnn.com/2022/12/01/business/ tesla-semi-pepsi/index.html (Accessed 2 December 2022). Walia, G. (2022) Astonishing discovery! Not just Earth, Moon’s soil fertile enough to grow plants successfully, WION. Available at: www.wionews.com/science/astonishing-discover y-not-just-earth-moons-soil-fertile-enough-to-grow-plants-successfully-478628 (Accessed 4 December 2022). World Bank (2020) Qatar. CKP. Available at: https://climateknowledgeportal.worldba nk.org/country/qatar/vulnerability (Accessed 27 November 2022). World Bank (2022) Trends in solid waste management. Available at: https://datatopics. worldbank.org/what-a-waste/trends_in_solid_waste_management.html (Accessed 1 December 2022). Yergin, D. (2021) Why the energy transition will be so complicated. The Atlantic, 27 November. Available at: www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/11/energy­ shock-transition/620813/ (Accessed 13 April 2023).

10 Is gigascale the ideal?

In the movie 2012, starring John Cusack, the cast experiences earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, mega tsunamis, and a global flood, ending up in enor­ mous arks where not everyone can fit, in a replay of the Noah’s Ark myth. This fictional plot resembles what many think is a set of cascading risks humanity might face at some point in the future. Gigantic infrastructure provides opportunities to do things better because the scale allows for thinking big. Think of the Great Wall of China or the Great Pyramid of Giza. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of biginfrastructure mistakes. Traditionally, a project is considered a megaproject if the cost is at least $1 billion and a gigaproject when the planned investment in it exceeds $10 billion (Galloway, Nielsen and Dignum, 2012). The classic examples are the Panama Canal (1881–1914) and the Suez Canal (1959–1969) and now its expansion (2021–2023), each of which in today’s money would have cost billions. Other examples include international airports, high-speed railways, national highway systems, city infrastructure, sports stadiums, mos­ ques, cathedrals, power plants, oil processing facilities, or nuclear plants. These take a decade or more to complete, involve multiple companies, have high levels of public attention, regulatory challenges, complex financing, unusual engineering challenges, enormous risk, cultural differences, delays, and typically land use disputes (Galloway, Nielsen, and Dignum, 2012). There are currently 1,154 UNESCO World Heritage Sites located in 167 states (UNESCO, 2022). Among those sites built by humans, places like Angkor Wat in Cambodia built by the Khmer Empire, the rock-cut archi­ tecture of Petra, Jordan, the Pyramids of Giza, The Old City of Jerusalem, or the Great Wall of China stand out. What unites these sites is that they were explicit choices made by the economic elite of a given historical period that were of benefit to a larger group of people even at the time of completion. Every civilization builds its own monuments that it hopes will last forever and become part of its legacy. Contemporary civilizations have to ask them­ selves the same question. Does Norway want to be known for its fossil oil rigs which created the enormous pension fund at the price of enormous tempera­ ture rise or does it want to be known for restoring biodiversity to the world’s oceans, or some other giga-challenge humanity is currently facing? Does DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-14

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Saudi Arabia want to be known for oil wealth and inequality or does it want to be known for creating a regenerative society that reverberates across the Middle East? Does the EU want to be known as a bureaucratic structure that builds an internal market that keeps immigrants out or do they want to be known as a haven for all of humanity? These are choices. Answering them well, rising to the challenge, makes a civilization timeless. We might truly need gigascale projects someday. So far, the track record seems abysmal. This poses a number of problems. Can they be solved?

Why does gigascale so often turn into giga hell? Currently mostly empty, Forest City, the vast space in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, just north of Singapore, spreads across 1,740 hectares. The large property developer, China’s Country Garden Holdings, got free rein to build a $100­ billion luxurious “living paradise” for 700,000 residents without carrying out an environmental impact assessment (EIA) but instead got a ghost town with less than 15,000 committed apartment owners (as of 2019) and is forced to target domestic markets instead of wealthy Chinese speculators (He and Tritto, 2022). They also got the local community against them (Susskind, 2019). It has been on TopLuxury’s list of “most useless megaprojects”. A Foreign Policy article wrote “Simply put, corrupt local elites have taken a Chinese Fortune 500 company for a ride”. Another way to read the story is that a combination of urban speculation and Chinese colonialism through the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative missed their opportunity to shape a much smaller Southeast Asian country. The environmental consequences are immense should Forest City further descend into disrepair. The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a 3,000-km Chinese infrastructure network project estimated to cost $87 billion, launched in 2015. Unfortunately, the largest Pakistani investment ever and the largest Chinese foreign direct investment project is 40 percent built on coal fired power plants (CSIS, 2020). There are less blackouts in Pakistan now. The 720 MW Karot hydropower plant is now in operation. Thousands of kilometers of highways are completed. The railroad from Peshawar to Karachi got an upgrade. A metro system was built in Lahore. Fiber optic cables now run from China to Pakistan (Sacks, 2021). However, some estimate up to 60 percent fossil fuels will be the end result (Mardell, 2020). Environmental costs will be enormous. IT projects are lacking. All the nine envisioned special economic zones have not yet been built. Will it even transform Pakistan to a major manufacturing hub or will it simply become a polluting trade transit hub with a big harbor? The evolving story is that Pakistan’s government considers scrapping CPEC if the US or others give similar guarantees. Why? Slow pace and security com­ plaints by the Chinese personnel? (PTI, 2022). There’s clearly more to the story, such as allegations of corruption and resource waste (World News, 2022). The Chinese debt trap is already a fact and might be more a result of the Pakistanis defaulting on payments (ANI, 2022). Most likely, Pakistan was

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aware of the weaknesses of the project, but was too concerned with keeping a counter to India to listen to critical voices (ANI, 2022). There’s now a third country in the mix, as Pakistan seeks to involve Afghanistan in CPEC, clearly to access a different pool of money and natural resources worth up to US$3 trillion. A further development is that Russia also wants to participate, seek­ ing markets for its petroleum products and wheat as part of its Greater Eur­ asian Partnership (The Jamestown Foundation, 2022). Adding to that, back in 2020, the Pakistani prime minister pledged a halt to the coal power boom (Lo, 2020). There are signs the Chinese government will begin phasing out coal as part of further projects within China’s belt and road initiative (BRI).

Reconsidering motivations In the past, religion motivated civilization to build billion-dollar structures to become sanctuaries for its believers. In each case, it wasn’t just the institution itself that got the job done, there were always people behind it. It was Paris Bishop Maurice de Sully who convinced the French to invest what ultimately would amount to a billion dollars in today’s money to build the Notre Dame Cathedral (420 feet long, 157 feet wide, and 115 feet high) in 1163 (Shields, 2019). An aesthetic and engineering marvel, the cathedral took over 100 years to complete. Was it worth it? We got an answer to that recently, because when it burned, the French didn’t just look at it as a loss but raised another billion dollars after the fire to restore its marvelous wooden ceiling, although its planned 2024 completion will require even more (Cascone, 2021). The first pledges came from billionaires including Bernard Arnault and François-Henri Pinault, but the rest is a mix of government and private funds. I have certainly enjoyed being in and around Notre Dame as a frequent visitor to Paris and so have millions of others. Even those who don’t see it as a religious monument close to their own conviction might still appreciate the immense awesomeness of such a construction. It is arguably the most beloved cathedral in the world and is France’s spiritual home. However, there are majestic cathedrals across Europe. Saint Peter’s Basilica (Vatican City) cost $5.4 billion. Cologne Cathedral cost $1 billion. Cosimo Medici of the Medici family, one of the most important and wealthiest in Florence, single-handedly paid for the startup construction of the beautiful Duomo cathedral in 1293 (in gothic style). It was consecrated nearly 150 years later in 1436 (in roman­ esque renaissance style), after managing to construct the enormous dome which had been designed back in 1296. However, it can accommodate 30,000 worshippers, the largest at the time. The dome remains the largest brick dome ever constructed. These kinds of investments have continued to our time and are nearly always controversial. That kind of money could always be spent elsewhere. The Great Mosque of Algiers began in 2008 and was completed in 2019 to the tune of a billion dollars, after switching from a German to a Chinese contractor (Arabiya, 2018). The world’s third largest mosque, pushed through by Abdelaziz

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Bouteflika, the autocratic Former President of Algeria, aims to “spread tol­ erance and combat extremism” (The National News, 2020), and that’s indeed what great works of art and architecture do. However, the people of Algiers might have had other things in mind for that amount of time and money if it was their choice. Bouteflika was “forced out after mass street protests against his two-decade-long rule” (Belalloufi, 2020). That being said, when well-conceived, gigaprojects become part of humanity’s basic infrastructure and, with a few exceptions, tend to be main­ tained in perpetuity. At their outset, mega- and gigaprojects present visions of “desirable futures”, often reflecting a “politics of aspiration” (Müller-Mahn, Mkutu, and Kioko, 2021). There are numerous issues with the “politics of scaling”, including the often-uncritical embrace of modernist tech solutionism and experimentalism and the often dubious promise of future value, to the detri­ ment of other, often saner approaches (Pfotenhauer et al., 2022). Today, sus­ tainability concerns mean that the best projects strive to manage greenhouse gas emissions, responsible sourcing, user health, and life cycle cost (Ahmed, Darwish, and Farrell, 2022). To “minimize waste” from a lean perspective, sustainability should reflect purpose, people, and process (Wang et al., 2020). However, due to the relatively few projects of this nature, approaches are fragmented (Wang et al., 2020) which is not optimal. Infrastructure for the future One projection has it that megaprojects (in excess of $1 billion) will constitute 24 percent (up from 8 percent) of global GDP by 2027, by building global infrastructure, space industries, ocean industries, bridge-tunnel projects, extreme physics challenges (terraforming, mass energy storage), or controlling extreme weather (Frey, 2017). Going forward, it is not inconceivable that many future gigaprojects will deal with upgrading infrastructure to meet the challenges of climate change, or indeed will be climate adaptation projects. One of the largest ongoing projects, China’s South–North Water Transfer Scheme was projected to cost $62 billion with planned completion in 2050 (Water Technology, 2003). It has already cost more than that (Fessenden, 2014). That project is not without its critics and has not solved China’s water problems (Akhtar, 2022). It has, however, displaced millions of people, and caused massive land use disputes. Infrastructure is politics. Gigaprojects typi­ cally also cause significant loss of life at some stage. To fix many of these cost and risk issues, it would be necessary to make the projects more modular (Flyvbjerg, 2021). I would add that any gigaproject should really be discussed in the United Nations and should not merely be a national concern. There are more than 1,400 semiconductor chip fabs worldwide (SEMI, 2022). Yet, the world has a shortage of advanced microchips. The challenge is that high-end semiconductor chip fabs cost between $10 billion and $20 bil­ lion (Farshchi, 2022). The world has two world-class ones, one in Taiwan

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(TSMC) and one in South Korea (Samsung). Three more are being built in the US. Intel is building in Ohio and TSMC is building in Arizona. Samsung is planning to build in Texas (Farshchi, 2022). The EU has earmarked money for chip fabs as well (Amaro, 2022). Africa is also in the race. There is a small-scale chip fab in Kenya but with inferior technology (Wanjala, 2021). Building chip fabs in local markets will decrease supply chain costs but will increase salary and production costs. Such fabs have a huge carbon footprint. TSMC uses 5 percent of Taiwan’s electricity and 63 million tons of water, has a polluting production process, and produces massive amounts of waste (Belton, 2021). On the plus side, advanced gigafactories bring with them associated benefits for local talent, local manufacturing supply chains, as well as spillover effects from the technology and innovation involved. There is obviously also a national security aspect. Chip fabs are part of most advanced regions’ future. There are 450 nuclear plants today spread over 30 countries (World Nuclear Association, 2022). Those facilities require monitoring for thousands of years. As nuclear energy increasingly becomes a part of the energy mix, what guarantees do we have for the long-term regenerative effects? It doesn’t help much that newer facilities are small-scale and modular if we cannot guarantee long-term governance of those 30 countries (and counting) and have protection against natural disasters as well as war damage. Perhaps the regulatory process needs to look at that? Or, better, we need to address the root causes that make countries unstable. With instability comes risk. Too much risk in the case of nuclear energy. Which other industrial areas need such investments? Northvolt’s battery gigafactory in Sweden. Tesla’s gigafactory in Texas will run 100 percent on renewable energy. Elon Musk claims 100 Tesla gigafactories could “power the entire world” (Gohd, 2017). The $500-billion Saudi gigaproject NEOM is another. A futuristic smart city with an area larger than Israel, it would feature miles-long buildings. But is it, so far in the process, also greenwashing (Thomas and Venema, 2022)? For sure, NEOM would have to rely on AI, vertical farm­ ing, water production (smart irrigation, leak detection, desalination), green hydrogen, wind energy, cooling systems, and a host of other technology break­ throughs (Burbano, 2022). The project is also caught in the MENA-region’s aging metaverse hype which is dying down elsewhere (El Yaakoubi, 2022). NEOM would have to face unprecedented manufacturing scale-up challenges and skyrocketing running costs. The NEOM area is also earthquake-prone (Al Saud, 2020). This will not be an easy project to undertake. Space tech is a big contributor to giga-infrastructure. The International Space Station (ISS) and its future replacements, as well as the future settle­ ments on the Moon and on Mars also come to mind. In the case of space, “giga” is often the only scale possible due to the cost and constraints of the space environment. Feeding the Mars outpost with cyanobacteria is one strategy (Verseux et al., 2016) but more holistic approaches will be needed. NASA’s description of its strategy so far leads me to believe a traditional

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industrial extraction strategy still will shape the early exploration of Mars (Warner, 2020). Worst case, the materials used, apart from Mars-specific materials, will be some version of the extractive materials concrete and steel. Let’s instead use the Mars experience to transform materials chemistry both in space and on Earth (Savage, 2017). Space might be the ultimate frontier, but it is also a space where we, from a humanity governance perspective, would want to avoid both no regulation and overregulation. The stakes are high, despite the vast space available, mistakes could be costly, both immediately and ultimately. Asteroid mining is fascinating, but using telescopes to keep Earth safe makes a lot of sense, too. The use cases of space tech and, eventually, space manufacturing, might become many, and it’s hard to envision exactly when which of them will come into play.

Conclusion The best way to run a gigaproject is to modularize it and ensure that indivi­ dual components are self-sustaining yet consider the whole. The best example that comes to mind is the way Ivy League-type universities are run. The core mission is clear, emphasis is on distinct brand efforts, but departments and centers are relatively autonomous and can even set conflicting priorities. That way, some of them manage $50-billion endowments, and $10-billion annual budgets. Any country without a galvanizing gigaproject(s) in the next decade is not only missing an opportunity to create their legacy but might also be culpable for ushering in the Emergency Era which is what I call the years from 2050 to 2075. The same can be said for billionaires, and I’m not talking about egotrips to space. Curiously, it might even be possible for individuals to finance gigaprojects through crowdfunding. Pebble’s smartwatch launched in 2015 still holds the record for the most funded Kickstarter campaign of all time, raising $20,338,986. That will likely not be the upper bounds of crowdfund­ ing. Could crowdfunding reach into the billions of dollars? You better believe it: if the concepts are strong enough. The next chapter looks at various eco-flavors that can be quite misleading from a regenerative perspective.

References Ahmed, S., Darwish, A.S. and Farrell, P. (2022) Benchmarking sustainability of megaprojects: A review, in A. Sayigh (ed.) Sustainable Energy Development and Innovation: Selected Papers from the World Renewable Energy Congress (WREC) 2020. Springer International Publishing, pp. 743–753. Akhtar, M. (2022) Climate change has come for the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. Available at: www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/9/29/23375616/china-clima te-adaptation-heat-wave-future (Accessed 1 December 2022).

