Green, Environmentally Friendly Economic Growth

1 Reply Jonny Hankins

Green Growth Through Technology

I have been following the European Biotechnology Seminar series 2021, an online University run series of 20 minute presentations that take in lots of different aspects of technology.

It’s the second series (here for a review of the first) and really interesting.

Yesterday we got into a discussion about the problems of what we might like to think of as intelligent sustainable growth, the use of technology to reduce emissions and help to improve the health of the planet while also producing economic growth.

The talk was about evaluating sustainability. This is not an easy thing to do in reality, as there are lots of factors that we might like to include, an endless number of factors are really possible, depending on your point of view.

CO2 output, water use, pollution of the land, use of space, just to think about environmental issues. But sustainability also involves social sustainability, and economic. If we close all the factories down then half of the problem will be resolved. But is that socially or economically sustainable?

So we find ourselves having to make decisions about what we are going to address, weight the various aspects of interest and then try to compare one approach with another.

This brought in a discussion about framing the future. Any presentation that we see about addressing climate change today makes proposals, the world will be intelligent, connected and electric. If we frame the future as this, we should understand that we are not only making a proposal, but also excluding other paths. Once electric transport is promoted as the future for transport, others fall by the wayside and what we get is a future of electric transport.

The green growth model (technological solutions) also brings other things into play that are not so broadly discussed: the manufacturing of all of this technology requires raw materials, and a large percentage of those that we use today lie in developing nations.

Lithium Mining

Namibia and Zimbabwe are two of the world’s largest lithium producers today. Chile, China and Australia are the biggest by far in terms of production, the USA for deposits, while the largest mining companies are multinationals, with extraction processes spread across the world. And thanks to its use in batteries this is a growth industry, with current production expected to double by 2024!

The largest project in Zimbabwe appears to be Chinese owned and run (Sinomine), While the largest in Namibia is Canadian.

All of which brings back thoughts of my sociology studies and the start of the mining exploitation by the Belgians and French in Africa. They called in colonialism in those days, taking raw materials from a third country to feed the ruling nation’s economy. The reality also includes polluting other people’s back yards, cheap life and labour.

Any Suggestions?

I am not suggesting that the battery/electric transport future should not go ahead, far from it. Regular readers will have seen lots of my posts about environmentally friendly, energy saving and producing technology, but there are more complications to the model that we like to think about.

Sitting in Europe it is easy to take the technological path without fully working through the consequences for other peoples and global politics. Fed the narrative of doing the right thing for the Earth, always trying to do what is best, but without a full picture of the implications, we (I too) fall into line within the narrative, we drive it and make both the positive and the negative sides real.

Luck in Scientific Work

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Luck In Scientific Work

Last week I wrote a post about Alexander Fleming’s luck in discovering penicillin. I want to continue this discussion this week, as I left it (deliberately) one-sided.

Fleming went on holiday without cleaning his dishes, some mold grew that seemed to secrete something that killed some types of bacteria. Had he cleaned the dishes, he would not have made the discovery and nobody would know his name today.

But we have to acknowledge that this little piece of luck found itself in a scientific laboratory, and it was not luck that led Fleming to understanding the importance of the mold. Other people might not have noticed what was happening for example, only a chemist working with bacteria would have understood the importance of the gap developing between the mold and the bacteria..

In effect, we could see the growth of the mold was part of the experiment process, even though it was unforeseen. Without the scientific process it becomes merely mold!

Here is an article about other discoveries that owe something to luck.

Luck as a Scientist

From the various articles in the Journal of Responsible Innovation special issue on luck, I learn that luck is seen by scientists as playing a greater role in science’s social worlds, rather than the experiments themselves. Who receives your project (luckily someone who shares your approach maybe) could be important in terms of whether it receives funding or is rejected. Meeting someone in a lift who gives you a tip about something, or flicking through the cable TV in your hotel room and coming across a program that sets off a chain reaction in your thinking that leads to an understanding, lucky events that may lead to something big.

Obviously, we can take this as far back as we want, and bring in global political events such as wars and pandemics, but lucky encounters on a local level do seem to be important in building careers and carrying out scientific processes.

Luck in the Future

Now the big question then. What about luck in the future regarding something that you have developed yourself as a scientist?

Let’s take the invention of the electronic joystick by SEGA in 1969 as en example. This revolutionary control system boasted a fire button that enabled players of their Missile game to steer their missile towards enemy tanks on the screen. Little did the developers know (nor could they have predicted) the uses that this technology would be put to in the future: remote surgery techniques, flying modern jet aircraft, and flying unmanned drones over foreign lands, executing people from the comfort of an office in the USA.

There is a risk that your discovery will go on to be used for things that you might not like. You may be lucky or you may be unlucky, and may receive credit for having bettered the world, or unlucky and face huge criticism in the future.

Luck in Scientific Investigation

1 Reply Jonny Hankins

A lucky discovery

I have just read a Special Issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation all about the role of luck in science that raises some interesting and entertaining questions about responsibility. One of the events that is often discussed in the field of ‘science and luck’ (oh yes, there is a field), is that of Alexander Flemming’s discovery of penicillin.

Fleming was lucky enough to be able to take a holiday from his work in St Mary’s Hospital in 1928, and rushed out of the lab leaving some of his dishes unwashed that he had been using to do some experiments with a bacteria that causes boils, sore throats and abscesses.

When he returned, refreshed, and started to tidy up, he noticed that one of the dishes had some mold growing on it, and around the mold was clear. No bacteria! Maybe the mold was producing something that was able to kill the bacteria!

Fleming called it mold juice, and he discovered that it worked against lots of bacteria, but it was unstable and difficult to work with. It was only really of interest because it could be used to isolate different forms of bacteria, so those that were sensitive to the mold juice substance (something that we call penicillin) from those that were not.

It could have all stopped there, but a team in Oxford discovered that if they gave the substance to mice it seemed to work against streptococci, so they tried it on a person, a police officer with a badly infected cut. It seemed to work, but they did not have enough material to continue the treatment, and unfortunately the patient died after they had to stop treatment.

Unlucky for him.

11 years had passed by this point, but times had changed with the Second World War well underway. The Brits were busy with the war effort, so the researchers contacted their colleagues in the USA to see if they would be interested in continuing the work. They took it on and started to look for more efficient production methods, and more productive strains to develop.

Well, what would you know, they found a moldy cantaloupe in a Peoria fruit market that seemed to work fantastically.

As the US joined the war there was a push to scale up production, and within 3 years the pharmaceutical companies had produced enough (and tried it out enough on injured soldiers) to supply the allied armies with enough to treat all the seriously wounded troops from D-Day.

A Lucky Boy

Fleming was given the Nobel Prize, and today we all know his name. But we might say that he was a lucky boy. His discovery was at least partially beyond his control after all. If he had cleaned up properly before his holiday the world might be a very different place today.