Discovering a surprisingly pragmatic solution to climate change
We’re doomed. Pretty much. Unless we can keep the temperature down, it’s going to be bad. Very bad.
The tricky part is persuading a few billion people to work together in their long-term best interests, when, right now, life is struggle enough. The ultimate tragedy of the commons.
There is no single magic solution that can be implemented quickly and without causing mass uprisings. Sure, we could all go back to living off the land as medieval peasants, forgoing all trappings of modern life, from transport to healthcare, but, realistically, that’s not going to happen, pretty much however bad things get.
Conversely, we shouldn’t ignore the situation because it is hard, and try to pretend it’s all a conspiracy, as some populist regimes might find expedient in the short term.
In my role corralling Impact Investments, I see a lot of projects designed to “save the world”. Most are aspirational, or non-scalable, and fall more into the category of “nice hobby you have there” or “what a fascinating research project”, but rarely likely to actually help dial things down enough.
But on occasion I see something more pragmatic, something that acknowledges the realities around us, our need to maintain civilisation, and at the same time offers a scalable solution to a significant part of the problem. So today I’m going to focus on transport.
Our foe here is the internal combustion engine. Guzzling fossil fuels in everything from lawnmowers, cars, trucks, trains, ships and cruise liners.
There’s some amazing work going on with electric vehicles, they are undoubtedly great, but I’m currently not convinced that overall they provide an environmental solution: too often they are simply shifting the pollution, from the vehicle to the power station and the factory. In time this will improve, as renewable power comes on line, batteries improve their power density, etc.
In the meantime, we have a global infrastructure which relies upon internal combustion, and for some modes of transport, the renewable alternatives just aren’t practical. Container ships, cruise liners, heavy vehicles. Yet those categories are where some of the worst pollution occurs.
What caught my eye was a simple statistic: in an internal combustion engine only 30% of the energy in the fuel is usefully used. The rest is wasted. Think about the radiator in your car. All that does is take heat — energy — and throw it away.
The reason we do that rapidly becomes technical. It boils down to the fact that engines work most efficiently when very hot, but if you make them too hot, they melt. Since that’s clearly bad, we cool them down, which keeps them running, at the dual expense of throwing energy away, and running at an inefficient lower temperature.
There’s an obvious solution here, which is to make the engine out of something that doesn’t melt at the high temperatures that are most efficient. Ditch the radiator, and use all the energy. And it turns out this is possible: rather than a 30% efficiency we can get up to about 70%. In essence, halving fossil fuel usage wherever this is implemented — reducing carbon dioxide emissions and particulate pollution.
The news gets better. The technology for doing this — specialist ceramics and clever engine design — is under development now. What’s even better is this isn’t locked up in the R&D division of a single corporate, but is run by a non-profit charity, with the intention that vehicle manufacturers and suppliers of all types can license and use the technology together.
Of course, there’s a catch, but it’s an easy one to fix. As a non-profit, they need help funding their work. Currently they are looking for support from philanthropists to fund continuing research and development. So far they’ve spent a few $m and about a decade on this, and have an impressive patent portfolio to show for it. Now, they need to push the project across the line, which should be possible in the next few months.
The hope is that with this technology in widespread use we can buy the world some time. Time for some of the longer-term structural reorganisations of society which we’ll inevitably need to do. But in the meantime we need to stop the planet from reaching that tipping point of no return. And for that, pragmatic solutions like this are incredibly exciting.
You can learn more and support the Litus Foundation here: https://www.sharedimpact.org/product/45001/Litus-Foundation
Bob North is CEO of SharedImpact, a global Impact Investment donor-advised fund, based in London, New York and Hong Kong. Opinions are personal.
Image credit: https://www.maxpixel.net/photo-1908433
