Atelier WeekNotes w/c 25 March and 1 April 2024
Output: Depth of Change spectrum in a talk. Contrasts: International Platform for Climate Finance vs The University of the Forest. Science Museum Adani Green Energy 'Energy Revolutions' Opening.
I am writing newsletter of #weeknotes of starting the Atelier of What’s Next (a studio for initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future). For my rationale for starting the Atelier see here.
Events, dear reader, events have once again prevented me from post a weekly update. So, you get a bumper 2-week edition instead. SubStack tells me this is too long for email. So, you might need to click through to get the last part.
This post covers:
Output: Depth of Change spectrum in a talk. (Soft Reform; Strong Reform; Radical Resistance; Deep Transformation; Make Good Ruins.)
0/DETECTING.
Contrasts: International Platform for Climate Finance (Strong Reform) vs The University of the Forest (DFeep Transformation?).
Science Museum Adani Green Energy 'Energy Revolutions' Opening.
Who has the discretionary funds for novelty?
The exhibition itself: Soft Reform.
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Output: Depth of Change spectrum in a talk
I was invited to contribute to a different UCL module, Business and Sustainability (BENV0009), at the invitation of Dr Catherine Willan. It was the final session, on 'Sustainable change and the future of sustainable business'.
This gave me a chance to present the Depth of Change Spectrum (first posted here). The key arguments:
There is a response to our situation which is more than 'Strong Reform', uses the insights of ‘Radical Resistance’ but not retreating to 'Make Good Ruins'. I'm giving that strategy zone the working title of 'Deep Transformation'.
While Strong Reform is necessary, and Make Good Ruins a legitimate back-up, I think we need to develop more and more initiatives in this Deep Transformation zone.
I gave examples for each step along the Spectrum (you can download the presentation here):
More of the same. "Saudi Aramco CEO says energy transition is failing, world should abandon 'fantasy' of phasing out oil" (yes, really) here.
Soft Reform. An exchange I had with 'the father of social investment' Sir Ronald Cohen at the launch of his book, Impact, a few years ago. I asked him if he believed that better financial disclosure was the biggest and best way to change capitalism. He said yes, it was all that was needed.
Strong reform. The Inflation Reduction Act is an example of catalytic government, which would have been forbidden under neoliberalism (see numerous excellent episodes in the Volts podcast series for more, starting here). The B Corp movement is an attempt to make all business is a force for good, as explained by the founder in this excellent episode of All In.
Radical Resistance. The Degrowth Movement has many valid critiques and insights into the status quo. But, in my view, by defining itself by what it is against (growth), it accepts and reinforces that as a defining feature of societies.
Deep Transformation. The Climate Majority Project is a rare example in this space, combining: activating the majority of citizens with taking action which is commensurate with the predicament of climate change.
Make Good Ruins. Dougald Hine's book 'At Work In The Ruins' argues this: the status quo is inevitably failing; we cannot control what happens next; it falls to us to make good ruins for future generations. Deep Adaptation's 4Rs (Resilience, Relinquishment, Restoration, Reconciliation) are in this space too.
My experience of the student response was mixed. Partly the above is a lot for 20 minutes. My sense is that it did work for some, especially as their course gives them the cognitive dissonance of the latest climate science (which pushes you to Make Good Ruins) and latest modelling and policy (which is in the Strong Reform space).
My other experiences over the last 2 weeks do speak to these categories.
WHAT NEXT. Keep using the Depth of Change spectrum as framing device, and maybe strategy stimulus.
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Contrasts: International Platform for Climate Finance vs The University of the Forest
Soon after giving that talk I had 2 Zoom meetings which were straight after each other, exemplifying so much.
International Platform for Climate Finance
The International Platform for Climate Finance (IPCF) is a network convened by Steve Waygood of Aviva. The starting point was gathering pro-change sustainability finance organisations in the run up to UK Presidency of the climate conference. Now it meets regularly to try and coordinate advocacy for pro-sustainability regulation of global finance.