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Al Saud, M.M. (2020) Discussion and conclusion, in M.M. Al Saud (ed.) Sustainable Land Management for NEOM Region. Springer International Publishing, pp. 201– 207. Amaro, S. (2022) EU plans multi-billion euro boost for chip production to ease supply disruptions, CNBC. Available at: www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/eu-plans-multi-billion­ euro-boost-for-chip-production.html (Accessed 1 December 2022). ANI (2022) Scrapping CPEC Authority no panacea for Pakistan from Chinese debttrap: Report, ANI News. Available at: www.aninews.in/news/world/asia/scrapping-cp ec-authority-no-panacea-for-pakistan-from-chinese-debt-trap-report20220428131412/ (Accessed 4 December 2022). Al Arabiya (2018) Algeria set to finally open world’s 3rd largest mosque built at a cost of $2 bln. Available at: https://english.alarabiya.net/features/2018/09/04/Algeria-set­ to-finally-open-world-s-3rd-largest-mosque-built-at-a-cost-of-2-bln (Accessed 4 December 2022). Belalloufi, A. (2020) Algeria to inaugurate Bouteflika-era mega mosque, Arab News, 28 October. Available at: www.arabnews.com/node/1755321/middle-east (Accessed 4 December 2022). Belton, P. (2021) The computer chip industry has a dirty climate secret, The Guardian, 18 September. Available at: www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/18/sem iconductor-silicon-chips-carbon-footprint-climate (Accessed 1 December 2022). Burbano, L. (2022) NEOM, the smart city built from scratch in the Arabian desert, Tomorrow City. Available at: https://tomorrow.city/a/neom-saudi-arabia (Accessed 1 December 2022). Cascone, S. (2021) Notre Dame raised almost $1 billion after its devastating fire—But now, the church says it needs more. Available at: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ notre-dame-fund-raising-1980724 (Accessed 4 December 2022). CSIS (2020) The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor at five. Available at: www.csis. org/analysis/china-pakistan-economic-corridor-five (Accessed 4 December 2022). El Yaakoubi, A. (2022) Saudi NEOM’s tech unit rebrands, invests $1 bln in 2022 -CEO, Reuters, 27 September. Available at: www.reuters.com/technology/saudi­ neoms-tech-unit-rebrands-invests-1-bln-2022-ceo-2022-09-27/ (Accessed 1 December 2022). Farshchi, N. (2022) Who’s going to pay for American-made semiconductors? Built In. Available at: https://builtin.com/hardware/american-made-semiconductor-costs (Acces­ sed 1 December 2022). Fessenden, M. (2014) China just opened the world’s largest water diversion project, Smithsonian Magazine. Available at: www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/china -just-sent-first-flows-through-largest-water-diversion-project-world-180953607/ (Acces­ sed 1 December 2022). Flyvbjerg, B. (2021) Make megaprojects more modular, Harvard Business Review, 1 November. Available at: https://hbr.org/2021/11/make-megaprojects-more-modular (Accessed 2 December 2022). Frey, T. (2017) Megaprojects set to explode to 24% of global GDP within a decade, Future of Construction. Available at: www.futureofconstruction.org/blog/megap rojects-set-to-explode-to-24-of-global-gdp-within-a-decade/ (Accessed 2 December 2022). Galloway, P.D., Nielsen, K.R. and Dignum, J.L. (eds) (2012) Managing Gigaprojects: Advice from Those Who’ve Been There, Done That. American Society of Civil Engineers.

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Gohd, C. (2017) Elon Musk: 100 Tesla gigafactories could power the entire world, Futurism. Available at: https://futurism.com/elon-musk-100-tesla-gigafactories-could-p ower-entire-world (Accessed 1 December 2022). He, Y. and Tritto, A. (2022) Urban utopia or pipe dream? Examining Chinese-invested smart city development in Southeast Asia, Third World Quarterly, 43 (9), pp. 2244– 2268. Lo, J. (2020) Pakistan signals coal power exit, in potential model for China’s belt and road, Climate Change News. Available at: www.climatechangenews.com/2020/12/ 16/pakistan-signals-coal-power-exit-potential-model-chinas-belt-road/ (Accessed 5 December 2022). Mardell, J. (2020) The BRI in Pakistan: China’s flagship economic corridor, Merics. Available at: https://merics.org/en/analysis/bri-pakistan-chinas-flagship-economic-corri dor (Accessed 4 December 2022). Müller-Mahn, D., Mkutu, K. and Kioko, E. (2021) Megaprojects—mega failures? The politics of aspiration and the transformation of rural Kenya, The European Journal of Development Research, 33 (4), pp. 1069–1090. Pfotenhauer, S., Laurent, B., Papageorgiou, K. and Stilgoe, J. (2022) The politics of scaling, Social Studies of Science, 52 (1), pp. 3–34. Available at: https://doi.org/10. 1177/03063127211048945 PTI (2022) China okay with Pakistan’s move to scrap CPEC Authority, The Tribune India. Available at: www.tribuneindia.com/news/world/china-okay-with-pak-move­ to-scrap-cpec-authority-423559 (Accessed 4 December 2022). Sacks, D. (2021) The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor—Hard reality greets BRI’s signature initiative, Council on Foreign Relations. Available at: www.cfr.org/blog/ china-pakistan-economic-corridor-hard-reality-greets-bris-signature-initiative (Acces­ sed 5 December 2022). Savage, N. (2017) To build settlements on Mars, we’ll need materials chemistry, Che­ mical & Engineering News. American Chemical Society. Available at: https://cen.acs. org/articles/96/i1/build-settlements-Mars-ll-need.html (Accessed 1 December 2022). SEMI (2022) World fab forecast. Available at: www.semi.org/en/products-services/ma rket-data/fab-forecast (Accessed 1 December 2022). Shields, J. (2019) Notre Dame Cathedral: What it took to build her, HowStuffWorks. Available at: https://history.howstuffworks.com/european-history/notre-dame-cathedra l.htm (Accessed 4 December 2022). Susskind, L. (2019) Forest City Development Project, MIT Science Impact. Avail­ able at: https://scienceimpact.mit.edu/forest-city-development-project (Accessed 4 December 2022). The Jamestown Foundation (2022) Russia wants to participate in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, OilPrice.com. Available at: https://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/ International/Russia-Wants-To-Participate-In-The-China-Pakistan-Economic-Corri dor.html (Accessed 5 December 2022). The National News (2020) Inside Algeria’s $1bn mosque, the third-largest in the world. Available at: www.thenationalnews.com/world/mena/inside-algeria-s-1bn-m osque-the-third-largest-in-the-world-1.1101860 (Accessed 4 December 2022). Thomas, M. and Venema, V. (2022) Neom: What’s the green truth behind a planned eco-city in the Saudi desert? BBC, 22 February. Available at: www.bbc.com/news/ blogs-trending-59601335 (Accessed 1 December 2022). UNESCO (2022) World Heritage List, UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Available at: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/ (Accessed 4 December 2022).

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Verseux, C., Baqué, M., Lehto, K., de Vera, J.-P. P., Rothschild, L. J. and Billi, D. (2016) Sustainable life support on Mars—the potential roles of cyanobacteria, International Journal of Astrobiology, 15 (1), pp. 65–92. Wang, G., Wu, P., Wu, X., Zhang, H., Guo, Q., Cai, Y. (2020) Mapping global research on sustainability of megaproject management: A scientometric review, Journal of Cleaner Production, 259, p. 120831. Wanjala, T. (2021) Kenya first in Africa to make electronic chips amid questions over relevance of tech. Available at: www.zenger.news/2021/05/30/kenya-first-in-africa­ to-make-electronic-chips-amid-questions-over-relevance-of-tech/ (Accessed 1 December 2022). Warner, C. (2020) NASA outlines lunar surface sustainability concept, 25 March. Available at: www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-outlines-lunar-surface-sustainability-concept (Accessed 1 December 2022). Water Technology (2003) South-to-North water diversion project. Available at: www. water-technology.net/projects/south_north/ (Accessed 1 December 2022). World News (2022) China-Pakistan economic corridor gaining momentum seems unlikely: Report, Hindustan Times, 18 November. Available at: www.hindustantim es.com/world-news/chinapakistan-economic-corridor-gaining-momentum-seems-unli kely-report-101668750512739.html (Accessed 4 December 2022). World Nuclear Association (2022) Nuclear power today. Available at: https://world-nu clear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the­ world-today.aspx (Accessed 1 December 2022).

11 Eco-flavors Corporate social responsibility, eco-efficiency, and carbon accounting

The history of corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainability, eco-efficiency, and carbon accounting is not linear, but it is seldom told. In reality, all of these eco-flavors suffer from the same weaknesses: making too many compromises and obsessing over measurement instead of nailing the objective and the best journey to get there.

A brief history of corporate responsibility Corporate social responsibility (CSR) was coined in 1953 by Harold Bowen, who believed that the large corporations at the time concentrated great power and needed to consider their impact (Bowen, Gond, and Bowen, 2013; Agu­ delo et al., 2019). As Bowen wrote: “the obligations of businessmen to pursue those policies, to make those decisions, or to follow those lines of action which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society” (Bowen, Gond, and Bowen, 2013). These social responsibilities grew into a set of intrinsic obligations that the rising category of multinationals started to concern themselves with over the next 20 years, particularly in the US. The legacy of CSR was brought up with the various UN initiatives calling for private sector participation throughout the next 70 years all the way up to now (e.g., sustainable development, Paris Agreement, SDGs). By the early 2000s, major companies like Walt Disney, Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, and Pfizer had incorporated CSR into their businesses (Baldridge, 2021). In 2001, a specific European flavor emerged with the EU Green Paper: “Promoting a European framework for corporate social responsibility”: “[CSR] is essentially a concept whereby companies decide voluntarily to contribute to a better society and a cleaner environment” (EC, 2001). In 2011, Porter and Kramer claimed CSR should be redefined as creating shared value (CSV) where the corporation would first identify the social needs, benefits, or harms embodied through its products, and based on that reconceive products and markets, redefine productivity in the value chain, and create supportive industry clusters where the company operates (Agudelo et al., 2019). CSR took on renewed importance to evaluate corporate behavior in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008–2010. Even Exxon refers to CSR in its 2020 sustainability report (Baldridge, 2021). DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-15

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Already The Population Bomb by Ehrlich (1969) questioned the limits of growth. In the early 1970s, Ehrlich and Holdren claimed the impact of human activity on the environment was a simple formula where impact (I) was a function of three factors: population (P), affluence (A), and technology (T), or I = (PAT). To describe the resulting “maximum endurable impact” he used the term carrying capacity, for example the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources (Biology Online, 2022). The socalled “Kaya identity” further specifies that the total emission level of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide can be expressed as the product of four fac­ tors: human population, GDP per capita, energy intensity (per unit of GDP), and carbon intensity, such as emissions per unit of energy consumed (Kaya and Yokobori, 1997). The Kaya identity is subsequently used in the IPCC’s emission scenarios. According to William E. Rees and Mathis Wackernagel of the Global Footprint Network (2003), impact can be further measured as ecological footprint, for example the quantity of nature it takes to support an economy, not to be confused with the carbon footprint, which measures the emission of gasses that contribute to global warming (by an individual or organizational entity). The idea of a personal carbon footprint was popularized by a large adver­ tising campaign of the fossil fuel company BP in 2005, designed by Ogilvy, and, arguably, attempted to shift the blame for the negative impact of the oil industry onto individual choices. The most immediate effect was a blossoming of individual carbon footprint calculators (e.g., Cool Climate Network and CarbonStory) but it took a while before corporations picked up the mantle. Such calculations will always be fraught with large uncertainties. In 1978, economists Robert J. McIntyre and James Richard Thornton wrote a seminal article, “On the environmental efficiency of economic sys­ tems”, where they became among the first to describe eco-efficiency (McIn­ tyre and Thornton, 1978). In that work, they showed that different countries have dissimilar levels of economic development depending on their “political or institutional form”, and that this should lead to caution as regards the assessment of environmental performance comparisons as well. Their view was simply that the “environmental efficiency” of an economic system will vary depending on how that system works. To a contemporary scholar of political economy, this statement seems self-evident. However, to an energy policy analyst, it is not. In fact, any discussion of eco-efficiency is con­ troversial even today. Why is that?

Tracing the flaws of eco-efficiency The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) is a CEO-led organization founded in 1995 as a platform to respond to corporate sustainability challenges. Its membership currently includes over 200 interna­ tional companies. AT&T, Nestlé, Kodak, 3M, and Royal Philips Electronics,

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Iberdrola, Arkema, Mahindra & Mahindra, Saint Gobain, Nestlé, CLP Holdings, Eni, Kering, ABB, Royal Dutch Shell, Alstom, Total, Solvay, Apple, Randstad, IBM, Schneider Electric, Toshiba, Bayer, and Infosys, are among its members. Its existence is controversial. In 2011, Greenpeace went on the record stating WBCSD has been holding world society back from tackling the climate crisis for the last 20 years (Greenpeace, 2011). WBCSD popularized the notion of eco-efficiency in the early 1990s with its publication Changing Course (Schmidheiny, 1992). The concept invites industry to create more goods and services while using fewer resources, creating less waste and pollution in the process. More value with less impact surely sounds enticing. The industrial elegance of eco-efficiency cannot be denied. For a decade or so, this was hot stuff. The OECD picked it up in a 1998 report (OECD, 1998), defining eco-efficiency as “the efficiency with which ecological resources are used to meet human needs” and defines it as a ratio of an output (the value of products and services produced by a firm, sector, or economy as a whole) divided by the input (the sum of environ­ mental pressures generated by the firm, the sector, or the economy). To the OECD, “innovation in technology, behavior, and organization” is needed to improve eco-efficiency, but also alludes to the “lock-in” that makes change look costly to “the current system of alliances among stakeholders that tends to preserve the status-quo”. A follow-up book, Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development (Holliday, Schmidheiny, and Watts, 2002), further evangelized the topic as entailing four key strategies: dematerialization (let knowledge flow instead), production loop closure (with zero waste), service extension (leasing not buying), and functional extension towards smarter products (Davies, 2003), but without being too specific on what actions to take (John­ son, 2003). Either way, the soundbite was to see the environmental challenge as a win-win for corporations and society: “Eco-efficiency is a management philosophy that encourages business to search for environmental improve­ ments that yield parallel economic benefits” (WBCSD, 2006). As of the end of 2022, WCBSD requires science-based plans to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within the next 30 years as a condition of membership (Hicks, 2020) or will be asked to ‘adhere or explain’ and seek extension or exemp­ tion” (WBCSD, 2023). The context must be fully understood as the corporate response to the Brundtland Commission (1987) five years earlier and to guide industry towards its contribution at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro conference on the environment. The goal was to guide industry on “how the business commu­ nity can adapt and contribute to the crucial goal of sustainable develop­ ment—which combines the objectives of environmental protection and economic growth” (Schmidheiny, 1992). By doing so, it aimed to show how (previously “invisible”) environmental costs can best be factored into pro­ duction, investment, and trade. The study clarifies that markets will only work well if prices reflect environmental costs, a “difficult condition to achieve” (Diebold Jr., 1992). This was the beginning of the debate on corporate

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environment reporting and discussed how an environmentally conscious firm should be managed. We have to keep in mind that each of these things were pathbreaking at the time since by now it sounds like business as usual. Out of this work, evolved the notion of product life cycle assessment (LCA). There are several challenges with the notion of eco-efficiency. There is the alle­ gation that corporate eco-efficiency indicators purporting to show how efficiently companies use scarce environmental resources is merely a form of greenwashing and that it really is only an efficiency measure. McIntyre and Thornton claim that eco-efficiency depends on the institutional setting and cannot be compared apples to apples. However, that flies in the face of most carbon accounting frameworks that attempt to do just that. A myriad of eco-efficiency indicators has been sug­ gested and it’s not immediately clear that desirable economic outcomes can be directly juxtaposed to undesirable environmental impacts, or even to unwanted resource use, since the two tend to be intermixed. It’s easier to miss biodiversity if you focus simply on efficiency (given that diversity is a long-tail concern about ecosystem survival). Because efficiency is derived from economics, the term is at times reductive of socio-cultural concerns and phenomena. How eco-efficiency evolved into standards Whatever one might have against the corporate concept of eco-efficiency and its ability to short-circuit the most ambitious sustainability aspirations of environmentalists, it did after a while evolve into concrete metrics. Already back in 1996, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) cre­ ated the “14000” set of standards “to help companies address their environ­ mental impact” (Baldridge, 2021). In 2001, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a global non-governmental stan­ dard, and a set of calculation tools for measuring corporate greenhouse gas emissions was created through a partnership between the World Resources Institute, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and other nongovernmental organizations and businesses. The GHG Protocol organi­ zation itself estimates that more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies participate in some type of disclosure associated with the framework (GHGProtocol, 2022). The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) also provides some general standards for greenhouse gas emissions at organization level (ISO 14064–1), and greenhouse gas emissions at project level (ISO 14064–2) which were completed after a four-year development in March 2006. Normally, sustainability standards are accompanied by a ver­ ification process (e.g., typically third-party certification).

