Day 1: Sea change forthcoming?
The fuel that fuels us all.
In Scalloway, on the Shetland Islands. The boat upon which I am to be embedded with a crew of artists, sailors, scientists – The Swan – arrives as I type. Why am I here – a venture capitalist obsessed by carbon?
My last night in Aberdeen was a night spent out with oil workers, engineers and trades who work on the oil platforms out in the North Sea. Perhaps the jet fuel that powered by flight over came from those platforms. A helicopter went down a few days ago, and they’re land-locked. Drinking beer with a cleantech VC …
We lurch ever closer to the climate cliff that looms before us. We don’t have to. Solutions clearly exist: the technology required to build a low-carbon economy is cleantech; the patient capital required to deploy it at scale sits in our pension funds; the political tool to unleash that capital is a long-term, increasing price on carbon.
It certainly won’t be easy – yet we do almost nothing. Our efforts are akin to bailing out the titanic with a teaspoon. Why?
I’ve recently become less interested in the solutions themselves, and more interested in why we remain effectively paralyzed on climate: the underlying rules of the game, the systemic reasons our market economy is prevented from unleashing it’s creative might to solve our collective carbon problem.
The personal psychology of denial. The economic models that discount future catastrophic warming. Our commitment to a myth that prioritizes freedom in the marketplace over collective action. The deep conservatism of corporate leaders.
Climate paralysis is a multi-disciplinary phenomenon. The solutions must likewise cross boundaries: art to science, economics to theatre, anthropology to engineering. Cape Farewell is about new ways of communicating. It sees climate as culture, not a physical thing. Sea Change implies deep, foundational shifts: turning tides, complex ecosystems, efforts to interact sustainably with those ecosystems.
I welcome the opportunity to think, talk, see, interact within a highly diverse group, in a deeply thought-provoking place. Now let’s see about some sea change …
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