This is likely to be a rather meandering blog. There is a lot I want to say but I am not entirely sure how best to arrange my thoughts so I think I will just dump everything on paper and see how it turns out.
I have just been listening to a fabulous Podcast called “Thirteen Minutes to the Moon”. It’s about three years old and was made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing – its well worth a listen, especially if, like me, you were completely captivated by the whole space thing in the late 60s and early 70s. Its difficult to get past the continually recurring question of “how did they manage it ?” When I think back to the first computers that I used in my working life in the early 1980s, it just seems incredible that more than a decade earlier computer technology played such a vital role in getting people to the Moon and back.
When you listen to the story of the Apollo missions, you can’t help but be impressed by the incredible inventiveness and tenacity that we possess as a species and this must give us hope that we can tackle the even greater challenge that we gace today, namely climate change.
So, lets consider the Apollo missions and tackling climate change as two long-term projects and then compare and contrast them.
The Business Case
Any project needs a compelling reason that gets it through an approvals process – people need to be convinced that the project needs to be done. In the case of the Apollo project, the compelling reason was the Cold War. The Americans didn’t snaffle up the best German scientists as the end of WWII because they wanted to land on the moon. They did it because they wanted to make sure those scientists could apply their expertise in building weapons for them rather than for the Russians. You can make a strong case that the moon landings wouldn’t have happened (and maybe still wouldn’t have happened) if it hadn’t been for the Cold War. Its that old adage “necessity is the mother of invention”.
In the case of climate change, there is a reason but, for many, its still not compelling. There are wide differences of opinion on what needs to be done and by when. Countries like China and India are still seeking to grow through the use of fossil fuels. And, in the developed world, where there may be a wider recognition of the issue, there is still a reluctance for people to accept measures that may in some way inconvenience them, maybe because in these countries the real impact of climate change is yet to be felt or is felt in a more limited way.
Project Goals
When a project is initiated, its important to identify some goals. JFK stated the goal for the Apollo project pretty clearly. His words were “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade”. Now, you could argue that “go to the moon” was a bit vague but he clearly stated a timescale and a goal that could be measured in a fairly unambiguous way. If, by the end of 1969, nobody had been to the Moon, the project would have been a failure.
Does similar clarity exist in the case of climate change ? Well, I think that’s a pretty clear and resounding no. Timescales seem to vary from place to place, so do the targets and I would argue that its not even clear how those targets will be measured ? When a politician or business leader states that “we will be Net Zero by 2030”, can we be sure what this means and how they will be measuring this ? Furthermore, is the way that one business or government measures its carbon footprint globally consistent ? I suspect not. And, finally, is Net Zero actually good enough – it seems to me that we need to do better than Net Zero.
Project Co-ordination
Possibly the biggest difference between the Apollo missions and the project to tackle climate change is that there was a greater degree of co-ordination of effort. A lot of things had to come together for Neil Armstrong to take that one small step and this work was carried out by people working for a wide range of organisations, including NASA, Grumman, MIT, to name just a few. But the project would have failed had MIT done all the work needed to deliver the computer systems whilst Grumman failed to deliver a working Lunar Module, and vice versa.
This highlights possibly the most depressing thing about climate change – even if the UK and other countries in, say, western Europe achieve Net Zero, this won’t count for much if countries like India and China continue to build their growth upon the use of fossil fuels. I have heard many people asking whether it is worth them recycling whilst China is still building coal powered fire-stations ?
On a global scale, it feels as if our leaders are doing a Nero – fiddling whilst the planet burns around us.
So, what is the conclusion from all of this ? In a nutshell, I would put it this way; time and again we have, as a species, demonstrated incredible levels of resourcefulness and inventiveness to allow us to overcome many challenges. So, when people say that they believe that technology will eventually solve the climate change problem, they have a point. However, until we can address some pretty fundamental issues in terms of the way that the climate change “project” is being managed, the technology, whatever it is and however good it is, may not be enough.
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