The industrial ecology interlude Industrial ecology is a relatively newly emerged academic field (and industrial concern) which conceptualizes industry as a man-made ecosystem that oper­ ates in a similar way to natural ecosystems, where the wastes of a species may

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be a resource to another species. It argues that in industry, it should equally be so that the waste or by-product of one industrial process is used as an input (for example a raw material) into another process, thereby reducing the impact of industry on the environment (Frosch and Gallopoulos, 1989). Today, industrial ecology provides “scientifically rigorous methodologies, tools, and approaches for understanding and applying circular economy practices”, including material flow analysis, life cycle assessment, environ­ mental footprint analysis, and industrial symbiosis (IS4IE, 2022). Industrial ecology is focused on the stages of the production processes of goods and services, trying to mimic a natural system by conserving and reusing resources (Chertow, 2008). One of the earliest and best examples of life cycle assessment in a corporate setting was done by economists at the German multinational chemical com­ pany BASF, based on the ISO 14040 standard for life cycle analysis (1997– 2000, 2006). Interestingly, already early on, the connection to marketing became apparent because LCA shows “which process is more favorable than other alternatives” (Saling et al., 2002). Early efforts at ESG reporting The term environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors was first coined by Ivo Knoepfel in 2005 in a landmark UN Compact and IFC work stream and study entitled “Who cares wins” (UNGCO, 2005). The same year, the so-called “Freshfield Report” showed that ESG issues are relevant for financial valuation. These two reports formed the backbone for the launch of the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) at the New York Stock Exchange in 2006 and the launch of the Sustainable Stock Exchange Initia­ tive (SSEI) the following year (Kell 2018). Today, an ESG report, which encompasses both qualitative disclosures and quantitative metrics, is as much a communication tool as it is a compliance tool enabling an organization to be transparent about the risks and opportunities it faces (PWC, 2022). The environmental pillar of ESG contains topics such as climate change, carbon emissions, natural resources, biodiversity and land use, pollution and waste, package materials, and raw material sourcing. Today, globally, a third of all professionally managed assets, or roughly $30 trillion, are now subject to ESG criteria (Howard-Grenville, 2021). B cor­ porations, business entities that voluntarily certify their ESG performance, now number over 4,000 companies in 77 countries (Baldridge, 2021). Three of the world’s largest markets—the United States, the EU, and China—will have ESG reporting requirements mandated by the end of 2021 (Baldridge, 2021). The downside of ESG reporting However, operationalizing and measuring ESG is not trivial. For years, there has existed a trail of consultants willing to help. Only quite recently have

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software frameworks emerged which aim to automate the process. Arguably, although both “necessary” and “inevitable”, our current measurement is “dangerously narrow” and “fails to consider the systemic nature of social and environmental systems” (Howard-Grenville, 2021). ESG in its current form is “more a buzzword than a solution” (Kaplan and Ramanna, 2021). Environ­ mental liability of product and production process is more straightforward to measure. An E-liability approach would track emissions across an entire value chain reducing incentives for gaming and manipulation by outsourcing. The only caveat is that this procedure assumes everyone is calculating their E-lia­ bility so that this value add can be transferred between suppliers “much the way it assumes production inputs as inventory on its financial-accounting books” (Kaplan and Ramanna, 2021). With ESG, Howard-Grenville (2021) writes, we tend to measure inputs (for example, setting fuel-economy standards for cars), not outcomes (better fuel economy across all transportation), with the result that (in the US in parti­ cular) companies shifted towards SUVs and light trucks, and emissions did not drop as much as hoped (Howard-Grenville, 2021). From eco-efficiency to opportunity cost Eco-efficiency analysis based on the notion of opportunity cost (which is then compared to the performance of an alternative economic activity) is perhaps the most compatible with standard management thinking, but true corporate uptake has been limited (Hahn et al., 2010). In a later study, Figge and Hahn (2013) helpfully suggest that eco-efficiency, beyond capital considerations (e. g., sales margin and capital turnover) depends on the amount of environ­ mental resources used, relative to the use of economic capital (sustainability leverage), and, as a result considers the return on other resources alongside economic capital. This, in turn allows you to compare the eco-efficiency of a company to that of a market, which is quite helpful, and it allows that com­ parison to be multifaceted. That’s why I like the term, because it can become a useful way to describe value drivers. The World Economic Forum’s Global Lighthouse Network has (for a decade) tracked the world’s leading factories (e.g., lighthouse factories). In their last report, they claim that some lighthouse factories, enabled by “fourth industrial revolution technology” deserve a sustainability designation for their ability to “increase efficiency and productivity, in tandem with environmental stewardship” achieving “step-change improvements in sustainability and pro­ ductivity” (WEF, 2021). For example, Ericsson’s (Lewisville) greenfield 5G factory is powered 100 percent by renewable electricity from on-site solar and green-e® certified renewable electricity from the utility grid. Henkel (Düsseldorf) deployed utility meters on machines integrated in a digital twin that connects and benchmarks 30 factories and prescribes real-time sustainability actions that has led to 38 percent less energy (kWh/ton) used. Finally, Schneider Electric’s (Lexington) smart factory leveraged IoT connectivity with power meters and

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predictive analytics to optimize energy cost, leading to a 26 percent energy reduction (GWh), 30 percent net CO2 reduction (WEF, 2021).

The tricky business of carbon accounting Of the world’s largest 2000 public companies, 21 percent have committed to meeting net zero targets (ECIU, 2021). However, it is unclear what this means, and what the consequences would be of not following up on their commitments. That’s where carbon accounting and carbon standards frame­ works come in. Carbon accounting is not a new discussion but has been slow to take hold because of a lack of agreement of what it would entail and because of com­ peting, cumbersome, and proprietary sustainability reporting frameworks (e. g., GHG Protocol, PCAF, PEF, CDP, GRI, SBTi, TCFD, SBTs, SECR, CDP, and others). Dozens of competing reporting frameworks of varying scope exist and are used in a myriad of ways, poorly regulated, and without effective sanctions by investor-, board-, stakeholder-, or government reg­ ulatory oversight. Mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting through the GHG Protocol is law in 40 countries, including the UK, many EU member states, North America, Australia, and Japan. Mandatory carbon reporting regulations were implemented in the EU’s Regulation on the Governance of the Energy Union and Climate Action (EC, 2023), and the UK requires companies to report on climate change by 2025. Since the Paris Climate Agreement, the largest banks have still invested more than $3.8 trillion into the fossil fuel sector with no assessment of the carbon impact of that finance (PCAF, 2022). In 2015, 14 Dutch financial institutions created Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF), an industry-led partnership to facilitate transparency and accountability of the financial industry to the Paris Agreement. Since then, 28 banks have joined the effort, applying this standard to over 250 institutions globally. PCAF aims to grow the number of commitments to over 250 financial insti­ tutions globally by 2022 (also targeting pension funds, asset owners, and managers), and ultimately aim to make GHG accounting common practice within the financial industry (PCAF, 2022). A large number of startups are now active in the emerging Climate Man­ agement & Accounting Platform (CMAP) space, perhaps a few hundred firms (Glasner, 2021; Merchant, 2021; Crunchbase, 2022), including Phoenix-based Persefoni (2020), San Francisco-based Sinai Technologies (2017), Munichbased Makersite (2018), Stockholm-based Normative (2014), Montpellier, France-based Sweep (2020), and two London-based startups, Sylvera (2020) and Supercritical (2021). Persefoni’s Software-as-a-Service solutions aim to constitute “the ERP of carbon” to manage carbon transactions and inventory with the same rigor as financial transactions. SINAI Technologies builds enterprise decarbonization software to measure, analyze, price, and reduce emissions. Makersite is a cloud-based platform combining data aggregation

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and live applications for agile product life cycle management (PLM) in the manufacturing industry, making use of digital twins. Normative assesses a company’s social and environmental impact automatically by analyzing their purchase, using artificial intelligence combined with the world’s largest sus­ tainability research database. Sweep is a software platform that helps com­ panies understand, manage, and reduce their carbon emissions across their entire business and value chain. Sylvera is scaling carbon markets to tackle climate change. Supercritical helps businesses measure, reduce, and offset their climate impact in weeks without the need for a sustainability team. Right now, the carbon accounting space is relatively undifferentiated and there are far too many firms to know what will happen to the space apart from the safe prediction that the market will rapidly consolidate.

Conclusion In my view, the winning eco-efficiency firms will have (1) a clear, simple con­ cept, (2) an interoperable, data-rich deep tech platform feeding on both public and company data, potentially on proprietary collected data as well, acces­ sible through a SaaS-based subscription model, (3) critical mass of lead cli­ ents to achieve product–market fit through rapidly responding to emerging client needs (which are uncertain at the moment), and (4) solid awareness of and influence upon government regulatory processes (in the EU, US, and China), and emerging standardization frameworks. There are two possibi­ lities: industrial winners, and a winner-take-all set of solutions. It will likely start out as a set of three to five industrial winners and further move towards a win-all market as some of it will be plain accounting and some will become part of operational excellence management. The next chapter takes a critical look at various forms for carbon capture and asks whether it is a good idea.

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Johnson, E. (2003) Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development: Charles Holliday, Stephan Schmidheiny and Philip Watts. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 23 (1), p. 131. Kaplan, R.S. and Ramanna, K. (2021) Accounting for climate change, Harvard Busi­ ness Review, 1 November. Available at: https://hbr.org/2021/11/accounting-for-clima te-change (Accessed 11 December 2022). Kaya, Y. and Yokobori, K. (1997) Environment, energy, and economy: Strategies for sustainability, UNU. Available at: https://archive.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/ uu17ee/uu17ee00.htm (Accessed 11 December 2022). Kell, G. (2018) The remarkable rise of ESG. Forbes, 11 July. Available at: www.forbes. com/sites/georgkell/2018/07/11/the-remarkable-rise-of-esg/?sh=11bc161c1695 (Acces­ sed 13 April 2023). McIntyre, R.J. and Thornton, J.R. (1978) On the environmental efficiency of economic systems, Soviet Studies, 30 (2), pp. 173–192. Merchant, E.F. (2021) Carbon accounting is hard. These startups want to make it easier, Canary Media. Available at: www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-industry/ca rbon-accounting-is-hard-these-startups-aim-to-make-it-easier (Accessed 11 Decem­ ber 2022). OECD (1998) Eco-efficiency. OECD Publishing. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1787/ 9789264040304-en (Accessed 13 April 2023). PCAF (2022) PCAF: Enabling financial institutions to assess greenhouse gas emissions. Available at: https://carbonaccountingfinancials.com/ (Accessed 11 December 2022). PWC (2022) ESG reporting and preparation of a sustainability report. Available at: www.pwc.com/sk/en/environmental-social-and-corporate-governance-esg/esg-rep orting.html (Accessed 11 December 2022). Saling, P., Kicherer, A., Dittrich-Krämer, B. et al. (2002) Eco-efficiency analysis by BASF: The method, International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 7 (4), pp. 203–218. Schmidheiny, S. (1992) Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Develop­ ment and the Environment. 1st edn. The MIT Press. UNGCO (2005) Investing for long-term value: integrating environmental, social and governance value drivers in asset management and financial research, in Conference on “Investing for Long-Term Value: Integrating Environmental, Social and Gov­ ernance Value Drivers in Asset Management and Financial Research”. (2005: Zurich, Switzerland). International Finance Corporation (IFC): Available at: https:// digitallibrary.un.org/record/681686?ln=en (Accessed 11 December 2022). WBCSD (2006) Eco-efficiency learning module, World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Available at: www.wbcsd.org/Projects/Education/Resources/Eco-efficiency­ Learning-Module (Accessed 11 December 2022). WEF (2021) Global lighthouse network: Reimagining operations for growth. White Paper, March. Available at: www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GLN_2021_Reima gining_Operations_for_Growth.pdf (Accessed 13 April 2023).

12 Carbon capture illusions

Imagine knowing what will be in the history books of the future. One thing is for certain, carbon capture, as technical as it is, will appear prominently. The basic idea of capturing CO₂ and preventing it from being released into the atmosphere was first suggested in 1977. Gas processing facilities have long used a version of it to separate CO₂ from methane, to purify and sell either. The process is called enhanced oil recovery and the resulting excess gas is injected into oil fields. In contrast, the industrially relevant version of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a point-of-emissions capture system. Industrial CCS (attached to smokestacks) become add-ons to existing factories. Pre­ sumably, they will ultimately become mandated in new ones. Such systems reduce future emissions but cannot remove carbon already in the atmosphere.

Scaling industrial carbon capture Ten years ago, there were only six large CCS projects around the world. Sharon Ridge oilfield in Texas by BlueSource (1972), Sleipner in Norway by Equinor (1996), Koch Nitrogen Plant, Enid, Oklahoma (2003), Snøhvit in Norway by Equinor (2008), Shengli power plant, China by Sinopec (2007) and Shute Creek Gas Processing Plant, in LaBarge, Wyoming by ExxonMo­ bil (2010). The motivations for building these facilities are important to keep in mind. The two US facilities (Sharon Ridge and Koch), and the Chinese one (Shengli) were designed for enhanced oil recovery (which equals more profits) and deploy a simplified technology for that purpose. The Sleipner CO2 gas processing and capture unit was “built in order to evade the 1991 Norwegian CO2 tax” and “obtains CO2 credit for the injected CO2 and does not pay the tax” (MIT, 2016b). Today, carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) facilities around the world have the capacity to capture more than 40 MtCO2 each year. In 1996, Norway launched the world’s first integrated carbon capture and storage project, known as Sleipner, in the North Sea, with follow-up projects at Snøhvit and Kårstø, an aborted project at Halten (found not commercially viable), followed by large-scale testing at Mongstad (canceled 2013) in the following years (Braend, 2016; MIT, 2016a). At that time, government subsidies played a major DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-16

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role. Now, there’s disagreement on whether subsidies are the answer, given the business opportunities to simply get paid for such efforts. The Global CCS Institute claims that 135 commercial CCS facilities are in the pipeline and 27 are fully operational, representing sectors like cement, steel, hydrogen, power generation, and direct air capture (GCCSI, 2022). After $3 billion is invested, the amount of CO2 being captured today is 43 million tons, or 0.1 percent of global emissions (BNEF, 2022). However, to constrain global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, capacity would need to reach “a staggering 7,750 Mtpa” (MacKenzie, 2022). Even Wood MacKenzie, an analyst that serves all the heavy emitter industries, admits it would require a mix of technology improvements, solutions to transportation and storage, effective policy support, and “well structured carbon pricing schemes” (MacKenzie, 2022). On the upside, more than 60 companies and nine governments have now joined the First Movers Coalition,1 a public–private partnership that aims to scale up carbon dioxide removal technologies. The technical and commercial challenges are daunting. A Global CCS Institute report estimates up to US $1,280 billion of capital investment is required by 2050 (GCCSI, 2021), which is about the size of the energy sector today. The additional challenge is speed, because most of this infrastructure would need to become operational by 2030. The US is a global leader in CCUS, supported by its 45Q tax credit incentive for carbon sequestration launched in 2008. On 16 August 2022, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law, which will enhance and extend the 45Q tax incentive, at $85 per ton captured. Even though various startup trackers list hundreds or more startups (Tracxn, 2022) some of them are too insignificant to count on at present. However, today, there are at least ten startups that have entered the race to provide carbon capture and storage at industrial scale (Nanalyze, 2021). Sev­ eral of them are supported by major corporate venture capitalists from the oil and gas industry. In early 2021, Elon Musk donated $100 million to a carbon removal prize launched on XPRIZE with the competition running for four years, until 2025. By November, 23 student-led teams won the first competi­ tion (XPRIZE, 2021). The most interesting startups from the perspective of eco-efficiency, and who already have reached commercial scale, include Aker Carbon Capture (2020), Climeworks (2009), Carbon Clean Solutions (2009), Pasadena, Cali­ fornia-based Carbon Capture (2019), and Canada-based Svante (2007) which enjoys a significant amount of government subsidies (Friedman, 2021). Svante is a Canadian startup founded in 2007, an original equipment manu­ facturer (OEM) in the carbon space. The startup spun out of the University of Calgary based on a metal organic framework (MOF) called CALF-20 that can selectively capture CO2 in large quantities. The catch and store process (catch, release, condition, cool) takes 60 seconds according to Svante’s web­ site, and uses nano-materials as solid absorbents. With government support it did a $100 million Series D in 2020, and another $318 million Series E led by

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Chevron in 2022, collaborates with Climeworks, and has a pilot with Chev­ ron. According to Letourneau, to effectively capture the CO2 currently being emitted into the atmosphere, the world needs to have 10,000 capture plants running over the next 30 years, or “two plants a week in the next decade, at a cost of approximately $250 million per plant”. Letorneau feels Biden’s Infla­ tion Reduction Act will drive the investment required to bring mass com­ mercial scale projects to financial investment decision (FID). He also thinks CCS is “inexpensive” because it represents “2% of the total cost and will deliver 20% of the emissions mitigation benefit”, if using IRENA’s 120 trillion US dollars mitigation cost (IRENA, 2022). Talk about rhetoric.

