Fascinated by my new read that I picked up in London recently:
Value(s) by Mark Carney – a former governor of the Bank of England.
According to Mark, the original charter of the Bank of England (established in 1694) was to promote the public good to the benefit of the people.
Most of the original charter is repealed, but here is part of the original text available online (https://lnkd.in/gjr-nihG)
Bank of England Act 1694 1694 CHAPTER 20 5 and 6 Will and Mar
An Act for granting to theire Majesties severall Rates and Duties upon Tunnage of Shipps and Vessells and upon Beere Ale and other Liquors for secureing certaine Recompenses and Advantages in the said Act mentioned to such Persons as shall voluntarily advance the summe of Fifteene hundred thousand pounds towards the carrying on the Warr against France:
X1Wee your Majesties most dutifull and loyall Subjects the Comons assembled in Parliament for the further Supply of your Majesties extraordinary Occasions for and towards the necessary Defence of your Realmes doe humbly present your Majesties with the further Gift of the Impositions Rates and Duties herein after mentioned…
Carbon Dioxyde is a gas me, you and most of living organisms on earth exhale. It is light, invisible and we generally ignore it (unless you cover your head with the blanket for a minute while in bed).
With all humans weighing about half of gigaton (500,000,000 tons), we manage to emit 40 gigatons (40,000,000,000) of CO2 per year (or 80 times our own weight). Exhaling, unfortunately is not the major source. It is the transformation of our planet into the man-made world of concrete, metal, glass and polymers that does the damage.
Now, CO2 is extremely light, as all gases. 1 ton of CO2 under standard atmosphere (so, at the earth’s surface, or at 101KPa) takes about 556 cubic meters of space!
Imagine if CO2 emitted would be appropriated to each of us equally, that would mean that you and I, each inherit 5 tons of CO2 per year (40×10ꝰ / 8×10ꝰ = 5). That is 2,780m3 of a greenhouse gas per year per person! A cube with a side of 14m. In your lifetime, you will continue “building” your “castle in the sky” out of these cubes and after 80 years of a construction, you and I will be the proud owners of 1 cubic kilometer 3D plot each, warming our hearts as well as the rest of the planet by a few degrees.
OurWorldInData.org is a great source run by the University of Oxford. It allows you to have a deeper understanding of the global trends. It has a set of comprehensive tools for the CO2 emissions and you can see for yourself how your country is doing compared to the world.
Overwhelming amount of emissions comes from the energy sector – more than 73% or 29 gigatons per year (industry 24%, buildings 17,5%, transport 16%). This is by far the first priority to focus on.
On top of that, more than half of the world’s emissions are coming from only these 3 countries: China (31%), USA (13%) and India (7%).
Transforming energy sector from fossil fuels to renewables is an outmost priority for all.
CO2 has been ignored and neglected until the moment it became a killer gas. The gas that will finish human reign on the blue planet unless we learn to emit much less as well as to capture what’s been emitted by us and our predecessors.
Consuming less is the practical and pragmatic answer. The “3R” (reduce, reuse, recycle) is the magic formula for the bright new world that is ahead of us.
What is it that you are ready to forgo to save humans? Don’t worry about the planet, it will live another 7,5 billion years before the sun consumes it. Worry about your children…
I have been recommended this book and I cannot stop reading it! I haven’t finished it, but already can’t wait to share some of the great thoughts it contains!
The idea that a pure luck is behind almost everything that we encounter was cultivating inside my mind for a while and this book describes best what I tried to figure out.
On top of the odds and volatilities, the book talks about our self-imposed biases, noise that distorts our reality perception and black swan events. Through basic examples and thorough fundamentals discussion (i.e. Shiller redux, Monte Carlo simulation), it creates an important foundation to anyone interested in psychology, negotiations or applied sciences.
Here are some quotes that moved me
“The problem with information is not that it is diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic.”
“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”
“Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.”
“Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.”
“No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.”
Put yourself in the best possible state to perform by creating an attitude of energetic curiosity.
You do this by deliberately thinking, Let’s see how well I can[run/throw/sing/speak..] right now! Instead of being dead serious and thinking, This [race/game/audition/speach..] is super important, so I really have to do well right now or I’m in big trouble!
Thomas Piketty took a long shot (1000 pages!) trying to connect the dots, extrapolating and giving his vision of the past from the droplets of data in the Paris archives as well as relying on other scholars’ works. An enormous effort to portray the world’s complex socio-economic relations.
Having acquired Swania (Maison Verte), Henkel will pioneer Direct-To-Consumer business model in Europe. It is a unique opportunity to test the channel through a relatively small niche yet very trendy brand.
Unilever has been experimenting with Dollar Shave Club to no avail, finally relaunching it through proven brick-and-mortar channel to offset $1Bln investment in the US, but Swania example and the risk of missing the train might trigger changes. I believe that sooner than later Seventh Generation and Love Beauty and Planet will be knocking on our doors directly.
Let us see if finally P&G will launch their re-usable hybrid diapers on subscription. They too experiment with DTC elsewhere.
In any way, the DTC trend in Europe is bound to grow. It should reach the tilting point of profitability through offer premiumisation and on-subscription model.
Congratulations to Henkel. A true gem in the crown of household giant.
In the famous scene, Neo tries to comprehend that the rules he follows are the ones his brain imposed on him. There is no spoon, it is a fiction, mutually accepted social construct.
In the daily negotiations, I see over and over again my counterparts bringing their spoons to the table. Anchoring on them, insisting that it is the best alternative to walking away hungry.
True, when you play by socially constructed rules, spoon is a physical object with concrete value attached to it. The more spoons the better.
Yet, my objective is to prove that there is no spoon. There is no cake nor pear to cut. No win-win, nothing of those clichés. Just two individuals trying to understand each other.
