Magic, algae and what we consume

Magic. I caught a few of the highlights from the first Harry Potter movie the other day (because, why not?). One of them was the scene when Harry is gifted the invisibility cloak for Christmas. Ah — magic.

Except, a group of Israeli researchers have theorized the world’s first invisibility cloak. They still need to build a prototype to test the theory. But, the fascinating part of where we are in our relationship with science is that you probably read the article and said — “Ah, interesting.” And, moved on.

That’s the problem with magic being made commonplace.

• A portrait that recognizes who I am? We’ve got face recognition on our iPhone.
• Flying carpets and broomsticks? We’ve got Uber Elevate coming. \
• Floo powder? FaceTime
• Transfigured chess pieces that can play chess intelligently? Hello deep learning.
• Portraits with people that move? We’ve got digital displays that do just that.

And so on.

It is an incredible time to be alive. Crazy, at times. But, incredible nevertheless.

That brings me to algae.

But, before we get to algae.

I’ve gone through phases in writing these notes over the course of this year. There was a distinct media and advertising phase, an artificial intelligence phase, and a blockchain phase. My current phase is one around energy and sustainability. My last note was about solving for carbon di-oxide emissions.

As is the case with such journeys, it is only when you begin writing about a topic do you realize how little you know. I stumbled upon a few cool facts about carbon dioxide over the past 3 weeks. Fun fact — the cement industry emits more than twice the amount of greenhouse gas as every airplane in the sky, combined.

That, in turn, brings me to Algoland.
Given the cement industry produces 5–6% of global emissions, the industry is trying to find ways to change. This is especially the case in Sweden — a country that is on a mission to get to net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2045. Ergo, the Algoland project.

The Algoland is built on algae. Algae is the green goo you see on water.

This green goo creates more than half of Earth’s oxygen via photosynthesis, and in the process they capture a lot of carbon dioxide — way more than trees.

From a recent piece on Quartz —

Algae use the same biological process as trees: photosynthesis, in which organisms capture carbon dioxide in the presence of sunlight and then convert it to useful chemical energy. But algae has a few advantages. It grows in water, even salty seas, which means it doesn’t need to consume valuable land. It grows in all sorts of weather conditions — from Antarctic oceans to tropical lakes (and even outer space). And because it is microscopic, algae growth can easily be accelerated by feeding it more carbon dioxide in easy-to-manage industrial contraptions, rather than expensive greenhouses.

Many industries are pinning their hopes on algae, which is rich in proteins, vitamins, and fats. The food giant Cargill thinks it could develop algae as “the best food for humanity in the 21st century.” If not, there’s always animal feed.

Projects like the Algoland project funnel carbon dioxide to the algae. The algae, in turn, convert this carbon dioxide into nutrients — thus, producing zero-emission cement.

They are yet to figure out what to do with the vitamin rich algae. But, that takes away from the sheer awesomeness of this process. We’re in day one and this progress is encouraging.

Our consumption model
On August 2nd this year, we used more from nature than our planet can renew in a year. We’re currently spending resources equal to 1.7 planets. It is unsustainable. An awesome article on NewCo Shift makes a few important points -