Interview 12.1 Carbon Removal Challenges. Interview with Claude Letorneau, CEO, Svante. Futurized podcast.

Letorneau, CEO of Svante, tells me: I looked at the airline industry and I said “how many Airbus and Boeing planes do we have in the fleet?” [The answer is] twenty-five thousand. The cost of an airplane is about $300 million, about the same investment as a carbon capture plant. The airline industry with two companies, Airbus and Boeing dominated the market of building commercial aircraft. Three companies provided engines to the airline industry: GE, Pratt & Whitney, and Rolls-Royce. I want to be the GE of the carbon capture space. We don’t need a breakthrough to get the industry going. We need to get going with what we have now and that’s what the CCS market is. (Undheim, 2023a) The Norwegian company Aker Carbon Capture (ACC) serves a range of industries, including the cement, bio and waste-to-energy, gas-to-power, and blue hydrogen segments. Its carbon capture technology has been developed since 2005 and has been offered commercially since 2009. Part of Aker, the industrial investment company with ownership interests concentrated in oil and gas, renewable energy and green technologies, maritime assets, marine

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biotechnology, and industrial software, it has been a separate exchange-listed company since 2020, currently has 70 employees and deploys a carbon capture-as-a-service business model. ACCs technical solution is a chemistrybased process engineering chemical loop using aimines, specifically solvents S21 and S26 (Gorset et al., 2014), arguably described as second-generation CCS technology. Competitors in the space include Shell and Mitsubishi as well as off-the-shelf amine players. CCS approaches include cryogenic, absorption, membrane, adsorption, and chemical looping There is also newer third-generation technology which is less proven out, including an approach using potassium carbonate which is hard to scale without costly additional pressure, temperature, catalyst, or enzyme (Baker et al., 2022). There are also newer technologies, newer solvents, and various metal organic compounds and frameworks under development. One of the biggest issues is transportation. David Phillips, Head of UK and Investor Relations at Aker Carbon Capture told me: Not every emitter is going to have an industrial cluster on their doorstep. We have a lot of incoming requests for studies and engineering work for plants that are, to be blunt, in the wrong place. They are in Southern Europe somewhere, in Italy, or Greece, and there’s not an obvious route to take your CO2 and store it somewhere. The only route is to put it in a ship and take it up to Norway or the UK. That I think is a classic “known unknown”, because those ships don’t really exist yet. (Undheim, 2023b) In the Americas, there’s land-based storage opportunities but the Gulf of Mexico is another option with less land rights issues and only the government to deal with although it is also the site of the largest oil spill in history, Deepwater Horizon (Richards and Anchondo, 2022).

Interview 12.2 Industrial Carbon Removal. Interview with David Phillips, Head of UK and Investor Relations at Aker Carbon Capture. Futurized podcast.

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It is still early days for industrial carbon capture. More innovation is needed but the world also cannot wait for it. Government and industry in unison have to scale up the solutions that exist today, with drastically increased efforts. Despite those challenges, industrial carbon removal is necessary if we want to keep industry operating. That is a question but not one that is particularly realistic to ponder. Industry will most likely prevail over ecological concerns at least until 2050, at which point, what happens will depend on what changes have been achieved and how bad climate cataclysm has become. Unfortunately, foresight seems to play a smaller role.

Is direct air capture (DAC) pure fantasy? Canadian startup Carbon Engineering (2009) and Swiss-based Climeworks (2009) are among the companies who attempt direct-air carbon (DAC) cap­ ture at scale, using massive fans, sending it through a liquid or solid filter to remove CO₂ and storing the gas permanently underground (Thorne, 2021). From a pilot plant in British Columbia, Carbon Engineering has been cap­ turing CO₂ from the atmosphere since 2015. In 2021, Carbon Engineering secured the first banking client (BMO) to purchase 1,000 tons of direct air capture carbon removals (BMO, 2021). In 2021, Climeworks started up the first commercial carbon absorbing site. The plant will capture 4,000 tons of CO₂ a year, making it the largest directair capture facility in the world. At a price of $600 per ton (in bulk) but aiming to get down to $200 per ton by 2030 it would soon make it cheaper for polluters in Europe to use Climeworks than pay the penalty. The firm sells carbon removal credits at up to €1,000 a ton to buyers including Microsoft, Audi, and BCG (Abnett, 2022). The carbon price (per ton) fluctuates widely across each carbon market but is rarely above $100. By 2022, Climeworks had raised $650 million, including institutional investors. Admittedly, its concept for Mammoth, its newest air capture facility looks futuristic although by the look of it has as much steel as a 1980s space station. Climeworks aims for multi-megaton capacity “on track to gigaton capacity by 2050” (Climeworks, 2022). Let’s see. To me, unfortunately for all of us, it looks enormously dystopian, industrial, and backward. I will note that Climeworks turned down the chance to be interviewed for this book, which was a shame for both parties. US-based Global Thermostat LLC has a similar approach (Sigurdardottir and Rathi, 2021). A newcomer, Bill Gross startup Carbon Capture (2019) is working with mining companies Rio Tinto and Talon Metals. Otherwise, it is distinct by its modular approach with DAC systems that fit into containersized modules to ease rapid deployment built on a Wyoming site (Peters, 2022). Both of those startups currently operate at factors of magnitude earlier stages of maturity than Climeworks. Some observers are moderately optimistic about DAC’s commercial, tech­ nical, and scaling path (McQueen et al., 2021). I am not. We might need almost as many DAC machines as we have cars on the road, at least in the

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tens of millions (Malm and Carton, 2021). The reality is, the type of tech­ nology currently used to experiment with DAC is far from the technology that would be used if this were to be scaled up to become a global climate solution to address even 15 percent of the Earth’s annual excess carbon emissions. The scaling logic would likely also have to be very different. It cannot depend on the same toxic industrial supply chains and materials that got us into trouble in the first place, namely steel and cement. The cynical view is DAC simply is a hook for policy funding, and not much else. For now, it is squarely in the sci-fi category, but it sounds nice. We are currently far away from the needed scale for CCS startups to handle excess emissions, even counting on a fabulistic scale-up effort, including public acceptance of massive direct-to-air infrastructure near urban areas. It seems clear that, even in the most optimistic of scenarios, a portfolio approach is needed. CCS might be a small part of the solution but is very unlikely to be the only horse in the race to bet on. Scale-up challenges Subsidies are intended to protect consumers by keeping prices low. But they come at a high cost. In this case they encourage pollution. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion (or 6.8 percent of GDP) in 2020, expected to increase to 7.4 percent of GDP in 2025 as the share of fuel consumption in emerging markets (where price gaps are generally larger) continues to climb (IMF, 2019). The critique is that many CCUS projects just provide cover for increasing emissions and become an excuse for even further government sub­ sidies. CCUS creates the idea that we can go on burning oil and gas and make the carbon disappear, which is only partly true, and at great cost and some risk. Adding expensive carbon capture equipment to a fossil power plant would only tilt the balance further in favor of renewable sources. China and Southeast Asia are forecast to have the biggest demand for CCUS in the 2040s. However, Asia is far behind in its regulatory and policy implementa­ tion. In fact, despite a growing pipeline, only Australia and Japan have operational CCUS projects. Most governments have only recently recognized that policy support is essential to drive investment (Thompson, 2022). The world has 35 commercial facilities deploying CCS according to the IEA, although even oil companies such as Shell estimate that 10,000 large facilities are needed in the next 50 years. In that case, the CO2 market will be in the tens of billions in this decade and would reach a trillion-dollar market by that time. It is clear why the fossil industry wants to manage the transition. However, there’s a pretty straightforward argument that says that CCUS should be reserved for the hardest to abate sectors, not to offset the emissions from hydrocarbons which are easily substituted through electrification and renewable energy. Another matter is the dependency on infrastructure clusters for offshore storage. The cost to ship it to storage sources (UK, Northern Lights, North Sea) means new investment in coastal vessels to pick up the

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CO2 is needed, too. If not being used on-site, the captured CO2 is compressed and transported by pipeline, ship, rail or truck to be used in a range of applications or injected into deep geological formations (including depleted oil and gas reservoirs or saline formations) which trap the CO2 for permanent storage. A carbon price would be one way to create fossil industry incentives to change, by taxing plants on the CO2 entering the atmosphere. Several states, countries, and regions around the world already use carbon pri­ cing, including the European Union, China, California, and a group of states in the Northeast United States called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Recently, a small set of companies are starting to emphasize the carbon utilization angle as opposed to simply storage, which I personally find much more convincing, appealing, and socio-behaviorally sound. Storage is a recipe for future problems—utilization handles the problem immediately. The hidden cost of carbon capture The biggest challenge to CCS is likely to be public backlash against ugly infrastructure build-out. The eco-efficiency behavior that those favoring or fostering carbon capture initiatives need to keep in mind is that on the one hand, such efforts might have a detrimental effect on individual motivation to change eco-effective consumption behaviors that make a real difference inde­ pendently (less air travel, using public transport, becoming vegetarians) because they have faith in the sci-tech and big whammy effect of such efforts (even though they might fail or arrive too late to fix the problem). On the other hand, big CCS initiatives have a cost that ultimately will be passed on to consumers or citizens. Whether that cost will be viewed as legitimate and timely will to a large degree depend on whether the perception of the behavioral effects of CCS are positive or negative. The three key dimensions of social acceptance (i.e., socio-political, market, and community acceptance) pertaining to innovation within CO₂ utilization, are each interrelated, and will fundamentally shape their path (Markusson, Shackley, and Evar, 2012; Jones et al., 2017; IEA, 2019). Local acceptance of a project might color national decision making, and vice versa, and might affect its consumer uptake (as an approach) or might lead to consumers rejecting CO₂-derived products. CCS (particularly DAC) projects might be big, but it is key to remember that all such projects are local and need a localization strategy (Cherepovitsyn et al., 2020). Location might, in fact make or break a CCS project, making the siting decision crucial as some locations might lead residents to question the impact on property values, safety, health, nature, or the marine ecosys­ tems—or if the site was purely a storage site and would get fewer employment benefits (von Rothkirch and Ejderyan, 2021). Earlier controversies around other large-scale public technology projects such as windmills, pipelines, or

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nuclear energy siting could also come into play. Transporting the CCS is already creating opposition against the “need” for a new 2,000-mile-long pipeline network across the US Midwest (Joyce, 2021). CCS projects remain controversial with high-profile public opposition to particular CCS developments for reasons of safety, cost, risk, or fair­ ness. The Swiss seem more accepting than the Canadians, for example. Those living closer to a project are (no surprise) typically less supportive, but the opposite dynamic has also been observed, perhaps because such projects also provide jobs or other reasons such as the merit of the pro­ ject and feeling involved in sustainability. All seems to depend on the framing of the project. One risky strategy for developers would be to pose CCS as an alternative to lifestyle change when in reality both will be required in order to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels but is perhaps an argument for participatory approaches where stakeholders have a say in the process (Whitmarsh, Xenias, and Jones, 2019). There are three main rationales for public engagement: normative (as sta­ keholders), substantive (adding insight and values), and instrumental (raising awareness and fostering trust in experts) (Whitmarsh, Xenias, and Jones, 2019). Consumers could simply refuse (or conversely decide to only buy CO₂­ infused building materials such as green concrete). They might potentially object to the use of CO₂ to enhance the yields of biological processes, or to its existing or future use in fuels or chemicals, and so on. Think only of the pivotal role of public procurement. Public procurement of low-carbon pro­ ducts can help to create an early market for CO2-derived products, but only if the voters agree that it is a good approach. The aesthetics also matter. Big “carbon sucking machines”, for lack of a better term, might be even more unsightly than windmills or power lines, and we all know how hard it has been to convince locals of putting windmills or powerlines smack on top of their residential property, favorite natural resource, piece of ocean, walking path, or recreation trail. The same people would love to have more windmills (generally) because they favor renewables, just not in their backyard. Management and innovation in the face of sci-tech uncertainty is complex but is further complicated by regulators or engineers who do not always take the socio-behavioral aspects into account and treat them as afterthoughts only of importance to social consequences and ethics. In contrast, socio-behavioral effects might make or break such projects in the mind of the public, or indeed make them commercially viable because of the support they are able to muster in the local community or the community­ at-large. Imagine the public rejects the costs for the trillion dollars it would take to make carbon capture a reality. Could the private sector handle the costs alone? This doesn’t seem feasible. The more innovators understand about the long tail of social network effects, the better their innovations will succeed.

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Conclusion At present, the investment case for industrial CCS is murky, at best, but the potential eco-efficiency gains, and the financial returns are also potentially astronomical. However, unless governments step in, and in a big way, the business case for direct air capture is non-existent and the cost and infra­ structure challenges insurmountable. Given the stakes, governments might. CCS as such currently is on track to produce exactly the kind of unmanage­ able, complex, over-engineered, and proprietary infrastructure technologies that we were trying to get away from in the process industry and, in effect, is the legacy of the past few industrial revolutions. The utilization angle does sweeten the pie somewhat, but does still sit on the same closed, bulky platforms. I have yet to see an elegant CCS project, the kind a product-centric Adobe, 3M, Apple, Disney, Dyson, Nike, Rolls-Royce, Samsung, Tesla, or SpaceX would build. Until that appears, I’m on the fence, and I think most consumers will be, as well. Our troubled times are mind-boggling. Yet, all we need to do is to dedicate ourselves to the task. We do need scientific breakthroughs. We need engi­ neering marvels. We might even need beautiful constructions, to the extent that synthetic biology can be beautiful. We also need trillions of dollars. But the money already exists, it’s just spread out on too many different people, institutions, and geographies. Gigaprojects is also not a panacea, so the answer could be a coherently managed, balanced portfolio. The next chapter presents a small set of eco-effective commandments, with the idea that less is more.

Note 1 www.weforum.org/first-movers-coalition.

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Braend, T. (2016) CCS in Norway—still a long way from the goal, Airclim. Available at: www.airclim.org/acidnews/ccs-norway-%E2%80%93-still-long-way-goal (Acces­ sed 23 December 2022). Cherepovitsyn, A., Chvileva, T. and Fedoseev, S. (2020). Popularization of carbon capture and storage technology in society: Principles and methods. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17 (22), p. 8368. https://doi. org/10.3390/ijerph17228368 Climeworks (2022) Mammoth: Our newest direct air capture and storage facility. Available at: https://climeworks.com/roadmap/mammoth (Accessed 27 November 2022). Friedman, G. (2021) Ottawa invests $25 million in B.C.-based startup to help build “Silicon Valley of carbon capture industry”, Calgary Herald. Available at: https://ca lgaryherald.com/commodities/energy/oil-gas/ottawa-invests-25-million-in-b-c-ba sed-carbon-capture-startup/ (Accessed 23 December 2022). GCCSI (2021) Global status of CCS 2021, Global CCS Institute. Available at: www. globalccsinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Global-Status-of-CCS-2021-Globa l-CCS-Institute-1121.pdf. GCCSI (2022) Global status of CCS 2022, Global CCS Institute. Available at: www.globa lccsinstitute.com/resources/global-status-of-ccs-2022/ (Accessed 23 December 2022). Gorset, O., Nygaard, K., Bade, O.M. and Askestad, I. (2014) Results from testing of Aker Solutions advanced amine solvents at CO2 Technology Centre Mongstad, Energy Procedia, 63, pp. 6267–6280. IEA (2019) Putting CO2 to use. Available at: www.iea.org/reports/putting-co2-to-use (Accessed 23 December 2022). IMF (2019) Fossil fuel subsidies. Available at: www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/ energy-subsidies (Accessed 27 November 2022). IRENA (2022) World Energy Transitions Outlook: 1–5C Pathway, 2022 edition. Available at: www.irena.org/Publications/2022/Mar/World-Energy-Transitions-Out look-2022 (Accessed 27 November 2022). Jones, C.R., Olfe-Kräutlein, B., Naims, H. and Armstrong, K. (2017) The social acceptance of carbon dioxide utilisation: A review and research agenda, Frontiers in Energy Research, 5. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fenrg.2017.00011. Joyce, S. (2021) Biggest-ever carbon capture project facing Midwest opposition. Available at: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/biggest-ever-carbon­ capture-project-facing-midwest-opposition (Accessed 2 December 2022). MacKenzie, W. (2022) Carbon capture, utilisation and storage: What you need to know, WoodMac. Available at: https://www.woodmac.com/market-insights/topics/ ccus/ (Accessed 27 November 2022). Malm, A. and Carton, W. (2021) Seize the means of carbon removal: The political economy of direct air capture, Historical Materialism, 29 (1), pp. 3–48. Markusson, N., Shackley, S. and Evar, B. (eds) (2012) The Social Dynamics of Carbon Capture and Storage: Understanding CCS Representations, Governance and Innova­ tion (The Earthscan Science in Society Series). 1st edn. Routledge. McQueen, N., Vaz Gomes, K., McCormick, C. et al. (2021) A review of direct air capture (DAC): Scaling up commercial technologies and innovating for the future, Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, 3 (3), p. 032001. MIT (2016a) Halten CO2 project (Draugen) fact sheet: Carbon dioxide capture and storage project. Available at: https://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/statoil_ shell_halten_draugen.html (Accessed 23 December 2022).