You can find out more about Steve's work in my interview with him in this Innovation for Sustainability podcast. Steve defines ‘macro-stewardship’ as “taking a more holistic view of our stewardship responsibilities and actively engaging with policymakers, industry bodies and peers, regulators, standard setters and other influential parties to advocate and push for changes that will help create a more sustainable economic system.”
I was originally invited as the Chair of EIRIS Foundation ('pioneering the next steps for sustainable finance') and go to the Zooms when I can because they are a window in the world of Strong Reform in finance. There is always the next international summit (G7, G20, Climate COP, OECD) which provides the next opportunity to land a narrative and advocate a policy.
The last meeting was particularly informative. I cannot give the specifics of the confidential conversation. But I can point at items already in the public domain:
The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries' third report in collaboration with climate scientists: ‘Climate Scorpion – the sting is in the tail’. The blurb says "It shows that climate risks are complex, interconnected, and could threaten the basis of our society and economy".
Integrating Nature-Climate Scenarios & Analytics for Financial Decision-Making (INCAF), a mostly-academic research programme that focuses on the scenarios used by Financial Institutions to influence risk pricing and investment decisions".
My reflections:
The scientific and modelling findings are consistently very scary. Make sure you have a strong drink to hand for the Climate Scorpion report.
Despite the strength of evidence, the general direction of financial regulation is at best slow, if not actual retreat, from urgent action.
All this work is the best technocratic Strong Reform stuff one could hope for, in terms of the content. Really high quality from some brilliant people.
But the political context is not there for the findings to be implemented.
I'm amazed some people still think that more and better evidence will make a decisive difference. Necessary but a long way from sufficient.
The material was deeper and more detailed than the work I was doing at Forum 15 years ago on Climate Futures. But the fundamental findings, messages and direction of travel are the same.
The progress we've made over the last 15 years: got more answers to the question 'what could we have done to avoid the worst?'.
So, I left that call very frustrated. Very. Frustrated.
The University of the Forest
The next Zoom, with literally 2 seconds between them, was an Inter-Narratives webinar from Vanessa Andreotti on "The University of the Forest".
Inter-Narratives is "for anyone working with narrative to support a regenerative, just world". You can sign up to a biweekly newsletter, search for recent insight on the issues you’re working on, or read the analysis from community members. (One of the key people is Ella Saltmarshe, who you can hear in this Powerful Times interview talk about the role of narratives in system change.)
Prof Vanessa Andreotti is Dean of the Faculty of Education at University of Victoria in Canada. She is also the author of Hospicing Modernity, which gave the jumping off point for the Depth of Change Spectrum above.
The University of the Forest "has been a centre of wisdom and knowledge for the Huni Kui Indigenous People of Acre since time immemorial. Its physical campus is located between the Indigenous communities of Uskuyá Yuxibúon and Txanayá, on the banks of Rio Envira, one of the affluents of the Amazon river, around 12 hours by boat from the town of Feijó, in Acre, Brazil."
Prof Andreotti spoke about the a collaboration between the University of the Forest and University of Victoria. The other programmed speaker, Chief Ninawa Inu Huni Kui, couldn't join us because various weather- and climate-related crises had taken him into the forest, where he had no access to Zoom.
It is very hard to do justice to what she said because, in my limited understanding, she was trying to convey a different way of being in the world (ontology) and a different understanding of the nature of the universe (cosmology).
The quick way of expressing it was in these diagrams, which Andreotti presented as a progression of understanding (and themselves as insufficient expressions of what she meant, just the finger pointing to the moon, as the Buddhists say):
The difference from a 'normal' (which is to say, Western) university can also be found in the organisational structure. A Western University will have faculties based on subjects (like physics or economics). The University of the Forest has faculties based on functions or behaviours: Respect, Reverence, Reciprocity, Responsibility and Regeneration.
My reflections:
My neat categories (Radical Resistance, Deep Transformation, Making Good Ruins) look very flat compared to the three dimensions of this work.
