Godspeed to decarbonisation

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The story goes that more than two thousand years ago the three wise men visited a new-born baby, who was later about to give hope and guidance for a better living to a large portion of people in the world. There are other stories at different times of the history where other men of the same caliber have visited the earth whenever the state of humanity has declined to a deplorable state and needed spiritual uplifting.

As we are arriving to the Christmas and New Year periods growingly aware of the climate crisis, it is maybe the right time to reflect if there is any hope and way out of this and what New Year promises we all could make to get things right.

For too long time the burning of fossil fuels drove the industrial revolution, the birth of the consumer market and constantly growing energy demand for globalisation and digitalisation. All sorts of fossil fuel backed development have given humanity an amazing number of press-button gadgets and comforts to ease their lives and give them fascinating experiences. The only concern people used to have in 1970s’ and 80s’, was the sufficiency of this “black gold”.

No knowledgeable, reasonable man today negates the fact, that the humanity is fast and in accelerating speed heading off the cliff towards its own destruction when staying complacently in inertia. We are helplessly looking at the global temperature trajectory pointing at vertical direction. We are fooling ourselves with 1,5 °C target while we are clearly heading to 3 °C. Anybody who understands the dynamics behind current development will also appreciate that the only hope is a total paradigm shift in all sectors of human activity.

Educated as we are, we now know that the earth is round, not flat. Similarly, we now know the mother nature always made us available infinite, limitless amount of “white gold” in the form of wind, solar, water and more. Also, it would be unreasonable to expect the vast and still rapidly growing number of humans to renounce its toys and comforts. Even spiritual edification when the patient is in ICU wouldn’t help him, but right medication could.

The only real solution for the humanity to avoid the impending doom is to develop and apply couple of real breakthrough technologies that have capacity to cut the emissions in scale. We already have renewable wind-, solar- and hydropower technologies for clean electricity production, which is the very basis for the transition and as said, its limitless. We already have batteries to utilise that clean electricity in cars and other transportation. We have new food technologies and so on. What is promising also is the trend of brightest of people from different disciplines turning their career choices to cleantech.

The biggest lacuna in terms of hope, has been the absence of clean breakthrough technologies in industry sector. Chemicals and petrochemicals, cement, iron and steel and the rest counts for 8,7 billion tonnes or 25% of all global CO₂ emissions. Massive amounts of fossil fuels are burned when manufacturing the basic materials out of which various kinds of end products for consumers are produced. This is no more. Just ten days ago, on 12 December, Coolbrook successfully hatched its carbon-free RotoDynamic Technology in the large-scale pilot to demonstrate an opportunity for the world to eliminate 2,4 billion tonnes or 28% of all the global industrial CO₂ emissions.

So, there is hope as several powerful technologies are already there or approaching their commercial stage. The real challenge left is the speed. The current speed we are applying clean technologies is a speed of a tortoise. EU Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans has rightly remarked, “no more talk, we must start walking the talk. I would go one step further to say, walking may not be enough, we need to start running! That’s the urgency with which we at Coolbrook are working on our initiative.

This New Year we throw a challenge to all the governments, regulators, thought leaders, manufacturers, technology providers and consumers from all parts of the world to join us in implementing this change with our or any other breakthrough technologies, as soon as possible. A global problem needs a global effort to solve it. Together we can bring about this paradigm shift and help the companies and people the world over to a brighter and cleaner future.

And to make sure the transition is achieved, this Christmas, if you are spiritual, pray for Godspeed to decarbonisation. And if you are not, pray for it anyway!