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MIT (2016b) Sleipner fact sheet: Carbon dioxide capture and storage project. Avail­ able at: https://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/sleipner.html (Accessed 23 December 2022). Nanalyze (2021) When will carbon capture tech become economically viable? Nana­ lyze, 22 January. Available at: www.nanalyze.com/2021/01/when-carbon-captur e-tech-economically-viable/ (Accessed 13 April 2023). Peters, A. (2022) Wyoming will soon be home to the world’s largest carbon removal facility, Fast Company. Available at: www.fastcompany.com/90787507/wyoming-will­ soon-be-home-to-the-worlds-largest-carbon-removal-facility (Accessed 27 November 2022). Richards, H. and Anchondo, C. (2022) CCS in the Gulf: Climate solution or green washing?, EE News. Available at: www.eenews.net/articles/ccs-in-the-gulf-climate-so lution-or-green-washing/ (Accessed 2 December 2022). Sigurdardottir, R. and Rathi, A. (2021) World’s largest carbon-capture plant by Cli­ meworks starts making tiny dent in emissions, Financial Post. Available at: https:// financialpost.com/commodities/energy/worlds-largest-carbon-capture-plant-starts­ making-tiny-dent-in-emissions (Accessed 23 December 2022). Thompson, G. (2022) Making CCUS work in Asia Pacific, Wood Mackenzie. Avail­ able at: https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/making-ccus-work-in-asia-pacific/ (Accessed 27 November 2022). Thorne, J. (2021) Carbon capture is all the rage. Can these startups make it profitable? PitchBook, 29 March. Available at: https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/carbon-cap ture-is-all-the-rage-can-these-startups-make-it-profitable (Accessed 13 April 2023). Tracxn (2022) Top carbon capture and offset startups. Tracxn. Available at: https:// tracxn.com/d/trending-themes/Startups-in-Carbon-Capture-and-Offset (Accessed 13 April 2023). Undheim, T.A. (2023a) Carbon removal challenges with Claude Letorneau. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/carbon-removal-challenges/ (Accessed 6 April 2023). Undheim, T.A. (2023b) Industrial carbon removal with David Phillips. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/industrial-carbon-removal/ (Accessed 6 April 2023). von Rothkirch, J. and Ejderyan, O. (2021) Anticipating the social fit of CCS projects by looking at place factors, International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control, 110, p. 103399. Whitmarsh, L., Xenias, D. and Jones, C.R. (2019) Framing effects on public support for carbon capture and storage, Palgrave Communications, 5 (1), pp. 1–10. XPRIZE (2021) XPRIZE and Musk Foundation name 23 winners in five million dollar carbon removal student competition. Available at: www.xprize.org/prizes/elonm usk/articles/xprize-and-musk-foundation-name-23-winners-in-five-million-dollar-ca rbon-removal-student-competition (Accessed 23 December 2022).

Part 4

Solutions

13 Eco-effective commandments

Seven Commandments Speaking about a regenerative future trade-off without talking about spe­ cifics doesn’t go anywhere. Instead, in Figure 13.1, the Seven Command­ ments clarify what’s needed to transition through an intermediate step of an eco-effective future. Sign treaties Without a regulatory driver, we cannot accomplish the shift towards a regenerative future. We cannot afford to have any major countries that don’t engage fully in this process. Future generations would blame the descendants of those politicians harshly. Signing treaties is obviously only the first step. Following through on them is what counts. The Biodiversity Agreement to preserve 30 percent of the world’s land and seas signed at COP15 in 2022 is a good first step (Einhorn, 2022). A solid plastics treaty by 2024 to end plastic pollution in every form is a very minimum of what’s needed (Volcovici, 2022). End fossil activity There is no way we will get there if the oil and gas industry still exists by 2030. This one will be hard to do. Hundreds of thousands of lobbyists are working for this not to happen. Yet, it must. This commandment is not a radical position, it is a middle-ground position. The radical position is to outlaw oil companies and put those executives responsible for the past two decades of growth in jail. Launch gigaprojects The success of any project hinges on great project management, a productive set of visions, and a competent R&D function as well as an efficient

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Figure 13.1 The Seven Commandments

manufacturing sector because most of these would ultimately need to be scaled and produced (and not in an industrial way). Commit to renewables Renewables is, at this point, an energy manufacturing, scaling, and infrastructure challenge. It requires standardization, collaboration, digitization, and advanced sensor and algorithmic technologies such as machine learning. This might be the easiest of them, but it has a high economic cost and the payback will be long

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term. Commitments have to be made by governments, businesses, and indivi­ duals—it’s an all-in effort. Abolish meat Behavioral challenges might seem moralistic but are nevertheless important. It will also become easier once meat substitutes, both plant-based and cellbased, improve in quality and availability. Among the 40-something labgrown meat startups (Cell Based Tech, 2018), a few might prove to become game changers for the future of soil and human nutrition (Monbiot, 2022). Other alternatives such as beans, tempeh, lentils, jackfruit, mushrooms, nuts, and seeds must play a greater role (Ware, 2021). There are significant consumer acceptance issues, enduring scientific challenges, scaling issues, as well as reg­ ulatory and safety issues (Chriki and Hocquette, 2020). However, when those are resolved, the development will transform, and likely reduce or abolish animal agriculture. If so, that would make a tremendous amount of land available for rewilding (Monbiot, 2017). This will be politically difficult because agricultural subsidies are the biggest, especially in the EU and the USA. Key to success here will be to find other incentives for farmers, such as to become energy producers instead of meat producers, reusing some of their same resources.

Interview 13.1 The Future of Cultured Meat. Interview with David Brandes, CEO of Peace of Meat. Futurized podcast.

Develop resilient crops R&D challenges such as resilient crops will perhaps require a gigaproject but are likely better solved by hundreds, perhaps thousands of megaprojects of $1 billion or even as little as $100 million in size. This kind of research does not require expensive infrastructure (such science infrastructure is already being built by the synthetic biology industry). What it does require is thousands of researchers coordinating their work in ways previously not imaginable. It will also require a set of scientific breakthroughs, none of which could be

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guaranteed by monetary investment alone. All profits from non-resilient crops should be subject to a small tax which gets redistributed to R&D on resilient crops. Create a climate restoration fund The seventh commandment is a formidable amount of capital, $100 trillion dollars (and I’m talking 2023 dollars not 2050 dollars). There are those who would say that this amount is unrealistic. Maybe so, but climate reparations will be so much more expensive than most estimates that exist today. The reason is that exponential calamities that we haven’t even imagined yet are coming our way. We know this is the case, but they are even hard to financially estimate in terms of long-term cost and consequences. The reason is that most of the col­ lateral damage is likely to be created by cascading risks and damages, not by calculable risks alone. Without such a fund, many countries will simply not be able to function once a set of climate disasters start to hit them. The simplicity of following commandments I’m sure there are 70 other big actions that must be taken, but I’m also convinced that there is a Pareto optimum here. If these seven things happen, those other 70 things would also happen. At least, there would be enough adjacent action that we only needed to track these seven things on a global scale.

Ten obstacles blocking a regenerative economy Consider the following indicators which were used to construct the four sce­ nario vignettes. I have coupled each of them with a behavioral proxy indicator to hit home the psychological component. You should be able to think of how you contribute to the excessive growth and destruction described by each of these indicators. For me, the result can be summarized in ten obstacles (see Figure 13.2), to which we now turn. Those are significantly harder to mitigate than the seven commandments just considered. Improving air quality The first worry is air quality, the annual deterioration of air pollution, parti­ cularly urban air quality. There are various datasets available for real-time tracking. The WHO air quality database is one (WHO, n.d.). A behavioral proxy indicator for this could be whether you have difficulty breathing during walks in the winter and a more shocking one would be whether you develop a lung disease or cancer from bad air where you live, both of which are real possibilities. There is also a clear relationship between the quality of the air you breathe and life expectancy—currently you lose 2.6 years life span on average (Berkowits et al., 2018). One air pollution model predicts 6.6 million

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Figure 13.2 The Ten Obstacles and Fixes

deaths by 2050 (Hadlington, 2015). An OECD Environmental Outlook from a decade ago using an “inaction” scenario predicted that air pollution would become the world’s top environmental cause of premature mortality, particu­ larly in Asia (OECD, 2012).

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Boosting biodiversity The annual reduction of biodiversity is measured simply by the observed disappearance of known species. A behavioral proxy indicator for this would be the number of species you have in your backyard based on a simple count. Strikingly, very little work is done on biodiversity by the top global institu­ tions, so the data is scant. It is a completely overlooked topic, which is simply mind-boggling. A more recent report states the world needs investment in nature of US$8.1 trillion between now and 2050, and US$536 billion annually by 2050, to tackle the interlinked climate, biodiversity, and land degradation crises (UNEP, 2021). Needless to say, we are not on track. Minimizing carbon footprint The annual amount of excess carbon released into the atmosphere can be measured by the annual global warming, but the annual individual carbon footprint is more meaningful to individuals. A behavioral proxy indicator for this could be the number of flights you take in a year. An OECD Environ­ mental Outlook from a decade ago using an “inaction” scenario predicted global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions projected to increase by 50 percent by 2050, without new policies. Which is the track we are on, COP pledges or not. To reach net-zero emissions by 2050, annual clean energy investment worldwide will need to more than triple by 2030 to around $4 trillion (IEA, 2021). Needless to say, we are not on track. Reducing disaster risk The annual number of natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, cyclones, or volcanic eruptions) is one disaster risk indicator. A behavioral proxy indicator for this might be how many natural disasters you have been affected by this year or, by proxy, how many natural disasters you remember mentioned in the media. The number of people worldwide vulnerable to a devastating flood is expected to “mushroom to 2 billion by 2050” due to “climate change, deforestation, rising sea levels and population growth in flood-prone lands” (United Nations University, 2004). These disasters tend to form cascades that connect to other risks and accelerate further natural deterioration as well as cause social upheaval. More importantly, they are not really “natural disasters”, they are controllable by humans who choose to do so or not (Kelman, 2022). Restoring water quality Loss of water quality, the annual depletion of water quality in oceans and freshwater, is worrisome. Particularly, (a) the annual increase in ocean acid­ ification, (b) annual square foot of coral reef disappearance or (c) annual

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depletion of fish stocks, or (d) depletion of drinking water. A behavioral proxy indicator for this could be whether you drink tap water at home, or whether you drink tap water after using a coal filter, or whether you buy all water or drink some from the tap (filtered or not). One 2050 projection says droughts, floods, and storms could wipe US$5.6 trillion from the GDP of key economies (GHD, 2022). But the bigger worry we all have is the depletion of ocean resources which not only means less seafood but potentially ripple effects across other systems. Trimming down our energy infrastructure Energy usage, the annual energy use per individual or household, just goes up and up. A behavioral proxy indicator would be the size of your electricity bill, or, if you are diligent, the amount of electricity you use every year, which, in my opinion, should be a matter of public record. EIA projects nearly 50 per­ cent increase in world energy usage by 2050, led by growth in Asia (EIA, 2019). After that, the growth would undoubtedly come from Africa. There are no easy solutions here, because these regions are emerging and would pre­ sumably go through a similar trajectory and transition as the US and Europe as their economies grow. The only x-factor is how decarbonization and elec­ trification will play out, but energy use will definitely increase, there is no doubt about it. It turns out the spatial energy density of large-scale electricity generation from power sources worldwide, notably solar and wind, is such that its footprint would be enormous, increasing to nearly 3 percent of land area (Nøland et al., 2022). Are people really willing to see nature, nearly all of nature, filled with energy infrastructure? History tells us we are not. What then? Learning to live with sea level rise A sixth worry is sea level rise, the annual sea level rise especially as indicated by the decline in Arctic sea ice levels or the rise in ocean temperature. A behavioral proxy indicator for this might be the number of severe coastal flooding incidents in your local coastal neighborhood. Between now and the year 2100, US coastlines “may average an extra 2 feet of rise, thanks to emissions already in the atmosphere, and up to 5 feet more if humanity fails to cut its emissions between now and then”, according to a US federal report (Simon, 2022). But the real issue will be for island nations as well as nations such as Bangladesh with low-lying areas with vast populations. Overall, over 410 million people are predicted to be at risk from rising sea levels by 2100 and sea levels have been rising faster since about 1850 when people started burning coal (Masterson and Hall, 2022). Richer nations such as The Neth­ erlands, who are experienced at building levies, may be able to deal with it. The city of Rotterdam is an example and aims to be “climate proof” by 2025 (Dircke and Molenaar, 2010). A laudable goal but also too optimistic.

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Change is too fast to predict in the long term. Rich delta cities might be able to afford to track the changes, at least. Poorer Pacific Islands, on the other hand, will be severely challenged. Many are already relocating entire villages. Managing synthetic nature Synthetic nature is a result of the genetic engineering and modification of humans and plants. One measure is the amount of genetically modified DNA or organisms touched by genetic engineering. Another is the cost of DNA sequencing. A DNA sequencer is a scientific instrument used to automate the DNA sequencing process. In 2022, Illumina released a machine that pushes the price to $200, down from $20,000 only a few years ago, and from $100 million at the turn of the millennium (Hale, 2022). This could be a boon for gene-targeting drugs and a host of other applications. A behavioral proxy indicator for this might be whether you know a synthetic biologist or whether you have any synthetic biology products in your home. Bioinnovation is a double-edged sword. We should not negate all the posi­ tive effects either. Natural resources are depleting at a rapid pace. There is not going to be a bigger game in town than synthetic biology in terms of restoring it. Global food production “needs to be increased by 70%” to meet demands by 2050, and “current agricultural practices cannot cope with this pace” so synthetic biology will need to increase crop yield (Roell and Zurbriggen, 2020). The direct annual global impact of the “bio revolution” could be up to $4 trillion in 2030–2040, as it transforms entire value chains (Chui et al., 2020). The Carlson curve describes the rate of DNA sequencing (or its cost) as a function of time. The biological equivalent of Moore’s Law and “at least as fast” (Carlson, 2011). Living with temperature rise Annual global temperature rise is one thing, but the temperature rise in ocean-facing urban areas specifically is particularly pressing. A behavioral proxy indicator for this might be the number of days you have felt uncom­ fortably hot outside your door when it is not midsummer. During the 2022 heatwave, record-high temperatures predicted to hit England and France in 2050 scorched the European continent with high temperatures above 40° Celsius—104° Fahrenheit (Friedman, 2022). Results from a wide range of climate model simulations suggest that our planet’s average temperature could be between 2 and 9.7°F (1.1 to 5.4°C) warmer in 2100 than it is today. In 2021, the IPPC’s sixth assessment report said, “Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming dec­ ades” (IPCC, 2021). They also wrote that “ice-sheet collapse, abrupt ocean circulation changes, some compound extreme events, and warming

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substantially larger than the assessed very likely range of future warming, cannot be ruled out” (IPCC, 2021). Dealing with waste Annual household and individual non-organic waste production can be mea­ sured by the amount of non-biodegradable plastics, and the increase in land­ fill waste. A behavioral proxy indicator would be the size of your garbage bin. The thing is, only 5 to 6 percent of the 46 million tons of plastic waste generated annually in the US gets recycled (Kummer, 2022). How can this be? A lot that is collected ends up in landfills or is being burned. Recycling figures are unreliable. Styrofoam is not recyclable. Nor is flexible plastic packaging. Global plastic waste is “set to almost triple by 2060”, with around “half ending up in landfill and less than a fifth recycled”, says OECD (2022). Visi­ ble impacts of plastic debris are the “ingestion, suffocation and entanglement of hundreds of marine species” (IUCN, 2021).

