Various species of humans lingered at the middle of the food chain for more than two million years. Then we learned how to handle fire and started eating all kinds of things we never could before, things that are too fibrous, too tough, or too contaminated to stomach raw. Easy access to all those new calories and nutrients gave us time to wonder – beyond the question of where our next meal might be coming from – gave us time to dream, time to plan. And as we all know, our big ideas quickly got away from us.
First industrial revolution – machine production powered by water and steam; Second industrial revolution – global infrastructures and electrification; Third industrial revolution – transistors, lasers, and information technology; Fourth industrial revolution – cognitive computing and augmented reality. You are here.
The person who owns the fire, the mill, the railroad, the server farm, the cyber-physical metaverse is the person who gets their own needs met first. And then . . . they feel a temptation to take just a little bit more. It’s hard to resist.
Whether “might makes right,” whether “ends justify means,” whether “finders keepers” – it’s also hard to resist the arguments of oppression. To prefer the manifest turmoil of democracy over the promised stability of autocracy is an acquired taste. It requires holding focus on the self-evident yet ephemeral truth that my neighbor is myself. This is not a truth for all of the people all of the time, nor for some of the people any of the time. But for those of us who dream and plan to increase the happiness of creation, it is our charge.
Our gracious Creator cares and provides for all his creatures. His tender mercies are over all his works; and so far as his love influences our minds, . . . we become interested in his workmanship and feel a desire to take hold of every opportunity to lessen the distress of the afflicted and increase the happiness of creation. Here we have a prospect of one common interest from which our own is inseparable, that to turn all the treasures we possess into the channel of universal love becomes the business of our lives. . . (John Woolman, 1763)
In May 2021, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published a market-shaking report, “Net Zero by 2050.” The actual message of the report was not new: “[To] avert the worst effects of climate change” . . . “what is required [is] to bring global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050, [which will] give the world an even chance of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 °C.” The market-shaking aspect of this report was its messenger. The IEA is an organization that represents 30 wealthy nations. It has maintained close ties with the oil and gas industry since its founding in 1974. Climate activists and scientists have been unimpressed by IEA reports over the decades. “Net Zero by 2050” broke the mold by stating some difficult truths in plain language:
“Staying on [the path to net zero] requires the massive deployment of all available clean energy technologies . . . annual clean energy investment worldwide will need to more than triple by 2030 to around $4 trillion . . . [Success] requires steps such as halting sales of new internal combustion engine passenger cars by 2035 and phasing out all unabated coal and oil power plants by 2040.”
During the past three years, the energy sector has shown mixed results in advancing towards the 400 specific benchmarks spelled out in the IEA report. But not no success. And the IEA is monitoring progress. Despite this being a fox-guarding-the-henhouse situation, humanity has invested in these foxes. The scale of change they are demanding of themselves is do-able. Tripling the world’s clean energy investments means going from about 1% global GDP to about 3% global GDP. Industry has got a lot to gain from such investments.
The more we can comprehend what the holders of wealth are up to (and the more we can invest in civil liberties, investigative journalism, life-long learning, etc.), the more we can discern how well industry is serving the business of universal love.
Then it becomes our business to speak up as best we can. And it’s hard to speak up publicly, to stick our necks out. Still wired as essentially middle-of-the-food-chain kind of creatures, fear often lurks in the backs of our minds that somebody big and bad is around the corner, waiting to get us. But we are also blessed to know the tender mercies of our gracious creator. Let that be our work song as we face the crises of our day.