Because it is by establishing direct contact with your counterpart, by building trust and credibility that the person will liberate her mind and let go of the spoon.
This act of faith is highly rewarding for both. Once the right messages are sent, the multiplier effect kicks in bringing extraordinary results.
Chris Goodall in his new book “WHAT WE NEED TO DO NOW For a Zero Carbon Future” decodes actions that must be taken for the UK to become a net zero emitter by 2050.
His key recommendations for the UK are:
Building a huge over-capacity of wind and solar
energy, storing the excess as hydrogen
Using hydrogen to fuel our trains, shipping,
boilers and heavy industry, while electrifying buses, trucks and cars
Farming – and eating – differently, encouraging
plant-based alternatives to meat, and paying farmers to plant and maintain
woodlands
Making fashion sustainable and aviation pay its
way, funding synthetic fuels and genuine offsets
Using technical solutions to capture CO2 from
the air, and biochar to lock carbon in soil
What are the measures that your country’s industry and
government are able to apply swiftly?
As promised, let’s deep dive into the major GHG emitters together. And we start with the great country – China. First in population, first in GDP PP, fourth in territory, second in the number of billionaires. The country that has a unique communist-capitalist blend, driving societal needs with liberal market tools.
China is responsible for roughly 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions. According to the Climate Watch, 80% of its emissions come from: electricity/heat generation (42%), construction (22%), industry (9%), transportation (7%).
Under the 2015 Paris Climate Deal, China pledged to become the net zero emitter by 2060. According to the experts, this bold move would mean a total transformation of the Chinese society. What are the obvious steps and implications? Let’s look at the key polluting sectors.
1. Energy
China must shift from coal to renewable sources of energy. Today its share of renewables is already 26%, which is the largest in the world in both the absolute and proportional values. The recent announcement of the controversial Yarlung Tsangpo 60GW dam project would theoretically add 2% to renewables (if we dare to consider melting glacier as a renewable source). That, however, is proven to be a challenge, as currently there are 184 (!) coal power plants being built, with nominal capacity of total 246GW (about the size of all Chinese solar power plants).
Zhang Xiliang, a climate modeller at Tsinghua University in Beijing suggests that not only China should retire coal power plants by 2060, but also ramp-up renewable electricity generation over the next 40 years, including a 16-fold increase in solar and a 9-fold increase in wind. To replace coal-fired power generation, nuclear power would need to increase sixfold, and hydroelectricity to double. A truly gigantic challenge for a gigantic nation.
2. Construction
Staggering half of all the world’s new buildings are raised in China. There are 3,400 cement companies in China, producing 2,4bln tons of cement. That is 60% of all cement produced in the world.
In the article “Cement and Carbon Emissions” by Laurent Barcelo, John Kline, Gunther Walenta and Ellis Gartner, authors argue that “It has been shown that the cement industry is a major producer of CO2, accounting for some 5 – 7% of man-made CO2 emissions. This is more related to the prevalence of concrete as the global construction material rather than the intrinsic level of embodied CO2 of concrete and cement. In cement manufacture, the CO2 comes from both a combination of process related emissions from the decarbonation of limestone, as well as energy related emissions from fuel combustion. The cement industry has traditionally relied on three main levers to reduce CO2 emissions; energy efficiency, alternative fuels and biomass, and clinker substitution. More can be done in each of these areas, but even at their full potential, their combined effect is not sufficient to meet the CSI and IEA cement industry targets. Another 50% reduction in CO2 emissions will still be required. Carbon capture and sequestration has not been fully proven, but it appears that it would add a significant cost to cement manufacture and therefore construction in general. Therefore additional innovation is required in cement formulation“.
Chinese Cement Association reports that the government has been pushing manufacturers to follow an example of Anhui Conch plant (photo below), that has retrofitted its clinkers to capture and store about 50,000 tons of emitted CO2.
Another opportunity Chinese cement companies explore in order to offset costly investment is a waste-to-energy model.
3. Industrial Emissions
Being world’s workshop is energy intensive. Traditionally, Chinese government has been subsidizing exporters for the sake of export revenue growth. This policy has been changing under the US pressure and since 2016 is officially abandoned. In reality, it has been transformed into a series of indirect “green” industrial subsidies.
Jihyun Selena Lee, Energy Efficiency Policy Analyst at the International Energy Agency reports: “During 2016‑19, China’s green bond market quadrupled to nearly USD 120 billion, making it the world’s second-largest. Dedicated government guidance and support for green bonds boosts energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, catalysing the clean-energy transition. Among the six green-bond categories, 12% of all bonds issued in 2016-19 pertained to energy-saving, claiming third place behind clean transportation (25%) and clean energy (36%). In practice, the energy efficiency share exceeds 12%, as resource conservation and recycling and other categories also incorporate numerous energy efficiency measures”.
4. Transportation
China is both the largest manufacturer and buyer of electric vehicles in the world, accounting for more than half of all electric cars made and sold (see chart below). China also makes 99% of the world’s electric buses.
Without any doubt, China has been leading the electric revolution banning motorcycles in 2016, allowing only electrical vehicles registrations in the biggest cities and finally pledging to ban all petrol vehicles as of 2035. It uses its rivers and builds railroads with unprecedented speed to reduce transport cost and emissions.
Conclusion:
China is moving fast from the global workshop to the global powerhouse. Its centralization allows for concrete and undisputable steps, be it a total ban of waste import or investment in the Road and Belt Initiative. China will continue its unprecedented transformation and their 2060 carbon neutrality pledge supported by the newest technological innovations seems achievable.
This sets the bar very high, and for the US or the EU to compete successfully, they must adapt fast. But are they prepared?