Conclusion Ten obstacles are a lot. I listed them alphabetically, but the alphabet is instructive in many cases. Air pollution, biodiversity, and carbon footprint are my three biggest worries, followed by sea level rise and temperature rise, and the disaster risk they represent and accelerate. They are connected, of course, which is where the cascading risk argument comes into play. I’m spending the next two years of my life understanding such cascading effects (Undheim, 2022). Add long-term effects related to energy use and synthetic nature. Consider the potential for tipping points, non-linear acceleration, and combination effects. You end up with the end of nature. “Post nature”, as I call it, for effect. Even without a complex climate model at hand, the results, which I depicted in a few of the scenario vignettes in Chapter 1, are scary reading. I know, because I created them. Why did I pick these few indicators? They were picked strategically based on what I consider to be highly visible snapshots of ecosystem efficiency. Tracking them would indicate whether eco tech (or any other intervention) was successful. The other criterion I had was whether these indicators could be influenced by individual behaviors. However, it is far from a complex cli­ mate model. In my defense, if I think of my role as an investor, why spend a lot of time and effort on a complex climate model that is still a drastic sim­ plification of the real world when the thrust of the argument can be shown with a far simpler model? There is much public skepticism against climate change models. This is understandable because few non-experts have investigated them in any detail. To find out for myself, I investigated a few studies that assess the historical accuracy of climate models. As it turns out, when tested using a method called backcasting, for example, a statistical calculation determining probable

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past conditions, these models have been pretty accurate (Buis, 2020). The average of such models plots nicely against the actual temperature changes, for example. One notable challenge with most scenarios so far is that they don’t consider land use and mostly focus on emissions (Wayne, 2013). But direct emissions from land-use change such as the loss of pasture, grasslands and croplands is important. So are hydrological impacts, bio-geophysical impacts, and the size of the remaining vegetable stock. All impact the climate system. The less arable land where you can grow crops or place organic gardens, the bigger problems we get. The next chapter presents a small set of good future directions to follow towards a regenerative future.

References Berkowits, B., Muyskens, J., Sharma, M., Ulmanu, M. (2018) How many years do we lose to the air we breathe?, The Washington Post, 19 November. Available at: www. washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/health-science/lost-years/ (Accessed 20 November 2022). Buis, A. (2020) Study confirms climate models are getting future warming projections right, 9 January. Available at: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-m odels-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/ (Accessed 20 November 2022). Carlson, R.H. (2011) Biology Is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life. Harvard University Press. Cell Based Tech (2018) Lab grown meat companies. Available at: https://cellbasedtech. com/lab-grown-meat-companies (Accessed 6 February 2023). Chriki, S. and Hocquette, J.-F. (2020) The myth of cultured meat: A review, Frontiers in Nutrition, 7, p. 7. Chui, M., Evers, M., Manyika, J., Zheng, A. and Nisbet, T. (2020) The bio revolution: Innovations transforming economies, societies, and our lives. McKinsey & Company. Available at: www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/the-bio-revolution­ innovations-transforming-economies-societies-and-our-lives (Accessed 20 November 2022). Dircke, P. and Molenaar, A. (2010) Smart climate change adaptation in Rotterdam, delta city of the future, Water Practice & Technology, 5 (4). Available at: https:// iwaponline-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/wpt/article/5/4/wpt2010083/21270/Smart­ Climate-Change-Adaptation-in-Rotterdam-Delta?searchresult=1. EIA (2019) EIA projects nearly 50% increase in world energy usage by 2050, led by growth in Asia. Available at: www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41433 (Accessed 20 November 2022). Einhorn, C. (2022) Nearly every country signs on to a sweeping deal to protect nature, The New York Times, 19 December. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2022/ 12/19/climate/biodiversity-cop15-montreal-30x30.html (Accessed 20 December 2022). Friedman, A. (2022) Temperatures predicted for 2050 are happening now, GeekRe­ porter. Available at: https://greekreporter.com/2022/07/18/hot-temperatures-predic ted-2050-happening-now/ (Accessed 20 November 2022).

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GHD (2022) New research reveals USD 5.6 trillion water risk by 2050, PreventionWeb. Available at: www.preventionweb.net/news/new-research-reveals-usd-56-trillion-water­ risk-2050 (Accessed 20 November 2022). Hadlington, S. (2015) Air pollution model predicts 6.6 million deaths by 2050, Chem­ istry World. Available at: www.chemistryworld.com/news/air-pollution-model-p redicts-66-million-deaths-by-2050-/8956.article (Accessed 20 November 2022). Hale, C. (2022) Illumina pitches $200 genomes with new line of DNA sequencers. Available at: www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/illumina-pitches-200-genomes-new-li ne-dna-sequencers (Accessed 20 November 2022). IEA (2021) Net zero by 2050. Available at: https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050 (Accessed 20 November 2022). IPCC (2021) Climate change 2021: The physical science basis. Available at: www.ipcc. ch/report/ar6/wg1/ (Accessed 20 November 2022). IUCN (2021) Marine plastic pollution. Available at: www.iucn.org/resources/issues­ brief/marine-plastic-pollution (Accessed 20 November 2022). Kelman, I. (2022) Disaster by Choice: How our Actions Turn Natural Hazards into Catastrophes. Reprint edition. Oxford University Press. Kummer, F. (2022) Only about 5% of plastic waste gets recycled in US, new report says, Phys.org. Available at: https://phys.org/news/2022-05-plastic-recycled.html (Accessed 20 November 2022). Masterson, V. and Hall, S. (2022) Sea level rise: Everything you need to know, World Economic Forum. Available at: www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/rising-sea-levels­ global-threat/ (Accessed 20 November 2022). Monbiot, G. (2017) Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life. Reprint edi­ tion. University of Chicago Press. Monbiot, G. (2022) Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet. Pen­ guin Books. Nøland, J.K., Auxepaules, J., Rousset, A. et al. (2022) Spatial energy density of largescale electricity generation from power sources worldwide, Scientific Reports, 12 (1), p. 21280. OECD (2012) OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050: The Consequences of Inaction - Key Facts and Figures. Available at: www.oecd.org/env/indicators-modelling-outlooks/oecden vironmentaloutlookto2050theconsequencesofinaction-keyfactsandfigures.htm (Accessed 20 November 2022). OECD (2022) Global plastic waste set to almost triple by 2060, says OECD. Available at: www.oecd.org/environment/global-plastic-waste-set-to-almost-triple-by-2060.htm (Accessed 20 November 2022). Roell, M.-S. and Zurbriggen, M.D. (2020) The impact of synthetic biology for future agriculture and nutrition, Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 61, pp. 102–109. Simon, M. (2022) Sea level rise will be catastrophic—and unequal, Wired, 24 Feb­ ruary. Available at: www.wired.com/story/sea-level-rise-will-be-catastrophic-and-une qual/ (Accessed 20 November 2022). Undheim, T.A. (2020) The future of cultured meat. Interview with David Brandes, CEO of Peace of Meat. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/the-fu ture-of-cultured-meat/ (Accessed 6 April 2023). Undheim, T.A. (2022) The Stanford Global Systemic Risk Scenarios Study, Existential Risks Initiative. Available at: https://seri.stanford.edu/research/stanford-global-system ic-risk-scenarios-study (Accessed 30 December 2022).

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UNEP (2021) World needs USD 8.1 trillion investment in nature by 2050 to tackle triple planetary crisis. Available at: www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/ world-needs-usd-81-trillion-investment-nature-2050-tackle-triple (Accessed 20 November 2022). United Nations University (2004) Two billion vulnerable to floods by 2050; Number expected to double or more in two generations, Science Daily, 14 June. Available at: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/06/040614081820.htm (Accessed 20 November 2022). Volcovici, V. (2022) Countries split on plastics treaty focus as U.N. talks close, Reuters, 3 December. Available at: www.reuters.com/business/environment/countries-split-pla stics-treaty-focus-un-talks-close-2022-12-03/ (Accessed 20 December 2022). Ware, T. (2021) Best meat alternatives of 2023. Available at: www.popsci.com/story/ reviews/best-meat-alternatives/ (Accessed 6 February 2023). Wayne, G.P. (2013) The Beginner’s Guide to Representative Concentration Pathways, Skeptical Science. Available at: https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=1 (Accessed 20 November 2022). WHO (n.d.) Air quality database. Available at: www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/a ir-pollution/who-air-quality-database (Accessed 20 November 2022).

14 Good future directions

Focusing on actions is necessary because of the urgency of change. However, actions can never substitute for guiding principles that stake out a direction. Therefore, I have included the seven directions that would further the regenerative futures we so desperately need. I say futures because these principles in no way limit particular projects to co-exist, even radically different futures to emerge. On the other hand, these principles are outer bounds that ensure that the overall system coherence is intact within the pursuit of such separate and entirely legitimate goals. To explore activism with direction, I spoke with Jonathon Porritt, a major player at the forefront of the sustainability movement for over 30 years, author of many books, UK Green Party politician and activist (Undheim, 2023). Porritt is adamant that sustainability in companies cannot be left to specialist teams. He agrees that sustainable “business models” such as natural capitalism, the natural step, or cradle-to-cradle are new tools but not new paradigms. He says we have to start challenging subsidies of extracting industries and agriculture, lowering consump­ tion, and reducing world population growth. In his new book, Hope in Hell, the important job we need to do, he says, is in this decade (2022–2030), mainly refer­ ring to carbon removal (Porritt, 2021). He recommends rolling up our sleeves and favors the “Green New Deal” analogy to the 1930s and the Great Depression. The solutions are all “radical”: “decarbonisation of the economy through technology”, “decarbonisation of the natural world”, and “political disruption through civil disobedience”.

Interview 14.1 Hope in Hell for the Earth. Interview with Jonathon Porritt. Futurized podcast.

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According to Porritt, There’s a whole thing going on in the world of sustainability, which is: how much truth do we actually share with people? If our principal goal is to get those people to change what they’re doing and if they’re gonna change what they’re doing, then they need to feel empowered. They need to feel that they’ve got some agency. On the other hand, he says, “I simply disagree with the idea that there is a recognizable, distinct class or tribe of sustainability minded people who represent this somewhat elitist space.” Also, this is hitting people hard: You can see enormous numbers of people who are struggling to reconcile what is going on in their own lives with what they now increasingly recognize as being the truth about the state of the world and the state of society today. The real problem is that “no one is challenging the notion that permanent exponential economic growth on a finite planet is a viable way of building a better world.” Having said that, he says: I like to challenge the notion of growth. I accept that going straight to de-growth, which is no more growth at all anywhere in the world, is not right. I think there are many parts of the world where the economic situation requires a different kind of economic growth than we’ve had up until now. But Porritt sticks to the sustainability concept: “I think all the other concepts, they’re just bland, empty manipulation of language. What does ‘flourishing’ mean for 4 billion people on planet Earth today?” He likes sustainability, “rather than automatically going along with sustainable development”, which has always troubled him as an idea, “if that development is still based on permanent economic growth”. Sustainability, for him, is the “critical scientific underpinning of how our species can cohabit with every other life form on this planet”. That is, it’s not subject to variations that depend on how you interpret different concepts. It’s not subject to resilience or to prospering as an alternative. All these things are a critical part of living sustainably on this planet, he says. But “living sustainably is a scientific construct”. But Porritt is realistic in his hopes about a better future. For change to happen: we are gonna need some semi collapse. […] something like the largest storm hurricane ever coming in off the Atlantic, completely submerging the whole of Miami and all that part of Florida. Total collapse of the insurance industry as a consequence in America. Total collapse of the

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global insurance industry across the world. As a consequence of that total collapse of the economic system as a consequence of the insurance system collapsing. That’s pretty grim. And the lives of hundreds of millions of people will be rendered utterly miserable as a consequence of that. But at least it would remind people that the financial costs of what we’re doing to the climate now are getting worse every year. For Porritt, as for myself, what it boils down to is that we need an emergency mindset. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born” is attributed to Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), the Italian political theorist and activist in 1930, appearing in 1971’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Archar, 2021). Porritt feels he needs to be “part of killing the old world and killing it fast because that old world is still strangling the birth of the new world”.

Seven good future directions In Figure 14.1 these seven directions are depicted as they are meant to affect resource use (the most immediate concern), capitalism (an important inter­ mediate worry but not the most important one), systemic scope (important but hard to enforce because it is so different from most people’s everyday lives and realities), governance (because understanding challenges without design­ ing a way to govern them is moot), justice (because that’s how humanity polices itself), time frame (because this is a surprisingly divisive topic that needs to be negotiated), and finally, platform innovation (which is the princi­ ple upon which all scaling of change relies). Fully explaining what these directions entail would take a whole other book. Instead, I’ll simply sketch what I mean by each and will have to tackle the sub­ stantial task of interpreting them at another time. What I will do is suggest, with an extended paragraph, one way each direction could be implemented. Extractive to regenerative Simply extracting resources from our planet (or other planetary bodies) is not a viable path forward. Not because we couldn’t technically continue this path for a while (as we could eventually expand into the universe, extending the timeline beyond earthly geological time frames), but because resource deple­ tion has a substantial cost to living generations and to the generations immediately to follow. Industrial activity should report on progress towards a politically negotiated goal of a timetable towards 100 percent regenerative resource use, perhaps set for the year 2100. Accumulative to distributive Capitalism is where most of the attention is in the discussion of climate change. Environmentalists feel its entire logic is flawed. That may be so.

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Figure 14.1 Seven Directions

However, with a system so ingrained in society it may be more fruitful to gradually transition to a more meaningful system than to attempt to overturn it by some magical principle, event, or set of revolutionary activity. If our national societies, as well as larger governing entities such as multinational corporations, simply started to include a distributive logic of sharing profits and bounties more equitably with their citizens, employees, and stakeholders, we might be able to save the core and alienate less people in the process. There are many individual paths here, and no right or wrong. Right now, the problem is that we are marching in the opposite direction. The way I envision this best implemented is by setting arbitrary maximum limits on

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capital accumulation by any single actor, government, corporation, group, or individual. Once the threshold is reached, they would have to begin a regu­ lated drawdown towards “sustainable” levels. Hopefully, that would unleash a different way of conducting activity so that these dramatic thresholds seldom are reached. In effect this is a type of monopoly tax and could be monitored by competition law. Any larger system would have to be a competition or collaboration between several actors. To avoid cartels, again, competition law already has the instruments to monitor such collusion. Geopolitics to cosmopolitics The systemic scope of geopolitics is becoming far too pedestrian for the challenges humanity and the ecosystem jointly should be facing. We are increasingly living in a cosmopolitan system where the cosmos, not planet Earth or even our solar system, is the measure by which we are most affected. A time will come when an interplanetary civilization will emerge. I’m less afraid of aliens than I’m afraid of the confrontation between Earth humans and humans bred on other planets. If we are worried about lack of empathy between humans bred and born in different socio-economic strata on earth, that’s just a taste of interstellar diversity. You don’t need to watch Star Trek to imagine how perspectives all seem to depend on where we grew up. Again, this is not a challenge only posed by radical longtermists who look centuries and millennia ahead. Rather, the first lunar colony or Mars colony would immediately provide such a counterpoint. Space regulation is a challenge we need to tackle over the next 25 years. What seems clear is that it will not be an esoteric topic—it would challenge earthly regulations in a fundamental way. For example, who has the right to exploit the resources in space, what taxes would they be subject to, and how should those tax revenues be allocated? We need a combination of stability and renewal even in this emerging governance system. Technocratic to ecocratic Broadly speaking, most current societies are technocratic, meaning that they are not governed by particularly unified ideological positions but rather by a set of pragmatic concerns such as majority rule. Even the various flavors of democratic institutions that support such a governance structure are frayed starting with its founding documents (constitutions or common law); its con­ stituent population seems divided and often lacks a principled position from which to navigate. Part of the problem is that a secularized world has lost the obvious compass provided by religion. Another problem is the course of his­ tory which, of course, has shown that even societies that make the honest attempt to be just and fair, fail to uphold those principles again and again. Either way, the way out of such a conundrum is arguably not to avoid any such discussion but to seek to ground society on something less fundamental

