My company thrives on Innovation. We live it, celebrate it, communicate it for our clients; in fact we refuse to work with clients that do not innovate, in some form or another. We have a Chief Innovation Officer (the super-smart Marianne Allison), and senior management is constantly seeking ways to encourage Innovation among our ranks.
With all the angst surrounding climate change the past few years, I've been mulling over the role that Innovation is playing in the fight against global warming. A lot has been discussed by scientists and politicians about the proposed methods for curbing carbon dioxide emissions (emissions trading, carbon tax, carbon offsets, renewable energy, soft energy path), but are we encouraging Innovation from all directions, creating incentives for average people to think outside of the box? More importantly, do we have mechanisms for funneling, vetting and matching ideas with resources?
One of these is the Virgin Earth Challenge, a competition awarding US$25M to the individual or organization that can invent a way to remove greenhouse gases from the Earth's atmosphere. The prize will be awarded to the first scheme that is capable of removing one billion metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year for 10 years (current emissions average 6.3 million tons per year.) Announced by Sir Richard Branson in February 2007, with Al Gore listed as one of the judges, the competition is a rare call for ideas (and action) that anyone can participate in. In my view almost all the truly big, bold ideas will involve geoengineering in some way.
The field of geoengineering is fraught with anxiety. Previously regarded as being in the realm of science fiction, the large-scale artificial modification of a planet (or Earth's) to suit human needs, is garnering more attention recently as a way to combat global warming:
Geoengineering is the name given to large scale planning projects aiming to counteract or reduce the effects of planetary change. For example, some have proposed putting large mirrors in orbit which would modify the insolation received by Earth - either increasing or decreasing it, as the need arises. Other examples which have been seriously considered include: large-scale sequestration of CO2 inside geological formations or ocean sediment, the modification of Earth's albedo with reflective or absorptive materials spread over portions of its surface, the alteration of rainfall patterns through the creation of artificial seas, and the depositing of iron in the ocean to encourage algae growth. To date, none of these proposals has been implemented on truly a planetary scale.
(from Wikipedia)
Arguments against geoengineering as a solution include its viability on such a large scale, its potential to distract current efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions ("If we can fix it, why bother changing our behavior?"), but most importantly, the fact that we have only one Earth, and if we fail and create unintended side consequences there is not fallback, rendering the Earth uninhabitable.
Just like the end of the movie Total Recall, when Schwarzenegger's character activated a massive alien machine that made Mars' atmosphere breathable, is the human race intelligent enough to create a machine (or an array of machines) that will alter a whole planet's atmosphere to our liking?
Call me naive, but I believe Innovation got us here (the Industrial Revolution) and Innovation will get us out of the global warming mess that we're in. For a global problem, the key is to democratize Innovation and allow a good idea, from anywhere in the world, to bubble up and be taken seriously. That's the challenge. The Internet is great, but it only reaches a fraction of the human race.