If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.
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https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon
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Silicon Valley claims to be the epicenter of American innovation, but what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is some combination of nonsense, climate-wrecking tech, and climate-wrecking nonsense tech. Forget Jeff Hammerbacher's lament about "the best minds of my generation thinking about how to make people click ads." Today's best-paid, best-trained technologists are enlisted to making boobytrapped IoT gadgets:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification
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Planet-destroying cryptocurrency scams:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho
NFT frauds:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/06/crypto-copyright-%f0%9f%a4%a1%f0%9f%92%a9/
Or planet-destroying AI frauds:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain
If that was the best "innovation" the human race had to offer, we'd be fucking doomed.
But - as Ryan Cooper writes for *The American Prospect* - there's a far more dynamic, consequential, useful and *exciting* innovation revolution underway, thanks to muscular public spending on climate tech:
https://prospect.org/environment/2024-05-30-green-energy-revolution-real-innovation/
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The green energy revolution - funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act - is accomplishing *amazing* feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype. I did an interview a while ago about my climate novel *The Lost Cause* and the interviewer wanted to know what role AI would play in resolving the climate emergency.
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I was momentarily speechless, then I said, "Well, I guess maybe all the energy used to train and operate models could make it much worse? What role do *you* think it could play?" The interviewer had no answer.
Here's brief tour of the revolution:
* 2023 saw 32GW of new solar energy come online in the USA (up 50% from 2022);
* Wind increased from 118GW to 141GW;
* Grid-scale batteries doubled in 2023 and will double again in 2024;
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* EV sales increased from 20,000 to 90,000/month.
The cost of clean energy is plummeting, and that's triggering other areas of innovation, like using "hot rocks" to replace fossil fuel heat (25% of overall US energy consumption):
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Heather Boushey, Chief Economist, Investing in America Cabinet Justina Gallegos, Deputy Director for Industrial Innovation, Office of Science and Technology Policy In 2021 and 2022, President Biden signed into law his Investing in America agenda, a series of strategic public investments in industries critical for the long-run economic growth of the United States. This included…
Increasing our access to cheap, clean energy will require a lot of materials, and material production is very carbon intensive. Luckily, the existing supply of cheap, clean energy is fueling "green steel" production experiments:
Cheap, clean energy also makes it possible to recover valuable minerals from aluminum production tailings, a process that doubles as site-remediation:
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/toxic-red-mud-co2-free-iron
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And while all this electrification is going to require grid upgrades, there's lots we can do with our existing grid, like power-line automation that increases capacity by 40%:
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/13/1187620367/power-grid-enhancing-technologies-climate-change
It's also going to require a lot of storage, which is why it's so exciting that we're figuring out how to turn decommissioned mines into giant batteries.
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During the day, excess renewable energy is channeled into raising rock-laden platforms to the top of the mine-shafts, and at night, these unspool, releasing energy that's fed into the high-availability power-lines that are already present at every mine-site:
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Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, *real* innovation? Cooper cites a plausible explanation from the Apperceptive newsletter:
https://buttondown.email/apperceptive/archive/destructive-investing-and-the-siren-song-of/
Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation.
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Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It's run by investors who *hate* the idea of paying people. That's why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others.
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It's the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as "contractors," and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually "independent small businesses."
It's also the natural next step for an industry that hates workers so much that it will pretend that their work is being done by robots, and then outsource the labor itself to distant Indian call-centers:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds
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(No wonder Indian techies joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians,")
Contrast this with climate tech: this is a profoundly *physical* kind of technology. It is *labor intensive*. It is *skilled*. The workers who perform it have power, both because they are so far from their employers' direct oversight and because these fed-funded sectors are more likely to be unionized than Silicon Valley shops. Moreover, climate tech is *capital* intensive.
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Cory Doctorow
mcc