• The climate crisis is rooted in our modern lifestyle, and in the economic model that supports it.
• Consumer powered — In 2007, consumers contributed to more than 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. They (/we) also contributed between 50 and 80 percent of total land, material, and water use.
• Food — as income rises, people consume more dairy and meat products. These are the food categories with the highest environmental footprint. In fact, the global livestock industry produces more emissions than all cars, planes, trains, and ships combined. A study by Oxford University calculated that a global shift to a vegan diet would reduce food-related emission by 70 percent by 2050.
• Clothes — The world now consumes 400 percent more clothes than two decades ago. According to the World Bank, textile processing causes 20 percent of water pollution globally. Cotton, the “thirsty crop,” makes up about half of our clothes and requires 5,300 gallons of water to produce 1kg of cotton.
• Waste — Only 9 percent of all plastic waste produced since the 1950s has been recycled. The rest ends up in landfills or polluting our environment. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation projects that, by 2050, oceans will contain more plastic than fish.
• Our consumption hurts us just as it hurts the environment — Diseases such as heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s are the leading cause of disability and death in the US. They have been increasing at an alarming rate and claim 90 percent of the US healthcare spending. As of 2012, about half of all adult Americans had one or more chronic health conditions. We can prevent, treat or reverse these conditions with lifestyle and dietary changes like eating less meat and junk foods.
• Toxic chemicals are everywhere — In recent years, scientists found toxic chemicals in most of our consumer products. More than 80,000 chemicals are used in commerce in the US, but the vast majority is not tested for health effects.
• Consumption doesn’t make us happy either — people who strongly value the pursuit of wealth and possessions report lower psychological well-being than those who are less concerned with such aims. The American dream has a dark side, and the pursuit of wealth and possessions might actually be undermining our well-being”.

(Envisioning the American dream — mid century media)

This isn’t just about food and clothing. It works with ideas, too.
We’ve spent a lot of time this year figuring out who is to blame for the whole fake news epidemic. Is it Russia? Facebook? An enterprising group of entrepreneurs in Macedonia? Silicon valley and the cult of social media? Lack of regulation from Washington?

While blame lies in all of these parties, we spend very little time reflecting on the role we have to play. Ben Evans shared an post on his blog on “Fashion, Maslow and Facebook’s Control of Social.” Here are 3 powerful points —

There’s a common idea that in some way fashion designers get together in a room and decide what the fashion will be next year. That’s a pretty fundamental misunderstanding. Rather, they propose what might fit the zeitgeist. Sometimes that’s incremental and sometimes it’s a radical break — sometimes the pendulum needs to swing from one extreme to another. Sometimes they get it wrong, but when they get it right it captures an age.

When Facebook says “games have great metrics and make us lots of money, but we think they make the Facebook experience worse so we’ll kill them”, and, more recently, when Snap says “we think the algorithmic linear feed is bad”, this is also a proposal, and, again, it might be wrong. It might be suggested by detailed daily metrics, or a vague instinctive sense of, again, the zeitgeist, but the crucial point is that whether this is right — whether people like it — is never fundamentally determined by the company. This applies at every level of scale — whether it’s creating an entirely new product or tuning some small feature based on a daily or hourly feedback loop — Facebook doesn’t determine what the feedback tells it.

You can shape things, sometimes. You can ride and channel the trend. But I think we attribute vastly too much power to a handful of product managers in Menlo Park, and vastly too little power to the billions of people who look at their phone screen and wonder which app to open. Facebook writes algorithms, and designers cut the cloth, but that doesn’t mean they control what people look at or what people wear.

Self righteousness is not the answer
The point of all this is not to parse out what we do well and take a self righteous stance. Self righteousness is dangerous because it often precedes or accompanies a complete lack of self awareness.

For example, in our household, we are minimalist in our consumption of goods or clothing in our household. We sort our trash, recycle and even use a compostable diaper service to ensure diapers don’t go into landfills. Our diet is mostly vegetarian.

But, being self righteous about any of the above would overlook that we drive petroleum based cars, enjoy dairy and chicken every once a while, and so on.

It also inspires very little actionable change.

My hope, instead, is that this spurs reflection around 2 questions —
1. What is my consumption model like?
2. How can I do better?

A wise friend told me that the best diet is the one that is a bit better than the one you currently consume.

I think it works the same for consumption. We need to fix our consumption models. Over time, that’ll help us fix the consumption model of our families, organizations and communities… i.e., our world and, eventually, the world.

Change begins with us.

Links for additional reading

• The AWESOME Quartz Daily Brief and Obsessions newsletters
• The Algoland project — on Quartz
• Our consumption model is broken — on NewCo Shift
• Fashion, maslow and Facebook’s control of social — on Ben Evan’s blog

This is an edition of a bi-weekly technology newsletter called Notes by Ada. If you like this and would like free weekly notes via email, please just subscribe here.