My sense is the next wave of good work is right at the particular. My reflection on the Climate Group strategy work was that all implementation is local (sorta). The main plan of the Climate Majority work is local adaptation (on the claim that it is both useful directly, and because it gives people a way to make climate action real to them, not some abstract thing, far away and in the future).
I still crave a way to get such very local good work up to a scale which makes a global difference (or even just an Amazon-level difference, given the recent headlines on tipping points).
I do wish people wouldn't use 'quantum' to explain macro-scale connections between physical things. (That's not what quantum mechanics says, at least as it was taught to me.) Surely better to say: part of the Unbound wisdom is an acceptance of enduring mystery, including knowing there is embodied entanglement, even if we don't know how. (After all, Newton didn't have a physical mechanism for how gravity worked, just that the maths made accurate predictions.)
The perspective she is sharing doesn’t fit into our modernist categories. So, the ‘wide-boundary intelligence’ and ‘unbound wisdom’ can easily sound like woo-woo. But that doesn’t mean she is wrong. It might only mean what she is saying doesn’t fit into how we evaluate meaning. We can bring our critical faculties, but with care.
Is there any sense to be made?
So, over the course of 3 hours I had the well-intentioned but stalled Strong Reform of the IPCF, and the well-intentioned but small University of the Forest. Both grappling with how to do good work in a context where massive forces are actively trying to maintain a deeply damaging status quo.
That people are trying, and with a variety of interventions, should, I guess, be a source of inspiration.
Still, I was left at the end with a sense that no one knows what they are doing, or how to make it make enough of a difference to prevent prolonged, human-caused suffering for many people over the coming decades. So, frustrating times.
Science Museum Adani Green Energy 'Energy Revolutions' Opening
One evening recently I was invited to the opening of the new Energy Revolutions gallery at the Science Museum. (I was the guest of someone who works at a foundation that has funded things there in the past.)
Beforehand, we were both a bit non-plussed at just how many times they told us we would need to bring the invitation and photo ID. When we got there, we realised why.
Outside the entrance was a group of protestors, literally banging the drum against the main sponsor of the gallery: Adani Green Energy.
Adani Green Energy is part of the Adani Group. The wikipedia entry here says that over 60% of the group revenue comes from coal-related businesses and it has also has "attracted controversies" due to "reports of stock manipulation, accounting irregularities, political corruption, cronyism, tax evasion, environmental damage, and suing journalists". You can read what Pankaj Mishra could get approved by the London Review of Books' lawyers here.
(In short, is it possible that Prime Minister Modi has outsourced infrastructure construction to key conglomerates, like the Adani Group? If so, could it be similar to the US Gilded Age, roughly 1870s-1890s, when the economic expansion was combined with close alignment, to put it mildly, between politicians and leading industrialists?)
A pretty controversial organisation to have as a sponsor of a museum. A very controversial organisation to sponsor a gallery on "how the world can generate and use energy more sustainably to limit climate change". Hence the protestors, and the security.
One thing I can confirm is that Mr Gautam Adani, the founder of the group and one of the richest people in the world, did not become a billionaire because of his oratory skills. His dull speech followed a fanfare from the brass section of one of London orchestra's (I missed which one), and two very positive speeches by people in the Science Museum hierarchy.
The CEO said very deliberately that the gallery had benefited from both the Adani sponsorship and also from independent curation. Just to be clear. Independent curation.
The other speech was from Rt Hon Claire Coutinho, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, who was very clear on how the UK is leading on tackling climate change (despite what the Climate Change Committee keeps saying), and how much difference nuclear technology was going to make. (I heard that speech very much as "we will do the least we can on Net Zero except where it will annoy the greenies/woke because we love chasing headlines, hate governing and have zero strategy for the country".)
In the networking afterwards, the Chair of the Science Museum came and spoke to my friend and me. I was able to ask him what he hoped for from the gallery (answer: educate millions on clean energy) and what he feared. On that he looked puzzled. The conversation roughly went like this:
Me: Well, Adani is a controversial sponsor.
