I think that the EU’s model is driven by the idea that in order for it to create a bigger resilience, it must not allow its smaller members to grow stronger. The whole is always stronger than the sum of its parts when the parts themselves are strong. Similarly, a chain is strong as its weakest link, that is the case with the EU. Limiting a member state’s ability to grow and prosper will eventually limit the European Union as a whole.
There are types of storms that you can hear about on the news. There are types of storms that you can simply hear knocking on your window. And, there are types of storms that you can feel all around you—the perfect storms.
Perfect storms might be rare and require a perfect alignment of multiple elements from unrelated ecologies. Yet, once they hit, they emphasize the interconnectivity of these elements and the fragile lines that hold everything together. When a perfect storm arises, it can devastate the surrounding structures and collapse our societal wellbeing.
We are about to be struck by such a storm.
The consequences of COVID-19 are beginning to take a toll. I’m not here to judge the decisions that policymakers took when driving lockdowns, masks, distance working and learning, and more. Yet, the law of physics should have played a bigger role before taking these actions—every action has an equal opposite reaction. We have not even approached the full force of the aftermath winds, yet we can already now see a hint of what is coming our way.
The geopolitical climate is changing, and circus shows are only adding to an already burning situation. From a devastating blow to the promise of freedom in the digital domain to intensified supply chain struggles, fuel shortages, and food shortages. Add to that an uncontrolled inflation and the realization that nations around the world cannot sustain themselves, it is clear that the king is indeed naked.
One of my favorite quotes is by Vivian Greene, who said, “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” When faced with a perfect storm, we all learn that there is no place we can simply wait it out.
Unfortunately, science is not based on data anymore, but on people’s opinions. We don’t try to learn the data, and instead get caught up in the buzzwords. We confuse correlation with causation, forgetting that correlation is not causation!
The climate is a non-linear, chaotic system that lacks a core of implicit order. As such, it is beyond our ability to fully understand and accurately predict. Carbon dioxide is essential to live on our planet, and it can’t be the enemy. By driving narratives that are not anchored in data, we lose sight of the bigger picture. Fossil fuel is a reliable, environment-friendly, and cost-effective energy source, while wind and solar, for example, are not.
Net-zero and the green deal philosophies pose the greatest threat to our societal and physical infrastructures. Antagonistic towards human beings and science, and full of a fascist tone, these philosophies, if fully adopted and implemented, could bring about the doom and gloom they aim to prevent.
Sustainability is a balance between environmental, equity, and economic considerations. It dawned on me that the keyword is balance. The scare-driven narratives behind net-zero and the green deal are jeopardizing the already delicate balance we have in securing a sustainable future. They push us towards not just an unattainable future, but one that is unnecessary.
A confused leadership, stubborn leadership and a spinless leadership walk into a bar… This might sounds like a joke yet both in our geopolitical and industrial landscapes, this is the reality. While we are now facing unprecedented challenges. Not just for our tomorrows but for one of our children, it appears that we are led by those who are blind to the implications of their actions (or maybe we are the blind ones)
You can’t resolve today conflicts using yesterday’s means. One must look into the future and reverse engineer the desired impacts into meaningful steps that are anchored in a new (needed) landscape. A landscape that can actually accommodate our place in the future, Innovation, and transformation should close the gap between politics, society, and technology rather than deepen it.
The very nature of our world is one of continual change. This, for the most part, is a very positive thing. Occasionally, though, we get somewhat slightly ahead of ourselves and neglect to use our rearview mirror as we hurtle uncompromisingly into a pre-defined future.
Take the electric car as a prime example. The entire automotive industry has been pulled, pushed and cornered into accepting the inevitability of eMobility. Sure, studies have been performed, DOE, the EPA and the EU have issued directives calling for a shift away from internal combustion engined vehicles, and battery chemistry is advancing at pace. But when you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, it can be difficult to accept that all the due diligence has, in fact, been done.
To get a better understanding of where we currently find ourselves, it is necessary to examine how we got here. Humanity’s quest for progress and profit have delivered us to the veritable crossroads that Robert Johnson sang about. For progress demands a price, much as the Devil does in Mr. Johnson’s song.