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than religion but more stable than technocratic efficiency, namely seeking to build an ecocratic system, focused on protecting the natural environment on earth and beyond as a fundamental principle. The joy inherent in practicing Norwegian friluftsliv (outdoor life, or literally: free-air life), meaning being constantly outdoors and always in the process of connecting with nature, does not necessarily stem from a deep-seated urge to connect with nature as much as it has to do with an awareness of being connected to nature by definition. We are natural beings as much as we are human beings. As a consequence, those who seek a regenerative future will not practice technology because it is rewarding financially but because it expresses their vitality and the potential for further vitality of the ecosystem. There will always be those who don’t, and I think we will have to live with that diversity of perspective. Retributive to distributive Retributive ethics (Kant, Hegel, Aquinas) is traditionally viewed as necessary to uphold society by setting an example of those who don’t follow the laws of society. It was needed to restore a rightful equilibrium, a balance. Retributive justice, in the penal system, requires suffering proportional to the crime. Societies caught in that logic would struggle with transitioning towards a regenerative future. Imagine forcing entire nations to not only give up the wealth gained during colonial oppression and fossil fuel industrialization but to pay for it proportionately. Instead, societies that embrace (any) form of distributive justice, meaning they share the benefits and burdens across classes and spheres of society based on some measure of allocation across the spec­ trum of societal inequality (income, wealth, jobs, utility, etc.), are inherently egalitarian. It is important to point out that, for me at least, distributive jus­ tice is not simply a moral obligation, it is good economics. I also find that the utilitarian extreme of distributive justice, currently expressed in the form of radical longtermism (Ord, 2021; MacAskill, 2022), is pushing the distributive logic to an illogical extreme in which present time barely matters at all in the bigger picture. I have no space to go through that argument here, but suffice to say that, to me, this is an enormously problematic position. For one, it is directly counter­ productive for a regenerative future because it structurally ignores even the most pressing social and ecological issues of our time under the assumption that those are less important issues than the concerns of theoretical humans that don’t yet exist. In ethical theory, the difference is between deontological reasoning, utilitar­ ian reasoning, or virtue ethics. Deontological ethics (Kant, Rawls, Nozick, Nagel) refers to the importance of moral obligations. Utilitarian ethics (Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick) ultimately rests on the end justifying the means. Virtue ethics (Mencius, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle) says an action is good, courageous, loyal, or wise, if a virtuous person would do it. People are different. This is not a treatise of ethics. Having said that, regenerative futures are often influenced by deontology in that it seeks to take up the duty of

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redistribution, by virtue ethics in that it asks individuals, corporations, and nations to be moral examples to tip the world in a new, more positive direc­ tion. Lastly, it is consequentialist (utilitarian) in that it looks at the long-term effects of industrial and technological actions and seeks to accomplish and attempts to design actions that render a better end result. At the end of the day, the position that bridges most of these in ethics is John Rawls’ notion of justice as fairness, which is an egalitarian theory. Generational to intergenerational The time frame of contemporary politics, or indeed of any politics that cur­ rently exists in majority form around the world is generational. That is, it is mostly concerned with the living. It also strongly prefers to deal with adults of working age. In fact, democracy itself is structured around the population from 18 years old to retirement age. All the political activity, voting rules, and participation rules are focused on stimulating this group to take an active role meaning vote and answer survey questions. Any extension beyond this group would have to be seen as outside of the current scope. Bringing youth into decision making is not foreseen. Involving the elderly is practically difficult. Involving future generations through some kind of representation is still not done in any existing democracy. If we want to foster regenerative futures, this needs to change. How it should evolve is another question. There are many pitfalls on this path. One of them, in my view, is radical longtermism, which departs too far from the current position and attempts to completely negate it. This is not only futile, but also dangerous, and morally questionable. Building an intergenerational perspective both into democracy and business life is clearly needed. But shouldn’t we begin by thinking about our children and our grandchildren first? Getting the broader population involved in these discussions will clearly reveal a bias towards the currently living. In a way, this is common sense. Stretching our compassion and planning towards the children of our grand­ children would seem to me as almost the furthest we could plan. Emotional investment in our descendants’ whereabouts has a practical limit (which we might need to generationally extend). But there is another limit, which has to do with our current data set and scenario methods. Clearly, this could change. Should we become capable of advanced civilization-scale simulations in the near future, the debate could take a different form based on scenarios that are more or less desirable, yet plausible for the year 2250. Diversity to standardization Platform innovation which has emerged as a powerful principle in the net­ work society of the past few decades has also revealed the weakness of diversity-absent structure. It is simply not possible to produce lasting innova­ tions, for example, without building on a common set of denominators

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(technologies, manufacturing modes, infrastructures, mental models, etc.). As we attempt to scale novel regenerative technologies to the scale that they can tilt industrialization away from its extractive core, we will need to depend on a modular, standardized set of components. This does not negate diversity and innovation, it facilitates it. What will limit us in this endeavor is pro­ prietary interfaces that chase suboptimal rent-seeking for their own good.

Conclusion These seven directions, which presumably will be part of the general direction of the next few decades, affect resource use, capitalism, systemic scope, governance, justice, time frame, and finally, platform innovation. They are directions, not binary options, they will each evolve independently although they are also related in some ways. Before the world generally moves significantly towards these directions, we will not stand much chance of a regenerative future. The next chapter concludes the book with a summary of the eco-efficient past, our eco-effective present, and possible regenerative futures.

References Archar, G. (2021) Morbid symptoms. Available at: https://isreview.org/issue/108/m orbid-symptoms/index.html (Accessed 20 December 2022). MacAskill, W. (2022) What We Owe the Future. Basic Books. Ord, T. (2021) Precipice. Hachette Books. Porritt, J. (2021) Hope in Hell: How We Can Confront the Climate Crisis & Save the Earth. Earth Aware Editions. Undheim, T.A. (2023) Hope in Hell for the Earth. Interview with Jonathon Porritt. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/hope-in-hell-for-the-earth

15 Conclusion The eco-efficient past, our eco-effective present, and regenerative futures

The journey towards any and all kinds of regenerative futures is bound to be arduous. But it doesn’t have to be only arduous. The sheer enjoyment of finding a new equilibrium in society will be highly rewarding. We will have opportunity to regain a sense of true wonder. There will be both winners and losers. On the other hand, we need not overthrow everything right now in pursuit of a regenerative future. Certainly not in pursuit of a particular, poorly conceived, one-dimensional future of degrowth. The future will likely hold exactly the same kind of diversity that we now know, perhaps far more. That’s why climate storylines, physically consistent narratives of the unfolding of past or plausible future events and path­ ways, may be equally important as probabilistic climate scenarios, as climate sci­ entist Ted Shepherd told me recently. These narratives are certainly easier to grasp and relate to.

Interview 15.1 Climate Storylines. Interview with Ted Shepherd, Professor, University of Reading, UK. Futurized podcast.

There are no easy answers as to what constitutes the ideal future society. That’s comforting. There will be many societies going forward. They will ebb and flow. The caveat is, should freedom become locked in through technolo­ gical or other means, we stand less of a chance to shape our own destiny. In his recent book, Climate isn’t Everything, leading climate scientist Mike Hulme writes that “climate change is a relative risk not an absolute one” DOI: 10.4324/9781003386049-20

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(Hulme, 2023). This is not because climate change could not become an existential risk at some point (Kemp et al., 2022). But if we totalize our attention on climate change to the detriment of other important issues—such as the key social, political, and ecological phenomena facing the world today—we risk missing the opportunity to shape our world in other impor­ tant ways. We might also shut the door on the governance flexibility we need to confront other serious, emerging threats. Biodiversity first comes to mind, but it is equally important to safeguard and rethink democracy for our evol­ ving needs, and deal with the important cosmopolitical challenges that go beyond planet Earth. We also fairly urgently need to get a grip on the gov­ ernance of artificial intelligence.

Interview 15.2 How Climate Visions get Constructed. Interview with Mike Hulme. Futurized podcast.

What we need more than anything else, it seems to me, is to embrace the notion of solidifying the rights of access to the commons, the resources such as air, water, and global public spaces that belong in equal measure to us all. We need to design a financial system by which commons-based approaches can be integrated into an emergent version of capitalism that is more responsive to the needs of the wider ecosystem. It may never be completely aligned. I think we will have to live with that. As an example, the peer-to-peer based models of production that have so far grown up around the technological platform of the blockchain have pro­ mise and potential. However, their positive impact has largely been underwhelming so far, and risks abound. What we have to figure out is whether that is due to that technology’s inherent shortcomings or whether it is simply because we haven’t fully explored the most fruitful and fundamental ways it can enrich capitalism and finance. What does seem clear is that the most extreme version by which a decentralized system without anybody in charge could somehow replace centralized governance in the form of regulators and governments, is a far-fetched dreamscape with terrible consequences. Rather, it is through integration of new forms of standardized and (yes) decentralizing

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technology platforms that we can achieve its main benefits of oversight, transparency, and accountability. The path from sustainability via eco-efficiency towards eco-effectiveness and towards regenerative futures is only one trajectory. There are also other paths. We could end up being stuck in extractive industrialization for so long that eco-effectiveness ceases to be a viable present or future option. In that case, we are forced to head directly towards regeneration. That path will, most likely, be utterly destructive. It won’t give us enough time to prepare. However, at this point, I’d say that it is about equally as likely that we will succeed at creating a fruitful, eco-effective interlude that buys us the time needed to fully transform all our economic, social, and intellectual activity towards building truly regeneratively. That being said, some changes seem near irreversible, such as biodiversity loss and deterioration of the oceans. And, one could remark, the ability to go cross-country skiing on natural snow, a small but not insignificant pleasure.

Eco-conundrums Industrialists, and pragmatic politicians have long felt that, realistically, what we can aspire to is eco-efficiency. That’s not a defeatist statement, it is still, to me, an energizing proposition. But given where we are now, it has to be taken one step further, into eco-effectiveness, where we do things better, not just more efficiently. Effectiveness challenges innovators, policy makers, citizens, and workers alike. We clearly must do what we can with what we have now, but we cannot stop there. Change must start at the individual level, but it must encompass all collectives we take part in. Couples. Households. Famil­ ies. Communities. Interest groups. Churches. Nations. Regions. Global orga­ nizations. The next change humanity undertakes needs to have a sociological foundation beyond democracy’s obsession with votes, decision making, and elected bodies of governance. We are more than that. In parallel, we must decide what proportion of our efforts are going to be risky innovation efforts with uncertain outcomes (e.g., carbon capture, largescale energy storage). But we would be foolish to count on exponential inno­ vation. Eco-efficiency investments have intensified but are likely happening 50 years too late. With ecological phenomena, 30–50 years is the smallest appropriate time scale within which to frame our actions and assess consequences. We would have been better off if the world’s governance structures were organized to prioritize actions within this time frame. I think aiming for eternity as the perspective, as some philosophers (Ord, 2021) and ethicists advocate, simply is unrealistic, probably also unethical. It is just to focus on the present. It is equally just to focus on the coming generations. The mathematical properties of eternity wreak havoc with the balance between these two notions. The uncertainties we are dealing with are another reason to wait with the eternal perspective for another few centuries or leave that to religion. Given that

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people’s lifespans are approaching 100 on average and pushing towards 150 for the elite before too soon (Willingham, 2021), century-long planning is the next governance milestone humanity needs to aim for. The massive build-up of the petroleum sector in the 1970s put the world on an unsustainable track that we couldn’t stop. That’s a fact. What’s done is done. But we must reckon with this fact, too. And we must act accordingly, and with fairness. What we should count on is setbacks. The history of technology shows that all foundational technologies (e.g., industrial machinery, electricity, the web, synthetic biology, AI, the metaverse, quantum, fusion energy tech) have gone through such setbacks (Kapoor and Klueter, 2020). The current state of CCS technology does seem to be a blind track that would lead us astray, but per­ haps we need to experience that for ourselves. There is also the chance that out of that failure, something better arises. Yet, eco-efficiency investments with long-term hope that we need to still propel forward include modular carbon utilization devices, zero-carbon industrial tech, battery technology (both for mobile use and for large-scale grid energy storage), as well as hyper efficient energy sources (green fuel cell, small-scale modular fis­ sion, fusion). Each of these areas would need factors of magnitude break­ throughs. One could wonder why there are no Manhattan project-style efforts underway, either in Europe or in the US, with regards to any of these platforms. Green hydrogen under $2 per kilogram (down from $6) would be a game chan­ ger, for example (Rich, 2021). Having said that, the history of success with such enormous capital influx in one technology area is also mixed. Enormous amounts of capital are most efficiently used for scale-up of infrastructure and platforms, not for developing them, which is prone to trial and error. We also, still, need to push forward with other renewables (particularly solar energy) that, with factors of magnitude eco-efficiency improvements that still may take decades, could potentially replace fossil fuels for good. Renewables, though, may still rely on extractive mining (of lithium and cobalt) and degen­ erative infrastructure, which also need to be dealt with. What cannot happen is that the promise of emerging technologies becomes an excuse not to act today. I say this as a deep believer in innovation and having worked closely with all of MIT’s top sci-tech innovators over the past decade and now with a close watch of the same at Stanford. Teams of scientists and engineers can indeed, at times, perform sci-tech ‘miracles’, which sets us up for engineering marvels (bridges, skyscrapers, space shuttles), and manufacturing scale-ups (global vaccine production), but not always, and usually not on command. The mobilization around winning World War II and inventing the radar, as well as the massive push around the mRNA platform which, among other things, benefited the first generation COVID-19 vaccines, are examples of how an emergency can produce scientific results. Except, as I showed in the analysis of past and current mega- and gigaprojects, we haven’t found a way to guarantee that the investment of enormous amounts of resources yields the desired mega results we hope for. That will have to change. Projects of a

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certain magnitude should also not just be of national concern and impor­ tance, they should seek global guidance. They will, for better or for worse, at some point become humanity’s infrastructure. We need to only build regen­ erative infrastructure from now on. How can we ensure this is the case? We must live the way we would if we thought it needed to stand up to the scrutiny of our own last thoughts before we expire. That does mean a certain ethic towards eco-effectiveness in our daily lives. It would color our invest­ ments, our purchases, our choice of careers. The climate challenge is not a question of politics or ideology, but of sur­ vival. But for that reason, the questions it raises have significant, unques­ tionable political elements. What we choose to do about it will indeed depend on politics. It is a fool’s errand to say otherwise. What we should be able to agree on is that innovations that don’t pass the sanity test in the population at large will have to be Apple-style killer applications to survive in the market. For all others, keeping in touch with the stakeholders around the technology will make or break it. My thoughts go to carbon capture projects where nobody seems to have modeled out exactly where such installations would need to be placed, at what scale, and what people on various parts of the globe would say about it. Are we prepared to have football fields of air-to-air capture factories every 100 square miles of land? Imagine the debates around windmills or powerlines amplified by a factor of 100,000, as every citizen in the world starts to voice their opposition (or support) for such massive, ugly physical infrastructure covering the Earth. Are we prepared to pay for it? Could we even build it in time to make a difference? (Roberts, 2018). The leading contender, Climeworks, aims to be capturing 1% of global CO2 emissions each year by 2025 (Evans, 2017). That’s not a lot. For that reason, should we need carbon cap­ ture at a scale that could reverse emissions to the tune of gigatons we should probably spend our energies developing new technologies, not implementing old ones. However, as some of the startups in the field pointed out, without starting somewhere, we may not be able to upgrade the technologies in time. Carbon capture is a chicken and egg question if there ever was one. If not, we might as well prepare for the inevitable, which is a highly prob­ able temperature rise of 2–5 degrees over the next 100 years. That means in my kids’ lifetimes. If we don’t stop this rise, it means that the globe suddenly has a time limit, very possibly less than 500 years before it becomes largely uninhabitable to today’s humans. What tomorrow’s humans would be pre­ pared to bear (living indoors, under the sea, underground, or in the sky), we don’t yet know. But we surely will try, because the human spirit, or perhaps our soul, does have a strong survival instinct. We have, at best, likely about five to seven generations left before extinction or before we are forced (not by choice) to become a multi-planetary species. That’s not a lot of time to build massive spacecraft, if you consider what that would entail in terms of new propulsion technologies, advances in space agriculture, medical technology, and a host of other innovations before intergenerational

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space flight could become viable. But for now, I think our resources are better spent on shoring up the one planet we know the best. Regardless of which exponential technology fits in our idea of the future, the socio-behavioral perspective crafted throughout this book invites inves­ tors, policymakers, citizens, employees, individuals, and the influential groups they each belong to, to take a long and hard look at infrastructure. More specifically, decide what you think are the requirements for changing old infrastructure and what you would want in a new one. More likely, in most cases we are doomed to retrofit our industrial infrastructure. This may be related to thresholds (e.g., how much interruption are you willing to handle in your everyday life), ethical perspective (e.g., what do you feel is your obliga­ tion to future generations), and sunk cost (removing a certain infrastructure’s ecological footprint may be near impossible, economically). There should be a new masterplan for the entire planet which maps out fragile natural resources that the world needs to protect (the Amazon, the oceans, fresh air, the Arctic, freshwater resources, biodiversity, coral reefs), not only putting them on a UN heritage list but putting penalties in place for violating their continued existence. I think it should be clear that I’m not thinking of another UN agency or even a strengthening of an existing func­ tion. This would have to be a democratically elected body representing a global constituency with police powers and a judicial system. An idea that would likely gain traction if a good organization could be the steward of it, would be a blockchain-based valuation system for all commonsbased resources in the “global blockchain commons” (Waters, 2017). But as I said above, any fix-it-all solution is likely to be the wrong approach. Imagine we put all our eggs in one blockchain basket and it failed. I’m reminded of the several dozen recent crypto exchanges that failed, most notably FTX’s demise in 2022, due to a mix of factors such as market failure, tech chal­ lenges, regulatory crackdown, poor oversight, or questionable leadership decisions (Parker and Das, 2022). No technology makes us immune from human exploitation and greed. Governance is the only protection we have in this regard. That’s why good, old-fashioned politics is a solution we need to rekindle. Eco-effectiveness is about to become established practice for governments, corporations, startups, and for most individuals (not all). I hope I have described in some detail what this predicament would look like, feel like, and what it might foster in terms of technologies, ethics, and societal changes. For now, all we have is the fragile ecosystem we are part of. What the future holds beyond that, is up to us as explorers of the solar system and beyond, but this is highly likely a pursuit we will only begin in earnest at the start of the 2100s, at which point it, unfortunately, will become a chore not a choice. Let’s spend the next 75 years doing something useful, developing good habits for survival, not just preparing for this near inevitability. However, should we in the process also be able to build (save) public goods by drasti­ cally reducing CO₂ emissions, that would obviously be fantastic.