Him: We have been through a rigourous process.
Me: Have you looked at the overall proportion of capital expenditure going into fossil fuels versus renewables? Which future revenues are they trying to generate? What are they betting the group on?
Him: We have been through a rigourous process.
Who has the discretionary funds for novelty?
Even with my tactful pushing, I can understand the bind the museum is in. After decades of neoliberalism, the institutions which used to have discretionary capacity to invest (public bodies, universities, trade unions, charities) have been hollowed out. Governments have decided against raising either debt or taxes to fund investment. Philanthropists are nearly the only people left who can choose to invest without requiring certain, near-term private returns.
As long as governments constrain themselves, the only source of public-benefit resources at scale are billionaires, who are unlikely to invest in anything that challenges their place in the hierarchy. There is not the requisite variety for change. Such is the exhaustion of neoliberalism.
Hard to blame the Science Museum for being the subject to the forces of history.
When I was at sustainability NGO Forum for the Future, we faced similar forces. Indeed, while at Forum, I worked with both BP and Shell in the mid-2000s. At that point, there was a (small) chance that their renewables investments were the core of their future businesses. I would say that I know better now.
Those fossil fuel companies are leopards who are not going to change their spots. Indeed, these are the leopards who are eat our faces.
Is that true of Adani Group? Well, one key difference is that it is a conglomerate. It does not base its identity (and asset investments, and skills acquisition, and narrative to investors) on being only a fossil fuel business. (In contrast, people in BP and Shell always tell me they are not an energy business, they are an oil and gas business, or even a geology and refining business.) Adani Group may (may!) have the requisite variety to change its spots, just like Nokia did, moving from mainly paper to telecoms.
Also, Adani Green Energy is publicly talking a very big game. This CNN article has Adani saying it "plans to invest $100 billion into energy transition over the next decade, with 70% of the investments ear-marked for clean energy" (I'd love to know the planned CapEx for coal).
The plans for Khavda Renewable Energy Park: "Five times the size of Paris. Visible from space. The world’s biggest energy plant. Enough electricity to power Switzerland." You will be glad to know that "the park will cover more than 200 square miles and be the planet’s largest power plant regardless of the energy source." Plus it is located on "a region so large, a region that is so unencumbered, there’s no wildlife, there’s no vegetation, there’s no habitation. There is no better alternative use of that land.” Which is good to know.
These are commitments that sound hard to pull out of while retaining credibility. But then, people thought that of BP saying it had gone Beyond Petroleum.
I find myself pulled in various directions. Deep scepticism about the motives of the Adani Group. Deep pragmatism about the need to act with today's realities, rather than some perfect world that will never exist.
All of which speaks to reluctantly accepting that the Adani's of this world will be players in what happens now. With the right incentives, regulation, and on-going pressure, they might be players for a world on a path to Net Zero and a safer climate. (In my view, the Oil Majors have had their chance.) The protestors outside the museum are a necessary element in keeping this messy show on the road.
The exhibition itself: Soft Reform.
As for the exhibition, not quite as dull as Mr Adani's speech. But not far off.
It is organised like a solar park, with radial arms point into the centre. At the centre is a sculpture, Only Breath, made from windblown wood, repurposed mirrors and steel. It is like a downward-pointing flower, with mirrored petals that pulse slowly. (It rather reminded me of the top half of the time travel device in Avengers' Endgame.)
The good news (for my UCL module co-lead, Will, at least) is that the exhibition does feature an electric cargo bike.
The bad news: it doesn't really feature people or social forces.
In this, the gallery fits in the a Soft Reform part of the Depth of Change Spectrum. Just a bit of tweaking, and technologies (innovated and diffused by for-profit organisations) will save us. So, that’s OK then.
WHAT NEXT. Go visit again, and see if I was overly-harsh. Have a position on what money or work the Atelier would not accept or do.