A New Dawn of Alchemists, This Time Healing the Planet
When we find ourselves in nature, we are often amazed at how everything fits and we cannot help to wonder how this beautiful expression of unity and harmonious complexity came to be. In comparison, when we look at manmade societies, we see bureaucracy, corruption, waste, trauma and more. Sometimes we even see ugliness. Mankind, in a vain effort to control its surroundings, has become in the view of an increasing number of people the cancer of the earth.
The modern environmental movement was born after the Club of Rome introduced the concept of “limits to growth” in 1973. Since then, innovators have fought relentlessly to devise a way out of a vicious cycle that is taking the concept of civilizational collapse to a new dimension. We pollute and mess up the balances that make life possible. We know this even if deniers still occupy our highest political positions.
The good news is this: A phenomenal new class of companies out there are completely turning this cycle on its head, and are boldly bringing human endeavor to levels of sophistication which mimic biological systems and perhaps even surpass them.
It is time we scale these products that are so self-evident it hurts to think how obvious they have been all along in replacing the feeling of doom and gloom with hope. In a word, they are ‘man-kind’. After all, if we can design ourselves out of trouble and extinction while making good business, why should we turn that plan down?
I have sought for two decades to help launch products and services that would disrupt while avoiding a systems collapse. It has made me sensitive to ideas that have a chance of success in the long run. What Tesla has done for mobility and the electric car could soon be done by other companies for global warming, plastic pollution, rainforest depletion, etc. The magic lies in understanding the hard science while staying utterly pragmatic about adoption. It’s remembering that the capitalist economy can both lead to moral hazards and act as a catapult for necessary ideas.
It is in the spirit of conservative optimism — and, perhaps, I admit, with dash of post-industrial utopianism — that I will go to my favorite gathering of the year, the Near Future Summit, to curate a session on ‘asset alchemists.’ The team and I, led by the ever more ambitious Zem Joaquin, have selected innovators that, like the alchemists of the Renaissance who turned dirt into gold, transform problems into solutions.
They altogether symbolize in enterprise Lavoisier’s core tenet: ‘In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes.’
What if we could simply vacuum carbon dioxide out of the sky, cheaply, near those who need it for industrial processes like bottling and plastics, and slowly clean up the atmosphere of its worst greenhouse gas while making tons of money? It sounds truly suspicious, almost a hoax, but here’s the thing: it works. The world-class team behind it at Global Thermostat are making strides to prove it. Their multi-patented technology is, in layman terms, a large dehumidifier, which sucks out carbon dioxide out of the air instead of water. It is a low cost carbon dioxide production plant that can help localize the production of an expensive resource for various processes. Just imagine how a few years from now we will laugh at the fact that we had to truck carbon dioxide around to bottle Coke. The notion of burning fossil fuels in order to transport other fuels will be as ludicrous as smoking in restaurants is today. While the battle is not won just yet, the company is busy demonstrating how this can scale—and the business case is rather appealing even to hard-core environmental skeptics.
No need to preach to the choir: We may soon literally print money from the carbon dioxide we so fear in the atmosphere. I am certainly getting more excited about the prospect of doing the right thing, but my excitement is doubled when I encounter a technology and group of people able to speak the language of those who still see the world with very dark shades ignoring what is happening to those who already feel the bitter consequences of climate change.
A bit less market-ready, but equally astounding if it proves to work out in the next few years, is a technology developed by OPUS12 in the Cyclotron Road incubation program founded by Ilan Gur. An elite group of Stanford University graduates — Etosha Cave, Kendra Kuhl, and Nicholas Flanders — teamed up to develop research on carbon dioxide utilization. Using an innovative electrochemical process, OPUS12 promises to convert stationary carbon dioxide emissions into liquid fuels such as syngas, ethylene, ethanol, and methane. It could replace a growing proportion of gasoline demand in the U.S. You get it. This is a big picture idea that could help alleviate geopolitical tensions, while at the same time providing carbon neutral fuels and mitigating the effects of climate change. The company frames its technology’s vision as ‘enabling an artificial carbon cycle that sequesters carbon dioxide in the form of commodity chemicals or creates carbon-neutral fuels, leading to an overall decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.’ The problem is that the technology is still young and the market case needs to be fully proven. But if this scales, it will be one of a series of solutions that we will need to consider as a complete game changer on so many levels.
Sure, these two companies must have been my best shot. But no, consider now another massive problem, which is like a permanent oil spill slowly accumulating in the oceans. Our petrochemical addiction to plastics that end up in the gyros of the Pacific Ocean is a concern we should all have, not just for the planet, but for our health, our food, our children, and, plainly speaking, ourselves. We are all affected by the toxicity of plastics in little doses, and if it takes a while for the planetary ecosystems to grind to a halt from global warming, nobody is spared from the devastating effects of plastic pollution. It ruins even the most pristine landscapes and beaches of Indonesia. Now what can we do? Many ideas have been proposed. Many are getting traction, but one in particular excites me: Mango Materials. It’s a company that aims to take waste methane from waste treatment plants and transform it into biodegradable performance plastics. What does that mean exactly? Well, it means that after electric mobility and renewable energy generation, we could further reduce our addiction to petrochemicals. The company founded by a brilliant lady, Molly Morse, is raising capital confidently on the basis of having a very solid beta plant in the Bay Area.
And the grand finale is of a different genus. My history is mostly associated with transforming places and designing solutions for community resilience. My first contact with this field was in the intentional community and eco-village movement, but it never really scaled because it wanted to stay marginal and alternative. This approach led to insularity over time and an inability to significantly disrupt the real estate markets. This could be about to change with the project a few visionaries are now concocting a first pilot of near Tulum in Mexico. BIG architects have just shared their masterplan for a new type of real estate development. Far from the resort or traditional top-down eco-village, this is a Mayan-inspired ode to the integration between man and his surroundings, an often poorly told story of the Mayan genius. One might see it as a self-sufficient innovation village nestled in the Yucatan mangrove, offering a savant combination of technological research and transfer, educational opportunities with the Green School, cultural heritage and environmental conservation. Still, it is more than that, and the founders, hotelier-developer-architect Sebastian Saas and politician-developer-entrepreneur Antonio De La Rua, are betting on this becoming a prototyping ground to reshape the way we live and protect indigenous knowledge and the rainforest while providing a new and more meaningful setting for personal wellbeing and fulfillment. I see this as asset alchemy on the macro scale.
So… You now understand how enthusiastic I am. Not only because major breakthrough technologies are on the shelf ready to be deployed, but because of the sheer elegance of the solutions that I am most moved by.
They are not pipe dreams, they are not massive infrastructures, they are solutions that integrate well within current systems and almost passively re-engineer them.
I certainly would like to tear down more things as we transition into a more carbon-intelligent and light-footprint globalized society, but allow me to have serious doubts. What can we expect to achieve without playing the game of the current systems, not to mention the completely valid needs of developing nations to feel they are allowed to ‘catch up’ when they have done so little in comparison to harm the planet?
We need more companies and inventor-entrepreneurs in parks like the Cyclotron Road to put as much, if not more, effort into the applicability of world saving technologies, than the obsession of having the silver bullet. It is a slightly twisted way of saying yes to big business opportunities because they may be the only way to scale change without leading to disruptions we may not anticipate the impact of. Massively scalable incremental technologies affording us a logical systemic disruption with a world positive balance sheet in mind is what we should aim for now more than ever to win the environmental battle ahead. COP21 or the SDGs are guidelines but not benchmarks. We need business to drive this home.