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What to do about imagined futures? Chapter 1 depicted the four ecological scenarios for the world over the next 50 years: Setbacks, Synthetic Existence, Destruction, or Ecomax Earth. Set­ backs are never good but might be realistic on the path. Synthetic Existence almost seems like a given because nature is going away at such an alarming and accelerating pace. Destruction would be devastating but is not outside of the realm of possibility—we would exclude it at our peril. Taking steps to prevent it is the only way to truly lower its chance of ever transpiring. Ecomax Earth seems like a paradise but even humanity and nature’s best-case scenario has a mix of challenges, notably the path to get there which entails a lot of sacrifices in terms of growth, delayed gratification, risks, and somehow finding a global, collaborative spirit. Which will it be? That’s largely up to us. Energizing human existence, desires, and aspirations in the next 30 to 50 years will have to entail examining humanity’s relationship to nature itself. It is not going to be obvious. What we find might surprise many of us. As much as I believe in polling people, it is also not as simple as doing a global poll. We may not all agree. More importantly, we may not yet know what we hold to be true about the question because the truths will change rapidly as sci-tech makes advances and, in parallel, setbacks occur. We are rejiggering the world’s most complex machine and we cannot afford it to stop. That would cause ripple effects that would destroy the ideals we are trying to protect by tilting the system in the right direction in the first place. That’s why my tilt is better than the reductive revolution. This is not always better but in this case it is the only prudent course of action. I hope this view prevails. If not, we would be risking far too much in far too short a timeline to have a good recourse. The cathedrals of the past were monuments whose grandeur is largely unmatched, but they were projects without a goal of changing our world. But they are indicative of the power of the human collective imagination. If we turn that imagination to the immediate concerns of climate change, we can avoid an imminent emergency and build regenerative futures soon. Even more ambitiously, we can start to design for generative futures without always looking back, searching for an imagined, perfect past state, which is necessa­ rily a fiction. We should rather, creatively, look forward, aiming to generate even better worlds for our children and descendants.

References Evans, S. (2017) The Swiss company hoping to capture 1% of global CO2 emissions by 2025, CarbonBrief. Available at: www.carbonbrief.org/swiss-company-hoping-cap ture-1-global-co2-emissions-2025/ (Accessed 12 December 2022). Hulme, M. (2023) Climate Change isn’t Everything. 1st edn. Polity. Kapoor, R. and Klueter, T. (2020) Progress and setbacks: The two faces of technology emergence, Research Policy, 49 (1), p. 103874.

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Kemp, L., Xu, C., Depledge, J. et al. (2022) Climate endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119 (34), p. e2108146119. Ord, T. (2021) Precipice. Hachette Books. Parker, L. and Das, A. (2022) Crypto exchanges continue to fail as hacks and exit scams bite. Available at: https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/36-bitcoin-exchanges-that-are-no­ longer-with-us (Accessed 30 December 2022). Rich, G. (2021) A clean-energy technology Elon Musk hates may be near a big break­ through, Investors.com. Available at: www.investors.com/news/fuel-cell-stocks-and-hy drogen-power-may-be-near-a-big-breakthrough/ (Accessed 12 December 2022). Roberts, D. (2018) Sucking carbon out of the air won’t solve climate change, Vox. Available at: www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/14/17445622/direct-air­ capture-air-to-fuels-carbon-dioxide-engineering (Accessed 12 December 2022). Undheim, T.A. (2023a) Climate Storylines. Interview with Ted Shepherd, Professor, University of Reading, UK. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/ climate-storylines/ Undheim, T.A. (2023b) How Climate Visions get Constructed. Interview with Mike Hulme. Futurized podcast. Available at: www.futurized.org/how-climate-visions-get-constructed/ Waters, N. (2017) Blockchain commons: The end of all corporate business models, Peerism. Available at: https://medium.com/peerism/blockchain-commons-the-end-of­ all-corporate-business-models-3178998148ba (Accessed 12 December 2022). Willingham, E. (2021) Humans could live up to 150 years, new research suggests, May 25, Scientific American. Available at: www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans­ could-live-up-to-150-years-new-research-suggests/ (Accessed 30 December 2022).

Index

Antler 4, 55 Badrina, Eddy 130 batteries 60, 62, 63, 114, 117–118 The Big Fix (Harvey and Gillis) 5 biodiversity 63, 78, 81, 86–87, 95, 98, 103, 128, 133, 139, 151–152, 171, 176, 179, 192–193, 196; biodiversity and land use 152; biodiversity legislation 87; biodiversity loss 16, 98, 193; Biodiversity Agreement 171; United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) of 2022 42 biomanufacturing 1–2, 6, 60 bioplastics 1, 14, 125–126, Bye, Kristian 96 capitalism 183, 185, 190, 192, Carson, Rachel 3, 41 Cemvita 1, 2 China 3,17, 22, 41, 46–48, 51, 56, 97, 101, 139–142, 152, 155, 158, 163–4; belt and road initiative (BRI) 140; China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) 140–141; China’s South-North Water Transfer Scheme 142 city: cities 13, 47, 61, 88, 104, 109, 115, 133,178; megacities 96, 109, 120, 126, 128, 134 civilization 6, 35, 89, 95, 109, 118, 121, 134, 139–141, 187, 189 cleantech 3–4, 54–56, 58–59, 61, 85, 117 climate change 1, 3–4, 6, 14, 16, 30–31, 42, 46–48, 53, 56, 58, 74, 79, 85–86, 95, 97–98, 119, 131–133, 142, 152, 154–155, 176, 179, 185–186, 191–192, 197 climate change models 236; The 2021 United Nations Climate Change

Conference 48; climate change policy 42, 85, 111 CO2 1–2, 46–47, 59, 61, 117, 133–134, 154, 158–165, 178, 195–196; Aker Carbon Capture 159–161; carbon accounting 77, 148, 151, 154–155; carbon capture 2, 16, 81, 111, 155, 158–165, 193, 195; Carbon Capture 159, 162; carbon capture business models 2; carbon capture plant 160; carbon capture-as-a-service business model 161; carbon capture space 160; carbon-negative 1; carbon neutrality 1, 61; Carbon Neutrality Ventures 57; carbon capture and storage (CCS) 111, 158–159; carbon dioxide 16, 47, 59, 86, 111, 133–134, 149, 159, 178; CO2-derived products 154; CO2 emis­ sions 46, 59, 61, 117, 195–196; CO2 market 163; CO2 reduction 154; CO2 tax 158; CO2 utilization 1, 164; CCS 158–161, 163–166, 194; CCSSU 16; decarbonization 3, 5, 59, 61, 81, 105, 177; industrial carbon capture 158, 162 consumer 29, 35, 56–57, 73, 77, 86, 88–89, 111, 115, 126–127, 129, 132, 163–166, 173 consumerism 33, 100, 102 consumerist 75 corporate venturing 25, 56–57, 62 CSR 6, 98, 148 degrowth 21, 34–35, 76–77, 103, 191 determinism 90, 109 Dikeman, Neal 55 eco-effectiveness 26–27, 34, 193, 195 eco-efficiency 34, 54, 77, 105

200

Index

eco-investments 6, 49, 51, 61–62 economic growth 2, 35, 42, 45, 48, 51, 89, 100, 150, 184 effectiveness 29, 34, 193 Ehrenfeld, John R. 70–71, 74 electrification 14, 96, 135, 163, 177 Elkington, John 78, 80–81 emergency mindset 98, 103, 106, 134, 185 environmental: environmentalism 3, 42, 69–70, 98; environmentalist 4, 11, 13, 35–36, 41, 46, 72, 90–91, 98, 151, 185 Eremenko, Paul 112–113 ESG 21, 26; criteria 152; governance tools 60; investment space 26; invest­ ing 58; measurement 77, 99; reporting 72, 85, 152; reports 21; targets 98 EU 27, 47, 114, 140, 143, 148, 152, 155, 173; The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 133; the EU Framework Program 17; the EU green paper: Promoting a European framework for Corporate Social Responsibility (2001) 148; the European carbon market (ETS) 47; the European continent 17–18, 178; the Europeans 13; the European standard for compostable products (EN 13432) 126; the European Union 164 extractive 28, 35, 49, 62, 68, 72, 144, 185, 190, 193 failure 4, 6, 32, 43, 79, 81, 85–86, 89–91, 194, 196 Farshchi, Shahin 128, 142–143 flourish 7,14, 35, 71, 73–74, 78–79, 81, 184 Forde, Cindy 31 forest bathing 14, 74 friluftsliv 188 fusion energy 29, 63, 103, 118–121 future: regenerative future 7, 32–33, 35, 51, 57, 76–77, 121, 135, 171, 180, 183, 188–191 Futurized podcast (podcast interviews): Badrina, Eddy 130; Bye, Kristian 96; Dikeman, Neal 55; Ehrenfeld, John 71; Elkington, John 81; Eremenko, Paul 113; Farshchi, Shahin 128; Forde, Cindy 31; Gillis, Justin 5; Hill, Graham 43; Holland, Andrew 119; Hulme, Mike 192; Karimi, Moji 2; Letorneau, Claude 160; Moore, Alan

69; Phillips, David 161; Porritt,

Jonathon 183; Singh, Vandana

30; Torres, Carolina 52; Usher,

Bruce 59

gigafactory 143 giga-infrastructure 143 gigaprojects, 134–135, 142, 144, 171, 194 gigascale, 6, 135, 140 Gillis, Justin, 5 governance, 826, 29, 59–60, 76, 86, 88, 103, 106, 143–144, 152, 154, 185, 187, 190, 192–194, 196 Hill, Graham 43, 59, 60–61 Hitachi 4, 29; Hitachi Ventures 57, 60 Holland, Andrew 119 Hulme, Mike 192 hydrogen 16, 29, 59, 61, 63, 81, 110–118 identity 95, 100, 106, 149 imagination 30–31, 43, 197 India 3, 17, 21, 31, 46–47, 56, 89, 97, 101, 112, 141 industrial ecology 6, 28, 63, 68, 70–72, 77, 81, 151–152 infrastructure: blockchain infrastructure 133; city infrastructure 139; direct-to­ air infrastructure 163; energy infra­ structure 177; fusion infrastructure 120; giga-infrastructure 143; green hydrogen infrastructure 116; humanity’;s infrastructure 195; infrastructure projects 54; ugly infrastructure build-out 164 investment framework 6, 23, 25, 33 investments 12, 29, 53–54, 56–60, 96, 105, 114, 117, 132, 135, 141, 143, 193, 195 Karimi, Moji 1–2, 5 Letorneau, Claude 160 Lomborg, Bjørn 4 longtermism 86, 188–189 manufacturing: biomanufacturing 1–2, 6, 60 MIT Sloan 4 modular 79, 113, 117, 142–144, 162, 190, 194 Moore, Alan 68–69

Index Nigeria 11–14, 97, 101 Norway 14–15, 11–13, 17–18, 41–42, 46, 56, 88, 95–97, 101–102, 114, 116, 139, 158, 161 Phillips, David 161 politics: cosmopolitics 187; geopolitics 187 Porritt, Jonathon 183 Post Growth: Life after Capitalism (Jackson) 76 R&D 3, 25, 56, 62, 113–114, 125, 171, 173–174 regenerative: agriculture 81; behavior 68; business 68; capitalism 78–80; civilization 134; economy 81, 98, 135, 174; fallacy 68–81; finance 128, 131; geography 78; gigaprojects 133; future(s) 76,121, 183, 188–191, 193; infrastructure, 195; investment 6, 25–36, 58; investor 78; market 132; megacities 134; mindset 74; paradigm 76; perspective 144; practice 132; production 251; society 106; technologies 134; world 91 regulation 3, 18, 85, 118, 129, 144, 154, 187 deregulation, 56 scalable 16, 60, 110, 117 scenarios 6, 149, 180, 189; climate scenarios 191; ecological scenarios 11–23; emission scenarios 149, 180; scenarios for 2050 11–23 science 2, 5, 7, 20, 43–45, 47, 61, 69, 74, 103, 117, 118, 127, 150, 173 Silent Spring (Carson) 3, 41, 48, 98 Singh, Vandana 30 The Skeptical Environmentalist (Lomborg) 4 standardization 63, 76, 151, 155, 172, 189; carbon standards 153; ecological standards 27; fuel-economy standards 153; jazz standards 76; standards 63, 105, 118, 151; standards-compliant interoperability 56; sustainability standards 72, 151 Stanford 45, 194 Startups 44, 54–58, 60, 62–63, 81, 85, 103, 105, 116, 119, 127, 129, 131, 135, 154, 159, 162–163, 173, 195–196

201

sustainability: brundtland Commission (1987) 42, 45, 90, 150; commitments 48; Crypto Sustainability Coalition 133; funds 56; governance 59; proprietary sustainability reporting frameworks 154; standards 72, 151; Stanford Doerr School in Climate and Sustainability 45 Sweden 41, 46, 143 synthetic: biofuel 112; biology 1–2, 6, 13–16, 20, 29, 133, 166, 173, 178, 194; existence 14, 23, 197; genetic circuits 19; nature 178–179; nitrogen fertilizers 16; photosynthetic algae 60; synthetically modified natural environment 22 technology: batteries 60, 62–63, 114, 117–118; battery technology 114, 127, 194; communication technology 22; fourth industrial revolution technology 153; information technology 59; large-scale energy storage 62; large-scale public technology projects 164; nanotechnology 29; operational technology 59; technology determinism 109; technology infrastructure 117; technology optimists 90; technology solution 5 Torres, Carolina 52 trade 32; trade transit hub 140; tradeoff 89 treaty 46–47, 171 UK 53, 72, 80, 99, 114, 116, 120–121, 154, 161, 163, 183, 191 Ukraine 12 United Nations 41–43, 45, 47–48, 142, 176 USA 111, 173; US Department of Agriculture 126; US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore lab 120 Usher, Bruce 58–59 VC 55, 57; CVC 57–58 venture 54–57, 125; capital community 125; capitalists 25, 159; capital cycle 55; investor 30, 44; investments 58; partner 4 waste 26, 42, 70, 114, 128–129, 140, 143, 179; animal waste 15; atomic waste 17; batteries as a waste problem 62; efficiency as a measure of waste

202

Index

reduction 34; food waste 118, 131; industrial ecology 70–71, 151–152; industrial waste 27; plastic waste 13, 86; as feedstock 110; waste oils 112;

waste management 54, 128–129; waste problem 62; waste production 120; waste-to-energy 160; wastewater lagoons 14