Around two years ago, TEMPUS.MOTU GROUP was charged with providing insights into the challenges that remain in the shift to electromobility and increased electrification. To say that, we identified a rather large pachyderm in the room would be something of an understatement. Policymakers, despite clear signals from the automotive industry, decided to bring the curtain down on internal combustion engines and ‘encourage’ automakers to begin the switch to electric propulsion systems. To be fair, there was mostly stick and very little carrot involved in the discussions that led to this dictate.
However, everyone agreed that the internal combustion engine had outlived its usefulness and was a key contributor to climate change, even though power generation, the air travel and shipping industries, along with construction, remain the biggest contributing culprits.
The task we had been given was to provide a group of companies with some insights and potential pathways forward, whilst highlighting the challenges that lay ahead on their pre-determined journey.
What emerged was fascinating. A complete disconnect between policymakers demands, access to the required natural resources, a lack of strategic planning and threat analysis, little or no public consultation on the question of electro mobility, and a decidedly poor international-level approach to what would ostensibly become one of the major technology shifts of our time.
As usual, policymakers made the simplistic choice to replace one technology (the combustion engine) with another (the electric motor and battery) without fully examining the potential for disruptive alternatives.
To paraphrase my business partner, Aric Dromi, we continue to design everything in our mobility and logistic systems around the width of two horses’ asses (based on the initial technology – the chariot – for which the Roman Empire built its first roads). For a wonderfully inventive and imaginative species, we seem to be very attached to our horses’ asses, as we continue to design everything around them…
Of course public consultations do not necessarily provide any measure of actionable direction, but they do offer a snapshot of peoples’ pain points in the current mobility paradigm, from which one might extrapolate and experiment with alternatives.
Similarly, we found that while governments were hell-bent on a technology shift towards electrification, they seemed less aware of the crumbling nature of the electrical grids in their charge and their marked inability to meet the coming demand for both generation and distribution of electricity (green or not) to power the cars of tomorrow. It is somewhat akin to having a baby in an empty bathtub.
The lack of foresight, planning, or even awareness to the potential challenges that lay ahead was nothing short of criminal. One must only look back around 20 years when diesel-engined cars were heralded, by the same cadre of policymakers, as being better for the environment than petrol-engined cars.
Of course hindsight is infrequently experienced with less than 20-20 vision, but to continue making such schoolboy errors is unforgivable, given the current state in which we find our planet.
Our findings were relatively straightforward and actionable. We saw a clear need for massive levels of investment in national electricity grids and power generation facilities – the kind of investments that governments and nations alone might struggle to achieve without private investment – even in the short term. For without this and without the underlying charging infrastructure that electric cars demand, there will be a lot of immobile electric cars on our streets in the coming years.
We also understood the huge challenge that was dropped onto the laps of the automotive industry, forcing them to adapt combustion-engined platforms to electric propulsion, when in fact they would have benefited from another 8-10 years to develop a ‘skateboard’ platform that better met the needs of an electric car. We are getting there today, but it has been a costly process, during which time the Hydrogen Economy has emerged to fracture consensus.
One cannot help but think that once again we are traveling down that old Roman road, two asses wide, when we have an opportunity to re-imagine public transport and personal mobility, just as we have the potential to re-imagine the road haulage, construction, steel and shipping industries.
The potential for smart grids, metered by AI, a move to a form of Universal Basic Public Transport to reduce single-person journeys, a fresh approach to town planning that puts people, rather than traffic first, is not too much to ask for.
If we must cross The Rubicon, let us do so in full knowledge that things cannot remain as they once were. If the current gas, oil, and electricity shortages brought about by the conflict in Ukraine tells us anything, it is that we are still not prepared for tomorrow, or today, for that matter.
In recent years, the world has seen an increasing number of transformation-triggered events, from climate and other natural disasters, to epidemics, pandemics and a pending global war. The accumulated impact of these events will disrupt (yes, there are still systems that can be disrupted more) every aspect of our societal and economical landscapes. Managing these events as they come will strain our capacity. While facing the aftermath of the global Corona pandemic crisis and the upcoming energy and economic challenges, we need to realize that it is just a matter of time before the next event, one with potentially even greater catastrophic consequences. A severe event, which becomes an Opportunity for Change (OfC) Event, requires substantial cooperation among industries, civil authorities, and key international organizations.
