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| Prof. James Woudhuysen Former Professor of Forecasting and Innovation, De Montfort University, Leicester Speaker at PolyTalk2014 |
People repeat the mantra that resources are running out, yet new resources are being discovered every day. People see salvation in a circular economy, when trends point toward a stagnant, financialised, vertical economy.
The culture of fear, and the cultural preference for bans, outdo even the culture of regulation in slowing the pace of technological change. Technology is reduced to
(1) IT
and
(2) eco-innovation
Advances in new materials, textiles, pipeline technology, transport, energy and construction are already much slower than they need to be. Robots are not coming in the quantities that are needed. Genetic engineering in agriculture, like the development of new antibiotics, is only just beginning.
Corporate and state budgets for R&D are often weak, and are certainly modest around Europe’s nascent New Carbon Infrastructure. To overcome post-2008 ennui, officialdom must start to see carbon as an Opportunity, not a Problem.
In one of your articles about 3D printing you affirm that “innovation’s pace depends on society’s confidence”. Do you think that confidence is lacking and if so, how can it be restored?
Confidence in the ethic of progress has been lacking for many years now, like confidence in the merits of economic growth. The slowdown in innovation since around 1971 has been interpreted in a very pessimistic way.
What is also interesting, despite the atmosphere of apprehension, is the ridiculous amounts of confidence placed in:
(1) Price signals, the European Trading System for carbon and carbon taxes
(2) IT, especially IT that lowers demand for transport and energy
(3) Cars that are shared, rented, driverless and that operate in compact cities
(4) Energy efficiency, the ‘hydrogen economy’ and the generation of electricity by decentralised means
(5) Patronising, intrusive and unsuccessful state ‘nudges’ to people to change their ‘behaviours’.
Confidence can be restored if ambitious programmes of fundamental, blue skies research are combined with full public debate on supply-side solutions. Neither corporations, nor the EU, can be relied upon to support these things: we must rely on our own efforts.
In your view, what will be the most innovative sectors in years to come?
All of the sectors I have mentioned could prove very dynamic if we question official objections and policy dogmas, improve our language, and improve our visualisation of scientific and technological data.
We could also add Small Modular Reactors and fusion power to the list of innovative sectors, if the political will can be found.
Some of the sectors most relevant to the plastics industry are likely to be:
(1) Carbon Capture and Storage
(2) Air capture of CO2
(3) Self-cleaning textiles
(4) 3D-printed medical implants (PEEK, etc)
(5) Carbon fibre
(6) Carbon nanotubes (CNTs)
(7) Graphene
(8) Applications of paper in construction and batteries
(9) Biorefineries
(10) The automated printing of nearly any kind of material on nearly any other kind of material
(11) New biofuels, combined with higher agricultural yields.
Will the advances on technological innovations change our understanding of mass production? How will it affect the industry?
In energy, petit-bourgeois utopias – of families living ‘off-grid’ and decentralised electricity supply systems being invulnerable to terrorist attack – have entranced environmentalists. In design, the small-is-beautiful influence of Gandhi, Schumacher, Illich, Lovins, Papanek and their successors is both unnoticed and unchallenged. In the US, the ‘maker movement’ has revived the producer ideology of the 19th century homesteader.
Yet the results of this programme in terms of output, cheapness, durability, reliability and market share have been a big fat zero over more than 40 years. In India, the largest and most exacting case, none of these methods has produced much more than a local difference to a village. Nevertheless, India’s two million Non-Governmental Organisations continue to advocate labour-intensive alternatives to mass production.
Capitalism has always allowed some customisation of individual products. It will add to this trend – but it will still not amount to much. Since Adam Smith (1776), arguments in favour of economies of scale and even of scope have proved incontrovertible. What developing countries and the USA’s 50m poverty-line inhabitants both need is more, cheaper and better universal products. What they don’t need is obsessively personalised dear ones, built in short batch runs.
What would you say to people who have concerns regarding shale gas extraction?
Get a life!
First, work out whether you really want to mount no fewer than eight groups of objections:
(1) Heavy vehicle traffic – especially water tankers
(2) Footprint vs land, crops, air, silence, wildlife, recreation, tourism
(3) Fraccidents
(4) Earthquakes, subsidence
(5) Irreversible subsurface contamination: benzene, toluene, H2S, lead, cadmium, chromium, radium
(6) Surface water contamination vs land, crops, wildlife
(7) Water shortages eg China
(8) Fugitive methane, fossil fuel emissions and their effects on climate change
Next, ask why so few class actions against shale have been brought in the US. Have hundred really caught fire from their taps, or died at the wellhead? Has every victim really been bribed? Is there really a mass conspiracy and cover-up by Big Oil and its friends in high places?
Next, recognise that, aided by sophisticated forms of IT, horizontal drilling has become much more accurate, and levels of productivity are rising.
Last, power plants fired by shale gas can and should be equipped with Carbon Capture and Storage.
Yes, drilling for shale gas and oil cannot and should not happen everywhere. But to argue that it should happen nowhere is unprincipled, and retrogressive.
