Bill Joy
Futurist; cofounder and former chief scientist, Sun Microsystems; Greentech Venture Capital Group and Partner Emeritus, KPCB
Climate change is an enormous challenge. Rapid de-carbonization of manufacturing, electricity generation, and transportation is critical and may become a crisis because of nonlinear effects. Last year brought not-widely-disseminated news of the commercial availability of three substantial scientific breakthroughs that can significantly accelerate de-carbonization.
De-carbonizing Concrete; Commoditizing CO2After water, concrete is the most widely used material in the world. The manufacture of Portland cement for use in concrete accounts for up to 5 percent of global anthropogenic emissions. A new “Solidia cement,” invented by Dr. Richard Riman of Rutgers University, can be made from the same ingredients as Portland cement and in the same kilns, but at lower temperature, while incorporating less limestone, thus emitting substantially less CO2 in its manufacture. Unlike Portland cement, which consumes water to cure, this new cement cures by consuming CO2. Concrete products made from it have their CO2 footprint reduced by up to 70 percent. Thousands of tons of the new cement have been manufactured, and 2015 brought news that large manufacturers are now modifying their factories to use it instead of Portland cement to make concrete. Its widespread adoption would multiply the demand for industrial CO2 substantially, creating a strong economic incentive for CO2 capture and reuse.
Previous attempts at introducing radically-low-carbon cements have all failed to scale, because they required raw materials that were not ubiquitous and expensive new capital equipment, and/or because of the large range of material properties required by regulation or for specific applications. Solidia cement overcomes these problems and offers lower cost and better performance. But rapid adoption in an existing infrastructure has to be simple. In this case, only a single step of the manufacturing process—to cure with CO2 rather than water—has to change.
Can we similarly expect to reduce the CO2 footprint of other high-embodied-energy materials, such as steel and aluminum, while reusing the existing infrastructure? A decade-long search found no suitable candidate breakthroughs, so these de-carbonizations may unfortunately require a much slower process of redesigning products to use lower-embodied-energy materials like structural polymers and fibers.
Scalable Wind Turbines for Distributed WindMore than a billion people, mostly in rural areas in the developing world, lack access to a reliable grid and electricity; it matters greatly whether they will get electricity from renewables or fossil fuels. Wind turbines today are the cheapest renewable but only in very large multi-megawatt Utility-Scale units unsuitable for distributed generation. At smaller sizes, the performance of existing wind-turbine designs degrades substantially. A new type of shrouded wind turbine, invented by Walter Presz and Michael Werle of Ogin Energy, saw its first multi-unit deployment at Mid-Scale (100kW-rated range) in 2015. This new turbine’s shroud system pumps air around the turbine so that it is efficient at both Mid- and Small-Scale sizes and at lower wind speeds, thus supporting distributed generation and microgrids.
A recent analysis shows Utility-Scale Wind the cheapest renewable, with unsubsidized cost at about $80/MWh, Solar PV at about $150/MWh; conventional Mid-Scale Wind is $240/MWh—too expensive to make a substantial contribution. The new shrouded turbines provide electricity at half the cost of the conventional Mid-Scale turbines today and will be cost-competitive with Utility-Scale Wind when they are in volume production.
We need to deploy enormous amounts of renewables to fully de-carbonize electricity generation and enable the necessary decommissioning of most of the existing fossil-fuel-consuming generating equipment. Wind can be deployed extensively much more quickly, safely, and cheaply than the often proposed scale-up of nuclear energy, and can be combined with grid storage such as batteries to make it fully dispatchable. If we get serious about de-carbonization, Small- and Mid-Scale turbines can be quickly scaled to high-volume production using existing manufacturing infrastructure, much as was done for materiel during WW II. Having cost-effective wind at all scales complements Solar PV and, with grid storage, completes a portfolio that can further accelerate the marked trend toward renewables.
Room Temperature Ionic Electrolyte for Solid State BatteriesCurrent lithium-ion batteries use a flammable liquid electrolyte and typically incorporate materials that further increase fire danger. Most contain expensive metals, like lithium, cobalt, and nickel. Last year brought publication of the existence of a new polymer electrolyte invented by Michael Zimmerman of Ionic Materials—the first solid to have commercially practical ionic conductivity at room temperature. The polymer is also inherently safe, self-extinguishing when set on fire. It creates a chemical environment substantially different from that of a liquid, supporting novel and abundant cathode materials, like sulfur (which is high-capacity, light, and inexpensive) and new and inexpensive metal anodes, thereby supporting multivalent species, like Zn2+. Many desirable battery chemistries, infeasible with liquid electrolytes, are newly possible.
This scientific breakthrough, shown only in the 2030s on most battery-industry roadmaps, has long been desired because solid batteries can be much cheaper and safer and store more energy. Solid polymer batteries can be manufactured using mature and inexpensive scale-manufacturing equipment from the plastics industry.
Fifteen percent of global CO2 fossil-fuel emissions come from wheeled transportation. India and China’s fleets will grow substantially in the years ahead; whether energy for these additional vehicles is provided by renewables or fossil fuels will make a significant difference in global emissions. Low-cost, safe, and high-capacity batteries can greatly accelerate the electrification of transportation and these fleets beyond the current modest projections.