To be able and brace the unknown, organizations, and governments must first accept that fact that they can’t escape the impact—evolution in driven by disruptions. Even if the result of the upcoming event will be half of what some predict them to be, it’s obvious that it’s going to be enough of a disruption to affect our political, societal, economical and technological landscape.
Second, it’s obvious that the emergence of a new economic landscape will drive the majority of changes. The dominance of the Dollar empire is fading away—and the more we try to fight the inevitable, the more the noose will tighten against our necks. This process didn’t start with the current war in Ukraine, or it’s a carry on from the days of Covid. The stage was set already in 2001 when Jim O’Neill coins the term BRIC. Jim O’Neill didn’t design BRIC, but rather simply gave it a name. The design itself was the result of the USA and Europe thought-fixations that they are of immune from disruption.
The emergence of a new economic landscape will not eliminate the current one, as it’s even set on the same playing filed—there lies the current system problem. While the leaders of the USA and Europe try to drive new values to their systems, The BRIC model is creating a new impact. Think about it this way—the iPhone is a direct decedent of the impact line created by the Gutenberg press (i.e., giving society access to information) and Tesla is a direct decedent of the Roman horse and carriage impact line. The new model is a result of an entirely new impact line.
This disruption is not the end as the media and some leaders like to portray it, but rather an Opportunity for Change. It’s not a bout choosing a side, but about figuring out what is the best next move for your organization, your government. It’s about cooperation rather than dictation. Situation are driven by their potentials. What we need to understand that there is a big difference between fighting the future and navigating it.
The Biden administration move to cut China off from certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with U.S. equipment is nothing more than a declaration of war not just on China, but on technological progress in general.
According to U.S. the rule is the latest in a series of moves aimed at slowing China’s technological advances, which the U.S. sees as a national security threat. I will not argue with Biden administration concerns for U.S. national security, as I wrote in the past, the interpretation of any topic is always subjective. Yet, the requirement by firms to obtain a license before using U.S. chip-making equipment to produce semiconductors for Chinese needs, will introduce a bureaucratic layer that will stop innovation and invention. While this move is mainly aimed at China’s military and intelligence services, its impact will echo all around the world.
Let’s look at the immediate implications. It’s easy to imagine how China would react—invade Taiwan and take over its chip infrastructure. That will immediately would be a major blow to the U.S. economy. What would U.S. do? Try to drive China back into the technological landscape of the 90th the same way it’s trying to do to Russia? How will China react?
While the official story keep evolving around the narratives of the semiconductor industry, this battle between U.S. and China goes deeper than that and threaten society on a much deeper level.
The advancement of technology and science is already defining the geopolitical landscape, and its applications are poised to bring forward game-changing solutions in agriculture, health, energy and more. At the end of the day, it’s technological progress that will enable us to achieve leap-ahead breakthroughs, creating new industries, driving societal prosperity and eventually, expanding humanity to the stars.
I seam to me that the Biden administration forgot the story of one of humanity’s greatest achievement—the story of the Voyager. I know that NASA is proud of “owning” the Voyager mission. Yet if you take a closer look, you will find out that it was the international collaboration, the collective minds of scientist, engineers, and thinkers from all over the world, that made this project possible. This message in a bottle object, was deigned for a five-year mission to explore the outer solar system and were not expected to last more than a few decades. But here they are, still going strong after 40 years. The Voyagers have transformed our understanding of the solar system. They have made discoveries that have rewritten the textbooks. And they have shown us that there is so much more to explore. None of it would have happened without cooperation and collaboration.
Now that humanity is facing its greatest challenges yet, the Voyager collaborative narrative is more important than ever before.
U.S. focus on an outdated economic and innovation model is counterproductive. It will drive its economy and society to the days before World War I when the U.S. was able to look only inward (in a sense, it’s already there). The Biden administration need to remember that we are born into culture, we are not born with culture. It is something we learn through the interaction set by our environment. To instill a culture of creativity and risk-taking, you must have an assertive leadership team’s commitment to set the example. There must be a willingness to embrace new approaches and challenge the existing state of affairs.