In the 21st century, we need to stop combusting fossil fuels. Electrochemistry—both better batteries and fuel cells—has far greater potential than is generally realized and can displace most combustion.
There are other gas- and liquid-based technologies we can hope to convert to solid-state to reduce their CO2 impact—such as cooling, which generally uses a liquid-gas phase transition today. I hope the future brings news of a solid-state cooling breakthrough that, like the above technologies, can be quickly taken to scale.
Juice
James Croak
Artist
In one hand you’re holding a gallon of gasoline weighing 6 pounds, in the other a 3-pound battery; now imagine them containing equal energy. Spoiler alert: They already can. The most exciting and far-reaching scientific advance is the dramatic increase in electric-battery density, allowing it to displace gasoline and solving the problems of night electricity, vehicle range, and becalmed windmills.
Electric-car range increases about 9 percent per year and has reached a point where one can imagine round-trips that don’t involve a flatbed. But the public was startled in 2011 when a seven-figure prize was claimed from Green Flight Challenge, which had offered it to an aircraft that could fly 200 miles in under two hours with a passenger, using less than a gallon of fuel. Three planes competed—two electric and one hybrid—with only the electric planes finishing within the allotted time. The winner averaged 114 mph on a plug-in electric plane sans a gas engine. This was a Tom Swift fantasy five years earlier, because the weight of the batteries was too much for the plane—even if they had been able to be crammed into fuselage. Their weight and size shrank, while the energy storage increased.
Battery density now peaks at about 250 watt-hours per kilogram, up markedly from 150 wh/kg a few years ago but still far below petroleum, which is 12,000 wh/kg. One company is about to release a 400 wh/kg, but batteries under development could pass the energy density of fossil fuels within a few years.
The most exciting and counterintuitive battery invented is the lithium-air, which inhales air for the oxygen needed for its chemical reaction and exhales the air when finished. This should ring a bell: Gas engines inhale air and add a
gas mist; the expanding air creates power but then expels an atmospheric sewer. The lithium-air battery is solid-state and exhales clean air. MIT has already demonstrated a lithium-air battery with densities of over 10,000 wh/kg.
Batteries need not have the energy density of gasoline in order to replace it. The physics of gasoline power are lame; only 15 percent of the energy in your tank powers the car down the highway; the rest is lost to heat, engine and transmission weight, friction, and idling. As a practical matter, batteries in the labs are already beyond usable energy density of fossil fuels, an energy density that results in a 500-mile range for an electric car with a modest battery and probably more for a small plane.
The second substantial change is that increased battery density has lowered both the size and cost of electrical storage, creating the bridge between intermittent wind and daytime photovoltaic energy, and the round-the-clock current demands of the consumer.
Windmills produce prodigious electricity during a good blow but bupkis when becalmed; the batteries provide steady current until a breeze appears. A new battery installation at the Elkins, West Virginia, windfarm keeps the 98-megawatt turbines as a constant part of the overall grid supply, with pollutant-free electricity and the reliability of a conventional fossil-fuel plant.
Also, fossil-fuel plants run at higher capacity than needed, in case of a spike in demand. A new megawatt battery installation in the Atacama Desert of Chile brought stability to the grid and a reduction in fuel usage.
The hoped-for green revolution is suddenly here, improbably due to the humble battery. A century ago, there were more electric cars on the road than gasoline cars. Very soon, we will be back to the future.
A Call to Action
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; author, Ways of Curating
The publication in 2015 of a paper by Mark Williams et al. titled “The Anthropocene Biosphere”* provides more evidence that the changes wrought upon the climate by human civilization are set to produce a sixth mass extinction. According to one of the paper’s co-authors, geologist Peter Haff, we have already entered a period of fundamental changes that may continue to alter the world beyond our imagination. All of us can provide anecdotal evidence of the shifts in our environment. In December I received a call from a friend in Engadin, Switzerland, where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra; at an altitude of 2,000 meters, there was no snow. Meanwhile, in Hyde Park, the daffodils were blooming.
As the artist, environmentalist, and political activist Gustav Metzger has been saying for years, it is no longer enough just to talk about ecology: We need to create calls to action. We must consider the potential for individual and collective agency to effect changes in our behavior and develop adaptive strategies for the Anthropocene age. To quote Metzger, we need “to take a stand against the ongoing erasure of species, even where there is little chance of ultimate success. It is our privilege and our duty to be at the forefront of the struggle.” We must fight against the disappearances of species, languages, entire cultures; we must battle the homogenization of our world. We must understand this news as part of a broader continuum. The French historian Fernand Braudel advocated the longue durée, a view of history which relegates the historical importance of “news events” to a place beneath the grand underlying structures of human civilization. Extinction is a phenomenon belonging to the longue durée of the Anthropocene, the symptoms of which we are beginning to experience as news. By connecting the news to the longue durée, we can formulate strategies to transform our future and avert the most catastrophic extinction scenarios. By understanding the news, we can act upon it.
Art is one means by which we reimagine existing paradigms to accommodate new discoveries, the thread connecting the now to the past and future, the thread linking news events to the longue durée. Art is also a means of pooling knowledge, and it is, like literature, news that stays news. When Shelley stated that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he meant something like this: that writers and artists reimagine news in ways that change how we perceive the world, how we think and act.
Among my great inspirations is Félix Fénéon, a fin-de-siècle French editor (and the first publisher of James Joyce in France), art critic (he discovered and popularized the work of Georges Seurat), and anarchist (put on trial, he escaped prosecution after famously directing a series of barbs at the prosecutor and judge, to the jury’s great entertainment). Fénéon was a master of transformation. He transformed the news into world literature via his series of prose poems. In 1906 he was the anonymous author of a series of three-line news items published in Le Matin which have since become famous. Those brief reports adapted stories of contemporary murder and misery into prose poems that will last forever. Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet transformed the Copernican breakthroughs of Einstein and Freud into fiction. By translating events that are ephemeral and local in their initial impact into that which is universal and enduring, we can make news into culture.
John Dos Passos gave lasting form to events that seemed characterized by a fleeting immediacy. In his U.S.A. trilogy, Dos Passos pioneered new styles of writing that sought to capture the experience of living in a society overwhelmed by the proliferation of print media, television, and advertising. In his “newsreel” sections, the author collages newspaper clippings and popular song lyrics; elsewhere he pursues his experiments in what he called the “camera eye,” a stream-of-consciousness technique that attempts to replicate the unfiltered receptivity of the camera—which makes no distinction between what is important and what is not. Later this material is transformed into stories. According to the filmmaker Adam Curtis, the U.S.A. trilogy identifies
the great dialectic of our time, which is between individual experience and how those fragments get turned into stories, . . . [W]hen you live through an experience you have no idea what it means. It’s only later, when you go home, that you reassemble those fragments into a story. And that’s what individuals do, and it’s what societies do. It’s what the great novelists of the 19th century, like Tolstoy, wrote about. They wrote about that tension between how an individual tells the story of an event themselves, out of fragments, and how society then does it.
The Lebanese-American poet, painter, novelist, urbanist, architect, and activist Etel Adnan speaks about the process of transformation as the “beautiful combination of a substratum that is permanent and something that changes on top. There is a notion of continuity in transformation.” In her telling, transformation describes the relationship between the longue durée of history, current news events, and action that can transform the future. She shows us how dialogue can produce new strategies that can preserve difference and help act against extinction, while also acknowledging that change is inevitable. If we are to develop radical new strategies to address one of the most important issues of our time, then we must go beyond the fear of pooling knowledge among disciplines. If we do not pool knowledge, then the news is just news: Each new year will bring reports of another dead language, another species lost. While writing this text, I received an email in the form of a poem from Etel Adnan which expresses this beautifully:
Where do the news go?
News go where angels go
News go into the waste-baskets of foreign embassies
News go in the cosmic garbage that the universe has become
News go (unfortunately) into our heads.
A Bridge Between the 21st and 22nd Century
Koo Jeong-A
Conceptual artist
Aristotle discussed magnetism with Thales of Miletus. Oriental medicine refers to the meridian circles and was treating by using the magnetic field before the invention of the acupuncture needle in the Iron Age. As the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce wrote, “All history is contemporary history.” The magnet’s cryptographic character—relevant in the computer network, medical devices, and space expeditions through electromagnetic fields that link multiple
cultural devices in our saturated era—as a decorous bridge between the 21st and the 22nd century, will still innovate. Far from extreme division, magnet-espoused technology would make peace in our world.
The Greatest Environmental Disaster
Richard Muller
Physicist, UC Berkeley; author, Energy for Future Presidents
The news stories from China are horrific. The best estimate is that on average, 4,400 people die every day from air pollution in that country. That’s 1.6 million per year. Every time I hear of some tragedy that makes headlines, such as a landslide in Shenzhen that killed 200 people, I think to myself, “Yes—and today 4,400 people died of air pollution and it didn’t make the news.”
This is not the old eye-burning, throat-irritating air pollution of yesterday. Today’s pollutant is known as PM2.5—particulate matter 2.5 microns and smaller. It is produced by automobiles, by construction, by farm work, but the greatest contributor by far is coal, burned by industry and for electric-power production. PM2.5 wasn’t even listed as a major pollutant by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency until 1997. It was present but just not fully proved to be as deadly as it is.
We now know that on a bad day in Beijing, such pollution hurts people as much as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Bad air triggers strokes, heart attacks, asthma, and lung cancer. Look at the causes of death in China and you’ll see a remarkable excess of such deaths, despite the fact that obesity is uncommon compared with that in the U.S.
We know about the health effects from some remarkable studies. In the U.S., we saw decreases in health problems when factories and coal plants were temporarily shut down (the 1993 “Six Cities Study”). In China, we have the Huai River Study, in which the Chinese policy of giving free coal to households north of the Huai River, but none to the south, resulted in a reduced average lifetime in the north of 5.5 years.
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